Thursday Night in Cobble Hill: Nicholas Thompson and "The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War" at Book Court

Tonight, with a fall chill in the air, we took the R train to Court Street and then walked down to Cobble Hill to the great indie bookstore Book Court to hear a fascinating reading and talk by Nicholas Thompson, whose new book, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, has gotten glowing reviews and a lot of praise from people we trust.

We were impressed by the passages that Johnson, Nitze's grandson and an editor at Wired Magazine, read from his book and look forward to reading his account of the two friends, who were what one critic called "the Jefferson and Adams of the Cold War," often on opposite sides in foreign and defense policy disputes and whose long lives included over half a century of active engagement in the highest levels of government at the most dangerous time in American and world history.

The Washington Post review had a good overview:

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 his 1947 "Mr. X." article in Foreign Affairs, Kennan laid out the doctrine of Soviet containment -- essentially the intellectual scaffolding of the cold war. Then he spent the next decades disavowing his authorship of it. Thompson observes that Kennan later wrote that he felt like "one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly watches its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster."

Nitze would have none of this. According to Thompson, "Nitze was in sync with the times, far more confident than Kennan in his country's ability to do good." In 1950, he presided over the drafting of Document NSC-68, which rejected Kennan's recommendation that America forswear first use of nuclear weapons; the document also called on the United States to fight communism worldwide and to invest in a massive arms buildup. Decades later, Thompson writes, Nitze crossed out a line in a student's master's thesis which argued that in NSC-68 he had advocated military containment over political means. In the late 1950s and in the '70s, Nitze warned that America was in danger of becoming the weaker combatant in the superpower contest and needed to rearm. . .

Towards the end of their lives, however, Nitze and Kennan reconciled their differences as the Cold War's end prompted Nitze to endorse the abolition of the weapons whose existence he had once done so much to promote.

We're particularly interested in the Cold War these days because this term we have the privilege of teaching a course in Cold War Literature at City College of New York - we've already read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Quiet American with our students - so it was very interesting to get the perspective of Nicholas Thompson's book, which as the New York Times review noted, "succeeds admirably in blending biography and intellectual history, painting colorful portraits of complicated men who embodied conflicting strains of American thinking about foreign policy."

Thompson began by making note of the presence of his little son, who "knows about six word and one of them is book." He talked about the genesis of the book, when his grandfather Nitze in 1999 had an op-ed in the New York Times saying "I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons" and got a letter from his old friend George Kennan, who said he loved the op-ed and was glad they were finally "in complete accord." Thompson had not realized the closeness of the adversaries' friendship - they attended each other's family weddings - and the parallels in their lives made Thompson realized he could tell the story of the American Cold War from a unique vantage point.

As Nitze's grandson, he had access to Nitze's papers, including a trove apparently known only to a janitor at Johns Hopkins' Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, which he founded. Thompson also got access to a lot of Kennan's papers, including the diaries he kept over the years.

Thompson begins his story at the end of World War II, with Kennan in Red Square on V-E Day and Nitze interrogating Albert Speer in Berlin and then going on to Hiroshima to report on the effects of the atom bomb. He was able to get a wonderful start to his narrative, starting from the point of view of Martha Mautner, then a clerk in the American embassy in Moscow eager to go out on a date for the evening, when Kennan comes in asking her to stay late and send what became known, famously, as the Long Telegram.

Thompson read two excerpts from Kennan's diaries, the first from April 1951 when he and Nitze, working together on the Marshall Plan, began to have seriously divergent views on the conduct of the Cold War and defense policy. Kennan's unsparing self-criticism and perhaps even self-hatred in this entry reminded us more of Dostoevsky's Underground Man than the diplomat and scholar we'd known of.

The second excerpt from Kennan's diaries, from 1957, as he pondered a lecture he needed to give on the BBC, toys with being "honest" and suggesting that the U.S. should be merged with Canada and Britain with a new capital in Ottawa as well as banning cars and drastically reducting population, was also eyebrow-raising.

