George F. Kennan: An American Life (47 page)

He did so almost single-handedly: there was no eagerness among Kennan’s Foreign Service colleagues to join the new and as yet vaguely defined Policy Planning Staff. Nor was Acheson always helpful. With no background of his own in economics, Kennan had tried to recruit Paul H. Nitze—later to succeed him as staff director—but Acheson blocked the appointment on the grounds that Nitze was “a Wall Street operator,” not “a long-range thinker.” There was not even, for a while, assigned office space. The State Department was moving from its ornate but cramped quarters next to the White House to a spare but more spacious building—vacated by the War Department when it built the Pentagon—in the “Foggy Bottom” section of Washington. The name, Reston explained to his readers, was “not an intellectual condition but a geographical area down by the Potomac.”
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When the staff formally began its operations, on May 5, it had only two other members: Joseph E. Johnson, a Williams College professor with no plans to remain in government, and Carlton Savage, a longtime aide to former secretary of state Cordell Hull. These were not heavy-hitters. It was under these circumstances, Kennan recalled, that

He was staggering “under a terrible burden right now,” George wrote his cousin Charlie James, but he was happy to have the sense “that perhaps I can leave a mark in the conduct of our international business.” This was only the beginning, though, “of a long and hard fight and I think I better not do much talking at this stage.”
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The staff soon grew to include more qualified members: Jacques Reinstein, who supplied the economic expertise Kennan had hoped to get from Nitze; Ware Adams, a Foreign Service officer with a background on German and Austrian issues; Charles (Tick) Bonesteel III, an Army colonel assigned to the State Department who supplied a military perspective; and later that summer, at Kennan’s special request, his former Moscow colleague John Paton Davies, who handled East Asian affairs. Kennan was also fortunate to have Dorothy Hessman follow him into yet another job that generated an “endless torrent of prose.”
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He took three weeks—not two—to propose a response to the European crisis, a pardonable delay given the scale of the problem. On May 23, after many late nights and much anguished discussion, he sent Marshall PPS/1, “Policy With Respect to American Aid to Western Europe,” the first paper to emerge from the Policy Planning Staff and certainly the most influential. Kennan drafted almost all of it, a practice he generally followed. The format, however, met Marshall’s specifications: there was an opening summary of main points, a statement of the problem, a set of proposals for short-term and longer-term solutions, and a conclusion—in this case, a particularly pointed one.

The problem confronting Europe, as Kennan identified it, was not the Soviet Union itself, or international communism, but rather an “economic maladjustment” that had made European society vulnerable to exploitation by totalitarianism. It had arisen from “a profound exhaustion of physical plant and of spiritual vigor,” brought about by the effects of war and the postwar division of the continent. Further communist successes would endanger American interests, a situation that should be “frankly stated” to the American people.

The immediate need was for “effective and dramatic action” to show Washington’s determination to reverse the situation. The objective would be psychological: “to put us on the offensive instead of the defensive, to convince the European peoples that we mean business, to serve as a catalyst for their hope and confidence, and to dramatize for our people the nature of Europe’s problems and the importance of American assistance.” It would be, in short, an application of
leverage,
designed to accomplish a lot with a little. Kennan was vague on just what this might be: perhaps getting coal from the Rhine Valley to wherever else it was needed, possibly providing additional economic aid to Italy. His weakness in economics was showing here: the staff, he explained, would have to study this matter more fully.

Kennan did better when he turned to long-term solutions: the Europeans, he insisted, would have to design their own recovery. In language Marshall himself used in announcing the plan that bore his name, Kennan proclaimed it

The American role would be to finance such a program and to help the Europeans set its priorities. But they would have to act together. The United States could not respond to “isolated and individual appeals.” The goal would be self-sufficiency: a “reasonable assurance that if we support it, this will be the last such program we shall be asked to support in the foreseeable future.”

The question then was how to define “Europe.” Great Britain would have to be included. Germany was nowhere mentioned, but by mentioning Rhine Valley coal and by citing the Americans’ responsibilities in the territories they occupied, Kennan implied its inclusion. He made the point explicit in a war college lecture on May 6, while PPS/1 was still being drafted: reviving productive capacity in western Germany “should be the primary object of our policy.” An equally sensitive issue was whether to invite the Soviet Union and its satellites to participate in the plan. Here Kennan recommended extending an offer, but in such a way that they would either “exclude themselves by unwillingness to accept the proposed conditions or agree to abandon the exclusive orientation of their economies.”

