George F. Kennan: An American Life (51 page)

Despite Harkins’s ponderously mixed metaphors—Kennan was “the prize package in the deep freeze that the security-conscious State Department has installed for ‘the cold war’ ”—the article did contain some shrewd insights. Kennan wore no cloak, carried no dagger, did not smoke, drank little, and ate judiciously, “out of respect to a dormant ulcer.” He loved the guitar and with graceful gestures liked to imitate playing it. Circles might show under his eyes at the end of a long day, but he was still ready to draw on Dostoyevsky for insights into the Russian mind. He could even act out scenes from
Crime and Punishment
to show that although the Soviet government might believe that ends justified means, the Russian conscience shouted “No!” And what of Kennan’s own conscience? It was, Harkins noted, Protestant, midwestern, and hence “baffling to Europeans and Orientals,” but it had driven a young man from Milwaukee to Moscow and back again. Now it had conspired (more metaphors) “with a terrifying whirlwind of outside forces to put [him] at a radioactive chessboard opposite skillful and determined opponents.”
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It’s not clear what Kennan thought of the Harkins piece—he probably cringed—but his family was impressed: the clipping wound up in several scrapbooks. It felt strange, Jeanette recalled, “to have somebody so close to you and that you love so much, suddenly so important.” Annelise remembered George’s fame as having emerged more gradually: “I really can’t say that I suddenly felt that I was the wife of an important man.” But “I wasn’t stupid.” Invitations started arriving “to dinner here, and to dinner there. People are quick.” Especially “the ambassadresses.”

With George now no longer at the war college, the Kennans were renting a house at 4418 Q Street in the Foxhall Village neighborhood just west of Georgetown. “I was always the one who did everything about the house,” Annelise explained. “And with the children, except if there was something important, I was the one who had to do it. He was very busy.” George lacked the strength “to be social every day of the week,” so the farm became all the more necessary. Weekends at East Berlin were “absolutely sacred,” not least because those were the only days he could spend with Grace and Joan. The Kennans, at one point, even declined a dinner at the Achesons’ : “Whatever they felt, they were very nice about it.” The farm had one other advantage, which was to substitute for summer camp: “We couldn’t afford that.”
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Weekdays normally began with the Policy Planning Staff members arriving at their desks to find stacks of overnight telegrams, distributed by areas of responsibility. There would be only an hour or two to read them before Kennan would call a meeting. “We’d all gather around the table, and George would start talking,” Ware Adams recalled. “Very often none of us would say a word, but we’d just be looking at him. And he, by watching us, seemed to know just what we were thinking.” Robert Tufts, the staff’s economics specialist, confirmed that

John Paton Davies thought Kennan handled the staff well. As Foreign Service officers, they were not used to such seminars: “George was operating at an intellectual level several degrees above theirs. Nevertheless, he was most gracious and considerate of the feelings of these people.”

The important papers, Davies added, originated with Kennan and were drafted by Kennan: “We sat by in some awe and tried to make intelligent comments about them. He invited the comments. He welcomed the criticism.” That was a good thing, because “George does have a tendency to go sailing off, and he has to be brought back to earth.” The Policy Planning Staff, he thought, functioned somewhat as Annelise did. Someone would say: “Well, George, that’s going a little far, isn’t it?” He would then “tone it down and it would come into place.” Kennan needed “a backboard against which to play his game. He’s got to bounce it off of somebody who will react against it.”
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One person who did was Dorothy Fosdick, recruited by Kennan in 1948 to help with United Nations affairs. “We were not equals,” she stressed. “Kennan was the prince, and we were the advisers to him.” Being female, however, gave her a special status:

When crises would arise, Kennan would take Fosdick to lunch at J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite restaurant, the Allies Inn. With the FBI director and his partner Clyde Tolson usually seated nearby, Kennan would “pour out his heart to me.” That was what he saw as a woman’s role: “to listen, to console, to quietly advise—and I regarded it at the time as a very high compliment. He knew he could trust me not to repeat what he’d said.”
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Chip Bohlen, another confidant, was never a member of the staff—his official title now was Counselor in the State Department—although he participated frequently in its discussions. If inclined during the war to be optimistic about relations with Moscow, the British embassy in Washington noted, Bohlen had for some time shared the harsher view of Soviet policy “which the less career-minded and more profound Kennan has always expressed.” Adams nonetheless found the contrasts fascinating. “They were both thinkers, but in different ways”: Kennan was the dreamer, Bohlen the practical one. “It was interesting to see two people so unlike agreeing as much as they did,” something that had not been true in the past and would not be in the future.

As Kennan had hinted to Marshall, others in the State Department doubted the Policy Planning Staff’s usefulness. “I think it was all right,” Loy Henderson observed neutrally, “but it was kind of a paper thing. It had no way of enforcing itself. The geographic bureaus were where the real power was.” Henderson and the other assistant secretaries, Davies explained, resisted planning. They felt that “you had to ride like a bush pilot on the seat of your pants. You couldn’t anticipate how things were going to go, therefore you took your cues from what was happening right in front of you. That was real. The rest was day-dreaming, or speculative, and therefore did not contribute very much.” But Marshall respected Kennan and was used to working with planners. Kennan’s assignment was to provide a broad outlook, which Marshall valued because he understood that “you can’t proceed from 1A to 1B to 1C and so on down. You had to have an overview.”
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That was how Kennan understood his responsibilities. “Look,” he remembered telling the staff, “I want to hear your opinion. We’ll talk these things out as long as we need to. But, in the end, the opinion of this Staff is what you can make me understand, and what I can state.” There was, he believed, no such thing as a collective document, because “it has to pass, in the end, through the filter of the intelligence of the man who wrote it.”

