What appalled them more was the substance of the speech—its lack of clear economic thinking, its failure to think through the dilemmas of using the atom bomb as either a threat or an instrument of war. Particularly astonished by the speech was Paul Nitze, chief author of NSC-68, the paper that served as the Truman Administration’s blueprint for rearmament after the Korean War broke out. Nitze never did like Dulles. They worked at rival Wall Street firms in the 1930s, and Nitze thought Dulles all too eager to do whatever clients wanted regardless of considerations of sound finance. When Eisenhower took office, Dulles asked Nitze to stay on at the State Department for six months, but then let him go, telling Nitze that he essentially agreed with his policies but they had raised such a fuss about Truman’s foreign policy in the campaign that personnel simply had to be changed. In short, Nitze viewed Dulles as an opportunist and a charlatan.
To Nitze, the speech simply made no sense. The very next day, he wrote a ten-page critique for Robert Bowie, his successor at the Policy Planning Staff. Dulles had raised the Korean War as the sort of thing we must avoid in the future. But to Nitze, the Korean War only demonstrated that reliance on the atomic bomb alone—and then the U.S. had an atomic monopoly—would not deter the Soviets from aggression; and yet it was such a reliance that Dulles proposed to bring back.
Nor could Nitze fathom the economic analysis furnished by Dulles, the notion that raising defense spending would “bankrupt” the economy. “Can one say today,” wrote Nitze, “when our population is living better than any people on earth have ever lived, when our steel plants are only being used to 75% of their capacity, when we feel threatened by the magnitude of our agricultural surpluses, that we are even close to the economic limits of what we could do if we were called upon with clarity of purpose and nobility of vision to do it? Are we facing ‘practical bankruptcy’ with average consumer expenditures five times those of the average Soviet citizen while the Russians are not?”
Finally, to Nitze, Dulles seemed to lack an understanding of just how powerful the bomb was. The Soviets had the bomb, too, and if we massively retaliated against them, they would almost certainly massively retaliate against us.
On the basis of these arguments, a general critique of the Dulles speech—and, by implication, the Eisenhower defense policy—began to emerge within the foreign-policy establishment, among certain prominent newspaper columnists and in Democratic Party circles. But the most powerful critical blow, the line of argument that was most articulately formulated and that would have the greatest influence, came ten months after the Dulles speech in the form of a twenty-three-page mimeograph released by the Center of International Studies at Princeton University. The essay was entitled “The Requirements of Deterrence,” and its author was a Princeton political science professor named William W. Kaufmann.
William Weed Kaufmann was a short man, with a slightly high-pitched voice and moods alternating between a dour, even sour cynicism and a wry, contagious mirth punctuated by a chuckling giggle. After age ten, when his father died, Kaufmann attended boarding schools, then prep school in Switzerland and at Choate (where one of his classmates and friends was Jack Kennedy), then Yale, where he graduated in 1939. War was distinctly hovering over the horizon in his undergraduate years. The Yale Institute of International Studies—the academic bedrock of Realpolitik thinking founded four years earlier by Nicholas Spykman, Arnold Wolfers and Ted Dunn, and later joined by Bernard Brodie—was having an impression on the campus. But New Haven was also a center of the isolationist movement, and several of the faculty—including Whitney Griswold and Kingman Brewster, later university presidents—were active in the America First organization. The Yale Daily News and the Political Union served as frequent forums for the great interventionist versus isolationist debate in those years.
The times and the Yale climate naturally pushed several students in the direction of international affairs as life’s work. The class of ’39 grew up to be an uncannily illustrious group, its alumni including Cyrus “Spider” Vance, campus hockey-team star and future Deputy Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State; William Bundy, conservative leader of the Political Union and later Assistant Secretary of State in the Lyndon Johnson Administration (with his brother, McGeorge, Kennedy’s National Security Adviser, one class behind); Stanley Resor, later Secretary of the Army and Undersecretary of Defense; William Scranton, future governor of Pennsylvania and a Presidential candidate at the 1964 Republican convention.
For many of these alumni, political interests were combined with a strong flavor of noblesse oblige. Yale was a bastion of upper-class education, and in the wake of the Depression and on the eve of World War, many were uncomfortably conscious of their own wealth and (in numerous conscience-stirring Daily News editorials, it was spelled with a capital M) Materialism. Bill Bundy represented the apotheosis of this tendency. In an oration delivered to his fellow Yale seniors on Class Day, 1939, he passionately told them, “If we are to consider ourselves as a group and a class of special significance, we must get right down to earth and perform special services, for it is only on that basis that the idea of class can be tolerated in a democracy.”
Bill Kaufmann was wealthy, but not that wealthy. He was not a part of the gala-party social set at Yale, nor a prominent campus politico. He was a prize-winning orator, a very diligent student, one of the academic stars in diplomatic history. But two years before America’s entry into the war, he didn’t take the international storm clouds too seriously. He joined a spirited group of campus anarchists called the Veterans of Future Wars, which morbidly but good-humoredly paraded around the campus grounds carrying placards demanding their veteran payments now since they would not likely be alive to collect them after the war was over.
After graduation, Kaufmann moved to Manhattan and worked for a year on Wall Street. He then returned to New Haven for graduate school in the department of international relations, but within a couple of months was drafted into the Army and assigned to a Medical Corps training battalion in Camp Lee, Virginia. Private Kaufmann hated the Med Corps, felt unqualified for his tasks and longed for a more exciting post in the Army Air Corps or the Intelligence Service. Eventually, his application to the Air Corps was accepted.
After the Germans seized Crete, the Army had embarked upon an enormous glider-plane program. Gliders were great fun to fly, almost anyone could get into the training program, and about 20,000 joined up, including Kaufmann. After a year, however, with the Normandy invasion in the works, the Army decided that gliders would not be so great for combat after all, and Kaufmann was retrained first as a bombardier and then as a radar instructor. In April 1945, he was finally assigned to an operational unit that was scheduled to join the Eighth Air Force in England. When they got to the East Coast, they found themselves put on hold for two weeks at Roosevelt Island in New York, during which V-E Day was celebrated.
For Kaufmann, the war in the Pacific was equally eventful. He was sent to Arizona to train on a new navigational radar system invented by the MIT Radiation Lab, and before he could be sent out to join the Twentieth Air Force, the Japanese surrendered.
Kaufmann re-enrolled in the graduate school of international relations at Yale and was soon recognized as the department’s brightest postwar graduate student. His doctoral dissertation—on British foreign policy toward Latin America and balance-of-power politics in the nineteenth century—won Yale’s annual historian’s prize even though Kaufmann was not in the history department. After completing his Ph.D., he joined the Yale faculty and the Institute staff, the first staff member to have emerged from the ranks of Institute students.