George F. Kennan: An American Life (59 page)

But perhaps his strategy—with respect to both Germany and NATO—had asked too much of the Europeans, Kennan admitted to a Pentagon audience that same month. The Marshall Plan’s success had provoked Moscow into
appearing
to be aggressive: “We knew that there would be . . . a baring of the fangs designed to scare us.” By asking the Europeans to put economic recovery before military security, “we were in effect asking them to walk a sort of a tight-rope and telling them that if they concentrated on their own steps and did not keep looking down into the chasm of their own military helplessness we thought there was a good chance that they would arrive safely on the other side.” The problem was that too many people in Europe—but also in Washington—had looked down. That was leaving the Soviet Union with no way out: it was making the division of Europe “insoluble by any other than military means.”
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This was a shrewd assessment, not just of the Europeans, but also of Kennan himself. To mix his own metaphors, he had been asking them to ignore the snarling dog with which they shared a continent, even as they walked, unperturbed, across the tightrope the Marshall Plan had thrown to them. They could do this only with self-confidence, but he had taken it upon himself to
tell
them when they had reached that state. If, as Kennan had often noted, fear was a subjective condition, then surely self-confidence was too: he believed, however, that his objective view of Soviet intentions should override European subjectivity. He was after all, or at least he had been, the expert. His strategy amounted, in the end, to saying: “Trust me.”
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“George has been much better this fall,” Annelise wrote Frieda Por late in 1948. “I am keeping my fingers crossed. He looks better too, and I think he has put on a little weight.” His workload had by no means diminished. Since returning from the hospital in April, he had prepared major policy papers on the Soviet Union, Germany, China, Japan, Yugoslavia, the proposed North Atlantic Treaty, and covert action, some of them in several versions. He delivered four lectures at the National War College, and one each at the Pentagon, the Naval War College, and the Canadian Defence College. He found the time to do public lectures in Milwaukee, Detroit, Birmingham, and New York, as well as informal presentations for Air Force officers, the Harvard faculty, Princeton alumni, Louisville newspapermen and bankers, and his Pennsylvania neighbors. He continued to run the Policy Planning Staff and to serve as its representative on the National Security Council—although he gave up the latter responsibility at the end of the year. And all the while he was deeply involved in Berlin crisis management: the only diary entry Kennan made during these months recorded a sleepless night spent coordinating communications among American officials in that city, Paris, and Washington.
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Psychologically, though, he was more depressed than he had been when his physical ailments laid him low. For it was becoming clear that his grand strategy was no longer to be that of the United States. Kennan had suffered setbacks on seeking a “background understanding” with the Soviet Union, on managing covert operations, on heading off the North Atlantic Treaty, on calculating the relationship between military means and national ends, and—most significantly for him—on clearing the way for a European settlement based on German reunification. Only on Yugoslavia and China had he had his way.

If Kennan had been, in the eyes of the Canadians, a Delphic oracle in the spring of 1948, he was by the end of the year a beleaguered and increasingly bypassed oracle. His gloom was hard to miss when he returned to the war college on December 21 to deliver the final lecture of the semester. He promised the students “a completely unvarnished and unsparing picture of what appears to me
personally
to be our present international position.” The underlining in the transcript was his own.

One thing not easily forgiven in life, he told them, was “to be elevated many times above the level of your fellows in privilege and riches and comfort and power. The rich man is rarely loved and never pitied.” The United States had 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6 percent of its population. The remaining 94 percent included people who “would not hesitate to tear us limb from limb figuratively, or perhaps even physically, if they would thereby get a share of our wealth or reduce the power we hold.” They would do this despite the fact that “never before in its history has the world known, or is it likely to know, a great power which has conducted itself more decently and more moderately in its foreign relations.” The United States was “a misunderstood country throughout the world.”

