The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  McCloy certainly did everything he could to create a congenial relationship between the Council and Washington. He frequently hosted smaller dinners at the Pratt House to which a select number of CFR members would be invited to dine with a State Department official or a visiting foreign dignitary. These were formal, black-tie affairs, but he made sure that the conversation, even in the presence of a foreign official, was always relaxed and informal. Issues of great moment might well be discussed, but so too might the conversation drift toward a discussion of fly-fishing or reminiscences of the war years. In terms of the stature of those invited and the ambience created by Pratt House, these dinners represented a private counterpart to Eisenhower’s stag dinners. In such relaxed settings, the Council’s members could take the measure of a Guy Mollet, a Harold Macmillan, or an Abba Eban.55

  By 1958, Joseph Kraft was describing the Council as “an incubator of men and ideas.”56 Few of the speakers McCloy brought to the Council were particularly brilliant or entertaining, but they often could bring a firsthand report on a major news event. If nothing else, a great body of dry factual material was conveyed to the CFR’s membership. The Council emphasized the importance of understanding the “factual situation” of any foreign-policy problem.57 By this it meant to stress the complexity of foreign affairs and the value of experienced, expert leadership in the making of U.S. foreign policy. The unspoken assumption, of course, was that foreign policy was a subject that could not be left solely in the hands of the average American voter or his elected representatives in Congress.58

  Next to the quarterly publication of Foreign Affairs, the most important activity carried on at the Council during these years was the institution of the study group. Much of the initial foundation money raised by McCloy soon after he became chairman was used to expand the number and quality of these study groups. The earliest of such projects—the study of U.S.-Soviet relations—had been chaired by McCloy and was without a doubt the Council’s most ambitious and most expensive undertaking. Six full-time researchers were financed by the Ford Foundation, and McCloy, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and Walt W. Rostow participated in the group’s deliberations, which were also attended by observers from the CIA, the State Department, and the armed services. Its relative success set the standard for subsequent study groups. Soon the Council was publishing an average of four books or pamphlets a year. By 1956, there were six study groups at work and five less intensive “discussion groups” regularly meeting. These discussions were not meant to be merely academic exercises; the purpose of the Council’s “study group method” was to ensure that the “views and experience of Council members of different backgrounds can be brought to bear on a foreign policy. . . .”59

  Some CFR study groups were, of course, more influential than others. The most important such project became a study of “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” which was begun late in 1954. Earlier that year, McCloy and many other Pratt House regulars had been extremely disquieted by John Foster Dulles’s CFR speech, in which the Eisenhower administration endorsed the doctrine of massive nuclear retaliation. McCloy bluntly dismissed Dulles’s doctrine as “rather contrived.”60

  Since then, he had given considerable thought to the problem of nuclear strategy. Like anyone who was aware of the technical developments in nuclear weaponry and delivery systems, McCloy was particularly disturbed by the potential for a Soviet first strike. That same autumn, he gave a speech warning that guided missiles armed with nuclear warheads are “only a matter of time and ballistics.” He told his Atlantic City audience, five thousand members of the National Gas Association, that he wondered whether the American people understood the dangers. “The shortest distance to our heartland from an aggressive Soviet,” he said, “is by way of the North. Ice blocks to the North are no longer a barrier to aggression.”61

  McCloy was already chairing the CFR Study Group on U.S.-Soviet Relations, so he did not formally participate in the nuclear-weapons study group. But through Robert Bowie, who flew up from his job at the State Department to attend the meetings, McCloy kept himself informed of its progress. Not surprisingly, the group floundered for nearly a year, getting caught up in the convoluted logic of nuclear warfare. Hanson Baldwin suggested that the credibility of a doctrine of massive retaliation ultimately required one to convince the Soviets that U.S. strategic thinkers were capable of the final irrational act. Baldwin concluded this was not credible. Paul Nitze disagreed, saying, “Even if war were to destroy the world as we know it today, still the U.S. must win that war decisively.” This sounded to David Rockefeller like a veiled call for a “preventive war,” a charge Nitze denied. The study group nevertheless went on to discuss whether “an initial attack by the United States could succeed in destroying the Soviet potential for retaliation.”62

  After almost half a year, the group’s chairman, Gordon E. Dean (the same man who had sat in judgment of J. Robert Oppenheimer at his security hearing), decided to bring in an outside academic to serve as study director. Henry Kissinger quickly became the leading candidate. The young Harvard lecturer had recently written an article for Foreign Affairs, and both his Harvard mentor, Professor William Elliot, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., were promoting him for a job opening at Foreign Affairs. When interviewed for the position of managing editor, Kissinger impressed the men he met at the Council, but the magazine’s patrician editor, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, realized Kissinger’s writing style was too ponderous. When Kissinger was rejected by Armstrong, George Franklin steered him toward the nuclear-weapons study group. On the basis of strong letters of recommendation from both Schlesinger and Harvard Dean McGeorge Bundy, Kissinger was then given the appointment, which marked a major turning point for both Kissinger’s career and the Council.63

