George F. Kennan: An American Life (49 page)

So how good a planner was Kennan? That he pioneered the process goes without saying: he was the first and remains the most respected of all Policy Planning Staff directors. Nor could he complain about access. Marshall gave him an office next to his own, with the implied invitation to walk through the door connecting them whenever he felt the need.
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There was no competition: grand strategy was a new concept in Washington, and Marshall’s prestige was such that the State Department—for the moment at least—took the lead in shaping it. The conditions for planning, then, were as good as any planner could expect to get. The world, however, defied theory as much as the farm did. Kennan relished and in many ways rose to the challenges his new job posed. In the end, though, he failed to master them—thereby setting the pattern for all the policy planners who would succeed him.

Kennan delivered his June 18 lecture extemporaneously: there wasn’t time to do more than sketch out rough notes. For that reason, though, it—together with a more formal lecture he had given on May 6—provides a good sense of what was on his mind as he was setting up the Policy Planning Staff. They show that even as he was helping to design the Marshall Plan, he was looking beyond it in search of general principles to guide the strategy of containment. He shared these first with his war college students.

One such principle was self-restraint. Kennan had argued in PPS/1 that it would be “neither fitting nor efficacious” for the United States to design a European recovery program: the Europeans should do this themselves. Marshall incorporated that language into his June 5 Harvard speech, but neither he nor Kennan had explained the reasoning behind it. Why should Americans allow Europeans to decide how Americans would spend their money?

Kennan’s answer began with the communist parties of Western Europe, who on Moscow’s orders would do all they could to frustrate any workable recovery program: “They will fight it everywhere, tooth and nail.” But because they lacked the backing of the Red Army or the Soviet secret police, those parties depended on popular support. Their hard core of “violent, fanatical extremists” had to attract a wider circle of “muddled, discontented, embittered liberals.” If the latter ever abandoned the former, then Stalin’s strategy for dominating the rest of Europe would be in trouble. It made sense, therefore, to let the Europeans take the lead in shaping the Marshall Plan, because this would encourage unity among them while simultaneously undermining the agents through which Moscow had hoped to take control. Neither the Soviet Union nor its communist allies could credibly denounce a
European
initiative as “American imperialism.”

Behind Kennan’s argument were two larger ideas that had long shaped his thinking. One was Gibbon’s conviction that conquered provinces—whatever the means of conquest—were sources of weakness: the Soviet Union, Kennan believed, was already overstretched. The other, closely related, was that international communism had itself become a form of imperialism: this was “the weakest and most vulnerable [point] in the Kremlin armor.” It followed, then, that the Americans had time on their side and could afford to be patient. They could best secure their influence in Europe by not appearing too obviously to want it.

A second principle derived from the first: that containment meant contracting American aspirations, not expanding them. The resources available to the United States—material and intellectual—were more limited than anyone had understood them to be at the end of the war. As a result, a serious gap had developed between intentions and capabilities.

That interest lay in balancing power within the existing international system. If the United States was to avoid the overextension that was already afflicting the Soviet Union, then it should bolster the strength of allies in such a way as not to deplete its own.

The Marshall Plan’s purpose, therefore, was not to create American satellites. Rather, it sought to encourage the Europeans to make maximum use of their resources, before drawing upon those of the United States. This approach would promote self-reliance, distinguish Washington’s policy from Moscow ’s, and respect the interests of American taxpayers, who would be footing the bill for whatever assistance the Europeans did receive. Independence, not dependence, was to be the goal, and the effort expended in seeking it should be as little as possible.

That meant rethinking relationships with defeated enemies. The American occupation of part of Germany and all of Japan, Kennan reminded his students, was still focusing on prosecuting war criminals, dismantling industrial facilities, extracting reparations, restricting trade, and reeducating formerly authoritarian societies. There had been little coordination with the strategy of containment: the United States would need German and Japanese allies in resisting the Soviet Union. Even if that were not the case, to impose one’s will on a conquered people “means eventually that you fall heir, unless you are very careful, to all the problems and responsibilities of that people.” Americans were not equipped “to handle successfully for any length of time [those] other than our own.”

Beyond Western Europe and Japan, there was little the United States could or should do. Marshall had spent all of 1946 trying to mediate the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists in China, Kennan pointed out, but the country was probably still going to fall under Mao Zedong’s control. “If I thought for a moment that the precedent of Greece and Turkey obliged us to try to do the same thing in China, I would throw up my hands and say we had better have a whole new approach to the affairs of the world.” A communist China would not necessarily be a Soviet satellite. The more likely prospect—here Kennan reflected the views of John Paton Davies, his mentor on all things Chinese—was that “if you let the Russians alone in China, they will come a cropper on that problem just as everybody else has for hundreds of years.”

A third principle, consistent with Kennan’s emphasis on self-restraint and the contraction of responsibilities, was that expectations themselves could be a form of power. Stalin’s self-confidence, which had so alarmed Marshall, rested on the belief that capitalism faced a new crisis. The task for the United States, then, was to rebuild self-confidence in those parts of the world most vital to it, while shaking that of the Soviet Union. Truth and reason, combined with economic assistance, were the only weapons available with which to do this. Employed effectively, they would “strengthen the resistance of other people to the lure of unreality, so powerful in its effect on those who are confused and frustrated and who see no escape from their difficulties in the formidable mass of reality itself.” Their use, however, would require planning, and it was not at all clear that the American political system was up to that task: “Great modern democracies are apparently incapable of dealing with the subtleties and contradictions of power relationships.”

