George F. Kennan: An American Life

“I WAS PERMITTED TO READ A VERY LONG AND WELL-WRITTEN DISPATCH from Moscow from Kennan of our Embassy staff there,” David E. Lilienthal, soon to become the first chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, recorded in his diary on March 6, 1946. “When he says that the position of the U.S.S.R…. presents the greatest test of diplomacy and statecraft in our history, he certainly does not overstate the matter.” With his own responsibility for managing the American atomic arsenal in mind, Lilienthal added: “I didn’t sleep well last night, and little wonder. I find myself in the midst of wholly strange and fearsome things.”¹

Lilienthal wrote this a day after Harry S. Truman sat next to Winston Churchill on a stage at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, nodding approvingly as the former prime minister warned of an “iron curtain” that had descended across the center of postwar Europe. No speech of that era—not even Stalin’s a month earlier—more clearly proclaimed the demise of the wartime grand alliance. Churchill’s address in that sense paralleled Kennan’s telegram, a more closely held obituary that was still top secret when Lilienthal read it.² Both texts became iconic in Cold War history. Neither, however, brought about the shift in U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union that took place during the first three months of 1946.

That was happening, J. C. Donnelly of the British Foreign Office noted on March 5, because circumstances had forced the Truman administration at last to give the world “some measure of the leadership which the United States ought to be providing.”³ The events in question were those Kennan had been reporting since arriving in Moscow in 1944. They showed the Soviet Union defining its postwar security requirements unilaterally, without taking into account those of the United States, Great Britain, and their democratic allies. That finding would have shocked most Americans while the war was going on, as Harriman and Bohlen were well aware: Kennan had been almost alone in insisting on it. The coming of peace, however, accomplished the only objective—military victory—that the U.S.S.R. shared with anyone else. The disillusionments that followed made balancing hopes against fears increasingly difficult, and Stalin’s “election” speech on February 9, 1946, ended the effort altogether for all but his most abject apologists.

It was within this context that Truman took control of foreign policy, having for the most part delegated it, during his first months in office, to his secretary of state. There would be, the president insisted, no further concessions like the ones made at Moscow. Byrnes swung into line with an address of his own in New York on February 28: “We will not and we cannot stand aloof,” he warned, “if force or the threat of force is used contrary to the purposes of the [U.N.] Charter…. If we are to be a great power we must act as a great power, not only in order to ensure our own security but in order to preserve the peace of the world.”⁴

The secretary of state had seen Kennan’s “long telegram” before delivering this speech, but most of it had already been drafted by then. What 511 did do, Doc Matthews explained to his friend Robert Murphy, was to provide the rationale for the course upon which the administration had already embarked. With pardonable pride—he and Durbrow having elicited it—Matthews confirmed that Kennan’s analysis, “to my mind the finest piece of analytical writing that I have ever seen come out of the [Foreign] Service…, has been received in the highest quarters here as a basic outline of future Soviet policy. That goes for the Secretary [of State], the Secretaries of War and Navy, our highest Army and Navy authorities and also across the street.” Across the street for the Department of State in 1946—as when Kennan trained there in 1926 and in moments of boredom could look out the window to monitor the comings and goings of Calvin Coolidge—was the White House. “I am very much impressed,” Murphy replied. “I think that you deserve a large bouquet of orchids for having engineered this process.”⁵

I.

Donnelly had expressed doubt, in his March 5 assessment from London, that the new policy would stick: “It is unlikely that even the most ideal American administration imaginable would achieve what we should regard as a high standard in clarity of thought and consistency.”⁶ Kennan would not have disputed that view. Nothing had prepared him for the possibility that his country might devise and carry out a coherent grand strategy, much less one based on his own thinking. Yet this is what happened: the “long telegram” became the conceptual foundation for the strategy the United States—and Great Britain—would follow for over four decades. How then did a single dispatch sent from a distant post by a relatively unknown diplomat produce such a result?

One way to answer this question is to compare Kennan’s telegram with a review of policy toward the Soviet Union that had been under way in the State Department since the fall of 1945. Authorized by the new under secretary of state, Dean Acheson, its principal authors were Bohlen and Geroid T. Robinson, a Columbia University historian of Russia who had worked in the Office of Strategic Services during the war. The Bohlen-Robinson report was meant to reflect both Foreign Service and academic expertise on the U.S.S.R., but it differed from Kennan’s analysis in several ways.

It began by questioning its own authority: theirs was “a doubtful and uncertain enterprise,” Bohlen and Robinson lamented, because “it is impossible to grasp the total situation fully and to describe it in a set of coherent and well-established conclusions.” Mindful of this, they presented a matrix of options while avoiding specific claims. The report identified three probable “periods” in the future Soviet-American relationship in which it might be possible to apply a “Policy A,” a “Policy B,” or a “Third Alternative Procedure.” They composed the paper over several months, while handling other responsibilities. The final draft, dated February 14, 1946, reflected these limitations, concluding inelegantly that

Coming five days after Stalin’s speech, which Time magazine described as “the most warlike pronouncement uttered by any top-rank statesman since V-J Day,” this was not quite rising to the occasion. Despite its authors’ credentials, the Bohlen-Robinson report was a bureaucratic soporific, hedged with qualifications, unin-spiringly written, overtaken by events.⁷

Kennan’s telegram, in contrast, projected fierce self-confidence in clear prose with relentless logic. It qualified nothing, advanced no alternatives, and made no apologies for seeing everything in a single snapshot. It was the geopolitical equivalent of a medical X-ray, penetrating beneath alarming symptoms to yield at first clarity, then comprehension, and finally by implication a course of treatment.

The clarity came from Kennan’s demonstration—it was more than just a claim—that victory in war and security in peace required different strategies. The United States and Great Britain could have defeated Nazi Germany only by allying with the Soviet Union; their postwar safety, however, would depend on resisting the Soviet Union. Kennan drove the point home by placing wartime cooperation within the stream of time and the realm of ideas. The roots of Soviet policy lay not in that brief experience but much further back in Russian history and much more deeply in Bolshevik ideology. It was to these centers of gravity that Stalin was now returning. The Grand Alliance could not be a blueprint for the postwar world because the U.S.S.R. had never been, and as currently constituted would never be, a normal state, willing to work with others to establish a mutually satisfactory international order.

Comprehension followed, for if—as Kennan insisted—the Soviet regime needed external enemies to justify its internal rule, then this would account for the wariness with which it had regarded its wartime allies, as well as for the ease with which it turned them into enemies once victory had been achieved. Diplomacy would be of little use in this situation. The United States faced new and profound dangers, against which a mobilization of political, economic, ideological, intellectual, and moral resources would be as necessary as in the war just ended.

That grim prognosis, paradoxically, relieved most of those who saw it, because Kennan left open the possibility that military mobilization might not be required. Stalin’s offensives would rely on agents and ideologies but not armies; he had no deadlines; there was time to construct fortifications. The most important of these would be a revival of European self-reliance, something the United States should want even in the absence of a Soviet threat. Hence, Kennan was saying, Americans could secure their interests by meeting their responsibilities. The tautology was oddly comforting.

After reading the “long telegram,” Bohlen philosophically abandoned his own review. “There is no need,” he wrote his State Department colleagues on March 13, “to go into any long analysis of the motives or the reasons for present Soviet policy.” Kennan’s telegram had provided that. It was clear now that the Kremlin saw a world “divided into two irreconcilably hostile camps.” Provided neither contested the other’s sphere, they might coexist: the problem was “(a) to convince the Soviet Union of this possibility and (b) to make clear well in advance the inevitable consequence of the present line of Soviet policy based on the opposite thesis.”⁸

Kennan’s dispatch, by then, had gained an unusually large audience for a classified document. The State Department sent summaries to major foreign posts, and the Army and Navy forwarded it to overseas commanders, one of whom—significantly for Kennan’s future—was General George C. Marshall, then on a presidential mission to try to end the civil war in China. Accolades soon reached the author. A typical one came from Henry Norweb, now ambassador to Cuba, who had known Kennan in Lisbon during the war: “I am sure every chief of mission who read it has been made wistful—wishing such a report could emanate from his office.” It was “a masterpiece of ‘thinking things out,’ [of] realism devoid of hysteria, of courageous approach to a problem.” Norweb’s staff had returned it with comments like “Astonishing!” “[A]n answer to prayer.” “Suggest you tell the Department how good this is.” Kennan’s presence in Moscow had been “one tremendous, undeserved piece of good luck for the United States of America.”⁹

Frank Roberts saw Kennan’s telegram soon after he sent it and, with his permission, forwarded a summary to London. The Foreign Office response was “Please will you send us yours?” Roberts obliged with three dispatches—not cables—that went by pouch in mid-March. Much longer than Kennan’s, Roberts’s messages placed less emphasis on persuasion—his foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, needed none when it came to suspecting Stalin’s intentions—and more on how Soviet ambitions might affect the British Empire. Nonetheless, Roberts faithfully echoed Kennan’s main points. “George was the great expert,” he later acknowledged, “and I benefited enormously from this.”¹⁰

The “long telegram” also had unauthorized readers. Kennan assumed, correctly as it turned out, that reports of the document, if not the full text, would quickly reach Moscow. It took a few months for its significance to sink in, but at some point in the summer of 1946, Foreign Minister Molotov ordered Nikolay Novikov, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, to follow suit. Kennan enjoyed imagining how Molotov might have put it: “Why haven’t you produced anything like this?”

Sent by pouch on September 27, the Novikov dispatch began with, and at no point departed from, the proposition that the foreign policy of the United States, reflecting “the imperialist tendencies of American monopolistic capital,” was one of “striving for world supremacy.” It would seek this objective in collaboration with Great Britain; but Novikov also claimed—contradicting his own logic but aligning himself with Lenin’s—that as capitalist rivals the British and the Americans regarded each other as their greatest enemy. “These poor people, put on the spot, produced the thing,” Kennan concluded, but “it was only a way of saying to their masters in Moscow: ‘How true, sir!’”¹¹

Kennan’s “long telegram” set an international standard for analytical reporting, and it was not just contemporaries who envied it. Future diplomats would dream of accomplishing what he did with a single document, but no one ever managed it: the dispatch remains unique. It set out no fully conceived grand strategy, but it was a start, and in that sense it met a need. “I now feel better about things than I have for some time,” Kennan admitted to a friend two months after sending his famous message. “[S]ome of the most dangerous tendencies in American thought about Russia have been checked, if not overcome. If we can now only restrain the hot-heads and the panic-mongers and keep policy on a firm and even keel, I am not pessimistic.”¹²

II.

Kennan still wanted to come home. “I feel I must get away this spring,” he cabled Durbrow on March 7, and “if Dept can not take some action in near future I am afraid I will have to submit telegraphic resignation and ask to be relieved by May 1.” Byrnes himself replied, noting that Harriman’s successor as ambassador, General Walter Bedell Smith, would soon arrive in Moscow, but that Durbrow, who was to replace Kennan, would not be able to get there until July. Could not Kennan stay on until that date? “You have been doing a wonderful job, for which we are all very grateful.” Smith followed up: “The most important single thing to me in connection with this mission is that I have the benefit of your experience and advice…. I request most urgently that you remain until about July first.”¹³

“It is a source of great satisfaction to me that I have been able, with the loyal and effective support of the other officers here, to assist you in your heavy responsibility at this difficult period,” Kennan replied to Byrnes. “I have been associated with this Mission on and off since its inception, and no one—I think—has its interests more keenly at heart.” If the department really wanted him to stay through June, he would do so to the extent that his health permitted. But he warned Durbrow that it might not. He had been sick for weeks, and in “this sunless and vitaminless environment,” recovery had been slow. With other departures and persisting staff shortages, “we are operating here under tremendous pressure and on absolutely no margin.”¹⁴

That left Durbrow looking for a solution. “George wanted to get out of the Service [to go] into the academic world. I didn’t want George to get out of the Service. Chip [Bohlen] didn’t, and Loy Henderson didn’t. We had a guy that had a wonderful analytical mind, and we needed him.” Fortunately for all concerned, Durbrow enjoyed Washington cocktail parties. At one he ran into General Alfred M. Gruenther, a distinguished Army officer who had just been appointed deputy commandant of the new National War College. “You know George Kennan, don’t you?” “Very well, yes.” “We need somebody with background on the Soviet Union, who’s brilliant.” Behind the inquiry, Durbrow suspected, was “the telegram,” which Gruenther had probably read. “He’s in Moscow, isn’t he? Any chance of getting him back?” After hearing what the job would entail, Durbrow thought it perfect: “George will love that. It’ll get him in the academic world to a certain extent. It’ll get him out of the rut of routine business.” Kennan too, when Durbrow wrote him, jumped at the opportunity. “Am interested in National War College job mentioned in your letter,” he cabled back. “What would be “[n]ature of duties, salary, title, etcetera?”¹⁵

The title, it turned out, would be Deputy Commandant for Foreign Affairs; Kennan would retain his Class I rank in the Foreign Service; and his assignment would be to help design and teach the curriculum at the first school for grand strategy that had ever existed in the United States. Located in the former premises of the Army War College at Fort McNair in Washington, the National War College was an early response to the widespread conviction, emerging from World War II, that the nation could no longer afford to separate military operations from political objectives. Although he played no role in establishing it, the school was another vindication of Kennan’s thinking. He was, Ambassador Smith had to acknowledge, “unquestionably the best possible choice that could be made from the State Dept.” The students would be mid-career Army, Navy, and Foreign Service officers destined for higher responsibilities; classes would start early in September. The job suited Kennan for many reasons, not the least of which was that the task of preparing for it would get him and his family home sooner. They needed to leave right away, he wrote Bohlen on April 19. “[O]nly ex-Muscovite could understand.”¹⁶

The Kennans departed on the twenty-ninth, traveling with Smith by plane to Paris, where George spent a week with the U.S. delegation to the Council of Foreign Ministers, which was meeting there. They sailed for New York on May 10, and by the twenty-first were back at the farm in East Berlin. “We are as usual frightfully busy getting settled,” Annelise wrote to Frieda Por. “I wonder if we are ever going to get out of that state.” The State Department, in the meantime, had authorized George’s transfer, even if it was not quite sure where: “You are hereby assigned to duty at the Naval War College.”¹⁷

Feeling guilty that he had abandoned Smith as the new ambassador was taking up his duties in Moscow, Kennan wrote him a long letter on June 27, explaining how he had used the past five weeks. Most of his time had been spent working with Gruenther and his colleagues on the war college curriculum. But there had also been “many demands” to talk about the Soviet Union:

There would now be three weeks at the farm until July 20, when Kennan would begin a speaking tour of the western United States. It was a State Department experiment in public outreach: “I hope it will be profitable to the victims.”

Kennan was grateful for the confidence Smith had shown in him by allowing his early return: the pressure would have been much greater had he had to remain in Moscow through most of the summer. He and Annelise hoped that the Smiths were beginning to feel “some of the ineffable and implausible, but nonetheless real compensations which life [in Moscow] has to offer.” The ambassador would probably say, “with a snort,” that these were apparent “only to those who have left and are reposing comfortably in the arms of capitalism. And to that retort, I have no reply.”¹⁸

III.

When he began designing a course on grand strategy in the summer of 1946, Kennan had to start from scratch: “This was the first time I had personally ever had occasion to address myself seriously, either as a student or as a teacher, to this subject.” But it was also the first time the U.S. government had ever prescribed its study. Apart from Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose work at the Naval War College half a century earlier had focused exclusively on that form of power, no American had written anything worth reading on the relationship of war to politics. There were, to be sure, the great European strategists, conveniently analyzed in Edward Mead Earle’s recently published collection of commissioned essays, Makers of Modern Strategy. But “in no instance was the thinking of these earlier figures… adequate to the needs of a great American democracy in the atomic age. All of this, clearly, was going to have to be rethought.”¹⁹

The rethinking, for Kennan, began with the bomb. His initial reactions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been a jumble—relief that the war was over, regret at the destruction employed to bring this about, alarm at the possibility that the Soviet Union might obtain its own weapon, whether through espionage or the Truman administration’s naïveté in prematurely embracing the principle of international control.²⁰ None of these thoughts cohered, however, until Kennan read another book of essays, edited by Bernard Brodie, just off the press in June 1946. Entitled The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, this volume, together with Earle’s Makers, gave Kennan a crash course in the field he was about to teach. The notes he took suggest what he learned.

Kennan began with Brodie’s book, grasping at once the paradox it posed: “Best way to avoid atomic war is to avoid war; best way to avoid war is to be prepared to resort to atomic warfare.” He recorded detailed information on the destructive capabilities of the new weapon, on the resources necessary to build it, and on the possibility that the Baruch Plan, then being proposed by the Truman administration, might provide a way for the United Nations to manage it. He was, however, skeptical: “Soviets would not hesitate to promise to forego production & proceed nevertheless to produce.” One essay claiming that only the world organization could handle the bomb caused Kennan to stop taking notes: “Remainder just rot.”²¹

The real significance of atomic weapons, he concluded, lay not in the need to bolster international institutions but in the realization that “if we are to avoid mutual destruction, we must revert to strategic political thinking of XVIII Century.” The complete annihilation of enemies no longer made sense, because:

It followed, then, that American objectives should be limited to:

And how might the eighteenth century help? Here Kennan drew on Earle’s volume, which contained essays on two post-Napoleonic grand strategists who had also rethought their subject in the aftermath of a total war.

The first, by the historians Crane Brinton, Gordon Craig, and Felix Gilbert, discussed the Swiss strategist Antoine-Henri Jomini, whose writings, the authors conceded, were outdated and little read. But Jomini had considered the central problem in warfare to be determining “correct lines of operation, leaving to enemy choice of withdrawing or accepting combat under unfavorable conditions.” Kennan saw a lesson for the United States:

The note is undated, but it appears to be Kennan’s first use—in a geopolitical context—of the verb that became associated with his name.²³

By far the greater impression, however, came from Hans Rothfels’s article on Carl von Clausewitz—the best study available in English at the time on the much-misunderstood Prussian strategist. Kennan was struck by Clausewitz’s emphasis on psychologically disarming an adversary: finding the point at which “the enemy realizes that victory is either too unlikely or too costly.” Hence the need to pinpoint the “center of gravity”—an army, a capital city, an alliance, even public opinion—against which minimum pressure might produce maximum results. The defense would, thus, lure the offense into overextension: “Assailant weakens himself as he advances.” (Kennan thought it significant that both Jomini and Clausewitz had fought on the Russian side when Napoleon invaded in 1812.) Once the “culminating point” of the offensive had been reached, the enemy could only shift to defense without its advantages: “The best he can do is to demonstrate that, if there is no longer any chance of his winning, his opponent cannot reach this aim either.”²⁴

Most important, for Kennan, was Clausewitz’s claim that war is a continuation of policy by other means. Kennan correctly understood this to imply not that politics are suspended during war, but just the opposite: “For[eign] pol[icy] aims are the end and war is the means.” Violence therefore could never be an objective: “Even in case of Germany it is questionable whether a war of destruction was desirable.” It would certainly not be possible against the Soviet Union: the only possibility was “a political war, a war of attrition for limited objectives.”

Not the least of Clausewitz’s attractions was that he provided ammunition for arguments with Bohlen: “Chip says that [a war of destruction] could not have been otherwise: that the U.S. cannot fight a political war.” Perhaps so, in World War II, but in the coming conflict Kennan—and Clausewitz’s ghost—were insisting that it would have no choice but to learn to do so.²⁵

What Clausewitz taught him, Kennan recalled years later, was that the United States had no peacetime political-military doctrine, only a set of obsolete traditions—isolationism, neutrality, the Open Door. There was, thus, the need to clarify the uses of military power: “what we could expect to do with it, what we could not expect to do with it, and how it should fit in with diplomacy and political aims.” Kennan’s war college teaching, he hoped, would “build an intellectual structure which could act as a guide to policy makers, and which could find acceptance gradually through the academic world in the country at large.”²⁶

IV.

In the meantime, though, the State Department had given Kennan an unusual opportunity to assess opinion in the country at large. He had called, in the “long telegram,” for educating Americans to the “realities of the Russian situation: I cannot over-emphasize [the] importance of this.” That passage particularly impressed William Benton, the new assistant secretary of state for public affairs, who pushed hard for giving Kennan part of that responsibility. The National War College appointment precluded any full-time commitment, but Kennan had been working with the department to find ways of “off-setting misleading and inaccurate propaganda.” The “experiment” of a speaking tour was one such effort.²⁷

Surprisingly for someone who had traveled so extensively elsewhere, Kennan had never been west of the Mississippi River until the State Department sent him there late in the summer of 1946. Accompanied by Annelise, George spoke in Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Los Angeles, concluding his trip with a talk to the Adams County Bankers’ Association of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He prepared no texts, relying “on a few scribbled notes, on the resources of memory, and on the inspiration of the moment.” The tour, for Kennan, was yet another discovery of America, although this time under official auspices, and with no bicycle.²⁸

Businessmen, he reported to the department, were his best audiences. Possessing few preconceived ideas on the Soviet Union, with no personal positions at stake, they were “friendly, curious, and generally anxious to be enlightened.” They were almost all male, and Kennan found that it was easier to hold their interest than when he was speaking to mixed audiences. Women, he still believed, were ill equipped to discuss international relations, because their clubs focused too earnestly on that subject. These organizations were a way of escaping “the boredom, frustration and faintly guilty conscience which seem to afflict many well-to-do and insufficiently occupied people in this country.” Russia—“mysterious and inviting, with just enough of wickedness and brutality to complete the allure”—was easier to talk about than the problems of race, slums, and labor unions at home. Having been told so often that only cooperation with Moscow could ensure peace, it was a shock for them to hear that peace would be possible “only through a long, unpleasant process of setting will against will, force against force, idea against idea.”

Professors were also difficult, because many of them had taken positions in public that were not in accord with what Kennan had to say. Their reputations were at stake, their pride was affected, they had made “rosy forecasts” in the hope of enhancing “their own glamour, prestige and importance.” The tendency showed up most clearly in California, where university faculties also seemed to have “a geographical inferiority complex,” resentful of the fact that foreign policy was still an East Coast product, confident that if given the chance they could handle it better, convinced that the future lay as much with countries bordering the Pacific as the Atlantic, certain that the Soviet Union, especially Siberia, fell within that realm.

Two West Coast groups particularly aroused Kennan’s concern. One was atomic scientists at Berkeley, who seemed to have “an unshakeable faith” that if they could only meet Soviet scientists and enlighten them about atomic weapons, all would be well. It had not occurred to them that, far from frightening Kremlin leaders, the bomb’s destructive potential might “whet their desire to find a way of using it.” Kennan also worried about San Francisco intellectuals, among whom he saw signs of communist activity: “I have been connected with Russian affairs for too many years not to know the real thing when I see it.” Everything he said, he was sure, was dutifully reported to the Soviet consul. (Kennan was right about this. A summary of his San Francisco remarks went off to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow on August 28.) Nothing he said was confidential, but if the State Department intended to send speakers on more sensitive topics, “it had better exercise some check on who is admitted to the meetings.”

By the time Kennan reached Los Angeles, another intelligence organization, without his knowledge, was tracking his movements. The local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that a “Mr. George Kennan,” whose name had appeared in left-wing publications in connection with activities taking place at the U.S. embassy in the Soviet Union, was soon to speak in that city. Did FBI headquarters wish “to ascertain the nature of his lecture”? J. Edgar Hoover’s office failed to respond, so an agent took it upon himself to attend Kennan’s talk on August 9, after which he sent in seven pages of notes and apologized for having earlier misspelled the speaker’s name, which should be “Kennon.” This did elicit a crisp reply: “For your information, George Frost Kennan has held many positions in the foreign service of the State Department, …is considered a foremost authority on Russian affairs, and his recent assignment to Moscow furnished considerable basis for our present foreign policy.”

Kennan ended his trip report with an affectionate tribute to his Gettysburg neighbors, who had come to his lecture “unencumbered—bless their hearts—by any pretensions to knowledge of the subject or by any inordinate sense of responsibility about it.” He had been warned that they might drift off, but this did not happen. They asked few questions, because they were shy, unaccustomed to that sort of thing, and “they don’t think that fast.” But they were “probably the most representative—and for that reason the most important—of the people I reached.”

The speaking tour, Kennan concluded, had been “generally successful,” in that he had been able to convey “a clearer, more realistic, less extreme and less alarmist view of Soviet-American relations” than his audiences had previously been exposed to, as well as “a greater confidence in the sincerity and soundness of the State Department.” Decades later he explained what he meant. He had found, on returning from Moscow, that if he warned people “that we couldn’t have the sort of collaboration we’d hoped for with the Russians,” this would cause them to conclude: “Well, then, war is inevitable.” So he had tried to say, on his trip, just the opposite: “You don’t have to have a war. Just don’t let them—if you can help it—expand their influence any further.”²⁹

“Boy, you missed your calling,” a Milwaukee minister told Kennan after hearing him in his hometown. The tour showed that he could speak extemporaneously to diverse audiences, that he enjoyed doing so, and that he would like to keep it up. Perhaps it might be possible, he wrote Acheson, “for someone who, like myself, is not too far from the Department of State and at the same time not too near it, to accomplish something valuable.” Acheson readily agreed: “I would like to have you accept as many invitations to speak as you can…. I appreciate the extra burden your generous offer places on you; nevertheless, I hasten to take advantage of it.”³⁰

V.

The National War College welcomed its first class, made up of forty-five Army and Army Air Force colonels, forty-five Navy captains, and ten State Department and Foreign Service officers, on September 3, 1946, a year and a day after the Japanese surrender. Vice Admiral Harry W. Hill, the commandant, warned the students that their wartime experiences would bear little relevance to what they would be studying: the atomic bomb might well require “a complete reorientation of old ideas.” It was important, therefore, “that you keep your minds flexible.” The purpose of the new institution, The New York Times reported the next day, was to integrate thinking “at the highest levels of the War, Navy, and State Departments.” The setting matched the mission, for from the old Army War College, situated at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, the students and their professors could see the Washington Monument, the Capitol, the Pentagon, and the new building just north of the Lincoln Memorial that the State Department would soon be occupying. The view was comprehensive, and the course that began that day was also meant to be.³¹

The students attended the same lectures and worked on the same problems, regardless of the positions they held or the uniforms they wore. They would graduate not only with “mutual respect and understanding,” Kennan explained, “but also a common approach to the major problems of our country in the field of foreign affairs.” Future leaders rubbed elbows with current leaders, who frequently visited. Navy Secretary Forrestal, who had helped to establish the college, came most often, but “[o]ther officers of Cabinet rank, generals, and Senators sat at our feet as we lectured.” The college became an “academic seminar for the higher echelons of governmental Washington generally.”³²

“Gentlemen; Admiral Hill. The question we have to consider this morning is a question of the relations between sovereign governments, and it pertains to the measures that they employ when they deal with each other for the main purposes for which states have to deal with each other.” That is how Kennan began his first lecture on September 16, 1946, prosaically titled “Measures Short of War (Diplomatic).” On stage alongside him was a chart listing “Diplomatic Measures of Adjustment for the Redress of Grievances or for the Pacific Settlement of Disputes.” There is no way to know how many inadequately caffeinated students—or policy makers—came close to dozing off at that point, but they soon woke up. For within five minutes Kennan had tossed traditional methods of conflict resolution onto a historical ash-heap.

Great-power clashes in the contemporary world, he insisted, did not take place within any agreed-upon framework of international law: rather, they pitted democracies against totalitarians prepared to employ “varieties of skullduggery… as unlimited as human ingenuity itself, and just about as unpleasant.” These included “persuasion, intimidation, deceit, corruption, penetration, subversion, horse-trading, bluffing, psychological pressure, economic pressure, seduction, blackmail, theft, fraud, rape, battle, murder, and sudden death. Don’t mistake that for a complete list.” Restrained “by no moral inhibitions, by no domestic public opinion to speak of and not even by any serious considerations of consistency and intellectual dignity,” states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were limited only by “their own estimate of the consequences to themselves of the adoption of a given measure.”

That left the question, then, of whether democracies could deal with such states by any means other than all-out war. Kennan had no definitive answer: the course they were taking, he reminded the students, was meant to develop one. But he did have suggestions, the first of which echoed Clausewitz. It was that psychology could itself become a strategy. The past decade had made it clear that everything the United States did produced psychological effects internationally. There had been no sustained effort, though, to tie these together in such a way as to serve a purpose.

Another suggestion had to do with economics, because democracies for the foreseeable future—he meant chiefly the United States—would possess a disproportionate share of the world’s productive capacity. Given the Soviet Union’s reliance on autarchy, that advantage might not produce immediate benefits, but the students should consider its cumulative effect “when exercised over a long period of time and in a wise way.” It could be especially useful among satellites with little to gain from Soviet domination: economic pressure might well provoke “discontent, trouble, and dissension within the totalitarian world.”

Finally the students should not neglect an important political weapon, which was “the cultivation of solidarity with other like minded nations.” In this respect, Kennan acknowledged, the United Nations had been more helpful than he had expected, because it provided a way to connect power with morality. Without that link, competition over spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and the Near East might have come across simply as power politics. With it, the United States had been able “to build up a record for good faith which it is hard for anyone to challenge.”

Each of these “measures short of war” fell within the realm of international affairs, which must now embrace all forms of power, even military capabilities: “You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.” Power, in turn, reflected the nation wielding it: “We are no stronger than the country we represent.” Hence no one could afford indifference “to internal disharmony, dissension, intolerance and the things that break up the real moral and political structure of our society at home.” Integrating force with foreign policy did not mean “blustering, threatening, waving clubs at people and telling them if they don’t do this or that we are going to drop a bomb on them.” But it did mean maintaining “a preponderance of strength” among the democracies: this was “the most peaceful of all the measures we can take short of war because the greater your strength, the less likelihood that you are ever going to use it.”

What was required, therefore, was coordination across each of the categories of available power: “We must work out a general plan of what the United States wants in this world and we must go after that with all the measures at our disposal, depending on what is indicated by the circumstances.” The nation needed in peacetime a “grand strategy no less concrete and no less consistent than that which governs our actions in war.” If applied wisely, then “these measures short of war will be all the ones that we will ever have to use to secure the prosperous and safe future of the people in this country.”

Kennan finished with that but got a tough first question: was it possible for the United States to have a grand strategy? “[W]e don’t aspire to anything particularly except what we have; [so] what, mainly can our grand strategy consist of ?” The point was well taken, Kennan acknowledged. “What has the United States got really to offer to other people?” Thinking quickly, he improvised an answer that raised a larger question:

Kennan would not attempt a reply. “I am going to let you try to think it out for yourself. I am still trying to think it out.” But he did offer a place to start: “Perhaps it is better that we don’t come to people with pat answers but say, instead, ‘You will have to solve your own problems, we are only trying to give you the breaks.’”³³

It’s unlikely that anyone dozed, therefore, through Kennan’s opening National War College lecture. It redefined international relations in an ideological age, it assessed totalitarian strengths and weaknesses, it sketched out democratic responses, it stressed the multiple forms that power can assume, it called for diplomacy to become grand strategy, and it concluded with Kennan’s imaginative leap into the minds of those for whose allegiance the United States and the Soviet Union would be competing. It was a satisfactory start, not least because of the work it left for his students—and for Kennan himself—still to do.

VI.

Kennan had long liked the idea of becoming a teacher. He had regularly raised it with Jeanette as an alternative to the Foreign Service, and his Bad Nauheim lectures had revealed unexpected pedagogical skills. That was hardly the ideal environment, though: the war college came closer. “I am enjoying the work very much,” George wrote Kent early in October. “It is the first time in years that I have been relatively free from administrative duties and able to give a good portion of my time to purely intellectual pursuits.” He was supervising four civilian professors—one was Brodie, on leave from Yale—while giving occasional lectures and listening to many more. He was consulting on foreign policy in Washington and speaking to audiences elsewhere, as Acheson had encouraged him to do. He was getting, from all of this, a stimulus, as well as a degree of appreciation, “which I haven’t experienced anywhere else. In consequence, I feel quite bucked up.” Dorothy Hessman, who had followed Kennan from Moscow, thought the situation ideal for him: “There was no ambassador or Secretary to say ‘he can’t say that.’”³⁴

By his count, Kennan composed seventeen lectures or articles, each about the length of the “long telegram,” between September 1946 and May 1947: the list did not include occasions on which he spoke extemporaneously or from rough notes. He gave most of the lectures at the National War College but also spoke at the Naval and Air War Colleges, at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania (where the Army War College would soon relocate), at Yale, Princeton, Virginia, Williams, at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association, and—as it turned out, famously—at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The indefatigable Hessman kept up, typing as many as three drafts for some of the lectures while managing a proliferating correspondence. This “veritable outpouring of literary and forensic effort” was meant to educate audiences on the nature of the postwar world and what the American response to it should be; but like all good teachers, Kennan was also educating himself along the way.³⁵

His chief concern, in the fall of 1946, was still that too few Americans saw anything between diplomacy and war: if the first failed, the second must follow. Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt’s former vice president, now Truman’s secretary of commerce and a leading Democratic Party liberal, dramatized the polarity in a New York speech on September 12, warning that “‘[g]etting tough’ never bought anything—whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers. The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.” The president, he insisted, had read his speech and agreed with it. A confused week followed, at the end of which Truman made it clear that he did not agree and demanded Wallace’s resignation. Everywhere he went, Kennan complained while the controversy was still raging, “I find people with their faces buried in their hands and an air of tragedy about them saying collaboration with Russia has proved to be impossible and, therefore, all is lost.” When would the war start?³⁶

Kennan used his first appearance before a university audience—an off-the-record lecture at Yale’s Institute of International Studies on October 1—to take on Wallace. The result was an evisceration, arguably unnecessary since the target by then had largely eviscerated himself. The talk was a response, though, not just to Wallace but to a succession of Kennan’s superiors—Bullitt, Davies, Harriman, Byrnes, and Roosevelt himself—all of whom had assumed, at one time or another, that if offered friendship the Soviet Union would reciprocate. If Wallace believed, like “many vain people” before him, “that the golden touch of his particular personality and the warmth of his sympathy for the cause of Russian Communism would modify in some important degree the actions of the Soviet Government,” then he was not only ignoring the way states worked, but he was also “flying in the face of some of the most basic and unshakeable of Russian realities.”

Stalin and his associates would not thank Wallace for implying that “they, the guardians of the Revolution, are a group of neurotic, wistful intellectuals, to be swept off their feet and won over from their holiest articles of faith by an engaging smile, [and] a few kind words.” They had committed acts that, in the absence of an ideology to justify them, would have to be considered among “the most stupendous crimes in the history of mankind.” They had built a regime in the image of that ideology. They had corrupted a generation:

They resembled the village misfits Dostoyevsky had described in The Demons, “already caught up in the toils of the revolution,” unable “to escape from its relentless demands.” But now they controlled a nation.

It was clear, then, that the fears and suspicions so prevalent in Moscow related not to the Truman administration’s policies but “to the character of the Soviet regime itself.” They would not be dispelled by “fatuous gestures of appeasement,” which could only lead “to the capitulation of the United States as a great power in the world and as the guardian of its own security.” There was, however, no reason to despair: Americans should see the situation instead “as a narrow and stony defile through which we must pass before we can emerge into more promising vistas.”

That promise resided in the Russian national character, more deeply rooted even than the Stalinist state or the ideology that animated it, yet visible in Russian literature. Kennan cited, as an example, the provincial governor in Gogol’s Dead Souls who one day acknowledged, in “a typically Russian burst of honesty,” that “perhaps I have, by my excessive suspiciousness, repelled those who sincerely wished to be useful to me.” He also recalled the Chekhov heroine who had tried to befriend peasants, got nowhere with them, walked away sadly, but was followed by a sympathetic blacksmith:

People, Kennan was suggesting, could indeed shape governments, but this would take time. And circumstances, not sentimentality, would shape people. Therein lay the key to what American strategy should be.

The United States could alter the circumstances in which the Soviet government operated “only by a long term policy of firmness, patience, and understanding, designed to keep the Russians confronted with superior strength at every juncture where they might otherwise be inclined to encroach upon the vital interests of a stable and peaceful world, but to do this in so friendly and unprovocative a manner that its basic purposes will not be subject to misrepresentation.” The objective would be Clausewitzian: to shift the psychology of an adversary. The manner, however, would be Chekhovian.³⁷

Was there reason to think that this might work? Kennan’s Naval War College lecture, delivered on the same day he spoke at Yale, addressed this issue. The Russians, he pointed out, were “the most un-naval of peoples,” but they understood naval strategy. Lacking easily defended borders, unable to count on domestic loyalty, Kremlin leaders would not willingly engage an adversary stronger than themselves. “They cannot afford to get into trouble.” They respected, therefore, one of “the great truths of naval warfare,” which was “that a force sufficiently superior to that of the enemy will probably never have to be used. Its mere existence does the trick.”

That was where the United States, with superior force, had the advantage. It ought to be possible “for us to contain the Russians indefinitely” and perhaps eventually “to maneuver them back into the limits within which we would like them to stay.” This would not “solve” the Soviet problem. “You never really solve problems like that; you only learn to live with them after a fashion and to avoid major catastrophe.” But if the United States followed such a strategy consistently enough over a long enough period of time, then “I believe that the logic of it would enter into the Soviet system as a whole and bring about changes there which would be beneficial to everyone.”

As currently configured, the American government was not equipped to do this. Its policies proceeded along separate tracks; there was no common concept. But it should be possible to secure such coordination. It would involve setting up “some formal organization for decision and action at the Cabinet level.” It would demand closer liaison with Congress. It would require educating the public on the “powers and prerogatives of government in the field of foreign affairs” and on the need for its own “restraint and self-discipline.” And there would have to be “more sheer courage” in defending policies from domestic critics.

The Soviet challenge, therefore, was really to “the quality of our own society, …[to] how good democracy is in the world of today.” If it could “force us to pull ourselves together,” then “perhaps we may call our Russian friends a blessing rather than a plague.” Shakespeare’s Henry V had anticipated that possibility long ago:

With these two lectures, given on the same day, Kennan found his voice as a teacher. He connected current events with his years of experience in the Soviet Union, his summer crash course on grand strategy and the atomic bomb, the impressions derived from his speaking tour, Admiral Hill’s mandate to rethink the requirements of national security, and his own sense that literature could inspire statecraft.³⁹ He did all of this with an eloquence that existed nowhere else in the government: he understood—as his friend Bohlen did not—that rhetoric persuades, and that style instructs. It’s no wonder that he attracted students, some of them highly placed.

The State Department sent Kennan to Ottawa in December to present the new American policy, on a top-secret basis, to Canadian officials worried about defense of the Arctic. It was “virtually certain,” he assured them, that Stalin planned no surprise attack, there or anywhere else. Miscalculation, however, might lead to unplanned hostilities, so the United States and its allies must leave no doubt, in his mind, of their resolve. They would have to be as firm as they were patient: the goal should be “to ‘contain’ Russian expansionism for so long a time that it would have to modify itself.” And how long might that take? Kennan guessed “10 or 15 years.”⁴⁰

VII.

“I seem to have hit the jackpot as a ‘Russian expert,’” George wrote Jeanette on Christmas Day 1946. “You’d be amazed, what seems to be coming my way.” Harvard, Princeton, and Yale had all asked him to join their faculties. “As far as I can see, I can write my own ticket.” The State Department was willing to keep him on the payroll while “loaning me out” for research: he would soon be promoted to the rank of “minister” with a salary rumored to be $15,000. It was “almost too good to be true, and I really doubt that it will materialize; but it all goes to show that nothing succeeds like success.”⁴¹

The Kennans had been living, since September, in a graceful three-story brick house on “General’s Row” at Fort McNair, courtesy of the U.S. Army. Facing the parade ground with a view of the Potomac out the back, it was large, well staffed, and came with full commissary privileges, which George noted “considerably reduce the cost of living.” There were tennis courts, a golf club, a swimming pool, an officers’ club, and it was all within reach of the East Berlin farm on weekends.

The farm, George believed, kept him healthy: “When, for one reason or another, I omitted these weekend expeditions to the country, I fell ill.” And his Pennsylvania neighbors provided not only practical advice but “a shrewd, reassuring common sense… that gave new, and sometimes healing, perspective to the trials, excitements, and disappointments of a hectic official existence.”⁴²

The disappointments, that fall and winter, were remarkably few. The children loved living in their Army house and, to their parents’ relief, liked their Washington schools, to which a bus delivered them every day. Grace, now fourteen, had been to several local dances; Joan, however, missed ballet classes in Moscow. Hearing The Nutcracker Suite, her father noticed, caused her to go “through all the dances as she remembered them…. She certainly has it in her blood.” George, for his part, was coming to see in his children something that he and his siblings had missed. “I hope you will get married,” he wrote Kent, “if only because you—like the rest of us—did not have a normal family life in childhood; and the re-living of it in one’s own family helps to overcome the effects of that.” The war college allowed as “normal” an existence as the Kennans had yet managed.⁴³

George was “terribly happy” at the National War College, Annelise remembered. “You must think me a little dotty,” he would come home and say, but “this was said, and this was discussed, and this is wonderful.” There had been eighty-five lectures that fall, he explained to Kent, probably the best series on international affairs that had ever been given. The contacts were “like manna to me after many years of the philistinism of American foreign colony life.” He was not sure now that he would want to return to diplomacy: “I have found such generous appreciation… among the academicians for what little I know about Russia and have had such tempting offers to continue working with them that I am sorely tried.” That knowledge now was “a chance aggregate of odds and ends, gathered without system and in large part without purpose.” If he could spend a year or two in systematic study, “I might really be able to do something more worthwhile in scholarship than in diplomacy.”

