George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  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.

  [I]f the division of Europe cannot be overcome peacefully at this juncture, when the lines of cleavage have not yet hardened completely across the continent, when the Soviet Union (as I believe) is not yet ready for another war, when the anticommunist sentiment in Germany is momentarily stronger than usual, and when the Soviet satellite area is troubled with serious dissension, uncertainty, and disaffection, then it is not likely that prospects for a peaceful resolution of Europe’s problems will be better after a further period of waiting.

  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 particul
arly 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.

  FIFTEEN

  Reprieve: 1949

  “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