Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 52, no. 1, February–March 2010, pp. 191–198
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The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War.
Nicholas Thompson. New York: Henry Holt, 2009. $27.50.
403 pp.
Nostalgia for the Cold War has become a cottage industry, if not an outright cliché. Against the backdrop of strategic uncertainty and instability that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall, intensified through shambolic attempts to forge a ‘new world order’, crystallised with the 11 September attacks, and devolved into President George W. Bush’s misguided ‘war on terror’, journalists, historians, political scientists and strategic analysts have exalted and in some ways longed for the ideological clarity and political focus that the bipolar Cold War confrontation provided. Part and parcel of this exercise in (mostly) constructive wistfulness has been qualified admiration for the dominant intellects and operators of that epoch. Recent biographies of Cold War players such as Dean Acheson, James Forrestal and George C. Marshall (a complete list would be far longer) have all tilted towards the adulatory.
The generally prevailing attitude might be encapsulated in Francis Fukuyama’s concluding appraisal of James Chace’s 1998 biography of Acheson: ‘It is hard to read this account of Acheson and Truman and not feel considerable nostalgia for an earlier Democratic Administration, when giants truly walked the earth’. Reviewing yet another life of Acheson eight years later, during G.W. Bush’s second term, Henry Kissinger lamented an age in which ‘eminence’ like that of Acheson ‘seems to be tolerable only in the garb of the commonplace’.
Implicit in this praise for Acheson and his ilk is some measure of disdain for, or at least disappointment in, their post-Cold War successors. It is natural, of course, that appreciation for the past would rise in the face of a tumultuous present and a consequently uncertain future. At the same time, it is difficult to erase the impression that the challenges of the Cold War produced (with at least one glaring exception in the Vietnam War) extraordinariness where very different yet equally daunting ones in subsequent times have summoned mainly mediocrity. But Nicholas Thompson, in The Hawk and the Dove, his thoughtful and still brisk account of the intersecting lives of two giants of the era – George Kennan and Paul Nitze – resists the temptation to draw inter-generational comparisons. Instead, though his prose occasionally assumes an elegiac tone, he tells their story within the boundaries of the remarkable era in which they toiled, assessing their broadly synergistic roles and gauging their relative impact during that period, as well as furnishing probative glosses on crises such as the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War.
As successive heads of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in the first stages of the Cold War, Kennan and Nitze framed from different perspectives the most durable tenets of US strategy, and refined their application in various senior official positions (and sometimes unofficially, via books, consulting and intellectual activism) for its duration. Kennan, of course, is esteemed as the architect of containment: the overarching…
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Jonathan Stevenson is a Contributing Editor to Survival and Professor of Strategic Studies at the US Naval War College
