American Lives

The Scribner Encyclopedia

of

American Lives

The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives presents original scholarly biogra phies of notable Americans. The series consists of two branches. Chronologically organized, one branch includes volumes on figures who have died since 1981. Each concise summary of achievements ranges from 1,000 to 6,000 words and usually includes a photo of the individual. Also detailed, wherever possible, are family background; educa tion; names of spouses with marriage and divorce dates; addresses of residences; and cause of death and place of burial. Volumes include; Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

1: 2: 3: 4: 5: 6: 7:

1981-1985 1986-1990 1991-1993 1994-1996 1997-1999 2000-2002 2003-2005

THE SCRIBNER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

American Lives VOLUME SEVEN 2003-2005

The second branch is the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives: Thematic Series. These subject-oriented sets extend the coverage of the original series to high-interest fields of endeavor or periods in history. In order to appropriately document the selected subject, profiles cover both living and deceased individu als. Volumes include:

Arnold Markoe

Sports Figures The 1960s

Kenneth T. Jackson CONSULTING EDITOR

A cumulative index for both branches appears in thematic volumes after Sports Figures and in chronological volumes after Volume 5.

EDITOR IN CHIEF Karen Markoe GENERAL EDITOR

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS An imprint of Thomson Gale, part of The Thomson Corporation

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Y0\ T The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Volume Seven Arnold Markoe, editor in chief

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The Scribner encyclopedia of American Lives / Arnold Markoe, editor in chief; Karen Markoe, general editor; Kenneth T. Jackson; consulting editor, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-10: 0-684-80492 (v. 1 : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-684-31499-0 (v. 7 : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-684-31499-1 (v. 7 ; alk. paper) 1. Contents: v 1. 1981-1985 2. United States - Biography - Dictionaries. I. Markoe, Arnold II. Markoe, Karen III. Jackson, Kenneth T. CT213.S37 1998 920.073—dc21 98-33793

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CUTLER

aficionado and player who played a role in fostering the first nationally televised U.S. Open in 1968. He also served as the U.S. Open tournament chairman from 1969 to 1970. He helped pioneer women’s tennis by playing a major role in developing the women’s professional tour, known as the Virginia Slims Circuit, in 1970. He served as president of the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1982 and as its chairman from 1985 to 1988, after which he became chairman emerims and then held the ap pointment as chairman of the Executive Committee for the next ten years. Cullman was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1990 as a contributor to the sport. Cullman was also an avid outdoorsman and hunter who was first inspired as a boy by the exploits of President Theodore Roosevelt. His travels as a big-game hunter in Africa and throughout the world ultimately led him to be come a wildlife conservationist. He helped initiate the World Wildlife Fund and supported the fund throughout his life, serving on its board of directors and giving the or ganization office space in a building he owned in New York City. In 1990 he and Robin Hurt, a professional hunter, formed the Cullman and Hurt Community Wild life Project and a trust that focused on wildhfe problems in Tanzania. Cullman’s conservationist efforts included serving as a trustee of the New York State Nature and Historical Preserve Trust and of the American Museum of National History. He once served on the Smithsonian Institution’s national board and as president of the International Adantic Salmon Foundation. His support of the arts included serving as the director of the American Folk Art Museum. Cullman’s philanthropic efforts were many, both on the personal and corporate level. He is credited with guiding the Philip Morris company into contributing biOions of dollars to the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, the Lincoln Center, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and such museums as the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan. He donated $2 million to establish an endowment to support the Joseph F. Cullman III Library of Natural History at the Smithsonian Libraries. Cullman received many awards and honors, including the Equal Employment Opportu nity Award from the National Urban League in 1972 and the Lone Sailor Award from the U.S. Navy Memorial

Despite taking over a tobacco company just as the in dustry was starting to undergo attacks for the ill effects of its products on people’s health, Cullman guided the com pany to become one of the largest corporations in Amer ica and the maker of the best-seUing product in the world in the form of Marlboro cigarettes. Although he remained a controversial figure for his vehement denial of the health risks of smoking and his continuing role as a staunch de fender of the tobacco industry, Cullman was much admired and honored by many for his efforts both inside and outside the business world. Once described as an “old-breed mogul,” Cullman left a legacy that lies beyond the “cigarette wars” in the recognition that he was a quint essential American businessman who knew his customers and how to sell his product.

★ Cullman’s autobiography, I’m a Gucky Guy (1998), pro vides a firsthand look at how Cullman viewed his career and his personal life. Several books are available about the tobacco wars” and Cullman’s role in defending the industry, including David A. Kessler, A Question of Intent: A Great American Battle with a Deadly Industry (2001), and David B. Moyer, The Tobacco Book: M Reference Guide of Facts, Figures, and Quotations about To bacco (2005). Articles about CuUman’s role in the tobacco in dustry and his outside interests include Morton Mintz, “Former Executive of Philip Morris Blames FTC Rule,” IFashington Tost (25 Feb. 1988), and “Mixed Reviews,” New York Times (25 Feb. 1990). An obituary is in the New York Times

Foundation in 2003. Cullman, who smoked for many years but eventually quit, published his memoirs, titled Vm a huclg Guj (1998). Many critics noted that his autobiography sidestepped the issues surrounding tobacco and public health, including his role in speaking out against government regulations con cerning cigarette smoking and advertising. Nevertheless, he noted in his book that he would probably be remembered most for his work at Philip Morris. Cullman died at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan at the age of ninetytwo. The family did not announce the cause of death.

SCRIBNER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LIVES

(1 May 2004). David Petechuk

CUTLER, Lloyd Norton {h. 10 November 1917 in New York City; d. 8 May 2005 in Washington, DC.), lawyer and White House counsel under presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Cutler was the only son of two children of Aaron Smith Cutler and Dorothy (Glaser) Cutler. Both parents were New York-born children of Jewish immigrants from east ern Poland. Cutler’s paternal grandfather changed the family name from Koslow and made a fortune in New York real estate. His father was a law partner of the prom inent New York Democratic politician and mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and his mother, a grammar school teacher with a Hunter College degree, became a homemaker after her first child’s birth. Cutler attended New York City public schools, including DeWitt Clinton High School, graduating in 1932 at age fourteen. After one year at New York University, he transferred to Yale Uni versity, majoring in history and economics and graduating cum laude with a BA in 1936. Three years later he earned his LLB magna cum laude from Yale Law School, where he was also editor in chief of the Yale Taw Journal.

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CUTLER Demobilized in 1946, Cuder remained in the capital, where he would make his mark. With three other young Lend-Lease Administration lawyers, including the agency’s counsel Oscar Cox, in 1946 he founded the Washington, D.C., law firm Cox, Langford, Stoddard, and Cuder. In 1962 the firm merged with another Washington, D.C., firm to become Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering, and in 2004 it merged with a Boston firm, metamorphosing into Wilmer, Cuder, Pickering, Hale, and Dorr, employing more than one thousand lawyers in offices on three con tinents. The gravelly voiced, polished, and well-connected Cuder, a lover of fine food and wine and a notable opera patron, quickly came to epitomize the consummate Wash ington, D.C., lawyer-politician, a judicious moderate respected by all parties for his formidable ability to devise acceptable solutions, and a skilled negotiator who could persuade opponents to compromise. His list of acquain tances was expanded from the 1970s on by his active memberships in the Council on Foreign Relations and Tri lateral Commission, which he helped to found in 1973.

