George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  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 h
e 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