The months since his return from Moscow had also allowed a reacquaintance with his own country, but here Kennan’s conclusions—admittedly tentative—were more measured.

Having educated himself in grand strategy, and having shown that he could educate others, he would get a chance to answer that question, sooner than he could have expected.

“ THE REAL CONSEQUENCES OF STATESMANSHIP,” KENNAN ONCE OBSERVED, citing the historian Herbert Butterfield, “are always ironic in their relationship to what the statesman thought he was achieving.”¹ What Kennan had hoped to do, during his time at the National War College, was to lay the intellectual foundations for an American grand strategy that would counter the Soviet Union’s challenge to the postwar international system, without resort to war or appeasement. No one has a better claim to having accomplished just that. As Henry Kissinger observed with professional admiration in 1979: “George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.”²

But Kennan took little pride in this achievement. If indeed he originated the strategy of “containment,” he wrote bitterly in his memoirs, composed as the Viet-nam War was escalating, then “I emphatically deny the paternity of any efforts to invoke that doctrine today in situations to which it has, and can have, no proper relevance.” Even after the Cold War had ended and the Soviet Union was itself history, Kennan regarded the “success” of his strategy as a failure because it had taken so long to produce results, because the costs had been so high, and because the United States and its Western European allies had demanded, in the end, “unconditional surrender.” That outcome had been “one of the great disappointments of my life.”

Kennan made this complaint, strangely, at a birthday party. The date was February 15, 1994—the eve of his ninetieth—and the celebration took place at Harold Pratt House on East 68th Street in New York, long the home of the Council on Foreign Relations. The organization had meant to honor Kennan’s accomplishments, but he used the occasion to lament them. He did so with a dejected felicity, reminding his audience of another event that had taken place in the same building almost half a century earlier. It had been then and there, he believed, that the consequences of his actions first began to diverge significantly from his intentions.³

When a younger Kennan, not quite forty-three, arrived at Pratt House on January 7, 1947, to address the Council’s discussion group on “Soviet Foreign Relations,” he did so with considerably less fanfare. The talk was one of dozens he had given since returning from Moscow. The audience would be small, and as was customary for Council events, everything said would be on a “not for attribution” basis. Like many speakers who have heard themselves repeat themselves too often, Kennan did not bother to prepare a text: the rapporteur’s notes are the only record of what he said.

Marxist-Leninist ideology, he told the group, did not guide the actions of Soviet leaders, but it was “a sort of mental eye or prism” through which they viewed the outside world. It justified an amorality little different from that of Russian rulers as far back as Ivan the Terrible; this was, however, at odds with the strong moral sense of the Russian people. Stalin and his subordinates saw enemies, therefore, within and beyond their country’s borders: they needed those on the outside, who were mostly imaginary, to excuse their brutality toward those on the inside, who were real enough. But Russians would outlast the regime that now governed them. That made it possible for the United States and its allies to “contain” Soviet power, “if it were done courteously and in a non-provocative way,” for a long enough time to allow internal changes to come about in Russia. When they did, no one would be more grateful than the Russians themselves. Nothing could be accomplished, though, as Wallace wished to do, “by the glad hand and the winning smile.” Americans would have to recognize that they were dealing “with the driving force of a great idea and a method of looking at the world which is anchored in the experience of centuries.”

Like many Council discussions, the one that followed meandered. The author Louis Fischer doubted that Russians were looking for new leadership: perhaps not, Kennan replied, but he had noticed a “weariness and lassitude” among them. Journalist Joseph Barnes pointed out that during the past several years more Russians had come into contact with foreigners than ever before: yes, Kennan noted, but there were at present hardly any foreigners inside the U.S.S.R. George S. Franklin, Jr., of the Council staff, wanted to know what within the Soviet leadership gave Kennan grounds for optimism: its flexibility, caution, and unwillingness to allow commitments to exceed capabilities, he responded. International banker R. Gordon Wasson wondered why, if xenophobia was so pervasive in Russia, agents of International Harvester and the Singer Sewing Machine Company had found warm receptions there in the nineteenth century. Russians themselves were friendly to foreigners, Kennan explained; it was their governments, tsarist and Soviet, that had tried to curb that tendency. Geroid T. Robinson, the Columbia history professor who had coauthored the Bohlen-Robinson report, observed that if force was necessary to maintain the Soviet government in power and if Soviet leaders needed to exaggerate outside dangers to justify the use of that force, then it was those dangers that kept them in power and they could not afford more conciliatory policies. But that was what Kennan had said in the first place.⁴

Kennan could have been pardoned, then, for leaving Pratt House vaguely dissatisfied: he did not appear to have made much of an impression. Wasson, however, liked the talk well enough to suggest revising it for publication in the Council’s journal, Foreign Affairs, and its longtime editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong—who had not been present—followed up on January 10 with a similar request. He had seen a copy of Kennan’s lecture at Yale, “which means that you not only have your ideas well in mind, but also have put them in preliminary written form.” Kennan might be under some constraints as to what he could say, “but I wonder whether the substance of your point of view as a whole isn’t so fair and constructive, and does not tend so much in the direction of a really mutual understanding between the Soviets and ourselves, that you would be warranted in undertaking to lay it before the public.”

Armstrong too, it seemed, had not quite gotten the point, and Kennan took his time in replying. When he did, on February 4, he observed that because he was still in the State Department, “I really can not write anything of value on Russia for publication under my own name. If you would be interested in an anonymous article, or one under a pen name, …I might be able to make the necessary arrangements.” In no hurry either, Armstrong waited until March 7 before agreeing “that the interest of the projected article more than outweighs from our point of view the disadvantage of anonymity.” Perhaps the piece would enable Kennan “to make effectively your one hopeful point which revolves around the liking that most Americans seem to have for most Russians.” This appeared to leave a door open, “whether to a blind alley or not, no one can say.”⁵

I.

While these leisurely and somewhat astigmatic exchanges were going on, a lot was happening elsewhere. On the evening Kennan spoke at the Council, President Truman announced the unexpected resignation of Secretary of State Byrnes and, in an even greater surprise, nominated as his replacement General George C. Marshall, the austere but highly respected wartime Army chief of staff, now back from his unsuccessful mission to China. Byrnes had written Kennan the previous day to confirm his promotion to career minister, and in his response Kennan expressed “keen disappointment” that Byrnes would be stepping down. The regret was probably real, for however much Byrnes might have irritated Kennan at the December 1945 Moscow foreign ministers’ conference, he had since stuck to a policy of what he called “patience with firmness” with respect to the Soviet Union. When the Wallace controversy broke out the following September, Byrnes made it clear that if the president did not fire his secretary of commerce, his secretary of state would quit. Truman backed Byrnes, but their relationship soured, and so three and a half months later, ostensibly for health reasons, Byrnes did resign.⁶

Kennan’s only previous contact with Marshall had been inauspicious: the general attended his unfortunate Pentagon briefing on Azores bases in the fall of 1943. But Marshall had, while in China, read several of Kennan’s dispatches from Moscow, including the “long telegram.” He would have heard more from Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, who had taken a special interest in advancing Kennan’s career, as well as from former military colleagues now at the National War College. An especially convincing accolade came from Walter Bedell Smith in Moscow, who had been one of Marshall’s wartime aides:

Smith suggested including Kennan on the American delegation to an upcoming Moscow foreign ministers’ conference, but Marshall had a larger responsibility in mind. As secretary of state, he was determined to achieve the policy coordination that had been missing during the war and, in his view, during the first year and a half of peace. Kennan, he thought, could help. “I was very close to Marshall then,” Bohlen recalled. “The telegram from Moscow was the thing that put George in the Policy Planning Staff.”⁷

Marshall took office on January 21, and three days later Under Secretary of State Acheson, acting on his new boss’s instructions, asked Kennan whether he might be interested in running a new State Department organization “for [the] review and planning of policy.” The group’s function, Acheson later recalled, would be

Despite his hopes to retire from the Foreign Service after completing his National War College duties, Kennan accepted the offer while wondering how to make the transition. “Mind you, I was dying to do this work,” but he couldn’t take time from his war college duties without Admiral Hill’s permission, and yet “I had no authorization to tell him about these plans.” Acheson and Kennan agreed, in the end, that he would take the job at an undetermined date in the spring. But Kennan had “no very clear understanding of what was involved; I am not sure that Mr. Acheson had gained a much clearer one from General Marshall.”⁸

“Well, gentlemen,” Loy Henderson remembered Acheson telling his staff, “we’re going to have a new office—an office of Policy Planning. George Kennan’s going to be brought in to take care of it. Loy, don’t you think that’s a good idea?” Henderson said that a man like Kennan would be excellent for the job. “A man like Kennan?” Acheson responded. “There’s nobody like Kennan.” The most important requirement for the new unit, Bohlen explained to Sir John (Jock) Balfour, the well-informed British chargé d’affaires, at a dinner party late in January, would be to ensure that all levels of the State Department understood official policy and the motives that lay behind it. People “like Kennan” might also give some talks on this subject. Acheson, also present, had already heard this once too often: “I am constantly being told that ‘people like George Kennan’ should give the boys the low-down about Russia,” he grumbled. “Unfortunately there is only one George Kennan.”⁹

Certainly there was only one Acheson. Trained as a lawyer, the dapper, defiantly mustachioed under secretary of state had surprisingly little foreign policy experience when Truman appointed him to that position in August 1945. Preoccupied at first with the international control of atomic energy, Acheson had been one of the last of the president’s top advisers—apart from Wallace himself—to give up on postwar cooperation with the U.S.S.R. Kennan’s “long telegram,” Acheson later acknowledged, had had a “deep effect on thinking within the Government,” but it made little impression on him. When Acheson did finally change his mind about Stalin’s intentions, in August 1946, he did so for different reasons, totally and almost overnight.

The provocation was Soviet demands on Turkey for boundary concessions and bases in the Dardanelles. Stalin backed down when Truman sent the Sixth Fleet into the eastern Mediterranean, but Acheson did not back off. The crisis, however belatedly, caused him to connect dots: he suddenly saw how Soviet ambitions, American complacency, and British weakness might combine to upset the balance of power in Europe. Acheson went from assuming the best to suspecting the worst: it was shortly after that he began encouraging Kennan to speak openly about the Soviet danger. His “predictions and warnings could not have been better,” Acheson later acknowledged. “We [had] responded to them slowly.”

But Kennan’s recommendations for American policy had been “of no help.” They amounted to exhortations “to be of good heart, to look out for our own social and economic health, to present a good face to the world, all of which the Government was trying to do.” Composed in the 1960s after he and Kennan had disagreed about many things, Acheson’s complaint may not have reflected what he thought in 1947. His contemporary comments, however, mix respect for Kennan with just enough acidity to suggest that one of the things about which Acheson was unclear, regarding the planning staff job, was whether the Soviet expert that Kennan had been could function equally successfully as the policy adviser Marshall wanted him to become.¹⁰

The question became more than hypothetical on February 21, when the British embassy informed the State Department that the British government, staggering under the burdens of postwar recovery and beset by one of the worst winters ever, could no longer provide military and economic assistance to Greece and Turkey. The news shocked Truman and most of his advisers, but Acheson had seen it coming and was ready with a response. A Foreign Office official caught its substance when he reported a growing conviction in Washington “that no time must be lost in plucking the torch of world leadership from our chilling hands.” With Marshall new in his job and about to depart for Moscow, Acheson took the lead in determining how this might be done. And on February 24 he brought Kennan—still at the war college—into the planning process.¹¹

The forum was a committee convened that day under Henderson’s chairmanship to draft recommendations for the president and the secretary of state. Kennan remembered arguing that the United States had to replace the aid the British would now be withholding: “I returned to my home late that evening with the simulating impression of having participated prominently in a historic decision of American foreign policy.” But the minutes of the meeting failed to record his remarks, and Kennan later learned that Truman, Marshall, and Acheson had already decided to extend assistance. “If, on this occasion, I somewhat overrated the effectiveness of my own voice, it would not be the last time that egotism, and the attention my words seemed often to attract on the part of startled colleagues, would deceive me as to the measure of my real influence on the process of decision-taking.”¹²

The problem now was to defend this departure from traditional noninvolve-ment in European affairs before Congress and the American people. Acheson improvised a solution at a meeting with the president and congressional leaders on February 27 after Marshall—never rhetorically adept—fumbled his own presentation. The world was now divided into two hostile camps, Acheson warned, a situation unprecedented since the days of Rome and Carthage. If Greek communists, with Soviet support, won the civil war the British had so far kept them from winning, the infection—like the rot from bad apples in a barrel—could spread from Iran in the east to France and Italy in the West, with devastating consequences for American interests. The Soviet Union was poised to reap great gains at minimal costs. Only the United States stood in the way.¹³

That shook the skeptical legislators, and by early March drafts of a presidential speech were circulating justifying aid for both Greece and Turkey in terms of an American obligation to secure “a world of free peoples” against the imposition of dictatorships “whether fascist, nazi, communist, or of any other form.” Kennan read one of these on the sixth and objected to it strongly: “What I saw made me extremely unhappy.” He favored assisting Greece but not Turkey, where there was no civil war. He worried about provoking the Soviet Union, whose ambitions in the region he thought were limited. And why should a crisis in a single country become the occasion for an open-ended commitment to resist oppression everywhere? After complaining to Henderson and Acheson, Kennan produced a less sweeping draft and waited to see what the results would be.¹⁴

Two nights later the Achesons hosted a dinner party. The Kennans attended, as did David Lilienthal, still chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and one of the best diarists in Washington. Having read and been much struck by the “long telegram” a year earlier, he was meeting Kennan for the first time:

Acheson was anything but quiet that evening: “Dean spent a good deal of the time bubbling over with enthusiasm, rapture almost, about General Marshall,” who had entrusted him with “a historic change in American policy.” Kennan, however, was uneasy, brooding about how to aid the Greeks without their resenting it, anxious that Truman not play up the affair too much, “so that prestige isn’t too deeply involved.” It had been a particularly good moment, Lilienthal concluded, “to have an evening’s talk with these two men.”¹⁵

But Truman played up Greece—and Turkey—for all they were worth when he addressed Congress on March 12: the choice the world faced, he insisted, was between governments based on the will of the majority and those that denied it. In what quickly became known as the Truman Doctrine, the president announced “that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Achesonian hyperbole had prevailed, while Kennan’s cautions had been ignored. He had approached the edge of policy making at a critical moment, but had got no further.¹⁶

Kennan consoled himself by rewriting the president’s speech two days later in a war college lecture. The need to act did often leave little time to think, he reminded the students: “You have to take a deep breath and decide, for better or for worse.” Truman had decided to ensure that people who wished to achieve national security “are not deprived of the possibility of doing so through lack of our support, when the measure of that support is within reasonable limits.” This final qualification, however, was Kennan’s, not Truman’s.

Greece, Kennan thought, lay within American capabilities. It was small but accessible, and the amount the president had asked for—$400 million—was roughly what New Yorkers spent on consumer goods in a single day. The stakes were high, though, because reports indicated “that unless something was done to instill confidence in us” among the Greeks, “there would be no halting of the advance of Communism in that country, not because people wanted it but because they are hungry, they are tired, they haven’t anything, …[t]hey are afraid.” Without some hope, they would reluctantly make peace with the other side, and so might desperate people elsewhere in Europe. If that happened, the Soviet Union would not need to mount a military invasion: it would instead work through “subterranean penetration” to make it look as though communism were taking hold spontaneously.

Turkey was different. Its strategic importance was obvious, but the Turks had staunchly resisted Soviet pressures. They had turned their country into a bowling ball without holes, leaving Moscow looking in vain for a grip. If they kept their nerve, “it is going to be awfully hard for the Russians to find a pretext for monkey business there.” The same was true in the Middle East: was it really likely, given the region’s psychology and its “patriarchal” system, that the Soviet Union could take it over? And then there were regions “where you could perfectly well let people fall prey to totalitarian domination without any tragic consequences for world peace in general.” China was one: feeding it, clothing it, and resolving its social problems would probably be “beyond the resources of the whole world put together.”¹⁷

Kennan, thus, dismantled the Truman Doctrine immediately after the president proclaimed it—a risky move, one might think, for a new policy planner. Again, though, the agile Acheson was ahead of him: he had quietly assured congressional leaders the day after Truman spoke that the United States would act only in areas “where our help can be effective in resisting [Soviet] penetration.” So why the grandiose rhetoric in the first place? Kennan concluded years later that the Truman Doctrine reflected an American urge “to seek universal formulae or doctrines in which to clothe and justify particular actions.” It seemed not to have occurred to anyone that the better approach might be simply “to let the President, or the Secretary of State, use his head.”¹⁸

But democracies never allow their leaders the total freedom to use their heads. “He really had a childlike quality in such matters,” Dean Rusk, who would later become secretary of state, recalled of Kennan. “He was an elitist…. He took the view that the function of Congress was to keep the public off the backs of the foreign policy professionals.” Administrations have to act within boundaries, and the Truman Doctrine was meant to expand those that existed at the time. Its purpose was not simply to frighten Congress into aiding Greece and Turkey, although it had that effect and was meant to. It also set a goal for the future, however unattainable it might for the moment be. It was the geopolitical equivalent of a navigational beacon, pointing the way toward a destination beyond the visible horizon. Machiavelli would have approved: four centuries earlier he had advised his prince to follow the example of “prudent archers” who, “knowing how far the strength of their bow carries, …set their aim much higher than the place intended, not to reach such height with their arrow, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to achieve their plan.” Acheson’s arrow flew right over Kennan, but as a policy planner he would benefit from its trajectory, nonetheless.¹⁹

II.

On March 7, 1947—the day Armstrong agreed to publish Kennan anonymously in Foreign Affairs—Acheson, now acting secretary of state, formally asked the National War College to find a new deputy commandant for foreign affairs. Having authorized the creation of a “planning board,” Marshall had found Kennan to be “by far the best qualified man in our Service to fill the top post.” Appropriately, Kennan was lecturing that day on his 1943 Azores bases experience. He had chosen the case, he told his students, because it provided “a rather striking test-tube example” of the dangers that could come from lack of coordination within the government.²⁰

No date was set for Kennan’s return to the State Department, so he continued to teach while helping shape the policy Truman had set in motion. The Foreign Affairs article, never a top priority, now became less of one: having agreed to do it, Kennan lacked the time to write anything new. Armstrong had anticipated this when he suggested the Yale lecture as a suitable text, but Kennan had recently finished another essay he thought would work better. He had written it for Forrestal, whom Kennan remembered “as a man of burning, tireless energy, determined… to take both time and problems by the forelock.” One of the first Washington officials to sound the alarm about Soviet behavior, he had been “much concerned that we should get to the bottom of this problem as soon as possible and find out what it was we were dealing with.”²¹

Forrestal’s first guide had been Edward F. Willett, a Smith College professor who had sent him an analysis of “Dialectical Materialism and Russian Objectives” several weeks before Kennan’s “long telegram” arrived. The Navy secretary found Willett’s essay impressive and shared it widely. Kennan, however, thought it abstract and alarmist, and when Forrestal asked for his opinion on Willett, Kennan dodged the request, offering instead his own ideas. They took the form of a six-thousand-word paper on the “Psychological Background of Soviet Foreign Policy,” forwarded to Forrestal at the end of January 1947. Forrestal acknowledged it on February 17 as “extremely well-done,” and promised to pass it on to Marshall. It was safe to assume that the distribution would not stop there.²²

“Now that [the] article has been noted in official circles,” Kennan asked one of Forrestal’s aides on March 10, would the Navy secretary object to its being published anonymously in Foreign Affairs? Forrestal did not, and on April 8 the State Department’s Committee on Unofficial Publications also approved the plan. “I then crossed out my own name in the signature of the article, replaced it with an ‘X’ to assure the anonymity, sent it on to Mr. Armstrong, and thought no more about it.” Kennan made only a few handwritten corrections in the text. He also suggested a note, which Armstrong chose not to use: “The author of this article is one who has had long experience with Russian affairs, both practically and academically, but whose position makes it impossible for him to write about them under his own name.”²³

Kennan’s essay was much less casual than its publication arrangements. He began it, as he had the “long telegram,” with an explanation of how Marxism-Leninism shaped the beliefs and behavior of Soviet leaders. But ideology was now no longer just the “fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability”: it was also the “pseudo-scientific justification” by which Stalin and his subordinates clung to power despite their failure to find popular support at home or to overthrow capitalism elsewhere. Convinced that they alone knew what was good for society, they recognized “no restrictions, either of God or man, on the character of their methods.” That meant, paradoxically, that they could never be secure, because their “aggressive intransigence” had already provoked a backlash: the Kremlin leaders were finding it necessary, in Gibbon’s phrase, “to chastise the contumacy” their own actions had generated. “It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy,” Kennan reminded his readers, “for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.”

“Canonized” by the excesses it had committed, the Soviet system could not now dispense with its own infallibility. Stalin would always be right, for if truth were ever found to reside elsewhere, no basis would remain for his rule. As a result,

With the party line prescribed, the Soviet governmental machine “moves inexorably along the prescribed path, like a persistent toy automobile wound up and headed in a given direction, stopping only when it meets with some unanswerable force.” People within this system would not respond to persuasion from the outside sources. “Like the white dog before the phonograph, they hear only ‘the master’s voice.’”

It followed that the Russians would be difficult to deal with for a long time to come. It did not follow, though, that they had “embarked upon a do-or-die program to overthrow our society by a given date. The theory of the inevitability of the eventual fall of capitalism has the fortunate connotation that there is no hurry about it.” Like the church, the Kremlin could afford to wait. It would retreat in the face of superior force: “Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power.” That made Stalin’s ambitions more sensitive to resistance than those of Napoleon or Hitler. Resistance could not arise, though, from sporadic acts reflecting “the momentary whims of democratic opinion.” What was needed instead were strategies “no less steady in their purpose, and no less variegated and resourceful in their application, than those of the Soviet Union itself.” The main objective must be “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

Containment could be made to work, Kennan insisted in unusually convoluted prose, “by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manœuvres of Soviet policy, but which can not be charmed or talked out of existence.” This would produce results, with the passage of time, because the Soviet people were exhausted, the Soviet economy remained in many respects primitive, and the Soviet government had yet to evolve any orderly way of selecting a successor once Stalin had passed from the scene. Any one of these difficulties could disrupt discipline, and if that were ever to happen—here Kennan echoed the prediction he had made from Riga in 1932—“Soviet Russia might be changed over night from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.”

Its condition, then, resembled that of the Buddenbrooks family in Thomas Mann’s eponymous novel: a formidable facade concealed internal enfeeblement. The light of distant stars, after all, “shines brightest on this world when in reality [they have] long ceased to exist.” No one could know for sure whether this would happen, but “Soviet power, like the capitalist world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and… the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced.” The United States could embrace with reasonable confidence, then, “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”

If Americans could create the impression of a country that knew what it wanted, was coping successfully with its internal problems, and could hold its own amid the geopolitical and ideological currents of international affairs, then the hopes of Moscow’s supporters would wane, and there would be added stress on its foreign policy. The ultimate result could be “either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power. For no mystical, messianic movement—and particularly not that of the Kremlin—can face frustration indefinitely without eventually adjusting itself in one way or another to the logic of that state of affairs.” The Soviet challenge, therefore, required only that Americans live up to their own best traditions. “Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this.”²⁴

It’s hardly surprising that Forrestal liked the piece, or that Armstrong was eager to publish it. Like the “long telegram,” Kennan’s “Psychological Background” essay riveted readers in a way no one else in Washington had managed to do—certainly not Willett, whose report now followed that of Bohlen and Robinson into obscurity. Kennan had combined objectivity with eloquence, Armstrong wrote him: “It’s a pleasure for an editor to deal with something that needs practically no revision…. I only wish for your sake as well as for ours that it could carry your name.”²⁵

Kennan claimed later to have written the paper for Forrestal’s “private and personal edification,” and to have sent it to Armstrong only because he had it on hand.²⁶ That’s not how it reads, though: the tone is that of a stem-winding sermon—and preachers normally seek out pulpits. Armstrong provided one, but not right away. Because Foreign Affairs was a quarterly, the piece would not appear until late June, five months after Kennan had finished writing it. With such minimal revisions, the article ignored all that had happened during that time: there was no mention of the Greek-Turkish crisis, the Truman Doctrine, or their consequences for American foreign policy. It was as if Kennan had shot off an arrow of his own on a high trajectory, and then somehow forgotten about it.

The best explanation is that he saw the Foreign Affairs essay as ending an assignment, not beginning a new one.²⁷ It completed the task Durbrow, Gruenther, Hill, Forrestal, and Acheson had devised for him after his return from Moscow, which was to disseminate his insights about the Soviet Union as widely as possible, and to reflect—but only in general terms—on their implications for the United States in the postwar world. Marshall had now asked him to devise a grand strategy, a very different responsibility. Kennan’s perspective henceforth would be Washington’s, not Moscow’s; the demands on him would be organizational, not instructional ; and Marshall would expect invisibility, not publicity. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”—the title Kennan’s article carried—reflected his thinking as of January 1947 but not beyond. The only thing he did to connect it with his new job was to replace his name on the first page with an “X.”

III.

The National War College, Kennan assured a Foreign Service friend in mid-March, was achieving its purpose. Each year it would be sending a hundred graduates into the top ranks of their respective services. His own teaching had given him a closer acquaintance with this new generation of military leaders than anyone else in the State Department. That in itself should avoid many of the political-military confusions of the last war, for then there had been no civilian official with “the prestige and the guts” to challenge the military. Now that Marshall was secretary of state and Kennan would be running his Policy Planning Staff, the relationship should be even closer. Whether the staff would improve the conduct of foreign policy remained to be seen, but Marshall was not likely to put up with it if it did not. By starting quietly but with a small and select group, Kennan wrote another friend, “we may be able to avoid some of the pitfalls which have beset the careers of more ambitious and grandiose undertakings.”²⁸

Mindful of grandiosity, Kennan was still dissecting the Truman Doctrine—but with some significant shifts in his views. He had come to see the need for aiding both Greece and Turkey, he explained to his students on March 28, even though neither was in danger of becoming a Soviet satellite. The reason was psychological: a failure to act might convey the impression that “the Western Powers were on the run and that international communism was on the make.” Such a “bandwagon” mentality could cause Europeans to choose communism, in the belief that they had better climb on board while there was still time. That could shatter American prestige in the Near East, East Asia, and elsewhere.

This was a different and direr Kennan from the one who had lectured at the war college two weeks earlier. He was now approaching Acheson’s view that everything was at risk: the danger, though, was not from rotten apples but from cultural despair. The first barbarians to sack Rome had not held it; nevertheless the blow had begun the end of the Roman Empire. There was no reason to assume that Europe, “as we know it—and as we need it—would ever recover from… even a brief period of Russian control.” Floodwaters always receded, but was that a good reason not to build dikes? To abandon Europe would be to sever the roots of culture and tradition, leaving the United States with fewer safeguards against tyranny than one might think:

Retaining their freedoms in a hostile world would require Americans, therefore, “to whistle loudly in the dark.” That might not be enough to save them.

None of this meant, however, that they had to oppose totalitarianism everywhere all at once. Because means were limited, there had to be standards for determining when and how to act. The Truman Doctrine, with its promise “to support free peoples” wherever dictators threatened them, had failed to provide these. Kennan’s criteria, in contrast, were explicit:

Anyone trying to concentrate troops everywhere would be dismissed as “a military ignoramus.” Why that should not be true in foreign policy was a mystery. After all, bandwagoning could work both ways. There was “a very fair possibility” that, with a relatively small expenditure of money and effort in Greece and Turkey, “we might turn a critical tide and set in motion counter-currents which would change the entire political atmosphere of Europe to our advantage.”

Such a strategy would depart from decades of isolationism extending back to the Monroe Doctrine. But that pronouncement had not been some “higher truth,” divorced from the circumstances surrounding it: indeed the first drafts of Monroe’s message to Congress in 1823 expressed sympathy—little else was possible at the time—for the Greeks’ campaign for independence from the Ottoman Empire. What was happening now was that the United States was being asked defend principles too long admired only on “the comfortable plane of generality.”

Kennan concluded his lecture with what he acknowledged might be an apocryphal story about an American consul in Finland after World War I who had requested permission to fly the U.S. flag over premises he was occupying. After deliberation and delay, the reply came back from Washington: “No precedent.” The consul responded with equal brevity: “Precedent established.”²⁹

IV.

Marshall returned from the long and fruitless Moscow foreign ministers’ conference on April 28, 1947, determined to set precedents. During the weeks he had been away, it had become clear to him that the European crisis went well beyond the British withdrawal of aid to Greece and Turkey. The clearest warning had come from Stalin himself: when the secretary of state called on him in the Kremlin, the old dictator assured his guest that he did not see the situation as at all “tragic,” while at the same time doodling wolves on his notepad—a favorite tactic for disconcerting visitors. That was enough for Marshall, who ordered Acheson to get the Policy Planning Staff organized. On the day after his arrival in Washington, Marshall summoned Kennan for their first face-to-face conversation.

Something must be done, he insisted, otherwise others would seize the initiative: “I don’t want to wait for Congress to beat me over the head.” Kennan was to leave the war college immediately, review the whole question of Europe’s future, and tell him “what you think I ought to do.” He would have two weeks. Were there any other assignments? Kennan asked. Marshall’s reply became legendary: “Avoid trivia.” And so, “with this instruction and the weight of the world on my shoulders,” Kennan set to work.³⁰

Neither he nor Marshall nor any other individual invented the Marshall Plan. Its roots went back to the early 1920s, when American bankers, with quiet support from the Harding and Coolidge administrations, had helped to stabilize the post–World War I European economy. Roosevelt’s New Deal expanded the government’s responsibility for the domestic economy, and World War II made this a matter of international security, for if—as the experience of the 1930s strongly suggested—depressions made wars likely, then prosperity would be a prerequisite for peace. By the spring of 1947, however, the institutions designed to revive the global economy—the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank—were faltering. Meanwhile Stalin, tutored by Lenin to expect crises among capitalists, was doodling wolves, waiting for history to follow its prescribed path.³¹

Calls for action converged from several sources. Marshall himself had discussed the European crisis with his British and French counterparts, Ernest Bevin and Georges Bidault, while still in Moscow. Acheson had a State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee report ready for Marshall upon his return. The secretary of state’s economic advisers made their concerns clear, influenced by alarming reports from their chief, William L. Clayton, who was traveling in Europe. Well-informed columnists, notably James Reston and Walter Lippmann, were writing about the issue; their stories pushed officials who had supplied them with information into acting upon it. What Kennan did was to pull all of these threads together into a coherent policy.³²

He did so almost single-handedly: there was no eagerness among Kennan’s Foreign Service colleagues to join the new and as yet vaguely defined Policy Planning Staff. Nor was Acheson always helpful. With no background of his own in economics, Kennan had tried to recruit Paul H. Nitze—later to succeed him as staff director—but Acheson blocked the appointment on the grounds that Nitze was “a Wall Street operator,” not “a long-range thinker.” There was not even, for a while, assigned office space. The State Department was moving from its ornate but cramped quarters next to the White House to a spare but more spacious building—vacated by the War Department when it built the Pentagon—in the “Foggy Bottom” section of Washington. The name, Reston explained to his readers, was “not an intellectual condition but a geographical area down by the Potomac.”³³

When the staff formally began its operations, on May 5, it had only two other members: Joseph E. Johnson, a Williams College professor with no plans to remain in government, and Carlton Savage, a longtime aide to former secretary of state Cordell Hull. These were not heavy-hitters. It was under these circumstances, Kennan recalled, that

He was staggering “under a terrible burden right now,” George wrote his cousin Charlie James, but he was happy to have the sense “that perhaps I can leave a mark in the conduct of our international business.” This was only the beginning, though, “of a long and hard fight and I think I better not do much talking at this stage.”³⁴

The staff soon grew to include more qualified members: Jacques Reinstein, who supplied the economic expertise Kennan had hoped to get from Nitze; Ware Adams, a Foreign Service officer with a background on German and Austrian issues; Charles (Tick) Bonesteel III, an Army colonel assigned to the State Department who supplied a military perspective; and later that summer, at Kennan’s special request, his former Moscow colleague John Paton Davies, who handled East Asian affairs. Kennan was also fortunate to have Dorothy Hessman follow him into yet another job that generated an “endless torrent of prose.”³⁵

He took three weeks—not two—to propose a response to the European crisis, a pardonable delay given the scale of the problem. On May 23, after many late nights and much anguished discussion, he sent Marshall PPS/1, “Policy With Respect to American Aid to Western Europe,” the first paper to emerge from the Policy Planning Staff and certainly the most influential. Kennan drafted almost all of it, a practice he generally followed. The format, however, met Marshall’s specifications: there was an opening summary of main points, a statement of the problem, a set of proposals for short-term and longer-term solutions, and a conclusion—in this case, a particularly pointed one.

The problem confronting Europe, as Kennan identified it, was not the Soviet Union itself, or international communism, but rather an “economic maladjustment” that had made European society vulnerable to exploitation by totalitarianism. It had arisen from “a profound exhaustion of physical plant and of spiritual vigor,” brought about by the effects of war and the postwar division of the continent. Further communist successes would endanger American interests, a situation that should be “frankly stated” to the American people.

The immediate need was for “effective and dramatic action” to show Washington’s determination to reverse the situation. The objective would be psychological: “to put us on the offensive instead of the defensive, to convince the European peoples that we mean business, to serve as a catalyst for their hope and confidence, and to dramatize for our people the nature of Europe’s problems and the importance of American assistance.” It would be, in short, an application of leverage, designed to accomplish a lot with a little. Kennan was vague on just what this might be: perhaps getting coal from the Rhine Valley to wherever else it was needed, possibly providing additional economic aid to Italy. His weakness in economics was showing here: the staff, he explained, would have to study this matter more fully.

Kennan did better when he turned to long-term solutions: the Europeans, he insisted, would have to design their own recovery. In language Marshall himself used in announcing the plan that bore his name, Kennan proclaimed it

The American role would be to finance such a program and to help the Europeans set its priorities. But they would have to act together. The United States could not respond to “isolated and individual appeals.” The goal would be self-sufficiency: a “reasonable assurance that if we support it, this will be the last such program we shall be asked to support in the foreseeable future.”

The question then was how to define “Europe.” Great Britain would have to be included. Germany was nowhere mentioned, but by mentioning Rhine Valley coal and by citing the Americans’ responsibilities in the territories they occupied, Kennan implied its inclusion. He made the point explicit in a war college lecture on May 6, while PPS/1 was still being drafted: reviving productive capacity in western Germany “should be the primary object of our policy.” An equally sensitive issue was whether to invite the Soviet Union and its satellites to participate in the plan. Here Kennan recommended extending an offer, but in such a way that they would either “exclude themselves by unwillingness to accept the proposed conditions or agree to abandon the exclusive orientation of their economies.”

The paper’s conclusion was pure Kennan, although he had reason to know by then that Marshall would approve: “Steps should be taken to clarify what the press has unfortunately come to identify as the ‘Truman Doctrine’, and to remove in particular two damaging impressions which are current in large sections of public opinion.” These were, first, that the United States was responding defensively to communism and would not be acting in the absence of that danger; and, second, that the Truman Doctrine was “a blank check to give economic and military aid to any area in the world where the communists show signs of being successful.” Instead the United States must act “only in cases where the prospective results bear a satisfactory relationship to the expenditure of American resources and effort.”³⁶

Marshall convened top State Department officials on May 28 to discuss PPS/1. Kennan was present, as were Acheson and Will Clayton, just back from Europe and able to describe in startling detail the conditions he had seen. Bohlen was also there to support Kennan’s recommendation that the United States “play it straight,” offering aid to the Soviet Union and its satellites with the expectation that Stalin would refuse and thus take onto himself the responsibility for Europe’s division. Marshall, as was his habit, listened carefully but said little: he did ask, however, what would happen if the Russians accepted. Kennan suggested reminding them “that you like ourselves are a raw material producing and food producing country. We are contributing. What are you going to contribute?” Marshall nodded at this point but said nothing. He sent word to Harvard that day, though, that he would speak briefly a week hence when the university would be awarding him an honorary degree. Bohlen drafted the speech while Acheson, anticipating Marshall’s laconic manner, alerted the British that something significant was in the works.³⁷

The secretary of state’s address, unspectacularly delivered on June 5, 1947, left its audience unaware that they had heard something historic: like Lincoln’s at Gettysburg, it got polite but not enthusiastic applause. Kennan learned that Marshall had drawn on PPS/1 only when he saw the final text. The American media were unsure what to make of the “Marshall Plan,” as Truman insisted on calling it, but thanks to Acheson’s tip, Bevin was ready to act: he and Bidault invited Molotov to Paris to discuss Marshall’s proposal. The Soviet foreign minister arrived there on June 27 with a large group of economic experts, leading the Americans to worry briefly that Stalin had decided to participate in the plan. If he had, he soon changed his mind, ordering Molotov to walk out. The Eastern Europeans were at first told to accept aid with a view to sabotaging the Marshall Plan from within, but Stalin then countermanded those instructions as well.³⁸

It had all gone as Kennan expected. “Strain placed on communist movement by effort to draw up plan for European rehabilitation,” he wrote in a set of briefing notes for Marshall on July 21. “Communist parties in West[ern] Europe forced to show their hand. Russians smoked out in relations with satellite countries…. Events of past weeks the greatest blow to European Communism since termination of hostilities.”³⁹

What, then, was Kennan’s role in designing the Marshall Plan? The secretary of state himself credited PPS/1 as its basis and with characteristic understatement—all the more valued for that—found ways to show his appreciation.⁴⁰ Kennan’s contributions beyond that, though, are more difficult to sort out. Great Britain and Germany would have been included in the plan even if he had not recommended this: it would have made no economic sense without them. Kennan’s argument that the European crisis was psychological in character and could be reversed by psychological means was more original, although he framed that recommendation as a long-term solution: it was Marshall, Bohlen, and Acheson who saw that a speech made on short notice could accomplish the same thing.

Two features of the Marshall Plan, however, were particularly Kennan’s, one of them a success, the other a failure. The success was offering aid to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Had Stalin agreed to take it, he could have killed the program by ensuring that the U.S. Congress would never vote the necessary appropriations. But Kennan was sure—in a way that no one else in Washington except Bohlen could have been—that Stalin was not that clever and that the offer would catch him off guard. That was what happened: the offer lured him into displaying his own confusion, a devastating blow in a system that claimed infallibility. It was a lot to have accomplished with very little.

Kennan’s other priority—explicitly stated in the conclusion to PPS/1—was for the Marshall Plan to supplant the Truman Doctrine, with its implied obligation to act wherever Soviet aggression or intimidation occurred, without regard to whether American interests were at stake or the means existed with which to defend them. Unfortunately for Kennan, however, the literary arrow he had shot into the air before he had even heard of the Truman Doctrine or the Marshall Plan was now, in the wake of Marshall’s speech, about to make its unexpected impact.

V.

