The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War [Hardcover]

Nicholas Thompson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2009

A brilliant and revealing biography of the two most important Americans during the Cold War era—written by the grandson of one of them

Only two Americans held positions of great influence throughout the Cold War; ironically, they were the chief advocates for the opposing strategies for winning—and surviving—that harrowing conflict. Both men came to power during World War II, reached their professional peaks during the Cold War’s most frightening moments, and fought epic political battles that spanned decades. Yet despite their very different views, Paul Nitze and George Kennan dined together, attended the weddings of each other’s children, and remained good friends all their lives.

In this masterly double biography, Nicholas Thompson brings Nitze and Kennan to vivid life. Nitze—the hawk—was a consummate insider who believed that the best way to avoid a nuclear clash was to prepare to win one. More than any other American, he was responsible for the arms race. Kennan—the dove—was a diplomat turned academic whose famous “X article” persuasively argued that we should contain the Soviet Union while waiting for it to collapse from within. For forty years, he exercised more influence on foreign affairs than any other private citizen.

As he weaves a fascinating narrative that follows these two rivals and friends from the beginning of the Cold War to its end, Thompson accomplishes something remarkable: he tells the story of our nation during the most dangerous half century in history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The cold war was a matter of personalities as well as policies. From the 1940s through the 1980s, Paul Nitze and George Kennan were central actors at opposite poles. Nitze was the hawk. In the darkest days of the nuclear arms race, he argued that the way to avoid an atomic war was to prepare to win it. Few policymakers matched either his knowledge of weaponry or his persuasive skills. Even fewer matched Nitze's ability to alienate superiors, but his talent could not be overlooked for long. George Kennan was the dove, consistently arguing that the U.S. must end its reliance on nuclear weapons, advocating forbearance in the face of provocation. He had an unusual ability to forecast events: the Sino-Soviet split, the way the cold war would eventually end. In these days of personalized polarization, the close friendship between these two men seems anomalous—but instructive. That Thompson is Nitze's grandson does not inhibit his nuanced account of two men whose common goal of serving America's interests transcended perspectives. Their mutual respect and close friendship enabled administrations to balance their contributions. That balancing in turn significantly shaped the cold war's outcome. (Sept.)
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Review

“The book is brimming with fascinating revelations about the men and the harrowing events they steered through.” —The New York Times

 

“In this important and astute new study, Nitze emerges as a driven patriot and Kennan as a darkly conflicted and prophetic one.”—The Washington Post

 

“Paul Nitze and George Kennan were the yin and yang of American foreign policy. They were also the only figures deeply involved in the Cold War from beginning to end, and so they make ideal focal points for Nicholas Thompson’s lively and illuminating book.” —Newsweek

 

“Few men did more to shape postwar U.S. Foreign policy than Paul Nitze and George Kennan. In tracing their dueling visions of America’s role in the world, Nicholas Thompson provides a white-knuckle glimpse inside the 20th century’s most dangerous moments.” —Time Magazine

 

“Thoroughly engrossing … Thompson succeeds admirably in blending biography and intellectual history, painting colorful portraits of complicated men who embodied conflicting strains of American thinking about foreign policy.” —The New York Times Book Review

 

“The Hawk and the Dove does an inspired job of telling the story of the Cold War through the careers of two of its most interesting and important figures, who were not only present at the creation, but were each a witness—and, in Nitze’s case, a participant—in its end.” —The Washington Monthly

 

“Gripping, stirring … Thompson has delivered a book that’s not just a labor of love for a grandfather; it’s a vindication of a tradition of civic-republican comity that can’t be coerced but is quietly stronger, even in this polarizing, frightening time, than anything the republic’s noisier claimants have to offer.” —Talking Points Memo Cafe

 

“A very good new book.” —The National Review

 

“A lifetime of documentation combined with a personal narrative create a compelling story of two men who shared a lifetime of conflict and camaraderie.”—The Daily Beast

 

“[An] outstanding dual biography … Excellent insights into these men and their roles in the era they helped shape.” —Booklist

 

“The key to understanding modern American foreign policy is appreciating the complex 60-year friendship between George Kennan and Paul Nitze. Nicholas Thompson brilliantly captures their divergent personalities, clashing politics, and intellectual bonding. It is an insightful and important tale, but also a colorful and fascinating one—an intellectual buddy movie with enormous historical resonance.”—Walter Isaacson

 

“With clarity and vigor, Nicholas Thompson has given us an engaging and insightful account of one of the great friendships of the modern age, the personal bond between Paul Nitze and George Kennan that illuminates the epochal stakes of the Cold War. This is a terrific book.”—Jon Meacham

 

