Paul Nitze, who died Tuesday night at home in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., at age 97, was a long-serving diplomat and government administrator who surveyed the rubble soon after the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, drafted the American strategy for the Cold War, and reaped the fruits of the peace as President Reagan’s chief nuclear arms negotiator.

In a government career that spanned the terms of presidents Roosevelt to Reagan, Nitze evaluated the effectiveness of Allied bombing in World War II; took charge of policy under Dean Acheson at the State Department; helped formulate policy during the Berlin Crisis of 1961; served as secretary of the Navy during the war in Vietnam, and negotiated the removal of nuclear weapons from Europe under Reagan.

Speaking last week at the 60th anniversary dinner of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies – an institution co founded by Nitze and now named in his honor – Secretary of State Powell described sitting at meetings with Nitze during the last years of the Reagan administration.

“It was shocking to me then, a three star general, to sit at a head of a table with all kinds of distinguished individuals and to have Paul Nitze at the table,” he said. “It was like having Moses at the table.”

Speaking at the Aspen Institute in April, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a protege of Nitze who went on to hold many of the same jobs, said, “Paul Nitze is a wise man who helped guide us through some of our most difficult and dangerous challenges.”

“Paul Nitze was an architect of the strategy that defended America and the free world through the decades long struggle against the Soviet Empire,” Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said in a statement yesterday.

Most famous is the statement of Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz: “Wise men come and wise men go, but decade after decade there is Paul Nitze.”

Nitze’s self-description was as “an assertive, hard-nosed pragmatist.”

He first distinguished himself by writing the report of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (1944-1946), which evaluated the effectiveness of Allied bombing of cities. The survey famously concluded that such bombing was not especially effective.

As director of the policy planning department in the State Department during the Truman administration, Nitze in 1950 drafted National Security Council document 68, hailed by many as a “blueprint” for the Cold War. In surprisingly bold language, Nitze set forth a plan to counter the Soviet Union through massive rearmament and “‘a firm policy intended to check and roll back the Kremlin’s drive for world domination.” Grounding his critique firmly in matters of morality and stressing that America must win the battle over ideology as well as arms, Nitze wrote, “Our values, our policy and actions must be such as to foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system.”

Nitze is perhaps best known for his lead role in the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks under presidents Nixon and Reagan. He played a major role in SALT I and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaties, then resigned as Watergate overtook the Nixon White House. He was a founder of the Committee on the Present Danger, a group that criticized President Carter’s approach to SALT II.

Paul Henry Nitze was born January 16, 1907, in Amherst, Mass., where his father was a noted philologist who subsequently taught at the University of Chicago. Nitze attended Harvard University, where he crewed and was a member of Hasty Pudding. After graduating in 1928, Nitze went to work on Wall Street, at the investment-banking firm of Dillon, Read & Company, where he eventually became vice president and made a fortune in the markets, as well as in other investments, such as in Aspen, Colo., real estate.

In 1933, he married Phyllis Pratt, an heiress of a Standard Oil fortune. She died in 1987.

In 1937, Nitze took a year out from Wall Street to attend graduate school in sociology and law at Harvard, then briefly founded his own investment firm. He made money, but found the work fatiguing and returned to Dillon, Read.

When in 1940 the president of the firm, James Forrestal, was named undersecretary of the Navy, he sent a brief telegram that initiated Nitze’s half-century in government: “Be in Washington Monday, Forrestal.” Nitze happily complied, although he soon ended up working as an economist in various wartime departments.

After his stint on the bombing survey, Nitze moved on to the State Department, where he became part of a coterie of advisers to Secretary Dean Acheson that would set policy that would guide America for a half-century as it moved to embrace its role as a superpower. After serving as George F. Kennan’s assistant, Nitze took over as director of policy planning and helped draft the Marshall Plan, in addition to authoring NSC-68.

In 1953, he was expected to be named assistant secretary of defense for international security, but in a backroom deal much remarked on at the time, was passed over. In his memoirs, “From Hiroshima to Glasnost,” Nitze chalked it up to a plot by Senator Joseph McCarthy, although others have blamed his close association with Acheson.

Nitze stayed in Washington, where he was named to head the School of Advanced International Studies, and continued to consult from the sidelines while supporting Adlai Stevenson.

In the Kennedy administration, Nitze served as an assistant secretary of defense and later as secretary of the Navy. Despite his subsequent profession that he found escalation in Vietnam to be “foolish,” he nevertheless was perceived at the time as a strong supporter of administration policy. At one point, Nitze was put in charge of protecting the Pentagon during a massive antiwar march in which, he wrote in his memoir, “three of my four children were among the demonstrators – I suspect, more out of curiosity than for protest.”

Nitze was known for being quick to anger, and in his memoir recounts how, when in his 70s he sat across from a Soviet negotiator who displayed “an arrogant disregard for the truth.” Nitze wrote, “[I] pointed my finger at him and said, ‘You’re a damn liar!’ ” He also carried on decades-long feuds with Henry Kissinger, the arms negotiator Paul Warnke, and others.

In 1993, Nitze remarried, to the thrice-divorced Elisabeth Porter, an outspoken woman 35 years his junior with whom he had a shared admiration of many decades. Some in Washington’s social whirl were discomfited, but Nitze appeared almost giddy with happiness, telling the Washington Post: “Certainly my friends think I’m unimaginably lucky … and they’re right.”

In April, Nitze was on hand to watch his wife crack a champagne bottle across the bow when the Navy christened a destroyer named for him. It was only the eighth time in its history that it had named a ship for a living person.