The State Department announced the Policy Planning Staff’s establishment, along with Kennan’s appointment as its director, on May 7. He combined “great strength of character, not to say toughness, with high-minded idealism,” Jock Balfour informed London, but this was “tempered by a healthy respect for the practicability of any given course.” Kennan had thought the Truman Doctrine an “unnecessary and perhaps even dangerous” overdramatization of the need to aid Greece and Turkey. He knew a great deal about the Soviet Union but had not “given way to the hysteria which colours the views of so many of his countrymen.” Balfour even reported on the Kennans’ living arrangements: he would continue some lecturing at the National War College because his family wanted to hang on to the house it provided for as long as possible.⁴¹

Kennan became even more visible a few weeks later when the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop ran the first public story on the “long telegram,” identifying him as its author. It was, they claimed, highly significant that Marshall had given this new responsibility to the man who had produced “the most important single state paper on the Soviet Union.” Worried that the still-secret document had leaked, Kennan hastened to assure Acheson that he had not been the source. He pointed out, however, that the telegram contained little “which has not subsequently been stated as American policy on many occasions and by many other people.”⁴²

“Keep an eye on George F. Kennan,” The Christian Science Monitor advised its readers a few days after the Alsops’ column appeared. United States News ran a brief biography stressing Kennan’s qualifications for the new job and noting—inaccurately—that while serving in Moscow, he had organized a dance band called “Kennan’s Kampus Kids.” He was “tall, lean, smooth-shaven and bald,” The Baltimore Sun reported early in June, alongside an improbable photograph from the 1920s showing an anxious young man with a full head of hair. Meanwhile, the Policy Planning Staff was posing for The Washington Post. Its photograph showed an older and more confident Kennan, elegant in a three-piece suit, leaning back in his chair with his chin in one hand and a pen in the other, legs crossed, a notepad balanced on his knee, as if waiting. The staff, journalist Ferdinand Kuhn noted, was as new and as sensible as the air-conditioned Virginia Avenue building where the State Department now had its headquarters. Its members would operate with a “passion for anonymity.”⁴³

That was the intention, but late in June the July issue of Foreign Affairs came out. With its somber cover and stolid contents, the quarterly made no effort to reach a mass audience: it cost $1.25 a copy, a lot in 1947, and its circulation was just over 19,000. There were articles that month on peacemaking, trade charters, international law, self-government in U.S. territories, Latin American population problems, and the Dutch-Belgian economic union. These raised few eyebrows, but one that did—at least in Moscow—was an essay by Yevgeny Varga, one of Stalin’s economic advisers, that cited the Greek-Turkish crisis and the Truman Doctrine as evidence that Washington and London were cooperating to preserve capitalism. Varga seemed to be challenging Leninist orthodoxy about capitalist contradictions, and he got into trouble at home for having done so. Immediately preceding his article was one that made no reference at all to those recent events. Its title was “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” and its author was listed, without explanation, as “X.”⁴⁴

No one paid much attention until July 8, when New York Times columnist Arthur Krock pointed out that its argument was “exactly that adopted by the American government after appeasement of the Kremlin proved a failure.” Obviously the author had studied the Soviet Union for years “at the closest range possible for a foreigner.” His analysis had been so accurate that the State Department had used it to predict how Molotov would respond, at the Paris conference the previous week, to the American offer of Marshall Plan aid. The views of “X,” Krock concluded, “closely resemble those marked ‘Top Secret’ in several official files in Washington.”⁴⁵

This set off a scramble for copies of Foreign Affairs. Krock had not named Kennan, but he knew who he was writing about because Forrestal had let him see the draft, with Kennan’s name still on it, that had gone to Armstrong. By the end of the day, the United Press was reporting “X”’s identity: the tip-off was not just the argument but also the prose. “If Kennan didn’t write that article,” one diplomat commented, then it was done by someone who could “imitate his writing style.” No one else, Hessman later confirmed, would have quoted from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. The State Department did not deny the rumor, and on July 9 the Daily Worker, the organ of the Communist Party of the United States, exposed the plot: “‘X’ Bared as State Dep’t Aid [sic]: Calls for Overthrow of Soviet Government.” That clipping made its way into Grace Kennan’s scrapbook. “The first nasty article,” she noted carefully, “but it’s about Mr. X who may or may not be Daddy.”⁴⁶

The next issue of Newsweek treated the “X” article—and Kennan’s ascent within the State Department—as a long-delayed vindication for the Soviet specialists Kelley had begun training two decades earlier. This “tightly knit little career group,” having survived “the appeasement and war years,” had concluded from them that dealing with Stalin was impossible. The “X” article, reflecting their thinking, explained the reasons behind the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, while charting “the course that this country is likely to pursue for years to come.”⁴⁷

Far from being anonymous, Kennan was now extremely conspicuous: “Feeling like one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster, I absorbed the bombardment of press comment that now set in.” Equally unsettling was what Marshall might say. He had been pleased to see Kennan’s appointment publicized, because it suggested seriousness within the State Department about constructing a postwar grand strategy. He was not at all happy, however, to find what purported to be that strategy—along with its alleged author—emblazoned across the pages of national newsmagazines.

Marshall never mentioned the matter to Kennan again, “[b]ut it was long, I suspect, before he recovered from his astonishment over the strange ways of the department he now headed.”⁴⁸

Kennan might soon have faded back into the anonymity he and Marshall wanted, had it not been for another unexpected event: Walter Lippmann brought his copy of Foreign Affairs with him to his summer fishing camp in Maine. When he returned to his home in Washington, Time magazine reported, America’s “best-known pundit” had no fish, but he did have a juicy target at which he now took aim: “Two secretaries hovered beside him. Western Union stood by to pick up his copy daily at 1 o’clock and transmit it to New York, while Mr. Lippmann, in red silk Chinese trousers and a grey-&-black silk shirt, sat at his antique desk and wrote.” And wrote, and wrote.

Lippmann produced fourteen columns on “Mr. X” for the New York Herald Tribune, the first of which appeared on September 2, 1947. Widely syndicated and republished as a short book entitled The Cold War—one of the first public uses of that term—they argued that Kennan had spawned a “strategic monstrosity” that would relinquish the initiative to Stalin, exhaust the United States, and force it into dependency on “a coalition of disorganized, disunited, feeble or disorderly nations, tribes and factions.” Only a miracle could make “containment” work: that concept assumed a competition in which “the Soviet Union will break its leg while the United States grows a pair of wings to speed it on its way.”

The basis for Lippmann’s complaint was his certainty that Kennan had inspired the Truman Doctrine, a conclusion he reached by reasoning backward. Had not Truman claimed the need to assist victims of totalitarianism everywhere? Had not Kennan insisted that the United States must “confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world”? It followed, in Lippmann’s mind at least, that the “X” article was “not only an analytical interpretation of the sources of Soviet conduct. It is also a document of primary importance on the sources of American foreign policy—of at least that part of it which is known as the Truman Doctrine.”⁴⁹

This could not have been more wrong. Kennan’s “Psychological Background” paper, completed at the end of January 1947, had indeed preceded Truman’s March 12 speech, but there is no evidence that it influenced the drafting of that address and abundant evidence that Kennan had sought to remove the language in it to which Lippmann later objected. Kennan had made his own objections to the Truman Doctrine clear in his National War College lectures, and in PPS/1 he recommended scrapping the idea altogether. Those positions were not public, but Lippmann had excellent sources within the government: Kennan had even consulted him, on Forrestal’s recommendation, with respect to the Marshall Plan. Lippmann later acknowledged having found Kennan upset by the Truman Doctrine. “[W]e were in pretty good agreement, I thought.”

Then the “X” article came out. Lippmann interpreted it as representing a faction within the State Department—opposed to the Marshall Plan—that favored the “military encirclement of the Soviet Union.” They were using Kennan to promote that objective. Hence Lippmann’s public attack: Kennan had either misled him or been captured by hard-liners. Lippmann could have cleared up the matter with a single phone call, but unlike Reston, Krock, and the Alsops, he was not an investigative reporter. It was not his habit to seek out information but rather to wait for it to come to him. When it did, he pronounced on its significance. And what he had, at his fishing camp in the late summer of 1947, were two apparently parallel texts: Truman’s speech and Kennan’s article. That was sufficient.⁵⁰

“Mr. Lippmann,” Kennan recalled ruefully, “mistook me for the author of precisely those features of the Truman Doctrine which I had most vigorously opposed.” Privately, Kennan suspected a more personal reason for Lippmann’s anger. Armstrong had banished Lippmann—and any mention of Lippmann—from the pages of Foreign Affairs after the editor’s wife left him to marry the columnist in 1938. Lippmann in turn, Kennan believed, resented the fact that he had published the “X” article in Armstrong’s journal, the only one in which Lippmann could not appear.⁵¹

Armstrong, pleased with all the attention, could not resist a bit of needling. “I see that Mr. Lippmann, having gone to Europe saying that the policy of containing Russia was based on fallacies and would fail, comes back saying that it has succeeded so well that it should be abandoned,” he wrote Kennan in November. Kennan, by then, was resigned to Lippmann’s inconsistencies: “I have never doubted that in the end the paths of Mr. Lippmann and myself would meet,” he replied. “History will tell which was the more tortuous.”⁵²

Whatever motivated Lippmann, Kennan also bore—and later acknowledged—responsibility for what had happened. His language did imply relinquishing the initiative to the Kremlin: it was difficult to read any other meaning into “the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manœuvres of Soviet policy.” He failed to say where the United States would find the means to do this, apart from maintaining its own self-confidence. He neglected to revise his draft in the light of the questions the Truman Doctrine had raised in his mind, which he in turn had raised with his war college students. He had time to do this: his final draft did not go to Armstrong until April 11, a day short of a month since Truman had made his speech. His insistence on anonymity secured the article a level of scrutiny it might not have received had he used his own name. And even after that anonymity had evaporated, Kennan continued to seek refuge in it: when Lippmann pounced, Kennan interpreted his own official responsibilities as precluding a public response, preferring instead to suffer in silence. Kennan’s “containment” therefore became synonymous, in the minds of most people who knew the phrase, with Truman’s doctrine.⁵³

Herbert Butterfield, whom Kennan read later in life, wrote of “the tricks that time plays with the purposes of men, as it turns those purposes to ends not realised.” Time played a trick on Kennan just as he was attaining national and international prominence. His Council on Foreign Relations talk, his essay for Forrestal, and its subsequent publication in Foreign Affairs, all looked backward to the despair of 1946 when war or appeasement appeared to be the only alternatives open to the United States. Kennan’s criticisms of the Truman Doctrine, however, looked forward to the purposefulness of 1947: having decided to resist the Soviet Union, how might the United States do that with maximum effectiveness at minimal cost?⁵⁴

But time does not tolerate such Janus-like postures. However distinct visions of the past and the future may be, conclusions drawn from them coexist in the present, intertwine, and often surprise. That was what happened to Kennan. He did indeed, as Kissinger acknowledged, come closer than anyone else to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era. But after 1947 he could never regard the doctrine with which he was credited as his own. That produced a dejection extending over dozens of Kennan birthdays to come.

KENNAN RETURNED TO THE NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE FOR WHAT he described as a farewell lecture on June 18, 1947. It seemed like centuries, he told his former students, since he had gone to work at the State Department. His months of teaching were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within “neat, geometric patterns” that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was “like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experienced it.”

There was, however, an analogy that might help. “I have a largish farm in Pennsylvania. The reason you never see me around here on weekends (or rather, the reason you would never see me around here if you were here on weekends) is that I am up there trying to look after that farm.” It had 235 acres, on each of which things were happening. Weekends, in theory, were days of rest. But farms defied theory:

Policy planning was like that. You might anticipate a problem three or four months into the future, but by the time you’d got your ideas down on paper, the months had shrunk to three or four weeks. Getting the paper approved took still more time, which left perhaps three or four days. And by the time others had translated those ideas into action, “the thing you were planning for took place the day before yesterday, and everyone wants to know why in the hell you didn’t foresee it a long time ago.” Meanwhile, 234 other problems were following similar trajectories, causing throngs of people to stand around trying to get your attention: “Say, do you know that the bull is out there in the strawberry patch again?”¹

So how good a planner was Kennan? That he pioneered the process goes without saying: he was the first and remains the most respected of all Policy Planning Staff directors. Nor could he complain about access. Marshall gave him an office next to his own, with the implied invitation to walk through the door connecting them whenever he felt the need.² There was no competition: grand strategy was a new concept in Washington, and Marshall’s prestige was such that the State Department—for the moment at least—took the lead in shaping it. The conditions for planning, then, were as good as any planner could expect to get. The world, however, defied theory as much as the farm did. Kennan relished and in many ways rose to the challenges his new job posed. In the end, though, he failed to master them—thereby setting the pattern for all the policy planners who would succeed him.

I.

Kennan delivered his June 18 lecture extemporaneously: there wasn’t time to do more than sketch out rough notes. For that reason, though, it—together with a more formal lecture he had given on May 6—provides a good sense of what was on his mind as he was setting up the Policy Planning Staff. They show that even as he was helping to design the Marshall Plan, he was looking beyond it in search of general principles to guide the strategy of containment. He shared these first with his war college students.

One such principle was self-restraint. Kennan had argued in PPS/1 that it would be “neither fitting nor efficacious” for the United States to design a European recovery program: the Europeans should do this themselves. Marshall incorporated that language into his June 5 Harvard speech, but neither he nor Kennan had explained the reasoning behind it. Why should Americans allow Europeans to decide how Americans would spend their money?

Kennan’s answer began with the communist parties of Western Europe, who on Moscow’s orders would do all they could to frustrate any workable recovery program: “They will fight it everywhere, tooth and nail.” But because they lacked the backing of the Red Army or the Soviet secret police, those parties depended on popular support. Their hard core of “violent, fanatical extremists” had to attract a wider circle of “muddled, discontented, embittered liberals.” If the latter ever abandoned the former, then Stalin’s strategy for dominating the rest of Europe would be in trouble. It made sense, therefore, to let the Europeans take the lead in shaping the Marshall Plan, because this would encourage unity among them while simultaneously undermining the agents through which Moscow had hoped to take control. Neither the Soviet Union nor its communist allies could credibly denounce a European initiative as “American imperialism.”

Behind Kennan’s argument were two larger ideas that had long shaped his thinking. One was Gibbon’s conviction that conquered provinces—whatever the means of conquest—were sources of weakness: the Soviet Union, Kennan believed, was already overstretched. The other, closely related, was that international communism had itself become a form of imperialism: this was “the weakest and most vulnerable [point] in the Kremlin armor.” It followed, then, that the Americans had time on their side and could afford to be patient. They could best secure their influence in Europe by not appearing too obviously to want it.

A second principle derived from the first: that containment meant contracting American aspirations, not expanding them. The resources available to the United States—material and intellectual—were more limited than anyone had understood them to be at the end of the war. As a result, a serious gap had developed between intentions and capabilities.

That interest lay in balancing power within the existing international system. If the United States was to avoid the overextension that was already afflicting the Soviet Union, then it should bolster the strength of allies in such a way as not to deplete its own.

The Marshall Plan’s purpose, therefore, was not to create American satellites. Rather, it sought to encourage the Europeans to make maximum use of their resources, before drawing upon those of the United States. This approach would promote self-reliance, distinguish Washington’s policy from Moscow ’s, and respect the interests of American taxpayers, who would be footing the bill for whatever assistance the Europeans did receive. Independence, not dependence, was to be the goal, and the effort expended in seeking it should be as little as possible.

That meant rethinking relationships with defeated enemies. The American occupation of part of Germany and all of Japan, Kennan reminded his students, was still focusing on prosecuting war criminals, dismantling industrial facilities, extracting reparations, restricting trade, and reeducating formerly authoritarian societies. There had been little coordination with the strategy of containment: the United States would need German and Japanese allies in resisting the Soviet Union. Even if that were not the case, to impose one’s will on a conquered people “means eventually that you fall heir, unless you are very careful, to all the problems and responsibilities of that people.” Americans were not equipped “to handle successfully for any length of time [those] other than our own.”

Beyond Western Europe and Japan, there was little the United States could or should do. Marshall had spent all of 1946 trying to mediate the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists in China, Kennan pointed out, but the country was probably still going to fall under Mao Zedong’s control. “If I thought for a moment that the precedent of Greece and Turkey obliged us to try to do the same thing in China, I would throw up my hands and say we had better have a whole new approach to the affairs of the world.” A communist China would not necessarily be a Soviet satellite. The more likely prospect—here Kennan reflected the views of John Paton Davies, his mentor on all things Chinese—was that “if you let the Russians alone in China, they will come a cropper on that problem just as everybody else has for hundreds of years.”

A third principle, consistent with Kennan’s emphasis on self-restraint and the contraction of responsibilities, was that expectations themselves could be a form of power. Stalin’s self-confidence, which had so alarmed Marshall, rested on the belief that capitalism faced a new crisis. The task for the United States, then, was to rebuild self-confidence in those parts of the world most vital to it, while shaking that of the Soviet Union. Truth and reason, combined with economic assistance, were the only weapons available with which to do this. Employed effectively, they would “strengthen the resistance of other people to the lure of unreality, so powerful in its effect on those who are confused and frustrated and who see no escape from their difficulties in the formidable mass of reality itself.” Their use, however, would require planning, and it was not at all clear that the American political system was up to that task: “Great modern democracies are apparently incapable of dealing with the subtleties and contradictions of power relationships.”

A fourth Kennan principle, therefore, was that—given the gravity of the situation—“there can be far greater concentration of authority within the operating branches of our Government without detriment to the essentials of democracy.” This would be federalism, not fascism: had not Hamilton pointed out that “the vigour of government is essential to the security of liberty”? Containment required “a more courageous acceptance of the fact that power must be delegated and delegated power must be respected.” As a consequence, “many of our ideas about democracy may have to be modified.”

Kennan concluded his June 18 lecture by thanking the students for the confidence they had shown him: “This experience has given me much more than many of you suspect.”³ The National War College had been—and with less frequency would continue to be—a place that allowed floating ideas before bright people on a confidential basis without worrying about Lippmann-like public critiques. But there was a greater distance than maps might indicate between neat geometric weekdays at Fort McNair and crisis-ridden weekends at the Pennsylvania farm: now, for Kennan, all the weekdays were weekends.

II.

The distance between theory and reality revealed itself almost at once as Kennan’s insistence that the Europeans design the Marshall Plan began to run into difficulties. representatives from the sixteen states expecting American assistance—minus the Soviet Union and the Eastern European satellites whose participation Stalin had forbidden—convened in Paris on July 12, 1947, to work out the amounts required and how the program would be administered. Washington’s plan, Kennan reminded Marshall, was to “have no plan.” But the United States did have certain requirements.

It should consider only proposals that would enable the Europeans to exist without charity so that “they can buy from us” and “will have enough self-confidence to withstand outside pressures.” More fundamental, however, was the traditional concept of American security, which had assumed a Europe of free states subservient to no single great power. “If this premise were to be invalidated, there would have to be a basic revision of the whole concept of our international position,” which might demand sacrifices far beyond those required by a program for European reconstruction. “But in addition, the United States, in common with most of the rest of the world, would suffer a cultural and spiritual loss incalculable in its long-term effects.” It was of course important to respect European autonomy. The American people, however, were “bound to be influenced by whether the European nations are doing a good job of helping themselves.”⁴

By the middle of August, it was becoming clear that they were not. The Paris conferees estimated that their countries would need $29.2 billion over the next four years—a figure well above what the Americans thought reasonable—and probably more after that. Even worse, there was no common plan for spending the money: the Europeans had simply added up each state’s projected recovery costs without considering the efficiencies to be gained, or the political benefits to be achieved, by integrating their economies. These deficiencies led Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Will Clayton to conclude that “there is no other way to deal with this situation than to impose certain necessary conditions.”⁵

But Robert M. Lovett, Acheson’s replacement as under secretary of state, still hoped to salvage something of the idea that the Europeans should take the lead, so he sent Kennan on a quick trip to Paris to see what might be done. “I was very interested to meet him,” Sir Oliver Franks, who headed the British delegation, recalled. “What struck me was the combination of rational, lucid exposition with controlled passion.” Having “agonized within himself,” Kennan came to a view “which I regarded as essentially intuitive, and then proceeded to argue with great elegance from the premises he had intuited.”⁶

Geopolitical and economic interests precluded abandoning the Europeans altogether, Kennan believed, while limited resources and domestic political constraints ruled out giving them everything they wanted. Within those boundaries, there was room to maneuver. The State Department could work behind the scenes to reshape the Europeans’ report. It could then treat that document as a basis for discussion, while deciding for itself what recommendations to make to the president and Congress. And it could include among these a program of interim aid without conditions, even as the conditions for a larger four-year plan were being worked out. In short, “we would listen to all that the Europeans had to say, but in the end we would not ask them, we would just tell them what they would get.”⁷

Self-restraint, then, had turned out to be neither “fitting nor efficacious.” In recommending its temporary abandonment, Kennan was acknowledging a paradox of planning: that short-term actions can proceed in opposite directions from long-term objectives and still be consistent with them. Only telling the Europeans what they would get would allow them to know what they should request. Only unconditional emergency aid would make extended conditional aid possible. Only by respecting European viewpoints could the Americans hope to change them.

The Paris trip had been an eye-opener: a collision of theory with reality. But it was also, in a way, exhilarating. Kennan composed a poem on the long flight home that suggested why:

The usual pessimism and self-pity were there, but so too, at the end of the poem, was a new theme, echoing something Bismarck had once said: “By himself the individual can create nothing; he can only wait until he hears God’s footsteps resounding through events and then spring forward to grasp the hem of his mantle—that is all.”⁸

Franks had it right: Kennan’s performance in Paris was intuitive as well as passionate, but it fit, nonetheless, within a set of grand strategic priorities. The most important one, as Kennan described it a few weeks after his return, was to ensure that “elements of independent power are developed on the Eurasian land mass as rapidly as possible, in order to take off our shoulders some of the burden of ‘bi-polarity.’ To my mind, the chief beauty of the Marshall Plan is that it had outstandingly this effect.”⁹

III.

The Europeans presented their report—scaled down now to $22 billion—on September 22. “We have as yet no cause to triumph,” Kennan cautioned an audience at the Commerce Department two days later. But there was reason to believe that the tide of postwar extremism had peaked and was beginning to recede. The basis for Kennan’s optimism lay less in the Europeans than in the confusion the Marshall Plan had caused among Soviet leaders.

Marshall’s speech had “laid bare, as if with a scalpel,” their inability to contribute to economic recovery. Stalin and his advisers had “tossed about on the horns of this dilemma, hoping that they could avoid a final impalement”—that was why Molotov had appeared briefly in Paris with his bevy of economic experts. Soon enough, though, the “iron logic” of the situation became clear, and the Soviet delegation fled “in the middle of the night.” In ordering them to do so, Stalin divided Europe, an outcome he had hoped to avoid: it was, however, the lesser of the evils he now confronted. The Marshall Plan had forced him to choose between cooperating with a program whose success would discredit communism, or openly seeking that program’s failure—a course that could, by a different route, produce the same result. It was a no-win situation: “The repercussions of it are still reverberating through the Kremlin.”¹⁰

One became apparent in late September, when the Soviets convened a conference of East European, French, and Italian communists in Poland. In his opening address, Leningrad party boss Andrey Zhdanov acknowledged Europe’s division into “socialist” and “capitalist” camps: all communists everywhere must now work for the triumph of the former over the latter. To facilitate that task, the old Communist International or Comintern—abolished during the war—would be revived as the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform.¹¹

What this meant, Kennan advised Lovett, was a tightening up of discipline within the Soviet bloc, regardless of its effects in “the left-wing liberal world.” To do otherwise was to run the risk that communist parties in Western Europe, as well as in the Eastern European satellites, might evolve into a series of nationalist movements with which Moscow would eventually come into conflict. As a result, it now saw greater dangers than opportunities in European communism: “We should be able to capitalize effectively on this situation.”¹²

But how? Kennan went back to the war college to work out an answer. He spoke there three times in five weeks after returning from Paris, using his lectures—still mostly extemporaneous—to clarify in his own mind what policy toward the Soviet Union should now be. He also took the opportunity to reply, off the record, to a conspicuous critic. “Our speaker this morning is Mr. X,” the students were told on the first of these occasions, “the man who made Walter Lippmann famous.”

Containment, Kennan insisted, did not mean preparation for war, because “it is not Russian military power which is threatening us; it is Russian political power…. Since it is more than a military threat, I doubt that it can effectively be met entirely by military means.” But containment was not diplomacy either, because the United States and the Soviet Union shared no common interests: no Soviet diplomat was likely to return to Moscow and say, “I have just talked to these fellows and I think they have a case.” Nor did containment require the “application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manœuvres of Soviet policy”—the language Kennan had used in the “X” article that had so aroused Lippmann.

Instead, Kennan now spoke of selectively applied “counter pressure”—of deploying strengths against weaknesses with a view to producing a psychological change in the mind of the adversary. It would be like playing chess, disposing of pawns, queens, and kings “in such a way that the Russian sees it is going to be in his interests to do what you want him to do.” The game would require patience as well as perseverance, but “[i]f they see that you are sufficiently determined, that you are sufficiently collected, and that you know exactly where you are going, you can sometimes put the fear of God in their hearts; and they will move.”

Soviet leaders were less confident than they looked. They knew that their empire in Eastern Europe was unstable: why otherwise would they tighten their control over it? They would do so next, Kennan predicted, in Czechoslovakia, still a relatively free country from which Western influences could spread if allowed to take root. But was it really plausible to believe that 140 million Russians, who already had a third that number of minorities within their own country, would be able to take over and handle indefinitely an additional 90 million in Eastern and Central Europe?

Another reason for unease in the Kremlin went back to the differences Kennan had long perceived between Stalin’s regime and the people it ruled. Three decades after the Bolshevik Revolution, the country remained what it had been for centuries, “a sea of mud and poverty and cruelty.” The Russians didn’t talk about this because it was dangerous to do so. They didn’t do much about it, because that was even more dangerous. “But they know it in their hearts; and they are not happy about it. That I can assure you.”

What, then, should the United States expect? Not that Russia would become a democracy: Americans who hoped for that were “quixotic fools,” because it would never happen. But a change in the Soviet Union’s international behavior could very well take place if it “gets its knuckles sharply rapped.” That could stabilize the international system until—in a more distant future—Russians overthrew communism for failing to keep its promises. They were “still potentially our friends…. I believe we still have a possibility of bringing [them] over to our side.”¹³

By the end of October, Kennan could see some correspondence between his planning and the results American policy had begun to produce. Whatever difficulties the Paris conferees were having in drafting an aid request that would satisfy Washington, the very fact that the effort was under way and that Moscow could make no competitive offer had shifted the gravitational field in Europe. The center of attraction now lay in the West, a contingency for which Stalin’s planners had made no provision: in time, Kennan suggested, it could pull not only European communists and satellite states from the Soviet Union’s orbit, but ultimately the Russian people themselves. By persuading Marshall that he should invite all Europeans, east and west, to decide how Americans should spend their money, Kennan had pulled off a classic Clausewitzian maneuver: a minimal effort—the making of a single short speech—had reversed expectations in what Lippmann was calling the “Cold War,” with consequences that, if managed wisely, might well determine its outcome.

IV.

On November 4, 1947, Marshall asked Kennan to prepare a brief résumé of the world situation for his use at a cabinet meeting three days later. Completed on the sixth, PPS/13 turned out to be the first comprehensive statement of U.S. grand strategy since the end of World War II. Marshall was impressed enough to read a summary aloud when the Cabinet convened on the seventh, and President Truman, in turn, requested a copy of the full paper. Kennan’s views on American policy had now made their way to the top.

PPS/13 began with a lesson in geopolitics. The simultaneous defeats of Germany and Japan had left power vacuums into which the Soviet Union had tried to move, with a view to extending its “virtual domination over all, or as much as possible, of the Eurasian land mass.” That offensive had now come to a standstill, partly because the postwar radicalism that fueled it was diminishing, but mostly because the United States had surprised the Kremlin by delaying its own military withdrawal from former enemy territories, by offering economic assistance to demoralized Europeans, and by using the United Nations to rally resistance. The question now was what to do next.

Kennan’s answer was less, not more, for these accomplishments had “stretched our resources dangerously far in several respects.” Americans still occupied portions of Germany, Italy, Austria, and Korea, as well as all of Japan: that task could only become more difficult as time went on. However effective the Marshall Plan was proving to be, it set no precedents: it was probably the last major effort of that kind that the United States should make.

That meant making allies of defeated enemies: to continue punishing the Germans and the Japanese would only perpetuate the power vacuums that had encouraged Soviet ambitions in the first place. But restoring the balance would also require abandoning actual and potential allies whose defense would now be too costly. Czechoslovakia fell into that category, as did Nationalist China and noncommunist Korea: where territories were “not of decisive strategic importance to us, our main task is to extricate ourselves without too great a loss of prestige.”

The Soviet Union would attempt to exploit discontent in France, Greece, and especially Italy, where American forces would soon withdraw, while keeping its own hand concealed so as “to leave us in the frustrated position of having no one to oppose but local communists, or possibly the satellites.” The United States “should be free to call the play,” determining whether action was to be directed against the U.S.S.R. or only its stooges. The latter would be strongly preferable and would not necessarily lead to war. That danger was “vastly exaggerated in many quarters.”¹⁴

Kennan’s was, then, a minimalist strategy, at least as noteworthy for what it rejected as for what it endorsed. It contained none of the Wilsonian idealism that had shaped American foreign policy during and immediately after the two world wars. There was no Truman-like commitment “to support free peoples” wherever freedom was under attack: instead Kennan called for casting some adrift, while defending others who only a few years earlier had grossly violated freedom. The atomic bomb was nowhere mentioned in PPS/13, which stressed the limits of American power and the consequent need to distinguish vital from peripheral interests. The task would be to deploy strengths against weaknesses: “victory” would not be unconditional surrender, but rather a shift in the minds of Soviet leaders that would reverse their expectations about success.

Six days after Marshall presented these recommendations to the president, Kennan sent the secretary of state a report evaluating the Policy Planning Staff’s accomplishments during its first six months. Consisting of five members—two others would soon be added—the staff had sought to remain small, flexible, and unencumbered by administrative problems. It had prepared, during this period, thirteen formal reports, eleven of which made recommendations that had “found some reflection in subsequent operations.” If work continued at this level over the next six months, the result should be a collection of staff papers relating to all major areas. Together they would constitute “something like a global concept of United States policy.”

Kennan acknowledged suspicions about his organization elsewhere in the State Department, where no such “uniform framework of thought” was possible. But the Policy Planning Staff was meeting a broader requirement, for with the establishment of the National Security Council in July 1947, the department needed a unit that could function as a counterpart to the Pentagon’s planning units “in matters affecting policy as a whole.” If the staff did not already exist, something like it would have had to be created. And with Marshall having appointed Kennan as his representative on the NSC staff, “a desirable symmetry” had been reached in coordinating diplomatic with military strategy.¹⁵

What Kennan could not yet say was how critical that appointment would turn out to be. Over the next two years the Policy Planning Staff became the principal source of ideas for the National Security Council. Papers prepared under a PPS prefix were routinely renumbered, with little modification, as NSC papers, and if approved by the president—most of them were—they became national policy. Since Kennan so dominated his own staff, this arrangement had made him, by the beginning of 1948, not just the State Department’s but the nation’s top policy planner.¹⁶

V.

He was not generally available to the press. His name was not on the directory in the cold marble lobby. To reach his office, you had to pass portentous murals, lengthy corridors, private dining rooms, and watchful guards. “The buzzers buzz, a door opens, and here he is: Mr. X—George Frost Kennan, of Milwaukee and Moscow.”

The job he held defied description. It could involve preparation for next week’s squabble with the Russians, or something that might not happen for fifteen years. His decisions could affect everything from the cost of living to whether there would be war or peace. Prepared for whatever problem might wind up in its lap, the Policy Planning Staff met in a room without a phone, an intercom, or baskets marked “incoming” and “outgoing”—just a long table and eight green leather chairs. A connecting door led to Marshall’s office.

The profile, by Philip Harkins, appeared in the New York Herald Tribune magazine on January 4, 1948, accompanied by an austere but (this time) current photograph of its subject. Entitled “Mysterious Mr. X,” it was based on an interview with Kennan, although he was still not acknowledging the pseudonym. He would not have allowed access, however, without the State Department’s approval: anonymity, it seemed, was no longer expected, and the “X” article appeared not to have been such a catastrophe after all.

Despite Harkins’s ponderously mixed metaphors—Kennan was “the prize package in the deep freeze that the security-conscious State Department has installed for ‘the cold war’”—the article did contain some shrewd insights. Kennan wore no cloak, carried no dagger, did not smoke, drank little, and ate judiciously, “out of respect to a dormant ulcer.” He loved the guitar and with graceful gestures liked to imitate playing it. Circles might show under his eyes at the end of a long day, but he was still ready to draw on Dostoyevsky for insights into the Russian mind. He could even act out scenes from Crime and Punishment to show that although the Soviet government might believe that ends justified means, the Russian conscience shouted “No!” And what of Kennan’s own conscience? It was, Harkins noted, Protestant, midwestern, and hence “baffling to Europeans and Orientals,” but it had driven a young man from Milwaukee to Moscow and back again. Now it had conspired (more metaphors) “with a terrifying whirlwind of outside forces to put [him] at a radioactive chessboard opposite skillful and determined opponents.”¹⁷

It’s not clear what Kennan thought of the Harkins piece—he probably cringed—but his family was impressed: the clipping wound up in several scrapbooks. It felt strange, Jeanette recalled, “to have somebody so close to you and that you love so much, suddenly so important.” Annelise remembered George’s fame as having emerged more gradually: “I really can’t say that I suddenly felt that I was the wife of an important man.” But “I wasn’t stupid.” Invitations started arriving “to dinner here, and to dinner there. People are quick.” Especially “the ambassadresses.”

With George now no longer at the war college, the Kennans were renting a house at 4418 Q Street in the Foxhall Village neighborhood just west of Georgetown. “I was always the one who did everything about the house,” Annelise explained. “And with the children, except if there was something important, I was the one who had to do it. He was very busy.” George lacked the strength “to be social every day of the week,” so the farm became all the more necessary. Weekends at East Berlin were “absolutely sacred,” not least because those were the only days he could spend with Grace and Joan. The Kennans, at one point, even declined a dinner at the Achesons’ : “Whatever they felt, they were very nice about it.” The farm had one other advantage, which was to substitute for summer camp: “We couldn’t afford that.”¹⁸

Weekdays normally began with the Policy Planning Staff members arriving at their desks to find stacks of overnight telegrams, distributed by areas of responsibility. There would be only an hour or two to read them before Kennan would call a meeting. “We’d all gather around the table, and George would start talking,” Ware Adams recalled. “Very often none of us would say a word, but we’d just be looking at him. And he, by watching us, seemed to know just what we were thinking.” Robert Tufts, the staff’s economics specialist, confirmed that

John Paton Davies thought Kennan handled the staff well. As Foreign Service officers, they were not used to such seminars: “George was operating at an intellectual level several degrees above theirs. Nevertheless, he was most gracious and considerate of the feelings of these people.”

The important papers, Davies added, originated with Kennan and were drafted by Kennan: “We sat by in some awe and tried to make intelligent comments about them. He invited the comments. He welcomed the criticism.” That was a good thing, because “George does have a tendency to go sailing off, and he has to be brought back to earth.” The Policy Planning Staff, he thought, functioned somewhat as Annelise did. Someone would say: “Well, George, that’s going a little far, isn’t it?” He would then “tone it down and it would come into place.” Kennan needed “a backboard against which to play his game. He’s got to bounce it off of somebody who will react against it.”¹⁹

One person who did was Dorothy Fosdick, recruited by Kennan in 1948 to help with United Nations affairs. “We were not equals,” she stressed. “Kennan was the prince, and we were the advisers to him.” Being female, however, gave her a special status:

When crises would arise, Kennan would take Fosdick to lunch at J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite restaurant, the Allies Inn. With the FBI director and his partner Clyde Tolson usually seated nearby, Kennan would “pour out his heart to me.” That was what he saw as a woman’s role: “to listen, to console, to quietly advise—and I regarded it at the time as a very high compliment. He knew he could trust me not to repeat what he’d said.”²⁰

Chip Bohlen, another confidant, was never a member of the staff—his official title now was Counselor in the State Department—although he participated frequently in its discussions. If inclined during the war to be optimistic about relations with Moscow, the British embassy in Washington noted, Bohlen had for some time shared the harsher view of Soviet policy “which the less career-minded and more profound Kennan has always expressed.” Adams nonetheless found the contrasts fascinating. “They were both thinkers, but in different ways”: Kennan was the dreamer, Bohlen the practical one. “It was interesting to see two people so unlike agreeing as much as they did,” something that had not been true in the past and would not be in the future.

As Kennan had hinted to Marshall, others in the State Department doubted the Policy Planning Staff’s usefulness. “I think it was all right,” Loy Henderson observed neutrally, “but it was kind of a paper thing. It had no way of enforcing itself. The geographic bureaus were where the real power was.” Henderson and the other assistant secretaries, Davies explained, resisted planning. They felt that “you had to ride like a bush pilot on the seat of your pants. You couldn’t anticipate how things were going to go, therefore you took your cues from what was happening right in front of you. That was real. The rest was day-dreaming, or speculative, and therefore did not contribute very much.” But Marshall respected Kennan and was used to working with planners. Kennan’s assignment was to provide a broad outlook, which Marshall valued because he understood that “you can’t proceed from 1A to 1B to 1C and so on down. You had to have an overview.”²¹

That was how Kennan understood his responsibilities. “Look,” he remembered telling the staff, “I want to hear your opinion. We’ll talk these things out as long as we need to. But, in the end, the opinion of this Staff is what you can make me understand, and what I can state.” There was, he believed, no such thing as a collective document, because “it has to pass, in the end, through the filter of the intelligence of the man who wrote it.”

Kennan recalled listening to the staff with respect and patience. He quickly discovered, though, that when “people get to talking, they talk and they talk. But they don’t talk each other into conclusions.” He once admonished them:

At such moments, Tufts remembered, Kennan would disappear, and a paper would soon appear. “He could dictate a better paper than most of us could write, even after editing.”

Having worked with Kennan since 1944, Dorothy Hessman knew how to keep up with him, even when his intensity caused him to lose track of time, place, and posture: “I was sitting by the desk one day, and he was pacing back and forth behind me, and suddenly his voice sounded a little strange. So I turned around and looked and he had sat down in the leather armchair with his feet over one arm and his back over the other and then stiffened up—so that he lay there across this chair.” On other occasions, however, he needed an audience. Marshall Green, a young Foreign Service officer who went with Kennan to Japan early in 1948, found that one of his jobs was to “look intelligent.” Kennan would speak to Green, while Hessman took it down. This gave his writing a conversational flavor, and “when he was through, he didn’t have to change a word of it.”²²

During the two and a half years that Kennan ran the Policy Planning Staff, it produced over seventy formal papers: the complete set came to more than nine hundred single-spaced pages. “The world was our oyster,” he later wrote, “there was no problem of American foreign policy to which we could not address ourselves—indeed, to which it was not our duty to address ourselves—if we found the problem serious enough and significant enough to warrant the effort.” Kennan meant the papers to serve, not as a theoretical framework for the conduct of international relations, but rather as applications of certain “methods and principles” to “practical situations.” No other office in the State Department produced so many papers on so many issues over so many months, “from a single point of view.”

That was, if anything, an understatement. Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff papers were the most thorough specification of interests, threats, and feasible responses that anyone had yet worked out within the U.S. government, and it would have been difficult to find anything comparable in any other government at the time. They were an intellectual tour de force: an extraordinary attempt to devise a global grand strategy. But they were also, as Kennan acknowledged, “one man’s concept of how our government ought to behave and by what principles it ought to be guided.”²³ They rested on the premise that a single policy planner (Kennan) could suggest to a single policy maker (Marshall) what he, and hence the nation, ought to do. They were, in this sense, strikingly solipsistic.

Kennan’s strategy would depend, therefore, on the extent to which he could embed it in the minds of others. His policy papers, like his lectures, were a starting point, for strategies require coherence. But they must also inspire confidence, overcome resistance, and adapt to the unexpected. If they fail to take root, they wither. Kennan’s task was now as much cultivation as conception: the farm had prepared him for it, arguably, about as well as the war college had.

VI.

The next set of issues the Policy Planning Staff faced, after getting the Marshall Plan under way, arose as aftershocks of the British withdrawal from the eastern Mediterranean. That unexpected development had left a new power vacuum in an area of strategic importance to the United States, not as the result of an enemy’s defeat in war but from an ally’s weakness in the first years of peace. The danger was the one Kennan had warned of in Western Europe: that the Soviet Union, working through the international communist movement, might fill the void, bringing southeastern Europe and potentially also the Near East within its orbit. The test for his strategy was whether minimalism would meet this threat. Could the Truman administration limit its response chiefly to economic assistance, while waiting for internal contradictions within the Soviet empire to halt its expansion? Or would something more be required?

Lovett posed the question bluntly in the late summer of 1947: what would happen if communists took power in Italy or Greece? The staff papers Kennan produced acknowledged the seriousness of the situation. The Italian Communist Party, now the strongest force in Italian politics, would, if it came to power, menace the interests of the United States in Western Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, even in South America, where there was a large Italian emigrant population. A communist victory in the Greek civil war would produce similar results in Europe. In either instance, the Soviet Union would have extended its political and military control “beyond the high-water mark” it had reached at the end of the war. But constraints on American power limited what might be done: the United States could not, for example, send troops to fight the communists inside Greece or Italy, for that would require deploying forces it did not have to battlefields it would not have chosen. It could, however, secure air and naval bases in those countries while strengthening the Sixth Fleet, which already dominated the Mediterranean.

