The Nitze Approach: Hard Line, Deft Touch

By KURT ANDERSEN

If by last July, Paul Nitze and Yuli Kvitsinsky were not precisely friends, the American and his much younger Soviet counterpart nevertheless knew each other well. For more than eight months, Nitze, 76, and Kvitsinsky, 46, had been assigned to Geneva, meeting twice weekly to negotiate a diminution of both sides' European missile arsenals, the goal of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks. The men met more casually as well. Their final informal meeting before last summer's two-month recess took place on the afternoon of July 16 at a mountainside restaurant near the town of Saint-Cergue, overlooking Geneva. Leaving the lodge, as they strolled together down a forest path on the way to their car, Nitze passed to Kvitsinsky a typed document. The paper outlined a possible agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union on the INF issues. The Soviet official studied the document, then, in his perfect English, told Nitze that he thought such a compromise seemed plausible. The Soviets would dismantle more of their missiles than they publicly intended, although not as many as the U.S. publicly demanded. Both men agreed to take the plan back to their governments for consideration.

As it turned out, the U.S. and the Soviet Union rejected the proposals. In fact, only a few weeks later, Nitze and his boss, Eugene Rostow, were rebuked by the White House for even exploring such a missile compromise with the Soviets. And when Rostow was fired earlier this month, he suggested a bit misleadingly that it was Nitze's abortive breakthrough last July that had clinched his downfall, and not his own sometimes imperious style. Yet Nitze remains, by every account, the most experienced, respected hawk in the defense Establishment.

In 1976, two years after resigning as Pentagon representative on the SALT negotiating team because he feared the Watergate-obsessed Nixon Administration might concede too much, he and Rostow helped form the hard-line Committee on the Present Danger to lobby against the SALT II treaty and for bigger defense budgets. But he is not an unreasoning zealot. Indeed, even his critics, on the left and the right, admit Nitze's pragmatism and acute intellectual power.

Last spring and summer, Nitze came to believe that the chances of realizing the Administration's goal--the zero option--were close to nil. Instead, the compromise on which he and Kvitsinsky agreed called for Moscow, most significantly, to shrink the European SS-20 force from 240 to 75. In return, the U.S. and NATO would cancel the deployment of the Pershing II and cut the number of planned Tomahawk cruise-missile launchers from 116 to 75. Each SS-20 carries three warheads, while each cruise-missile launcher holds four Tomahawks. Thus, the U.S. would have been left with a one-third numerical advantage in intermediate-range land-based European warheads (300 vs. 225).

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 tete-`a-tete, 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

With reporting by Gregory H. Wierzynski This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.