The Nitze Approach: Hard Line, Deft Touch

• Share

(2 of 2)

Nitze would prefer the zero option, but given Soviet demands and souring NATO relations, he thought he had wrenched from Kvitsinsky an attractive deal. Back in Washington, Nitze and Rostow explained the proposal at a special meeting of Administration arms control principals, including National Security Adviser William Clark and Secretary of State George Shultz. The reaction there was mainly hopeful. Within days, Rostow's aides and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had finished a report on the plan for Reagan, who had just one comment: Could the Joint Chiefs live without the Pershing II?

In a collaborative reply, the military chiefs concluded that the new Pershing missile was important though not essential. But that answer to Reagan's question, routed first through Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, never reached the President. Instead, Weinberger had an aide, Richard Perle, paraphrase the Joint Chiefs' memo and graft it onto an elaborate Pentagon condemnation of the Nitze-Kvitsinsky plan. A month after the Swiss mountainside tête-à-tête, Nitze and Rostow were chastised by Clark in a memo to Shultz for exceeding their negotiating authority. Clark denies that the memo was a reprimand, but officials who have seen it insist otherwise.

Back at their mountainside meeting place in September, Kvitsinsky told Nitze glumly that his superiors in Moscow had rejected the July proposal, and had scolded him for agreeing to it. The crucial, unanswerable question: Might the Nitze plan have blossomed into an agreement, despite the initial Soviet rejection, if Washington had backed it?

Nitze refuses to admit that his hand has been weakened as he returns to Geneva this week. "If you propose to get something done," he said last week, hours before meeting at the White House with Reagan, "you can't go into it thinking you'll be defeated. I will have the necessary flexibility."

Or so he naturally expects. From the beginning he has led a productive, patrician life of unimpeded success. After graduating from Harvard, Nitze amassed a fortune during the Depression as an investment banker. In government since 1940, he oversaw the creation of the Marshall Plan and the NATO Alliance; in the early '60s he helped manage U.S. responses to crises over Berlin and Cuban missiles. Some who know him suggest that Nitze is now driven to achieve an INF treaty as a sort of final professional capstone. Nitze scoffs: "I just don't give that kind of thing any thought. My problem is with the Russians. They're the subject I'm focusing on, with my eyes wide open." No one should doubt that he has all requisite skepticism toward the Soviets. But he may ultimately lack patience with compatriots he considers wrongheaded. "If Reagan fails to concede more flexibility," says one colleague, "I think Paul would leave." Even if Nitze is finally forced out of government, he will surely prefer to go discreetly, ever the gentleman policymaker. Says Nitze: "There's been entirely too much fuss made over problems here on the Washington scene." The fuss and the problems are surely not over yet. —By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington