Book Review: 'The Hawk and the Dove' by Nicholas Thompson

Nicholas Thompson's book The Hawk and the Dove was reviewed in the Washington Post.

After a dinner party at his Georgetown home, Joseph Alsop, the legendary newspaper columnist, watched George F. Kennan head to his car and yelled, "You know, George, the problem with you is that you're a nineteenth century man." Kennan turned around and countered, "No, I'm an eighteenth-century man." It was hardly a charge that anyone would have lodged against Kennan's friend and longtime antagonist Paul Nitze. Alsop diagnosed Nitze's failings during a bibulous evening at Martin's Tavern in Washington, D.C.: "The trouble with you, Paul, is that you're just a bureaucrat."

For much of the past half-century, Kennan and Nitze formed a classic odd couple, battling over cold war policy both while in government service and out. Kennan was a learned diplomat and historian who had witnessed Stalin's show trials and purges as a young man stationed at the Moscow embassy. He went on to draft the basis for cold war doctrine by famously warning of Soviet intentions in his 1946 "Long Telegram," only to retreat from his prescriptions, leave government service and devote himself to warning of the perils of an arms race that threatened to obliterate the planet. Nitze was an inveterate hawk who attached great importance to the balance of nuclear firepower between the Russians and Americans. He formulated the foundation for American nuclear strategy in the early 1950s and occupied numerous government posts for presidents from Truman to Reagan, while persistently sounding alarms about Soviet nuclear intentions and capabilities.

In The Hawk and the Dove, Nicholas Thompson, an editor at Wired magazine, skillfully contrasts Nitze and Kennan. Thompson, who is Nitze's grandson, brings a judicial impartiality to the fierce disputes that raged between the two men. Thompson has enjoyed full access to his grandfather's archival documents, but perhaps his most impressive accomplishment is to have mined Kennan's extensive diaries for new insights. In this important and astute new study, Nitze emerges as a driven patriot and Kennan as a darkly conflicted and prophetic one.