George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  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:

  (a) in the best of circumstances (i.e., that the Russians lack atomic weapons or facilities for employing them against us) it implies on our part a war against the Russian people and the eventual occupation of Russian territory; and

  (b) in the worst of circumstances, the virtual ruin of our country as well as theirs.

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

  (a) preventing the power of the Sov. Gov’t from extending to point vital or important to US or British Empire; and

  (b) without forfeiting the confidence & friendship of the Russian people, to bring [ab]out the discrediting of those forces in Russia who insist that Russia regard itself as at war with the western world.22

  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and Felix Gilbert, discussed the Swiss strategist Antoine-Henri Jomini, whose writings, the authors conceded, were outdated and little read.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:

  Our task is to plan and execute our strategic dispositions in such a way as to compel Sov. Govt. either to accept combat under unfavorable conditions (which it will never do), or withdraw. In this way we can contain Soviet power until Russians tire of the game.

  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.”

  We are in peculiar position of having to defend ourselves against mortal attack, but yet not wishing to inflict mortal defeat on our attacker. We cannot be carried too far away by attractive conception of “the flashing sword of vengeance.” We must be like the porcupine who only gradually convinces the carnivorous beast of prey that he is not a fit object of attack.

  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 p
ride 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 effor
t, 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.”