Lloyd Cutler. TERRY ASHE/TIME

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After spending one year as clerk to Second Circuit Judge Charles Edward Clark, Cutler joined the New York corporate law firm Cravath, Swaine, and Moore in the fall of 1940, working on railroad reorganizations. In 1941 Cuder married Louise Winslow Howe, a Wellesley College graduate and the daughter of a Chicago lawyer; the couple had four children. Although not an observant Jew, Cuder, who visited Italy, Germany, Austria, and Hungary in 1939, fiercely opposed Adolf Hider’s Germany and strongly supported American in tervention in the war. In February 1942 he moved to Wash ington, D.C., as assistant general counsel to the Lend-Lease Administration. Cuder spent three months in late 1942 as ju nior counsel on the government team prosecuting eight cap tured German saboteurs who landed by submarine on the Long Island coast. Six were eventually executed. After the North African landings by Allied forces, in 1943 he spent nine months representing the Lend-Lease Administration overseas on the North African Economic Board. In late 1943 Cuder enlisted in the U.S. Army, training as a combat engineer, and in spring 1944 he was transferred to the Pen tagon, working as a cryptanalyst in the Special Branch prepar ing summaries of intercepted Japanese, German, French, and Italian signals intelligence for the president and other top officials. For the final four months of 1945, Cuder liquidated outstanding Lend-Lease stocks in Latin America.

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Cutler argued nine cases before the Supreme Court, winning judgments supporting post-Watergate campaign finance reform and one in 1982 reversing an antitrust rul ing against the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for organizing a boycott of white merchants. In 1985, arguing on behalf of the envi ronmental group Greenpeace, he won $8.5 million in damages from the French government. Besides represent ing liberal advocacy groups and government employees facing McCarthyite attacks. Cutler advised industrialists investing abroad after World War II and represented trade associations for pharmaceuticals, cars, and chemi cals, and an array of major corporations, including the Washington Post Company, Bethlehem Steel, IBM, Co lumbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Express, and Pan American World Airways. Cutler’s legal career had a significant impact on bankruptcy law, administrative law, securities law, automobile safety, and drug safety, areas in which he sought to reach reasonable compromises. Cutler, who viewed law and politics alike as arenas for public service, insisted that his firm, known for its egali tarian and collegial atmosphere, undertake extensive pro bono work. At the request of President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, in 1963 Cutler was a founder and later cochairman of the Lawyers’ Com mittee for Civil Rights Under Law, a body that argued nu merous civU rights cases, defended individuals arrested for protesting segregation, and represented looters arrested in the 1968 Washington, DC., race riots. In 1979 he was also a founder of the Southern Africa Legal Services and Legal Education Project, which fought apartheid in South Africa through the courts. Although he served on numerous government bodies, only once, as White House counsel under


CUTLER

President Jimmy Carter (1979-1980), did Cuder desert his law practice for an official government position. A Dem ocrat in politics, he undertook specific domestic and inter national assignments for both Democratic and Republican presidents; numbered among his friends the Republican secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Baker; and broke with his party to support the un successful 1987 Supreme Court nomination of the conser vative judge Robert Bork. As a member of the Brownell Commission investigating American intelligence failures during the early Korean War, Cuder coauthored a 1952 re port recommending the creation of the National Security Agency plus the position of an assistant secretary of de fense for intelligence to coordinate intelligence gathering for the three armed services. In 1961—1962 Cuder helped to negotiate the remrn of American-trained Cuban fight ers capmred in the March 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Cutler was skeptical of the possibility of American military success in Vietnam. In the spring of 1965, shortly before the escalation of American troop commitments there, Cutler, Undersecretary of State George W. Ball, and the former secretary of state Dean Acheson drafted and circulated within the government an abortive plan for a cease-fire and neutralization of South Vietnam. Be sides working for civti rights, in 1967-1968 Cuder served as special counsel to the President’s Committee on Urban Housing, established to provide low-cost, good-quality private housing for low-income families. As conditions in American cities deteriorated from the mid-1960s and repeatedly flamed into race riots, in 1968—1969 he was ex ecutive director of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, which produced a multivolume report and recommendations on handgun

boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and also the im position of economic sanctions on Iran. President Ronald W Reagan likewise turned to Cuder, in 1983—1984 making him senior consultant to the Scowcroft Presidential Com mission on Strategic Forces and appointing him member (1985) and chairman (1989) of a commission on the sal aries of senior government officials. In 1989 President George H. W Bush named Cuder to the National Com mission on Federal Election Reform. Cuder was an energetic director of several corpora tions and longtime trustee, director, or member of several dozen public-service organizations, prominent among them the Brookings Institution, the American Ditchley Foundation, the Washington National Opera, the Ameri can Academy of Political and Social Science, the Commit tee on the Constitutional System, the American Law Instimte, and the Center for National Policy. From 1984 to 1994 he chaired the Salzburg Seminar in American studies. As a longtime member of Yale University’s coun cil, he helped to raise $374 million for the university. A vo racious reader, in his later years Cuder lecmred on law and politics at Yale University, Harvard University, and Ox ford University, England. From the 1970s onward he pub lished widely in legal and foreign policy journals and wrote op-ed pieces in the Washington Post and other newspapers, dealing not just with constitutional and juridical issues, legal ethics, and international law, but also with such sub jects as wealth and politics, Balkan war trials, the operation of the Federal Reserve System, handgun control, and con gressional pay. Reflecting Cutler’s preference for efficiency, his Foreign Affairs article “To Form a Government” (1980), which quickly became a classic political science text,

control. Cutler disliked President Richard M. Nixon, who included Cuder on his enemies list, and had few dealings with Nixon’s successor. President Gerald R. Ford. Cuder first encountered President Carter as a fellow Trilateral Commission member and subsequently advised him dur ing and after the presidential campaign, later handling the problems caused by his younger brother’s erratic behavior and dealings with Libya. From 1977 to 1979 Cutler was Carter’s special representative for maritime resource and boundary negotiations with Canada, his mandate to en sure ratification of the beleaguered 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II). Crises in Iran and Afghani stan meant the U.S. Senate never endorsed the treaty, but Cutler did persuade the exiled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi II to leave the United States for Panama, thereby facilitating the evenmal return of fifty-two Amer ican embassy staff taken hostage in Tehran, Iran, in 1980. Cutler helped to formulate and implement American responses to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, including embargoing American grain sales to Russia and the


praised the British parliamentary system. Cutler’s first wife died in 1988, and on 9 November 1989 Cuder married the artist Rhoda Winton “Polly” Kraft, widow of the columnist Joseph Kraft. Though semiretired, Cuder remained active and highly respected, his memberships on public-service venmres proliferating. In 1994 President Bill Clinton resorted to Cutler’s seas oned authority, appointing him for 130 days as unpaid presidential counsel to defuse congressional and public misgivings over White House handling of an investigation of presidential family investments. In 2001 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appointed Cuder to an advi sory group developing rules for the new Military Tribu nals. In 2003 Cutler served on a Pentagon advisory board on antiterrorist measures and as cochair of the Continuity of Government Commission, which planned the course of leading officials after a possible major ter rorist attack, and in 2004 President George W. Bush appointed him to the Commission on Intelbgence Capa bilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, established to assess U.S. inteUigence fore casting before the 2003 decision for war against Iraq.

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CUTLER On these bodies and, during his final months, as cochair of a National Academy of Atts and Sciences project on “Privacy in the Information Age,” Cuder consistendy up held the rule of law. Cuder died in 2005 of complications from a broken hip in Washington, D.C. The Republican and Democratic power brokers of Washington, D.C., who recalled Cuder s oft-repeated motto, “Don’t just do well—do good,” attended his funeral at Christ Church, Georgetown, where the Kaddish was read for him, and his memorial service in Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C. Cutler was celebrated not just as a consummate political insider and operator but also as a man of decency and principle, as perhaps the last of an old-fashioned breed of civilized and able lawyer-statesmen whose integrity and commit ment to public service transcended partisan allegiance and commanded widespread respect.

★ Cutler’s legal papers remain with his law firm, Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering. Official records relating to his govern ment service are in the U.S. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library,

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Boston; the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas; the James Earl Carter Presidential Library, Plains, Geor gia; and the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library, Little Rock, Arkansas. Stuart Taylor, Jr., wrote an appreciation of Cutler as power broker, “Cutler from a Different Cloth, ican iMuyer (Apr. 1994): 8. “Legends in the Law: A Conversation with Lloyd N. Cutler,” is in the DC Bar Report 26, no. 2 (Oct./ Nov. 1997): 12. Cutler and his law firm feature prominently in Mark J. Green, The Other Government The Unseen Power of Wash ington Uauyers, rev. ed. (1978). His service under President Car ter is covered in Hamilton Jordan, Crisis: The Tast Tear of the Carter Presidency (1982); Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (1982); and William Shawcross, The Shah’s Last Ride: The Fate of an Ally (1988). Cutler’s work for the Clinton ad ministration feamres in James B. Stewart, Blood Sport: The Presi dent and His Adversaries (1996). Cutler recorded several oral histories, including those for the Historical Society of the Dis trict of Columbia Circuit Oral History Program; the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston; and the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Obitua ries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 9 May 2005). Priscilla Roberts


DILLON

1961 the company now known as the Diebold Group developed a way to link account records at Bowery Savings Bank in New York. Thus, accounts were immediately updated to reflect both deposits and withdrawals, and this information was made available to tellers. Customers could then bank at any branch of that bank, and other banks soon hired the Diebold Group to install similar sys tems in order to compete. A data network established at Baylor University Hospital, in Texas, eliminated paperwork in accounting, inventory, payroll, and purchasing, and med ical records and statistics were made available to research ers. Other institutions soon created similar systems. Some of Diebold’s ideas were too advanced for the time. In 1963 Diebold told newspaper editors about “input keyboards” and “editing consoles,” which would re place typewriters and carbon paper, and in 1968 he pro posed a national system of electronic funds transfers in 1968 to Chase Manhattan Bank—envisioning several tech nologies that are now common. In the audience for that presentation was Paul Volcker, the future chairman of the Federal Reserve. In addition to the Diebold Group, Diebold started the investment firm John Diebold Inc. in 1967 to finance computer leasing. After selling the Die bold Group in 1991, he focused on the Diebold Institute for Public Policy Studies, a research group he had founded in 1968 to promote broad, technology-based reform. Other books by Diebold include Beyond Automation: Managerial Problems of an Exploding Technology (1964), Making the Future Work: Unleashing Our Powers of Innovation for the Decades Ahead (1984), and The Innovators: The Discoveries, Inventions, and Breakthroughs of Our Time (1990). The Amer ican Management Association and Praeger published his papers. He was interviewed by many prominent television personalities, including Johnny Carson, and appeared on the cover of popular newsmagazines, such as Time. Die bold also served on the boards of many well-known com panies, such as Mead Johnson and Prentice Hall, and was decorated by the governments of Italy, Germany, and Jor dan. Diebold divorced his first wife and later remarried; he had two children with his second wife, Vanessa. Die bold died from esophageal cancer at his home in New York. Diebold was a visionary who preached about automa tion when most people had not even heard of the concept His original idea had come from watching automatic anti aircraft fire control during World War II and thus wonder ing about the possibility of automatic factories. Overall, he is remembered as a creative thinker and a futurist who was able to attend to the birth of his dreams.

★ Obituaries are in the New York Times (27 Dec. 2005) and Eos Angeles Times (30 Dec. 2005). Sheila Beck

146

DILLON, C(larence) Douglas {b. 21 August 1909 in Geneva, Switzerland; d. 10 January 2003 in New York City), versatile New York City financier and philanthropist who was secretary of the treasury during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Dillon was the only son of Clarence Douglas Dillon, a self-made financier, and Anne (Douglass) Dillon, a home maker and art collector. He also had a younger sister. Of Polish-Jewish extraction, the elder Dillon changed his sur name from Lapowski to Dillon, adopting his paternal grandmother’s name and his American wife’s Presbyterian faith. Dillon’s father was a cosmopolitan art connoisseur and a founder of the prominent New York City invest ment firm Dillon, Read. Born while his parents were visit ing Switzerland, Dillon was raised in affluent New York City suburbs. Precociously intelligent and a fluent reader by his fourth birthday, Dillon attended the elite Groton School in Massachusetts, graduating in 1927. He then went on to Harvard University, managing the football team, becoming class treasurer, and graduating magna cum laude in 1931 with an AB in American history and literature. On 10 March 1931 the athletic, strong-jawed, but self-effacing Dillon married Phyllis Chess Ellsworth, with whom he had two children. Dillon settled in the New Jersey suburbs and paid 1185,000 for a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, spending five years in stock broking and investment banking. He became president of the family-owned U.S. and Foreign Securities Corporation in 1937 and a Dillon, Read director and vice president the following year. In 1940, as World War II began in Europe, Dillon joined the U.S. Naval Reserve. Called to active duty in 1941, he rose to lieutenant commander by 1945, winning the Legion of Merit and Air Medal for active service at Guam, at Saipan, and in the Philippines. Returning as board chairman of Dillon, Read in 1946, Dillon super vised its extensive domestic and foreign investments, dou bling them by 1952. Possessing a forte for detached analysis, he was known for carefully scrutinizing fine details of business proposals. Having been active in state Republican politics since 1934, Dillon assisted the fumre secretary of state John Foster Dulles in New York gover nor Thomas E. Dewey’s unsuccessful presidential cam paign in 1948. In December 1951 Dillon launched New Jersey’s campaign to make Dwight D. Eisenhower the Re publican presidential nominee, contributing heavily to his subsequent campaign. Appointed ambassador to France in 1953, Dillon was initially criticized for his inadequate French and diplomatic inexperience, but he developed into an adept envoy, skill fully winning French acquiescence to German membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1954 and