The paper’s conclusion was pure Kennan, although he had reason to know by then that Marshall would approve: “Steps should be taken to clarify what the press has unfortunately come to identify as the ‘Truman Doctrine’, and to remove in particular two damaging impressions which are current in large sections of public opinion.” These were, first, that the United States was responding defensively to communism and would not be acting in the absence of that danger; and, second, that the Truman Doctrine was “a blank check to give economic and military aid to any area in the world where the communists show signs of being successful.” Instead the United States must act “only in cases where the prospective results bear a satisfactory relationship to the expenditure of American resources and effort.”
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Marshall convened top State Department officials on May 28 to discuss PPS/1. Kennan was present, as were Acheson and Will Clayton, just back from Europe and able to describe in startling detail the conditions he had seen. Bohlen was also there to support Kennan’s recommendation that the United States “play it straight,” offering aid to the Soviet Union and its satellites with the expectation that Stalin would refuse and thus take onto himself the responsibility for Europe’s division. Marshall, as was his habit, listened carefully but said little: he did ask, however, what would happen if the Russians accepted. Kennan suggested reminding them “that you like ourselves are a raw material producing and food producing country. We are contributing. What are you going to contribute?” Marshall nodded at this point but said nothing. He sent word to Harvard that day, though, that he would speak briefly a week hence when the university would be awarding him an honorary degree. Bohlen drafted the speech while Acheson, anticipating Marshall’s laconic manner, alerted the British that something significant was in the works.
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The secretary of state’s address, unspectacularly delivered on June 5, 1947, left its audience unaware that they had heard something historic: like Lincoln’s at Gettysburg, it got polite but not enthusiastic applause. Kennan learned that Marshall had drawn on PPS/1 only when he saw the final text. The American media were unsure what to make of the “Marshall Plan,” as Truman insisted on calling it, but thanks to Acheson’s tip, Bevin was ready to act: he and Bidault invited Molotov to Paris to discuss Marshall’s proposal. The Soviet foreign minister arrived there on June 27 with a large group of economic experts, leading the Americans to worry briefly that Stalin had decided to participate in the plan. If he had, he soon changed his mind, ordering Molotov to walk out. The Eastern Europeans were at first told to accept aid with a view to sabotaging the Marshall Plan from within, but Stalin then countermanded those instructions as well.
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It had all gone as Kennan expected. “Strain placed on communist movement by effort to draw up plan for European rehabilitation,” he wrote in a set of briefing notes for Marshall on July 21. “Communist parties in West[ern] Europe forced to show their hand. Russians smoked out in relations with satellite countries.... Events of past weeks the greatest blow to European Communism since termination of hostilities.”
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What, then, was Kennan’s role in designing the Marshall Plan? The secretary of state himself credited PPS/1 as its basis and with characteristic understatement—all the more valued for that—found ways to show his appreciation.
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Kennan’s contributions beyond that, though, are more difficult to sort out. Great Britain and Germany would have been included in the plan even if he had not recommended this: it would have made no economic sense without them. Kennan’s argument that the European crisis was psychological in character and could be reversed by psychological means was more original, although he framed that recommendation as a long-term solution: it was Marshall, Bohlen, and Acheson who saw that a speech made on short notice could accomplish the same thing.

Two features of the Marshall Plan, however, were particularly Kennan’s, one of them a success, the other a failure. The success was offering aid to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Had Stalin agreed to take it, he could have killed the program by ensuring that the U.S. Congress would never vote the necessary appropriations. But Kennan was sure—in a way that no one else in Washington except Bohlen could have been—that Stalin was not that clever and that the offer would catch him off guard. That was what happened: the offer lured him into displaying his own confusion, a devastating blow in a system that claimed infallibility. It was a lot to have accomplished with very little.

Kennan’s other priority—explicitly stated in the conclusion to PPS/1—was for the Marshall Plan to supplant the Truman Doctrine, with its implied obligation to act wherever Soviet aggression or intimidation occurred, without regard to whether American interests were at stake or the means existed with which to defend them. Unfortunately for Kennan, however, the literary arrow he had shot into the air before he had even heard of the Truman Doctrine or the Marshall Plan was now, in the wake of Marshall’s speech, about to make its unexpected impact.

The State Department announced the Policy Planning Staff ’s establishment, along with Kennan’s appointment as its director, on May 7. He combined “great strength of character, not to say toughness, with high-minded idealism,” Jock Balfour informed London, but this was “tempered by a healthy respect for the practicability of any given course.” Kennan had thought the Truman Doctrine an “unnecessary and perhaps even dangerous” overdramatization of the need to aid Greece and Turkey. He knew a great deal about the Soviet Union but had not “given way to the hysteria which colours the views of so many of his countrymen.” Balfour even reported on the Kennans’ living arrangements: he would continue some lecturing at the National War College because his family wanted to hang on to the house it provided for as long as possible.
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Kennan became even more visible a few weeks later when the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop ran the first public story on the “long telegram,” identifying him as its author. It was, they claimed, highly significant that Marshall had given this new responsibility to the man who had produced “the most important single state paper on the Soviet Union.” Worried that the still-secret document had leaked, Kennan hastened to assure Acheson that he had not been the source. He pointed out, however, that the telegram contained little “which has not subsequently been stated as American policy on many occasions and by many other people.”
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“Keep an eye on George F. Kennan,”
The Christian Science Monitor
advised its readers a few days after the Alsops’ column appeared.
United States News
ran a brief biography stressing Kennan’s qualifications for the new job and noting—inaccurately—that while serving in Moscow, he had organized a dance band called “Kennan’s Kampus Kids.” He was “tall, lean, smooth-shaven and bald,”
The Baltimore Sun
reported early in June, alongside an improbable photograph from the 1920s showing an anxious young man with a full head of hair. Meanwhile, the Policy Planning Staff was posing for
The Washington Post
. Its photograph showed an older and more confident Kennan, elegant in a three-piece suit, leaning back in his chair with his chin in one hand and a pen in the other, legs crossed, a notepad balanced on his knee, as if waiting. The staff, journalist Ferdinand Kuhn noted, was as new and as sensible as the air-conditioned Virginia Avenue building where the State Department now had its headquarters. Its members would operate with a “passion for anonymity.”
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