George F. Kennan: An American Life (44 page)

“ THE REAL CONSEQUENCES OF STATESMANSHIP,” KENNAN ONCE OBSERVED, citing the historian Herbert Butterfield, “are always ironic in their relationship to what the statesman thought he was achieving.”
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What Kennan had hoped to do, during his time at the National War College, was to lay the intellectual foundations for an American grand strategy that would counter the Soviet Union’s challenge to the postwar international system, without resort to war or appeasement. No one has a better claim to having accomplished just that. As Henry Kissinger observed with professional admiration in 1979: “George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.”
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But Kennan took little pride in this achievement. If indeed he originated the strategy of “containment,” he wrote bitterly in his memoirs, composed as the Viet-nam War was escalating, then “I emphatically deny the paternity of any efforts to invoke that doctrine today in situations to which it has, and can have, no proper relevance.” Even after the Cold War had ended and the Soviet Union was itself history, Kennan regarded the “success” of his strategy as a failure because it had taken so long to produce results, because the costs had been so high, and because the United States and its Western European allies had demanded, in the end, “unconditional surrender.” That outcome had been “one of the great disappointments of my life.”

Kennan made this complaint, strangely, at a birthday party. The date was February 15, 1994—the eve of his ninetieth—and the celebration took place at Harold Pratt House on East 68th Street in New York, long the home of the Council on Foreign Relations. The organization had meant to honor Kennan’s accomplishments, but he used the occasion to lament them. He did so with a dejected felicity, reminding his audience of another event that had taken place in the same building almost half a century earlier. It had been then and there, he believed, that the consequences of his actions first began to diverge significantly from his intentions.
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When a younger Kennan, not quite forty-three, arrived at Pratt House on January 7, 1947, to address the Council’s discussion group on “Soviet Foreign Relations,” he did so with considerably less fanfare. The talk was one of dozens he had given since returning from Moscow. The audience would be small, and as was customary for Council events, everything said would be on a “not for attribution” basis. Like many speakers who have heard themselves repeat themselves too often, Kennan did not bother to prepare a text: the rapporteur’s notes are the only record of what he said.

Marxist-Leninist ideology, he told the group, did not guide the actions of Soviet leaders, but it was “a sort of mental eye or prism” through which they viewed the outside world. It justified an amorality little different from that of Russian rulers as far back as Ivan the Terrible; this was, however, at odds with the strong moral sense of the Russian people. Stalin and his subordinates saw enemies, therefore, within and beyond their country ’s borders: they needed those on the outside, who were mostly imaginary, to excuse their brutality toward those on the inside, who were real enough. But Russians would outlast the regime that now governed them. That made it possible for the United States and its allies to “contain” Soviet power, “if it were done courteously and in a non-provocative way,” for a long enough time to allow internal changes to come about in Russia. When they did, no one would be more grateful than the Russians themselves. Nothing could be accomplished, though, as Wallace wished to do, “by the glad hand and the winning smile.” Americans would have to recognize that they were dealing “with the driving force of a great idea and a method of looking at the world which is anchored in the experience of centuries.”

Like many Council discussions, the one that followed meandered. The author Louis Fischer doubted that Russians were looking for new leadership: perhaps not, Kennan replied, but he had noticed a “weariness and lassitude” among them. Journalist Joseph Barnes pointed out that during the past several years more Russians had come into contact with foreigners than ever before: yes, Kennan noted, but there were at present hardly any foreigners inside the U.S.S.R. George S. Franklin, Jr., of the Council staff, wanted to know what within the Soviet leadership gave Kennan grounds for optimism: its flexibility, caution, and unwillingness to allow commitments to exceed capabilities, he responded. International banker R. Gordon Wasson wondered why, if xenophobia was so pervasive in Russia, agents of International Harvester and the Singer Sewing Machine Company had found warm receptions there in the nineteenth century. Russians themselves were friendly to foreigners, Kennan explained; it was their governments, tsarist and Soviet, that had tried to curb that tendency. Geroid T. Robinson, the Columbia history professor who had coauthored the Bohlen-Robinson report, observed that if force was necessary to maintain the Soviet government in power and if Soviet leaders needed to exaggerate outside dangers to justify the use of that force, then it was those dangers that kept them in power and they could not afford more conciliatory policies. But that was what Kennan had said in the first place.
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Kennan could have been pardoned, then, for leaving Pratt House vaguely dissatisfied: he did not appear to have made much of an impression. Wasson, however, liked the talk well enough to suggest revising it for publication in the Council’s journal,
Foreign Affairs
, and its longtime editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong—who had not been present—followed up on January 10 with a similar request. He had seen a copy of Kennan’s lecture at Yale, “which means that you not only have your ideas well in mind, but also have put them in preliminary written form.” Kennan might be under some constraints as to what he could say, “but I wonder whether the substance of your point of view as a whole isn’t so fair and constructive, and does not tend so much in the direction of a really mutual understanding between the Soviets and ourselves, that you would be warranted in undertaking to lay it before the public.”

