George F. Kennan: An American Life (54 page)

Italy was the key: if it went communist, then the whole American position in Europe would be at risk. It would “be better that elections not take place at all than that [the] Communists win in these circumstances.” So should the Italian government not outlaw their party prior to the elections? Civil war might follow, but that would give the United States the excuse to reoccupy whatever Italian military facilities it might wish. Such a course would “admittedly result in much violence and probably a military division of Italy.” That would be preferable, though, “to a bloodless election victory, unopposed by ourselves, which would give the Communists the entire peninsula . . . and send waves of panic to all surrounding areas.”
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If a long telegram from Moscow two years earlier had made Kennan’s reputation, then this short one from Manila diminished it. The analysis was contradictory: how, if European communists were relishing their successes, could Soviet leaders be worrying about the success of the Marshall Plan? How could Kennan so suddenly withdraw his assurances about Moscow’s reluctance to risk war, as well as his warnings against using American troops in the eastern Mediterranean? How, in a larger sense, could policy be planned if the top planner abruptly repudiated his own analyses? Hickerson, no admirer of Kennan, consigned his Manila dispatch to bureaucratic oblivion with a crisp comment, scribbled at the bottom of it:

Privately, Hickerson concluded that Kennan, when drafting this cable, could only have been “roaring drunk.”
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That seems unlikely. Alcohol was not a problem for Kennan, but solipsism was, and in March 1948 it was beginning to catch up with him. He had built a staff around himself, producing analyses remarkable for their clarity, coherence, and depth; its members depended so much on Kennan’s guidance, though, that they drifted in his absence. Designed to resist what he regarded as parochialism in the State Department’s geographical bureaus, the Policy Planning Staff succumbed to just that malady when it accepted Hickerson’s advice on Bevin’s proposal: it embraced an Atlantic perspective but not a global one. Kennan had planted seeds but neglected their cultivation. “My mistake lay in my failure to realize that . . . , despite all that had been said in the reporting from Moscow, in the X-article, and in innumerable private conversations in the State Department, [my views] had made only a faint and wholly inadequate impression on official Washington.”
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Solipsism showed up as well in Kennan’s conviction that only he could reverse MacArthur’s course in Japan: perhaps one reason the two hit it off is that each regarded himself as indispensable. Having insisted that all lines of authority over foreign policy go through him, Kennan assigned himself a task that would take him away from Washington for at least a month. He had no way of knowing that the month he chose would be as crisis-ridden as it was. But even in normal circumstances, it would have been unrealistic to assume, as Kennan seemed to, that all the crises except the one he was working on could wait until he got back. It’s not even clear that the trip was necessary. Other pressures to shift his policies were converging on MacArthur: Kennan affected the timing but not the outcome.
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By doing so in such a labor-intensive way, he fell into a parochialism of his own. He became, however briefly, Asia-centric—and in that too he resembled MacArthur.

Kennan also failed to allow for his own dependence on the staff he dominated. If Davies was right that his Policy Planning colleagues served as a backboard against which Kennan could bounce ideas—if, to use another metaphor, they tethered him, somewhat in the way that Annelise had always done—then this was another good reason for not leaving town. Deprived while on his trip of his staff’s feedback, of his lunches with Fosdick at the Allies Inn, and of Annelise’s sturdy common sense, Kennan fell into a funk if not a panic, with results embarrassingly apparent in the Manila “short telegram.” It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, when loneliness got the better of him, upsetting the precarious balance between his emotions and his avocation.

“George is far away at the moment,” Annelise wrote Frieda Por on March 8, 1948. “I hope he is enjoying it. If it isn’t too strenuous, I know he will.” But the trip was strenuous, and the delicate relationship between Kennan’s head and his stomach now also suffered. Since his frustrating service on the European Advisory Commission four years earlier, his ulcer had given him little trouble. Now, though, it flared up again: by the end of his Japan trip, Kennan was sick in bed, where he began dictating his long report for Lovett and Marshall. Upon his return to Washington at the end of March, he and Hessman spent two days finishing off that document, and then Kennan checked himself into the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was there for two weeks, followed by several more days of recuperation at the farm. Kennan had left his office on February 26. He was not back at work until April 19.
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By then, much had changed. On March 17 Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg signed the Brussels Treaty, a fifty-year defensive military alliance. President Truman welcomed it in an address to Congress on the same day, promising that the Europeans’ determination to protect themselves would be matched by an American determination to protect them. On March 22 Hickerson began secret talks on behalf of the State Department with British and Canadian representatives, looking toward associating the United States and Canada with the Brussels Treaty signatories. On April 3 Congress, spurred by the coup in Czechoslovakia, at last approved the Marshall Plan, and Truman signed the bill into law. And on April 7 Lovett took a revised version of PPS/27 to the president, with a view to securing his permission—which Truman readily granted—to sound out congressional leaders on the possibility of a North Atlantic treaty that would formally link the military security of Western Europe to that of the United States. Kennan could only watch these events take place. He had nothing to do with shaping them.
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Meanwhile, another of Kennan’s recommendations had caused a painful split between Truman and Marshall. On March 19 Warren Austin, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, presented the American plan for an international trusteeship over an undivided Palestine. But on the previous day the president—despite having approved the abandonment of partition—had assured the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann that there had been no change in policy. Embarrassed, Truman blamed the State Department: there were people there, he complained, “who have always wanted to cut my throat.” That was an exaggeration, but Kennan had failed to consider the humanitarian implications of withdrawing American support for a Jewish state only three years after the world had learned of the Holocaust. Nor had he taken into account the impact on Truman’s reelection prospects in the fall, an omission the White House staff quickly remedied. By the end of March the State Department had lost control of U.S. policy in the Middle East. In deciding to recognize the new state of Israel, an uncharacteristically angry Marshall told the president a few weeks later, he had indulged in a “transparent dodge to win a few votes.” Truman replied coolly that he knew what he was doing.
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“The greatest mystery of my own role in Washington in those years,” Kennan wrote in his memoirs, “was why so much attention was paid in certain instances . . . to what I had to say, and so little in others.” The answer, he concluded, was that