The idea, Kennan explained, would be to make it clear “that extensions of Soviet military power, by means of concealed aggression, …will be countered by corresponding advances of the bases of U.S. strategic power.” This is what he had in mind when he spoke to the National War College students of “counter-pressures.” These would not, as the “X” article had implied, correspond precisely to those undertaken by Moscow; rather, “concealed aggression” would produce “corresponding advances” in overall American military strength in the region, which could then be used to exploit Soviet weaknesses. Local communists might destabilize a country internally, but only at the cost of attracting greater U.S. air and naval power into the region, something Stalin could hardly favor. The strategy would require patience and steady nerves, for getting Kremlin leaders to see that their ambitions endangered their interests might take months or even years. It would, however, remain within the limits of American capabilities. It was, in this sense, still minimalist.²⁴

So too was another Kennan recommendation for containing national communist movements. The Central Intelligence Agency’s legal advisers were not sure that Congress, when it established that organization in the summer of 1947, had meant for it to engage in covert activities. “[W]e are handicapped,” Kennan told presidential aide Clark Clifford in August, “by the lack of ability to use the techniques of undercover political operation[s] which are being used against us.” Kennan admitted to Forrestal, now the first secretary of defense, that the American people would probably never approve of policies relying on such methods: “I do feel, however, that there are cases where it might be essential to our security that we fight fire with fire.” Italy and Greece were among them.²⁵

For the most part, the Truman administration followed Kennan’s advice. Italy was the first topic the National Security Council took up when it met for the first time on September 26, 1947, and PPS/9—Kennan’s paper—provided the basis for discussion. NSC 1/1, “The Position of the United States with Respect to Italy,” incorporated with only minor revisions the arguments he had made, and in December Truman approved it. When American troops were in fact withdrawn, Kennan suggested a presidential warning that the United States would not allow the overthrow of Italian democracy. Truman issued the statement on the thirteenth: if it became apparent that the freedom and independence of Italy were being threatened, directly or indirectly, the United States would be “obliged to consider what measures would be appropriate for the maintenance of peace and security.”²⁶

Five days later the president authorized the CIA, “within the limit of available funds,” to conduct “covert psychological operations designed to counteract Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities which… are designed to discredit and defeat the United States in its endeavors to promote world peace and security.” Kennan had not been alone in favoring this—pressures to undertake disavowable or “black” measures were converging from within the new agency and from Forrestal as well. It was at Kennan’s insistence, however, that the NSC was given the authority to review all such operations: “We would want to examine the situation in all its aspects in case of any suggested operation, and to judge each case strictly on its merits.” And Kennan was the State Department representative on the NSC staff.²⁷

Meanwhile Kennan was battling his former superior Loy Henderson—now director of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs—over what to do about Greece, where the war against the communist guerrillas was going badly. Henderson wanted to send American troops to show “that we will, if necessary, resort to force to meet aggression.” Kennan objected strongly: “We might find ourselves in a difficult position from which it would be hard to withdraw and equally hard to keep other nations from withdrawing the contingents they had contributed.” The argument extended into January 1948, with Marshall in the end settling it in Kennan’s favor by ruling that before any commitment of troops could be made,

The language was tough enough to have been Kennan’s, as indeed it was: he took the notes in the NSC meeting at which Lovett presented Marshall’s views.²⁸

On the future of the British mandate in Palestine, however, Kennan agreed with Henderson. Awarded by the League of Nations after World War I, it had placed Great Britain in the position of mediating between the Arab and Jewish inhabitants of the region—never an easy task, but an especially difficult one in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust because the international Zionist movement was determined at last to establish a Jewish state. Frustrated and overstretched, the British turned the issue over to the United Nations in February 1947, at the same time that they announced their decision to withdraw from Greece and Turkey. The General Assembly, the following November, voted with American support to partition Palestine between the Arabs and the Jews, but the Arabs immediately rejected this two-state solution. The question confronting the United States, then, was whether to help the United Nations impose partition against the will of the Arabs—a decision that might well require the use of military force—or to seek some other outcome.

Kennan and Henderson adamantly favored the latter approach. “Any assistance the U.S. might give to the enforcement of partition,” the Policy Planning Staff concluded on January 20, 1948, would produce “deep-seated antagonism” throughout the Muslim world over many years. That could endanger military base rights and access to oil, which might in turn threaten the success of the Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union, whether it supported the Arabs, the Jews, or both at once, could only gain as a result. Unless this policy was reversed, Kennan added in his diary a week later, there would be no alternative to taking over major military and police responsibility for maintaining a state of affairs in Palestine “violently resented by the whole Arab world.” Americans could not be “the keepers and moral guardians of all the peoples in this world.”²⁹

Here, too, Kennan prevailed, although not easily. Dean Rusk, director of the State Department’s Office of United Nations Affairs, thought him too pessimistic about partition. Marshall and Lovett advised caution, aware of the objections supporters of Zionism would make to any change in policy. Kennan persisted, however, and on February 11 he produced a revised staff paper that boiled the options down to three: full support for partition, whatever the international consequences; a shift to neutrality, which would make it hard to justify existing commitments in Greece and Italy; or some form of international trusteeship for an undivided Palestine, a decision that would preclude the formation of a Jewish state but “would regain in large measure our strategically important position in the area.” Boxed in by unpalatable alternatives, Marshall took the third recommendation to Truman, who approved it early in March—or, at least, appeared to have done so.³⁰

With respect to Italy, Greece, and Palestine, then, Kennan maneuvered skillfully. He fought off pressures to send troops to these regions, while showing how the careful expansion of American naval and air capabilities might cause the Soviet Union to restrain the activities of local communists. He encouraged the CIA to develop its own covert means of countering those activities, while arranging to supervise how this would be done. And he retained throughout the Marshall Plan’s focus on economic recovery as the principal instrument of containment. It was—or, at least, it seemed to be at the time—an impressive performance.

VII.

There was, nevertheless, an improvisational character to most of the Policy Planning Staff’s work in 1947. Because it had inherited existing crises in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East, there had not been time, Kennan acknowledged, to “come up for air, look around us, and attempt to take stock of America’s world position as a whole.”³¹ He tried to do that hastily in the global survey he prepared for Marshall in November, but the first region for which the staff was able to initiate its own planning was East Asia, a part of the world not yet fully caught up in the emerging Soviet-American rivalry. Once again Kennan dominated the planning process, but the process refined his own thinking as it progressed.

When Kennan wrote of the need to develop independent power on the Eurasian landmass as quickly as possible, he was echoing an anxiety felt by British and American strategists since the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the early twentieth century: the possibility that a single hostile state—whether German or Russian—might someday control all the territory from the English Channel to the Pacific Ocean. That would neutralize the advantages maritime strength had long given Great Britain and the United States. It was one of the reasons Kennan worried so much about the war having left power vacuums along the periphery of the Soviet Union.³² But as he thought more about this, he began to see that not all such vacuums were dangerous. The critical issue was how territory might be used, not how much an enemy might rule.

Kennan came to this view by way of China, which he regarded as more likely to suck in power than to be a base from which to project it. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had called, in June 1947, for a major effort to rescue Chiang Kai-shek: Mao Zedong’s forces were “tools of Soviet policy,” the chiefs insisted, and if the Truman Doctrine was to be effective, the administration must apply it consistently wherever Soviet expansionism was occurring. Skeptical but still sensitive about his mediation mission in China having failed, Marshall took no position on the proposal, suggesting instead that Truman send General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who had served as an aide to Chiang during the war, to assess his current prospects. Upon his return, Wedemeyer endorsed the chiefs’ views, so Kennan volunteered to have the Policy Planning Staff do its own study. Marshall, with relief, accepted the offer.³³

On November 3, Kennan advised him that while a Chinese Communist victory would be a serious setback, it would “not be a catastrophe.” Mao could hardly rule all of China while deferring to Moscow; and only massive American assistance—more than was contemplated for all of Western Europe—could save the Nationalists. China was not the place, then, to confront the Soviet Union, despite the fact that Chiang’s highly vocal supporters in the United States would demand doing so. The Truman administration should extend only the aid necessary to appease these domestic critics and, if possible, to prevent any immediate collapse of the Nationalist regime. It should not go beyond that point.³⁴

Marshall presented this recommendation to Truman, who quietly accepted it. Early in 1948 the president asked Congress for $570 million in nonmilitary assistance for China, only slightly more than what he had requested a year earlier for Greece and Turkey, and much less than the $17 billion he was seeking for the Marshall Plan. After reducing the appropriation still further, Congress approved the China Aid Act in April. Kennan’s role in cutting off aid to the Chinese Nationalists—for that was what these decisions amounted to—had been pivotal. He seized the initiative after Marshall passed it to him, he stood up to the Joint Chiefs and to Wedemeyer, and in doing so he carried his opposition to the Truman Doctrine from the realm of theory into that of policy. Most important, he did it with Truman’s approval.³⁵

Kennan’s rationale for what he admitted was a “plague on both your houses” strategy reflected a new calculation: that hostility, divorced from capability, posed no danger. The United States must never again be threatened from Asia, he told a Pentagon audience in January. But only the industrial regions of Siberia, Manchuria, northern China, and northern Korea could provide bases from which to mount an attack. All were already under actual or probable Soviet control. Politically immature, economically desperate, no other mainland peoples—including the rest of the Chinese—could, by themselves, pose any danger. The Truman administration could, therefore, safely abandon Chiang Kai-shek. It could even remove American occupation forces from southern Korea unless that territory was deemed “of sufficient strategic importance to retain.” Kennan doubted that it would be.

Japan, however, was different. It had shown itself to have dangerous capabilities, but these were now under American control. Disarming this former enemy was of course necessary, but it was just as vital to see that a demilitarized Japan did not fall within a Soviet sphere of influence: that would require “a stable, internally strong Japanese government.” Current occupation policies had focused too much on punishment and not enough on what was to follow. Adjustments were therefore necessary: the United States should commit itself to defending the country while strengthening its economy. It should “dispense with bromides about democratization” in Japan and in “the island world generally.”³⁶

Herein lay the origins of what later became known as the “defensive perimeter” strategy: that the United States would use its air and naval strength to hold islands, while liquidating positions on the Asian mainland. “[W]e are greatly over-extended… in that area,” Kennan explained in PPS/23, a comprehensive review of commitments he completed for Marshall in February 1948. Americans had clung too long to the idea of remaking China, an end far beyond their means. The Policy Planning Staff should determine what parts of East Asia are “absolutely vital to our security,” and the United States should then ensure that these remain “in hands which we can control or rely on.”

Kennan framed this recommendation within the need to choose between universal and particularist approaches in foreign policy. Universalism sought to apply the same principles everywhere. It favored procedures embodied in the United Nations and in other international organizations. It smoothed over the national peculiarities and conflicting ideologies that confused and irritated so many Americans. Its appeal lay in its promise to “relieve us of the necessity of dealing with the world as it is.” Particularism, in contrast, questioned “legalistic concepts.” It assumed appetites for power that only “counter-force” could control. It valued alliances, but only if based on communities of interest, not on the “abstract formalism” of obligations that might preclude pursuing national defense and global stability. Universalism entangled interests in cumbersome parliamen-tarianism. Particularism encouraged purposefulness, coordination, and economy of effort—qualities the nation would need “if we are to be sure of accomplishing our purposes.”³⁷

Kennan had not set out to become a philosopher, but his job was turning him into one. He was making the point, in PPS/23, that while ideals existed in people’s minds, capabilities determined what states could do. Ends for this reason were infinitely expandable; means could never be. Calculating relationships between ends and means required calibration: there was no place here for the untethered aspirations Americans had traditionally floated above the world, before they took over the responsibility for running the world. Now they would have to learn to operate like everyone else. The argument paralleled Hans Morgenthau’s in his classic text, Politics Among Nations, the first edition of which appeared in the fall of 1948. Within the government, Kennan was ahead of him.³⁸

VIII.

He was still enough of a Foreign Service officer, though, to distrust desk-bound perspectives. “The Director and members of the Staff must do more travelling and get about more,” Kennan advised Marshall late in 1947. There was real danger that their isolation might separate them from reality in their work and cause them to “cease to have their feet on the ground.”³⁹

Japan offered an opportunity. The country anchored Kennan’s East Asian strategy, but he had never been there. He knew that the first George Kennan, who had spent time in Japan, regarded its people as the Asians with whom Americans had the most in common. The second Kennan wondered whether it had been necessary to risk war with Japan while on the verge of war with Nazi Germany: the diplomat John Van Antwerp MacMurray, Kennan liked to point out, had argued as early as 1935 that such a course could only benefit the Soviet Union. From the moment he joined the Policy Planning Staff, Davies encouraged Kennan to challenge the punitive aspects of American occupation policy in Japan and to oppose any premature peace treaty that might leave the country unable to defend itself against the U.S.S.R. “Of all the failures of United States policy in the wake of World War II,” Kennan wrote in his diary at the end of January 1948, “history will rate as the most grievous” the mismanagement of defeated enemies forced to surrender unconditionally. He had Japan chiefly in mind.⁴⁰

Shifting policy, however, would require taking on General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander for the Allied powers in Japan: so far neither the president, nor the State Department, nor the Pentagon had dared to attempt it. MacArthur had gone from winning the war in the Pacific—as he liked to think of it—to running the most successful military occupation—as he also liked to think of it—since Caesar invaded Gaul and Britain. Determined to remake Japan from top to bottom, MacArthur compensated its victims, purged its government, broke up its big industries, redistributed land, secured votes for women, and demanded the teaching of democratic values. His reforms went beyond anything progressivism or the New Deal had accomplished in the United States, even though MacArthur considered himself a right-wing Republican.⁴¹ The intoxications of power and the satisfactions of exile overrode ideological consistency and political practicality in the general’s mind: he had, by his own choice, not set foot in the United States since 1939, but in the spring of 1948 he was eagerly awaiting a draft from his party—which never came—for its presidential nomination.

With little interest in Europe, less knowledge of the Soviet Union, and no inclination at all to defer to Washington, MacArthur cultivated a shogunlike remoteness that made it seem disrespectful, even impertinent, to ask how Japan might fit into the strategy of containment. He was, in Kennan’s view, a major threat to its success: MacArthur’s policies seemed almost designed “for the purpose of rendering Japanese society vulnerable to Communist political pressures and paving the way for a Communist takeover.”⁴²

Tutored by Marshall on what to expect, Kennan left for Japan on February 26, 1948, only two days after submitting PPS/23. He felt, he later recalled, as if he were establishing diplomatic relations with a suspicious foreign government. Accompanying him were a Pentagon representative, General Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Schuyler, Marshall Green, and Dorothy Hessman. The Seattle-Tokyo leg of the flight, which required thirty hours and two refueling stops, was as hair-raising as any of Kennan’s wartime transatlantic journeys, and even more exhausting. Upon arrival he was received, it seemed to Green, as a spy from the State Department. Kennan was told later that MacArthur, furious at his being sent, had said: “I’ll have him briefed until it comes out of his ears.”

MacArthur began by subjecting his guests to an interminable lunch: “We were so weary we were falling off our chairs.” The general turned his back on Kennan, giving Schuyler a two-hour table-pounding monologue on the occupation’s accomplishments. It concluded with the claim that the great events of the next thousand years were sure to take place in “the Orient,” and that Americans now had the opportunity, in Japan, to plant the seeds of Christianity and democracy throughout the region, thereby “fundamentally alter[ing] the course of world history.”⁴³

The general was a universalist in need of tethering, and that is what Kennan—once he had recovered—set out to do. After a day of uninformative briefings by MacArthur’s staff, Kennan sent a polite reminder “that I had questions of some moment which I was under instructions to discuss personally with him.” There was no direct response, but an aide soon arrived to conduct an audition. Satisfied, he extended an invitation for Kennan to lecture, on the next day, to a group of senior officers. It was a second tryout, in which Kennan’s improvisational skills served him well: having had much greater exposure to Soviet developments than any of them, “I think I was able to add to their knowledge and to clarify some of their impressions.” MacArthur was not present, but Kennan got the sense “that he was, in some way or other, excellently informed of what I had to say.” Green, who did attend, found the talk “absolutely brilliant,” like an eye “piercing into eternity.” A summons then arrived for Kennan to spend the evening of March 5 alone with the great man.⁴⁴

They could have started the conversation—no record confirms that they did—by reminiscing about Milwaukee: MacArthur’s father’s family was from the city, and young Douglas had spent two years living with his mother in a local hotel while preparing for the examinations that would get him into West Point in 1899.⁴⁵ A second shared interest turned out to be the defensive perimeter strategy. MacArthur had no intention of using American troops to Christianize Asia, favoring instead the creation of an arc of island bases running from the Aleutians and Midway through Okinawa and the Philippines. His reforms, he claimed, had not weakened Japan’s economy or compromised its security, but “academic theo-rizers of a left-wing variety” had influenced some of them. Changing priorities might make sense: this would require, however, the consent of the Far Eastern Commission, the international body established upon Japan’s surrender to oversee the occupation. Inconveniently, its membership included the Soviet Union.

Knowing the “flealike agility” with which MacArthur had used this argument in the past when asked to align his policies with Washington’s, Kennan was ready for it. The commission’s mandate, he pointed out, extended only to supervising surrender terms, not to determining Japan’s postwar future. The FEC could not be abolished, but making this distinction would leave it with little to do. MacArthur liked the idea, slapping his thigh in enthusiasm and telling Kennan this was “exactly the right line for us to take.” The rest of the conversation proceeded smoothly, and they parted amicably. Green admired the way Kennan handled MacArthur. The State Department, he was saying, wanted the general to remain in charge, but without the nuisance of the FEC: “[T]his appealed to MacArthur, because MacArthur was an intelligent man.”⁴⁶

Kennan’s lengthy report, however, called for an end to MacArthur’s reforms, a reduction in his authority, a revival of the Japanese economy, and the eventual transfer of political control to the Japanese themselves. It was the East Asian equivalent of the Marshall Plan’s requirement that western Germany be included in any program for the recovery of Europe. With strong support in Washington, Kennan’s recommendations sailed through the NSC at the end of September 1948, and on October 9 President Truman approved them. The shift in Japanese occupation policy came to be known as the “Reverse Course”: the course reversed was the one MacArthur had set.⁴⁷

It was Kennan, in this instance, who had shown agility. He had concealed his resentment of MacArthur’s arrogance, as well as his contempt for the sycophantic establishment that surrounded him. He had won the general’s trust by impressing his aides, found commonalities upon which he and MacArthur could agree, and then appeared to expand the supreme commander’s authority by proposing to emasculate the FEC. In fact, this constrained it, for with the FEC effectively out of business, MacArthur could no longer switch the administrative hats he wore—one international, the other American—when the actions he was instructed to take under one or the other displeased him. From this point on his orders came only from Washington, leaving the outmaneuvered general no excuses for ignoring or evading them.⁴⁸

Kennan regarded his role in the tethering of MacArthur as, after the Marshall Plan, “the most significant constructive contribution I was ever able to make in government.” On no other occasion did he make recommendations of such scope that met with such widespread acceptance: “I turned our whole occupation policy.”⁴⁹

IX.

Fixing policy in Japan, however, was like repairing a bridge on the farm: a lot could happen behind your back while you were concentrating on the task at hand. On February 25, 1948, the day before Kennan left for Tokyo, President Eduard Beneš of Czechoslovakia reluctantly agreed, under pressure from Moscow, to the formation of a communist government. Kennan for months had been predicting such a development. It would be, he insisted, a defensive response to the success of the Marshall Plan, requiring no action on the part of the United States. Czechoslovakia, after all, had been within the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence since the Red Army liberated it in 1945. An end to multiparty rule there would simply consolidate the status quo. It would not be part of a plan for “an unprovoked Soviet military conquest of Western Europe.”⁵⁰

But Kennan failed to anticipate the emotional response to the Prague “coup” in Western Europe and the United States. Less than a decade earlier the British and the French had forced the same Beneš to accept the Munich agreement, now universally regarded as having led to World War II. It was difficult to watch a similar tragedy unfold without thinking about World War III—especially when, on March 10, the broken body of the Czech foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, was found sprawled in a courtyard beneath his office. Whether he died from murder or suicide hardly mattered: he was the son of Tomáš Masaryk, who with Woodrow Wilson’s encouragement had founded the state of Czechoslovakia after World War I. His death symbolized the suppression, yet again, of the only democratic regime in Central Europe.

An immediate effect was to strengthen a case British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin had begun to make in December 1947: that Great Britain, France, and the Benelux countries should form the “Western Union,” a political and military alliance directed ostensibly against any resurgence of German aggression but in fact against the Soviet Union. Kennan had been skeptical, warning Marshall that any military buildup would divert the countries involved from the more important task of economic recovery. The Russians had no intention of attacking anyone. What they wanted instead was to take control from within, through “stooge political elements.” The Marshall Plan was the best way to keep that from happening.⁵¹

By the time the Policy Planning Staff got around to analyzing Bevin’s proposal, however, the Czechoslovak coup had occurred and Kennan was in Japan, unable to guide its deliberations. George Butler, its deputy director, was a Latin American specialist, so he asked a temporary member, Kennan’s former Riga colleague Bernard Gufler, to take on the assignment. Gufler, no expert either, sought help from the Office of European Affairs, whose director, John D. Hickerson, not only shared Bevin’s concerns but wanted to go one step further: the time had come, he believed, for a formal U.S. commitment to the defense of Western Europe. PPS/27, completed on March 23, reflected Hickerson’s reasoning. Fears of Soviet aggression, it concluded, were now so strong that assurances of military support from the United States were needed. Kennan was not consulted: “I was shocked to learn, on my return, that… my deputy had produced a Planning Staff paper blessing this idea.”⁵²

This had happened, as Kennan remembered it, because the State Department had panicked. There were indeed grounds for concern. On March 1 a Policy Planning Staff consultant, Yale professor Arnold Wolfers, warned on the basis of a just-concluded trip to Italy that the communists could win the upcoming elections there, and if that happened, the rest of Europe might follow the Italian example. Then on March 5 General Lucius D. Clay, MacArthur’s counterpart in American-occupied Germany, alerted Army intelligence to “a subtle change” he had detected in Soviet behavior suggesting that war might now come “with dramatic suddenness.” Clay’s cable leaked, causing a war scare in Washington, and summaries of both pronouncements finally caught up with Kennan on March 15, while he was on a side trip to Manila. Startled, he tried to evaluate their significance in a hastily composed telegram to Marshall and Lovett. It conveyed the impression, however, that Kennan had panicked.⁵³

He began by reminding his superiors that he had never foreseen Soviet military action unless Kremlin leaders became “dizzy with success” or feared a collapse of their authority in Eastern Europe. But now, strangely, both things seemed to be happening. Possibilities of success at the polls had excited European communists, while Stalin and his associates were becoming increasingly fearful that the Marshall Plan might succeed. This combination of euphoria and desperation posed new dangers: “We must be prepared for all eventualities.”

Italy was the key: if it went communist, then the whole American position in Europe would be at risk. It would “be better that elections not take place at all than that [the] Communists win in these circumstances.” So should the Italian government not outlaw their party prior to the elections? Civil war might follow, but that would give the United States the excuse to reoccupy whatever Italian military facilities it might wish. Such a course would “admittedly result in much violence and probably a military division of Italy.” That would be preferable, though, “to a bloodless election victory, unopposed by ourselves, which would give the Communists the entire peninsula… and send waves of panic to all surrounding areas.”⁵⁴

If a long telegram from Moscow two years earlier had made Kennan’s reputation, then this short one from Manila diminished it. The analysis was contradictory: how, if European communists were relishing their successes, could Soviet leaders be worrying about the success of the Marshall Plan? How could Kennan so suddenly withdraw his assurances about Moscow’s reluctance to risk war, as well as his warnings against using American troops in the eastern Mediterranean? How, in a larger sense, could policy be planned if the top planner abruptly repudiated his own analyses? Hickerson, no admirer of Kennan, consigned his Manila dispatch to bureaucratic oblivion with a crisp comment, scribbled at the bottom of it:

1. Action to outlaw C.P. before election or to postpone election would be certain to cause civil war.

2. Non-communist parties have a good chance of winning election without any such drastic steps.

3. Therefore action recommended by GFK seems unwise.

Privately, Hickerson concluded that Kennan, when drafting this cable, could only have been “roaring drunk.”⁵⁵

That seems unlikely. Alcohol was not a problem for Kennan, but solipsism was, and in March 1948 it was beginning to catch up with him. He had built a staff around himself, producing analyses remarkable for their clarity, coherence, and depth; its members depended so much on Kennan’s guidance, though, that they drifted in his absence. Designed to resist what he regarded as parochialism in the State Department’s geographical bureaus, the Policy Planning Staff succumbed to just that malady when it accepted Hickerson’s advice on Bevin’s proposal: it embraced an Atlantic perspective but not a global one. Kennan had planted seeds but neglected their cultivation. “My mistake lay in my failure to realize that…, despite all that had been said in the reporting from Moscow, in the X-article, and in innumerable private conversations in the State Department, [my views] had made only a faint and wholly inadequate impression on official Washington.”⁵⁶

Solipsism showed up as well in Kennan’s conviction that only he could reverse MacArthur’s course in Japan: perhaps one reason the two hit it off is that each regarded himself as indispensable. Having insisted that all lines of authority over foreign policy go through him, Kennan assigned himself a task that would take him away from Washington for at least a month. He had no way of knowing that the month he chose would be as crisis-ridden as it was. But even in normal circumstances, it would have been unrealistic to assume, as Kennan seemed to, that all the crises except the one he was working on could wait until he got back. It’s not even clear that the trip was necessary. Other pressures to shift his policies were converging on MacArthur: Kennan affected the timing but not the outcome.⁵⁷ By doing so in such a labor-intensive way, he fell into a parochialism of his own. He became, however briefly, Asia-centric—and in that too he resembled MacArthur.

Kennan also failed to allow for his own dependence on the staff he dominated. If Davies was right that his Policy Planning colleagues served as a backboard against which Kennan could bounce ideas—if, to use another metaphor, they tethered him, somewhat in the way that Annelise had always done—then this was another good reason for not leaving town. Deprived while on his trip of his staff’s feedback, of his lunches with Fosdick at the Allies Inn, and of Annelise’s sturdy common sense, Kennan fell into a funk if not a panic, with results embarrassingly apparent in the Manila “short telegram.” It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, when loneliness got the better of him, upsetting the precarious balance between his emotions and his avocation.

“George is far away at the moment,” Annelise wrote Frieda Por on March 8, 1948. “I hope he is enjoying it. If it isn’t too strenuous, I know he will.” But the trip was strenuous, and the delicate relationship between Kennan’s head and his stomach now also suffered. Since his frustrating service on the European Advisory Commission four years earlier, his ulcer had given him little trouble. Now, though, it flared up again: by the end of his Japan trip, Kennan was sick in bed, where he began dictating his long report for Lovett and Marshall. Upon his return to Washington at the end of March, he and Hessman spent two days finishing off that document, and then Kennan checked himself into the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was there for two weeks, followed by several more days of recuperation at the farm. Kennan had left his office on February 26. He was not back at work until April 19.⁵⁸

By then, much had changed. On March 17 Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg signed the Brussels Treaty, a fifty-year defensive military alliance. President Truman welcomed it in an address to Congress on the same day, promising that the Europeans’ determination to protect themselves would be matched by an American determination to protect them. On March 22 Hickerson began secret talks on behalf of the State Department with British and Canadian representatives, looking toward associating the United States and Canada with the Brussels Treaty signatories. On April 3 Congress, spurred by the coup in Czechoslovakia, at last approved the Marshall Plan, and Truman signed the bill into law. And on April 7 Lovett took a revised version of PPS/27 to the president, with a view to securing his permission—which Truman readily granted—to sound out congressional leaders on the possibility of a North Atlantic treaty that would formally link the military security of Western Europe to that of the United States. Kennan could only watch these events take place. He had nothing to do with shaping them.⁵⁹

Meanwhile, another of Kennan’s recommendations had caused a painful split between Truman and Marshall. On March 19 Warren Austin, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, presented the American plan for an international trusteeship over an undivided Palestine. But on the previous day the president—despite having approved the abandonment of partition—had assured the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann that there had been no change in policy. Embarrassed, Truman blamed the State Department: there were people there, he complained, “who have always wanted to cut my throat.” That was an exaggeration, but Kennan had failed to consider the humanitarian implications of withdrawing American support for a Jewish state only three years after the world had learned of the Holocaust. Nor had he taken into account the impact on Truman’s reelection prospects in the fall, an omission the White House staff quickly remedied. By the end of March the State Department had lost control of U.S. policy in the Middle East. In deciding to recognize the new state of Israel, an uncharacteristically angry Marshall told the president a few weeks later, he had indulged in a “transparent dodge to win a few votes.” Truman replied coolly that he knew what he was doing.⁶⁰

“The greatest mystery of my own role in Washington in those years,” Kennan wrote in his memoirs, “was why so much attention was paid in certain instances… to what I had to say, and so little in others.” The answer, he concluded, was that

But surely policy planning in a democracy, if it is to be effective, must allow for domestic politics, institutional interests, vastness, turgidity, self-centeredness, and emotion. These are not mysteries to most people. That they were to Kennan—that he expected theory to trump subjectivity—was in itself a solipsism that led to failure.

ENSCONCED ON THE SIXTEENTH FLOOR OF THE BETHESDA NAVAL Hospital in Washington through the first half of April 1948, Kennan recalled being “very bleak in spirit from the attendant fasting… made bleaker still by the whistling of the cold spring wind in the windows of that lofty pinnacle.”¹ But the enforced rest provided an opportunity, as the doctors treated his physical ulcer, for him to alleviate the pain of a mental ulcer that still persisted. From his usual horizontal position (there being no choice this time), Kennan summoned Hessman and began dictating a lengthy letter to Walter Lippmann.

“You have chosen, for some reason, to identify the policy of containment with the ‘Truman doctrine,’ which you deplore,” he admonished the pundit, “and to hold up the Marshall Plan, by way of contrast, as an example of constructive action.” Had Lippmann forgotten their lunches together the previous May, at which Kennan advanced his ideas for the latter initiative? Contrary to what Lippmann claimed, he had never called for resisting the Russians wherever they challenged Western interests. “I do not know what grounds I could have given for such an interpretation.” (Here Kennan ignored—or had repressed—his call in the “X” article for applying “counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manœuvres of Soviet policy.”) He did point out, accurately, that he had written “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” to counter “puerile defeatism” among American intellectuals who thought that firmness toward the Soviet Union could only bring war.

In fact, firmness had restored stability. “Has Iran gone? Or Turkey? Or Greece?” Not one would have remained independent had the Americans not acted. “Has Trieste fallen? Or Austria?” Italy was admittedly a weak spot, but that weakness had arisen from not stiffening the Italians soon enough. To be sure, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Manchuria, and North China had wound up on the wrong side of the “iron curtain.” That was to be expected, given the military realities existing at the end of the war. Communism might indeed prevail in the rest of China: “What of it? I never said we would—or should—be able to hold equally everywhere.” The point had been to hang on “in enough places, and in sufficiently strategic places, to accomplish our general purpose.” That, for the most part, had been done.

Containment would not require the United States to arm itself to the teeth, defending overextended positions indefinitely. The Russians, made also of flesh and blood, had their own vulnerabilities. Afflicted by “internal contradictions,” they would eventually defeat themselves. If capitalism bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction, why were they seeking so desperately to bring about its collapse? What was to be done, then, lay chiefly “within ourselves.”

The day would come—sooner than one might think—when their own weaknesses would convince Soviet leaders “that they cannot have what they want without talking to us. It has been our endeavor to assist them to that conclusion.”

And what of European allies? Lippmann had argued that the United States, having provided them moral and material assistance, now also owed them military protection. This was “preposterous.” The Russians much preferred conquest “by concealed methods, with a minimum of responsibility on their own part.” The Marshall Plan was countering that strategy. Should it not satisfy the Europeans, “I can only shrug my shoulders.” For the United States could not, by itself, sustain hope. But Kennan saw little faint-heartedness among recipients of Marshall Plan aid: they “have shown themselves ready enough to take risks as long as there is a reasonable indication that we are behind them and will do our best for them.”

So what was Lippmann worried about? A year ago fear had hung over everything. Since then, however, “no fruits have dropped.” Moscow had been forced to isolate the East from the West, where recovery was progressing rapidly: “Admittedly, the issue hangs on Italy; but it hangs—in reality—on Italy alone. A year ago it hung on all of Europe—and on us.” Lippmann should, then, “leave us some pride in our own legerdemain.” The saddest part of the past year’s experience was not the realization of how hard it was for a democracy to conduct a successful foreign policy. It was rather that if it did, “so few people would recognize it for what it was.”²

Kennan’s letter to Lippmann was roughly the length of a war college lecture. On reading it over, it seemed “plaintive and overdramatic,” so he never sent it. He did corner Lippmann on a train a few months later and subject him to some of its arguments; no portion of the letter itself reached its intended recipient, however, until 1967, when excerpts appeared in Kennan’s memoir. He blamed himself, after Lippmann’s death, for having been “too arrogant” during his first months on the Policy Planning Staff to have accepted criticism as patiently as he might have. But something else was going on then as well: for once in his life—despite his ulcer—Kennan was optimistic about the future.³

Hardly anyone else was, however. Kennan’s long Asian trip and the illness that followed prevented his seeing how pessimistic the mood in Washington and in allied capitals had become. As a result, the job to which he returned in mid-April was not the one he had left in late February. A year into his Policy Planning Staff directorship, Kennan found himself becoming a policy dissenter once again. He had, he discovered, lost his footing. He never quite regained it.

I.

The problems began with a recommendation that went awry. However much Kennan may have doubted himself over the years, he had never lacked confidence in his ability to explain—and even predict—the behavior of the Soviet Union. These skills had made his reputation in the Foreign Service, brought him to the National War College and the Policy Planning Staff, and inadvertently earned him, as “Mr. X,” celebrity status. Whatever else he might have been wrong about, he had a habit of being right about the U.S.S.R.

Kennan’s colleagues took him seriously, therefore, when he suggested in PPS/23, completed on February 24, 1948, that the Marshall Plan’s success might soon compel Soviet leaders to negotiate. Once this had happened—probably after the November presidential election in the United States—the talks should be entrusted to someone who

(a) has absolutely no personal axe to grind in the discussions, even along the lines of getting public credit for their success, and is prepared to observe the strictest silence about the whole proceeding; and

(b) is thoroughly acquainted not only with the background of our policies but with Soviet philosophy and strategy and with the dialectics used by Soviet statesmen in such discussions.

Lest there be any doubt as to whom he had in mind, Kennan also insisted that the negotiator be fluent in Russian. Containment, in his mind, was meant to end the Cold War, not to freeze it into place. He meant to play as large a role in completing that effort as he had in initiating it. In the meantime, it might be worth seeking “some sort of a background understanding” with the Stalin regime.⁴

The Czech coup, which Kennan had predicted, took place on the next day, so he departed for Japan on the twenty-sixth with his prestige as high as it would ever be. Shortly after arriving in Tokyo, he told an off-the-record press briefing that “within six months [a] spectacular retreat of Soviet and Communist influence in Europe may be expected.” The head of the Canadian mission in Japan reported Kennan’s comments to Ottawa, where they set off expressions of incredulity. From London, the Foreign Office assured the Canadians—who had passed on the account—that there must have been a mistake. “I can hardly believe that Mr. Kennan can have been accurately reported,” R. M. A. Hankey, head of the Northern Department, commented. It all seemed “so very much too optimistic.” Kennan’s former Moscow colleague Frank Roberts ventured another explanation: concerned by Lippmann’s criticisms “that containment is a fruitless policy,” he now “must prove that it can lead to positive results.”⁵

But Kennan was not freelancing. Worried that Stalin might overreact to Truman’s tough speech on March 17, the Policy Planning Staff had supported Kennan’s call for a quiet approach. “We have no way of knowing what appraisal Stalin is receiving of American intentions,” Davies pointed out. It was important to ensure that if war broke out, it would not have been through a misunderstanding. Bohlen seconded the suggestion, and on April 23 Lovett secured Truman’s permission to go ahead. Marshall asked Ambassador Smith, in Moscow, to convey the message. The British and the Canadians were not informed: indeed the British embassy in Washington reported that the Truman administration feared conciliatory signs from Moscow, lest these strengthen Soviet “apologists,” among them Wallace, now running for president on a third-party peace platform.⁶

Smith sent Molotov a carefully worded note on May 4, stating that while the United States would defend its interests, “the door is always wide open for full discussion and the composing of our differences.” The two men then met on the tenth, with each professing his country’s peaceful intentions. But on the eleventh, the Soviet news agency TASS released an edited version of this supposedly secret conversation: its apparent purpose was to imply that the United States had proposed a European settlement without consulting its allies. That unexpected development raised “very grave doubts in the minds of His Majesty’s Government as to what may have been intended,” Bevin cabled Marshall, in words more restrained than the anger he felt. Queries from other alarmed Europeans followed, as did a cacophony of excited press commentary.⁷

“I was appalled at what I had done,” Kennan later recalled. “For two evenings, I walked the streets of Foxhall Village, trying… to discover where the error had lain.” Finally he asked to see Marshall, for what he expected to be a reprimand. “I think we were right,” he said, “and that the critics are wrong. But where there is so much criticism, there must be some fault somewhere.”

The implications of what had happened, however, were not as reassuring. The Soviets had in the past respected confidentiality, Kennan reminded Marshall, but that could no longer be assumed: “The diplomatic channel to Moscow is really eliminated.” As long as Molotov remained foreign minister, there could be no communication “without making it to the world.”⁸

That was underestimating the problem, for Stalin himself had read Smith’s note, scribbling a sardonic “Ha, Ha!” next to the passage about an open door for diplomacy. He then ordered the release of the edited exchange and compounded the mischief by inserting himself into the American presidential campaign. On May 12 Wallace published an open letter to Stalin closely paralleling the TASS version of the Smith-Molotov conversation. Stalin responded on the seventeenth, welcoming Wallace’s letter as a possible basis for the peaceful resolution of differences. It was a transparent attempt, Durbrow reported disgustedly from Moscow, to “lend the appearance of substance to the vacuity of Wallace’s declarations… and thus to emasculate American policy.”⁹

The timing did seem more than coincidental. The State Department had evidence, Kennan explained to Smith, that Wallace had known what Stalin was going to do: “We unwittingly ran head on into a neat little arrangement between the Kremlin and some of the people in the Wallace headquarters.” Wallace was indeed coordinating his actions with Moscow, but Kennan chose not to pursue the possibility that a former vice president of the United States had become a Soviet agent. What chiefly concerned him was that something had been “seriously wrong with my own analysis of events.”

It was clear now that Stalin and his subordinates had no intention of dealing with Marshall and the other architects of containment. This was, in one sense, flattering: “They know very well that to us they would have to make real concessions, that we would not be put off with phony ones.” But the situation was also dangerous, for they would use every opportunity to confuse public opinion and to build up Wallace. Kennan had been “horrified,” he admitted to Smith, “by the ease with which the press and other groups interested in foreign affairs were taken in by this Russian maneuver.”¹⁰

He was still seething when he traveled to Canada late in May. The invitation had come about because the Canadians, for whom Kennan had become a kind of Delphic oracle, were still trying to figure out what he had meant weeks earlier when he had expressed optimism about relations with Moscow in his Tokyo press conference. What they got now, however, were grim warnings about the naïveté of such a view. Speaking at the National Defence College in Kingston, Kennan summoned a long list of witnesses to Muscovite perfidy, extending all the way back to the emissaries of Queen Elizabeth I: “One can search in vain through the annals of Russian diplomacy for a single example of an enduring, decent and pleasant relationship between Russia and a foreign state.”

Like early Christians in the late Roman Empire (Gibbon echoed loudly here), the international communist movement was hollowing out Western civilization from within, taking advantage of its “self-flagellating conscience.” Such penitence ignored Russian history and Soviet ideology, encouraging the illusion that Stalin’s behavior depended solely upon whether he was “pleased or irritated or impressed” with Western actions. The Smith-Molotov exchange had made it “terrifyingly clear” that “the Russians are able to raise or lower at will the temperature of American political life.”

The United States and its allies could no longer expect, therefore, any reconciliation with the Soviet leaders, after which “we would all go away and play golf.” The Cold War would continue, “probably through our lifetimes.” The task now must be to manage it, and that would require an approach as “profoundly dialectic” as its Soviet counterpart. It would have to contain “conflicting elements of persuasion and compulsion.” It would be “partly one and partly the other.” It would require allowing what might appear to be “complete and arbitrary inconsistency.” This capacity to “blow hot” one day and “blow cold” the next would be vital, for if “one or the other of these possibilities is denied to us, I assure you with the deepest conviction that we are lost.”¹¹

All of this may have clarified things for the Canadians, but Kennan’s vehemence suggested how much the Smith-Molotov episode had shaken him: for the first time since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, he had failed to anticipate what Stalin would do. With a single sleazy trick, the old dictator had undermined Kennan’s credibility as a Soviet expert. Kennan had let himself become too hopeful too soon. Even worse, he had transformed that hope into a failed policy initiative. His career did not suffer, because he still had Marshall’s support. But his faith in himself did, along with the reputation his expertise hitherto had earned him.

