George F. Kennan: An American Life (64 page)

Webb, who was now in charge of State Department administration, thought that it was exceeding Kennan’s strength. He had entered the Foreign Service, Webb later pointed out, “when brilliant individual action” was possible. Now, though, diplomacy required a large, complicated organization in which execution and feedback were at least as important as planning: “High-level statements simply do not implement themselves.” Kennan’s resignation arose, most immediately, from an effort by Webb to address that problem. He had instituted a new procedure by which Policy Planning Staff papers were to pass through his own staff, consisting of assistant secretaries for regions and functions, before going to Acheson. That more than quadrupled the distribution list, proliferating possibilities for objections. A paper on Yugoslavia came back with some on September 16, leaving it, Kennan believed, “in a state of suspended animation.” He took this to mean that Policy Planning would henceforth be “a sort of drafting secretariat for the Assistant Secretaries’ group.”

Webb had, in effect, closed Kennan’s door into Marshall’s office, and Acheson, who now occupied that space, had done nothing to reopen it. This changed little in an operational sense: Kennan had always been one of several advisers to Acheson, who would have tolerated no other arrangement. Symbolically, though, Webb’s requirement rankled—and it provided cover for the larger reason that lay behind Kennan’s resignation.
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This was his sense that, even if the door to the secretary’s office had remained open, Acheson was no longer listening to him: indeed, on the issue of European integration, Kennan believed, no one was. Hickerson had expressed “grave doubts” as to whether Germany could be absorbed into any Western European association to which the United States and Great Britain did not belong. Any effort to form an “Anglo-American-Canadian bloc,” Bohlen warned from Paris, would mean that “we will not be able to hold on to the nations of Western Europe.” A meeting of U.S. ambassadors in that region concluded unanimously in late October that no European integration would be possible without British participation because the continental powers would otherwise fear German domination.
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“That you were right in your premonitions about . . . talking to the British about European union I gladly concede,” Kennan wrote Bohlen early in November. “The path of lesser resistance and lesser immediate trouble in this matter would have been to keep silent.” Nor did he have any intention of challenging the ambassadors: “Even if the Secretary agreed one hundred percent with my view, I would not ask him to move in the face of such a body of opinion.” But the existing policy, Kennan warned,

“You may have your ideas where one goes from here on such a path and at what point it is supposed to bring us out on the broad uplands of a secure and peaceful Europe,” Kennan added, with some bitterness. “If so, I hope you will tell the Secretary about them.... I find it increasingly difficult to give guidance on this point.”
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Bohlen responded angrily: “I had hoped we could profitably correspond on such subjects, but frankly I am not interested in polemics.” “You should not have been offended at my letter,” Kennan replied. “We have always argued warmly, and with gloves off. You know me well enough to take into account my polemic temperament.” There was no point, however, in continuing the debate. “A decision has fallen.... Perhaps it was the right one. None of us sees deeply enough into the future to be entirely sure about these things.” But the depths of these disagreements had diminished his usefulness, he was sure, “and I will be happier than ever if, as I hope, it will be possible for me . . . to subside quietly into at least a year or two of private life.”
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“My planning staff, started nearly three years ago, has simply been a failure,” Kennan wrote in his diary in mid-November. The State Department’s operational units would reduce to meaninglessness any recommendation they did not originate. They would sabotage anything the secretary of state might decide on his own, knowing that no one could review every aspect of their work, and that the people who were trying to get action would soon be gone. Even if Acheson shared Kennan’s views, “he would not be able to find others who did.” The only way out would be to have a doctrine that could be “patiently and persistently pounded into the heads of the entire apparatus, high and low.” But since no such mechanism existed within the government, the only alternative was “an intensive educational effort,” conducted through the great universities, to reshape public opinion in the broadest sense. “All of this impels me to the thought that if I am ever to do any good in this work, . . . it must be outside the walls of this institution and not inside them.”
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For once, Kennan was keeping a Washington diary: it was the only time he did so for more than a few days while serving as Policy Planning Staff director. He began it in August 1949, shortly after bringing Nitze onto the staff. He knew, even then, that he would be leaving and seemed to think it important to record the reasons why. In addition to Kennan’s daily schedule, the diary documents the sterling-dollar crisis, his organizational disagreements with Webb, his growing sense of isolation over Western European integration, and hints at his future. It also shows, despite their differences, Kennan’s continuing respect and affection for Acheson, which the secretary of state fully reciprocated.

