George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  The hydrogen bomb debate distracted everyone over the next few months, but Nitze kept the idea of a conventional buildup alive by skillfully coupling his call for developing thermonuclear weapons with a recommendation to review all national security requirements. That won Acheson’s support for the “super” and ultimately even Lilienthal’s. Neither Truman nor Johnson understood what Nitze had in mind, but Acheson saw it clearly, and Kennan had a sense of it. If the United States was ever going to reduce its dependence on nuclear weapons, he wrote on the eve of his departure for Latin America, then this might require “a state of semi-mobilization.”30

  Acheson later implied that he had sent Kennan south to get him out of town while Nitze’s review was getting under way. That’s unlikely, because Kennan had been planning his trip for well over a year. He also sympathized with Nitze’s objective, which was to strengthen nonnuclear as well as nuclear means of deterrence. Kennan did believe, however, that this could be done only by drastically reducing “the exorbitant costs of national defense.” In this respect, he shared the views of Truman, Johnson, and other fiscal conservatives. Nitze, drawing on domestic policy studies undertaken by White House economic advisers, took a different approach. He pointed out that increased expenditures would create new jobs, generating the additional tax revenue that would allow balancing the budget at a higher level while correcting the American deficiency in conventional arms. It was a posthumous enlistment, in the Cold War, of John Maynard Keynes.31

  It’s also unlikely, though, that Acheson or Nitze regretted Kennan’s absence as they developed this line of argument. Kennan had opposed the presidential decision that allowed Nitze’s review to proceed. He knew little about economics, Keynesian or otherwise. His preference for prophecy was isolating him within the government. And he was becoming increasingly wary of policy papers whose content had to reflect a consensus and whose implementation he could not control: “You understand how hard this was for someone like myself, who felt that what you do has to be flexible, according to the situation of the moment.” Kennan’s real problem with the new initiative, Nitze believed, was that it was to be “a group paper, not his.”32

  NSC 68, “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” prepared mostly within the Policy Planning Staff, went to Truman on April 14, 1950. It was worthy of Kennan in several ways. One was length: the report came to sixty-six legal-size pages. A second was style: although classified top secret, it read as if meant to be proclaimed, even preached—its most memorable phrase, which Davies contributed, was the need to “frustrate the Kremlin’s design.” A third was its acceptance of containment: there need be neither appeasement of the Soviet Union nor a war fought with it. A fourth was the imprint of a distinctive personality: despite Nitze’s claim, he dominated the drafting, much as Kennan had always done. A final similarity was historical significance: since its declassification in 1975, historians have regarded NSC 68, alongside Kennan’s “long telegram” and “X” article, as a foundational statement of United States grand strategy in the Cold War.33

  But both Kennan and Bohlen objected to NSC 68, when they finally read it, for much the same reason that Kennan had opposed the Truman Doctrine. In order to “sell” the idea of a major military buildup—in this case, to Truman himself—the document exaggerated the threats the United States confronted. It portrayed a Soviet Union resolved to risk war as soon as its capabilities exceeded those of the Americans and their allies: that point would come, it claimed, if nothing was done, as early as 1954. It rejected distinctions between vital and peripheral interests, emphasizing instead the damaging psychological effects of losing even remote regions to communism. It saw all parts of the world as equally important because all threats were equally dangerous. And because it ruled out both appeasement and all-out war, it called for responding to aggression wherever and at whatever level it might take place. At Acheson’s suggestion, NSC 68 contained no estimate of what all this would cost. The amounts would be huge, though, which led Bohlen to conclude, shortsightedly, that “there was absolutely no chance that [it] would be adopted.”34

  Acheson was unrepentant. Of course NSC 68 exaggerated, he admitted in his memoirs. Its purpose was “to so bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’ that not only could the President make the decision but the decision could be carried out.... If we made our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise.” There were times, his great mentor Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had said, when “we need education in the obvious more than the investigation of the obscure.” Kennan, when asked about this shortly after Acheson’s account came out, had his own Holmes reference ready: the great man had also observed “that he couldn’t write out his philosophy of the law; he could express it only as it applied to specific cases.” Documents like NSC 68, Kennan argued, “assume a static world. They freeze policy, making it impossible to respond to external changes.”35

  The issue, fundamentally, was the tension between planning policy and executing it. Kennan’s approach, one historian observed, relied heavily on the “noncommunicable wisdom of the experienced career official” and had little patience with the “rigidities, simplifications, and artificialities” involved in administering large organizations. Acheson, in turn, had to think about exactly this: “I recognized and highly appreciated the personal and esoteric skill of our Foreign Service officers, but believed that insofar as their wisdom was ‘non-communicable,’ its value, though great in operations abroad, was limited in Washington.” Davies, on this point, sided with Acheson. “Kennan and Bohlen thought that NSC-68 was an extreme reaction and a misreading of Soviet intentions,” he recalled, “because it was so schematic. As indeed it was. It was highly schematic, it was a counter to the Communist Manifesto.” The Soviet Union “was a growing threat to the United States that had to be met. Whatever it cost, we had to do it.”36

  V.