There was no more dangerous sense, Kennan cautioned, than that of being a victim. This was how persecution manias began. Practiced on a national scale, they could lead to fanaticisms like those of the Nazis and the Communists. Nevertheless, the world really was filled with jealousy and devoid of pity. The prevailing view was that “we have been favored by the Gods, . . . and that it is high time that the Gods shifted their favor and that our faces were ground into the dirt.”
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It’s hard not to see projection happening here. Kennan’s letter to Lippmann, written in April at the height of his influence as Policy Planning Staff director, portrayed a world in which events were aligning themselves with American intentions. But by December, with Kennan’s authority significantly diminished, the world had become a dark and dangerous place. The
objective
position of the United States could not have changed that dramatically in so short a period of time. What had changed was Kennan’s
subjective
understanding of it: because Washington was no longer going his way, the world was no longer going Washington’s way.

One of Kennan’s most striking characteristics as a diplomat, as a strategist, and as a policy planner was an inability to insulate his jobs from his moods. Throughout his career he had taken things personally. He was “never able to detach himself emotionally from the issues we had to consider,” Dorothy Fosdick remembered. “He could go into a bad slump when he thought he was not being listened to.” He viewed the world through himself, not as something apart from himself. That could lead to great insights: Kennan’s understanding of the Soviet Union and how to contain it grew largely out of his own self-analysis. But it could also produce volatility: no sooner did the Truman administration reconcile itself to the division of Germany—something Kennan had been advocating since 1945—than he began pushing for reunification. It was as if he were allergic to orthodoxy. “I have the habit,” he acknowledged years later, “of seeing two opposing sides of a question, both of them wrong, and then overstating myself, so that I appear to be inconsistent.”
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That raised a question, then, about how useful the policy planning process, as Kennan conceived it, really was. He never meant the hundreds of pages he and his staff produced to serve as a systematic
philosophy
of American foreign relations, although at times they read like that. He did see them, though, “as one man’s concept of how our government ought to behave and by what principles it ought to be guided.”
⁵²
But what if that concept—and the principles that lay behind it—changed, whether in response to what was happening in the world or, more disconcertingly, in response to Kennan’s own unstable emotions? Reconsiderations are reasonable enough in government. When emotions amplify them, though, they can come across as erratic behavior—even if, by general acknowledgment, brilliance still lies behind it.

“IN THE FACE OF THESE DIFFICULTIES, A DETACHED PHILOSOPHER might not give us a very good chance for avoiding real trouble,” Kennan told the audience he had spoken to at the Pentagon on November 8, 1948. “But strange things have been known to happen. And who are we, in the face of the experiences of the past week, to say that theoretically unfavorable odds should be a source of discouragement?” The event he had in mind was President Truman’s surprise reelection four days earlier. Kennan knew that Marshall, whose health had been deteriorating, would be stepping down at the end of Truman’s first term: like almost everyone else, both expected it to be Truman’s only term. The prospect of a Republican administration, together with the discouragements of the past few months, had Kennan thinking again about resigning from the Foreign Service and accepting an academic position. As it happened, though, it was Truman who got to select the next secretary of state. At the end of November, he asked Dean Acheson to take the job.
¹

Acheson had played an important role, as under secretary of state, in advancing Kennan’s career. He encouraged the author of the “long telegram” to speak publicly about its contents, he facilitated Kennan’s move from the National War College to the Policy Planning Staff, and the two cooperated closely in designing the Marshall Plan. They differed only on the public justification for aid to Greece and Turkey, but Acheson, preoccupied with getting the bill through Congress, hardly noticed Kennan’s objections to the Truman Doctrine. Having left government to replenish his finances in the summer of 1947, Acheson could watch Kennan’s subsequent policy planning only as a well-informed outsider. But he thought highly enough of it—after learning that Truman wanted him now to run the State Department—to ask Kennan to defer any decision about retiring. That led Kennan, on January 3, 1949, to send Acheson an unorthodox offer to stay on.

“We all have our egos and ambitions,” he acknowledged. “But the shadows which fall on each of us, these days, are so huge and dark, and so unmistakable in portent, that they clearly dwarf all that happens among us individually, here below.” The disclaimer that followed must have raised an Achesonian eyebrow: “I really have no enthusiasm for sharing with the people I have known—Kerensky, Bruening, Dumba, or the king of Jugoslavia—the wretched consolation of having been particularly prominent among the parasites on the body of a dying social order, in the hours of its final agony.” Acheson was not to think it “implausible modesty”—there was little danger of that after reading this—when Kennan wrote that he wished to remain only if he could feel that “we are not just bravely paddling the antiquated raft of U.S. foreign policy upstream, at a speed of three miles an hour, against a current which is making four.”