  Beginning in the spring of 1955, Kissinger began working out of a small office in Pratt House. McCloy already knew him as the editor of Confluence, a quarterly magazine distributed largely in Western Europe and devoted to promoting unity inside the Atlantic alliance. Confluence aimed to influence the same audience of West European intellectuals targeted by such CIA-funded publications as Melvin Lasky’s Der Monat. Founded in 1952 with seed money from the Rockefeller Foundation, the magazine was assured of survival in 1953 by a grant from the Ford Foundation, arranged by McCloy.64

  Over the next two years, Kissinger spent twelve and sixteen hours a day in the Council, attending late-afternoon sessions of the study group, writing and rewriting his manuscript. Intellectually, the work he produced was his own, but he owed much to the men who made up the study group. Kissinger learned which arguments they found sound. In addition, he received informal access to what amounted to highly classified information. High-ranking Washington officials like General Lyman Lemnitzer and Air Force Major General James McCormack, Jr., came to these sessions and openly discussed the circumstances under which the U.S. military establishment contemplated battlefield use of nuclear weapons. In one such meeting, a former assistant secretary of defense stated that, if the situation in Korea “had continued to deteriorate, the U.S. would have used atomic bombs.”65 In no other setting outside of government could Kissinger have had the opportunity to hear such a frank exchange of views concerning the most sensitive defense secrets.

  This extraordinary access to various defense and intelligence officials was reflected in the authoritative tone of Kissinger’s final manuscript. The Council had produced numerous dry, soporific books over the years, but Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy sold seventeen thousand copies in its first year and remained on the best-seller list for fourteen weeks. It was easy to see why. Though his prose was far from graceful, the critique he presented of the Truman and Eisenhower strategic policies was bound to generate controversy. Nuclear weapons, he argued, had indeed changed the world, but not quite in the manner that had come to be accepted by Washington policy-makers. Because total war meant the end of all civilization, both the Soviets and the Americans would avoid waging total war except as a last r
esort. Indiscriminate thermonuclear warfare, and even a surprise attack, was therefore a remote possibility. But this did not mean, Kissinger said, that the Soviets could not hope to undermine the critical U.S. position in Western Europe by means of subversion and political warfare.

  Echoing some of McCloy’s own speeches, Kissinger argued that the Cold War would be won or lost in a political arena, not on the battlefields of Western Europe. But, should things come to a military confrontation, the Soviets could announce their intention to seize a limited objective, such as the disarming and neutralization of West Germany, and they could proceed to wage a conventional war in pursuit of that objective. They might even use limited nuclear weapons in such a conflict without precipitating general thermonuclear warfare. Would Washington risk the destruction of fifty American cities to defeat a limited Soviet objective in West Germany? One had to conclude that John Foster Dulles’s threat of massive retaliation in such a situation would have no credibility, and therefore it provided little deterrence to Soviet aggression. What was required, Kissinger argued, was a much more flexible doctrine. The United States had to announce its readiness to fight limited conventional wars and even limited nuclear wars. Specifically, NATO had to become more than a “trip-wire” presence in Western Europe.

  The apocalyptic nature of nuclear weapons themselves had not made diplomacy obsolete. The Soviets had pursued their political objectives in the world as if Hiroshima had never happened. They had consolidated their empire in Eastern Europe and invaded Hungary in 1956. On military grounds, Kissinger argued, the United States must be prepared “to fight local actions on our own terms and to shift to the other side the risk of initiating all-out war.” The United States had to be willing to risk war: “I would suggest you cannot avoid war except by the willingness to fight one.” Washington policy-makers must not allow the Soviets to “paralyze us with the argument that any limited war must automatically lead to all-out war.”66

  Kissinger also criticized Dulles’s legalistic approach to dealing with America’s allies. Imposing “obligations” upon them to join in support of various U.S. objectives outside the arena of their central national interests only generated unnecessary resentments. Similarly, Washington should become much more tolerant of anticolonial nationalism and neutralist sentiments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. There was no need for Washington policy-makers to treat every change from the status quo as a crisis. In a similar vein, Kissinger suggested that the string of military pacts Dulles had created around the world was greatly overrated. Much of the book, in fact, constituted an assault on what Kissinger considered to be an overly legalistic approach to foreign-policy making by men trained as lawyers. Such men acted “as if a course of action were eternally valid, as if a policy which might meet exactly the needs of a given moment could not backfire if adopted a year later.” In short, Americans had to lead the free world with a greater sense of realism and understanding of foreign sensibilities than had been displayed by John Foster Dulles.67

  All of these thoughts had been articulated by McCloy over the first four years of the Eisenhower administration. Though Kissinger wrote his critique of Dulles within a broader intellectual framework, the world-view expressed was shared by the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. McCloy had always felt that “we had to be much more flexible in this strategic [nuclear] business” and that “the legalities that seemed to intrigue” Dulles were actually quite irrelevant.68 What Kissinger had to say about greater tolerance of neutralist attitudes had already been voiced by McCloy a full year earlier, in his foreword to the Council’s book on U.S.-Soviet relations. McCloy also had lobbied for the building up of a larger and more modern conventional force within NATO. In fact, Kissinger’s ideas regarding the need for a versatile conventional-force structure borrowed heavily from a controversial talk General Maxwell Taylor gave at the Council in May 1956. The celebrated book that so helped to launch Kissinger’s subsequent career as a foreign-policy consultant was very much a creature of the Council on Foreign Relations.