“George Kennan and Paul Nitze were the Adams and Jefferson of the Cold War. They were there for the beginning, they witnessed its course over almost half a century, and they argued with each other constantly while it was going on. But they maintained throughout a remarkable friendship, demonstrating—as few others in our time have—that it is possible to differ with civility. Nicholas Thompson’s is a fine account of that relationship, carefully researched, beautifully written, and evocatively suggestive of how much we have lost because such civility has become so rare.”—John Lewis Gaddis

 

“With grace and a keen appreciation of human nature, Nicholas Thompson has written a revealing, moving history of the Cold War through two fascinating men.”—Evan Thomas

 

“They say that ‘history is an argument without end.’ In Thompson’s skillful hands, this momentous argument between two old friends on the most critical issue of the last century is thus history at its best. Thompson’s judicious and delicious depiction of Nitze and Kennan will fascinate anyone who cares about the Cold War or the ways that human beings shape the future.”—Jonathan Alter

 

“This is dual biography at its best: riveting, thought-provoking, and fair-minded throughout. Nicholas Thompson renders these two remarkable men—their ideas, their arguments, their personal passions—vividly, in three dimensions. Through the prism of this powerful rivalry, Thompson illuminates the entire Cold War era—as well as our own.”—Jeff Shesol

 

“The Hawk and the Dove is a wonderful idea for a book, wonderfully carried out. Nicholas Thompson has used illuminating new material to present each of his protagonists in a convincing, respectful, but unsparing way. Even more valuable, he has used the interactions and tensions between Paul Nitze and George Kennan to bring much of American 20th century foreign policy to life, with human richness ever present but with the big issues clear in all their complexity.”—James Fallows

 

“Nicholas Thompson is an exceptionally good writer and a very clear thinker; both of these talents lift up The Hawk and the Dove, an energetic, fair, revealing and highly readable account of two men whose thinking and public lives helped to define the Cold War—and whose views on the international order remain strikingly relevant to the era that has followed.”—Steve Coll

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition (September 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805081429
• ISBN-13: 978-0805081428
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #436,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Nicholas Thompson is a senior editor at The New Yorker and the author of "The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War."

Prior to The New Yorker, Mr. Thompson was a senior editor at Wired Magazine, Legal Affairs and an editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a contributing editor at Bloomberg Television, and a weekly contributor to CNN International.

Paul Nitze's grandson, he has worked for the past four years on this book. A New York Times profile says, "The book is brimming with fascinating revelations about the men and the harrowing events they steered through." A New York Times book review calls it "Thoroughly engrossing ... Thompson succeeds admirably in blending biography and intellectual history, painting colorful portraits of complicated men who embodied conflicting strains of American thinking about foreign policy."

And the Washington Post writes: "In The Hawk and the Dove, Nicholas Thompson, an editor at Wired magazine, skillfully contrasts Nitze and Kennan. Thompson, who is Nitze's grandson, brings a judicial impartiality to the fierce disputes that raged between the two men. Thompson has enjoyed full access to his grandfather's archival documents, but perhaps his most impressive accomplishment is to have mined Kennan's extensive diaries for new insights. In this important and astute new study, Nitze emerges as a driven patriot and Kennan as a darkly conflicted and prophetic one."

The Washington Times said it "may be the most important political biography in recent memory."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Playing Chicken...., August 21, 2009

By 

Bruce Loveitt (Ogdensburg, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (Hardcover)

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When I ordered a copy of this book I was a bit worried that the author is a grandson of Paul Nitze. Hmmm.....was this going to be a bit of a whitewash, overpraising Nitze while trashing Kennan? Or conversely, was Mr. Thompson going to be overly sensitive to the potential criticism and would he bend-over-backwards to be fair to Kennan at the expense of Nitze? Not to worry.....this is a fascinating, well-researched book, evenhanded in its approach and conclusions. Both men are given praise when praise is due, and criticized when necessary. One of the best things about the book is that it helps you see both men, and the Cold War itself, in shades of grey rather than in black-and-white. Despite their reputations, both men had some of the hawk and some of the dove in them. They both wanted to avoid nuclear war, they just had different ideas on the best way to achieve that goal. Although Kennan saw the Russians as people-like-us, he was a bit of an idealist and would probably have given away the farm if he had been involved in nuclear arms reduction talks. He would have been perceived as weak, and so would the United States as well. Not a good scenario when engaging in tough negotiations. On the other hand, Nitze probably was a bit too cynical and tended to demonize the Russians. This made him an overly tough negotiator and probably resulted in escalated tensions between the two countries. Both men would have been better off if they had had a bit of the other man's personality as part of their own make-up. Another fascinating thing about this book are the historical gems the author has unearthed. For example, did you know that early in his first administration Richard Nixon sent nuclear-weapon-laden bombers on an exercise where they pretended they were going to enter Russian airspace? (It was an idea cooked up with the help of Henry Kissinger, and the purpose was to make the Russians think that Nixon was a bit crazy and capable of anything. That way, they might be more flexible at the negotiating table.)....We also have the spectacle of Leonid Brezhnev being asked to "push the button" during a Soviet exercise, to launch missiles that were only equipped with dummy warheads. Brezhnev was terrified, and kept hesitating and asking his subordinates, "Are you sure the warheads are not real?".....There are also glimpses into the personal lives of the men. Both men lived to a ripe-old-age and had long, happy marriages. But Kennan was prone to depression and self-doubt and had a tendency to drink too much and engage in womanizing. Nitze seemed to be happier, but he was a workaholic. (He also had some odd ideas about staying in shape. He felt that regular exercise was bad because it was boring. He recommended periods of inactivity followed by bursts of extreme exercise...such as playing 5 sets of tennis after a long layoff. Probably not what the doctor would order but, hey, it worked for him!)....This was easily one of the best books I've read this year and I highly recommend it.