Armstrong too, it seemed, had not quite gotten the point, and Kennan took his time in replying. When he did, on February 4, he observed that because he was still in the State Department, “I really can not write anything of value on Russia for publication under my own name. If you would be interested in an anonymous article, or one under a pen name, . . . I might be able to make the necessary arrangements.” In no hurry either, Armstrong waited until March 7 before agreeing “that the interest of the projected article more than outweighs from our point of view the disadvantage of anonymity.” Perhaps the piece would enable Kennan “to make effectively your one hopeful point which revolves around the liking that most Americans seem to have for most Russians.” This appeared to leave a door open, “whether to a blind alley or not, no one can say.”
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While these leisurely and somewhat astigmatic exchanges were going on, a lot was happening elsewhere. On the evening Kennan spoke at the Council, President Truman announced the unexpected resignation of Secretary of State Byrnes and, in an even greater surprise, nominated as his replacement General George C. Marshall, the austere but highly respected wartime Army chief of staff, now back from his unsuccessful mission to China. Byrnes had written Kennan the previous day to confirm his promotion to career minister, and in his response Kennan expressed “keen disappointment” that Byrnes would be stepping down. The regret was probably real, for however much Byrnes might have irritated Kennan at the December 1945 Moscow foreign ministers’ conference, he had since stuck to a policy of what he called “patience with firmness” with respect to the Soviet Union. When the Wallace controversy broke out the following September, Byrnes made it clear that if the president did not fire his secretary of commerce, his secretary of state would quit. Truman backed Byrnes, but their relationship soured, and so three and a half months later, ostensibly for health reasons, Byrnes did resign.
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Kennan’s only previous contact with Marshall had been inauspicious: the general attended his unfortunate Pentagon briefing on Azores bases in the fall of 1943. But Marshall had, while in China, read several of Kennan’s dispatches from Moscow, including the “long telegram.” He would have heard more from Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, who had taken a special interest in advancing Kennan’s career, as well as from former military colleagues now at the National War College. An especially convincing accolade came from Walter Bedell Smith in Moscow, who had been one of Marshall’s wartime aides:

Smith suggested including Kennan on the American delegation to an upcoming Moscow foreign ministers’ conference, but Marshall had a larger responsibility in mind. As secretary of state, he was determined to achieve the policy coordination that had been missing during the war and, in his view, during the first year and a half of peace. Kennan, he thought, could help. “I was very close to Marshall then,” Bohlen recalled. “The telegram from Moscow was the thing that put George in the Policy Planning Staff.”
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Marshall took office on January 21, and three days later Under Secretary of State Acheson, acting on his new boss’s instructions, asked Kennan whether he might be interested in running a new State Department organization “for [the] review and planning of policy.” The group’s function, Acheson later recalled, would be

Despite his hopes to retire from the Foreign Service after completing his National War College duties, Kennan accepted the offer while wondering how to make the transition. “Mind you, I was dying to do this work,” but he couldn’t take time from his war college duties without Admiral Hill’s permission, and yet “I had no authorization to tell him about these plans.” Acheson and Kennan agreed, in the end, that he would take the job at an undetermined date in the spring. But Kennan had “no very clear understanding of what was involved; I am not sure that Mr. Acheson had gained a much clearer one from General Marshall.”
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“Well, gentlemen,” Loy Henderson remembered Acheson telling his staff, “we’re going to have a new office—an office of Policy Planning. George Kennan’s going to be brought in to take care of it. Loy, don’t you think that’s a good idea?” Henderson said that a man like Kennan would be excellent for the job. “A man like Kennan?” Acheson responded. “There’s nobody like Kennan.” The most important requirement for the new unit, Bohlen explained to Sir John (Jock) Balfour, the well-informed British
chargé d’affaires,
at a dinner party late in January, would be to ensure that all levels of the State Department understood official policy and the motives that lay behind it. People “like Kennan” might also give some talks on this subject. Acheson, also present, had already heard this once too often: “I am constantly being told that ‘people like George Kennan’ should give the boys the low-down about Russia,” he grumbled. “Unfortunately there is only one George Kennan.”
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Certainly there was only one Acheson. Trained as a lawyer, the dapper, defiantly mustachioed under secretary of state had surprisingly little foreign policy experience when Truman appointed him to that position in August 1945. Preoccupied at first with the international control of atomic energy, Acheson had been one of the last of the president’s top advisers—apart from Wallace himself—to give up on postwar cooperation with the U.S.S.R. Kennan’s “long telegram,” Acheson later acknowledged, had had a “deep effect on thinking within the Government,” but it made little impression on him. When Acheson did finally change his mind about Stalin’s intentions, in August 1946, he did so for different reasons, totally and almost overnight.

The provocation was Soviet demands on Turkey for boundary concessions and bases in the Dardanelles. Stalin backed down when Truman sent the Sixth Fleet into the eastern Mediterranean, but Acheson did not back off. The crisis, however belatedly, caused him to connect dots: he suddenly saw how Soviet ambitions, American complacency, and British weakness might combine to upset the balance of power in Europe. Acheson went from assuming the best to suspecting the worst: it was shortly after that he began encouraging Kennan to speak openly about the Soviet danger. His “predictions and warnings could not have been better,” Acheson later acknowledged. “We [had] responded to them slowly.”

But Kennan’s recommendations for American policy had been “of no help.” They amounted to exhortations “to be of good heart, to look out for our own social and economic health, to present a good face to the world, all of which the Government was trying to do.” Composed in the 1960s after he and Kennan had disagreed about many things, Acheson’s complaint may not have reflected what he thought in 1947. His contemporary comments, however, mix respect for Kennan with just enough acidity to suggest that one of the things about which Acheson was unclear, regarding the planning staff job, was whether the Soviet expert that Kennan had been could function equally successfully as the policy adviser Marshall wanted him to become.
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