  Of course, not everyone liked the book. At the White House, General Andrew Goodpaster, Jr., had Eisenhower read extensive excerpts of it. Ike thought Kissinger’s arguments were “over-simplified”; besides, “What he urges we are attempting to do. We are ready to use force in a limited way, that we have showed in Formosa, in the Mid-East.” To do any more would just be too “expensive.”69

  Still, if Ike didn’t like it, Kissinger’s book was widely enough read in the foreign-policy community during the summer of 1957 to identify the Council on Foreign Relations as an alternative school of thought to John Foster Dulles’s stewardship. Now, more than ever before, McCloy’s name was frequently mentioned in the press and in letters to the president as a suitable replacement for Dulles. Liberal Republicans and internationalist Democrats both claimed as their own the Council’s tough new realism in dealing with foreign-policy issues.

  By the time Kissinger’s book came out in the summer of 1957, McCloy had arranged for him to do a little part-time work for Nelson Rockefeller. The most charismatic of the Rockefeller brothers was at that time serving as the president’s special assistant for national-security affairs. Simultaneously, he chaired one of the family’s philanthropic institutions, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. In 1956, Rockefeller was looking for someone to head a “Special Studies Project,” an ambitious effort financed by the Fund to define the nation’s major problems and opportunities over the next ten to fifteen years. On McCloy’s recommendation, Rockefeller hired Kissinger to direct the study. “He wanted to get close to the Rockefellers/’ McCloy remembered, “[and so] took up the offer as a trout takes to bait.”70 Rockefeller enjoyed Kissinger’s sardonic wit, and over the next year they saw a great deal of each other over meals at his home or in meetings at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Kissinger sometimes talked of what he was learning at the CFR’s meetings on nuclear weapons, and from these conversations, Rockefeller gradually became obsessed with the idea that the country was in dire need of a massive civil-defense program. At a luncheon with Eisenhower in March 1957, he urged the president to establish a special commission to study the whole problem.71

  Eisenhower was skeptical, but gave his assent to the formation of a commission empowered to develop a “broad brush opinion of the relative values of various active and passive measures to protect civil population in case of nuclear attack.” Rowan Gaither, chairman of the Ford Foundation, was named as chairman. McCloy was selected as a member of the Gaither Commission’s top advisory panel.

  Gaither quickly expanded the scope of the Commission’s investigation when he became persuaded that one could not come to any sensible conclusions on the scope of a civil-defense program without studying the overall balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union. After studying reams of classified material, McCloy and the other panel members concluded that U.S. strategic defenses were unprepared for the deployment of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. By October, McCloy and most others on the Gaither Commission were convinced that the United States had to increase defense expenditures dramatically if the nuclear deterrent was to remain credible.

  On October 4, 1957, just as the steering committee was about to sit down and write a final report for the president, the Soviets launched a 184-pound satellite into orbit. Overnight, the country’s national self-esteem plunged. Eisenhower’s ratings in the Gallup opinion poll dropped twenty-two points.72 Clare Booth Luce quipped that Sputnik’s distinctive radio “beep” was “an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions. . . .”73 However, Sputnik handed the Gaither Commission a timely opportunity to underscore the urgency of their recommendations. Paul Nitze quickly drafted the final report, and it was presented to the president in the Oval Office on November 4 by McCloy and other members of the advisory panel.

  This twenty-nine-page report was clearly written with the intention of alarming the president so that he would sweep aside his conservative budg
etary principles and endorse a massive defense buildup. Eisenhower had cut the defense budget in 1954 from $41.3 billion to $36 billion; the Gaither Report proposed spending an additional $44.2 billion over five years: $19 billion on offensive weapons and missiles and $25.1 billion on an ambitious civil-defense program. The authors of “Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age” recommended that U.S. production of ICBMs be increased from eighty to six hundred Atlas and Titan missiles by 1963. In addition, the Polaris submarine intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) program should be accelerated. Looking ahead to the 1970s, the authors predicted that there would be a “continuing race” and that “There will be no end to the technical moves and counter-moves.” Anticipating the “Star Wars” program of the 1980s, they even suggested that an active missile defense system designed to intercept incoming warheads would someday prove to be feasible and therefore now required a “high-priority research and test program.”

  On the “passive-defense” side of the ledger, the Gaither panel proposed spending an astonishing $25 billion on civilian fallout shelters. This was justified largely on the grounds that it would “forcibly augment” the credibility of the U.S. nuclear deterrent “by reinforcing his [the enemy’s] belief in our readiness to use, if necessary, our strategic retaliatory power.”74