DILLON

1950s and thereby strengthen the dollar and prevent gold outflows. These priorities caused DiUon to oppose fiscal stimulus tax cuts and expansionary pubUc spending initiatives championed by the presidential Council o Economic Advisers chairman, Walter Heller. By late 1962, however, Dillon had become converted to a three-year tax cut of $10 bilUon, albeit one cautiously spread over three years. Eventually passed under Presi dent Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, the measure cut $11.5 biUion from personal and corporate income taxes. Seeking to rationaUze the tax system and enhance reve nue, from 1961 onward Dillon also introduced tax reforms that, though much modified by Congress, elimi nated various loopholes and provided investment tax credits designed to encourage the modernization of American industry against foreign competition and in duce Americans to invest domesticaUy rather than over seas. Dillon also drafted much of the antitariff Trade

C. Douglas Dillon,

hulton archive/getty images

defdy defusing crises over Indochina in 1954 and Suez in 1956. His urbane charm and knowledge of food, wine, and fine art proved diplomatic assets. Joining the State De partment in Washington, D.C., as deputy undersecretary for economic affairs in January 1957, assisting Secretary Dulles, eighteen months later Dillon became undersecretary for economic affairs. On DuUes’s resignation DiUon served from April 1959 to January 1961 as undersecretary, the department’s second position. Dillon, a dedicated internationaHst, concentrated on promoting trade and economic development, coordinating mutual security assistance pro grams, and enhancing the scope and effectiveness of for eign aid. His efforts contributed to the founding in 195; of the Inter-American Development Bank and to establish

Expansion Act (1962). Under Kennedy, DiUon served on the executive com mittee that decided policies during the October 1962 Cuban MissUe Crisis. He also sat on the National Security CouncU and in August 1961 headed his country’s delega tion to the Punta del Este conference that created the Latin American AUiance for Progress program. Dillon’s tax reduction program inaugurated several years of rapid economic growth, thereby, some argued, enabUng John son in 1964 and 1965 to launch the cosdy miUtary inter vention in Vietnam. Socially compatible with Kennedy, Dillon found Johnson less congenial and returned to banking in March 1965, becoming president of the U.S. and Foreign Securities Corporation in 1967 and serving as DiUon, Read executive chairman from 1971 to 1981. In March 1968, during the ongoing Vietnam War and after the January Tet Offensive, when Communist guerrUlas launched a nationwide assault against South Vietnam ese and American forces, DiUon, as one of the president’s Senior Advisory Group on Viemam, was among the “wise men” who urged Johnson to seek withdrawal from Viet nam Heading the Advisory Committee on International Monetary Affairs for the U.S. Treasury, DiUon simultane ously urged tax increases to bolster the doUar and the in

ing in 1960 the Act of Bogota economic development pro gram, a precursor of the subsequent Alliance for Progress, and the European-backed Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Although Dillon had openly supported the Republi can candidate Richard Nixon for president, in December 1960 the Democratic president-elect, John R Kennedy, seeking to reassure the financial community he would not adopt “easy money” poUcies, named DiUon secretary of the treasury, where he remained until March 1965. InitiaUy DiUon’s greatest preoccupation was to reverse the growing U.S. balance of payments deficit of the late


ternational monetary system. A trustee of the MetropoUtan Museum of Art in New York City since 1932, Dillon enthusiastically chaired its board from 1970 to 1978 and was president for five fur ther years, personaUy donating $20 miUion, raising another $100 mUUon, buUding up its holdings of Chinese art, an donating his own eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French paintings. At various junctures he chaired the Rockefeller Foundation, the Brookings Institution, and fhe Harvard Board of Overseers, and was vice chairman and a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, which he joined in 1946. After his first xvife’s death, DiUon

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DOBY married Susan Sage on 1 January 1983. He received nu merous honors, including the Presidential Medal of Free dom (1989). Dillon died of a severe infection at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. A committed internationalist of cosmopolitan antece dents, the cultivated, low-key, and prudent Dillon epito mized those moderate East Coast liberal Republicans who devised their country’s activist cold war strategy while firmly embracing relatively cautious and conserva tive economic principles.

★ Dillon’s personal papers are deposited in the John F. Ken nedy Presidential Library in Boston. Official records generated during his service in the State and Treasury Departments are located in the US. National Archives II in CoUege Park, Mary land; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abil ene, Kansas; the Kennedy Presidential Library; and the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. Sum maries of Dillon’s governmental service are given in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., Political Profiles: The Johnson Years (1976); Eleanora W. Schoenebaum, ed.. Political Profiles: The Eisenhower Years (1977); Bernard S. Katz and C. Daniel VenciU, Biographical Dictionary ofi the United States Secretaries of the Treasury, 1789-1995 (1996); and Joseph M. Siracusa, ed., Presidential Profiles: The Ken nedy Years (2004). Dillon also figures prominently in Deane F. Heller, The Kennedy Cabinet: America’s Men of Destiny (1961); Rob ert Sobel, The Ufe and Times of Dillon Bead (1991), a smdy of the investment bank; and Robert C. Perez and Edward F. Willett, Clarence Dillon: A Wall Street Enigma (1995), a biography of Ddlon’s father. Obituaries are in the Washington Por/(12 Jan. 2003), the New York Times (12 Jan. 2003), the Times (17 Jan. 2003), and the Guardian (24 Jan. 2003). Dillon recorded oral histories for the Columbia University Oral History Program and the

family. Etta Doby moved to Paterson, New Jersey, to work as a maid, and Lawrence, who was then called Bubba, stayed in South Carolina with his maternal grandmother, Augusta Brooks. Doby came to believe that his name was Bubba Brooks. Doby’s life changed dramatically in the summer of 1934. When his grandmother was institutionalized, his mother placed him with her married sister-in-law, Mce Lytelle Doby Cooke. In Cooke’s home, at the age of eleven, Doby learned his true name. Doby’s mother brought her son to Paterson in 1936, following the pattern of thousands of African Americans who brought their children north from the segregated South. Doby lived with friends of his mother’s while she worked as a livein maid six days a week in nearby Ridgewood, New Jersey. Doby attended Paterson’s integrated but predominantly white schools. At Eastside High School, Doby exceUed in football, basketball, baseball, and track, winning eleven varsity letters on state championship teams. After gradua tion from Eastside in June 1942, Doby enrolled on a bas ketball scholarship at Long Island University, then a national power in that sport. To prolong his deferment from military service, Doby transferred to all-black Vir ginia Union University and joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps with the hope of avoiding the military