II.

He had already been wrong about Italy. The prospect of a communist takeover there had so haunted Kennan that in his ill-conceived “short telegram” from Manila on March 15, he raised the possibility of canceling the upcoming elections and outlawing the communist party, even at the risk of civil war and an American reoccupation of military bases on the peninsula. The situation was still worrying him as he finished his letter to Lippmann on April 6: Italy was, he wrote, the only remaining weak spot in Western Europe. On the day after Kennan got back to the office, however, it became clear that the Italian Communist Party had suffered a decisive defeat in the April 18–19 elections. Alarmed by events in Czechoslovakia, encouraged by the prospect of Marshall Plan aid, the Italians had turned back a Moscow-inspired conquest from within, on their own and by democratic means. Or so it seemed.

In fact, Italy had been the site, over the past few weeks, of the CIA’s first major covert operation. It’s difficult, even today, to assess the importance of the secret funding the agency cobbled together for the Christian Democrats as against other influences on the election outcome: the Vatican’s implacable anticommunist offensive; the massive Italian American letter-writing campaign warning that a communist victory would end economic assistance from the United States; the extent to which the Czech coup discredited the Italian communists. Those who knew about the CIA’s intervention, however, considered it a great success. Although Kennan had pushed for the agency’s involvement in Italy the previous fall, his Manila telegram and the Lippmann letter suggest that he did not know the full extent of what was going on. When he found out, he rushed to get ahead of what he had not seen coming. From having warned, in mid-March, that Washington was getting Italy horribly wrong, he went to arguing by the end of April that it had gotten Italy brilliantly right—so much so that its actions there should become a model for the future.¹²

“Political warfare,” Kennan argued in a closely held and therefore unnumbered Policy Planning Staff paper completed early in May, was Clausewitz in peacetime. It employed all means short of war to achieve national objectives. These included overt initiatives like alliances, economic assistance, and “white” propaganda but also the clandestine support of “friendly” foreigners, the use of “black” psychological warfare, and even the encouragement of underground resistance in unfriendly states. The British had long relied on such methods, and Lenin had so synthesized the teachings of Marx and Clausewitz that the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare had become the most effective in history. Americans, in contrast, had traditionally viewed war as an extension of sports, free from any political context at all.

Now, facing global responsibilities and an intensifying conflict with the Soviet Union, the United States could no longer afford such innocence. It should not again have to scramble “as we did at the time of the Italian elections.” The Policy Planning Staff had been studying possibilities: secret support for refugee organizations that might become liberation movements if war broke out; strengthening indigenous anticommunists in countries threatened by Moscow’s political warfare; and, “in cases of critical necessity,” direct action to prevent the sabotage of facilities or the capture of key personnel by Kremlin agents. Tight control would be necessary: “One man must be boss.” And he would have to be “answerable to the Secretary of State.”¹³

What Kennan was proposing now was a sustained covert complement to the Marshall Plan. The United States required an organization that could “do things that very much needed to be done, but for which the government couldn’t take official responsibility.” The model, Davies added, would be something like the British Special Operations Executive or the American Office of Strategic Services in World War II, but it would operate in peacetime, chiefly in Western Europe. Otherwise, “the Marshall Plan would be undone.”¹⁴

Where to put such a unit, though? Kennan knew that the State Department could not handle it. He worried that the CIA might act too independently. Could not the NSC provide cover for such a program, perhaps under the leadership of Allen Dulles, an OSS veteran who had been conducting a review of CIA effectiveness? But Dulles wasn’t interested, and the director of central intelligence, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, wasn’t about to relinquish the agency’s jurisdiction. If State would not “go along with CIA operating this political warfare thing,” he snapped at one point, then “[l]et State run it and let it have no connection at all with us.”¹⁵ Which, of course, would mean no program at all.

The National Security Council, in mid-June, approved an unwieldy compromise. An Office of Special Projects within the CIA would take over the responsibility for covert operations, but Marshall would nominate its head with Hillenkoetter’s assent. Hillenkoetter would ensure political and military coordination, working through an advisory committee made up of representatives from the Departments of State and Defense. Kennan was skeptical: the new organization, he worried, would be too remote from the conduct of foreign policy, and it would be hard to find the right person to run it. Nonetheless, he advised Marshall to accept the plan. “It is probably the best arrangement we can get at this time.”¹⁶

At Kennan’s suggestion, Marshall nominated Frank Wisner, another OSS alumnus now in the State Department, to run the OSP. “I personally have no knowledge of his ability,” Kennan was careful to say, despite the fact that he and Annelise were regular guests at the Wisners’ potluck dinners in Georgetown, and the Wisners were occasional visitors at the Pennsylvania farm. Kennan, in turn, became the State Department representative on the OSP’s advisory committee. He made it clear, at a meeting with Wisner and Hillenkoetter early in August, that he would want “specific knowledge of the objectives of every operation and also of the procedures and methods employed in all cases where those procedures and methods involve political decisions.” By the end of the month, Kennan had approved his first covert operation: it was Project Umpire, a program of clandestine radio broadcasts from the American zone in Germany, beamed toward Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He had done so not on State Department stationery but on plain paper, he explained to Lovett: “This means that I am ostensibly acting in a personal capacity, and can, if necessary, be denied by the Secretary.”¹⁷

In this way the Policy Planning Staff became—officially at least—the overseer of all covert activities: perhaps with Kennan’s concerns in mind, the Office of Special Projects was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination. “If effectively conducted,” he wrote in a letter drafted for Lovett, “the new organization’s activities might well enhance possibilities for achieving American objectives by means short of war.” But the fundamental premise behind the OPC, Kennan reminded his superior a few weeks later, had been that “while this Department should take no responsibility for [Wisner’s] operations, we should nevertheless maintain a firm guiding hand.” As late as January 1949, Kennan was encouraging Wisner to think expansively: “Every day makes more evident the importance of the role which will have to be played by covert operations if our national interests are to be adequately protected.”¹⁸

Kennan had few if any moral or legal qualms about such activities. He had maintained contacts with the anti-Hitler resistance in Germany before the United States entered the war, and had helped the OSS monitor espionage activities in Lisbon during it. He facilitated the immigration of German diplomats and spymasters who might have useful information about the U.S.S.R., even if they had worked for the Nazis: to leave them in Germany, he believed, risked having Soviet agents kill or co-opt them. He had been advising the Washington intelligence establishment since returning from Moscow in 1946, emphasizing particularly the need to work closely with Russian expatriates. He had called, in his first National War College lecture, for the pursuit of strategic objectives “with all the measures at our disposal,” and he had acknowledged, shortly after the formation of the CIA in 1947, that it might be essential to “fight fire with fire.” When he spoke to the Canadians about a “dialectical” approach that would appear to reflect “arbitrary inconsistency,” he had Lenin’s example of political warfare in mind. Setting up the OPC, therefore, was more a continuation of past practices than a dramatic innovation for him.¹⁹

It was also one of many Policy Planning Staff responsibilities: after the OPC was established, “I scarcely paid any attention to it.” That, Kennan was sure in retrospect, was “probably the worst mistake I ever made in government.” The plan had been, Davies recalled, that secret operations should not be entrusted to an enormous bureaucracy: “Well, O.P.C. went the other way.” By 1952 it had forty-seven overseas stations, its budget was seventeen times what it had been in 1949, and it employed twenty times the number of people. Convinced that he had created a monstrosity, Kennan came to regret “all part that I or the staff took in any of this. I should never have accepted for the PPS the duty of giving political advice to Wisner’s outfit. The fact that we are all prone to error does not comfort me greatly when I think about it.”²⁰

Kennan’s regrets, in retrospect, seem disproportionate. He did propose giving the CIA a covert action capability, but it seems unlikely, had he not done so, that someone else would not have suggested this, or that the agency would not have thought of it on its own.²¹ “The feeling in Washington,” Dean Rusk recalled, was that “the Soviet Union was already operating with such methods. It was a mean, dirty, back-alley struggle, and if the U.S. had stayed out it would have found out what Leo Durocher [the legendary manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers] meant when he said ‘nice guys finish last.’” That said, there was one aspect of Kennan’s CIA involvement that made no more sense then than it does now. This was his continuing belief that he could do everything himself—that he could run covert operations against the Soviet Union, while conducting overt negotiations with the same country if they ever got under way, while planning all other aspects of American foreign policy. Annelise, as usual, was more practical: “There isn’t the possibility in one man to do all this.”²²

III.

One of the reasons Kennan pushed so hard for control over covert activities may have been his sense that he was losing control of the rapidly evolving U.S. relationship with Western Europe. The minimalist strategy he advocated in 1947 had rested on two interlocking assumptions: that (a) the promise and provision of Marshall Plan aid would be all that was necessary to reassure the Europeans, because (b) the Soviet Union had no intention of attacking them. The first proposition depended upon the second, for if the Red Army ever did strike, then American economic assistance, however generous it might be, would do the Europeans little good. They had no means of defending themselves; nor had the United States offered them any.

These assumptions, in turn, depended on Kennan’s proficiency as a mind reader. They would hold up only if he had accurately sensed what European and Soviet leaders were thinking. If the Europeans began to show nervousness, or if the U.S.S.R. began to exhibit aggressiveness, all bets would be off. Both developments had occurred by the time Kennan returned to his office at the end of April 1948. “As you know, I came in late on the work which is being done,” he wrote Marshall and Lovett on the twenty-ninth. But he had now familiarized himself with the situation and consulted Bohlen, who agreed with what he had to say. The problem was not doubt about American support if the Soviet Union attacked—the presence of U.S. occupation forces in Germany left no reason for Europeans to worry about that. Rather, it reflected uncertainty about what to do if that happened. All that was needed were “realistic staff talks” to reassure them.²³

By this time, though, top-secret negotiations on the possibility of a North Atlantic collective defense treaty had already taken place with the British and the Canadians. Meanwhile Marshall had secured the agreement of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to sponsor a “Vandenberg Resolution” confirming congressional approval. Kennan’s proposed reconsideration went nowhere. His frustration showed while he was in Ottawa at the end of May: did the Europeans not realize that “if the United States gave this guarantee, it would be doing something which would be in the interests of Western Europe but not necessarily in the interests of the United States, since the United States could, at any time, make a deal with the Soviet Union?” “We naturally took him up on this and he withdrew from this exposed position,” Escott Reid, the Canadian assistant under secretary for external affairs, reported to his superiors. It was indeed exposed, with the Smith-Molotov exchange having failed. The exchange left Reid with the uneasy sense “that if you scratch almost any American long enough, you will find an isolationist.”²⁴

Kennan was no isolationist, but as Sir Oliver Franks, now the British ambassador in Washington, recalled, he did tend to see things from an “Anglo-Saxon” perspective: “All those other chaps were rather more difficult. Therefore stick with what you know.” The planning process, in Kennan’s absence, had gone well beyond that. “I have always reproached myself,” he later admitted, “for not taking my own views to the General and making more of an issue of it.” His door still led directly into Marshall’s office, but “I’m afraid I didn’t use it enough. I was always so afraid of abusing this privilege…. I think that I may have been too hesitant [and] that I should have.”²⁵

So what might Kennan have said, had he been bolder? “Look, for goodness sake, let well enough alone, nobody is going to attack you,” he remembered wanting to tell the Europeans.

With his State Department colleagues, he would have been blunter:

Finally, he would have questioned the cultivation of Vandenberg. The Republicans were jealous, Kennan believed. They had supported the Marshall Plan but now wanted a plan of their own upon which they could put their stamp. Such people did not deserve “admiring applause every time they could be persuaded by the State Department to do something sensible.”²⁶

As far as we know, Kennan made none of these arguments—at least not openly—within the department. It’s safe to assume, though, that they lay behind the questions he did raise while participating in talks with British, French, Canadian, Belgian, and Dutch diplomats in Washington during the late summer of 1948. Might not the building of military strength distract attention from European economic recovery and the eventual unification of the entire continent? Could there not be two loosely linked alliances—a dumbbell arrangement—made up of the Americans and Canadians at one end, and the British, the French, and the Benelux countries at the other? If there had to be a single alliance, should its membership not be limited to those countries? If it were not, how many countries could the United States afford to defend? There was more than a hint of desperation in these queries, and Hickerson, the principal American negotiator, had no trouble deflecting them. “I consider that a compliment,” he responded when told years later that Kennan considered him the State Department colleague with whom he had disagreed most. “Thank you.”²⁷

IV.

There were still moments, though, when the policy process worked as Kennan thought it should. One came in late June 1948, after members of the Cominform, meeting in Bucharest, openly denounced the Yugoslav Communist Party. Under Josef Broz Tito’s leadership, they claimed, the Yugoslavs were pursuing a policy unfriendly to the U.S.S.R. and in violation of Marxist principles. Because Stalin controlled the Cominform, the complaint carried weight. Kennan had been predicting trouble in Eastern Europe for some time, but he thought it would come in the north, not in the Balkans. He missed the hints of Tito’s heresy conveyed in American diplomatic reporting from the region but rallied quickly, taking only two days to complete PPS/35, “The Attitude of This Government Toward Events in Yugoslavia.” It was the most immediately effective policy paper he ever produced.²⁸

Unusually for Kennan, it was brief—only four and a quarter typed pages—but it compressed a lot into that space. It placed the Cominform’s condemnation of Tito within a historical perspective, while projecting its significance into the future. At one point Kennan distilled into just three sentences his Gibbon-inspired doubts about the stability of empires, his belief that an internationalist ideology could not indefinitely command national loyalties, and his conviction that Stalin, for all his craftiness, had overreached:

The United States should not jump to Yugoslavia’s defense: that would be undignified, and Tito remained a dedicated communist. It should acknowledge, though, that “if Yugoslavia is not to be subservient to an outside power [then] its internal regime is basically its own business,” and ought not to prevent a normal diplomatic and economic relationship. In the meantime, “the international communist movement will never be able to make good entirely the damage done by this development.”²⁹

PPS/35 set forth several propositions that, in varying ways at various times, would guide American foreign policy through the rest of the Cold War. One was that communism need not be monolithic: the Soviet Union was likely to have as much trouble controlling its ideological allies as it would resisting its geopolitical adversaries. A second was that the United States should therefore cooperate with some communists to contain others: dividing enemies by driving wedges might now be feasible. A third was that the domestic character of a government was less important than its international behavior. The idea had long been implicit in Washington’s support for authoritarian regimes in Latin America, in its wartime alliance with the U.S.S.R., and more recently in the extension of Marshall Plan aid to socialist regimes in Western Europe. Kennan made it explicit.

The paper was also unusual in that it instantly became official policy. Lovett sent its conclusions to all diplomatic missions and consular offices on June 30, the day he received it. Marshall approved it the next day, after which he forwarded it to Truman for his information: the president’s endorsement was not thought necessary. PPS/35 eventually gained the status of an NSC document, but only for reasons of bureaucratic tidiness. Kennan’s Yugoslavia planning had made policy in record time, leaving him with every reason to be pleased.³⁰

Kennan then used Tito’s defection to defend the China policy he and Davies had been advocating. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had never reconciled themselves to abandoning the Nationalists, and with the prospect of a communist victory looming, they called once more, in the summer of 1948, for a major effort to save Chiang Kai-shek. Mao Zedong, they still claimed, was as much a puppet of the Soviet Union as the Eastern European satellite leaders had been, but now Tito had proven not to be a puppet. With Davies’s help, Kennan exploited that opening with PPS/39, “United States Policy Toward China,” completed early in September.

It acknowledged that the U.S.S.R. would appear to benefit from a triumph of communism in China. But “the edifying truancy of comrade Tito” must already have raised doubts in the minds of Kremlin leaders about their ability to dominate Mao, who had been running the Chinese Communist Party far longer than Tito had controlled its Yugoslav counterpart. “[A]n exceedingly shrewd judge of his fellow Chinese,” Mao knew that subservience to the Soviet Union would provoke resentment among them.

It followed, then, that “we must not become irrevocably committed to any one course of action or any one faction in China,” for there were operating in that country “tremendous, deep-flowing indigenous forces which are beyond our power to control.”³¹

When his mentor and patron Forrestal protested that this was not a policy, Kennan responded firmly. Noninterference in the internal affairs of another country was, after all, a long-standing principle of American diplomacy, “deeply sanctioned in practice and in public opinion.” Whoever proposed abandoning it now would have to show

(a) That there is sufficiently powerful national interest to justify our departure in the given instance from a rule of international conduct which has been proven sound by centuries of experience and which we would wish others to observe with respect to ourselves, and

(b) that we have the means to conduct such intervention successfully and can afford the cost in terms of the national effort it involves.

Neither of these claims held with respect to China, where “powerful ‘Tito’ tendencies” were likely to develop. It would, therefore, be “frivolous and irresponsible” to waste any more economic or military assistance on the Chinese Nationalists. They regarded the United States as a dairy cow, one end of which “can do you a lot of good” while the other “is incapable of conferring any damage.”³²

Kennan went so far as to draft a presidential statement, at the end of November 1948, warning that what was happening in China would not now be affected “by any measure of aid which the United States could feasibly make available.” Not wanting to appear to be administering a final blow to Chiang Kai-shek, Truman decided against using it. But he reserved the right to do so in the future, thereby departing from Kennan’s advice only on the question of when he should announce publicly that he was following it.³³

In planning policy for Yugoslavia and China, Kennan combined fast footwork with modest objectives. He was arguing, in these two instances, for letting existing trends run their course, while taking advantage of whatever opportunities they might present. His China policy, he admitted, was one of acting “on a day by day basis in accordance with the changes of the moment. It cannot be explicitly defined on paper in a form which can serve as a guide for months or years ahead.”³⁴ Curiously, this was the kind of improvisation Kennan had criticized in the past. It echoed Roosevelt’s resistance to planning in World War II. It sounded like Byrnes making it up as he went along in Moscow at the end of 1945. It was how, in Kennan’s view, the United States had drifted into a commitment to the military defense of Western Europe, regardless of the consequences for a European-wide settlement. Kennan was succeeding in shaping policy—or so it was beginning to seem in the last half of 1948—only where he could allow himself not to plan. Forrestal, who sensed this, was onto something.

V.

With good reason, for Kennan had failed to provide him with policy guidance on a more important issue when he desperately needed it. As secretary of defense, Forrestal faced the daunting task of ensuring that military capabilities were adequate to secure national interests, whether in peace or war. Worried that commitments were exceeding these, under pressure from Truman to stay within tight budget limits, beset by rivalries over scarce resources among the armed services, denied any assurance about the possible use of the atomic bomb, Forrestal was hoping for answers from his preferred Soviet expert to a big question: should the United States be preparing for a “peak period of danger” from the U.S.S.R., or for an extended but static threat? In either case, what proportion of American resources should be devoted to military purposes?³⁵

Kennan doubted the Policy Planning Staff’s ability to produce this information. It was not possible to predict when war might come, he explained to Marshall and Lovett, or which objectives might be achieved by military or nonmilitary means: “These things are hopelessly intertwined.” The Soviet Union’s capabilities, even when known accurately, would not necessarily shape its intentions: “We cannot calculate with precision the political imponderables.”³⁶ The skeletal NSC staff was unable to answer Forrestal’s question either, though, so Kennan reluctantly took it on. By the middle of August, he had finished a thirty-nine-page analysis that sought to reconcile the American tradition of distinguishing sharply between war and peace with Clausewitz’s warnings about the impossibility of doing so. It was not quite what Forrestal had in mind.

PPS/38, “United States Objectives With Respect to Russia,” pointed out that Soviet objectives had remained much the same, in both war and peace, from Lenin through Stalin. Planning for peak danger, therefore, made little sense. But a democracy would never find sustained planning easy, because its aversion to war would always tempt it to shift objectives in peacetime. The task, therefore, was to define present peacetime objectives and hypothetical wartime objectives in such a way as to diminish the gap between them.

Peacetime objectives were to reduce the Soviet Union’s external power, while bringing about change in the theories that drove its use. Both tasks were well under way. The Marshall Plan had reversed the Soviet Union’s appeal in Western Europe, while Tito’s defection had shown that Eastern Europeans could challenge Soviet domination. Stalin’s regime remained committed to the idea that conflict with the capitalist world was inevitable, but it was also capable of acting pragmatically, as when it cooperated with the United States and Great Britain to defeat Nazi Germany. It was prepared “to recognize situations, if not arguments.” If such situations could be re-created and sustained long enough to allow changes to take place within the Soviet Union, then these might modify the way it dealt with the rest of the world. Wartime objectives would not be needed, because there would be no war.

None of this would be likely, though, in a permanently divided Europe. On the contrary, the danger of war would be greater if the continent remained split than “if Russian power is peacefully withdrawn in good time and a normal balance restored to the European community.” With this call for a peaceful rollback, several aspects of Kennan’s thinking fell into alignment: his pride in the Marshall Plan’s accomplishments, his insistence on the need for covert operations to complement them, his quick exploitation of Tito’s defection, his abortive effort to keep open the possibility of negotiations with Moscow, and his attempts to derail the North Atlantic Treaty, which he was sure would solidify Europe’s disunity for decades to come. The dots, for Kennan at least, all connected.

Not for Forrestal, though. His peacetime objective was to be sure that the United States could win a war, and on this issue Kennan had nothing to offer. The last third of PPS/38 simply assumed victory, without saying how it would come about. Kennan made no effort to connect his political analysis with Pentagon war planning or with White House budgeting. Instead he focused on the terms a triumphant West should impose upon a defeated Soviet Union. These would not include unconditional surrender—the country was too big to occupy—but they might well require the detachment of certain non-Russian republics: Kennan specified which ones in some detail. All of this brought PPS/38 to over ten thousand words, twice the length of the “long telegram.” Forrestal had found in that earlier document just what he needed to understand Moscow’s behavior. This one, in contrast, turned out to be useless. His problem was that inadequate military resources might lose a war—not what to do after winning one.³⁷

Drastically cut, PPS/38 became NSC 20/4, which Truman approved on November 24, 1948. Despite the effort Kennan put into it, the paper had little impact on actual policy. The reasons reveal Kennan’s shortcomings as a planner, one of which was prolixity. Without the discipline imposed by time constraints, as in his Yugoslav paper, or by mode of transmission, as in the “long telegram,” or by tough-minded subordinates, which he did not have, Kennan tended to ramble. He had done so in “Russia—Seven Years Later,” the 1944 essay of which he had been so proud which no one else read. PPS/38 repeated that pattern. Another problem was shallowness in economics: neither Kennan nor his staff knew enough about that subject to answer Forrestal’s question about sustainable levels of peacetime military spending. Finally Kennan, as always, was self-absorbed. He was finding it easier to connect dots in his head than within the U.S. government. He was writing increasingly, once again, for himself.³⁸

VI.

In Kennan’s defense, he had a lot on his mind while preparing PPS/38. For on June 24, 1948, Stalin cut off land access to the British, French, and American sectors of West Berlin, which lay over a hundred miles inside the Soviet occupation zone. He had been slowly restricting access to the city since March, presumably in response to talks the Western allies had been holding in London looking toward the establishment of a separate West German state. But by finally completing the process—ostensibly to stop circulation of the Deutschmark, the new West German currency, in the Soviet sector of the city—he created the gravest threat of a new war since the last one had ended.

Kennan had given relatively little attention to Germany since calling for its partition just prior to the Yalta conference in February 1945. He still lamented the Anglo-American insistence on unconditional surrender that had left the Red Army controlling almost half the country. He doubted the victors’ ability to reform it, or even to agree on a plan for doing so. He saw in General Clay the same obliviousness to geopolitics—and to instructions from Washington—that MacArthur had shown in Japan. Kennan had argued strongly for including the western zones of Germany in the Marshall Plan; nor had he opposed their political consolidation when that idea was first broached. Now, though, the blockade forced him to focus on the German question, and within weeks he had repudiated most of his own thinking about that country since the end of the war.

His first response was to call for firmness. “[W]e are in Berlin by right,” he wrote a friend, “and we do not propose to be ridden out by any blackmail or other forms of coercion.” When the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concerned about the exposed position of American troops in the city, suggested withdrawing them out of “humanitarian consideration” for the West Berliners, Kennan reacted angrily: “The world would know well enough that we were turning 2,400,000 people over to all the rigors and terrors of totalitarian rule.” The United States should risk war if necessary, he advised Lovett, to retain its position in Berlin. Still Kennan could not conceal from Smith, in Moscow, a growing concern “that our Soviet adversaries may be now too over-extended—at once too weak and too terrified of their own weakness—to behave rationally.” If that was the case, “then I am afraid no one can save them, even for the sake of the peace of Europe, and that their regime will have to go down in violence, no matter how strongly the rest of us work to prevent this issue.”³⁹

It was with a view to avoiding that grim prospect that Kennan asked the Policy Planning Staff to take a fresh look at the German question in late July. Any peaceful end to the Berlin blockade, he assumed, would have to be arranged through the Council of Foreign Ministers, which still represented the four occupying powers in Germany; but what should the Americans seek in such negotiations? By August 12, working under intense pressure, Kennan had completed PPS/37, “Policy Questions Concerning a Possible German Settlement.” Unlike his Yugoslavia and China papers, it argued for not allowing existing trends to continue but rather for making a bold effort to reverse them.

Continuity would mean carrying on with a divided Germany while strengthening Western Europe. That, though, would ensure a divided continent, which could hardly be the long-term goal of the United States. Stalin had blockaded Berlin because he feared the formation of a West German government. If that process proceeded, he would set up a rival regime in East Germany, and “the fight would be on for fair.” Half of Europe would form a military alliance with Washington, precluding any rollback of Moscow’s influence over the other half. Germans would resent the breakup of their country, the collapse of east-west trade would cripple European recovery, and the Truman administration would face the costs of an indefinite military occupation at a time when Congress could at any point cut the necessary appropriations: “From such a trend of developments, it would be hard—harder than it is now—to find ‘the road back’ to a united and free Europe.”

The alternative was “to press at this time for a sweeping settlement of the German problem which would involve the withdrawal of Allied forces from at least the major portion of Germany, the termination of military government and the establishment of a German Government with real power and independence.” This was, after all, what the United States supposedly had wanted since the end of the war. By showing how much Stalin feared a divided Germany, his blockade had advanced the prospects for reunification further and faster than anyone had expected. If handled imaginatively, the Berlin crisis could be an opportunity to mitigate—if not to end altogether—the European standoff.

Stalin would find it hard to resist an offer to substitute, for an independent West German state aligned militarily with the United States, a unified demilitarized Germany linked to no alliance—or so Kennan insisted. This would solve the Berlin problem, for if occupation forces were to leave the country, there could be no humiliation in withdrawing them from the city. The possibility that a reconstituted Germany might tilt toward Moscow was now vanishingly small, given the extent to which Stalin’s blockade had angered most Germans. And Kennan’s plan would remove the need to keep a large American military establishment in the middle of Europe, thereby placating Congress while alleviating Forrestal’s concerns.

What if a unified Germany, even if anti-Soviet, again threatened the peace of Europe? The four occupying powers could prevent unauthorized rearmament, Kennan maintained, by each retaining a military base on German territory, even as they relinquished responsibility for civil affairs to the new German government. The American, British, and Soviet bases would be supplied by sea, leaving the U.S.S.R. with no justification for continuing to occupy Poland. Disengagement from Germany, hence, would also advance the liberation of Eastern Europe.

And what of the plans, now well under way, for a North Atlantic Treaty? Kennan said nothing about this in PPS/37, but his logic was clear enough. If the Europeans’ military insecurity had led them to seek such a guarantee in the first place, would their anxieties not diminish as Soviet forces withdrew from Germany and even from Eastern Europe? The Americans would not go home: their bases on German soil, along with those of the British and the French, would allow watching the Germans, but also the Russians. So what would be left to fear?

Boldness, Kennan acknowledged, was more difficult than timidity: “The course of action and change is harder than the course of inaction.” But disengagement would become no easier as time passed.

The ultimate answer to the German question was a federated Europe into which all parts of the country could be absorbed. A divided Germany would prevent that. It followed, then, that “Germany must be given back to the Germans,” for the reconstitution of Europe could not await the resolution of east-west differences. At a minimum, by putting forward such a proposal, “we shall at least have made the gesture, which is important.”⁴⁰

PPS/37 demonstrated, better than anything else Kennan ever wrote, his ability to look beyond processes to the structures they were creating, and to propose alternatives. Clausewitz, borrowing from the French, would have described this as a coup d’oeil: an integration of experience, observation, and imagination that constructs the whole out of the fragments the eye can see. The method, he suggested, was that of a poet or a painter, involving “the quick recognition of a truth that the mind would ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection.”⁴¹

The truth Kennan recognized in this instance was one his own mind had missed until this point: that the division of Germany, which he had been advocating since 1945 as a way of restoring a balance of power in Europe, was in fact removing power from Europe, concentrating it instead in the hands of the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War would go on indefinitely unless this trend was reversed. PPS/37 began Kennan’s effort to do that: it was a Clausewitzian coup d’oeil, aimed at rescuing the Germans, the Europeans, the Americans, and ultimately even the Russians from the consequences of a course he had previously recommended. It was Kennan reversing himself.

VII.

The difficulty with coups d’oeil, however, is that they are more likely to be regarded as art than policy. PPS/37 was indeed “bold and imaginative,” Hickerson wrote Kennan on August 31, 1948, but it would be dangerous to try to unite Germany until Western Europe was economically and militarily stronger. That was the first of many objections. Too many people, Kennan recalled—not just Hickerson and his State Department colleagues, but also Clay, the British, and even the French—had locked themselves into creating a West German government. They feared that any dealing with the Russians would cause confusion in Germany, leading to the suspicion “that we were about to sell some of these people out.” From their point of view, though, Kennan was too inclined to negotiate. “The problem with that approach,” Dean Rusk recalled—he was then running the Office of United Nations Affairs—“is that it allows you to be nibbled to death, like ducks. Kennan couldn’t see that.” All responses received opposed his conclusions, Kennan reported to Marshall and Lovett on September 8. “I think them worthy of careful attention…. I disagree with them all.”⁴²

Marshall nonetheless supported Kennan’s effort to think broadly about a German settlement. He authorized the Policy Planning Staff to convene a group of consultants to discuss the issue—among them were Hamilton Fish Armstrong, still the editor of Foreign Affairs, and Dean Acheson, soon to replace Marshall as secretary of state. They endorsed Kennan’s position as a long-term objective but doubted that Moscow would accept such a plan anytime soon: the United States should, therefore, proceed with the formation of a West German state. Kennan accepted their advice philosophically. “We will continue to work on this program,” he assured Marshall on September 17. The consultants had at least agreed that “time is on our side, that we must not yield in Berlin, and that we must continue to sweat it out there as best we can.”⁴³

As it happened, Kennan was lecturing that morning at the National War College. There were, he told the newly arrived students, “only five centers of industrial and military power in the world which are important to us from the standpoint of national security.” One, obviously, was the United States. The other four—Great Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan—lay on or alongside the Eurasian landmass. Nowhere else did climate, population, tradition, and industrial strength allow developing the kind of military power that could endanger American interests. Only the Soviet Union was completely hostile. Japan could fall under Moscow’s influence if the United States mismanaged its transition to full sovereignty, but that was now unlikely. Germany, however, was contested territory, the only point upon which the global power balance could now pivot. That was why its future was so important.

The ideal would have been to make a united Germany the centerpiece of a united Europe, but the allies were far from ready for such an arrangement: “Oh, it is very easy for you to talk,” they would say to any American who proposed this. “You are strong and sleek and fat and you are three thousand miles away, and you can do this backseat driving perfectly safely, but it is a different thing for us up here.” They were more interested in the guarantees they could extract from Washington, therefore, than in reuniting the Germans. A divided Europe, whatever its implications for the international system as a whole, would not much bother them.

Americans faced, then, a tough choice. Was it better to do alone what was right, or to do in company of allies what was wrong? The State Department had concluded that “come what may, we simply must hold with the French and the British, …because if we let disunity creep in we may have lost the whole battle anyway.” For if the United States ever abandoned its allies, then it would have become cynical, a change that was bound to affect the nation’s character: if “we cease having ideals in the field of foreign policy, something very valuable will have gone out of our internal political life.” There was no alternative, then, but “to bind our friends to us with the proverbial Shakespeare’s hoop of steel.” This was “our worst problem of foreign policy today,” because “what appears to be the sensible thing to do about Germany is the thing our own Allies are most reluctant to do.”⁴⁴

The Policy Planning Staff continued to work on “Program A,” as Kennan’s plan came to be called, and by mid-November he had a revised version ready for use if the United States should wish to specify terms for a comprehensive German settlement. It would be put forward, however, only with assurance of “a wide enough degree of British and French acquiescence to maintain basic three-power unity.” Even then, the Russians probably would not accept it. The plan would at least show the Germans that Moscow, not Washington, was dividing their country: that would “place us in a more favorable position to continue the struggle both in Berlin and in Germany as a whole.”⁴⁵

A similar resignation informed Kennan’s final report to Marshall on the North Atlantic Treaty, completed on November 23, 1948. It was too late now to prevent such a development, “but I was, after all, still the head of his planning staff, and I thought he should at least have available to him the view I took personally of the entire NATO project.” PPS/43, “Considerations Affecting the Conclusion of a North Atlantic Security Pact,” carried with it the warning “that there will be adverse views in the European office.” Marshall did not need the reminder: this document, even more than Program A, would be art for art’s sake.

A security guarantee, Kennan acknowledged, might stiffen the Europeans’ self-confidence, in itself a desirable outcome. But their insistence on it was “primarily a subjective one, arising in their own minds as a result of their failure to understand correctly their own position.” Their best course would still be to achieve economic recovery and internal political stability. Rearmament could easily divert such efforts. That would particularly be the case if the view took hold that war was inevitable and that therefore “no further efforts are necessary toward the political weakening and defeat of the communist power in central and eastern Europe”—in short (Kennan did not need to make this explicit), what covert operations were meant to accomplish.

If there had to be a military alliance, its members should include only the North Atlantic countries, where there was “a community of defense interest firmly rooted in geography and tradition.” To go further would invite still further demands for protection: there would then be “no stopping point in the development of a system of anti-Russian alliances until that system has circled the globe and has embraced all the non-communist countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa.” By then, one of two things would have happened: the alliances would have become meaningless, like the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, or the United States would have become hopelessly overextended, in which case it would have ignored warnings about the increasing discrepancy between its resources and its commitments.

The fundamental issue was what kind of Europe the United States wanted. Official policy looked toward the eventual withdrawal of both American and Soviet forces and, accordingly, “toward the encouragement of a third force which can absorb and take over the territory between the two.” But an alliance including most Marshall Plan recipients would mean “a final militarization of the present dividing-line through Europe.” It would not only prevent a German settlement: it would also impede the satellites’ ability to throw off Russian domination, “since any move in that direction would take on the aspect of a provocative military move.” The United States should not do anything to make the status quo unchangeable by peaceful means. Process should not define purpose.⁴⁶

But perhaps his strategy—with respect to both Germany and NATO—had asked too much of the Europeans, Kennan admitted to a Pentagon audience that same month. The Marshall Plan’s success had provoked Moscow into appearing to be aggressive: “We knew that there would be… a baring of the fangs designed to scare us.” By asking the Europeans to put economic recovery before military security, “we were in effect asking them to walk a sort of a tight-rope and telling them that if they concentrated on their own steps and did not keep looking down into the chasm of their own military helplessness we thought there was a good chance that they would arrive safely on the other side.” The problem was that too many people in Europe—but also in Washington—had looked down. That was leaving the Soviet Union with no way out: it was making the division of Europe “insoluble by any other than military means.”⁴⁷

This was a shrewd assessment, not just of the Europeans, but also of Kennan himself. To mix his own metaphors, he had been asking them to ignore the snarling dog with which they shared a continent, even as they walked, unperturbed, across the tightrope the Marshall Plan had thrown to them. They could do this only with self-confidence, but he had taken it upon himself to tell them when they had reached that state. If, as Kennan had often noted, fear was a subjective condition, then surely self-confidence was too: he believed, however, that his objective view of Soviet intentions should override European subjectivity. He was after all, or at least he had been, the expert. His strategy amounted, in the end, to saying: “Trust me.”⁴⁸

VIII.

“George has been much better this fall,” Annelise wrote Frieda Por late in 1948. “I am keeping my fingers crossed. He looks better too, and I think he has put on a little weight.” His workload had by no means diminished. Since returning from the hospital in April, he had prepared major policy papers on the Soviet Union, Germany, China, Japan, Yugoslavia, the proposed North Atlantic Treaty, and covert action, some of them in several versions. He delivered four lectures at the National War College, and one each at the Pentagon, the Naval War College, and the Canadian Defence College. He found the time to do public lectures in Milwaukee, Detroit, Birmingham, and New York, as well as informal presentations for Air Force officers, the Harvard faculty, Princeton alumni, Louisville newspapermen and bankers, and his Pennsylvania neighbors. He continued to run the Policy Planning Staff and to serve as its representative on the National Security Council—although he gave up the latter responsibility at the end of the year. And all the while he was deeply involved in Berlin crisis management: the only diary entry Kennan made during these months recorded a sleepless night spent coordinating communications among American officials in that city, Paris, and Washington.⁴⁹

Psychologically, though, he was more depressed than he had been when his physical ailments laid him low. For it was becoming clear that his grand strategy was no longer to be that of the United States. Kennan had suffered setbacks on seeking a “background understanding” with the Soviet Union, on managing covert operations, on heading off the North Atlantic Treaty, on calculating the relationship between military means and national ends, and—most significantly for him—on clearing the way for a European settlement based on German reunification. Only on Yugoslavia and China had he had his way.

If Kennan had been, in the eyes of the Canadians, a Delphic oracle in the spring of 1948, he was by the end of the year a beleaguered and increasingly bypassed oracle. His gloom was hard to miss when he returned to the war college on December 21 to deliver the final lecture of the semester. He promised the students “a completely unvarnished and unsparing picture of what appears to me personally to be our present international position.” The underlining in the transcript was his own.

One thing not easily forgiven in life, he told them, was “to be elevated many times above the level of your fellows in privilege and riches and comfort and power. The rich man is rarely loved and never pitied.” The United States had 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6 percent of its population. The remaining 94 percent included people who “would not hesitate to tear us limb from limb figuratively, or perhaps even physically, if they would thereby get a share of our wealth or reduce the power we hold.” They would do this despite the fact that “never before in its history has the world known, or is it likely to know, a great power which has conducted itself more decently and more moderately in its foreign relations.” The United States was “a misunderstood country throughout the world.”

There was no more dangerous sense, Kennan cautioned, than that of being a victim. This was how persecution manias began. Practiced on a national scale, they could lead to fanaticisms like those of the Nazis and the Communists. Nevertheless, the world really was filled with jealousy and devoid of pity. The prevailing view was that “we have been favored by the Gods, …and that it is high time that the Gods shifted their favor and that our faces were ground into the dirt.”⁵⁰

It’s hard not to see projection happening here. Kennan’s letter to Lippmann, written in April at the height of his influence as Policy Planning Staff director, portrayed a world in which events were aligning themselves with American intentions. But by December, with Kennan’s authority significantly diminished, the world had become a dark and dangerous place. The objective position of the United States could not have changed that dramatically in so short a period of time. What had changed was Kennan’s subjective understanding of it: because Washington was no longer going his way, the world was no longer going Washington’s way.

One of Kennan’s most striking characteristics as a diplomat, as a strategist, and as a policy planner was an inability to insulate his jobs from his moods. Throughout his career he had taken things personally. He was “never able to detach himself emotionally from the issues we had to consider,” Dorothy Fosdick remembered. “He could go into a bad slump when he thought he was not being listened to.” He viewed the world through himself, not as something apart from himself. That could lead to great insights: Kennan’s understanding of the Soviet Union and how to contain it grew largely out of his own self-analysis. But it could also produce volatility: no sooner did the Truman administration reconcile itself to the division of Germany—something Kennan had been advocating since 1945—than he began pushing for reunification. It was as if he were allergic to orthodoxy. “I have the habit,” he acknowledged years later, “of seeing two opposing sides of a question, both of them wrong, and then overstating myself, so that I appear to be inconsistent.”⁵¹

That raised a question, then, about how useful the policy planning process, as Kennan conceived it, really was. He never meant the hundreds of pages he and his staff produced to serve as a systematic philosophy of American foreign relations, although at times they read like that. He did see them, though, “as one man’s concept of how our government ought to behave and by what principles it ought to be guided.”⁵² But what if that concept—and the principles that lay behind it—changed, whether in response to what was happening in the world or, more disconcertingly, in response to Kennan’s own unstable emotions? Reconsiderations are reasonable enough in government. When emotions amplify them, though, they can come across as erratic behavior—even if, by general acknowledgment, brilliance still lies behind it.