One problem was the State Department. It was drifting away from Marshall’s concept of a planning staff that met regularly, avoided functional or regional parochialism, and conveyed its recommendations to a secretary of state who patiently awaited them. Nor was the department adequately publicizing its policies: the “X” article at the time had “shocked people to tears,” but Kennan now wished there had been twenty like it. Byrnes and Marshall had spent too much time away from Washington: the secretary should not be “an itinerant negotiator,” shuttling from one overseas meeting to another “in order to demonstrate our devotion to the principle of international organization.” Nor should there be further “lofty pronouncements about peace and democracy.” What was needed instead was “hard work, concentration, discipline, and an inner silence.”

“There—dear Dean—are some of the things which I think would have to be done to the hull of the ship of state, if it is to be restored to a really buoyant condition.” Without them, there was no point in anyone trying “to blow wind into the sails of the old hulk.... I’d rather be at Yale, or where-you-will—any place where I could sound-off and talk freely to people—than in the confines of a department in which you can neither do anything about it nor tell people what you think ought to be done.”
²

Kennan claimed, in a postscript, to have written this letter before he knew that Acheson would become secretary of state, but it did not read that way. Its tone was one of Kennan interviewing Acheson, rather than the other way around. It sounded like an effort to press the new secretary into the mold of the previous one, thereby restoring the Policy Planning Staff to its rightful place within the State Department hierarchy. This, Kennan must have known, was going to be a stretch.

Acheson had the highest respect for Marshall, so much so that he wrote one of the best short descriptions of how the great man operated: “All elements of the problem were held, as it were, in solution in his mind until it was ready to precipitate a decision.” That was not, however, Acheson’s style. He lacked Marshall’s modesty, self-discipline, and procedural restraint. He was incapable of commanding quietly: of not commenting on competing positions until he had chosen one. Acheson paraded his wit, his wardrobe, and especially his mustache—the latter ornament, the journalist James Reston wrote, was itself “a triumph of policy planning.” Oliver Franks, the British ambassador, recalled that Acheson “
bathed
in talk.” The idea of “having your thinking done for you, which is what the Policy Planning Staff stood for, was alien to Dean.” The new secretary of state so loved debate, in fact, that at one contentious NATO meeting, having exhausted the British and French foreign ministers, he took over and performed their parts after they had gone to bed.
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“You have to remember this about Acheson,” Kennan pointed out a few years after the older man’s death. “He was basically a Washington lawyer, not a diplomat. The fact that he looked like a diplomat confused people, but it didn’t make him one. He had never lived abroad, knew no foreign languages, knew nothing about the outside world.” Acheson was chiefly, Franks remembered, “a man of action. He wanted actually to get things done. I think he felt that Kennan wasn’t: that he sat in his cell and thought major thoughts, but was not particularly concerned with their application to things as they are now.” Kennan focused on the long term. Acheson wanted to know: “What do I do now?”
⁴

Why, then, did they think they could work together? One reason was that they were good friends: the Kennans and the Achesons saw each other regularly, while the Marshalls determinedly avoided the Washington social scene. “I enjoyed his company, and profited constantly from exposure to the critical discipline of his fine mind,” Kennan recalled. “He was a lovely person.” Acheson’s sharp tongue, John Paton Davies remembered, could not conceal “a great gentleness” in him—“a great gentlemanliness.” It was also the case that Acheson respected Kennan’s accomplishments, whereas other secretaries of state—John Foster Dulles was widely assumed to be the Republican alternative—might not have. Finally, Acheson returned to the State Department with a relatively open mind. Having been out of government for a year and a half, he had no position on several of the issues with which Kennan had been wrestling, and so was ready to listen to him, even if only as one of several voices. Kennan, for his part, was sure that the ship of state would crash into the rocks unless his could again become the dominant voice in setting a new course—but that could only happen now, if it was to happen at all, through Acheson.
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