George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Why was it, for example, that in their meetings with Germans, Clay’s staff was still seating them at the far ends of tables, as if to replay surrender negotiations? Why couldn’t the Americans understand that their “childish” reliance on ice cream and Coca-Cola revived the Germans’ old sense of superiority? Why relieve them of responsibility by managing—often mismanaging—their daily affairs, while at the same time “bloating their morbid delusions” by assuring them that the future of Europe depended on them?

  Too many Germans regarded defeat as a kind of automobile accident, allowing them to forget what they had done to bring it about. And yet denazification was doing more harm than good. How could one ever acknowledge enough guilt to compensate for the crimes? a half-Jewish editor asked Kennan. Balancing that scale was a task for another world, not this one. Some Germans, however, welcomed having their occupiers cram down their throats things they would never voluntarily have swallowed. They might not like living under the Americans, but they didn’t want them to leave. They were, on the whole, better than the British, who ran their zone with a condescension imported from their empire, and certainly the predatory French, who seemed bent on stripping their zone bare. All were preferable to the nearby Russians.

  And yet it was André François-Poncet, the chief French diplomat in Germany and a spokesman for the new foreign minister, Robert Schuman, who proposed to Kennan a plan to end military government, place the three western zones under civilian commissioners, and give those Germans as much control over their own affairs as possible. The Soviet zone was gone, a German friend warned Kennan. The Russians had imposed a social revolution of such thoroughness and brutality that any attempt to reunify Germany would risk a civil war worse than the one Spain had suffered. A reunited Germany, should that nonetheless prove possible, would probably be “indigestible” for the rest of Europe: “We should, therefore, make a virtue of necessity and cling to the split Germany as the only hope for the consolidation of Europe.”

  Kennan’s visit to Hamburg, where he had served in the late 1920s, hit him especially hard. Berlin had always been a cold imperial city, haughty and pretentious. Such places “invited the wrath of gods and men.” But “poor old Hamburg”—it had been comfortable and good-humored, with no greater ambitions than “the common-sense humdrum of commerce and industry.” Its center had been obliterated in just three nights of incendiary raids in 1943. Seventy-five thousand people had died; three thousand still lay buried in the rubble.

  [H]ere for the first time I felt an unshakeable conviction that no momentary military advantage—even if such could have been calculated to exist, could have justified this stupendous, careless destruction of civilian life and of material values, built up laboriously by human hands, over the course of centuries, for purposes having nothing to do with war.

  It was not enough to excuse this with “the screaming non-sequitur: ‘They did it to us.’” For if the West was to claim superiority over its adversaries, then “it had to learn to fight its wars morally as well as militarily, or not fight them at all.” This might seem, at first, naïve. What it really required, though, was for the United States “to be militarily stronger than its adversaries by a margin sufficient to enable it to dispense with those means which can stave off defeat only at the cost of undermining victory.” It was a nebulous early anticipation of nuclear deterrence.

  With all of this, Kennan found some things little changed. There was the Elbe, the harbor, and its hinterland. There were the same stolid commuters, engrossed in their newspapers and smoking bad cigarettes as they took ferries to work: only the seagulls, riding the waves as they always had done, seemed “to rejoice in the wind and the water and the first premonitions of spring.” Saint Pauli had in part survived: the facades of famous beer halls, the narrow streets stretching off into obscurity, “and at one point, under an archway, with the traditional uniform of fur neck-piece, short skirt and shiny handbag, . . . one of those merry damsels who once contributed so much to the life and lure of this port.”

  A final day left time to visit a few villages outside Frankfurt, near where Kennan had been interned seven years earlier. They were mostly intact, but the burghers who inhabited them—once the backbone of Nazism—were now grotesque: they were like “awkward, aging beetles, who had survived some sort of flood and catastrophe and were still stubbornly crawling around the haunts from which they were supposed to have been removed.” They were throwbacks, however: they were not the future. On the train to Paris that evening,

  I thought of the whole bizonal area stretching off behind us in the dusk; and it seemed to me that you could hear the great low murmur of human life beginning to stir again, beginning to recapture the rhythm of work and life and change, after years of shock and prostration. Here were tens of millions of human beings, of all ages and walks of life, reacting, as human beings always have and must, to the myriad of stimuli of heredity and education and climate and economic necessity and emotion. Whatever we did, they would no longer stand still in thought or in outlook.

  Kennan did not cite Gibbon on this trip, but the historian’s warning about conquered provinces, which had so often raised doubts about the ability of the Nazis and the Soviets to control the territories they had taken, must have haunted him. For now, Kennan did write, the “ironic dialectics of military victory and defeat” were constraining what the Americans and their allies could do—or, at least, what he thought they should do:

  [T]he victor, having taken upon himself all responsibility and all power, has nothing more to gain and only things to lose and is therefore enslaved by his own successes, whereas the vanquished, having nothing more to lose and only things to gain, . . . is free of responsibility, can afford to be clear-sighted and unpityingly realistic, and has only to wait, in order that things may again go his way.14

  What Kennan saw on his trip provided little reason to think that a reunification of Germany, along the lines of Program A, could be imposed from the top down. A division of Germany was already taking place, with the consent of most Germans, from the bottom up. It was, Kennan thought, a Bismarckian moment, “when you hear the garments of the Goddess of Time rustling through the course of events. Who ignores this rustling, does so at his peril.”15

  III.