Kennedy and Johnson Presidential Libraries. Priscilla Roberts

DOBY, Lawrence Eugene ("Larry") {b. 13 Decem ber 1923 in Camden, South Carolina; d. 18 June 2003 m Montclair, New Jersey), first African American to play baseball in the American League. Doby was born in a racially segregated area that was the winter home of wealthy northerners who brought their horses south to escape the cold. His grandfather, Bur rell Doby, born a slave, appears as a sharecropper in the U.S. census of 1880, four years after federal troops withdrew from the region. By the time of his death, Doby’s grandfather owned twenty-three acres and had fathered eight children. One of his sons, David Doby, became a stable hand, spending part of the year m South Carolina and part in New York State. David Doby served in the U.S. Army during World War I and married Etta Brooks in 1922 but later left the

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Larry Doby, 1947. NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY/MLB PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES


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participated in seminars, town gatherings, and school proorams. Congress recessed to allow members to parttcipate in events, and New York City’s mayor closed Fifth Avenue to accommodate an ecology fair attended by 100,000 peo ple. In the decades that foUowed, Earth Day became an annual, worldwide event. By 1980 Nelson had reached near iconic proportions in American politics. He was easUy reelected to the Senate in 1968 and 1974, and few doubted that Nelson would seek and win a fourth term. Even his opponent in the 1980 election, Robert Hasten, acknowledged Nelsons sta tus as “a man who is as close to Uving legend as is Ukely to be found in American politics. He lives on his salary, he is ftee of taint, and he thinks he was sent to Washington to lead rather than foUow.” But the political tide had changed in America. Voters were dissatisfied with the lackluster performance of Jimmy Carter’s administration and Lbraced the “revolution” offered by the Republican

can be found at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The best biography is Bill Christofferson. The Man from Clear Lake: Earth Day Founder Senator Gaylord Nelson (2004). See also Thomas R. Huffman, Protedors of the Eand and Water: Environmentalism in Wisconsin, 1961 196 (1994). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 4 July 2005). The John F. Kennedy Presidential Li brary in Boston, Massachusetts, has an oral history done with Nelson in 1964. Several oral histories in the Senate Histoncal Office collection in Washington, D.C., include insights into Nelson’s Senate career, particularly the 2005 interview with

presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. Nelson had been on the Republicans’ electoral hit Ust since the Nixon era, and in 1980 the RepubUcan Party targeted him for defeat. Nelson saw it coming. “If [Reagan] wins,” he told a col league, “it will bring out people who normally dont vote. That means I’m done. Nelson was out of political office in 1981, but he hardly retired. Resisting the lure of high-paid lobbying, he continued his environmental activism as a counselor of the Wilderness Society in Washington, DC. The Unite Nations awarded him the Environmental Leadership Award in 1982, and President Bill Clinton presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995. Nel son was the author of numerous articles and several books including “What Are Me and You Gonna Do? Child ren’s Letters to Senator Gaylord Nelson About the Environment (1971) and, with Susan CampbeU and Paul Wozmak, yond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise (2002). Nelson died of heart failure at his Kensington home at age eightynine. He is buried in his family’s plot in Clear Lake Cemetery. Nelson emerged from the Progressive tradition of Wisconsin politics to help define the modern Democratic Party and became a leading voice for consumer protec tion opposition to the Viemarn War, and environmental protection. He mastered the ability to forge the biparnsan coaUtions that bring legislative success, and by all accounts he was one of the most respected senators of his day Nel son’s greatest legacy Hes in his tireless devoUon to the en vironment and his successfhl efforts to raise the level of

Dennis Brezina, Nelson’s legislative assistant in 1970. Betty K, Koed

NEUSTADT, Richard Elliott {b. 26 June 1919 in Phil adelphia, Pennsylvania; d. 31 October 2003 in Furneux Pelham, Hertfordshire, England), pohtical scientist and pubUc servant who wrote extensively on presidential power and advised numerous presidents and other gov ernment officials. Neustadt was the only child of Richard Mitchells Neu stadt, a progressive activist and social worker, and Eliza beth’(Neufeld) Neustadt, also a social worker, who died when Neustadt was four years old. Three years later his father married Minna Blum, a widow with two daughters whom Neustadt came to consider his sisters. The youthfu Neustadfs family background introduced him to a num ber of prominent political activists as well as to the prac tical operations of government. Neustadfs father was employed in assorted settlement houses and government unemployment programs in Boston, New York, Philadel phia, and San Francisco. Gready mfluenced by President Theodore Roosevelt’s reformist precepts and advocacy of public service, Neustadfs father became an ardent sup porter of the New Deal in the 1930s, working for several federal agencies in Washington, DC., before heading up the Western Region Office of the new Social Security Board in San Francisco. Neustadt attended several schools during is bicoastal upbringing, including the District of Côlumbia s Western High School, from which he graduated in 1935. In 1939 he received his BA from the University of Cahfornia, Berkeley, and then, in 1941, his MA in poHocal econ omy and government from Harvard Umversity. His first

awareness about an ongoing environmental crisis.

★ The largest collection of papers related to Nelson’s poKtical career is located at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. A smaU coUection of correspondence and briefings

:CRIBNER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LIVES

position in government was a job as an assistant econo mist in the Office of Price Administration from 1941 to 1942 Neustadt left the Office of Price Administration to become a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, servmg as a sup ply officer in the Aleutian Islands and in Oakland, Califor nia After the war ended in 1945, he returned to Washington, DC., where, on 21 December, he married Bertha Frances Cummings, a teacher. The couple ha two children.

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critical of the Republican incumbent. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Neustadt not only delineated the obstacles impeding any president from achieving his objectives but also urged the chief executive to use the office’s substan tial persuasive powers to attain his ends. When the 1960 Democratic President-elect, John R Kennedy, was photo graphed carrying a copy of Presidential Power, the book be came an immediate best seller. Neustadt subsequently updated it four times, adding new material that made the final 1990 edition twice the length of the 1960 version. Neustadt was particularly interested in the process of transition between presidential administrations. He had admired Truman’s efforts to facilitate the transition to Eisenhower’s incoming administration in 1953. In 1960 Neustadt’s former White House associate Clark Clifford recruited him to advise Kennedy on the forthcoming tran sition. Neustadt drafted several memoranda on the sub ject and also recommended personnel for key positions in the Kennedy administration, including David Bell for the position of budget director.

