George F. Kennan: An American Life (60 page)

Shortly after receiving Kennan’s letter, Acheson asked him to stay on as Policy Planning Staff director. Kennan readily agreed. And so one of the thinnest skins in Washington went to work for one of the thickest. Both men remembered it, years later, as a difficult relationship. But it seemed like a good idea at the time.

“General policy meeting on Germany in the morning. Smaller one in afternoon. Packed in evening.” That was all Kennan wrote, in the diary he had begun keeping again, about March 9, 1949, a day on which the prospects for Program A suddenly brightened. The next day’s entry read simply: “Took off at 2:00 p.m. for Germany in General Clay’s plane.” Stranded overnight in Bermuda, Kennan did something he had not done for some time: he wrote a poem.

Addressed to a fellow passenger—an unnamed lady—the lines hinted at liberation, whether from conventionality, or from being stuck in Washington, or from the sense of having reached a dead end in his job. Or maybe it was just a poem. The lady responded, in any event, with a dash of reality.

Nevertheless, looking back over the past few weeks, Kennan had reason to be glad that he had not resigned.
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In his January 3 letter, he had advised Acheson to finish a task Marshall left uncompleted: bringing the military administration of occupied Germany and Japan into line with State Department planning on the future of those countries. They would be two of the five power centers that would shape the postwar world, and yet the establishments of Clay and MacArthur were so inflexibly top-heavy that the connection between objectives and actions was being lost: “I cannot tell you how serious this is.” Kennan had already accomplished a partial course correction in Japan, but on Germany, after several months of effort, hardly anyone seemed to be supporting Program A.
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Except, from outside the government, an old but prominent adversary: on December 30 Walter Lippmann had published a column criticizing the rush to form a West German government. Such a regime, he insisted, would combine toxic irredentism with an indefinite dependence on the United States. Acheson was no fan of Lippmann: he had gone out of his way in a National War College lecture a few months earlier to ridicule the journalist’s “somewhat tiring” attacks on Kennan’s “X” article. But the incoming secretary of state had been briefed on Program A as a consultant to the Policy Planning Staff and would have connected it with what Lippmann had now written. Shortly after taking office, Acheson got Truman’s permission to take a fresh look at the German problem, and then asked Kennan to chair an NSC working group assembled for that purpose. In the meantime, Kennan had shared the substance of Program A—still a classified document—with Lippmann, who agreed that the liquidation of military government and a gradual withdrawal of occupation forces should be “a real and present objective, not a remote and theoretical one.” There was thus a Kennan-Lippmann convergence on Germany, which in turn converged on Acheson.
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Was Kennan, as Frank Roberts suggested, trying to win Lippmann’s approval? Kennan had always believed that containment should lead to a settlement with the Soviet Union, but Lippmann’s criticisms may have induced him to advance the timetable. Kennan would not have written his long unsent letter in April 1948 had he not taken Lippmann seriously, and from the time he returned to work later that month, he was pushing simultaneously on several fronts—in a way that he had not done before—to keep the diplomatic channels to Moscow open. The Smith-Molotov exchange had been an effort to do this, but the same objective lay behind Kennan’s opposition to NATO and his support for Program A. Processes, he believed, had to
reflect
purposes—here Kennan certainly agreed with Lippmann—and ending the Cold War was what the purpose of conducting it should be.
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The Kennan-Lippmann-Acheson convergence gained added significance on January 31, 1949, when Stalin, in a cryptic set of answers to a newspaperman’s questions, hinted at a willingness to lift the Berlin blockade on the condition that the foreign ministers of the occupying powers meet to discuss Germany’s future. He did so without mentioning an earlier insistence that the
Deutschmark
be withdrawn from circulation in the city. Discreet inquiries established that the omission had been no accident. This raised the prospect, then, of a conference at which the United States would have to reveal, once and for all, its intentions for Germany. Program A was the clearest blueprint available.
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The controversy surrounding it, however, had not diminished. Robert Murphy, Clay’s political adviser, complained that if Stalin really had been serious, he would have used confidential communications, not a newspaper, to explore a settlement. Where Kennan stressed the need to avoid a division of Europe, Murphy retorted that the line had already been drawn “through no fault of the Western Powers.” If the West Germans lost confidence in the Americans, the Truman administration would soon be worrying about a new line that would leave all of Germany on the wrong side. Murphy’s views had support elsewhere in the State Department, the Defense Department, and of course within Clay’s command, where doubts about Program A were as strong as ever.
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Kennan’s committee was being whipsawed, he complained to Acheson early in February, but the choices it was considering would shape the future for decades to come. So in an effort to break the stalemate—and no doubt with his Japan trip in mind—Kennan offered to go to Germany to see the situation for himself. He was, Franks reported to London, a powerful influence in Acheson’s State Department. “I regard his mission to Germany as likely to be of particular importance.” Nonetheless, Kennan admitted on the day before he was to leave, it was probably too late to change the American position on the establishment of a West German government.