“IN THE FACE OF THESE DIFFICULTIES, A DETACHED PHILOSOPHER might not give us a very good chance for avoiding real trouble,” Kennan told the audience he had spoken to at the Pentagon on November 8, 1948. “But strange things have been known to happen. And who are we, in the face of the experiences of the past week, to say that theoretically unfavorable odds should be a source of discouragement?” The event he had in mind was President Truman’s surprise reelection four days earlier. Kennan knew that Marshall, whose health had been deteriorating, would be stepping down at the end of Truman’s first term: like almost everyone else, both expected it to be Truman’s only term. The prospect of a Republican administration, together with the discouragements of the past few months, had Kennan thinking again about resigning from the Foreign Service and accepting an academic position. As it happened, though, it was Truman who got to select the next secretary of state. At the end of November, he asked Dean Acheson to take the job.¹

Acheson had played an important role, as under secretary of state, in advancing Kennan’s career. He encouraged the author of the “long telegram” to speak publicly about its contents, he facilitated Kennan’s move from the National War College to the Policy Planning Staff, and the two cooperated closely in designing the Marshall Plan. They differed only on the public justification for aid to Greece and Turkey, but Acheson, preoccupied with getting the bill through Congress, hardly noticed Kennan’s objections to the Truman Doctrine. Having left government to replenish his finances in the summer of 1947, Acheson could watch Kennan’s subsequent policy planning only as a well-informed outsider. But he thought highly enough of it—after learning that Truman wanted him now to run the State Department—to ask Kennan to defer any decision about retiring. That led Kennan, on January 3, 1949, to send Acheson an unorthodox offer to stay on.

“We all have our egos and ambitions,” he acknowledged. “But the shadows which fall on each of us, these days, are so huge and dark, and so unmistakable in portent, that they clearly dwarf all that happens among us individually, here below.” The disclaimer that followed must have raised an Achesonian eyebrow: “I really have no enthusiasm for sharing with the people I have known—Kerensky, Bruening, Dumba, or the king of Jugoslavia—the wretched consolation of having been particularly prominent among the parasites on the body of a dying social order, in the hours of its final agony.” Acheson was not to think it “implausible modesty”—there was little danger of that after reading this—when Kennan wrote that he wished to remain only if he could feel that “we are not just bravely paddling the antiquated raft of U.S. foreign policy upstream, at a speed of three miles an hour, against a current which is making four.”

One problem was the State Department. It was drifting away from Marshall’s concept of a planning staff that met regularly, avoided functional or regional parochialism, and conveyed its recommendations to a secretary of state who patiently awaited them. Nor was the department adequately publicizing its policies: the “X” article at the time had “shocked people to tears,” but Kennan now wished there had been twenty like it. Byrnes and Marshall had spent too much time away from Washington: the secretary should not be “an itinerant negotiator,” shuttling from one overseas meeting to another “in order to demonstrate our devotion to the principle of international organization.” Nor should there be further “lofty pronouncements about peace and democracy.” What was needed instead was “hard work, concentration, discipline, and an inner silence.”

“There—dear Dean—are some of the things which I think would have to be done to the hull of the ship of state, if it is to be restored to a really buoyant condition.” Without them, there was no point in anyone trying “to blow wind into the sails of the old hulk…. I’d rather be at Yale, or where-you-will—any place where I could sound-off and talk freely to people—than in the confines of a department in which you can neither do anything about it nor tell people what you think ought to be done.”²

Kennan claimed, in a postscript, to have written this letter before he knew that Acheson would become secretary of state, but it did not read that way. Its tone was one of Kennan interviewing Acheson, rather than the other way around. It sounded like an effort to press the new secretary into the mold of the previous one, thereby restoring the Policy Planning Staff to its rightful place within the State Department hierarchy. This, Kennan must have known, was going to be a stretch.

Acheson had the highest respect for Marshall, so much so that he wrote one of the best short descriptions of how the great man operated: “All elements of the problem were held, as it were, in solution in his mind until it was ready to precipitate a decision.” That was not, however, Acheson’s style. He lacked Marshall’s modesty, self-discipline, and procedural restraint. He was incapable of commanding quietly: of not commenting on competing positions until he had chosen one. Acheson paraded his wit, his wardrobe, and especially his mustache—the latter ornament, the journalist James Reston wrote, was itself “a triumph of policy planning.” Oliver Franks, the British ambassador, recalled that Acheson “bathed in talk.” The idea of “having your thinking done for you, which is what the Policy Planning Staff stood for, was alien to Dean.” The new secretary of state so loved debate, in fact, that at one contentious NATO meeting, having exhausted the British and French foreign ministers, he took over and performed their parts after they had gone to bed.³

“You have to remember this about Acheson,” Kennan pointed out a few years after the older man’s death. “He was basically a Washington lawyer, not a diplomat. The fact that he looked like a diplomat confused people, but it didn’t make him one. He had never lived abroad, knew no foreign languages, knew nothing about the outside world.” Acheson was chiefly, Franks remembered, “a man of action. He wanted actually to get things done. I think he felt that Kennan wasn’t: that he sat in his cell and thought major thoughts, but was not particularly concerned with their application to things as they are now.” Kennan focused on the long term. Acheson wanted to know: “What do I do now?”⁴

Why, then, did they think they could work together? One reason was that they were good friends: the Kennans and the Achesons saw each other regularly, while the Marshalls determinedly avoided the Washington social scene. “I enjoyed his company, and profited constantly from exposure to the critical discipline of his fine mind,” Kennan recalled. “He was a lovely person.” Acheson’s sharp tongue, John Paton Davies remembered, could not conceal “a great gentleness” in him—“a great gentlemanliness.” It was also the case that Acheson respected Kennan’s accomplishments, whereas other secretaries of state—John Foster Dulles was widely assumed to be the Republican alternative—might not have. Finally, Acheson returned to the State Department with a relatively open mind. Having been out of government for a year and a half, he had no position on several of the issues with which Kennan had been wrestling, and so was ready to listen to him, even if only as one of several voices. Kennan, for his part, was sure that the ship of state would crash into the rocks unless his could again become the dominant voice in setting a new course—but that could only happen now, if it was to happen at all, through Acheson.⁵

Shortly after receiving Kennan’s letter, Acheson asked him to stay on as Policy Planning Staff director. Kennan readily agreed. And so one of the thinnest skins in Washington went to work for one of the thickest. Both men remembered it, years later, as a difficult relationship. But it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I.

“General policy meeting on Germany in the morning. Smaller one in afternoon. Packed in evening.” That was all Kennan wrote, in the diary he had begun keeping again, about March 9, 1949, a day on which the prospects for Program A suddenly brightened. The next day’s entry read simply: “Took off at 2:00 p.m. for Germany in General Clay’s plane.” Stranded overnight in Bermuda, Kennan did something he had not done for some time: he wrote a poem.

Addressed to a fellow passenger—an unnamed lady—the lines hinted at liberation, whether from conventionality, or from being stuck in Washington, or from the sense of having reached a dead end in his job. Or maybe it was just a poem. The lady responded, in any event, with a dash of reality.

Nevertheless, looking back over the past few weeks, Kennan had reason to be glad that he had not resigned.⁶

In his January 3 letter, he had advised Acheson to finish a task Marshall left uncompleted: bringing the military administration of occupied Germany and Japan into line with State Department planning on the future of those countries. They would be two of the five power centers that would shape the postwar world, and yet the establishments of Clay and MacArthur were so inflexibly top-heavy that the connection between objectives and actions was being lost: “I cannot tell you how serious this is.” Kennan had already accomplished a partial course correction in Japan, but on Germany, after several months of effort, hardly anyone seemed to be supporting Program A.⁷

Except, from outside the government, an old but prominent adversary: on December 30 Walter Lippmann had published a column criticizing the rush to form a West German government. Such a regime, he insisted, would combine toxic irredentism with an indefinite dependence on the United States. Acheson was no fan of Lippmann: he had gone out of his way in a National War College lecture a few months earlier to ridicule the journalist’s “somewhat tiring” attacks on Kennan’s “X” article. But the incoming secretary of state had been briefed on Program A as a consultant to the Policy Planning Staff and would have connected it with what Lippmann had now written. Shortly after taking office, Acheson got Truman’s permission to take a fresh look at the German problem, and then asked Kennan to chair an NSC working group assembled for that purpose. In the meantime, Kennan had shared the substance of Program A—still a classified document—with Lippmann, who agreed that the liquidation of military government and a gradual withdrawal of occupation forces should be “a real and present objective, not a remote and theoretical one.” There was thus a Kennan-Lippmann convergence on Germany, which in turn converged on Acheson.⁸

Was Kennan, as Frank Roberts suggested, trying to win Lippmann’s approval? Kennan had always believed that containment should lead to a settlement with the Soviet Union, but Lippmann’s criticisms may have induced him to advance the timetable. Kennan would not have written his long unsent letter in April 1948 had he not taken Lippmann seriously, and from the time he returned to work later that month, he was pushing simultaneously on several fronts—in a way that he had not done before—to keep the diplomatic channels to Moscow open. The Smith-Molotov exchange had been an effort to do this, but the same objective lay behind Kennan’s opposition to NATO and his support for Program A. Processes, he believed, had to reflect purposes—here Kennan certainly agreed with Lippmann—and ending the Cold War was what the purpose of conducting it should be.⁹

The Kennan-Lippmann-Acheson convergence gained added significance on January 31, 1949, when Stalin, in a cryptic set of answers to a newspaperman’s questions, hinted at a willingness to lift the Berlin blockade on the condition that the foreign ministers of the occupying powers meet to discuss Germany’s future. He did so without mentioning an earlier insistence that the Deutschmark be withdrawn from circulation in the city. Discreet inquiries established that the omission had been no accident. This raised the prospect, then, of a conference at which the United States would have to reveal, once and for all, its intentions for Germany. Program A was the clearest blueprint available.¹⁰

The controversy surrounding it, however, had not diminished. Robert Murphy, Clay’s political adviser, complained that if Stalin really had been serious, he would have used confidential communications, not a newspaper, to explore a settlement. Where Kennan stressed the need to avoid a division of Europe, Murphy retorted that the line had already been drawn “through no fault of the Western Powers.” If the West Germans lost confidence in the Americans, the Truman administration would soon be worrying about a new line that would leave all of Germany on the wrong side. Murphy’s views had support elsewhere in the State Department, the Defense Department, and of course within Clay’s command, where doubts about Program A were as strong as ever.¹¹

Kennan’s committee was being whipsawed, he complained to Acheson early in February, but the choices it was considering would shape the future for decades to come. So in an effort to break the stalemate—and no doubt with his Japan trip in mind—Kennan offered to go to Germany to see the situation for himself. He was, Franks reported to London, a powerful influence in Acheson’s State Department. “I regard his mission to Germany as likely to be of particular importance.” Nonetheless, Kennan admitted on the day before he was to leave, it was probably too late to change the American position on the establishment of a West German government.

What followed surprised and gratified Kennan, for, in the words of the meeting minutes, taken by Murphy himself,

Acheson deferred any decision on Germany until after Kennan’s return. He then asked Kennan to follow him home that evening to continue the discussion, and there expanded his assignment to include talks with American and allied diplomats elsewhere in Europe. This gave Kennan a broader mandate than he had ever received from Marshall to pursue Program A. Murphy, deeply worried, sent word ahead to Clay that “Kennan is as luke warm as ever toward the establishment of a Western German government…. I am most eager for him to obtain a better understanding of the actual German conditions.”¹²

Still stuck in Bermuda on the night of March 10, Kennan made his way to the officers’ club, where a bingo game was in progress. It seemed to exempt the players “from the necessity to think and speak.” Outside a breeze was blowing, “unceasing and slightly sinister,” while in the distance a B-29 was revving its engines for takeoff. Most Americans on the island were coming from, or going to, Germany: how had it been in the old days? one of them wanted to know. “It was awful now,” he continued, without waiting for an answer. After another stop in the Azores—well known to Kennan as a place and as a problem in World War II—he flew into blockaded Berlin on March 12 and was able to see it for himself: “The city seemed dead—a ghost of its former self.” For the ever-impressionable Kennan, who had always regarded Germany, along with Russia, as an expatriate home, it was as if he were seeing his own ghost as well.¹³

II.

Which is probably why he went back to keeping a diary, his first sustained effort to do so since returning to Washington in the spring of 1946. That city rarely inspired, or left time for, the kind of writing he had done in the past. Nor had his 1948 trip to Japan produced such an account, perhaps because the setting was too alien. But when Hessman finished typing what Kennan had written during the eleven days he spent in Germany in 1949, she had thirty-four pages. Kennan had permitted himself again—as if with relief—to filter a diplomat’s observations through an artist’s eye, a historian’s ear, and a poet’s emotions. He wrote of

The planes landing every three minutes were keeping the city supplied, but that was an improvisation: “We had no answer, yet, to the great political insecurity that hung over this area.” Whatever vision did exist was clouded by “our habits, our comforts, our false and corrupting position as conquerors and occupiers.”

Why was it, for example, that in their meetings with Germans, Clay’s staff was still seating them at the far ends of tables, as if to replay surrender negotiations? Why couldn’t the Americans understand that their “childish” reliance on ice cream and Coca-Cola revived the Germans’ old sense of superiority? Why relieve them of responsibility by managing—often mismanaging—their daily affairs, while at the same time “bloating their morbid delusions” by assuring them that the future of Europe depended on them?

Too many Germans regarded defeat as a kind of automobile accident, allowing them to forget what they had done to bring it about. And yet denazification was doing more harm than good. How could one ever acknowledge enough guilt to compensate for the crimes? a half-Jewish editor asked Kennan. Balancing that scale was a task for another world, not this one. Some Germans, however, welcomed having their occupiers cram down their throats things they would never voluntarily have swallowed. They might not like living under the Americans, but they didn’t want them to leave. They were, on the whole, better than the British, who ran their zone with a condescension imported from their empire, and certainly the predatory French, who seemed bent on stripping their zone bare. All were preferable to the nearby Russians.

And yet it was André François-Poncet, the chief French diplomat in Germany and a spokesman for the new foreign minister, Robert Schuman, who proposed to Kennan a plan to end military government, place the three western zones under civilian commissioners, and give those Germans as much control over their own affairs as possible. The Soviet zone was gone, a German friend warned Kennan. The Russians had imposed a social revolution of such thoroughness and brutality that any attempt to reunify Germany would risk a civil war worse than the one Spain had suffered. A reunited Germany, should that nonetheless prove possible, would probably be “indigestible” for the rest of Europe: “We should, therefore, make a virtue of necessity and cling to the split Germany as the only hope for the consolidation of Europe.”

Kennan’s visit to Hamburg, where he had served in the late 1920s, hit him especially hard. Berlin had always been a cold imperial city, haughty and pretentious. Such places “invited the wrath of gods and men.” But “poor old Hamburg”—it had been comfortable and good-humored, with no greater ambitions than “the common-sense humdrum of commerce and industry.” Its center had been obliterated in just three nights of incendiary raids in 1943. Seventy-five thousand people had died; three thousand still lay buried in the rubble.

It was not enough to excuse this with “the screaming non-sequitur: ‘They did it to us.’” For if the West was to claim superiority over its adversaries, then “it had to learn to fight its wars morally as well as militarily, or not fight them at all.” This might seem, at first, naïve. What it really required, though, was for the United States “to be militarily stronger than its adversaries by a margin sufficient to enable it to dispense with those means which can stave off defeat only at the cost of undermining victory.” It was a nebulous early anticipation of nuclear deterrence.

With all of this, Kennan found some things little changed. There was the Elbe, the harbor, and its hinterland. There were the same stolid commuters, engrossed in their newspapers and smoking bad cigarettes as they took ferries to work: only the seagulls, riding the waves as they always had done, seemed “to rejoice in the wind and the water and the first premonitions of spring.” Saint Pauli had in part survived: the facades of famous beer halls, the narrow streets stretching off into obscurity, “and at one point, under an archway, with the traditional uniform of fur neck-piece, short skirt and shiny handbag, …one of those merry damsels who once contributed so much to the life and lure of this port.”

A final day left time to visit a few villages outside Frankfurt, near where Kennan had been interned seven years earlier. They were mostly intact, but the burghers who inhabited them—once the backbone of Nazism—were now grotesque: they were like “awkward, aging beetles, who had survived some sort of flood and catastrophe and were still stubbornly crawling around the haunts from which they were supposed to have been removed.” They were throwbacks, however: they were not the future. On the train to Paris that evening,

Kennan did not cite Gibbon on this trip, but the historian’s warning about conquered provinces, which had so often raised doubts about the ability of the Nazis and the Soviets to control the territories they had taken, must have haunted him. For now, Kennan did write, the “ironic dialectics of military victory and defeat” were constraining what the Americans and their allies could do—or, at least, what he thought they should do:

What Kennan saw on his trip provided little reason to think that a reunification of Germany, along the lines of Program A, could be imposed from the top down. A division of Germany was already taking place, with the consent of most Germans, from the bottom up. It was, Kennan thought, a Bismarckian moment, “when you hear the garments of the Goddess of Time rustling through the course of events. Who ignores this rustling, does so at his peril.”¹⁵

III.

Acheson, however, was keeping his options open. His immediate priority was the upcoming visit of the British and French foreign ministers, who would be in Washington for the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty early in April. Nothing had been said to them about Program A, and Acheson did not think this the right occasion to raise it. He was still worried, though, about being rushed too quickly into a division of Germany, and he was not yet ready to write off Kennan’s plan. Acheson’s first concern was process but he had not given up on purpose: what kind of Europe did the United States really want?¹⁶

NATO answered one part of that question: there was now an American commitment to defend the western portions of Europe against a Soviet attack and, by implication, an acknowledgment that the eastern parts would remain, for the foreseeable future, under Soviet domination. That made it hard to see how Germany—already divided into Soviet and western zones—could reunify anytime soon. Acheson had little choice but to proceed with Anglo-American-French planning for an independent West Germany. The purpose the new state would serve, however, was still unclear in his mind. Would it become an end in itself—a final nail in the coffin of a unified Europe—or would it be the means by which that idea might revive?

The issue had to be settled quickly, because the American, British, and French foreign ministers would be discussing the German question with their Soviet counterpart in Paris at the end of May. Acheson asked Philip Jessup, ambassador at large in the State Department, to supervise preparations, and Jessup unexpectedly endorsed Program A as a set of “optimum” proposals, not to be discarded either “in anticipation of possible Soviet objections [or] for fear that they might be accepted by the Soviet Union and thus be translated into reality.” Whatever happened, Kennan made it clear that Program A should be put forward only if there had been careful prior consultations with the British and the French.¹⁷

Acheson approved this procedure, got Truman’s permission to present these ideas to the allies, entrusted Jessup and Bohlen with the assignment, and on May 11 dictated instructions on how it should be done: “Just as the unification of Germany is not an end in itself, so the division of Germany is not an end in itself.” The test would be whether unification advanced the goal of a free Europe. The price for a Red Army withdrawal might well be too high, but

[a] possible regrouping of troops which would have the effect of removing Russian troops eastward and possibly ending their presence in and passage through the Eastern European countries may have important advantages. It deserves the most careful study…. No outcome—even a good one—is free from objection. Any decision will have some dangers. But this is not a time for avoiding decisions.

Kennan himself could have written this. But then, on the next morning, James Reston published a simplified version of Program A on the front page of The New York Times. The headlines alone were shocking—but the text was worse: “The screen of United States, British and French troops now standing between the Soviet Army and Western Europe… would be withdrawn.”¹⁸

The impression given the British and the French, Kennan immediately realized, could only have been that the United States was considering pulling its forces out of Germany, had kept this from them, and was about to spring it on them. Bohlen and Jessup—now in Paris—tried to calm the resulting furor by disavowing any intention to remove or redeploy American forces. Acheson still was not ready to give up, however: he reminded Bevin and Schuman that Germany could not remain permanently occupied. Some “gradual reduction and regrouping” of forces would have to occur. At this point, though, the Russians put an end to the discussion. “The Germans hate us,” General V. I. Chuikov, the Soviet high commissioner for the eastern zone, told Bohlen after Acheson asked him to propose Kennan’s plan. “It is necessary that we maintain our forces in Germany.”¹⁹

So who killed Program A? Reston never revealed his source, but there were plenty of possible culprits: Clay, who had moved from discouragement to satisfaction to outrage as Program A reappeared, disappeared, and reappeared again; Murphy, now in an influential position as acting director of the State Department’s Office of German and Austrian Affairs; Hickerson and his colleagues in the Office of European Affairs, who had long seen NATO as a way to bind the western zones of Germany to Western Europe and the United States; the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who thought the idea militarily unfeasible. And Chuikov certainly had not helped. Whoever did it, Kennan ruefully acknowledged, had administered “a spectacular coup de grace” to Program A.²⁰

A year earlier Stalin had killed another Kennan initiative by publicizing it: this was the supposedly confidential Smith-Molotov exchange. But that at least had been the act of an adversary, aimed at compromising the United States in the eyes of its allies. The Reston leak came from one or more American officials, who targeted Kennan while seeking to lock Acheson—and, through him, the United States—into an irreversible commitment to a West German state and hence to a divided Germany that would ensure a divided Europe. Acheson could do no more. “Interest in this approach waned,” he wrote blandly in his 1969 memoir of over seven hundred pages, which devoted only three sentences to Program A.²¹

Kennan took it all badly. The past few days, he wrote the secretary of state, had eliminated any possibility of Germany’s reunification under the auspices of its occupiers: there now appeared to be “no conditions on which we would really find such a solution satisfactory.” This would surely embitter the Germans, raising the possibility of “some violent manifestation” by which they might unify themselves, demanding the departure of all occupying powers. At least as disturbing was what all of this implied about the American planning process:

Under these circumstances, Washington might as well let the British and the French solve the German problem, while acknowledging “that we have deferred extensively to their views.”²²

Which Acheson indeed had now done. What Kennan failed to point out, though, was that most American officials had long since given up on German reunification—as he himself had done between 1945 and 1948—so this was hardly a matter of blindly empowering allies. Nor did the Soviet Union want reunification if it could not be on Moscow’s terms. Program A had always been a long shot: even Kennan had not been optimistic about its prospects. Why, then, was he so upset now?

Probably because Program A, for all its enemies, had won more support in Washington than his views on NATO ever did. There was never much chance of reversing the movement toward a military alliance, but his plan for Germany was a cat with multiple lives: it kept reviving after being declared dead.²³ To have it finally buried by a newspaper leak after all of these resurrections was infuriating. It was also alarming, for Kennan had convinced himself that the future of Europe would depend on what was done about Germany. Now, it seemed, that future had been determined by a fluke, rather than by the months of planning Kennan and his staff had devoted to it.

But it was not really a fluke, because it was not at all clear that even the West Germans would have accepted Program A. Kennan thought he understood Germans as well as any American, but he had not lived among them since 1942. He was aware, but only from a distance, of what they had since endured. As a consequence, he overestimated the Germans’ resentment of their American, British, and French occupiers, and—strangely—underestimated their fear of the Russians. He objected especially to the signs he saw of American consumer culture, but there was only a single reference in his 1949 trip diary to the far more radical transformations that Soviet authorities were imposing in their part of Germany. Kennan acknowledged, two decades later, that he had worried more than most Germans about “the iniquities and inadequacies of our occupational establishment.” These had been, on his part, “grievous miscalculations.”²⁴

Program A’s fate also upset Kennan because it confirmed what he should already have known about his new boss. It was Acheson’s habit, when circumstances forced him to change his mind, to do so quickly, without regret, often without acknowledgment that the reversal had even taken place. That had happened in August 1946 when, in response to the Turkish Straits crisis, he had gone from being a Henry Wallace sympathizer to a George Kennan publicist almost overnight. Acheson’s shift on Germany in May 1949 was equally abrupt, but Kennan took it as a repudiation. He lacked the skill, as Acheson would put it in another context, of “graciously” conceding what one “no longer had the power to withhold.”²⁵

Acheson was conceding now, as Kennan saw it, any prospect of resolving Cold War differences within the likely lifetimes of either of them. If Acheson lost sleep over this, there is little evidence of it. Kennan—who could never avoid looking back, or reconsidering, or regretting what might have been—lost a lot.

IV.

He could hardly claim, though, that Acheson had not listened. Program A was a grand scheme that ran up against blunt realities, one of which was the secretary of state’s lack of enthusiasm for the pursuit of lost causes. Where the cause was more promising, he would pursue it, even in the face of controversy. That became clear with respect to another Kennan idea, which was that not all communists everywhere were equally dangerous. The very success of communism beyond the Soviet Union, he had long believed, would corrupt it with nationalism, so that Moscow could only assume the loyalty of its ideological followers where they had not yet seized power—or where, as in Eastern Europe, the Red Army was keeping them in power. China was Kennan’s prime example: under Davies’s tutelage, he had been arguing since 1947 that a victory for Mao Zedong would not necessarily be one for the Kremlin. He had no word then for what he was describing, but Yugoslavia’s defection in 1948 provided one: it was “Titoism,” and one of Kennan’s priorities in 1949 was to persuade Acheson of its importance.

“Tito’s heresy is of the type unlikely ever to be forgiven,” he wrote in an updated Policy Planning Staff paper on Yugoslavia, completed on February 10. By successfully defying the Kremlin, Tito had compromised Moscow’s control of its remaining satellite empire. The repercussions would extend not only through Eastern Europe but also among communist parties in France, Italy, and especially China, where Mao “might already be infected with the Tito virus.” The United States should do all it could, therefore, to ensure Tito’s survival, without at the same time endorsing the nature of his regime.²⁶

The Chinese Communists were “deeply suspicious” of the United States, Kennan added on February 25. But any further aid to Chiang Kai-shek would only alienate the Chinese people, perpetuating the illusion that China’s interests lay with the U.S.S.R. Mao would discover that this was not the case: the Soviet Union would have no more success shaping events in China than had the United States. Eventually a new revolution would either overthrow the Communists or change their character. That would take time, but the Americans could afford to wait: “We are under no Byzantine Tartar compulsion to shackle as our own captive the revolution which we seek to release.”²⁷

Implied in all of this was another homage to Bismarck, who after unifying Germany in 1871 had turned its enemies’ animosities upon themselves. “Our safety depends,” Kennan told the war college students in his lecture the previous December, “on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile or undependable forces of the world.” Adversaries should

Such a strategy would achieve containment without overcommitment, and Titoism—the first tangible evidence of hostility among communists—made it seem possible. Smith, now back from three years as ambassador in Moscow, caught Kennan’s meaning precisely when he reminded the Policy Planning Staff, on March 1, that “the Russians fear Titoism above everything else…. [T]he United States does not fear communism if it is not controlled by Moscow and not committed to aggression.”²⁸

But as Davies, together with his staff colleague Ware Adams, reminded Kennan, acting on Smith’s assumption would require shifting the official portrayal of international communism. The Truman administration had been describing it as “a single, coherent, unitary, self-consistent doctrine,” and no doubt Soviet leaders wished that it were. But not all communists were Moscow’s agents. By treating them all as such, Washington’s rhetoric was forcing them into that position. If it could distinguish communism from Russian imperialism, “we would thus… remove from the communists in China and elsewhere throughout the world a strong force tending to compel them to collaborate with the Soviet Union.” This would give the United States a much more effective weapon “than is the blunderbuss of primitive ‘anti-communism,’ aimed against a vaguely defined, out of date, self-contradictory, and possibly dying, set of political theories.”²⁹

Kennan’s response is not on record, but shortly after returning from Germany at the end of March, he did tell the staff that the United States should do everything possible “to increase the suspicion between the Kremlin and its agents abroad.” Titoism was a “disintegrating force” within international communism and “should be stimulated and encouraged by all devices of propaganda.”³⁰ The problem would be to make this work in a domestic political climate that was growing more hospitable, not less, to rhetorical blunderbusses.

Defending communists of any kind had never been popular in the United States, and the onset of the Cold War had made it much less so. The Truman Doctrine was widely regarded as a declaration of war against communists everywhere. During the 1948 presidential campaign, the president denounced “Henry Wallace and his communists,” while former State Department official Alger Hiss—an old friend of Acheson’s—was charged with spying for the Soviet Union, raising fears that communists had infiltrated the U.S. government. Meanwhile, the pro-Nationalist “China Lobby” was whipping up support for Chiang Kai-shek in Congress and the media: Mao’s triumph, it insisted, would be a disaster for the United States. Acheson had dropped Program A because it unsettled allies. To what extent would he support an even riskier Kennan strategy that—at least in the eyes of domestic critics—attempted to distinguish “good” communists from “bad” ones?³¹

V.

As it happened, Acheson did just that. It was an “obvious interest” of the United States, he commented in February, that Tito survive. Once it became clear that Yugoslavia had stopped assisting the Greek communists, Acheson favored relaxing restrictions on trade with that country, even to the point of allowing the sale of a militarily significant steel mill. That got him into trouble with the new secretary of defense, Louis Johnson—Forrestal had resigned after suffering a nervous breakdown, and then committed suicide. When the word got out that the United States was selling steel mills to communists, Johnson fumed, the resulting furor might sink the Democratic Party’s chances in the next election. Acheson stood his ground, however, won Truman’s approval for the sale, and to Kennan’s relief it went through. The American objective, he suggested at the end of August 1949, should not be to promote democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe but rather to encourage other communists like Tito to follow a nationalist line. Acheson got the point. The Yugoslav dictator might be a son-of-a-bitch, he observed the following month, but he was “our son-of-a-bitch.”³²

Nor did Acheson object to less public methods of undermining Soviet authority in Eastern Europe. Kennan had been content at first to let Tito’s example do that, but with Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination available, it was hard to resist the temptation to speed the process. By 1949 Kennan was helping to set up an ostensibly private National Committee for a Free Europe—actually funded through the OPC—to provide financial support and employment opportunities for Eastern European émigrés, as well as anti-Soviet broadcasts to their homelands through its subsidiary, Radio Free Europe. The OPC was also collaborating with “defectors, deserters and escapees” from the region: they were, a Policy Planning Staff paper noted in June, the “most effective agents to destroy the communist myth of the Soviet paradise.” When asked, several months later, about more aggressive initiatives, Kennan replied that “some covert operations should be applied at the appropriate time,” perhaps in Poland even immediately.³³

Did these include the possibility of assassinations? Kennan acknowledged years later that a unit had existed within the OPC “specifically charged with this sort of activity if and when we ever decided to conduct it.” But its chief, Boris Pash, an Army colonel whose military intelligence career went back to the Manhattan Project, had been vague about his authority: “If any such responsibility was written into his charter (and [Pash] couldn’t remember that it was), it was because the list of dirty tricks with which they were charged had been taken over, practically verbatim, from the list of responsibilities of the corresponding division of the wartime O.S.S., which apparently did not preclude this sort of thing.” Kennan was sure “that no assassinations were conducted during our time on the Planning Staff, and [that] the very idea of such a thing was decisively put down by higher authority.”³⁴

The OPC was already at work in Albania. Kennan had endorsed an operation there the previous April but remained unsure about its objectives. Should the United States, working with the British, seek to overthrow the regime of Enver Hoxha, still loyal to Moscow but caught between Tito’s Yugoslavia and the failing communist insurgency in Greece? Should Tito be encouraged to do that? What might the Soviet reaction be? But when Bevin asked Acheson, in September, whether the United States would agree to “bring down” Hoxha, the secretary of state replied—cautiously—in the affirmative. Caution would have been advisable, for over the next three years the OPC and the British secret intelligence service MI6 tried repeatedly to infiltrate agents and even paramilitary forces into Albania, with unvaryingly disastrous results. The principal reason was not Kennan’s insufficient oversight of the OPC, but the fact that MI6’s liaison officer to Wisner’s organization was the spy Kim Philby, who exposed each of the Albanian expeditions to Soviet intelligence and, through them, to Hoxha. Kennan had reason to regret his role in these activities, but the responsibility for their failure went well beyond him.³⁵

Long before the extent of the debacle became known, Kennan had made it clear that such operations should not be the primary instrument with which to roll back Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. That should be Stalin himself, who would accomplish the objective by continuing to insist that the interests of the satellite states must never conflict with those of the U.S.S.R.

The optimal strategy, then, would not be to try to overthrow communist regimes in Eastern Europe, but rather to encourage their nationalism: “to foster a heretical drifting-away process on the part of the satellite states.” In this way, the United States might begin to operate “on the basis of a balance of forces in the Communist world, and to foster the tendencies toward accommodation with the West implicit in such a state of affairs.”³⁶

On the whole, Kennan’s strategy of sustaining Tito succeeded. It survived the increasing tendency within the United States not to distinguish between communists: Acheson’s help here was vital. No other Eastern European state openly defied Stalin, but his fear that one or more of them might rattled him sufficiently that he launched devastating purges, over the next few years, eliminating many of his own loyalists in the region. The covert operations Kennan supported at the time—even though he later repudiated them—increased the Soviet Union’s insecurity about its empire. Their purpose, as he put it in August 1949, was to provoke a quarrel “between the Kremlin and the Communist Reformation.” Whether because of these activities or in spite of them, that is exactly what eventually happened.³⁷

VI.

Acheson shared Kennan’s hopes that Titoism would take hold in China as well. Late in February 1949 he asked Truman to approve a Policy Planning Staff recommendation that the United States seek “to exploit through political and economic means any rifts between the Chinese Communists and the USSR,” and the president readily did so. To say that the Russians controlled China and that “we might just as well die or give up,” the secretary of state assured the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the following month, was “a very distinct exaggeration of the whole matter.” The Nationalists were “washed up,” Acheson told Bevin in April, but Chinese inertia and corruption would soon absorb the Communists. It was difficult to say so publicly, but the United States would henceforth pursue “a more realistic policy respecting China.”³⁸

There were, however, important differences between China and Yugoslavia. One was that Tito headed a government already in power that wanted Washington’s help to stay there; Moscow offered only extinction. Mao led a movement about to take power that expected the Americans to try to stop it. Why, otherwise, were they still aiding their longtime ally Chiang Kai-shek? Moscow, from Mao’s perspective, offered ideological legitimation—something Tito did not need—but also protection against American efforts to overthrow him. That the Truman administration was aiding the Nationalists as a way of extracting itself from China while deflecting the China lobby’s wrath was a subtlety wholly lost on Mao. That he needed, for the moment at least, to align himself with Moscow was equally lost on the Americans. When Mao announced, at the end of June 1949, that the new China would “lean” to the side of the Soviet Union, it seemed to Acheson, Kennan, and Davies that he failed to follow the script. On that point, at least, they were right: Mao had been assuring Stalin that he would not become an Asian Tito.³⁹

Mao’s attitude made it difficult to portray him within the United States, therefore, as a “good” communist. Fed up with the Nationalists, Kennan and Davies had been overseeing the preparation of a voluminous “White Paper,” meant for public release, that would document the failures of Chiang’s government. Acheson endorsed the project, overriding objections from Secretary of Defense Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But by the time this 1,054-page volume finally came out in August, relations with Mao had soured: the secretary of state’s letter of transmittal—to which, strangely, neither Kennan nor Davies objected—denounced the communist leaders for having “forsworn their Chinese heritage.” This put Acheson, his biographer has commented, “in the remarkable position of trying to divide Chinese from Russian communists by describing the former as fanatics subservient to the latter.” In the meantime, the hundreds of declassified documents in the White Paper had insulted the Nationalists, while handing the China lobby enough ammunition to keep Acheson on the defensive through the rest of his term.⁴⁰

Kennan, at the time, was worrying about Taiwan, where Chiang was planning to move his government after being ejected from the mainland. But could Washington afford to leave that island, strategically located between Okinawa and the Philippines, in the hands of the incompetent Nationalists, who would surely soon lose it to the Communists? Kennan proposed, in July, a dramatic solution: that the United States move with “resolution, speed, ruthlessness, and self-assurance” to evict the 300,000 Nationalist troops already on the island, in “the way that Theodore Roosevelt might have done it.” This would have “an electrifying effect in this country and throughout the Far East.” The recommendation electrified somebody, because Kennan withdrew it on the day he submitted it. Years later he attributed the idea to Davies, who, when asked about it, denied responsibility for such a “totally implausible” plan. “I imagine that anyone, even of the intellectual eminence of Kennan, is entitled to some mad acts.”⁴¹

Davies was pulling his interviewer’s leg here, for however bombastic Kennan’s language was, his Taiwan proposal was no aberration. There had been discussions within the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, and MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo, of how the United States might persuade Chiang Kai-shek to step down, or remove him from power, or even foster a Taiwanese separatist movement that would deny the island to both the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists. The idea would have been to incorporate Taiwan within the “defensive perimeter” strategy that Kennan had been advocating, without having the United States take sides too obviously in the Chinese civil war. Kennan’s eviction scenario grew out of a Policy Planning Staff study Davies had helped prepare, and as he reminded Kennan, “God knows what the OPC may have been up to.”

But it was now too late for such maneuvers. Chiang was consolidating his authority over Taiwan, and his increasingly vociferous supporters in the United States were determined to keep him there: for them, the island was the base from which the Nationalists would one day eject the Communists from China itself. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, concerned about a growing gap between political commitments and military capabilities, had never liked the idea of using American forces to secure Taiwan. “We didn’t have the forces to throw Chiang off,” Rusk recalled, “and the domestic political ramifications would have been overwhelming.”⁴²

Kennan’s China policy showed that he was no China expert. All that he knew about it, he often acknowledged, had come from Davies. And Davies, in the summer of 1949, was suffering from an occupational hazard of experts: what happens when your country doesn’t do what you expected it to? Stalin had surprised and angered Kennan by revealing the Smith-Molotov exchanges. Now Mao had surprised and angered Davies by embracing Stalin, not splitting with him. Surprises, for experts, can be unsteadying, and on China both Kennan and Davies were staggering. Thanks to them, Acheson was too.

“It is dangerous to talk about a Chinese Tito-ism,” Kennan admitted in September 1949, a few days before Mao, in Beijing, formally proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. “What happens in China is not apt to be a replica of what has happened in Yugoslavia or anywhere else.” Still, Soviet leaders would have to watch the situation with great care, because their authority over China hung only on “the slender thread of a… tortuous and undependable ideology.” If differences did develop, they would be very serious for Moscow. It was entirely possible “that Russian Communism may some day be destroyed by its own children in the form of the rebellious Communist parties of other countries. I can think of no development for which there would be greater logic and justice.”⁴³

VII.

Kennan’s principal focus, however, was never on China: his attention to that issue was, at best, sporadic in 1949. What most concerned him, as Acheson’s China policy was falling apart, was how Europe might come together now that Program A had foundered. Was the continent to be divided indefinitely into Soviet and American spheres of influence, or could it regain an identity of its own? If the latter—decidedly Kennan’s preference—what identity might that be? The question was simple, he told the Policy Planning Staff on May 18: were there to be “two worlds or three”?⁴⁴

The answer was not simple. Europe’s most formidable war-making facilities—the Rhine-Ruhr industrial complex—lay within the boundaries of a country that had used them to start two great wars, the latter of which had left not only it but also Europe divided and for the moment powerless. That situation could not last: the Germans would sooner or later recover their strength, while the determination of their occupiers to control them would wane. At that point Germany would be in a position to dominate Europe again, a frightening prospect if, as Kennan suspected, the aggressive tendencies of the Germans had not changed. For Europe to remain split, though, would also be frightening: the Europeans were “almost the only modern, reasonable—if you will, tired—peoples with whom we can live. If they cease to be that… we would be a lonely nation. That terrifies me.”⁴⁵

Program A had proposed resolving this problem by negotiating a withdrawal of occupation forces from Germany, but then embedding the reunified state within a European federation: European values, in this scenario, would contain German ambitions. Now, however, the United States and its allies had given up on German reunification, leaving European integration in limbo. Could the United States, Great Britain, and France incorporate the new West German state within a sufficiently robust system to keep it from cutting its own deal on reunification with East Germany and the Soviet Union? That danger also alarmed Kennan, for if the Germans again linked up with the Russians, as they had in 1939–41, then “we might as well fold up.”⁴⁶ That’s why the future of Western Europe was so important to him in the summer of 1949. If the United States and its allies could not agree on how to reunify Germany in cooperation with the Soviet Union, then they should at least have a plan to keep the West Germans from doing that on their own.

Devising one became a final test, for Kennan, of what planning could accomplish. The past year—particularly the implosion of Program A—had given him many reasons for pessimism. But what if one were to approach the German problem, by way of European federation, in consultation with the British and the French? A British Foreign Office friend, Gladwyn Jebb, had suggested talks on what role Germany might play—or at least West Germany—in any future “United Western Europe.” That was all Kennan needed to assign his staff another big task: to devise the optimal federal structure for the noncommunist portions of Europe.⁴⁷

He was determined, this time, to do it right. He got Acheson’s approval for the exercise. He met with other top State Department officials—among them Hickerson—to let them know the direction of his thinking. He convened consultants of near-Olympian stature: they included former ambassador to Moscow Walter Bedell Smith; John J. McCloy, soon to depart for West Germany as the first U.S. high commissioner there; J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had run the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb and was now the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; Hans Morgenthau, rapidly emerging as the most influential academic theorist of international relations; and the equally influential theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who was then reviving, as Christian doctrine, the obligation to resist tyranny, whether of the fascist or the communist variety. “Let us proceed,” Niebuhr recalled Kennan saying, “as if there was no Russian threat.” That struck Niebuhr as like saying: “Let us proceed as though there was not sex in the world”—but did at least stimulate discussion.⁴⁸

As Robert Tufts recalled of the Policy Planning Staff consultants, though, “[w]e were often surprised to find how really ill-informed these people were on matters on which we’d expected them to provide some insights.” The meetings were “much more interesting for [them] than they were for the rest of us.” That happened in this instance: the heavyweights pontificated but reached no consensus, leaving Kennan free to construct his own.⁴⁹

It took shape as PPS/55, not a formal staff paper, but an outline of what he might say during the next stage of the planning process, a trip to Paris and London to consult the allies. There was no point, Kennan insisted, in trying to force the British into any political or economic union with Europe: they would always prefer alignment with the United States, Canada, and what remained of their empire. But only a European union, Kennan also believed, could control the Germans. That left France in a critical role. With some form of “Franco-German understanding and association, …Germany could conceivably be absorbed into [the] larger European family without dominating or demoralizing others.” The United States should retain its commitment to defend its NATO allies, plus West Germany and the western occupation zones of Austria, for as long as Europe remained divided. The Franco-German “association,” however, would seek over time to end that division: like the Marshall Plan, it would attract the Soviet Union’s satellites, filling the void left by the failure of Program A to reunify Germany and to reconstitute Europe.⁵⁰

But the French officials Kennan consulted, fearing exclusion from any Anglo-American relationship, seemed singularly unreceptive. They showed none of the willingness to think creatively about Germany that he had picked up from François-Poncet a few months earlier. The British were less anxious, although more inclined than Kennan had expected to value their ties to the Western Europeans. They were also on the verge of a major financial crisis, which left little room for thinking on Kennan’s grand scale. He returned to Washington, he recalled, “with empty hands.” Acheson was noncommittal, but “I was under no doubt that he viewed the concept I had presented, closely integrated as it was with my view of the German problem, skeptically and without enthusiasm.”⁵¹

With Britain’s trade imbalance draining its gold and dollar reserves at an alarming rate, Kennan shifted the staff’s attention, in August, to that problem. Never confident of his own economic expertise, he renewed a request that Acheson, as under secretary of state in 1947, had turned down: for Paul H. Nitze, then working in the department’s Office of Economic Affairs, to join the Policy Planning Staff. Kennan had known Nitze since 1946. He had a formidable reputation as a prewar investment banker, as a wartime economic analyst, and as vice-chairman of the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey. Nitze’s State Department work had focused chiefly on trade policy and administering the Marshall Plan, but he agreed with Kennan on Program A and had even helped draft the proposal. Now, with Acheson’s approval, Kennan made him deputy director, on the understanding that Nitze would eventually become his successor.⁵²

The sterling-dollar crisis showed, with almost textbook clarity, why planning was so difficult. Washington officials since before World War II had seen Anglo-American cooperation as a vital national interest, but Truman entrusted these negotiations to the secretary of the treasury, John W. Snyder, a Missouri political crony who made no secret of his contempt for the Labor government’s “socialism.” That upset Kennan, who knew that a major objective of the Marshall Plan—and even of several CIA covert operations—had been to strengthen the “noncommunist left” in Europe: Snyder seemed determined to rescue the British only if they dismantled their planned economy. James E. Webb, another Truman confidant who had replaced Lovett as under secretary of state, explained that because Acheson was under attack in Congress, it was necessary to give Snyder and Secretary of Defense Johnson a larger foreign policy role. Kennan shot back that the president should be backing up his secretary of state—and should realize “how terribly difficult it would be to find anyone with comparable qualities for this position.” Perhaps Snyder or someone else in the president’s “entourage” should take the job?⁵³

With Acheson’s support and after much effort, Kennan was able to shift the administration’s position, allowing the negotiators to work out a mutually acceptable plan to devalue the British pound in return for American concessions on trade and investment, but without any attempt to undo British socialism. After all of the “fireworks” for the benefit of Congress, Kennan grumbled, the president did exactly what he had advised doing: “But I got no credit for it. My name was never mentioned. I was disgusted with this. Acheson, however, being much more of a domestic political character than I was, found it all in order.” He was there, after all, “to serve Harry Truman’s political interests as well as his interests as head of state. I couldn’t have cared less about his political interests.”⁵⁴

A few weeks later Webb took Kennan to a meeting at the White House: it was one of the few occasions on which he actually met Truman. “The President looked slightly tired, but was his usual likeable self,” Kennan wrote in his diary that evening. “I could understand how such strong loyalties could develop between him and his associates.” But

Two days later, on September 28, 1949, Kennan told Webb that he wanted to go on leave from the State Department the following June. He also asked—sooner than that—to be “relieved of the title and responsibilities as Director of the Planning Staff.”⁵⁵

VIII.

Acheson had not eased him out: indeed he had just promoted Kennan. Having spent seven years in Washington, Bohlen was eager to go abroad again, so Acheson asked Kennan to replace him as State Department counselor while continuing to run Policy Planning. Kennan made it clear, though, that this would be a temporary arrangement: “I am very conscious of the increasing complexity of government,” he wrote his old mentor George Messersmith, “and sometimes wonder whether that complexity is not growing beyond the nervous and intellectual and physical strength of even the greatest human individuals.”⁵⁶

Webb, who was now in charge of State Department administration, thought that it was exceeding Kennan’s strength. He had entered the Foreign Service, Webb later pointed out, “when brilliant individual action” was possible. Now, though, diplomacy required a large, complicated organization in which execution and feedback were at least as important as planning: “High-level statements simply do not implement themselves.” Kennan’s resignation arose, most immediately, from an effort by Webb to address that problem. He had instituted a new procedure by which Policy Planning Staff papers were to pass through his own staff, consisting of assistant secretaries for regions and functions, before going to Acheson. That more than quadrupled the distribution list, proliferating possibilities for objections. A paper on Yugoslavia came back with some on September 16, leaving it, Kennan believed, “in a state of suspended animation.” He took this to mean that Policy Planning would henceforth be “a sort of drafting secretariat for the Assistant Secretaries’ group.”

Webb had, in effect, closed Kennan’s door into Marshall’s office, and Acheson, who now occupied that space, had done nothing to reopen it. This changed little in an operational sense: Kennan had always been one of several advisers to Acheson, who would have tolerated no other arrangement. Symbolically, though, Webb’s requirement rankled—and it provided cover for the larger reason that lay behind Kennan’s resignation.⁵⁷

This was his sense that, even if the door to the secretary’s office had remained open, Acheson was no longer listening to him: indeed, on the issue of European integration, Kennan believed, no one was. Hickerson had expressed “grave doubts” as to whether Germany could be absorbed into any Western European association to which the United States and Great Britain did not belong. Any effort to form an “Anglo-American-Canadian bloc,” Bohlen warned from Paris, would mean that “we will not be able to hold on to the nations of Western Europe.” A meeting of U.S. ambassadors in that region concluded unanimously in late October that no European integration would be possible without British participation because the continental powers would otherwise fear German domination.⁵⁸

“That you were right in your premonitions about… talking to the British about European union I gladly concede,” Kennan wrote Bohlen early in November. “The path of lesser resistance and lesser immediate trouble in this matter would have been to keep silent.” Nor did he have any intention of challenging the ambassadors: “Even if the Secretary agreed one hundred percent with my view, I would not ask him to move in the face of such a body of opinion.” But the existing policy, Kennan warned,

(a) gives the Russians no alternative but to continue their present policies or see further areas of central and eastern Europe slide into a U.S.-dominated alliance against them, and in this way makes unlikely any settlement of east-west differences except by war; and

(b) promises the Germans little more in the western context than an indefinite status as an overcrowded, occupied and frustrated semi-state, thus depriving them of a full stake in their own resistance to eastern pressures and forfeiting their potential aid in the establishment of a military balance between east and west.

“You may have your ideas where one goes from here on such a path and at what point it is supposed to bring us out on the broad uplands of a secure and peaceful Europe,” Kennan added, with some bitterness. “If so, I hope you will tell the Secretary about them…. I find it increasingly difficult to give guidance on this point.”⁵⁹

Bohlen responded angrily: “I had hoped we could profitably correspond on such subjects, but frankly I am not interested in polemics.” “You should not have been offended at my letter,” Kennan replied. “We have always argued warmly, and with gloves off. You know me well enough to take into account my polemic temperament.” There was no point, however, in continuing the debate. “A decision has fallen…. Perhaps it was the right one. None of us sees deeply enough into the future to be entirely sure about these things.” But the depths of these disagreements had diminished his usefulness, he was sure, “and I will be happier than ever if, as I hope, it will be possible for me… to subside quietly into at least a year or two of private life.”⁶⁰

“My planning staff, started nearly three years ago, has simply been a failure,” Kennan wrote in his diary in mid-November. The State Department’s operational units would reduce to meaninglessness any recommendation they did not originate. They would sabotage anything the secretary of state might decide on his own, knowing that no one could review every aspect of their work, and that the people who were trying to get action would soon be gone. Even if Acheson shared Kennan’s views, “he would not be able to find others who did.” The only way out would be to have a doctrine that could be “patiently and persistently pounded into the heads of the entire apparatus, high and low.” But since no such mechanism existed within the government, the only alternative was “an intensive educational effort,” conducted through the great universities, to reshape public opinion in the broadest sense. “All of this impels me to the thought that if I am ever to do any good in this work, …it must be outside the walls of this institution and not inside them.”⁶¹

IX.

For once, Kennan was keeping a Washington diary: it was the only time he did so for more than a few days while serving as Policy Planning Staff director. He began it in August 1949, shortly after bringing Nitze onto the staff. He knew, even then, that he would be leaving and seemed to think it important to record the reasons why. In addition to Kennan’s daily schedule, the diary documents the sterling-dollar crisis, his organizational disagreements with Webb, his growing sense of isolation over Western European integration, and hints at his future. It also shows, despite their differences, Kennan’s continuing respect and affection for Acheson, which the secretary of state fully reciprocated.

Acheson was grateful to Kennan for having rescued the British negotiations from the Anglophobic Snyder. They shared a dislike, soon to become a loathing, for Secretary of Defense Johnson. And they still enjoyed each other’s company: Acheson too had a farm—his was in Maryland—to which he invited the Kennans for an overnight visit on September 1. When, on the next morning, Joseph and Stewart Alsop reported that Kennan had drafted key paragraphs of a recent Truman speech on Anglo-American relations, Kennan feared that Acheson might suspect him of leaking that information to the two journalists. “Dear George, Don’t worry about,” Acheson reassured him. “Nobody can both know you and suspect you. This is life in a disorderly democracy.”⁶²

Kennan and Acheson had the pleasure—if it could be called that—of hosting the notoriously prickly Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, at the State Department on October 13. A few days earlier Kennan had entrusted to his diary the undiplomatic lecture he would like to deliver on that occasion; a few days later he recorded a Bill Bullitt prediction that any country allocating 30 to 50 percent of its food to sacred animals would never develop economically. On November 7 Acheson observed the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution by receiving Andrey Vyshinsky, the former prosecutor in the Moscow purge trials, now Molotov’s replacement as Soviet foreign minister. Kennan sat in on the conversation, concluding from it that Vyshinsky was really a bourgeois at heart and would secretly prefer to work for Acheson: “It is much too late for this, of course.” That evening Kennan attended the celebratory reception at the Soviet embassy, the first time he had been invited since returning from Moscow: “It was all the same—if anything, more false and grotesque than ever.”⁶³

With Acheson’s encouragement, Kennan was still maintaining a regular schedule of public speaking. In New York, on November 10, he addressed the Academy of Political Science on the subject of American history. He chose as his text Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’s Fourth of July address from 1821, which had proclaimed that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” It would become Kennan’s favorite quotation, and it reflected the shift in his thinking while on the Policy Planning Staff: the danger was now not that Americans would attempt too little internationally but that they would try to do too much. If that happened, Adams had warned, the United States could become “the dictatress of the world,” but no longer “the ruler of her own spirit.” Kennan was proud of this excursion into the past, but it got no publicity whatever. “You speak off-the-record,” he complained, “and worry for weeks about the resulting leaks. Speak publicly, and it is as secure as a safe. No one knows what you said.”⁶⁴

On November 16 Kennan spent the day in Princeton. He was there to talk with Oppenheimer about an issue weighing heavily on them both: the recently announced news that the Soviet Union had successfully tested its first atomic bomb, and the still-secret possibility that the United States might respond by building a “super” bomb, a weapon far more powerful than the ones that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was time, though, that afternoon, to walk around the university. “The early dusk was already falling on town and campus. It was Princeton as I remembered it from the moments of my greatest loneliness as a student.”

A light was on in his old window in the house where he had rented a room as a freshman. “Perhaps some other student was now there, much like myself, in many ways,” and yet with the “subtle, undefinable differences” that distanced generations. The dormitory windows let light, voices, and radio sounds into the night air. The swimmers in the gymnasium were plowing dutifully through the water. “Far below, on the athletic fields, football teams were working out under flood lights, the bright uniforms of the tiny figures gleaming like armor.” All of them regarded the people like himself at times as nuisances, at best as “regrettable and temporary necessities.” In their minds, “we were already consigned to the ash-heap of history.” Kennan and his contemporaries, however, would not be pushed.

Despite these intimations of mortality, Princeton still appealed. Oppenheimer and Kennan also discussed the possibility of his spending his leave from the State Department at the Institute for Advanced Study. And although Kennan declined when President Harold Dodds proposed a permanent university appointment, he did acknowledge that “I would like to live in Princeton and am thinking seriously of doing so.”⁶⁵

For the moment, though, there was another preoccupation: Grace and Joan had a little brother. “The wonder is to be officially known as Christopher James Kennan,” George wrote Charlie James early in December, thus giving him “an opportunity to immortalize both our names.” For weeks prior to his arrival, however, he had been referred to as “pumpkin,” and “he honored this title by appearing in this world on Thanksgiving Day.” That was still his nickname, but “I hope for his sake that it will not outlive his babyhood.” It was true, George added, that he would soon be leaving the State Department. “The reasons are many—but mostly private. I want to see what it feels like to be a free man.”⁶⁶

Meanwhile the rumors were flying in Washington. “I got so blue that I got out of there as fast as possible,” Lovett wrote Bohlen, on hearing that Kennan would be leaving. “I am equally disturbed at George’s plans,” Bohlen replied, but “a breathing spell for a year or so would not be at all a bad thing.” The news became public on December 10, leading to careful analyses of its significance from the British embassy. “We have had the impression for some time past that Kennan was not feeling very happy in the State Department,” F. M. Hoyer Millar informed London. Roger Makins of the Foreign Office, who had seen Kennan recently, confirmed this: with his views having “aroused keen and deep controversy in the State Department and Administration,” Kennan doubted “whether this was a desirable state of affairs.” Nitze would be the replacement, but although “hard-working and clear-headed and well thought of, …he is hardly of the stature of George Kennan.”⁶⁷

On December 21, 1949, the lucky students at the National War College got back-to-back lectures from Acheson and Kennan. The secretary of state took the opportunity to pay his subordinate a handsome tribute. The prospect of Kennan’s departure had at first “filled me with despair…. I have rarely met a man the depth of whose thought, the sweetness of whose nature combined to bring about a real understanding of the underlying problems of modern life.” Upon reflection, though, Acheson had concluded that a sabbatical was “the right and good thing” for Kennan. He had served the United States since the age of twenty-two, and the pressures were beginning to catch up with him. It would not be easy to have him gone, and “we will eagerly welcome him back.” “Dear Dean,” Kennan wrote that evening:

Kennan’s lecture that day summed up, with uncharacteristic modesty, what he thought he had learned as a policy planner. It had to do with the limitations of knowledge: just as it was not given to human beings to know the “totality of truth,” so no one could see anything as unlimited in its implications as “the development of our people in their relation to their world environment.” One could only fall back on Saint Paul’s reminder that “[w]e know in part and we prophesy in part.”

That made methods as important as objectives. Civilization best prospered when men stopped preoccupying themselves with purpose and began to apply restraints and rules on the means by which purposes were sought. From that perspective, strategy became “outstandingly a question of form and of style.” Because “few of us can see very far into the future,” all would be safer “if we take principles of conduct which we know we can live with, and at least stick to those,” rather than “try to chart out vast schemes.”⁶⁸

X.

Kennan had set up the Policy Planning Staff, in the spring of 1947, with vast schemes in mind: had not Marshall told him to “avoid trivia”? The Marshall Plan was the first and most successful of these, but Kennan intended that others would follow. The papers he and his staff produced, all nine hundred pages of them, set courses for great destinations. They were to have been the navigational system for the ship of state—Kennan’s own metaphor—in the postwar world. And he was to have been chief navigator.

In the long run, the ship reached the destinations specified: a secure and still-democratic United States; a peaceful and prosperous Germany and Japan; a reunified Europe capable of choosing its own future; a fragmented and ultimately moribund communist ideology; and a great-power peace more durable than any since the founding, three centuries earlier, of the modern state system. But it was, from Kennan’s perspective, a very long run: these objectives looked no closer at the end of 1949 than they had been at the beginning of 1949, when he had accepted Acheson’s invitation to stay on. That is why Kennan lost faith in himself as a navigator: the nation appeared to be as adrift as it had been before he took over.

Acheson agreed with Kennan on destinations but favored more flexible course settings. He didn’t care how long the voyage would take, what it would cost, or whether deviations might occur along the way. Preferring action to brooding, he distrusted perfectionism, tolerated contradictions, and was determined to enjoy the trip. “Even if it was an emotional situation,” Acheson’s daughter Mary recalled, he would still say: “What can you do about it? And if you can’t do anything about it, just stop thinking about it, and get on with something!” The secretary of state himself told the war college students, on the morning he shared the platform with Kennan, that “the more difficult a situation is, the more challenge there is to our powers, [and] the more keenness there is in life.”

No one would have said of Acheson what Joe Alsop—a collector—wrote to Kennan on the last day of 1949: that he was “a flawless piece of Soong eggshell ware…. I hardly know how things will go on without you.”⁶⁹

KENNAN’S NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE LECTURE ON DECEMBER 21, 1949, was one of the last to be delivered from that platform during the first half of the twentieth century. It was certainly his last as Policy Planning Staff director. It reflected, appropriately enough, some personal planning: having arranged at least a temporary disengagement from the Department of State, he was trying to decide how to use it. His topic that day was a question: “Where Do We Stand?” The answer, Kennan told the students, depended on where “you think we have come from, and where you think we are going.” Finding it required remedying an inattention to history—the tendency to view all problems “as though the world, like ourselves, had been born only yesterday.”

He then took the students on a time machine trip, with stops at half-century intervals. It began in 1749 with Russia confined to the edge of Europe just as the British colonies occupied the edge of North America. Only half of the Empress Elizabeth’s courtiers could read and write, while the future site of Washington was a wilderness plagued by wolves. France dominated Europe, and Europe ruled the world, although a few far-sighted advisers to Louis XV were shifting their attention from the Bourbons’ longtime rivals, the Austrian Hapsburgs, to the rising but still peripheral kingdom of Prussia.

Half a century later a revolution in France had swept away its monarchy, setting off wars that brought Russian armies into the heart of Europe. Great Britain now had a global maritime empire, diminished only by the defection of the Americans, who had established their own frontier republic. It had practiced, under the Federalists, a foreign policy of “great dignity and reserve,” but Jeffersonian idealists would set the nation—with no sense of irony—on the path of conquest and empire. Still, territorial acquisitions stayed within the continent: the United States refrained from involvement in European affairs.

By 1849, the Americans had expanded south to the Rio Grande and west to the Pacific, sowing the seeds of a civil war to be fought over slavery. Russia appeared stagnant under the despotism of Nicholas I, although revolutionary ideas had infected its intellectuals, artists, and the army officers who had fought the French. The European great powers had suppressed a new wave of revolutions in 1848, but a young Prussian called Bismarck was plotting ways to use the nationalism those upheavals had generated to make a unified Germany the strongest state in Europe.

The German Empire had reached that point by 1899 and was beginning to challenge British naval supremacy. Japan was now a comparably dominant power in Asia, while Russia, about to finish its Trans-Siberian Railway, was coming under pressure from both rivals even as it was hoping, like them, to carve up China. The United States, having built its own navy, defeated Spain, and taken the Philippines, was seeking to secure its interests by invoking the Open Door, the first of a series of unilaterally proclaimed principles that demanded the displacement of power politics by “juridical norms.” Meanwhile Lenin, from the obscurity of exile, was constructing a movement in which ends justified means, convinced that only out of “the bloody, violent destruction of the old order could anything positive be expected to emerge.”

These trends alarmed two Americans, Brooks and Henry Adams, the great-grandsons and grandsons, respectively, of John and John Quincy Adams, in different but complementary ways. Brooks was warning, as early as 1900, that rapid industrialization over the past half-century might now allow some combination of power on the Eurasian continent to end the British hegemony that had so far shielded the United States. Henry, even farther-sighted, was worrying about a scientific revolution that might someday harness the atom itself: infinite power, he suggested in 1905, could soon rest in the hands of finite men. It was just as well, Kennan concluded, that neither had lived to see 1949, by which time both of their visions had become realities.

“Gentlemen, reflect [for] a moment on what that means,” he admonished the war college students. Most of them, like him, had been born into the “Booth Tarkington innocence” of America prior to World War I: “the shady streets and the wooden houses and the backyards in which the kids played at cowboys and Indians.” Debilitated by decades of effortless security, American thinking about foreign policy had become “childish and naïve,” something the nation could no longer afford.

The crisis had come, not from the world wars or the Cold War, but from “the growing disproportion between man’s moral nature and the forces subject to this control.” Solutions, therefore, would have to begin at home: by showing that men could govern themselves somewhere without destroying themselves and their environment. Only then would Americans qualify to take on the great issues of international affairs.

That was why style was so important. Ends might justify means, but the reverse was also true: means could corrupt ends and, if carelessly chosen, even annihilate them. Care came from what the students had been doing: applying “the sober and undramatic process of scholarly analysis to all the intangibles, all the imponderables, all the elusive, shifting relationships of national policy.” They had probably been tempted, at various points in their course, to toss the political scientists into the Potomac: “Ah, to hell with it. Let’s have a war.” They should recall, however, what Thoreau had written: “Our darkest grief has that bronze color of the moon eclipsed. There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.”

Kennan’s had been a profound, impressive, “and, I must admit, somewhat disturbing presentation,” General Harold Bull, the new commandant of the war college, concluded in thanking him. He had, the previous September, provided the kickoff for the course, “and now he has run ahead and caught his own punt…. I am very grateful to you, sir.”¹

I.

The lecture suggested much broader concerns than those with which Kennan had taken up policy planning two and a half years earlier. Then his focus had been on geopolitics, ideology, and recent history: on devising a strategy that would contain the Soviet Union and international communism in the aftermath of World War II. Now his perspective had expanded backward in time and forward in portent, drawing on Brooks Adams’s insistence that industrialization was realigning politics, as well as Henry Adams’s fear that technology was outpacing morality. The development of nuclear weapons confirmed both premonitions, with implications that would haunt Kennan for the rest of his life.

His early thinking about the bomb had been unsystematic. Although Kennan conceded, after reading Brodie’s The Absolute Weapon in 1946, that great wars were now unlikely, he also believed in preserving American military superiority for as long as possible. He warned Acheson—still at that point under secretary of state—that the Soviet Union would consider the international control of atomic energy only if the United States maintained the capacity “to absorb atomic attack and to effect instant retaliation.” There could be no greater protection, Kennan claimed in a rare public lecture on national defense in January 1947, “than the deterrent effect of overwhelming retaliatory power in the hands of this country.” He went further in classified comments at the Air War College a few months later. Soviet industry was sufficiently concentrated that, if a war did break out, “ten good hits with atomic bombs” would probably destroy it. He even acknowledged the possibility of preventive war: it would be justified, however, only if the U.S.S.R. was undertaking more rapid industrial mobilization than the United States, and there was no sign of that: “I think we and our friends have a preponderance of strength in the world right now.”²

“What a fiery hard-liner I was, in those days!” Kennan later admitted. “However, it was the Stalin era.” The Soviet regime was “dizzy with success” after winning the war and after “the complacent abandonment to it, by the Western powers, of half of Europe.” He did acknowledge, early in 1948, “the suicidal nature of atomic warfare in a world in which more than one country has bombs.” But he was not yet ready to think about that: like most Washington officials at the time, he saw the new weapons as enhancing the strategic bombing capabilities of World War II, not as the revolution in warfare Brodie had predicted. PPS/38, completed in August 1948, discussed the terms the United States might impose upon a defeated Soviet Union without saying anything about the use of atomic bombs. Even Kennan’s tour of Hamburg in March 1949—from which he concluded that nothing could have justified the devastation he saw—failed to shake his conviction that the best way to avoid another such catastrophe would be to stay stronger than all potential adversaries. That included maintaining the American advantage in atomic weaponry.³

But Kennan had no sense of what that advantage was. He lacked access to Pentagon war plans; nor did he know how many atomic bombs there were. Nor would he have seen the top-secret study, commissioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which concluded in May 1949 that even if the United States used all available atomic weapons—about two hundred—against a Soviet Union with none of its own, this would not in itself ensure victory. That led the Defense Department to propose building more, and on August 2 Acheson called a meeting at the State Department to discuss the matter.

It took place within an informational fogbank, because the participants did not know—or if they knew, could not say—how large the increase would be. As far as Kennan was concerned, the current number of atomic bombs could as easily have been two thousand as two hundred. That may explain why he shocked Acheson—and perhaps surprised himself—by confessing, according to the minutes of the meeting, to

One can imagine, at this moment, a bewildered silence. Then Acheson pointed out that it would be difficult to justify such a strategy, “particularly if our failure to use atomic weapons meant a great loss of lives or a defeat in war.”⁴

It would indeed, so much so that one wonders where Kennan’s latest heterodoxy came from. Maybe it was “worst case” worries about what the Pentagon was proposing. Possibly it was a delayed reaction to what Kennan had seen in Hamburg. Certainly it was another of his prophetic leaps: it was not the first time he had startled colleagues by projecting policy much further into the future than they were able to do. The problem was never the desirability of what he wanted. Who could object to the prospect that nuclear weapons might exist for decades without the United States having to use one? Who could oppose, for that matter, a peacefully reunified Germany, or an epidemic of Titoism within the international communist movement, or a Soviet Union collapsing under the weight of its internal contradictions? The difficulty, as Acheson’s response suggested, was that Kennan so rarely specified the steps that would be necessary—over the next days, months, or years—to bring about these auspicious outcomes.

Two weeks later, on August 16, 1949, the Policy Planning Staff completed PPS/58, a paper whose title, “Political Implications of Detonation of an Atomic Bomb by the U.S.S.R.,” appeared to reflect an immediate prophetic insight. For thirteen days later, on August 29, the Soviet Union did in fact test its first atomic bomb. PPS/58, however, was less impressive than it looked. Only two pages in length, it focused on the importance of being able to detect a Soviet test if and when one took place. It made no prediction that one was about to happen. It acknowledged—unspectacularly—that such a development might require rethinking the American position on the international control of atomic energy, and it suggested—unhelpfully—that the existence of a Soviet bomb might or might not cause other states to cooperate more closely with Washington. Questions relating to the vulnerability of the United States if it should lose its nuclear monopoly were best left, the paper concluded, to the National Military Establishment. “The document in question was plainly not drafted by me,” Kennan commented, with some disdain, many years later.⁵

Kennan learned of the Soviet test on September 13, two weeks after it had taken place. After receiving confirmation, Truman decided to make the news public, overriding Acheson’s initial inclination—which Kennan opposed—to let it leak out gradually: Stalin had as yet said nothing. The president’s announcement came on September 23. “Bedlam,” Kennan recorded in his diary that day, but on the next he noted that “for the most part, people took it calmly and the press did a good job of placing the event in the proper perspective.”⁶

Calm, however, was hard to maintain. Kennan had hoped for a continuation of wartime cooperation with the British and the Canadians in building atomic weapons: that was one of the reasons he wanted to keep them and the United States out of any Western European federation. But the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy had grown increasingly concerned about security, and now, in the wake of the Soviet test, Kennan concluded that international collaboration would have to end altogether, apart from a few agreements on the allocation of raw materials. Congressional fears, it turned out, were well founded. Donald Maclean, the British representative on the committee overseeing atomic bomb production, was a Soviet spy: thanks to him, Stalin knew more than Kennan did about the size of the American arsenal. Maclean’s treachery was not yet known in the fall of 1949, but the FBI did have evidence that Klaus Fuchs, a British scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, had also leaked critical information to Moscow. That revelation explained to most people at the time—as it has to most historians since—how the U.S.S.R. got its own bomb so much sooner than anyone had expected.⁷

As it happened, Fuchs had also been present at a 1946 Los Alamos meeting during which the builders of the atomic bomb discussed the possibility of a thermonuclear, or hydrogen, or “super” bomb, based on the fusion of atoms instead of their fission, theoretically thousands of times more powerful than existing atomic weapons. Nothing had been done since to develop such a device, but when the news broke of the August 1949 Soviet atomic test, pressures began to mount, among the few scientists who knew that a “super” might be feasible, for the United States to build one. Who could say that a Soviet “super,” with Fuchs’s help, was not already under construction? Lewis L. Strauss, the most bellicose member of the Atomic Energy Commission, shared the scientists’ concerns, and on October 6 he conveyed them to Truman—for whom the concept of a hydrogen bomb was as unfamiliar as that of an atomic bomb had once been.⁸

It’s not clear when Kennan learned that thermonuclear weapons might be possible. But he met on October 12 with a group of Pentagon officers who favored greater reliance on atomic, biological, and chemical “weapons of mass destruction,” and the “super” was probably among the options discussed. What he heard, Kennan thought, reflected an overestimation of Soviet capabilities and a misunderstanding of Soviet intentions: “But I cannot prove this conviction, and the matters in question are too important for anyone to dare acting on a hunch.” By November 3, his position had become clearer. The United States, he told a Policy Planning Staff meeting attended by Acheson, was so far behind the Soviet Union in conventional military strength that its whole policy might soon be “tied to the atom bomb.” The question, then, was what the “super” bomb would accomplish.

Acheson acknowledged this, but then surprised Kennan, as he had done several months earlier on Program A, by thinking out loud. Could there be a two-year moratorium—“bilateral if possible, unilateral if necessary”—on the development of “super” bombs? Might that open possibilities for agreements on the international control of atomic weapons, on German and Japanese peace treaties, and maybe even on forgoing the use of “subversive tactics”? At least the Americans and the Soviets would be “attempting to do something constructive rather than just sitting and exchanging glassy stares.” If at the end of this “vacation” no progress had been made, then “go ahead with the overall production of both [atomic and thermonuclear weapons], backed up by your economy and your people, having made your best effort to do otherwise.”

This was, Acheson’s biographer has written, “a remarkable ball of wool” for him to have gathered, but the secretary of state’s mind was not normally woolly. His openness on this issue probably reflected his friendships with Oppenheimer and David E. Lilienthal, soon to retire as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. All three had worked, in 1946, on the imaginative Acheson-Lilienthal Plan for the international control of atomic energy: Truman had converted it, over their objections, into the more forbidding Baruch Plan, which the Soviet Union rejected. None now wanted a quantum leap in the lethality of weaponry when so little had been done, as yet, to limit the effects of the last one. Kennan liked what Acheson was suggesting, but Nitze did not, insisting that the burden of proof should fall on those who saw no power advantages in building the “super” bomb. He added tactfully, though, that the secretary of state’s question—whether “we would really be at a disadvantage if they developed it and we did not and why”—required further study.⁹

Kennan brought up Acheson’s idea of a “super” moratorium when he met with Oppenheimer in Princeton on November 16, only to have the physicist—still passionately opposed to developing such a weapon—throw cold water on it. However reasonable the plan might be, he wrote Kennan the next day, it would not seem so to those who demanded safeguards “of rigid and absolute quality.” Undaunted, Kennan on November 18 produced a draft presidential announcement that the United States would unilaterally forgo constructing thermonuclear weapons: they could serve no military purpose apart from mass destruction, they would add nothing to American security, and “for us to embark on such a path would certainly not deter others from doing likewise, and probably quite the contrary.”¹⁰

Truman, however, was not about to be rushed into any hasty decision. On the next day he ordered the formation of a special NSC committee, made up of Acheson, Lilienthal, and Secretary of Defense Johnson, to advise him on the matter. Since Johnson strongly supported the “super” and Lilienthal equally adamantly opposed it, Acheson’s would be the swing vote. To help him decide, he asked Kennan and Nitze to prepare separate reports on the matter, knowing that they would disagree. Acheson’s sympathies were with Kennan: his affectionate tribute at the National War College came only a few days after he read an early version of what Kennan was going to recommend. But Acheson’s political instincts told him that the decision would go the other way. For that reason, he put Nitze on the working group that advised the NSC committee.

Nitze’s report, completed on December 19, was short and to the point. Although fission weapons were likely to remain of primary importance in the military strategies of both the United States and the Soviet Union, there was at least a 50 percent chance that either country could achieve a thermonuclear reaction. Weapons of mass destruction—the hydrogen bomb apparently qualified, the atomic bomb did not—would serve American interests in neither peace nor war, and the Soviets would probably not initiate their use. Nevertheless, “it is essential that the U.S. not find itself in a position of technological inferiority in this field.” Accordingly, the president should authorize the Atomic Energy Commission to test the possibility of a thermonuclear weapon, reserving any decision to produce and deploy it until the results were known. In the meantime, the NSC should review American security requirements in the light of the Soviet atomic bomb, and the prospect that a thermonuclear bomb might be feasible.¹¹

Kennan, characteristically, wrote much more. He had begun composing a “super” bomb paper before Acheson asked him to, and he was determined to do justice to the secretary of state’s mandate. “Remarkable man,” Lilienthal noted, after watching Kennan read a draft: “Peeled off his coat, exhibiting farm-type gal-luses over his thin and bent shoulders. Then he nervously started rolling back his sleeves, folding them back by stages till they were way above his elbows.” Kennan submitted his final version, which came to seventy-nine pages, on January 20, 1950: he remembered it as “one of the most important, if not the most important, of all the documents I ever wrote in government.” Entitled “The International Control of Atomic Energy,” it called for nothing less than an end to reliance on nuclear weapons as instruments of offensive warfare.

Its reasoning echoed Henry Adams’s concern that morality was lagging behind technology. There was no way, Kennan argued, in which weapons of mass destruction could be made to serve rational ends beyond deterring the outbreak of hostilities. War, after all, was a means to an end, not an end in itself; it might imply an end “marked by submission to a new political will and perhaps to a new regime of life, but an end which at least did not negate the principle of life itself.” Nuclear weapons lacked these characteristics. “They reach beyond the frontiers of western civilization, to the concepts of warfare which were once familiar to the Asiatic hordes. They cannot really be reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying, the lives of the adversary. They fail to take account of the ultimate responsibility of men for one another.” Shakespeare had seen how thin this thread was:

It was vital therefore, Kennan argued, “that we not fall into the error of initiating, or planning to initiate, the employment of these weapons and concepts, thus hypnotizing ourselves into the belief that they may ultimately serve some positive national purpose.”

He was not arguing here for any unilateral relinquishment of nuclear weapons. Some such devices would have to be retained “for purposes of deterrence and retaliation.” What he was advocating was, in peacetime, a posture of what would come to be called “minimum deterrence”—restricting the number and power of bombs in the American arsenal strictly to “our estimate as to what it would take to make attack on this country or its allies by weapons of mass destruction a risky, probably unprofitable, and therefore irrational undertaking for any adversary,” and should war come, a strategy of “no first use.” Such an approach, he admitted, would require consultation with allies and a considerable upgrading of conventional capabilities. But it might obviate the need to build a hydrogen bomb, and it would place the United States in a better position from which to negotiate seriously with the Soviet Union on controlling all nuclear devices. Even an imperfect agreement would be less dangerous than leaving “the shadow of uncontrolled mass destruction weapons” lying across the world.

Now no longer Policy Planning Staff director—he had passed the job to Nitze on January 1—Kennan sent his memorandum to Acheson as a personal paper. “Paul and the others were not entirely in agreement with the substance,” he explained, in a considerable understatement. “I was afraid that this report might be embarrassing to have on record as a formal Staff report.” The course it recommended, he added, was filled with obstacles, so much so that “there is extremely little likelihood, judged by present circumstances, that we would ever successfully make our way to the end of it.” But the nation must see “that the initial lines of its policy are as close as possible to the principles dictated by its traditions and its nature, and that where it is necessary to depart from these lines, people are aware that this is a departure and understand why it is necessary.”¹²

Kennan later doubted, correctly, that the paper was seriously considered. Nor could he remember the secretary of state’s reaction: “It was probably one of bewilderment and pity for my naïveté.” Years afterward Acheson claimed to have said that if it was really Kennan’s recommendation that the United States not build the hydrogen bomb, then “he ought to resign from the Foreign Service and go out and preach his Quaker gospel.” There is no evidence, however, that Acheson said anything like this at the time: he was himself deeply troubled by the advice he was going to have to give, and Kennan would not have forgotten such an outburst if it had occurred.¹³

On January 31 an ambivalent Acheson, an enthusiastic Johnson, and a reluctant Lilienthal recommended to Truman, much as Nitze had suggested, that the United States “proceed to determine the technical feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon.” Johnson, in turn, reluctantly agreed to another Nitze proposal, insisted on by Acheson and Lilienthal: that the State and Defense departments reexamine national objectives in war and peace “in the light of the probable fission bomb capability and possible thermonuclear bomb capability of the Soviet Union.” Truman agreed on the spot and publicly announced his decision on the “super” that same day.¹⁴

The contrasts in the ways Kennan and Nitze had advised Acheson were striking. Nitze, balancing scientific evidence against military, political, and moral considerations, came up with a crisp recommendation, capable of being read in two minutes, which Acheson, Johnson, Lilienthal, and ultimately Truman could all accept. “I thought that the most important role of the Policy Planning Staff was not just creating a paper,” Nitze recalled. It was “to affect today’s decisions, and to do so in a way which would create or expand the margins of freedom for the future.”¹⁵

Kennan’s memorandum, more than thirty times the length of Nitze’s, was the most serious effort by any American at the time to grapple with the implications of the nuclear revolution. The ideas it developed—especially “minimum deterrence” and “no first use”—would shape the strategic debates of the 1970s and 1980s, some of which Kennan conducted with Nitze himself. “George was a sensitive, imaginative fellow,” Dean Rusk recalled. “He had the ability to look some distance down the trail, and to see the awesome consequences of the development of these weapons. But to look away from the problem we faced was not the way to prevent war.” As far as the Truman administration was concerned, Kennan’s memorandum was, as Nitze suggested, just a paper: it was of little use in shaping immediate policy. He had become prophetic but no longer relevant. Hence the equanimity with which his indulgent boss reconciled himself to the idea that Kennan needed a break. As Acheson reminded the war college students on the day they both appeared there, “it was not by chance that the Prophets used to go up in the mountains and fast and think and be in solitude.”¹⁶

II.

Kennan chose instead to go to Latin America. As had been the case with Japan, he had never been there. The Policy Planning Staff had produced only three papers on the region under his directorship, all narrowly focused. And yet Marshall, while in Bogotá for a conference in April 1948, had run into rioting so severe that for a time he had been literally under siege: the only life-threatening situation he encountered as secretary of state came in a part of the world his planners had largely ignored. Kennan may have had that episode in mind when he warned the war college students a few months later that, with half the earth’s wealth but only 6 percent of its population, the United States faced enemies willing “to tear us limb from limb figuratively, or perhaps even physically.” He was less dire in his December 1949 lecture, but he did—unusually—go out of his way to link the civil rights struggle at home with the credibility of American efforts to cooperate with “colored peoples in other parts of the globe.” So he was ready, at the beginning of 1950, not just to remedy his own inattention to problems of race, class, and inequality but to see them for himself.¹⁷

Feeling slightly guilty for abandoning his family, Kennan left Washington on February 18, taking advantage of the opportunity this time to avoid the discomforts of air travel and to indulge his love of trains. With a change in St. Louis, it was possible then to take a sleeping car all the way to Mexico City. The three-day journey allowed time to write:

• about passing in the night within a few miles of the Pennsylvania farm, where “the old drake would be standing, motionless, on the concrete water trough in the barnyard, …contemptuous of the cold, of the men who had neglected him, of the other birds and beasts who basked in the warmth of human favor—contemptuous even of the possibility for happiness in general, human or animal.”