Richard E. Neustadt. AL

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In 1946 Neustadt joined the Bureau of the Budget as assistant to the director, Ken Hechler. He moved four years later to the White House as a special assistant to President Harry S Truman. In addition to his many duties as a presidential assistant, Neustadt completed a graduate degree in government, receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1951. Until President Truman left office in January 1953, Neustadt drafted numerous speeches for him and worked on policy issues. Neustadt left government work for academic employ ment in 1953. After a one-year appointment teaching public administration at Cornell University, he joined Co lumbia University’s Department of Law and Public Gov ernment as an associate professor in 1954. He remained at Columbia until 1965, eventually becoming a full professor and head of the department. An enthusiastic teacher, Neustadt sought to convey to his students the realities, not simply the theory, of the practice of power. Short, chain-smoking, and intense but possessing a notable sense of humor, Neustadt was an inspiring and caring mentor to numerous students. A committed Democrat, Neustadt served on the Democratic Platform Commit tee’s staff in 1956. He became a consultant to the commit tee in 1960 and chaired it in 1972. In 1960 Neustadt published his first and most fa mous book by drawing on his White House experience. Presidential Power: The Politics of Teadership was implicitly

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After Kennedy’s inauguration, Neustadt continued to teach at Columbia but also undertook consultancy work for the White House and government agencies. During the 1960s he served as a consultant to Senator Henry M. Jackson’s congressional subcommittee on national se curity organization. He also advised the Bureau of the Budget from 1961 to 1970, the Atomic Energy Commis sion from 1962 to 1968, and the Department of State from 1962 to 1969. In 1963 President Kennedy commis sioned a report from Neustadt on the Anglo-American dispute precipitated by the decision made by the United States in 1962 to cancel the Skybolt missile on which Brit ain’s independent nuclear deterrence depended. Neustadt subsequently incorporated his research on the Skybolt cri sis into his 1970 book. Alliance Politics, which also covered the 1956 Suez crisis. In 1965 Kennedy’s successor. Presi dent Lyndon B. Johnson, sought Neustadt’s advice on the diplomatic ramifications of the projected North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s multilateral nuclear force. Johnson also appointed him to lead advisory groups on campaign finance, an anticipated airline strike, and U.S. policies in the Near East and southern Asia. In 1970 Neustadt pub licly condemned the Nixon administration’s bombing and invasion of Cambodia. In 1965 Neustadt became the founding director of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, a major compo nent of the John F. Kennedy School of Government cre ated to commemorate the dead president. Neustadt energetically played a key role in establishing programs that brought together scholars and practitioners to train not just academics but also actual and potential policy makers. Among those students permanently influenced by Neustadt’s outlook was A1 Gore, the future vice pres ident, who met with him for weekly tutorials. Neustadt


NEWFIELD

also continued to publish extensively, focusing on the pitfalls of official decision making in such books as The Ep idemic That Never Was: Policy-Making and the Swine Flu Scare (1983), written jointly with Harvey V. Fineberg, and Think ing in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (1986), developed from a course taught together with the eminent Harvard historian Ernest R. May. Neustadt’s staunch Democratic affiUation notwithstanding, those who con sulted him on transition policies included not just the in coming president, Jimmy Carter, in 1976 and the unsuccessful presidential candidate, Michael Dukakis, m 1988 but also the incoming Republican president, Rona Reagan, in 1980. Despite Reagan’s regard for him, Neustadt considered Franklin Roosevelt his presidential ideal. Neustadt’s wife was affected by multiple sclerosis in the 1970s; he nursed her devotedly until her death in 1984. In 1987 he married an old friend, the British politi cian Shirley Williams, a former Labour Party cabinet min ister and cofounder of the Social Democratic Party. In 1993 Williams became the Baroness Williams of Crosby, serving as the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords from 2001 to 2004. In 1989 Neustadt retired from teaching, dividing his time between his house on Cape Cod and his second home in England, a country he had known well and liked ever since his 1961 sabbatical at Nuffield College, a graduate coUege of the University of Oxford. Active until his last illness, he still published numerous articles and two books based on his earlier presidential memoranda and reports. In 2002 Neustadt briefly became the subject of contro versy when he praised British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s adept handling of Anglo-American relations, while advis ing Democratic politicians to emulate their Republican opponents’ organizational skills. Neustadt died of compUcations from a fall caused by recurrent sciatica.

Years (1976), summarizes Neustadt’s contributions to the Kennedy administration. Neustadt’s administrative theories are discussed in Matthew J. Dickinson, “Neustadt, New InstitutionaUsm, and Presidential Decision Making; A Theory and Test,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 35, no. 2 Qune 2005); 259288. His contributions to education are in Charles O. Jones, “Richard E. Neustadt; PubHc Servant as Scholar,” Annual Re view of PoUtical Science 6 (June 2003); 1-22, and M. B. Marcy, “Rawls, Neustadt, and Liberal Education; A Reflection on Two Scholars,” Uberal Education 90, no. 3 (Summer 2004); 54_59. Tributes to Neustadt include S. J. Wayne, Richard E. Neustadt as Teacher and Mentor; A Personal Reflection”; J. H. Kessel, “Richard E. Neustadt’s Intellectual Contribu tions”; and M. J. Kumar, “Richard Elliott Neustadt, 19192003; A Tribute,” all in Presidential Studies Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Mar. 2004); 3-24. Obituaries are in the Washington Post (2 Nov. 2003); the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, and the New York Times (all 3 Nov. 2003); and the Times (London) (4 Nov. 2003). Priscilla Roberts

NEWFIELD, Jack {b. 18 February 1938 in New York City; d. 20 December 2004 in New York City), liberal jour nalist and author best known as an advocate for New York City’s working classes. Newfield was raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, by his widowed mother, Ethel (Tuchman) Newfield. His fa ther PhilUp Newfield, died of a heart attack when New field was four years old. An only child, Newfield was raised as a latchkey kid in a predominantly black neighbor hood in “the working-class Brooklyn of the Dodgers, Democrats, unions, optimism and pluralism.” The ethos of his upbringing infused Newfield’s work, leading him to estabUsh a new genre of journaUsm, which he called

Sometimes characterized as an “operator,” Neustadt considered the term a compliment. An academic with practical policy-making experience who frequently advised government officials, he sought to bridge the gap between theoretical and appHed poUtical knowledge in his own ca reer and in founding the Kennedy School of Government.

★ Neustadt’s personal papers are deposited in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Columbia Point, Boston, Mas sachusetts. The Truman Presidential Museum and Library in Independence, Missouri, holds a small collection of his White House files. Later in Hfe, Neustadt pubUshed Report to * ]FK: The Skybolt Crisis in Perspective (1999) and his subsequent reflections on that episode. His memoranda advising several incoming presidents on transition policies are in Charles O. Jones, ed.. Preparing to Be President: The Memos of Richard E. Neu stadt (2000), to which Neustadt contributed an autobiograph ical essay. Nelson Lichtenstein, ed.. Political Profiles: The Kennedy


“advocacy journalism.” Newfield attended Boys High School. He graduated in 1955 and gained admission to New York Citys pubUc, tuition-free Hunter College (later of the City Umversity of New York), from which he graduated with a BA in 1961. While at Hunter, he wrote for the student newspaper, studied journalism, and began to be poUtically active. He wrote pamphlets for the Smdent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and came to know Robert Parris Moses, a leader in the southern civil rights movement and New Left of the 1960s. He traveled to Mississippi several times in the early 1960s; at one point in 1963, he spent two days in jail with Michael Schwerner, one of the three civil rights workers killed in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. During this period Newfield began working as a jour nalist, writing press releases for Madison Square Garden and articles for Commonweal. His first job with a newspaper