Thompson mentioned that neither man achieved his goal of becoming Secretary of State or Defense. Nitze, in particular, while much more congenial in person than the rather cold Kennan, seemed unable to resist being totally blunt and impatient when he thought the person with whom he was speaking was somewhat dense in not agreeing with Nitze's views - even if that person was the President Kennedy or President-elect Carter.

Thompson's editor is also Jimmy Carter's, and the editor gave Carter the manuscript of The Hawk and the Dove; after reading it, the former president said, "Nitze always was a horse's ass."

Kennan also tended to be self-destructive in his dealings with his superiors, as when, being considered for a top post in the Eisenhower administration and was asked to write a policy paper, Kennan wrote a devastating critique of everything in Eisenhower's foreign policy.

It's a tribute to both men that they endured. Nitze worked for ten presidents and was fired by most of them, but he kept being listened to. People always paid attention to whatever Kennan wrote about foreign policy. While neither of the subjects of Thompson's book sound like a very nice person, Nitze sound like a wonderful grandfather and Kennan probably was, too.

The Book Court audience was small, fifteen to twenty, but were appreciative of Thompson's discussion and digressions. On everything from Nitze challenging JFK's fear of his own generals starting a nuclear war on their own during the Cuban missile crisis and Nitze's trying to manipulate a somewhat befuddled Reagan at Reykjavik to the weirdness of Svetlana Stalin's letters diagnosing what she thought was Kennan's deep unhappiness, Thompson is a compelling storyteller.

So we're really looking forward to reading The Hawk and the Dove.

Wednesday Evening in Cobble Hill: BookCourt's Launch Party for "The Alcoholic" by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel

When the greatest economist of the twentieth century married the most famous Russian ballerina of her day, Londoners marveled

Was there ever such a union of beauty and brains
As when Lydia Lopkovka married John Maynard Keynes?

This evening at the fabulous BookCourt in Cobble Hall, we got to see a similarly spectacular coming together of two great American talents, Brooklynites Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel, who've produced a graphic novel, The Alcoholic, of which Kirkus Reviews has said, "Rarely does a collaboration produce a graphic novel of such literary and artistic merit" and which The Los Angeles Times has called "a scabby and subversive masterpiece."

We are big fans of both these guys - in our 2006 review of Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs in The American Book Review, we called Ames "perhaps the wittiest writer of his generation." We also loved Haspiel's artwork in collaboration with our old acquaintance Harvey Pekar on American Splendor and The Quitter and his other comics, not least of which his 1980s drawing of Richard Grayson.


So we got to Cobble Hill early and were in BookCourt's back room at least 15 minutes before the scheduled 7 p.m. reading/discussion with the author and artist. But we were out of luck: all the chairs were already taken or saved. But we figured Ames and Haspiel were worth standing for.

What we didn't know, and would find out only when we tried to leave, that there were over 100 people standing outside the inner room and even some on the street in front of the store. So we were lucky to have a great view and to be able to clearly hear Jonathan's trademark "hairy call" opening and closing.

We've experienced the three "hairy calls" before, most recently at last spring's PEN Awards ceremony at Lincoln Center, where our seatmates, the poet Kate Gale and writer Mark E. Cull of Red Hen Press, publishers of many great books and also our Silicon Valley Diet, were kind of surprised by Ames's thrilling trilling. To be honest, we thought until just looking it up that they were actually "Harry calls" because we don't associate Jonathan Ames with hair.

To us, Ames's copies of his male pattern baldness, which he passed out to the crowd to remind us that he knows he's losing (um, lost) his hair, were also old news. And he really needs to update it because, like the Arctic ice cap, his follicles have continued to disappear.

The event began a bit late because of the overflow crowd, but it was a terrific evening. Both Ames and Haspiel are big supporters of BookCourt, which has been a great resource for Brooklyn booklovers since 1981 (see The Written Nerd's excellent report on the store), and so the celebration of The Alcoholic had a neighborhood feel - as well as lots of cups of red wine passed around so the audience could better identify with the novel's hero, Jonathan A.

