George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  “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.

  He called me in, drew my attention to this anomaly, peered at me over his glasses with raised eyebrows (eyebrows before whose raising, I may say, better men than I had quailed), and waited for an answer. I explained the origins of the article, and pointed out that it had been duly cleared for publication by the competent official committee. This satisfied him.

  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 r
epresenting 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.

  THIRTEEN

  Policy Planner: 1947–1948

  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:

  Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbor comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven’t kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children’s pet kittens. In burying the kitten, you look up and notice a whole section of the barn roof has been blown off and needs instant repair. Somebody shouts from the bathroom window that the pump has stopped working, and there’s no water in the house. At that moment, a truck arrives with 5 tons of stone for the lane. And as you stand there hopelessly, wondering which of these crises to attend to first, you notice the farmer’s little boy standing silently before you with that maddening smile, which is halfway a leer, on his face, and when you ask him what’s up, he says triumphantly, “The bull’s busted out and he’s eating the strawberry bed.”

  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.