  Acheson, however, was keeping his options open. His immediate priority was the upcoming visit of the British and French foreign ministers, who would be in Washington for the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty early in April. Nothing had been said to them about Program A, and Acheson did not think this the right occasion to raise it. He was still worried, though, about being rushed too quickly into a division of Germany, and he was not yet ready to write off Kennan’s plan. Acheson’s first concern was process but he had not given up on purpose: what kind of Europe did the United States really want?16

  NATO answered one part of that question: there was now an American commitment to defend the western portions of Europe against a Soviet attack and, by implication, an acknowledgment that the eastern parts would remain, for the foreseeable future, under Soviet domination. That made it hard to see how Germany—already divided into Soviet and western zones—could reunify anytime soon. Acheson had little choice but to proceed with Anglo-American-French planning for an independent West Germany. The purpose the new state would serve, however, was still unclear in his mind. Would it become an end in itself—a final nail in the coffin of a unified Europe—or would it be the means by which that idea might revive?

  The issue had to be settled quickly, because the American, British, and French foreign ministers would be discussing the German question with their Soviet counterpart in Paris at the end of May. Acheson asked Philip Jessup, ambassador at large in the State Department, to supervise preparations, and Jessup unexpectedly endorsed Program A as a set of “optimum” proposals, not to be discarded either “in anticipation of possible Soviet objections [or] for fear that they might be accepted by the Soviet Union and thus be translated into reality.” Whatev
er happened, Kennan made it clear that Program A should be put forward only if there had been careful prior consultations with the British and the French.17

  Acheson approved this procedure, got Truman’s permission to present these ideas to the allies, entrusted Jessup and Bohlen with the assignment, and on May 11 dictated instructions on how it should be done: “Just as the unification of Germany is not an end in itself, so the division of Germany is not an end in itself.” The test would be whether unification advanced the goal of a free Europe. The price for a Red Army withdrawal might well be too high, but

  [a] possible regrouping of troops which would have the effect of removing Russian troops eastward and possibly ending their presence in and passage through the Eastern European countries may have important advantages. It deserves the most careful study.... No outcome—even a good one—is free from objection. Any decision will have some dangers. But this is not a time for avoiding decisions.

  Kennan himself could have written this. But then, on the next morning, James Reston published a simplified version of Program A on the front page of The New York Times. The headlines alone were shocking— —but the text was worse: “The screen of United States, British and French troops now standing between the Soviet Army and Western Europe . . . would be withdrawn.”18

  Big 3 Would Withdraw to Ports in the North Under Proposal.

  French Would Go Home.

  Presentation of Suggestion Will Depend on Soviet Stand in

  Paris Talks.

  The impression given the British and the French, Kennan immediately realized, could only have been that the United States was considering pulling its forces out of Germany, had kept this from them, and was about to spring it on them. Bohlen and Jessup—now in Paris—tried to calm the resulting furor by disavowing any intention to remove or redeploy American forces. Acheson still was not ready to give up, however: he reminded Bevin and Schuman that Germany could not remain permanently occupied. Some “gradual reduction and regrouping” of forces would have to occur. At this point, though, the Russians put an end to the discussion. “The Germans hate us,” General V. I. Chuikov, the Soviet high commissioner for the eastern zone, told Bohlen after Acheson asked him to propose Kennan’s plan. “It is necessary that we maintain our forces in Germany.”19

  So who killed Program A? Reston never revealed his source, but there were plenty of possible culprits: Clay, who had moved from discouragement to satisfaction to outrage as Program A reappeared, disappeared, and reappeared again; Murphy, now in an influential position as acting director of the State Department’s Office of German and Austrian Affairs; Hickerson and his colleagues in the Office of European Affairs, who had long seen NATO as a way to bind the western zones of Germany to Western Europe and the United States; the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who thought the idea militarily unfeasible. And Chuikov certainly had not helped. Whoever did it, Kennan ruefully acknowledged, had administered “a spectacular coup de grace” to Program A.20

  A year earlier Stalin had killed another Kennan initiative by publicizing it: this was the supposedly confidential Smith-Molotov exchange. But that at least had been the act of an adversary, aimed at compromising the United States in the eyes of its allies. The Reston leak came from one or more American officials, who targeted Kennan while seeking to lock Acheson—and, through him, the United States—into an irreversible commitment to a West German state and hence to a divided Germany that would ensure a divided Europe. Acheson could do no more. “Interest in this approach waned,” he wrote blandly in his 1969 memoir of over seven hundred pages, which devoted only three sentences to Program A.21

  Kennan took it all badly. The past few days, he wrote the secretary of state, had eliminated any possibility of Germany’s reunification under the auspices of its occupiers: there now appeared to be “no conditions on which we would really find such a solution satisfactory.” This would surely embitter the Germans, raising the possibility of “some violent manifestation” by which they might unify themselves, demanding the departure of all occupying powers. At least as disturbing was what all of this implied about the American planning process:

  [W]e spent eight weeks last fall working out what we felt would be a logical program for advance toward the unification of Germany. Piece by piece, . . . the essentials of this program have been discarded, and the logic broken up. Some modification was necessary; but the program emerging from the Paris talks now bears no logical connection with the original concept.

