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The Hawk And The Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, And The History Of The Cold War (2009)

by Nicholas Thompson(Favorite Author)

4.06 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0805081429 (ISBN13: 9780805081428)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Henry Holt and Co.

review 1: The book has the strength of its limitations; it is biography, not history. It presents history as seen and experienced by Kennan and Nitze. It conveys their personalities, roles, judgments and impacts on the complex and world-threatening era we call the Cold War. The author does this with a clear narrative thread and communicates the person without psychodrama and hagiography. Sensibly, this narrative addresses the history as his dualistic pair saw and experienced it. Accordingly, it omits many aspects of the context of that experience. The Cuban Bay of Pigs gets just a paragraph or so. Many background events and leading figures are left out of the story or treated cursorily. Examples are the role of Adeneuer, "Der Alte", in so many ways central to the rehabilitation of G... moreerman society and economics, the Suez Canal debacle of 1956, the Nuclear Disarmament campaigns that solidified the left across Europe, and the often bizarre policies of Foster Dulles in insisting a nation was either for us or against us and India's role in leading the nonaligned movement.The book's main purpose is to tell the story of the Cold War by using the interactions and tensions between Nitze and Kennan to bring much of American Cold War policies to life. Much of these discussions are intellectual, but Thompson makes it very readable..George Kennan and Paul Nitze were two of the most emblematic figures of the Cold War. By any measure their contributions to American government were enormous. Kennan is one of the most fascinating personalities from the last half of the 20th century. He is generally considered to have had a deeper understanding of the Soviet Union than any other individual and, as Nicholas Thompson so ably explains, anticipated many of the major developments in the last decades of the past century. He prophesied in the 1940s with uncanny accuracy the eventual fate of the Soviet Union, explaining both how and why the system would eventually implode and collapse. He was one of the major architects of the Marshall Plan, one of the greatest achievements in the history of American foreign policy. And he was the author of the famous Long Telegram, which evinced an understanding of the Soviet Union. His theory of containment dominated nearly all American policy during the Cold War, even if he complained that the ways that "containment" were construed varied from his own understanding. His insight into world affairs was unsurpassed by any other foreign policy expert of the century and he had no rival in articulating his understanding. Kennan was, by any standard, a great writer. At several points in the course of his public career Kennan was able to provide a way of viewing a group of issues so as to alter public comprehension. Yet, Kennan was also something of a crank. Though he was celebrated as a hero by the Left, he held a number of not merely conservative but reactionary view. He was personally extremely conservative, especially on cultural matters. He disliked men with long hair and didn't care for social change. I suspect he hated the Beatles. Many of his beliefs -- such as the desirability of the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain unifying under a capital to be located in Canada -- were downright weird. He was often a crank. He described himself as an 18th century man and certainly he had many of the oddities of a Gibbon (whom he loved) or Samuel Johnson. I find Kennan fascinating for being so brilliant at one moment and so bizarre the next.Nitze, who is the grandfather of the author of the book (at no point did I sense that Thompson was being kinder to his grandfather or less fair to Kennan than he ought), is a far less interesting character than Kennan. He lacked Kennan's enormous prescience and insight, and while a competent writer was not touched by genius as was Kennan. One is struck, however, by Nitze's drive and dedication and his enormous practical abilities. Nitze's two greatest contributions were on the one hand advocating the huge arms build up that occurred in the fifties and sixties and one the other hand his work on disarmament in the seventies and eighties. I find it fascinating that while Kennan was adored by the Left and Nitze by some on the Right, Kennan held many conservative beliefs and Nitze many liberal ones. The truth is that neither fit comfortably into simple characterizations of conservative or liberal. Frankly, I find both of them more interesting for being less than predictable.The joint biography does a splendid job of recounting most of the central foreign policy crises that occurred during the period. You get a great sense of the various personalities involved, from James Forrestal to George Marshall to Dean Acheson to Henry