George F. Kennan: An American Life (48 page)

That was the intention, but late in June the July issue of
Foreign Affairs
came out. With its somber cover and stolid contents, the quarterly made no effort to reach a mass audience: it cost $1.25 a copy, a lot in 1947, and its circulation was just over 19,000. There were articles that month on peacemaking, trade charters, international law, self-government in U.S. territories, Latin American population problems, and the Dutch-Belgian economic union. These raised few eyebrows, but one that did—at least in Moscow—was an essay by Yevgeny Varga, one of Stalin’s economic advisers, that cited the Greek-Turkish crisis and the Truman Doctrine as evidence that Washington and London were cooperating to preserve capitalism. Varga seemed to be challenging Leninist orthodoxy about capitalist contradictions, and he got into trouble at home for having done so. Immediately preceding his article was one that made no reference at all to those recent events. Its title was “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” and its author was listed, without explanation, as “X.”
⁴⁴

No one paid much attention until July 8, when
New York Times
columnist Arthur Krock pointed out that its argument was “exactly that adopted by the American government after appeasement of the Kremlin proved a failure.” Obviously the author had studied the Soviet Union for years “at the closest range possible for a foreigner.” His analysis had been so accurate that the State Department had used it to predict how Molotov would respond, at the Paris conference the previous week, to the American offer of Marshall Plan aid. The views of “X,” Krock concluded, “closely resemble those marked ‘Top Secret’ in several official files in Washington .”
⁴⁵

This set off a scramble for copies of
Foreign Affairs
. Krock had not named Kennan, but he knew who he was writing about because Forrestal had let him see the draft, with Kennan’s name still on it, that had gone to Armstrong. By the end of the day, the United Press was reporting “X” ’s identity: the tip-off was not just the argument but also the prose. “If Kennan didn’t write that article,” one diplomat commented, then it was done by someone who could “imitate his writing style.” No one else, Hessman later confirmed, would have quoted from Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
. The State Department did not deny the rumor, and on July 9 the
Daily Worker
, the organ of the Communist Party of the United States, exposed the plot: “ ‘X’ Bared as State Dep’t Aid [
sic
]: Calls for Overthrow of Soviet Government.” That clipping made its way into Grace Kennan’s scrapbook. “The first nasty article,” she noted carefully, “but it’s about Mr. X who may or may not be Daddy.”
⁴⁶

The next issue of
Newsweek
treated the “X” article—and Kennan’s ascent within the State Department—as a long-delayed vindication for the Soviet specialists Kelley had begun training two decades earlier. This “tightly knit little career group,” having survived “the appeasement and war years,” had concluded from them that dealing with Stalin was impossible. The “X” article, reflecting their thinking, explained the reasons behind the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, while charting “the course that this country is likely to pursue for years to come.”
⁴⁷

Far from being anonymous, Kennan was now extremely conspicuous: “Feeling like one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster, I absorbed the bombardment of press comment that now set in.” Equally unsettling was what Marshall might say. He had been pleased to see Kennan’s appointment publicized, because it suggested seriousness within the State Department about constructing a postwar grand strategy. He was not at all happy, however, to find what purported to be that strategy—along with its alleged author—emblazoned across the pages of national newsmagazines.

Marshall never mentioned the matter to Kennan again, “[b]ut it was long, I suspect, before he recovered from his astonishment over the strange ways of the department he now headed.”
⁴⁸

Kennan might soon have faded back into the anonymity he and Marshall wanted, had it not been for another unexpected event: Walter Lippmann brought his copy of
Foreign Affairs
with him to his summer fishing camp in Maine. When he returned to his home in Washington,
Time
magazine reported, America’s “best-known pundit” had no fish, but he did have a juicy target at which he now took aim: “Two secretaries hovered beside him. Western Union stood by to pick up his copy daily at 1 o’clock and transmit it to New York, while Mr. Lippmann, in red silk Chinese trousers and a grey-&-black silk shirt, sat at his antique desk and wrote.” And wrote, and wrote.

Lippmann produced fourteen columns on “Mr. X” for the
New York Herald Tribune
, the first of which appeared on September 2, 1947. Widely syndicated and republished as a short book entitled
The Cold War
—one of the first public uses of that term—they argued that Kennan had spawned a “strategic monstrosity” that would relinquish the initiative to Stalin, exhaust the United States, and force it into dependency on “a coalition of disorganized, disunited, feeble or disorderly nations, tribes and factions.” Only a miracle could make “containment” work: that concept assumed a competition in which “the Soviet Union will break its leg while the United States grows a pair of wings to speed it on its way.”

The basis for Lippmann’s complaint was his certainty that Kennan had inspired the Truman Doctrine, a conclusion he reached by reasoning backward. Had not Truman claimed the need to assist victims of totalitarianism everywhere? Had not Kennan insisted that the United States must “confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world”? It followed, in Lippmann’s mind at least, that the “X” article was “not only an analytical interpretation of the sources of Soviet conduct. It is also a document of primary importance on the sources of American foreign policy—of at least that part of it which is known as the Truman Doctrine.”
⁴⁹

This could not have been more wrong. Kennan’s “Psychological Background” paper, completed at the end of January 1947, had indeed preceded Truman’s March 12 speech, but there is no evidence that it influenced the drafting of that address and abundant evidence that Kennan had sought to remove the language in it to which Lippmann later objected. Kennan had made his own objections to the Truman Doctrine clear in his National War College lectures, and in PPS/1 he recommended scrapping the idea altogether. Those positions were not public, but Lippmann had excellent sources within the government: Kennan had even consulted him, on Forrestal’s recommendation, with respect to the Marshall Plan. Lippmann later acknowledged having found Kennan upset by the Truman Doctrine. “[W]e were in pretty good agreement, I thought.”

Then the “X” article came out. Lippmann interpreted it as representing a faction within the State Department—opposed to the Marshall Plan—that favored the “military encirclement of the Soviet Union.” They were using Kennan to promote that objective. Hence Lippmann’s public attack: Kennan had either misled him or been captured by hard-liners. Lippmann could have cleared up the matter with a single phone call, but unlike Reston, Krock, and the Alsops, he was not an investigative reporter. It was not his habit to seek out information but rather to wait for it to come to him. When it did, he pronounced on its significance. And what he had, at his fishing camp in the late summer of 1947, were two apparently parallel texts: Truman’s speech and Kennan’s article. That was sufficient.
⁵⁰

“Mr. Lippmann,” Kennan recalled ruefully, “mistook me for the author of precisely those features of the Truman Doctrine which I had most vigorously opposed.” Privately, Kennan suspected a more personal reason for Lippmann’s anger. Armstrong had banished Lippmann—and any mention of Lippmann—from the pages of
Foreign Affairs
after the editor’s wife left him to marry the columnist in 1938. Lippmann in turn, Kennan believed, resented the fact that he had published the “X” article in Armstrong’s journal, the only one in which Lippmann could not appear.
⁵¹

Armstrong, pleased with all the attention, could not resist a bit of needling. “I see that Mr. Lippmann, having gone to Europe saying that the policy of containing Russia was based on fallacies and would fail, comes back saying that it has succeeded so well that it should be abandoned,” he wrote Kennan in November. Kennan, by then, was resigned to Lippmann’s inconsistencies: “I have never doubted that in the end the paths of Mr. Lippmann and myself would meet,” he replied. “History will tell which was the more tortuous.”
⁵²

Whatever motivated Lippmann, Kennan also bore—and later acknowledged—responsibility for what had happened. His language did imply relinquishing the initiative to the Kremlin: it was difficult to read any other meaning into “the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manœuvres of Soviet policy.” He failed to say where the United States would find the means to do this, apart from maintaining its own self-confidence. He neglected to revise his draft in the light of the questions the Truman Doctrine had raised in his mind, which he in turn had raised with his war college students. He had time to do this: his final draft did not go to Armstrong until April 11, a day short of a month since Truman had made his speech. His insistence on anonymity secured the article a level of scrutiny it might not have received had he used his own name. And even after that anonymity had evaporated, Kennan continued to seek refuge in it: when Lippmann pounced, Kennan interpreted his own official responsibilities as precluding a public response, preferring instead to suffer in silence. Kennan’s “containment” therefore became synonymous, in the minds of most people who knew the phrase, with Truman’s doctrine.
⁵³

Herbert Butterfield, whom Kennan read later in life, wrote of “the tricks that time plays with the purposes of men, as it turns those purposes to ends not realised.” Time played a trick on Kennan just as he was attaining national and international prominence. His Council on Foreign Relations talk, his essay for Forrestal, and its subsequent publication in
Foreign Affairs
, all looked backward to the despair of 1946 when war or appeasement appeared to be the only alternatives open to the United States. Kennan’s criticisms of the Truman Doctrine, however, looked forward to the purposefulness of 1947: having decided to resist the Soviet Union, how might the United States do that with maximum effectiveness at minimal cost?
⁵⁴

But time does not tolerate such Janus-like postures. However distinct
visions
of the past and the future may be, conclusions drawn from them coexist in the present, intertwine, and often surprise. That was what happened to Kennan. He did indeed, as Kissinger acknowledged, come closer than anyone else to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era. But after 1947 he could never regard the doctrine with which he was credited as his own. That produced a dejection extending over dozens of Kennan birthdays to come.

KENNAN RETURNED TO THE NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE FOR WHAT he described as a farewell lecture on June 18, 1947. It seemed like centuries, he told his former students, since he had gone to work at the State Department. His months of teaching were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within “neat, geometric patterns” that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was “like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experienced it.”

There was, however, an analogy that might help. “I have a largish farm in Pennsylvania. The reason you never see me around here on weekends (or rather, the reason you
would
never see me around here if
you
were here on weekends) is that I am up there trying to look after that farm.” It had 235 acres, on each of which things were happening. Weekends, in theory, were days of rest. But farms defied theory:

Policy planning was like that. You might anticipate a problem three or four months into the future, but by the time you’d got your ideas down on paper, the months had shrunk to three or four weeks. Getting the paper approved took still more time, which left perhaps three or four days. And by the time others had translated those ideas into action, “the thing you were planning for took place the day before yesterday, and everyone wants to know why in the hell you didn’t foresee it a long time ago.” Meanwhile, 234 other problems were following similar trajectories, causing throngs of people to stand around trying to get your attention: “Say, do you know that the bull is out there in the strawberry patch again?”
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