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away. At that time and until her own death, she continued to maintain a sculpture studio in her home in Roxbury, Connecticut, where she died of a heart attack. Funeral services were held at the Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan, after which Newhouse was buried in the Baron Flirsch Cemetery on Staten Island, New York. Newhouse will be remembered as a petite, vivacious, and witty woman with a generous heart; a talented abstract artist and sculp tor; a “champion of dancers”; and, most of all, an “angel of the arts.”

discerned many parallels between the Soviet Union under Communism and Germany under National Social ism. Handsome, polished, lean, elegant, athletic, and vig orous, Nitze was recognized as intellectually brilliant— but his inability to suffer fools gladly, his caustic wit, and his raw ambition ultimately kept him out of the high est positions to which he aspired. From 1938 to 1939 Nitze briefly established his own firm, Paul H. Nitze & Co., but in late 1939 he returned to Dillon Read as a vice president.

★

Until the German blitzkrieg overran the Low Coun tries and France within a few weeks in the spring of 1940, Nitze opposed US. intervention on the side of the Allies in World War II, considering Britain and France too effete to oppose Hitler. In June 1940, however, he became an aide to James V. Forrestal, his former superior at Dillon, Read. Forrestal, a future secretary of defense, was then an administrative assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, helping him prepare the United States for war. Later that year, Nitze became a consultant to the War Department on the military draft. In 1941 he became the financial director of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, in 1942 he headed the Metals and Minerals Branch of the Board of Flconomic Warfare, and in 1943 he took over as the director of overseas

Obituaries are in the New York Times (29 Apr. 2003); the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and New Orleans Times-Picayune (both 30 Apr. 2003); and the San Diego Union-Tribune and Seattle Times (both 4 May 2003). Adriana C. Tomasino

NITZE, Paul Henry {b. Amherst, Massachusetts, 16 January 1907; d. Washington, D.C., 19 October 2004), in vestment banker, foreign policy official, arms control ad viser, and a major architect of US. cold war strategy from the Truman to the Reagan administrations. Nitze and his elder sisrer, Elizabeth, were the children of parents of German extraction. Nitze’s father, William A. Nitze, was a wealthy professor of literature at Amherst College. His mother, Anina (Hilken) Nitze, a homemaker, had strong artistic and musical interests and left-wing po litical opinions, which brought her a wide circle of Ukeminded friends. In 1908 Nitze’s father moved to the Uni versity of Chicago’s Department of Romance Languages and Literature. Nitze attended a private school in Hyde Park, a prosperous Chicago suburb, and the Hotchkiss School, an elite boarding school in Lakeville, Connecticut. From childhood he traveled extensivelv in Europe. He attended Harvard University, receiving a BA cum laude (with honors) in 1928. Nitze entered the prominent Wall Street investment banking house of Dillon, Read and Co. in September 1929. In 1932 he married Phyllis Pratt, a wealthy heiress; the couple had four children. His astute investments and his wife’s fortune soon made Nitze independently weal thy. He rose to the position of vice president at Dillon, Read, but he nonetheless found his career unfulfilling. Greatly affected by reading Oswald Spengler’s book The Decline of the West (1926—1928), which argued that Western democracies could not compete with authoritarian regimes, and by a 1937 vacation in Adolf Hitler’s Ger many, which impressed but alarmed him, Nitze took a leave of absence from Dillon, Read and returned to Har vard to study for a year. His studies, which permanendy affected his worldview, concentrated on totalitarian political systems, especially Marxism-Leninism. Nitze

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Paul H. Nitze, 1985.

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procurement in the Foreign Economic Administration. From 1944 to 1946 Nitze served first as director and then as vice chairman of the US. Strategic Bombing Sur vey, a smdy that sought to assess the impact of using con ventional as weU as atomic bombs against Germany and Japan. Nitze concluded that atomic weapons had probably not been decisive in forcing Japan’s surrender and were unlikely to deter future wars. This assessment would re quire the United States to anticipate the necessity of wag ing conventional wars after 1945. In late 1946 Nitze began seven years at the Depart ment of State as deputy director of its Office of Interna tional Trade Policy, becoming deputy assistant secretary of state for economic affairs in 1947, deputy director of the department’s poUcy planning staff in 1948, and director of poUcy planning in 1949—positions in which he helped to draft legislation for the European Recovery Program (also known as the Marshall Plan). His greatest contribution, however, was his role in formulating a central U.S. poUcy statement for the cold war. In January 1950, responding to the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb and a Commu nist victory in China, Secretary of State Dean Acheson asked Nitze to chair an interdepartmental study group to review American foreign and defense poUcy, the first such comprehensive survey. The result of the group s work was National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC-68), a classified report considered one of the most important historical documents of the cold war pe riod. Nitze largely wrote NSC-68, which maintained that the Soviets sought world domination. Nitze recom mended a strategy of active containment to meet this chal lenge, which committed the United States to rebuild the West’economicaUy while assuming primary responsibiUty for the entire non-Communist world’s security against outside attack. NSC-68 envisaged doubUng or even quadrupUng American defense spending, estimating that the United States could prudendy devote up to 20 percent of its gross national product (GNP) to funding its armed forces. President Harry S Truman received NSC-68 in April 1950. The budget-conscious Truman initiaUy rejected the report’s recommendations but implemented them when the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 appeared to confirm Nitze’s assessment of the Communist threat. Annual American defense oudays rose from $13 billion in 1949 to $50 billion in 1953. For forty years the broad

1953 to 1961. In addition to writing and speaking prolifically on international affairs, Nitze gave major financial and intellectual patronage to the School of Advanced In ternational Studies of the Johns Hopkins University, a graduate school he had cofounded in 1943. The school eventually took his name to become the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Nitze subsequentiy held numerous second-rank national security offi ces but never attained the top positions that he coveted. His strategic oudook was normally hard-line, although he was prepared to jettison areas he considered insignifi cant to the security of the United States. In 1957 Nitze became vice-chairman of the Demo cratic National Committee’s advisory committee on for eign policy, working closely with Acheson to warn that the Eisenhower administration was insufficiendy vigilant in waging the cold war. Nitze also served on the Eisen hower-appointed Gaither Committee on national secu rity in 1957. The committee’s report warned that United States was trailing Soviet Russia in missiles, de fense capabilities, and technology—themes taken up in the 1960 presidential campaign of the Democratic candi date, John F. Kennedy. Somewhat paradoxically, in the spring of 1960 Nitze floated proposals to confine U.S. nuclear forces to retaliatory systems under the command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Unit ed Nations, uncharacteristic suggestions that he never subsequentiy developed and later claimed had advanced only as a devil’s advocate in the hope of stimulating discussion. In January 1961 Kennedy appointed Nitze assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. In this capacity Nitze participated in deliberations during the BerUn and Cuba crises; in 1961 he even contemplated a preemptive strategic nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. From 1963 to 1967 he served as secretary of the navy, where he became a proponent of a negotiated peace setdement and de-escalation of the ground war in Viernam, positions he maintained from June 1967 to Jan uary 1969 as deputy secretary of defense under Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford. Nitze was one of the “Wise Men,” members of President Lyndon B. Johnsons Ad Hoc Task Force on Vietnam, who recommended gradual American withdrawal from Vietnam in March 1968. As deputy defense secretary, Nitze also established

