Nick Thompson’s new book, The Hawk and the Dove, has hit the shelves, and it’s been a hit in other ways as well.
Just published this weekend are reviews of Nick’s book in The New York Times (by Patricia Cohen) and The Washington Post (by Jacob Heilbrunn). These two papers join Gregg Herken of The Washington Monthly in delivering well-deserved encomiums for Nick’s history of the Cold War told through the lives of two of its principals: George Kennan and Paul Nitze. Others such as Walter Isaacson, the former CEO of CNN, and John Lewis Gaddis, a prominent military historian at Yale, have already praised Nick’s book, and I’m confident many other public intellectuals and book reviewers will concur with the judgments of Herken, Isaacson, Gaddis, Cohen, and Heilbrunn.
Nick, a good friend of mine, is Nitze’s grandson. As such, he had both exclusive access to Nitze’s private papers and introductions to many of his associates from both the Soviet and U.S. camps. In Nick’s hands, these hundreds of boxes of documents and more than 150 interviews are weaved into an engaging and informative narrative of a critical period in world history. He approaches this larger story through the relationship of two men who, while often on opposite sites of policy and possessed of diametrically opposed personalities, shared many parallels in their lives, particularly in the decade immediately following WWII.
Both Nitze and Kennan analyzed the immediate aftermath of the war and worked in the State Department to understand the dynamic politics of the evolving Cold War. Together, they tried chart a path for the United States through waters treacherous not only for the interests of the U.S. and the USSR, but also for the survival of humankind. Kennan made his stamp on policy early, authoring from his aerie in the U.S. embassy in Moscow the Long Telegram, the document that first advocated a policy of containing the expansive tendencies of the Soviet Union. It was a missive that Kennan would later worry had been misappropriated to support an aggressive and militaristic stance towards the Soviets. Kennan decided in the mid-50s to largely retire from official Washington, choosing to advocate his position via his pen.
Nitze might be considered amongst those philistines who turned the Long Telegram into the armed brinkmanship of the Cold War based on his later support of hawkish policies, but Nick is careful to show a nuanced picture of the future Secretary of the Navy and nuclear arms negotiator. Nick emphasizes not only Nitze’s support of military strength in dealing with the Soviets but his wisdom, for example, in hiding evidence of Soviet intervention in the Korean War, documents that almost certainly would’ve escalated that conflict had they been made public. While Kennan lobbed his articles and books into Washington from a research position at Princeton University, Nitze remained convinced that the best way to advocate for his position was as Beltway insider.
Too many histories of the Cold War focus on one or the other: the inside baseball of Washington or the ivory tower of academic analysis. Nick’s book is the first one I know of that weaves together the two, and he does it masterfully.
To complement the book, Nick is maintaining a website that should be a required reference for anyone interested in insight into the Cold War and its personalities. Nick has promised to release excerpts of the primary documents he discovered in the course of his research. Whether one is a amateur or professional historian or just a curious student of the period, the documents Nick will publish will expose much of the hidden history of the Cold War. I’d recommend keeping tabs on the site, reading the excerpt there, finding a copy of the book, and keeping an eye out for Nick’s future books, talks, and articles.