  Under these circumstances, Washington might as well let the British and the French solve the German problem, while acknowledging “that we have deferred extensively to their views.”22

  Which Acheson indeed had now done. What Kennan failed to point out, though, was that most American officials had long since given up on German reunification—as he himself had done between 1945 and 1948—so this was hardly a matter of blindly empowering allies. Nor did the Soviet Union want reunification if it could not be on Moscow’s terms. Program A had always been a long shot: even Kennan had not been optimistic about its prospects. Why, then, was he so upset now?

  Probably because Program A, for all its enemies, had won more support in Washington than his views on NATO ever did. There was never much chance of reversing the movement toward a military alliance, but his plan for Germany was a cat with multiple lives: it kept reviving after being declared dead.23 To have it finally buried by a newspaper leak after all of these resurrections was infuriating. It was also alarming, for Kennan had convinced himself that the future of Europe would depend on what was done about Germany. Now, it seemed, that future had been determined by a fluke, rather than by the months of planning Kennan and his staff had devoted to it.

  But it was not really a fluke, because it was not at all clear that even the West Germans would have accepted Program A. Kennan thought he understood Germans as well as any American, but he had not lived among them since 1942. He was aware, but only from a distance, of what they had since endured. As a consequence, he overestimated the Germans’ resentment of their American, British, and French occupiers, and—strangely—underestimated their fear of the Russians. He objected especially to the signs he saw of American consumer culture, but there was only a single reference in his 1949 trip diary to the far more radical transformations that Soviet authorities were imposing in their part of Germany. Kennan acknowledged, two decades later, that he had worried more than most Germans about “the iniquities and inadequacies of our occupational establishment.” These had been, on his part, “grievous miscalculations.”24

  Program A’s fate also upset Kennan because it confirmed what he should already have known about his new boss. It was Acheson’s habit, when circumstances forced him to change his mind, to do so quickly, without regret, often without acknowledgment that the reversal had even taken place. That had happened in August 1946 when, in response to the Turkish Straits crisis, he had gone from being a Henry Wallace sympathizer to a George Kennan publicist almost overnight. Acheson’s shift on Germany in May 1949 was equally abrupt, but Kennan took it as a repudiation. He lacked the skill, as Acheson would put it in another context, of “graciously” conceding what one “no longer had the power to withhold.”25

  Acheson was conceding now, as Kennan saw it, any prospect of resolving Cold War differences within the likely lifetimes of either of them. If Acheson lost sleep over this, there is little evidence of it. Kennan—who could never avoid looking back, or reconsidering, or regretting what might have been—lost a lot.

  IV.

  He could hardly claim, though, that Acheson had not listened. Program A was a grand scheme that ran up against blunt realities, one of which was the secretary of state’s lack of enthusiasm for the pursuit of lost causes. Where the cause was more promising, he would pursue it, even in the face of controversy. That became clear with respect to another Kennan idea, which was that not all communists everywhere were equally dangerous. The very success of communism beyond the Soviet Union, he had long believed, would co
rrupt it with nationalism, so that Moscow could only assume the loyalty of its ideological followers where they had not yet seized power—or where, as in Eastern Europe, the Red Army was keeping them in power. China was Kennan’s prime example: under Davies’s tutelage, he had been arguing since 1947 that a victory for Mao Zedong would not necessarily be one for the Kremlin. He had no word then for what he was describing, but Yugoslavia’s defection in 1948 provided one: it was “Titoism,” and one of Kennan’s priorities in 1949 was to persuade Acheson of its importance.

  “Tito’s heresy is of the type unlikely ever to be forgiven,” he wrote in an updated Policy Planning Staff paper on Yugoslavia, completed on February 10. By successfully defying the Kremlin, Tito had compromised Moscow’s control of its remaining satellite empire. The repercussions would extend not only through Eastern Europe but also among communist parties in France, Italy, and especially China, where Mao “might already be infected with the Tito virus.” The United States should do all it could, therefore, to ensure Tito’s survival, without at the same time endorsing the nature of his regime.26

  The Chinese Communists were “deeply suspicious” of the United States, Kennan added on February 25. But any further aid to Chiang Kai-shek would only alienate the Chinese people, perpetuating the illusion that China’s interests lay with the U.S.S.R. Mao would discover that this was not the case: the Soviet Union would have no more success shaping events in China than had the United States. Eventually a new revolution would either overthrow the Communists or change their character. That would take time, but the Americans could afford to wait: “We are under no Byzantine Tartar compulsion to shackle as our own captive the revolution which we seek to release.”27