What followed surprised and gratified Kennan, for, in the words of the meeting minutes, taken by Murphy himself,

Acheson deferred any decision on Germany until after Kennan’s return. He then asked Kennan to follow him home that evening to continue the discussion, and there expanded his assignment to include talks with American and allied diplomats elsewhere in Europe. This gave Kennan a broader mandate than he had ever received from Marshall to pursue Program A. Murphy, deeply worried, sent word ahead to Clay that “Kennan is as luke warm as ever toward the establishment of a Western German government.... I am most eager for him to obtain a better understanding of the actual German conditions.”
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Still stuck in Bermuda on the night of March 10, Kennan made his way to the officers’ club, where a bingo game was in progress. It seemed to exempt the players “from the necessity to think and speak.” Outside a breeze was blowing, “unceasing and slightly sinister,” while in the distance a B-29 was revving its engines for takeoff. Most Americans on the island were coming from, or going to, Germany: how had it been in the old days? one of them wanted to know. “It was awful now,” he continued, without waiting for an answer. After another stop in the Azores—well known to Kennan as a place and as a problem in World War II—he flew into blockaded Berlin on March 12 and was able to see it for himself: “The city seemed dead—a ghost of its former self.” For the ever-impressionable Kennan, who had always regarded Germany, along with Russia, as an expatriate home, it was as if he were seeing his own ghost as well.
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Which is probably why he went back to keeping a diary, his first sustained effort to do so since returning to Washington in the spring of 1946. That city rarely inspired, or left time for, the kind of writing he had done in the past. Nor had his 1948 trip to Japan produced such an account, perhaps because the setting was too alien. But when Hessman finished typing what Kennan had written during the eleven days he spent in Germany in 1949, she had thirty-four pages. Kennan had permitted himself again—as if with relief—to filter a diplomat’s observations through an artist’s eye, a historian’s ear, and a poet’s emotions. He wrote of

The planes landing every three minutes were keeping the city supplied, but that was an improvisation: “We had no answer, yet, to the great political insecurity that hung over this area.” Whatever vision did exist was clouded by “our habits, our comforts, our false and corrupting position as conquerors and occupiers.”

Why was it, for example, that in their meetings with Germans, Clay’s staff was still seating them at the far ends of tables, as if to replay surrender negotiations? Why couldn’t the Americans understand that their “childish” reliance on ice cream and Coca-Cola revived the Germans’ old sense of superiority? Why relieve them of responsibility by managing—often mismanaging—their daily affairs, while at the same time “bloating their morbid delusions” by assuring them that the future of Europe depended on them?

Too many Germans regarded defeat as a kind of automobile accident, allowing them to forget what they had done to bring it about. And yet denazification was doing more harm than good. How could one ever acknowledge enough guilt to compensate for the crimes? a half-Jewish editor asked Kennan. Balancing that scale was a task for another world, not this one. Some Germans, however, welcomed having their occupiers cram down their throats things they would never voluntarily have swallowed. They might not like living under the Americans, but they didn’t want them to leave. They were, on the whole, better than the British, who ran their zone with a condescension imported from their empire, and certainly the predatory French, who seemed bent on stripping their zone bare. All were preferable to the nearby Russians.

And yet it was André François-Poncet, the chief French diplomat in Germany and a spokesman for the new foreign minister, Robert Schuman, who proposed to Kennan a plan to end military government, place the three western zones under civilian commissioners, and give those Germans as much control over their own affairs as possible. The Soviet zone was gone, a German friend warned Kennan. The Russians had imposed a social revolution of such thoroughness and brutality that any attempt to reunify Germany would risk a civil war worse than the one Spain had suffered. A reunited Germany, should that nonetheless prove possible, would probably be “indigestible” for the rest of Europe: “We should, therefore, make a virtue of necessity and cling to the split Germany as the only hope for the consolidation of Europe.”

Kennan’s visit to Hamburg, where he had served in the late 1920s, hit him especially hard. Berlin had always been a cold imperial city, haughty and pretentious. Such places “invited the wrath of gods and men.” But “poor old Hamburg”—it had been comfortable and good-humored, with no greater ambitions than “the common-sense humdrum of commerce and industry.” Its center had been obliterated in just three nights of incendiary raids in 1943. Seventy-five thousand people had died; three thousand still lay buried in the rubble.