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A splendid joint biography of two preeminent figures of the Cold War era, August 12, 2009

By 

Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (Hardcover)

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In reading history I'm often reminded of the preface to Wittgenstein's PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS. He wrote that his subject required him to approach the same issues from different directions, like one exploring a landscape from different approaches. Each approach reveals the subject in a new way and sheds new light on it. In the same way, the entire Cold War era is best understood by criss crossing it in a variety of ways. I also very much enjoy joint biographies. In fact, one of the best I have ever read also involved George Kennan, THE WISE MEN: SIX FRIENDS AND THE WORLD THEY MADE by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, a marvelous joint biography of Kennan, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, Averell Harriman, Charles Bohlen, and Dean Acheson. Paul Nietzsche also featured prominently in that one. (In fact, I very strongly recommend that book to anyone who enjoys this one.)

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 contributinos 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 George 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.

I learned a great deal from reading this book. I learned a lot about the motives behind Nitze's desire for arms reduction talks. I was especially interested to learn that one reason the arms race continued on the Soviet side was the great pressure placed on the government to build more weapons by Soviet arms manufacturers. We are all too familiar with the pressure placed on American policy by the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower condemned, but one rarely gets the impression that the same was true in the Soviet Union. But Thompson shows that sometimes rockets and warheads were built simply to provide jobs and to keep the military industry going. And the book was great for taking a slightly different approach on a host of political issues. I definitely recommend this for anyone interested in world history in the last half of the twentieth century. These two men were either directly involved in or commented insightfully on nearly every important issue during that period. But book is interesting for the light it sheds on two extremely interesting public servants. And in the case of Kennan I hope that it inspires people to read some of his books. The two volumes of his MEMOIRS contains some of the finest prose writing in English since WW II. Thompson quotes from a letter to Kennan from Stalin's daughter, who urges him to isolate himself from public life and do what she believes he was born to be: a great writer. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps by gaining one of our great diplomats and public intellectuals we lost one of our greatest novelists. But we have only the life he actually lived. This fine joint biography will provide an excellent intro into the lives and work of two remarkable public servants.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent with a few provisos; it is a bio of history as experienced not history, August 24, 2009

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Peter G. Keen "rabidreader" (virginia usa) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (Hardcover)

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This is a skilled piece of writing and the book has many merits, which other Vine reviewers have covered insightfully and thoroughly. I'm a little on the fence about it and add not so much dissents as caveats. Yes, it's done well and it is an excellent biography built around the two brilliant figures whose lives were so intertwined: the idealist and the pragmatist, sometimes collaborators and increasingly in conflict, with both of them at the center of US foreign policy for half a century.

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 German 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.

I often had a sense of tasting an excellent hors d'oeuvre but wanting a full dish. This limitation in focusing history on the individuals is a strength, however, in that it provides clarity and avoids a sprawling 1,800 or so scholarly tome. But it really isn't a history of the Cold War; it's a story of how two of the best and the brightest struggled to make the right decisions as they saw them in handling the Age of the Nuclear Threat - that's its real topic.

One of the aspects of the book that I found striking is that it is so respectful. It doesn't demonize even people like Curtis Le May, famous for the wish to bomb Vietnam "back into the Stone Age." It is perhaps too nice to General McArthur, whose ego seemed the size of the Pentagon but his blunder to accomplishments ratio even bigger. But the liberality of spirit in the observations gives the work a sense of weight and reflectivity. It addresses the torments and borderline compulsive obsession of Kennan and the ability of Nitze to alienate just about anyone in his milieu as part of who they were, and running through everything in the book is a sense of honorable men doing the best they could.

It is not a vivid book, though well-crafted and lucid in its style. I wish there had been more variety in pacing and a little more color. It is well-documented and uses its sources responsibly. So, all in all, I recommend it, with the proviso that it is a biography of two figures who braved the whirlwinds of a dangerous era in history but it is not the history of that era.