Paul Nitze, 97, was a key adviser in Cold War

By Barry Schweid
The Associated Press

Paul H. Nitze served under eight presidents.

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WASHINGTON — Paul H. Nitze, who pursued a hard-line approach toward the Kremlin as he helped shape U.S. diplomatic and military strategy during the Cold War, is dead at 97.

His son, William Nitze, said he died Tuesday night at his home in the Georgetown area of Washington. A funeral will be held Saturday at Washington National Cathedral.

Mr. Nitze's long career, which began with success on Wall Street as an investment banker and included government service under eight presidents, was capped last April in Bath, Maine, as he witnessed the christening of a warship bearing his name.

President Reagan awarded Mr. Nitze the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, in 1985.

As director of the State Department's policy-planning staff in 1950, the self-described "hard-nosed pragmatist" helped to frame the strategy of building up U.S. forces to keep the Soviets contained in Eastern Europe.

"I didn't think we should go to war with the Soviets and I don't think they wanted to go to war with us," Mr. Nitze said 30 years later. "But how do you conduct things so that the Soviets would be deterred from foreign expansion and be forced to look inward at their own problems?"

Under Reagan, Mr. Nitze took charge of negotiating reductions in intermediate-range missiles with the Soviet Union in 1981.

In 1986, reflecting on the Soviet Union, which was to disintegrate five years later, Mr. Nitze said negotiating with the Soviets was like working with a defective vending machine.

"You put your quarter in, but you don't get anything out," he said. "You can shake it. You can talk to it. But you know it won't do any good. It just won't talk back to you."
 
Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and author of a 1988 biography of Mr. Nitze, called him "an extraordinary and influential figure over a long period of time."

"It was all the more remarkable because he operated at a level below the Cabinet and had a cumulative impact way beyond those who were secretary of state and secretary of defense," Talbott said in a statement to The Associated Press.