A fourth Kennan principle, therefore, was that—given the gravity of the situation—“there can be far greater concentration of authority within the operating branches of our Government without detriment to the essentials of democracy.” This would be federalism, not fascism: had not Hamilton pointed out that “the vigour of government is essential to the security of liberty”? Containment required “a more courageous acceptance of the fact that power must be delegated and delegated power must be respected.” As a consequence, “many of our ideas about democracy may have to be modified.”

Kennan concluded his June 18 lecture by thanking the students for the confidence they had shown him: “This experience has given me much more than many of you suspect.”
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The National War College had been—and with less frequency would continue to be—a place that allowed floating ideas before bright people on a confidential basis without worrying about Lippmann-like public critiques. But there was a greater distance than maps might indicate between neat geometric weekdays at Fort McNair and crisis-ridden weekends at the Pennsylvania farm: now, for Kennan, all the weekdays were weekends.

The distance between theory and reality revealed itself almost at once as Kennan’s insistence that the Europeans design the Marshall Plan began to run into difficulties. representatives from the sixteen states expecting American assistance—minus the Soviet Union and the Eastern European satellites whose participation Stalin had forbidden—convened in Paris on July 12, 1947, to work out the amounts required and how the program would be administered. Washington’s plan, Kennan reminded Marshall, was to “have no plan.” But the United States did have certain requirements.

It should consider only proposals that would enable the Europeans to exist without charity so that “they can buy from us” and “will have enough self-confidence to withstand outside pressures.” More fundamental, however, was the traditional concept of American security, which had assumed a Europe of free states subservient to no single great power. “If this premise were to be invalidated, there would have to be a basic revision of the whole concept of our international position,” which might demand sacrifices far beyond those required by a program for European reconstruction. “But in addition, the United States, in common with most of the rest of the world, would suffer a cultural and spiritual loss incalculable in its long-term effects.” It was of course important to respect European autonomy. The American people, however, were “bound to be influenced by whether the European nations are doing a good job of helping themselves.”
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By the middle of August, it was becoming clear that they were not. The Paris conferees estimated that their countries would need $29.2 billion over the next four years—a figure well above what the Americans thought reasonable—and probably more after that. Even worse, there was no common plan for spending the money: the Europeans had simply added up each state’s projected recovery costs without considering the efficiencies to be gained, or the political benefits to be achieved, by integrating their economies. These deficiencies led Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Will Clayton to conclude that “there is no other way to deal with this situation than to impose certain necessary conditions.”
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But Robert M. Lovett, Acheson’s replacement as under secretary of state, still hoped to salvage something of the idea that the Europeans should take the lead, so he sent Kennan on a quick trip to Paris to see what might be done. “I was very interested to meet him,” Sir Oliver Franks, who headed the British delegation, recalled. “What struck me was the combination of rational, lucid exposition with controlled passion.” Having “agonized within himself,” Kennan came to a view “which I regarded as essentially intuitive, and then proceeded to argue with great elegance from the premises he had intuited.”
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Geopolitical and economic interests precluded abandoning the Europeans altogether, Kennan believed, while limited resources and domestic political constraints ruled out giving them everything they wanted. Within those boundaries, there was room to maneuver. The State Department could work behind the scenes to reshape the Europeans’ report. It could then treat that document as a basis for discussion, while deciding for itself what recommendations to make to the president and Congress. And it could include among these a program of interim aid without conditions, even as the conditions for a larger four-year plan were being worked out. In short, “we would listen to all that the Europeans had to say, but in the end we would not
ask
them, we would just
tell
them what they would get.”
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Self-restraint, then, had turned out to be neither “fitting nor efficacious.” In recommending its temporary abandonment, Kennan was acknowledging a paradox of planning: that short-term actions can proceed in opposite directions from long-term objectives and still be consistent with them. Only telling the Europeans what they would get would allow them to know what they should request. Only unconditional emergency aid would make extended conditional aid possible. Only by respecting European viewpoints could the Americans hope to change them.

The Paris trip had been an eye-opener: a collision of theory with reality. But it was also, in a way, exhilarating. Kennan composed a poem on the long flight home that suggested why:

The usual pessimism and self-pity were there, but so too, at the end of the poem, was a new theme, echoing something Bismarck had once said: “By himself the individual can create nothing; he can only wait until he hears God’s footsteps resounding through events and then spring forward to grasp the hem of his mantle—that is all.”
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Franks had it right: Kennan’s performance in Paris was intuitive as well as passionate, but it fit, nonetheless, within a set of grand strategic priorities. The most important one, as Kennan described it a few weeks after his return, was to ensure that “elements of independent power are developed on the Eurasian land mass as rapidly as possible, in order to take off our shoulders some of the burden of ‘bi-polarity.’ To my mind, the chief beauty of the Marshall Plan is that it had outstandingly this effect.”
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