Paul Nitze - Early Life, Education, and Family

Early Life, Education, and Family

Nitze was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. His German ancestors came from the region of Magdeburg. Paul Nitze's father, William Nitze was a professor of Romance Linguistics who concluded his career at the University of Chicago. In his memoir, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, Paul Nitze describes how as a young boy he witnessed the outbreak of World War I while traveling in Germany with his father, mother, and sister, arriving in Munich just in time to be struck by the city crowds' patriotic enthusiasm for the imminent conflict.

Nitze attended the Hotchkiss School and graduated from Harvard University in 1928 and entered the field of investment banking.

In 1928-1929 the Chicago brokerage firm of Bacon, Whipple and Company sent Nitze to Europe. Upon his return, he heard Clarence Dillon predict the depression and the decline of the importance of finance. Having attained financial independence through the sale to Revlon of his interest in a French laboratory producing pharmaceutical products in the U.S., Nitze took an intellectual sabbatical that included a year of graduate study at Harvard in sociology, philosophy, and constitutional and international law. In 1929 he joined investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. where he remained until founding his own firm, P. H. Nitze & Co, in 1938. He returned to Dillon, Read as Vice-President from 1939 through to 1941.

In 1932, he married Phyllis Pratt, daughter of John Teele Pratt, Standard Oil financier and Ruth Baker Pratt Republican Congresswoman for New York. She died in 1987. They had four children: Peter, William, Phyllis Anina (Nina) and Heidi. The journalist Nicholas Thompson, who wrote a biography of Nitze and George F. Kennan, is his grandson. He was married to Elisabeth Scott Porter from 1993 until his death in 2004.

Nitze's brother-in-law Walter Paepcke founded the Aspen Institute and Aspen Skiing Company. Nitze continued to ski in Aspen until well into his 80s.