  The Kennans, at the beginning of 1950, were renting a house at 3707 33rd Place NW, a cul-de-sac in the Cleveland Park section of Washington, not far from the National Zoo. Grace was seventeen, Joan was thirteen, and Christopher was just over a month old: he was “very healthy and good natured,” George wrote a friend, “and vegetates quite normally.” Meanwhile Annelise had written to Kent, now a professor of music at the University of Texas, to thank him for a basket of grapefruit. These became regular Christmas gifts, and the appreciative letters back to Austin—sometimes from Annelise, more often from George—would over the next several decades chronicle family life. Apart from the children, the main topic in Annelise’s first grapefruit letter was George’s upcoming sabbatical: “We haven’t decided where to go yet, but the chances are pretty much in favour of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. They have asked him to come.” In the meantime George had taken up carpentry. He had built himself a workshop, was repairing old things, and making new ones. He would love to get some classical guitar music. Having taught himself to read it, “he struggles along in his spare moments.”37

  Finances were also a struggle. “My mother was a very feminine woman who greatly enjoyed pretty clothes,” Joan recalled, “but not to the point of ever neglecting what was most important. She could make do when she had to.” One day a Washington policeman stopped her because the car she was driving had Pennsylvania plates. When asked where they lived, Annelise was about to say East Berlin when Grace blurted out: “Oh, we live just around the corner.” This got them a fifteen-dollar fine, which meant that Annelise wouldn’t be able to buy the new dress for which she’d been saving money. She surprised her daughters by—uncharacteristically—bursting into tears.38

  The Institute appointment was definite by the middle of February, although Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dartmouth, as well as Princeton and Yale, had also tried to recruit Kennan. He would receive the equivalent of his Foreign Service salary, which he would be free to supplement through occasional lecturing and perhaps part-time t
eaching. Kennan would leave his job as State Department counselor, as he had requested, at the end of June. What he would do at the Institute was left vague, although he had hinted at an agenda a few days after his November 1949 meeting with Oppenheimer, when he wrote of the need for “an intensive educational effort directed toward our public opinion in general and particularly toward the work of our universities.”39 For the moment, though, he had a more immediate objective: this was to write, for the widely circulated Reader’s Digest, an updated “X” article.

  The idea came from Paul Palmer, senior editor of the magazine, who had approached Kennan the previous September about critiquing the “preventive war psychology” that he saw sweeping the country. Kennan agreed, knowing that news of the Soviet atomic bomb was about to break. Acheson approved the idea, but the need for State Department clearances delayed the article’s appearance: it had been “plucked and torn,” Kennan wrote Palmer, by people more interested in reducing its vulnerability than in improving its legibility. The original “X” article, “happily, though fortuitously,” had avoided such pitfalls and appeared “in all its helpless innocence.” The new piece finally came out in late February 1950, under Kennan’s own name, with the title: “Is War with Russia Inevitable? Five Solid Arguments for Peace.”

  The subtitle answered the question. War was always possible, Kennan argued, but highly unlikely. Soviet imperialism had bitten off more than it could chew. The end of the American atomic monopoly had not significantly shifted the military balance. A strong defense was necessary, but not “a morbid preoccupation with what could possibly happen if.” Americans should avoid “vainglorious schemes for changing human nature,” while cultivating “Christian humility before the enormous complexity of the world in which it has been given to us to live.” For all the effort that went into it, the article fell flat, confirming Kennan’s suspicion that publicity was more a matter of accident—an exasperated telegram, a mysterious pseudonym, a malicious leak—than of design.40

  Disappointed by this, and by the tepid response to his Milwaukee speech, Kennan hoped to cheer himself up by attending the twenty-fifth reunion of his Princeton class: he had, he wrote Oppenheimer, “succumbed to some very decent and considerate letters from fellow alumni.” On June 8 he, Annelise, and Jeanette drove there from the farm. An undergraduate “checked my name off the list, and coolly asked me for $75.00. I was horrified. I was head over heels in debt. I couldn’t have raised $75.00 by any stretch of the imagination. I fled, and repaired in panic to the Institute.” Oppenheimer offered to cover the cost, but Kennan refused and arranged instead for a telegram to be sent—from his Washington office—conveying regrets that he would not be able to attend after all. The three disheartened celebrants then slipped quietly out of town, driving to Dartmouth where, on the eleventh, George received an honorary degree. Another, from Yale, was awarded on the next day, “as a gesture of respect,” Kennan was told, “for the Department of State in the face of MacCarthy’s [sic] attacks.”