Kennan recalled listening to the staff with respect and patience. He quickly discovered, though, that when “people get to talking, they talk and they talk. But they don’t talk each other into conclusions.” He once admonished them:

At such moments, Tufts remembered, Kennan would disappear, and a paper would soon appear. “He could dictate a better paper than most of us could write, even after editing.”

Having worked with Kennan since 1944, Dorothy Hessman knew how to keep up with him, even when his intensity caused him to lose track of time, place, and posture: “I was sitting by the desk one day, and he was pacing back and forth behind me, and suddenly his voice sounded a little strange. So I turned around and looked and he had sat down in the leather armchair with his feet over one arm and his back over the other and then stiffened up—so that he lay there across this chair.” On other occasions, however, he needed an audience. Marshall Green, a young Foreign Service officer who went with Kennan to Japan early in 1948, found that one of his jobs was to “look intelligent.” Kennan would speak to Green, while Hessman took it down. This gave his writing a conversational flavor, and “when he was through, he didn’t have to change a word of it.”
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During the two and a half years that Kennan ran the Policy Planning Staff, it produced over seventy formal papers: the complete set came to more than nine hundred single-spaced pages. “The world was our oyster,” he later wrote, “there was no problem of American foreign policy to which we could not address ourselves—indeed, to which it was not our duty to address ourselves—if we found the problem serious enough and significant enough to warrant the effort.” Kennan meant the papers to serve, not as a theoretical framework for the conduct of international relations, but rather as applications of certain “methods and principles” to “practical situations.” No other office in the State Department produced so many papers on so many issues over so many months, “from a single point of view.”

That was, if anything, an understatement. Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff papers were the most thorough specification of interests, threats, and feasible responses that anyone had yet worked out within the U.S. government, and it would have been difficult to find anything comparable in any other government at the time. They were an intellectual tour de force: an extraordinary attempt to devise a global grand strategy. But they were also, as Kennan acknowledged, “one man’s concept of how our government ought to behave and by what principles it ought to be guided.”
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They rested on the premise that a single policy planner (Kennan) could suggest to a single policy maker (Marshall) what he, and hence the nation, ought to do. They were, in this sense, strikingly solipsistic.

Kennan’s strategy would depend, therefore, on the extent to which he could embed it in the minds of others. His policy papers, like his lectures, were a starting point, for strategies require coherence. But they must also inspire confidence, overcome resistance, and adapt to the unexpected. If they fail to take root, they wither. Kennan’s task was now as much cultivation as conception: the farm had prepared him for it, arguably, about as well as the war college had.

The next set of issues the Policy Planning Staff faced, after getting the Marshall Plan under way, arose as aftershocks of the British withdrawal from the eastern Mediterranean. That unexpected development had left a new power vacuum in an area of strategic importance to the United States, not as the result of an enemy’s defeat in war but from an ally’s weakness in the first years of peace. The danger was the one Kennan had warned of in Western Europe: that the Soviet Union, working through the international communist movement, might fill the void, bringing southeastern Europe and potentially also the Near East within its orbit. The test for his strategy was whether minimalism would meet this threat. Could the Truman administration limit its response chiefly to economic assistance, while waiting for internal contradictions within the Soviet empire to halt its expansion? Or would something more be required?

Lovett posed the question bluntly in the late summer of 1947: what would happen if communists took power in Italy or Greece? The staff papers Kennan produced acknowledged the seriousness of the situation. The Italian Communist Party, now the strongest force in Italian politics, would, if it came to power, menace the interests of the United States in Western Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, even in South America, where there was a large Italian emigrant population. A communist victory in the Greek civil war would produce similar results in Europe. In either instance, the Soviet Union would have extended its political and military control “beyond the high-water mark” it had reached at the end of the war. But constraints on American power limited what might be done: the United States could not, for example, send troops to fight the communists inside Greece or Italy, for that would require deploying forces it did not have to battlefields it would not have chosen. It could, however, secure air and naval bases in those countries while strengthening the Sixth Fleet, which already dominated the Mediterranean.

The idea, Kennan explained, would be to make it clear “that extensions of Soviet military power, by means of concealed aggression, ... will be countered by corresponding advances of the bases of U.S. strategic power.” This is what he had in mind when he spoke to the National War College students of “counter-pressures.” These would not, as the “X” article had implied, correspond precisely to those undertaken by Moscow; rather, “concealed aggression” would produce “corresponding advances” in
overall
American military strength in the region, which could then be used to exploit Soviet weaknesses. Local communists might destabilize a country internally, but only at the cost of attracting greater U.S. air and naval power into the region, something Stalin could hardly favor. The strategy would require patience and steady nerves, for getting Kremlin leaders to see that their ambitions endangered their interests might take months or even years. It would, however, remain within the limits of American capabilities. It was, in this sense, still minimalist.
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