But surely policy planning in a democracy, if it is to be effective, must allow for domestic politics, institutional interests, vastness, turgidity, self-centeredness, and emotion. These are not mysteries to most people. That they were to Kennan—that he expected theory to trump subjectivity—was in itself a solipsism that led to failure.

ENSCONCED ON THE SIXTEENTH FLOOR OF THE BETHESDA NAVAL Hospital in Washington through the first half of April 1948, Kennan recalled being “very bleak in spirit from the attendant fasting . . . made bleaker still by the whistling of the cold spring wind in the windows of that lofty pinnacle.”
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But the enforced rest provided an opportunity, as the doctors treated his physical ulcer, for him to alleviate the pain of a mental ulcer that still persisted. From his usual horizontal position (there being no choice this time), Kennan summoned Hessman and began dictating a lengthy letter to Walter Lippmann.

“You have chosen, for some reason, to identify the policy of containment with the ‘Truman doctrine,’ which you deplore,” he admonished the pundit, “and to hold up the Marshall Plan, by way of contrast, as an example of constructive action.” Had Lippmann forgotten their lunches together the previous May, at which Kennan advanced his ideas for the latter initiative? Contrary to what Lippmann claimed, he had never called for resisting the Russians wherever they challenged Western interests. “I do not know what grounds I could have given for such an interpretation.” (Here Kennan ignored—or had repressed—his call in the “X” article for applying “counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manœuvres of Soviet policy.”) He did point out, accurately, that he had written “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” to counter “puerile defeatism” among American intellectuals who thought that firmness toward the Soviet Union could only bring war.

In fact, firmness had restored stability. “Has Iran gone? Or Turkey? Or Greece?” Not one would have remained independent had the Americans not acted. “Has Trieste fallen? Or Austria?” Italy was admittedly a weak spot, but that weakness had arisen from not stiffening the Italians soon enough. To be sure, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Manchuria, and North China had wound up on the wrong side of the “iron curtain.” That was to be expected, given the military realities existing at the end of the war. Communism might indeed prevail in the rest of China: “What of it? I never said we would—or should—be able to hold equally everywhere.” The point had been to hang on “in enough places, and in sufficiently strategic places, to accomplish our general purpose.” That, for the most part, had been done.

Containment would not require the United States to arm itself to the teeth, defending overextended positions indefinitely. The Russians, made also of flesh and blood, had their own vulnerabilities. Afflicted by “internal contradictions,” they would eventually defeat themselves. If capitalism bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction, why were they seeking so desperately to bring about its collapse? What was to be done, then, lay chiefly “within ourselves.”

The day would come—sooner than one might think—when their own weaknesses would convince Soviet leaders “that they cannot have what they want
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talking to us. It has been our endeavor to assist them to that conclusion.”

And what of European allies? Lippmann had argued that the United States, having provided them moral and material assistance, now also owed them military protection. This was “preposterous.” The Russians much preferred conquest “by concealed methods, with a minimum of responsibility on their own part.” The Marshall Plan was countering that strategy. Should it not satisfy the Europeans, “I can only shrug my shoulders.” For the United States could not, by itself, sustain hope. But Kennan saw little faint-heartedness among recipients of Marshall Plan aid: they “have shown themselves ready enough to take risks as long as there is a reasonable indication that we are behind them and will do our best for them.”

So what was Lippmann worried about? A year ago fear had hung over everything. Since then, however, “no fruits have dropped.” Moscow had been forced to isolate the East from the West, where recovery was progressing rapidly: “Admittedly, the issue hangs on Italy; but it hangs—in reality—on Italy alone. A year ago it hung on all of Europe—and on us.” Lippmann should, then, “leave us some pride in our own legerdemain.” The saddest part of the past year’s experience was not the realization of how hard it was for a democracy to conduct a successful foreign policy. It was rather that if it did, “so few people would recognize it for what it was.”
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Kennan’s letter to Lippmann was roughly the length of a war college lecture. On reading it over, it seemed “plaintive and overdramatic,” so he never sent it. He did corner Lippmann on a train a few months later and subject him to some of its arguments; no portion of the letter itself reached its intended recipient, however, until 1967, when excerpts appeared in Kennan’s memoir. He blamed himself, after Lippmann’s death, for having been “too arrogant” during his first months on the Policy Planning Staff to have accepted criticism as patiently as he might have. But something else was going on then as well: for once in his life—despite his ulcer—Kennan was optimistic about the future.
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