The Yankee and the Germanist

In style, appearance and background, the two chief negotiators in Geneva could hardly differ more. At 74, Paul Nitze is one of this country's oldest and most distinguished diplomats. At 45, Yuli Kvitsinsky is young indeed by the gerontocratic standards of Soviet officialdom. Nitze is elegant and urbane, with a glint of mischievous humor in his eye. The slightly pudgy Kvitsinsky is dour, outspoken and openly ambitious. Nitze is an experienced policymaker who had a hand in drafting his negotiating strategy; Kvitsinsky operates with narrow instructions from Moscow.

Massachusetts-born and Harvard-educated, Nitze belongs to the cadre of well-bred Easterners who have helped shape U.S. foreign policy for decades. Since 1941, when he gave up investment banking to join the Government, he has worked for nearly every Administration. In a celebrated 1950 memorandum, he defined the Soviet military threat and urged vastly increased defense spending. It was a call he was to renew many times over the years.

Nitze quit as one of Richard Nixon's SALT negotiators in 1974 when he came to the conclusion that the Watergate crisis was making Nixon so desperate for a treaty that he was willing to sacrifice U.S. interests. Nitze's fear that SALT II would leave the U.S. vulnerable to a surprise Soviet attack led him to become the Carter Administration's most visible, tireless and technically well-informed opponent in the debate over Senate ratification of the treaty. Yet while Nitze's reputation is hawkish, he has never called for a return to military superiority over the Soviet Union. "Perhaps brilliant is not the right word to describe his mind," says a veteran diplomat who has known him for years. "But it is very precise and disciplined."

That is one trait Nitze has in common with Kvitsinsky. The son of an emigrant Polish engineer, Kvitsinsky grew up in Siberia. Assigned to East Germany from 1959 to 1965 and to West Germany since 1978, he is one of Moscow's large corps of German experts. It may, indeed, be the reason Kvitsinsky was chosen for the Geneva assignment. With his impressive command of German language, history and culture, he will be well placed to promote the Soviet Union's image as a peace-loving nation to West German missile opponents through the press and television. But Kvitsinsky is no Germanophile. Noted the liberal Sueddeutsche Zeitung:"He knows the Germans particularly well, and likes them particularly little."

In Bonn, Kvitsinsky came across as outspoken, unyielding and yet not dogmatic. "He always takes the Soviet line, but he doesn't talk ideology," one fellow diplomat observes. "After a while you even get to like him." That will not make him easy to deal with. Warns a Soviet colleague: "If you compare his age with Nitze's, you will see who has more time to sit and talk in Geneva."

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