Defense: New No. 2

• Share

Beneath the snowy thatch and the cool, professorial mien, Paul Henry Nitze glowed as warmly as the bowl of his ever-present pipe. "I shall be getting back into what I used to deal with," he said last week. "Back to the policy issues of the day." Back, but with a difference. Nitze, 60, who was nominated by the President to the post of Deputy Defense Secretary, the Pentagon's No. 2 job, will have one of the top policymaking roles in the Administration.

Nitze has had a long wait. Since 1940, he has held several influential posts, notably as chief of policy planning for the State Department and as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. He contributed to two historic, prescient documents—National Security Council No. 68 in 1950 and the Gaither Report in 1957—that pointed up serious weaknesses in the nation's defense posture.

Yet Nitze's prickly personality, his academic bent, and his penchant for discussing far-out security and disarmament theories made him enough enemies over the years to deny him still higher office. He faced firm, if unofficial, opposition from a handful of conservative Republican Senators when the Eisenhower Administration proposed to nominate him to a high Defense Department post, and he withdrew from Government. Later, he was prominently mentioned as a candidate for a number of top-level jobs, but settled in 1963 for the relatively prosaic appointment as Secretary of the Navy, the post he has held ever since.

Nitze's promotion was prompted by the resignation of Deputy Defense Secretary Cyrus Vance, 50. Despite the controversy that used to surround Nitze, the prospect is for easy confirmation of the man who has served ably and patiently under five Presidents.