• about the fellow passenger who, having inspected his luggage labels, could not help asking: “Say, are you the fellow who… ?” Confused associations followed, “too close to reality to be wholly denied, too far from it to be flatly admitted.”

• out St. Louis, which like many American cities had grown too fast to clean up after itself. “The new is there before the old is gone. What in one era is functional and elegant and fashionable survives into the following era as grotesque decay.”

• about the canned music in the lounge car on the train to Texas: what of the person “who doesn’t like The Rustic Wedding or Rose Marie or Ave Maria, or who has heard them too often, or who doesn’t like music at all through loud speakers, or who doesn’t like music?”

• about trying to write while crossing northern Mexico trapped by an Indiana voice, which boomed, with “unquenchable loquaciousness,” through the cars: “What-cha carryin’ that ink around fur?”

Nevertheless, the trip was a welcome respite. With a steam engine helping, the diesel ascended a mountain pass, wound its way down the other side, and brought the train on time into Mexico City on the evening of the twenty-first. The American embassy, where Kennan stayed, was preparing for its Washington’s birthday reception the next day.

The event, held on the veranda, required routine skills: clutching drinks in the left hand to keep the right one dry for shaking others; looking for places to stash empty glasses so they wouldn’t get stepped on; being patient with the wife of a senior colleague who wanted to know about the Russians: “They’re all slaves aren’t they? Why don’t we do something about it?” Outside there were magnificent monuments, handsome boulevards, and frenetic traffic, but in the adjoining neighborhoods people were “living, eating, and begging on slimy sidewalks.” Bearing little relation to its surroundings, the city was an “ostentatious, anxious demonstration of wealth by an ever-changing nouveau riche,” boiling up “like foam to the surface of a society that calls itself revolutionary.”

A weekend in Cuernavaca placed Kennan in a simulated Moorish palace owned by American friends, where the ceiling, wall paneling, furniture, and art—all imported from Europe—were not simulated. “I lay sleepless, through the long night, under the huge crimson draperies which had once served a prince of the Church and still bore his insignia—while mosquitoes buzzed around my pillow.” Outside the night breeze flitted aimlessly among the cloisters: the wind “of exiled royalty, of the hopelessly rich, of the tortured intellectuals,” of people like himself who had wandered in, amid “unhappy antiques, crowded together, like creatures in a zoo.” Kennan’s host, the next morning by the swimming pool, was also curious about the Russians: “I don’t see why we don’t go right over there and drop the bomb on those fellows. What are we waiting for?”

Four forest fires were visible on the road back into Mexico City, a frequent occurrence because the mountains were badly eroded. Water tables were sinking at an alarming rate. Population pressures were overtaking improvements in agriculture, industrial productivity, and public health. Mexico would remain inhospitable to earthly hope, which was why the Virgin of Guadalupe shrine, a brief stop on the way to the airport, moved Kennan deeply. There were of course hustlers outside the cathedral, and there was oppressive ostentation within. But who could doubt the need for “some moral law, even an imperfect one”? And how did this Mexican display of faith and corruption differ from Ilya Repin’s unforgettable painting of a religious procession outside a Russian village in an earlier century?

After several short stops in Central America, Kennan flew on to Caracas, a city that defied even his descriptive powers. So he instead wrote its history: how the Spanish had located it at a comfortable elevation inland, connected to its port by a wagon track; how the British had replaced this with a narrow-gauge railroad; how the Americans had arrived to pump oil out and to pump wealth back in; how the city was now so expensive that this particular American wanted to hide in his hotel, fearing “the financial consequences of any contact with the shops or the taxi drivers.” All the evils apparent at home from imposing a new technology on an unprepared people were magnified a hundredfold in Venezuela. One day the “morphine” would be withdrawn, and “a terrible awakening” would follow.

Perhaps because the culture was Portuguese and hence familiar, Kennan liked Rio de Janeiro better. The Brazilians had inherited a gentleness “for which one can only bear them respect and affection.” It was striking on the beaches, which displayed every shade of color, “a vast panorama of racial tolerance and maturity which could stand as a model for other peoples.” Still, it was depressing to sense “the gulf between the rich and the poor, the desperation with which people seek to leap over that gulf, and the lack of imagination they show in the enjoyment of their new emoluments when the leap has been successfully completed.” His reputation, by now, had caught up with him: Rio was plastered with “To Death With Kennan” signs, put up by local communists, and he had been accorded four mock funerals. Only in São Paulo, though, where the security was exasperatingly thorough, did he began to feel “like a hunted beast, and to ask myself whether it was really possible that I was as sinister as all this.”

There were further stops in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Lima—the Argentine president, Juan Perón, somehow mistook Kennan for the head of the CIA—but the trip by this time was tiring him out, teaching him little, and making him homesick. He was impressed by a demonstration, in Panama, of how the canal locks worked and, upon arrival in Miami, by the “relaxed, unemotional but utterly objective and self-respecting attitude” with which a railroad ticket clerk explained to a trainee how to change a reservation: “I went out onto the station platform with a sense of deep gratitude and of happy acceptance of this American world, marked as it is by the mediocrity of all that is exalted, and the excellence of all that which is without pretense.”¹⁸

Back in Washington, Kennan wrote a long report and submitted it to Acheson on March 29. He acknowledged the imprudence of generalizing about so vast a region, because differences in Latin America were often more significant than similarities. Nevertheless, some patterns were clear. One was location: human development was harder than in North America, with its broad plains, unifying rivers, and temperate climate. Compounding this problem had been the arrival, “like men from Mars,” of the European conquerors: “History, it seems to me, bears no record of anything more terrible having been done to entire peoples.” Slavery followed, as did the splendor and pretense of Latin American cities, built to compensate for the squalor of the countryside from which they sprang. All of this had produced a culture of “exaggerated self-centeredness and egotism,” conveying the illusion “of desperate courage, supreme cleverness, and a limitless virility where the more constructive virtues are so conspicuously lacking.” This was a world “where geography and history are alike tragic, but where no one must ever admit it.”

So what was Washington’s responsibility in an era in which Latin American communists, even if only loosely linked to Moscow, might seek to exploit the hopelessness that surrounded them by seizing power? That part of the world was of little military significance to either the United States or the Soviet Union, but there was a bandwagon psychology in international relations: multiple victories for communism could be demoralizing. One such victory somewhere, however—Kennan thought Guatemala the most likely possibility—might have an inoculating effect, shattering complacency about communism elsewhere. The problem, in any event, would be for the Latin Americans to handle: the United States could not return to the military interventions of the early twentieth century. It might, at most, apply economic pressure quietly. In public, its hands would have to be clean.

The United States could afford to relax, therefore, in managing its hemisphere, for the Latin Americans needed it more than it needed them. That meant tolerating rule by whatever means local rulers considered appropriate: they should not be held to the standards of American domestic democracy. It meant respecting their sovereignty, cooperating with them only when they wanted it. It meant that they, in turn, could not make their countries “the seats of dangerous intrigue against us.” No great power would ever have shown such restraint in dealing with neighboring smaller powers. If the Latin Americans liked it, fine. If not, the responsibility would be theirs for forfeiting its advantages. This was the best Washington could expect to do, Kennan concluded, in a region where problems would always be “multitudinous, complex and unpleasant.”¹⁹

The term “politically incorrect” had not yet been invented, but Edward G. Miller, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, acted as if it had when he read Kennan’s report. Appalled by its candor, worried about leaks, he persuaded Acheson not to circulate it. “I am not sure that he required much persuading,” Kennan remembered. As a consequence, all copies were “hidden from innocent eyes,” except for the one Kennan kept and quoted from in his 1967 memoir. The full document would not be published until 1976, after which historians treated it either as an example of Kennan’s insensitivity to “third world” issues, or as a blueprint for what the United States would do in Latin America for the rest of the Cold War.²⁰ Neither interpretation makes much sense.

Kennan in fact focused on the historical, cultural, economic, demographic, and environmental problems afflicting the region: he came closer to getting Latin America right in 1950 than he had Germany—a country he knew much better—in 1949. Nor was he unsympathetic to the Latin Americans. The rich and the poor, he repeatedly stressed, shared tragedies not of their own making. Nor did his memorandum affect what later transpired: it could hardly have done so, since nobody read it. If they had, they would have found it recommending a far more cautious policy than those carried out by the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan administrations, each of whom intervened in Latin America in ways well beyond anything Kennan recommended. It’s hard to see how the policy he suggested would have produced worse results.

Two things made Kennan’s report unacceptable, though, even by the standards of his own day. One was his outsider’s perspective, which upset the State Department’s Latin American experts, much as he would have been upset if forced to read a report from one of them on the Soviet Union or Germany. Crude looks at the whole²¹ generally unsettle specialists who spend their lives scrutinizing parts of it. The other problem was Kennan’s honesty about Latin America’s tragedies and his call for restraint in attempting to alleviate them. His pessimism was consistent with his own view of life. But it was—to use another term just coming into vogue at the time—deeply un-American.

III.

“I am not one of those who have been attacked,” Kennan assured a hometown audience in Milwaukee on May 5. However, “I must tell you that the atmosphere of public life in Washington does not have to deteriorate much further to produce a situation in which very few of our more quiet and sensitive and gifted people will be able to continue in government.” What worried him was not the reception of his Latin American report but rather the emergence of something that was coming to be called, in honor of the junior Republican senator from Wisconsin, “McCarthyism.”²²

It began as a backlash against the apparent “loss” of China. Mao Zedong had completed his conquest of the mainland the previous October, and then spent two months in Moscow. The State Department seemed not to care. It had discredited the Chinese Nationalists, now established on Taiwan, through the White Paper Kennan and Davies had helped to produce in the summer of 1949. On January 12, 1950, Acheson announced in a National Press Club speech that the United States had no plans to defend Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, despite a “defensive perimeter” strategy—which he was announcing publicly for the first time—of protecting other offshore positions including Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines. The secretary of state’s comments reflected the conclusions of a top-secret paper, NSC 48/2, endorsed by Truman at the end of December, that distilled a series of Policy Planning Staff studies, written mostly by Davies, dating back to 1948. Using American forces to prolong the civil war in China, all of these had concluded, would be a disaster. Nor was it clear, even now, that Mao would be a Soviet puppet. The very fact that he had spent so long in Moscow, Kennan believed, meant that problems already existed in the relationship.²³

This was not the best time, however, to try to explain these subtleties to the American people. Acheson had won few friends in Congress when he characterized his China policy, shortly after taking office, as one of waiting “until the dust settles.” Then on January 25, 1950, Alger Hiss was convicted of lying under oath about his involvement with Soviet intelligence: the secretary of state further inflamed his critics by telling a press conference that day that he would not “turn my back” on his old friend. Six days later Truman announced that the United States would try to build a hydrogen bomb. Four days after that the news broke of the Fuchs atomic espionage case. It was predictable, therefore, that someone would soon claim that the Department of State had knowingly harbored traitors who had sold out the Chinese Nationalists, given the Russians the atomic bomb, and who knew what else? The only thing unpredictable about the speech Senator Joseph R. McCarthy did in fact make on February 9 was the forum he chose for it: the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia.²⁴

Kennan read the reports on McCarthy while on his Latin American trip, naïvely expecting the outrageousness of the senator’s claims to discredit him immediately. Just the opposite happened, however, with results that would wreck the career of Kennan’s closest Policy Planning Staff colleague and one of his closest friends. Still assigned to liaison duties with Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination, John Paton Davies had found himself being questioned, in November 1949, by two “very low-powered characters” from that organization about a plan he had suggested to recruit American China experts who had retained some credibility with Mao’s regime to advise on psychological warfare operations against it. “It’s all very well to have white propaganda phrased as a direct attack against the Communists,” Davies later explained, “but one has to have some people whose view is more acceptable, who have a standing in China, who can give some guidance as to what might be done under OPC control.”

Davies’s interrogators, however, turned out to be counterintelligence agents searching for spies within the government. “So they misconstrued what I said and passed it on.” Hillenkoetter, still the director of central intelligence, professed to be shocked and turned the information over to the FBI. That meant that Davies would have to go before one of the loyalty review boards the White House had established to investigate such allegations of subversion.²⁵

“We have no protection against this happening again,” Kennan warned Webb shortly after returning to Washington in March 1950, “and no assurance that any one in this Department will even be aware of it when it does happen.” It had not been Wisner’s fault, but until the matter was clarified, there should be no further State Department cooperation with the OPC. The idea of covert operations had been “largely my own,” and Kennan remained convinced of its importance. Anything that interfered with such work—like the harassment of Davies—“seems to me to diminish the chances for defeating communist purposes on a world-wide scale.”²⁶

It was with Davies in mind that Kennan chose to challenge McCarthy—although not by name—in the state they shared. He could do so, he told his Milwaukee audience, because “I am leaving the Government for a long time in the near future.” He had chosen that city because “[m]y boyhood was spent here.” Whenever he returned to talk about international problems, he had the feeling of “rendering an accounting” to people who had a right to expect it and whose understanding “is somehow basic to the success of what we are trying to do.” So what should the State Department have recommended, given the obvious incompetence of the Chinese Nationalist government? He could conceive of “no more ghastly and fateful mistake” than to try to prop up with “our own blood and treasure a regime which had clearly lost the confidence of its own people. Nothing could have pleased our enemies more.”

The speech was courageous: few Foreign Service officers were saying such things openly at the time. But the size of the audience was disappointing, and the publicity was minimal. Kennan was irked to have provoked the wrath, not of McCarthy’s supporters, but of local “communists” who passed out handbills linking “Mr. X” to the development of the hydrogen bomb. The trip, he complained to State Department colleagues upon his return, had been a waste of his time.²⁷

IV.

Despite the investigation of him, Davies had taken on a new responsibility. “Paul Nitze apparently discovered that he couldn’t get along without him,” Annelise wrote George on February 23, while he was still in Latin America. She had had dinner the night before with the Nitzes, after which they had seen All the King’s Men, starring Broderick Crawford, a cinematic evocation of Huey Long that eerily anticipated McCarthy.²⁸ Nitze had delayed Davies’s next assignment, which was to have been Germany, to enlist him in an extraordinary effort to triple or quadruple defense spending in the United States—over the violent objections of its secretary of defense, Louis Johnson. It was a strange thing for someone suspected of sympathy with communists to be doing.

The idea, in a way, had originated with Kennan. He had long seen the need for a credible military deterrent but assumed that the American atomic monopoly could provide this. As long as it lasted, the Soviet Union would not attack: conventional defense could be entrusted to small, well-trained units like the Marine Corps, capable of responding rapidly in limited conflict situations. The capacity for massive mobilization would have to be in place, of course, but an actual mobilization should not be necessary in peacetime. The Soviet atomic bomb, however, shook Kennan’s confidence. He admitted to Acheson and the Policy Planning Staff, at a meeting in October 1949, that it might now be impossible “for us to retaliate with the atomic bomb against a Russian attack with orthodox weapons.”

Nitze at that point asked an important, if delicate, question: might this situation require increasing the conventional military forces of the United States and its Western European allies? Otherwise, what peacetime deterrent would there be? The delicacy lay in the fact that such armaments—and armies—would be considerably more expensive than atomic bombs and the bombers needed to deliver them. The costs could lower living standards in Europe while unbalancing budgets at home. Neither was a palatable alternative, given the Marshall Plan’s accomplishments and Truman’s determination to keep defense spending under tight control. The problem, Acheson acknowledged, was “what peoples and governments will do rather than what they can do.”²⁹

The hydrogen bomb debate distracted everyone over the next few months, but Nitze kept the idea of a conventional buildup alive by skillfully coupling his call for developing thermonuclear weapons with a recommendation to review all national security requirements. That won Acheson’s support for the “super” and ultimately even Lilienthal’s. Neither Truman nor Johnson understood what Nitze had in mind, but Acheson saw it clearly, and Kennan had a sense of it. If the United States was ever going to reduce its dependence on nuclear weapons, he wrote on the eve of his departure for Latin America, then this might require “a state of semi-mobilization.”³⁰

Acheson later implied that he had sent Kennan south to get him out of town while Nitze’s review was getting under way. That’s unlikely, because Kennan had been planning his trip for well over a year. He also sympathized with Nitze’s objective, which was to strengthen nonnuclear as well as nuclear means of deterrence. Kennan did believe, however, that this could be done only by drastically reducing “the exorbitant costs of national defense.” In this respect, he shared the views of Truman, Johnson, and other fiscal conservatives. Nitze, drawing on domestic policy studies undertaken by White House economic advisers, took a different approach. He pointed out that increased expenditures would create new jobs, generating the additional tax revenue that would allow balancing the budget at a higher level while correcting the American deficiency in conventional arms. It was a posthumous enlistment, in the Cold War, of John Maynard Keynes.³¹

It’s also unlikely, though, that Acheson or Nitze regretted Kennan’s absence as they developed this line of argument. Kennan had opposed the presidential decision that allowed Nitze’s review to proceed. He knew little about economics, Keynesian or otherwise. His preference for prophecy was isolating him within the government. And he was becoming increasingly wary of policy papers whose content had to reflect a consensus and whose implementation he could not control: “You understand how hard this was for someone like myself, who felt that what you do has to be flexible, according to the situation of the moment.” Kennan’s real problem with the new initiative, Nitze believed, was that it was to be “a group paper, not his.”³²

NSC 68, “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” prepared mostly within the Policy Planning Staff, went to Truman on April 14, 1950. It was worthy of Kennan in several ways. One was length: the report came to sixty-six legal-size pages. A second was style: although classified top secret, it read as if meant to be proclaimed, even preached—its most memorable phrase, which Davies contributed, was the need to “frustrate the Kremlin’s design.” A third was its acceptance of containment: there need be neither appeasement of the Soviet Union nor a war fought with it. A fourth was the imprint of a distinctive personality: despite Nitze’s claim, he dominated the drafting, much as Kennan had always done. A final similarity was historical significance: since its declassification in 1975, historians have regarded NSC 68, alongside Kennan’s “long telegram” and “X” article, as a foundational statement of United States grand strategy in the Cold War.³³

But both Kennan and Bohlen objected to NSC 68, when they finally read it, for much the same reason that Kennan had opposed the Truman Doctrine. In order to “sell” the idea of a major military buildup—in this case, to Truman himself—the document exaggerated the threats the United States confronted. It portrayed a Soviet Union resolved to risk war as soon as its capabilities exceeded those of the Americans and their allies: that point would come, it claimed, if nothing was done, as early as 1954. It rejected distinctions between vital and peripheral interests, emphasizing instead the damaging psychological effects of losing even remote regions to communism. It saw all parts of the world as equally important because all threats were equally dangerous. And because it ruled out both appeasement and all-out war, it called for responding to aggression wherever and at whatever level it might take place. At Acheson’s suggestion, NSC 68 contained no estimate of what all this would cost. The amounts would be huge, though, which led Bohlen to conclude, shortsightedly, that “there was absolutely no chance that [it] would be adopted.”³⁴

Acheson was unrepentant. Of course NSC 68 exaggerated, he admitted in his memoirs. Its purpose was “to so bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’ that not only could the President make the decision but the decision could be carried out…. If we made our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise.” There were times, his great mentor Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had said, when “we need education in the obvious more than the investigation of the obscure.” Kennan, when asked about this shortly after Acheson’s account came out, had his own Holmes reference ready: the great man had also observed “that he couldn’t write out his philosophy of the law; he could express it only as it applied to specific cases.” Documents like NSC 68, Kennan argued, “assume a static world. They freeze policy, making it impossible to respond to external changes.”³⁵

The issue, fundamentally, was the tension between planning policy and executing it. Kennan’s approach, one historian observed, relied heavily on the “noncommunicable wisdom of the experienced career official” and had little patience with the “rigidities, simplifications, and artificialities” involved in administering large organizations. Acheson, in turn, had to think about exactly this: “I recognized and highly appreciated the personal and esoteric skill of our Foreign Service officers, but believed that insofar as their wisdom was ‘non-communicable,’ its value, though great in operations abroad, was limited in Washington.” Davies, on this point, sided with Acheson. “Kennan and Bohlen thought that NSC-68 was an extreme reaction and a misreading of Soviet intentions,” he recalled, “because it was so schematic. As indeed it was. It was highly schematic, it was a counter to the Communist Manifesto.” The Soviet Union “was a growing threat to the United States that had to be met. Whatever it cost, we had to do it.”³⁶

V.

The Kennans, at the beginning of 1950, were renting a house at 3707 33rd Place NW, a cul-de-sac in the Cleveland Park section of Washington, not far from the National Zoo. Grace was seventeen, Joan was thirteen, and Christopher was just over a month old: he was “very healthy and good natured,” George wrote a friend, “and vegetates quite normally.” Meanwhile Annelise had written to Kent, now a professor of music at the University of Texas, to thank him for a basket of grapefruit. These became regular Christmas gifts, and the appreciative letters back to Austin—sometimes from Annelise, more often from George—would over the next several decades chronicle family life. Apart from the children, the main topic in Annelise’s first grapefruit letter was George’s upcoming sabbatical: “We haven’t decided where to go yet, but the chances are pretty much in favour of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. They have asked him to come.” In the meantime George had taken up carpentry. He had built himself a workshop, was repairing old things, and making new ones. He would love to get some classical guitar music. Having taught himself to read it, “he struggles along in his spare moments.”³⁷

Finances were also a struggle. “My mother was a very feminine woman who greatly enjoyed pretty clothes,” Joan recalled, “but not to the point of ever neglecting what was most important. She could make do when she had to.” One day a Washington policeman stopped her because the car she was driving had Pennsylvania plates. When asked where they lived, Annelise was about to say East Berlin when Grace blurted out: “Oh, we live just around the corner.” This got them a fifteen-dollar fine, which meant that Annelise wouldn’t be able to buy the new dress for which she’d been saving money. She surprised her daughters by—uncharacteristically—bursting into tears.³⁸

The Institute appointment was definite by the middle of February, although Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dartmouth, as well as Princeton and Yale, had also tried to recruit Kennan. He would receive the equivalent of his Foreign Service salary, which he would be free to supplement through occasional lecturing and perhaps part-time teaching. Kennan would leave his job as State Department counselor, as he had requested, at the end of June. What he would do at the Institute was left vague, although he had hinted at an agenda a few days after his November 1949 meeting with Oppenheimer, when he wrote of the need for “an intensive educational effort directed toward our public opinion in general and particularly toward the work of our universities.”³⁹ For the moment, though, he had a more immediate objective: this was to write, for the widely circulated Reader’s Digest, an updated “X” article.

The idea came from Paul Palmer, senior editor of the magazine, who had approached Kennan the previous September about critiquing the “preventive war psychology” that he saw sweeping the country. Kennan agreed, knowing that news of the Soviet atomic bomb was about to break. Acheson approved the idea, but the need for State Department clearances delayed the article’s appearance: it had been “plucked and torn,” Kennan wrote Palmer, by people more interested in reducing its vulnerability than in improving its legibility. The original “X” article, “happily, though fortuitously,” had avoided such pitfalls and appeared “in all its helpless innocence.” The new piece finally came out in late February 1950, under Kennan’s own name, with the title: “Is War with Russia Inevitable? Five Solid Arguments for Peace.”

The subtitle answered the question. War was always possible, Kennan argued, but highly unlikely. Soviet imperialism had bitten off more than it could chew. The end of the American atomic monopoly had not significantly shifted the military balance. A strong defense was necessary, but not “a morbid preoccupation with what could possibly happen if.” Americans should avoid “vainglorious schemes for changing human nature,” while cultivating “Christian humility before the enormous complexity of the world in which it has been given to us to live.” For all the effort that went into it, the article fell flat, confirming Kennan’s suspicion that publicity was more a matter of accident—an exasperated telegram, a mysterious pseudonym, a malicious leak—than of design.⁴⁰

Disappointed by this, and by the tepid response to his Milwaukee speech, Kennan hoped to cheer himself up by attending the twenty-fifth reunion of his Princeton class: he had, he wrote Oppenheimer, “succumbed to some very decent and considerate letters from fellow alumni.” On June 8 he, Annelise, and Jeanette drove there from the farm. An undergraduate “checked my name off the list, and coolly asked me for $75.00. I was horrified. I was head over heels in debt. I couldn’t have raised $75.00 by any stretch of the imagination. I fled, and repaired in panic to the Institute.” Oppenheimer offered to cover the cost, but Kennan refused and arranged instead for a telegram to be sent—from his Washington office—conveying regrets that he would not be able to attend after all. The three disheartened celebrants then slipped quietly out of town, driving to Dartmouth where, on the eleventh, George received an honorary degree. Another, from Yale, was awarded on the next day, “as a gesture of respect,” Kennan was told, “for the Department of State in the face of MacCarthy’s [sic] attacks.”

On June 14 he was back in Washington, where Webb wanted to talk about his future. His plan, Kennan told the under secretary of state, was to be away for at least an academic year: what happened after that depended on “what use [the department] could make of me.” If no one else qualified, perhaps ambassador to Great Britain? Webb said he had already spoken with Acheson about that post, which was “so expensive that I would not be able to afford it.” Kennan sat in for Nitze at one last meeting of the Policy Planning Staff, spent a gloomy afternoon griping to Joe Alsop about the hopelessness of conducting coherent policy in a democracy, and then went back to the farm. While he was driving to a nursery a few days later to pick up some trees, inspiration struck, so he pulled over and composed a poem.

He meant it to be his last Policy Planning Staff paper.⁴¹

VI.

Perhaps it would have been, had it not been for Stalin, Mao, and the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, who found a way, on June 25, 1950, to frustrate this and many other American designs. Korea, like Germany, had remained divided at the end of World War II. Unlike Germany, however, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union regarded the country as a vital interest. They were thus able to agree, if tacitly, on a mutual withdrawal of occupation forces, what Kennan had long hoped for in Germany. United Nations–sponsored elections south of the 38th parallel—the dividing line hastily drawn at the end of the war—had by then established the Republic of Korea; and the Soviet Union, without U.N. sanction, had set up the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north. It was no satisfactory solution, but by Cold War standards it looked like a relatively untroublesome one, which was why Acheson felt comfortable excluding South Korea from the “defensive perimeter” he publicly announced in January 1950. The only difficulty was that Stalin, Mao, and Kim read his speech—and probably also, courtesy of British spies operating in Washington at the time, NSC 48/2, upon which it had been based.⁴²

There had been indications, Kennan later recalled, that military operations might begin soon somewhere in the communist world, but the intelligence was not site-specific and MacArthur’s analysts in Tokyo discounted it. As a result, North Korea’s attack on South Korea, undertaken with the full knowledge and support of Stalin and Mao, caught the rest of the world by surprise. It came on a Sunday: President Truman was at his home in Independence, Missouri; Acheson was at his Maryland farm; Nitze was fishing in New Brunswick miles away from the nearest road; and Kennan was spending a quiet weekend with his family in East Berlin (Pennsylvania). He knew nothing of the invasion until they returned to Washington late that afternoon and saw the newspaper headlines: “Nobody had thought to notify me, and perhaps there was no reason anybody should have; but I could not help but reflect that General Marshall would have seen that this was done.”⁴³

Kennan had asked to be relieved of policy responsibilities. As with most things he did, however, there was a certain ambivalence about this. “It never occurred to me that you [and Acheson] would make foreign policy without having first consulted me,” Nitze remembered him saying sometime in the summer of 1950. Now, with Nitze stuck in the wilds of Canada—the first leg of his trip back had to be by canoe—Acheson welcomed Kennan’s offer to help. The next two months were an extraordinary moment in Kennan’s career: at no other point did he operate nearer to the top levels of government in a major crisis, or with greater freedom to provide advice. Remarkably—but with an eye to history and perhaps biography—he found the time to keep a detailed diary of those crowded days. It showed what he meant about the inadequacies of grand strategic documents that sought to embed, as if in amber, the complexities of a rapidly shifting world. At the same time it revealed several of these inadequacies as having been his own.⁴⁴

The first and most obvious one had to do with the “defensive perimeter” strategy, which reflected Kennan’s principle that because some interests were more important than others, not all needed to be defended. That sounded good in theory; in practice, however, it conflicted with another principle in which Kennan believed strongly—that psychology was as important as industrial-military capability in shaping world politics. Having excluded South Korea from American protection because it was militarily insignificant, he now concluded along with almost everyone else in Washington that it was psychologically vital. So too, he insisted, was the defense of Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists. Kennan’s first recommendation upon arriving at the State Department on the evening of June 25—it was probably the first on this subj ect from anyone in government—was to ensure “that Formosa did not fall to the communists since this, coming on top of the Korean attack, would be calamitous to our position in the Far East.”⁴⁵

With the approval of the U.N. Security Council—the Soviet representative, protesting the organization’s failure to seat the People’s Republic of China, had not been present to cast a veto—President Truman announced on June 27 that American troops, under MacArthur’s command, would be coming to the defense of South Korea. Meanwhile, the Navy would begin patrolling the Taiwan Strait. Asked on short notice to brief the NATO ambassadors that day, Kennan acknowledged that the United States was acting not because of the strategic importance of the territory at risk but because “of the damage to world confidence and morale which would have been produced had we not so acted.” The effects could have extended throughout East Asia and even into Europe. He then added—without authority, since the issue had not yet been decided—that the war would be limited : “We had no intention to do more than to restore the status quo ante and no intention to proceed to the conquest of northern Korea.”⁴⁶

That evening the Kennans attended a long-planned dinner party. On their way in, they met Joe Alsop. “Although he regards himself as a total contemplative,” the columnist wrote of this encounter, “I have always observed that George makes his best sense as a man of action, when there is a good, loud, cable machine at his elbow clacking out horrible problems all over the world. When George broods, he becomes a little silly.”

Two days later, still elated, Kennan attended a meeting of the NSC staff in the former State Department building next to the White House. Nostalgic for its cool, calm, and spacious interior, Kennan joked to his old friend “Doc” Matthews that the crisis would never have happened if they hadn’t moved to the new headquarters in Foggy Bottom. “To my surprise the colored elevator woman turned around and said with great firmness and enthusiasm: ‘That’s right, sir.’”⁴⁷

A second shift in Kennan’s thinking related to NSC 68. He had not questioned its call to spend more on conventional forces—how else could reliance on nuclear weapons be reduced?—but he and Bohlen had objected to Nitze’s portrayal of a worldwide Soviet threat. Now, though, by authorizing the attack in Korea, Stalin had made Nitze look prophetic. “I stated it as my deep conviction that the U.S. had no choice but to accept this challenge,” Kennan wrote of a meeting with Acheson and his advisers on June 26. It would have to commit whatever was required for the completion of the task. The fighting in Korea was likely to spread, and it was “absolutely essential” to mobilize for that purpose. If, in World War II, “our commanders had been told [that their only task] was to cope with an army of 90,000 Koreans with 100 tanks and small air support and to occupy Korea to the 38th Parallel, they would have considered it a small operation indeed.” So the question was one of will, not capability.

When told, on July 12, that the Council of Economic Advisers had seen no need for drastic mobilization measures, Kennan was furious. The problem, he complained to an equally worried Nitze on the seventeenth, lay in the president’s failure himself to take responsibility, and to require that all of his subordinates do so. Key portions of the executive branch had been left “to wallow around in the cluttering impediments of the committee system, complicated by the presence of such personalities as Mr. Johnson and Mr. Snyder and his own White House political advisers.” If this continued, “our world position might well be lost… for lack of the horse-shoe nail of real executive direction.” Its vigorous exercise, in contrast, would “electrify the Government into an entirely different style of action.” It would certainly impress the Russians, he added a few weeks later, who would see how little of the American national income was going to military spending compared with themselves. The United States would not go bankrupt “even if we were forced to shell out three times as much for defense.”⁴⁸

Kennan did not give up on his strategy of seeking to strain Sino-Soviet ties, but the Korean conflict made it much harder to sell that idea in Washington. He was wondering as early as June 29 whether it might be the Russians’ intention “to keep out of this business themselves… but to embroil us to the maximum with their Korean and Chinese satellites.” If so, why not offer the Chinese Communists an inducement not to cooperate? Would it not appeal to them and embarrass Moscow, he asked on July 11, “if we were suddenly to favor and achieve the admission of the Chinese Communists to the U.N. and to the Security Council?” Kennan’s proposal reflected no greater sympathy for Mao Zedong than he had for Chiang Kai-shek: like the decision to deploy the Navy in the Taiwan Strait, this would be a strategic maneuver, not a conciliatory gesture. China, he told the British ambassador Oliver Franks, “would never, in my opinion, be dependable from the standpoint of western interests.”⁴⁹

But when Kennan mentioned this plan to John Foster Dulles—who would have become secretary of state had the Republicans won in 1948 and was now the principal Japanese peace treaty negotiator—“I was shouted down.” It would look to the American public, Dulles insisted, “as though we had been tricked into giving up something for nothing.” Kennan saw the problem and abandoned the idea, but he hoped that history would someday record this as an example of the damage done “by the irresponsible and bigoted interference of the China lobby and its friends in Congress.” A few days later he learned what Dulles was telling newspapermen: “that while he used to think highly of George Kennan, he had now concluded that he was a very dangerous man: that he was advocating the admission of the Chinese Communists to the United Nations, and a cessation of U.S. military action at the 38th parallel.”⁵⁰

The latter charge oversimplified Kennan’s position. He had argued from the first days of the fighting that MacArthur should be free to conduct military operations anywhere on the Korean peninsula, as long as these advanced the political objective of liberating South Korea. What he did oppose, on both military and political grounds, was occupying all of North Korea. Kennan was sure that MacArthur would soon take the offensive, despite defeats that were pushing U.N. forces into a tight perimeter around Pusan. When he did,

Kennan knew how hard it had been to control MacArthur in Japan. Any insensitivity now to instructions from Washington could lead the Soviet Union to commit its forces. Nitze and Bohlen also worried about this, as did Davies, who stressed the additional danger of Chinese intervention. Even if these worst cases did not materialize, Kennan asked on July 31, what chance would there be of getting Soviet help to end the war if MacArthur was approaching “the gates of Vladivostok”?⁵¹

Restraint had few other advocates in Washington, however, as the planning for MacArthur’s offensive advanced. The Joint Chiefs of Staff disliked having diplomacy constrain military operations, and even within the State Department there were vigorous objections to Kennan’s argument, notably from John Allison, director of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs, who attacked it as “a timid, half-hearted policy designed not to provoke the Soviets to war.” Meanwhile the administration’s critics had become no less vehement. “This noisy and violent Republican minority in Congress [is] paralyzing… an intelligent and courageous approach,” Kennan wrote on August 14. Never before had there been such confusion with respect to foreign policy.

Kennan could not resist, however, making one last effort to sort it all out. On the twenty-third, he sent Acheson some parting recommendations before leaving for Princeton: “I am afraid that, like so many of my thoughts, they will be too remote from general thinking in the Government to be of much practical use to you.”⁵²

This proved to be true. For as Kennan detached himself from the clacking cable machines and began to contemplate what had happened over the past two months, the euphoria he had felt during the early days of the Korean conflict gave way to a more characteristic pessimism—some of it merited, much of it not—about what the United States could hope to accomplish in East Asia. The immediate problem was MacArthur: “We are tolerating a state of affairs in which we do not really have full control over the statements that are being made—and the actions taken—in our name.” But there were larger long-term issues as well.

One had to do with Korea’s future once the fighting had stopped. It had been necessary to resist the invasion, since the “psychological radiations” from a failure to do so would have been so devastating. But did the United States really wish to commit itself, indefinitely, to keeping the Korean peninsula outside of the Russian and Japanese spheres of influence within which it had historically been included? The latter would obviously be the better option, but defeat in war and occupation by the Americans had so weakened Japan that it could no longer play that role. Was there any alternative, then, to tolerating Soviet control, as long as it was not manifested “in ways calculated to throw panic and terror into other Asian peoples and thus to achieve for the Kremlin important successes going far beyond the Korean area”?

The war in Korea had led the Truman administration, in addition to ordering naval patrols in the Taiwan Strait, to increase economic and military assistance to the French in Indochina: this amounted to “guaranteeing the French in an undertaking which neither they nor we, nor both of us together, can win.” Would it not be preferable “to permit the turbulent political currents of that country to find their own level, unimpeded by foreign troops or pressures, even at the probable cost of an eventual deal between Viet-Nam and the Viet-Minh, and the spreading over the whole country of Viet-Minh authority”?

Finally, and most controversially, Kennan insisted that the United States could not indefinitely, using its own strength, keep Japan resistant to Soviet influence. Only the Japanese, through their own choices, could do that; yet how could they exercise that freedom if the Americans kept troops there? Any peace treaty anchored to a continued military presence would never have legitimacy in the eyes of the Japanese. The implied duress would divert their attention to the problem of “how to get United States troops out” rather than “how to meet Soviet pressures against Japan.”

The best solution, then, would be to seek a comprehensive settlement with the Soviet Union—partly explicit, partly tacit—that would terminate hostilities in Korea, admit Communist China to the United Nations, allow a plebiscite to determine Taiwan’s future, bring about the neutralization and demilitarization of Japan, and reduce American military capabilities to a “mixed combat force, commanded and operated as a unit, capable of dealing a sharp blow on a limited front almost anywhere in the world on short notice.” None of this could be left to MacArthur: “It would take a real diplomatic envoy, backed by Presidential authority but instructed to operate quietly, patiently and inconspicuously.”

Kennan admitted that such a project would provoke “violent and outraged opposition.” It would pour oil on fires already kindled by Republican charges “that our Far Eastern policy has been over-lenient to Communism and therefore neglectful of our national security.” But all of that, he too grandly concluded, “is not really my competence, and I do not think I should discuss it in this paper.” It was, as Acheson later summarized it, “a memorandum typical of its gifted author, beautifully expressed, sometimes contradictory, in which were mingled flashes of prophetic insight [with] suggestions… of total impracticality.”⁵³

VII.

Precisely so, which raises the question of what Kennan was trying to say, or do, or mean. He did not deliberately set out to irritate his boss, who was at the time and even in retrospect surprisingly restrained in his response to this document, which was yet another demonstration, or so it seemed, of Kennan’s volatility. Acheson saw him as “not a very useful policy adviser,” Nitze answered crisply years later, when asked what the secretary of state really thought of Kennan. “But there did seem to be a certain affection on Acheson’s part for Kennan, and vice versa,” Nitze’s interviewer protested. “There was,” he acknowledged. Isaiah Berlin, like Joe Alsop, saw in Kennan a dual personality, one part professional, the other elsewhere:

Most people have mood swings, if not that extreme: few, however, turn theirs into prophetically impractical policy memoranda. Toward what empyrean, then, was Kennan drifting?⁵⁴

One way to answer that question is to return to Kennan’s December 1949 National War College lecture, which focused on the underlying systems of international relations: over the past two centuries, he argued, states and statesmen had been carried along by structural shifts that few of them fully understood. Kennan’s distinctiveness lay in his ambition, as a policy planner, to detect such evolutions in international systems and to align statecraft with them. It was another Bismarckian reach for the hem of history.

He reached, however, just as the international system was undergoing its most radical shift in centuries. Kennan’s frame of reference was the balance of power system of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, in which several great powers—most recently the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Russia, and Japan—had balanced one another. This was, for him, the default: the gravitational center to which world politics must sooner or later return, however drastic the disruptions of recent decades. That those disruptions had themselves altered that structure—that bipolarity had replaced multipolarity—was not, and in some ways would never be, visible to him.

He was hardly alone in this. Who would have anticipated, in 1950, that a divided Germany could form the basis, over the next four decades, for a peaceful Europe? That despite devastating regional wars that left Korea divided and unified Vietnam, there would be no world wars? That the United States and the Soviet Union, soon to have tens of thousands of thermonuclear weapons pointed at one another, would agree tacitly never to use any of them? That the only empires of consequence left anywhere in the world would be those run from Washington and Moscow? That China and Taiwan, still under separate regimes and without admitting it, would half a century later share a common capitalist ideology?

The answer, obviously, is that no one did. What set Kennan apart from his contemporaries was not his failure to see this future, but rather his constant concern for how policies and structures related to one another. With the latter shifting in ways that not even Kennan understood, his anxieties came across as contradictions, volatility, even to Alsop and Berlin as a dual personality disorder. Acheson paid little more attention than they did to grand international systems. But he did know, from his legal training, that decisions—however expedient, hasty, or ill informed—built practices, which established precedents, which over time made law, which then became structures. It was enough, he believed, to have some vague sense of the destination toward which you were stumbling, to be of good cheer, and not to look back. The hyperconscientious Kennan could never reconcile himself to such an attitude. Which was why he now chose to depart, at last, for his own empyrean.