  On June 14 he was back in Washington, where Webb wanted to talk about his future. His plan, Kennan told the under secretary of state, was to be away for at least an academic year: what happened after that depended on “what use [the department] could make of me.” If no one else qualified, perhaps ambassador to Great Britain? Webb said he had already spoken with Acheson about that post, which was “so expensive that I would not be able to afford it.” Kennan sat in for Nitze at one last meeting of the Policy Planning Staff, spent a gloomy afternoon griping to Joe Alsop about the hopelessness of conducting coherent policy in a democracy, and then went back to the farm. While he was driving to a nursery a few days later to pick up some trees, inspiration struck, so he pulled over and composed a poem.

  From: G. F. Kennan

  To: The Members of the Policy Planning Staff

  Subject: Their Peculiar Fate

  Friends, teachers, pupils; toilers at the wheels;

  Undaunted drones of the official hive,

  In deep frustration doomed to strive,

  To power and to action uncommitted,

  Condemned (disconsolate, in world of steel and glass confined)

  To course the foggy bottoms of the mind,

  Unaided, unencouraged, to pursue,

  The rarer bloom, the deeper hue,

  The choicer fragrance—these to glean

  And, having gleaned, to synthesize

  And long in deepest reticence to hide . . .

  Until some distant day—perhaps—permitted,

  Anonymous and unidentified,

  The Great White Queen

  at last

  to fertilize.

  . . . .

  Who knows?

  Perhaps in moment unforeseen

  The Great White Queen,

  Made fruitful by your seed,

  may yet create

  So dazzling and so beauteous a brood

  That worlds will marvel, history admire.

  And then the scorned, no-longer-wanted sire,

  From bondage loosed, from travail freed,

  Basking beside the rays these progeny exude,

  May find the warmth to which all souls aspire

  in autumn late.

  He meant it to be his last Policy Planning Staff paper.41

  VI.

  Perhaps it would have been, had it not been for Stalin, Mao, and the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, who found a way, on June 25, 1950, to frustrate this and many other American designs. Korea, like Germany, had remained divided at the end of World War II. Unlike Germany, however, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union regarded the country as a vital interest. They were thus able to agree, if tacitly, on a mutual withdrawal of occupation forces, what Kennan had long hoped for in Germany. United Nations–sponsored elections south of the 38th parallel—the dividing line hastily drawn at the end of the war—had by then established the Republic of Korea; and the Soviet Union, without U.N. sanction, had set up the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north. It was no satisfactory solution, but by Cold War standards it looked like a relatively untroublesome one, which was why Acheson felt comfortable excluding South Korea from the “defensive perimeter” he publicly announced in January 1950. The only difficulty was that Stalin, Mao, and Kim read his speech—and probably also, courtesy of British spies operating in Washington at the time, NSC 48/2, upon which it had been based. 42

  There had been indications, Kennan later recalled, that military operations might begin soon somewhere in the communist world, but the intelligence was not site-specific and MacArthur’s analysts in Tokyo discounted it. As a result, North Korea’s attack on South Korea, undertaken with the full knowledge and support of Stalin and Mao, caught the rest of the world by surprise. It came on a Sunday: President Truman was at his home in Independence, Missouri; Acheson was at his Maryland farm; Nitze was fishing in New Brunswick miles away from the nearest road; and Kennan was spending a quiet weekend with his family in East Berlin (Pennsylvania). He knew nothing of the invasion until they returned to Washington late that afternoon and saw the newspaper headlines: “Nobody had thought to notify me, and perhaps there was no reason anybody should have; but I could not help but reflect that General Marshall would have seen that this was done.”43

  Kennan had asked to be relieved of policy responsibilities. As with most things he did, however, there was a certain ambivalence about this. “It never occurred to me that you [and Acheson] would make foreign policy without having first consulted me,” Nitze remembered him saying sometime in the summer of 1950. Now, with Nitze stuck in the wilds of Canada—the first leg of his trip back had to be by canoe—Acheson welcomed Kennan’s offer to help. The next two months were an extraordinary moment in Kennan’s career: at no other point did he operate nearer to the top levels of government in a major crisis, or with greater freedom to provide advice. Remarkably—but with an eye to history and perhaps biography—he found the time to keep a detailed diary of those crowded days. It showed wha
t he meant about the inadequacies of grand strategic documents that sought to embed, as if in amber, the complexities of a rapidly shifting world. At the same time it revealed several of these inadequacies as having been his own.44

  The first and most obvious one had to do with the “defensive perimeter” strategy, which reflected Kennan’s principle that because some interests were more important than others, not all needed to be defended. That sounded good in theory; in practice, however, it conflicted with another principle in which Kennan believed strongly—that psychology was as important as industrial-military capability in shaping world politics. Having excluded South Korea from American protection because it was militarily insignificant, he now concluded along with almost everyone else in Washington that it was psychologically vital. So too, he insisted, was the defense of Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists. Kennan’s first recommendation upon arriving at the State Department on the evening of June 25—it was probably the first on this subj ect from anyone in government—was to ensure “that Formosa did not fall to the communists since this, coming on top of the Korean attack, would be calamitous to our position in the Far East.”45