Volume 35, Number 21 & 22 · January 19, 1989
The Silver Fox
By Lord Zuckerman
The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace
by Strobe Talbott
Knopf, 416 pp., $19.95
For more than forty years, ever since the end of World War II, Paul Nitze has been prominent in national and international affairs. Mr. Talbott quotes him as saying that he had 'advised every President since Franklin Roosevelt,' all of whom had to some extent 'sought and taken that advice.'[1] Starting out as a registered Republican, he switched to the Democratic party after serving under Truman. He was given important posts in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, as he was in those of Nixon and Reagan. There were also occasions when some political office that he wanted slipped from his grasp because of opposition that he had engendered in congressional quarters, sometimes to his right, sometimes to his left, or because those who would have liked to appoint him feared that he would prove a troublesome teammate. 'When excluded from power,' Strobe Talbott writes, 'he tended to be not just a critic of the incumbent administration but a savage, sometimes even seemingly vengeful opponent…with a passion that sometimes carried him to extremes of ad hominem ferocity.' The Russians and, we are told, some of his colleagues dubbed him 'the silver fox' of the negotiating table. In the annals of East–West diplomacy Nitze will be remembered as what Strobe Talbott calls 'the grey eminence of nuclear diplomacy,' as the silver fox who walked with his Russian counterpart in the woods.
Review, 6025 words
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