George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

A quiet, rather academic-looking fellow.... Bald, slight, not impressive except for his eyes which are most unusual: large, intense, wide-set.... He is the first man I have talked to about Russia who seems to have the facts that support my essential thesis: that Communism isn’t what Russia stands for; it is rather simply a political machine with vested interests.

  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 handwrit
ten 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,

  the leadership is at liberty to put forward for tactical purposes any particular thesis which it finds useful to the cause at any particular moment and to require the faithful and unquestioning acceptance of that thesis by the members of the movement as a whole. This means that truth is not a constant but is actually created, for all intents and purposes, by the Soviet leaders themselves.

  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: