George F. Kennan: An American Life (65 page)

Kennan’s lecture that day summed up, with uncharacteristic modesty, what he thought he had learned as a policy planner. It had to do with the limitations of knowledge: just as it was not given to human beings to know the “totality of truth,” so no one could see anything as unlimited in its implications as “the development of our people in their relation to their world environment.” One could only fall back on Saint Paul’s reminder that “[w]e know in part and we prophesy in part.”

That made methods as important as objectives. Civilization best prospered when men stopped preoccupying themselves with purpose and began to apply restraints and rules on the means by which purposes were sought. From that perspective, strategy became “outstandingly a question of form and of style.” Because “few of us can see very far into the future,” all would be safer “if we take principles of conduct which we know we can live with, and at least stick to those,” rather than “try to chart out vast schemes.”
⁶⁸

Kennan had set up the Policy Planning Staff, in the spring of 1947, with vast schemes in mind: had not Marshall told him to “avoid trivia”? The Marshall Plan was the first and most successful of these, but Kennan intended that others would follow. The papers he and his staff produced, all nine hundred pages of them, set courses for great destinations. They were to have been the navigational system for the ship of state—Kennan’s own metaphor—in the postwar world. And he was to have been chief navigator.

In the long run, the ship reached the destinations specified: a secure and still-democratic United States; a peaceful and prosperous Germany and Japan; a reunified Europe capable of choosing its own future; a fragmented and ultimately moribund communist ideology; and a great-power peace more durable than any since the founding, three centuries earlier, of the modern state system. But it was, from Kennan’s perspective, a
very
long run: these objectives looked no closer at the end of 1949 than they had been at the beginning of 1949, when he had accepted Acheson’s invitation to stay on. That is why Kennan lost faith in himself as a navigator: the nation appeared to be as adrift as it had been before he took over.

Acheson agreed with Kennan on destinations but favored more flexible course settings. He didn’t care how long the voyage would take, what it would cost, or whether deviations might occur along the way. Preferring action to brooding, he distrusted perfectionism, tolerated contradictions, and was determined to enjoy the trip. “Even if it was an emotional situation,” Acheson’s daughter Mary recalled, he would still say: “What can you do about it? And if you can’t
do
anything about it, just stop
thinking
about it, and get on with something!” The secretary of state himself told the war college students, on the morning he shared the platform with Kennan, that “the more difficult a situation is, the more challenge there is to our powers, [and] the more keenness there is in life.”

No one would have said of Acheson what Joe Alsop—a collector—wrote to Kennan on the last day of 1949: that he was “a flawless piece of Soong eggshell ware.... I hardly know how things will go on without you.”
⁶⁹

KENNAN’S NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE LECTURE ON DECEMBER 21, 1949, was one of the last to be delivered from that platform during the first half of the twentieth century. It was certainly his last as Policy Planning Staff director. It reflected, appropriately enough, some personal planning: having arranged at least a temporary disengagement from the Department of State, he was trying to decide how to use it. His topic that day was a question: “Where Do We Stand?” The answer, Kennan told the students, depended on where “you think we have come from, and where you think we are going.” Finding it required remedying an inattention to history—the tendency to view all problems “as though the world, like ourselves, had been born only yesterday.”

He then took the students on a time machine trip, with stops at half-century intervals. It began in 1749 with Russia confined to the edge of Europe just as the British colonies occupied the edge of North America. Only half of the Empress Elizabeth’s courtiers could read and write, while the future site of Washington was a wilderness plagued by wolves. France dominated Europe, and Europe ruled the world, although a few far-sighted advisers to Louis XV were shifting their attention from the Bourbons’ longtime rivals, the Austrian Hapsburgs, to the rising but still peripheral kingdom of Prussia.

Half a century later a revolution in France had swept away its monarchy, setting off wars that brought Russian armies into the heart of Europe. Great Britain now had a global maritime empire, diminished only by the defection of the Americans, who had established their own frontier republic. It had practiced, under the Federalists, a foreign policy of “great dignity and reserve,” but Jeffersonian idealists would set the nation—with no sense of irony—on the path of conquest and empire. Still, territorial acquisitions stayed within the continent: the United States refrained from involvement in European affairs.

By 1849, the Americans had expanded south to the Rio Grande and west to the Pacific, sowing the seeds of a civil war to be fought over slavery. Russia appeared stagnant under the despotism of Nicholas I, although revolutionary ideas had infected its intellectuals, artists, and the army officers who had fought the French. The European great powers had suppressed a new wave of revolutions in 1848, but a young Prussian called Bismarck was plotting ways to use the nationalism those upheavals had generated to make a unified Germany the strongest state in Europe.

The German Empire had reached that point by 1899 and was beginning to challenge British naval supremacy. Japan was now a comparably dominant power in Asia, while Russia, about to finish its Trans-Siberian Railway, was coming under pressure from both rivals even as it was hoping, like them, to carve up China. The United States, having built its own navy, defeated Spain, and taken the Philippines, was seeking to secure its interests by invoking the Open Door, the first of a series of unilaterally proclaimed principles that demanded the displacement of power politics by “juridical norms.” Meanwhile Lenin, from the obscurity of exile, was constructing a movement in which ends justified means, convinced that only out of “the bloody, violent destruction of the old order could anything positive be expected to emerge.”

These trends alarmed two Americans, Brooks and Henry Adams, the great-grandsons and grandsons, respectively, of John and John Quincy Adams, in different but complementary ways. Brooks was warning, as early as 1900, that rapid industrialization over the past half-century might now allow some combination of power on the Eurasian continent to end the British hegemony that had so far shielded the United States. Henry, even farther-sighted, was worrying about a scientific revolution that might someday harness the atom itself: infinite power, he suggested in 1905, could soon rest in the hands of finite men. It was just as well, Kennan concluded, that neither had lived to see 1949, by which time both of their visions had become realities.

“Gentlemen, reflect [for] a moment on what that means,” he admonished the war college students. Most of them, like him, had been born into the “Booth Tarkington innocence” of America prior to World War I: “the shady streets and the wooden houses and the backyards in which the kids played at cowboys and Indians.” Debilitated by decades of effortless security, American thinking about foreign policy had become “childish and naïve,” something the nation could no longer afford.

The crisis had come, not from the world wars or the Cold War, but from “the growing disproportion between man’s moral nature and the forces subject to this control.” Solutions, therefore, would have to begin at home: by showing that men could govern themselves somewhere without destroying themselves and their environment. Only then would Americans qualify to take on the great issues of international affairs.

That was why
style
was so important. Ends might justify means, but the reverse was also true: means could corrupt ends and, if carelessly chosen, even annihilate them. Care came from what the students had been doing: applying “the sober and undramatic process of scholarly analysis to all the intangibles, all the imponderables, all the elusive, shifting relationships of national policy.” They had probably been tempted, at various points in their course, to toss the political scientists into the Potomac: “Ah, to hell with it. Let’s have a war.” They should recall, however, what Thoreau had written: “Our darkest grief has that bronze color of the moon eclipsed. There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.”

Kennan’s had been a profound, impressive, “and, I must admit, somewhat disturbing presentation,” General Harold Bull, the new commandant of the war college, concluded in thanking him. He had, the previous September, provided the kickoff for the course, “and now he has run ahead and caught his own punt.... I am very grateful to you, sir.”
¹

The lecture suggested much broader concerns than those with which Kennan had taken up policy planning two and a half years earlier. Then his focus had been on geopolitics, ideology, and recent history: on devising a strategy that would contain the Soviet Union and international communism in the aftermath of World War II. Now his perspective had expanded backward in time and forward in portent, drawing on Brooks Adams’s insistence that industrialization was realigning politics, as well as Henry Adams’s fear that technology was outpacing morality. The development of nuclear weapons confirmed both premonitions, with implications that would haunt Kennan for the rest of his life.

His early thinking about the bomb had been unsystematic. Although Kennan conceded, after reading Brodie’s
The Absolute Weapon
in 1946, that great wars were now unlikely, he also believed in preserving American military superiority for as long as possible. He warned Acheson—still at that point under secretary of state—that the Soviet Union would consider the international control of atomic energy only if the United States maintained the capacity “to absorb atomic attack and to effect instant retaliation.” There could be no greater protection, Kennan claimed in a rare public lecture on national defense in January 1947, “than the deterrent effect of overwhelming retaliatory power in the hands of this country.” He went further in classified comments at the Air War College a few months later. Soviet industry was sufficiently concentrated that, if a war did break out, “ten good hits with atomic bombs” would probably destroy it. He even acknowledged the possibility of preventive war: it would be justified, however, only if the U.S.S.R. was undertaking more rapid industrial mobilization than the United States, and there was no sign of that: “I think we and our friends have a preponderance of strength in the world right now.”
²

“What a fiery hard-liner I was, in those days!” Kennan later admitted. “However, it
was
the Stalin era.” The Soviet regime was “dizzy with success” after winning the war and after “the complacent abandonment to it, by the Western powers, of half of Europe.” He did acknowledge, early in 1948, “the suicidal nature of atomic warfare in a world in which more than one country has bombs.” But he was not yet ready to think about that: like most Washington officials at the time, he saw the new weapons as enhancing the strategic bombing capabilities of World War II, not as the revolution in warfare Brodie had predicted. PPS/38, completed in August 1948, discussed the terms the United States might impose upon a defeated Soviet Union without saying anything about the use of atomic bombs. Even Kennan’s tour of Hamburg in March 1949—from which he concluded that nothing could have justified the devastation he saw—failed to shake his conviction that the best way to avoid another such catastrophe would be to stay stronger than all potential adversaries. That included maintaining the American advantage in atomic weaponry.
³

But Kennan had no sense of what that advantage was. He lacked access to Pentagon war plans; nor did he know how many atomic bombs there were. Nor would he have seen the top-secret study, commissioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which concluded in May 1949 that even if the United States used
all
available atomic weapons—about two hundred—against a Soviet Union with none of its own, this would not in itself ensure victory. That led the Defense Department to propose building more, and on August 2 Acheson called a meeting at the State Department to discuss the matter.

It took place within an informational fogbank, because the participants did not know—or if they knew, could not say—how large the increase would be. As far as Kennan was concerned, the current number of atomic bombs could as easily have been two thousand as two hundred. That may explain why he shocked Acheson—and perhaps surprised himself—by confessing, according to the minutes of the meeting, to

One can imagine, at this moment, a bewildered silence. Then Acheson pointed out that it would be difficult to justify such a strategy, “particularly if our failure to use atomic weapons meant a great loss of lives or a defeat in war.”
⁴

It would indeed, so much so that one wonders where Kennan’s latest heterodoxy came from. Maybe it was “worst case” worries about what the Pentagon was proposing. Possibly it was a delayed reaction to what Kennan had seen in Hamburg. Certainly it was another of his prophetic leaps: it was not the first time he had startled colleagues by projecting policy much further into the future than they were able to do. The problem was never the desirability of what he wanted. Who could object to the prospect that nuclear weapons might exist for decades without the United States having to use one? Who could oppose, for that matter, a peacefully reunified Germany, or an epidemic of Titoism within the international communist movement, or a Soviet Union collapsing under the weight of its internal contradictions? The difficulty, as Acheson’s response suggested, was that Kennan so rarely specified the steps that would be necessary—over the next days, months, or years—to bring about these auspicious outcomes.