U.S. strategist Paul H. Nitze dies

WASHINGTON (AP) — 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, died Tuesday. He was 97.

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

Nitze's long career, which began with success on Wall Street as a young 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.

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

He wrote in a 1950 national security paper that the Soviets were "animated by a new, fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, which seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world."

Nitze, a conservative Democrat, was a natural fit for Ronald Reagan's Republican administration that began in 1981 because they both opposed President Jimmy Carter's 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) with the Soviet Union.

The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington was founded in 1943 by Nitze and the late former Secretary of State Christian Herter. Nitze could not attend the school's annual banquet last week, at which Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke in tribute to his long government service.