Kissinger to George Schulz to all the presidents of those years, as well as the major leaders of other countries, in particular the Soviet Union.The book also undercuts the current ahistorical claims about the role of Ronald Reagan in ending the Cold War. This is true of any actual historical accounts of the period. Reagan's greatest role in the Cold War was in his considerable accomplishments in arms control. This may, in fact, have been the great achievement of his presidency. The book demonstrated Reagan's extremely superficial understanding of the issues surrounding nuclear weapons (while Nitze liked Reagan, he considered him incompetent on nuclear issues and had nothing but utter disdain for his Star Wars initiative). As Thompson chronicles, the Soviet Union, as Kennan had predicted, was already suffering enormously from the strain of the arms race well before Reagan was president. In 1972 Brezhnev yearned for the completion of the SALT I agreement to help ease the great strain on the Soviet economy created by the arms race. The standard argument by Reagan's fans was that he caused an escalation in the arms race, but in fact the Soviets did not increase military spending during Reagan's presidency. The strain on their economy definitely preceded Reagan. And the reason that Reagan's fans hate Kennan so much is that his work as architect of the strategy for winning the Cold War lessens Reagan's role. Kennan's strategy of containment was embraced by every American president from Truman to Bush 41, with no exceptions, and it had precisely the effect Kennan predicted. He insisted that if we resisted the Soviet Union and limited its spread by his policy of containment (though his understanding was political containment, rather than the military containment that Nitze preferred), it would collapse upon itself, which is precisely what happened. Fans of Reagan, so desperate for political reasons to give him a legacy that he does not deserve (while refusing to grant him the legacy that he does deserve, as someone who worked hard for disarmament, with some success), don't like Kennan because he undercuts the script that they have concocted for him. They are not helped by the fact that virtually no historians outside of the United States (and even then virtually no historians who are not conservative Republicans) view Reagan as having played an especially role in bringing about the end of the Cold War. Unlike George Kennan, whom they do.Kennan was an odd sort of duck, highly intelligent, lonely, often feeling touchy or spurned or ill-used, who moved from the famous Long Telegram and X article in Foreign Affairs, where he came across as what at that time would have been something of a hawk, to become an advocate of a far more dovish policy towards the Soviets, pushing for a diplomatic engagement rather than a military one. He lived to be 101 years old, long enough to consider his point of view vindicated. Less well known today are his less popular ideas - without question he was something of an authoritarian, feeling democracy as a government model an inefficient way to fight the world struggle; his writings leave a trail of anti-Semitism and racism at times. Kennan increasingly found himself to be out of a government job, though called upon from time to time by various administrations and the press as an expert until his death.Nitze was different temperamentally as well as politically. Beginning from his experiences in studying the WWII strategic bombing campaigns against Nazi Germany and then Japan, including the results of the US use of nuclear weapons, he become likely the most well-informed (not to say opinionated) government non-scientist official regarding nuclear strategy, policy, and subsequently arms control detail. While generally speaking considered to be an ultra-hawk, there are instances of compromise or reasoned anti-war opinion (particularly regarding Vietnam). His impact on policy from a governmental position was far larger and apparently more influential than that of Kennan; he remained involved in the SALT and START talks right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, by which time he was in his 80s, and when he died at 97, he also could consider himself and his opinions on how to handle the Cold War vindicated.In all, an excellent work of both biography and Cold War history.
review 2: I really liked the book. There are wonderful anecdotes and it the focus on the perspectives of the two men is illuminating. Although both men are legend in international relations, neither was ever really satisfied in their career, feeling they had been shut out of where they should be. There is sad moment where Nitze thinks he will get a plum spot in the Carter administration only to find himself without any job at all. a great read. Watch out, though, for the occasional lapse into conspiracy theory. Thompson mentions a number of mysterious deaths that surround the making of foreign policy. It is by no means the focus of the book, or even of a given chapter, but it pops up in odd places. less

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