The novel's author, who may or may not be the model for the book's protagonist, read his hilarious essay "I Shit My Pants in the South of France," which The Signal described quite well:

It was a piece Ames penned when he was a columnist for the New York Press during the mid-'90s, which he included in his collection of essays What's Not To Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer. It chronicles his visit to a strange doctor in SoHo for his first colonic - a water enema incurred for the purpose of cleansing the beleaguered colon - and the aftermath, noting that it was "completely autobiographical, however embarrassing that is."

As he had a lubricated tube inserted into him, which Ames said conjured images of Laurence Olivier in "Spartacus," he recounted an adventure from 1983 when he spent the summer taking classes in the South of France.

After drunkenly buying a rank tuna sandwich from a dirty gentleman outside a café, Ames was overtaken by wrenching stomach cramps that ended with an "(explosion of) diarrhea like a ruptured sewer main."

Following this exercise in scatological participatory journalism - we are of the half of humanity who loves scatological humor and can't get enough of that shit - Jonathan and Dean took questions.

The first two asked them about their favorite comedians and boxers (Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor, Patton Oswalt) and then someone asked about the collaborative process in creating a graphic novel. The author and artist said that no drawing was done until things were written. Jonathan showed Dean old photos of himself, since the book is "semi-autobiographical," so that Dean could know, for instance, what Jonathan looked like in kindergrarten.

Dean said that he always focuses on one aspect of a character, and Jonathan's obviously was his prominent nose. Jonathan explained that DC had sent him material about how writers work on graphic novels: with each page, he wrote out the number of panels and then described the captions and dialogue to go within each.

Sometimes Dean would change a word or discuss his ideas for the story but they rarely disagreed - except at one point Jonathan felt his character was leering where he should have looked sweeter. Mostly, every two weeks, ten pages would go back and forth. Dean would pencil them and then ink them.

The creators of The Alcoholic said the work involved "lots of kismet," as they'd "traveled lateral roads" of drinking and drugs in their lives, albeit in very different ways. In response to a question about how they met, Dean said that as an admirer of Jonathan's classic essays in The New York Press, he saw him one day at the Fall Cafe on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens (our aside: we love the place too and have gone to great poetry readings there) and introduced himself.

What Jonathan said was particularly amazing was that Dean would often draw scenes from his life, like a childhood basketball court, exactly how it looked in real life. And he admired Dean's devotion to realism: to get drawings of Asbury Park right, Dean downloaded and studied dozens of photos from the Internet.

We were going to ask Dean how collaborating with Jonathan was different than working with Harvey Pekar but someone beat us to it. Dean said that "Jonathan is a writer; Harvey is a savant," that Jonathan "thinks about narrative structure" whereas Harvey "doesn't care what you draw" and might be happy if it were just his own head talking in every panel. Jonathan said he tried to make things interesting for his friend Dean so was conscious of putting in fight scenes and pretty girls into the narrative.

Someone asked Jonathan about his current projects, and he mentioned the HBO pilot of Bored to Death in which Jason Schwartzman will be playing his alter ego (rather than play himself as he did on Showtime's What's Not to Love?). Next summer Jonathan's new book, a collection of fiction and non-fiction The Double Life is Twice as Good, will be published.

We asked Dean about his projects, and he mentioned Fear, My Dear, the second installment of his Billy Dogma trilogy

and another book just coming out this month, but "for four-year-olds," entitled Mo and Jo: Fighting Together Forever.

After some more interesting questions about the constraints of writing graphic novels (Jonathan said he was forced to be concise, though he felt he usually was anyway) and how their friendship was affected by the collaboration (Dean said that from their first meeting, the two men hit it off, though Jonathan kept refusing his invitations to hang out and do stuff with Dean and his friends; Jonathan said that at the time he'd been in a relationship with a woman who didn't allow him to go out), the creators of The Alcoholic wrapped things up around 8 p.m. and many in the huge crowd went to get their copies of the book signed.

We stayed up too late reading The Alcoholic but we aren't sorry. As the L.A. Times said, the humor and a truly wicked honesty kept the pages turning.