framework of U.S. defense capabilities, commitments, and objectives laid out in NSC-68 guided the country’s strategy in many respects. Nitze left public office in June 1953, as McCarthyite congressmen hostile to his patron. Dean Acheson, blocked any possibility of an appointment in the Eisen hower administration for him. He served instead as pres ident of the Foreign Service Educational Foundation from


an ad hoc committee to explore a potential agreement on arms control between the United States and the Soviet Union—proposals that laid the groundwork for the sub sequent Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). From January 1969, when the incoming RepubUcan president, Richard Nixon, appointed Nitze as the repre sentative of the secretary of defense on the United States delegation to the SALT meetings held in Helsinki, Finland, from 1969 to 1974, arms control became Nitze’s primary

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focus. A tough negotiator, he reached agreement with So viet representadves on the 1972 SALT I treaty. In June 1974, however, Nitze resigned from the delegation, fear ing that the Watergate scandal would impel the embattled Nixon to make unacceptable concessions in the ongoing SALT II talks at Moscow. Nitze later attacked the 1979 SALT II treaty that President Jimmy Carter subsequently negotiated as unacceptable on the ground that it placed the United States at a disadvantage in terms of nuclear throw-weight. Throw-weight refers to the total weight of the warheads, guidance systems, and other payload of a guided missile. Increased throw-weight increases the num ber of warheads that a missile can deliver and the number of enemy missiles it can destroy. Nitze emphasized the danger in the Soviet Union’s numerical heavy-missile su periority over the United States, rendering the latter vul nerable to a first strike. The hawkish Committee on the Present Danger, a nonpartisan group that Nitze helped to found in 1976, propounded similar views. These views were publicized in the committee’s policy studies, which Nitze chaired, and were eventually taken up by the 1980 Republican presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan. Under Reagan, Nitze—now often dubbed the “Silver Fox”—headed his country’s delegation to the Geneva Arms Control Talks held between 1981 and 1984. In the course of a famous “walk in the woods” that Nitze and the Soviet negotiator, Yuli Kvitsinsky, shared in July 1982, the two diplomats tentatively agreed on a formula permitting each superpower to deploy seventy-five inter mediate-range nuclear force missiles in Europe, the Amer icans the four-warhead Tomahawk cruise missile and the Soviets the three-warhead SS-20 missile. Many analysts considered this arrangement beneficial to the United States, but to Nitze’s acute disappointment, the agreement fell victim to a hard-line contingent in the Pentagon that included Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Richard Perle, the assistant secretary for international se curity policy. The intermediate-range nuclear force talks collapsed when the Russians walked out of the negotia tions in November 1983. In the autumn of 1984 Nitze joined Secretary of State George P. Shultz as a special arms control adviser, draft ing the 1985 Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) proposals, which envisaged reductions of 50 percent in Soviet and American nuclear forces. The START pro posals also sought, over Weinberger’s and Perle’s sustained opposition, to trade the proposed Strategic Defense Initia tive space-based shield against incoming missiles for deep cuts in Soviet nuclear weaponry. The START negotiations ultimately proved unavailing during Reagan’s presidency, although they bore fruit under his successor. President George H. W. Bush. On 1 May 1989, Nitze finally left public office at the age of eighty-two.

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In retirement Nitze served as the diplomat in resi dence at School of Advanced International Studies, pub lishing his autobiography as well as several volumes of collected writings and addresses on current issues. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, he argued: “The United States, with first-class military potential, in herent political, economic and cultural strengths and no territorial ambitions,” must “play a unique role” in interna tional affairs. Nitze’s first wife died of emphysema in 1987, and in 1993 he married Elisabeth Scott Porter. De spite a serious fall in 1989, a bout with colon cancer, and a heart attack, until his final months Nitze remained physi cally and mentally robust, dancing, swimming, employing a personal trainer, and maintaining a crowded social life. He died of pneumonia at his Georgetown home and is buried on his farm at Port Tobacco, Maryland, next to his first wife. Nitze was one of the last surviving members of the East Coast elite, drawn from leading banking and law firms, which set the course of American foreign policy after World War II. Usually a hard-line hawk whose worldview was pessimistic, by the 1980s he nonetheless appeared to be a moderate among conservative Republi cans. After Nitze’s impressive funeral service in Washing ton National Cathedral, several commentators observed that his passing also marked the effective disappearance of the cold war “wise men.”

★ Nitze’s personal papers are in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Official records generated during his service in the Departments of State, Navy, and Defense are deposited in the U.S. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; the Truman Presidential Museum and Dbrary, Independence, Mis souri; the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Dbrary, Co lumbia Point, Boston, Massachusetts; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Dbrary and Museum, Austin, Texas; and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Dbrary and Museum, Simi Valley, Califor nia. Nitze published an autobiography, with Ann M. Smith and Steven L. Rearden, From Hiroshima to Glasnost at the Center of De cision: A Memoir (1989). His later book. Tension Between Opposites: Reflections on the PracPce and Theory of Politics (1993), also contains autobiographical material. NSC-68 and Nitze’s reflections thereon are in S. Nelson Drew, ed., NSC-68: Forging the Strat^ of Containment (1994). Three published collections of Nitze’s speeches and writings are Kenneth W Thompson and Stephen L. Rearden, eds., Paul H. Nitrê on Foreign Policy (1989); Paul H. Nitrê on National Security and Arms Control (1990); and Paul H. Nitsê on the Future (1991). Full-length smdies of Nitze’s career include Steven L. Rearden, The Evolution of American Strategic Doctrine: Paul H. Nitrê and the Soviet Challenge (1984); Strobe Tal bott, The Master of the Game: Paul Nitrê and the Nuclear Peace (1988); and David Callahan, Dangerous Capabilities: Paul Nitr^ê and the Cold War (1990). A study of Nitze’s tenure as secretary of the navy is Paul R. Schratz, “Paul Henry Nitze, 29


NITZE

November 1963-30 June 1967,” in American Secretaries of the Naty, Vol. 2: 1913-1972, edited by Paolo E. Coletta (1980), 941_959. He figures extensively in Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Tovett, McClqy (1986). Obit uaries are in the New York Times (20 Oct. 2004); the Washington

Post (21 Oct. 2004); and the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, and the Times (London) (all 22 Oct. 2004). Nitze also recorded oral histories for the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson presiden tial Hbraries and for the US. Air Force Oral History CoUection, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama.


Priscilla Roberts

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