Acheson was grateful to Kennan for having rescued the British negotiations from the Anglophobic Snyder. They shared a dislike, soon to become a loathing, for Secretary of Defense Johnson. And they still enjoyed each other’s company: Acheson too had a farm—his was in Maryland—to which he invited the Kennans for an overnight visit on September 1. When, on the next morning, Joseph and Stewart Alsop reported that Kennan had drafted key paragraphs of a recent Truman speech on Anglo-American relations, Kennan feared that Acheson might suspect him of leaking that information to the two journalists. “Dear George, Don’t worry about,” Acheson reassured him. “Nobody can both know you and suspect you. This is life in a disorderly democracy.”
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Kennan and Acheson had the pleasure—if it could be called that—of hosting the notoriously prickly Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, at the State Department on October 13. A few days earlier Kennan had entrusted to his diary the undiplomatic lecture he would
like
to deliver on that occasion; a few days later he recorded a Bill Bullitt prediction that any country allocating 30 to 50 percent of its food to sacred animals would never develop economically. On November 7 Acheson observed the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution by receiving Andrey Vyshinsky, the former prosecutor in the Moscow purge trials, now Molotov’s replacement as Soviet foreign minister. Kennan sat in on the conversation, concluding from it that Vyshinsky was really a bourgeois at heart and would secretly prefer to work for Acheson: “It is much too late for this, of course.” That evening Kennan attended the celebratory reception at the Soviet embassy, the first time he had been invited since returning from Moscow: “It was all the same—if anything, more false and grotesque than ever.”
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With Acheson’s encouragement, Kennan was still maintaining a regular schedule of public speaking. In New York, on November 10, he addressed the Academy of Political Science on the subject of American history. He chose as his text Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’s Fourth of July address from 1821, which had proclaimed that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” It would become Kennan’s favorite quotation, and it reflected the shift in his thinking while on the Policy Planning Staff: the danger was now not that Americans would attempt too little internationally but that they would try to do too much. If that happened, Adams had warned, the United States could become “the dictatress of the world,” but no longer “the ruler of her own spirit.” Kennan was proud of this excursion into the past, but it got no publicity whatever. “You speak off-the-record,” he complained, “and worry for weeks about the resulting leaks. Speak publicly, and it is as secure as a safe. No one knows what you said.”
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On November 16 Kennan spent the day in Princeton. He was there to talk with Oppenheimer about an issue weighing heavily on them both: the recently announced news that the Soviet Union had successfully tested its first atomic bomb, and the still-secret possibility that the United States might respond by building a “super” bomb, a weapon far more powerful than the ones that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was time, though, that afternoon, to walk around the university. “The early dusk was already falling on town and campus. It was Princeton as I remembered it from the moments of my greatest loneliness as a student.”

A light was on in his old window in the house where he had rented a room as a freshman. “Perhaps some other student was now there, much like myself, in many ways,” and yet with the “subtle, undefinable differences” that distanced generations. The dormitory windows let light, voices, and radio sounds into the night air. The swimmers in the gymnasium were plowing dutifully through the water. “Far below, on the athletic fields, football teams were working out under flood lights, the bright uniforms of the tiny figures gleaming like armor.” All of them regarded the people like himself at times as nuisances, at best as “regrettable and temporary necessities.” In their minds, “we were already consigned to the ash-heap of history.” Kennan and his contemporaries, however, would not be pushed.

Despite these intimations of mortality, Princeton still appealed. Oppenheimer and Kennan also discussed the possibility of his spending his leave from the State Department at the Institute for Advanced Study. And although Kennan declined when President Harold Dodds proposed a permanent university appointment, he did acknowledge that “I would like to live in Princeton and am thinking seriously of doing so.”
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For the moment, though, there was another preoccupation: Grace and Joan had a little brother. “The wonder is to be officially known as Christopher James Kennan,” George wrote Charlie James early in December, thus giving him “an opportunity to immortalize both our names.” For weeks prior to his arrival, however, he had been referred to as “pumpkin,” and “he honored this title by appearing in this world on Thanksgiving Day.” That was still his nickname, but “I hope for his sake that it will not outlive his babyhood.” It was true, George added, that he would soon be leaving the State Department. “The reasons are many—but mostly private. I want to see what it feels like to be a free man.”
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Meanwhile the rumors were flying in Washington. “I got so blue that I got out of there as fast as possible,” Lovett wrote Bohlen, on hearing that Kennan would be leaving. “I am equally disturbed at George’s plans,” Bohlen replied, but “a breathing spell for a year or so would not be at all a bad thing.” The news became public on December 10, leading to careful analyses of its significance from the British embassy. “We have had the impression for some time past that Kennan was not feeling very happy in the State Department,” F. M. Hoyer Millar informed London. Roger Makins of the Foreign Office, who had seen Kennan recently, confirmed this: with his views having “aroused keen and deep controversy in the State Department and Administration,” Kennan doubted “whether this was a desirable state of affairs.” Nitze would be the replacement, but although “hard-working and clear-headed and well thought of, . . . he is hardly of the stature of George Kennan.”
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On December 21, 1949, the lucky students at the National War College got back-to-back lectures from Acheson and Kennan. The secretary of state took the opportunity to pay his subordinate a handsome tribute. The prospect of Kennan’s departure had at first “filled me with despair.... I have rarely met a man the depth of whose thought, the sweetness of whose nature combined to bring about a real understanding of the underlying problems of modern life.” Upon reflection, though, Acheson had concluded that a sabbatical was “the right and good thing” for Kennan. He had served the United States since the age of twenty-two, and the pressures were beginning to catch up with him. It would not be easy to have him gone, and “we will eagerly welcome him back.” “Dear Dean,” Kennan wrote that evening: