The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us. It is only the cheerful light of confidence and security which keeps this evil genius down at the usual helpless and invisible depth. If confidence and security were to disappear, don’t think that he would not be waiting to take their place.
Retaining their freedoms in a hostile world would require Americans, therefore, “to whistle loudly in the dark.” That might not be enough to save them.
None of this meant, however, that they had to oppose totalitarianism everywhere all at once. Because means were limited, there had to be standards for determining when and how to act. The Truman Doctrine, with its promise “to support free peoples” wherever dictators threatened them, had failed to provide these. Kennan’s criteria, in contrast, were explicit:
A. The problem at hand is one within our economic, technical and financial capabilities.
B. If we did not take such action, the resulting situation might redound very decidedly to the advantage of our political adversaries.
C. If, on the other hand, we do take the action in question there is good reason to hope that the favorable consequences will carry far beyond the limits of Greece itself.
Anyone trying to concentrate troops everywhere would be dismissed as “a military ignoramus.” Why that should not be true in foreign policy was a mystery. After all, bandwagoning could work both ways. There was “a very fair possibility” that, with a relatively small expenditure of money and effort in Greece and Turkey, “we might turn a critical tide and set in motion counter-currents which would change the entire political atmosphere of Europe to our advantage.”
Such a strategy would depart from decades of isolationism extending back to the Monroe Doctrine. But that pronouncement had not been some “higher truth,” divorced from the circumstances surrounding it: indeed the first drafts of Monroe’s message to Congress in 1823 expressed sympathy—little else was possible at the time—for the Greeks’ campaign for independence from the Ottoman Empire. What was happening now was that the United States was being asked defend principles too long admired only on “the comfortable plane of generality.”
Here we can no longer hide behind language, behind any international pooling of responsibility, or behind that smug sense of disentanglement that animates us whenever we dispense pure charity. Here we have to bite and chew on the bitter truth that in this world you cannot even do good today unless you are prepared to exert your share of power, to take your share of responsibility, to make your share of mistakes, and to assume your share of risks.
Kennan concluded his lecture with what he acknowledged might be an apocryphal story about an American consul in Finland after World War I who had requested permission to fly the U.S. flag over premises he was occupying. After deliberation and delay, the reply came back from Washington: “No precedent.” The consul responded with equal brevity: “Precedent established.”29
IV.
Marshall returned from the long and fruitless Moscow foreign ministers’ conference on April 28, 1947, determined to set precedents. During the weeks he had been away, it had become clear to him that the European crisis went well beyond the British withdrawal of aid to Greece and Turkey. The clearest warning had come from Stalin himself: when the secretary of state called on him in the Kremlin, the old dictator assured his guest that he did not see the situation as at all “tragic,” while at the same time doodling wolves on his notepad—a favorite tactic for disconcerting visitors. That was enough for Marshall, who ordered Acheson to get the Policy Planning Staff organized. On the day after his arrival in Washington, Marshall summoned Kennan for their first face-to-face conversation.
Something must be done, he insisted, otherwise others would seize the initiative: “I don’t want to wait for Congress to beat me over the head.” Kennan was to leave the war college immediately, review the whole question of Europe’s future, and tell him “what you think I ought to do.” He would have two weeks. Were there any other assignments? Kennan asked. Marshall’s reply became legendary: “Avoid trivia.” And so, “with this instruction and the weight of the world on my shoulders,” Kennan set to work.30
Neither he nor Marshall nor any other individual invented the Marshall Plan. Its roots went back to the early 1920s, when American bankers, with quiet support from the Harding and Coolidge administrations, had helped to stabilize the post–World War I European economy. Roosevelt’s New Deal expanded the government’s responsibility for the domestic economy, and World War II made this a matter of international security, for if—as the experience of the 1930s strongly suggested—depressions made wars likely, then prosperity would be a prerequisite for peace. By the spring of 1947, however, the institutions designed to revive the global economy—the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank—were faltering. Meanwhile Stalin, tutored by Lenin to expect crises among capitalists, was doodling wolves, waiting for history to follow its prescribed path.31
Calls for action converged from several sources. Marshall himself had discussed the European crisis with his British and French counterparts, Ernest Bevin and Georges Bidault, while still in Moscow. Acheson had a State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee report ready for Marshall upon his return. The secretary of state’s economic advisers made their concerns clear, influenced by alarming reports from their chief, William L. Clayton, who was traveling in Europe. Well-informed columnists, notably James Reston and Walter Lippmann, were writing about the issue; their stories pushed officials who had supplied them with information into acting upon it. What Kennan did was to pull all of these threads together into a coherent policy.32
He did so almost single-handedly: there was no eagerness among Kennan’s Foreign Service colleagues to join the new and as yet vaguely defined Policy Planning Staff. Nor was Acheson always helpful. With no background of his own in economics, Kennan had tried to recruit Paul H. Nitze—later to succeed him as staff director—but Acheson blocked the appointment on the grounds that Nitze was “a Wall Street operator,” not “a long-range thinker.” There was not even, for a while, assigned office space. The State Department was moving from its ornate but cramped quarters next to the White House to a spare but more spacious building—vacated by the War Department when it built the Pentagon—in the “Foggy Bottom” section of Washington. The name, Reston explained to his readers, was “not an intellectual condition but a geographical area down by the Potomac.”33
When the staff formally began its operations, on May 5, it had only two other members: Joseph E. Johnson, a Williams College professor with no plans to remain in government, and Carlton Savage, a longtime aide to former secretary of state Cordell Hull. These were not heavy-hitters. It was under these circumstances, Kennan recalled, that
I was supposed to review the whole great problem of European recovery in all its complexity, to tap those various sources of outside advice which we would never be forgiven for not tapping, to draw up and present to the Secretary the recommendations he wanted, and be prepared to defend these recommendations against all government critics, including ones unavoidably more deeply versed in the details of the subject matter than myself, and ones who could be expected to show no charity or mercy toward a man who came as an invader of their hitherto private bureaucratic premises.
He was staggering “under a terrible burden right now,” George wrote his cousin Charlie James, but he was happy to have the sense “that perhaps I can leave a mark in the conduct of our international business.” This was only the beginning, though, “of a long and hard fight and I think I better not do much talking at this stage.”34
The staff soon grew to include more qualified members: Jacques Reinstein, who supplied the economic expertise Kennan had hoped to get from Nitze; Ware Adams, a Foreign Service officer with a background on German and Austrian issues; Charles (Tick) Bonesteel III, an Army colonel assigned to the State Department
who supplied a military perspective; and later that summer, at Kennan’s special request, his former Moscow colleague John Paton Davies, who handled East Asian affairs. Kennan was also fortunate to have Dorothy Hessman follow him into yet another job that generated an “endless torrent of prose.”35
He took three weeks—not two—to propose a response to the European crisis, a pardonable delay given the scale of the problem. On May 23, after many late nights and much anguished discussion, he sent Marshall PPS/1, “Policy With Respect to American Aid to Western Europe,” the first paper to emerge from the Policy Planning Staff and certainly the most influential. Kennan drafted almost all of it, a practice he generally followed. The format, however, met Marshall’s specifications: there was an opening summary of main points, a statement of the problem, a set of proposals for short-term and longer-term solutions, and a conclusion—in this case, a particularly pointed one.
The problem confronting Europe, as Kennan identified it, was not the Soviet Union itself, or international communism, but rather an “economic maladjustment” that had made European society vulnerable to exploitation by totalitarianism. It had arisen from “a profound exhaustion of physical plant and of spiritual vigor,” brought about by the effects of war and the postwar division of the continent. Further communist successes would endanger American interests, a situation that should be “frankly stated” to the American people.
The immediate need was for “effective and dramatic action” to show Washington’s determination to reverse the situation. The objective would be psychological: “to put us on the offensive instead of the defensive, to convince the European peoples that we mean business, to serve as a catalyst for their hope and confidence, and to dramatize for our people the nature of Europe’s problems and the importance of American assistance.” It would be, in short, an application of leverage, designed to accomplish a lot with a little. Kennan was vague on just what this might be: perhaps getting coal from the Rhine Valley to wherever else it was needed, possibly providing additional economic aid to Italy. His weakness in economics was showing here: the staff, he explained, would have to study this matter more fully.
Kennan did better when he turned to long-term solutions: the Europeans, he insisted, would have to design their own recovery. In language Marshall himself used in announcing the plan that bore his name, Kennan proclaimed it
neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally and to promulgate formally on its own a program designed to place western Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans. The formal initiative must come from Europe; the program must be evolved in Europe; and the Europeans must bear the basic responsibility for it.
The American role would be to finance such a program and to help the Europeans set its priorities. But they would have to act together. The United States could not respond to “isolated and individual appeals.” The goal would be self-sufficiency: a “reasonable assurance that if we support it, this will be the last such program we shall be asked to support in the foreseeable future.”
The question then was how to define “Europe.” Great Britain would have to be included. Germany was nowhere mentioned, but by mentioning Rhine Valley coal and by citing the Americans’ responsibilities in the territories they occupied, Kennan implied its inclusion. He made the point explicit in a war college lecture on May 6, while PPS/1 was still being drafted: reviving productive capacity in western Germany “should be the primary object of our policy.” An equally sensitive issue was whether to invite the Soviet Union and its satellites to participate in the plan. Here Kennan recommended extending an offer, but in such a way that they would either “exclude themselves by unwillingness to accept the proposed conditions or agree to abandon the exclusive orientation of their economies.”
The paper’s conclusion was pure Kennan, although he had reason to know by then that Marshall would approve: “Steps should be taken to clarify what the press has unfortunately come to identify as the ‘Truman Doctrine’, and to remove in particular two damaging impressions which are current in large sections of public opinion.” These were, first, that the United States was responding defensively to communism and would not be acting in the absence of that danger; and, second, that the Truman Doctrine was “a blank check to give economic and military aid to any area in the world where the communists show signs of being successful.” Instead the United States must act “only in cases where the prospective results bear a satisfactory relationship to the expenditure of American resources and effort.”36
Marshall convened top State Department officials on May 28 to discuss PPS/1. Kennan was present, as were Acheson and Will Clayton, just back from Europe and able to describe in startling detail the conditions he had seen. Bohlen was also there to support Kennan’s recommendation that the United States “play it straight,” offering aid to the Soviet Union and its satellites with the expectation that Stalin would refuse and thus take onto himself the responsibility for Europe’s division. Marshall, as was his habit, listened carefully but said little: he did ask, however, what would happen if the Russians accepted. Kennan suggested reminding them “that you like ourselves are a raw material producing and food producing country. We are contributing. What are you going to contribute?” Marshall nodded at this point but said nothing. He sent word to Harvard that day, though, that he would speak briefly a week hence when the university would be awarding him an honorary degree. Bohlen drafted the speech while Acheson, anticipating Marshall’s laconic manner, alerted the British that something significant was in the works.37
The secretary of state’s address, unspectacularly delivered on June 5, 1947, left its audience unaware that they had heard something historic: like Lincoln’s at Gettysburg, it got polite but not enthusiastic applause. Kennan learned that Marshall had drawn on PPS/1 only when he saw the final text. The American media were unsure what to make of the “Marshall Plan,” as Truman insisted on calling it, but thanks to Acheson’s tip, Bevin was ready to act: he and Bidault invited Molotov to Paris to discuss Marshall’s proposal. The Soviet foreign minister arrived there on June 27 with a large group of economic experts, leading the Americans to worry briefly that Stalin had decided to participate in the plan. If he had, he soon changed his mind, ordering Molotov to walk out. The Eastern Europeans were at first told to accept aid with a view to sabotaging the Marshall Plan from within, but Stalin then countermanded those instructions as well.38
It had all gone as Kennan expected. “Strain placed on communist movement by effort to draw up plan for European rehabilitation,” he wrote in a set of briefing notes for Marshall on July 21. “Communist parties in West[ern] Europe forced to show their hand. Russians smoked out in relations with satellite countries.... Events of past weeks the greatest blow to European Communism since termination of hostilities.”39
What, then, was Kennan’s role in designing the Marshall Plan? The secretary of state himself credited PPS/1 as its basis and with characteristic understatement—all the more valued for that—found ways to show his appreciation.40 Kennan’s contributions beyond that, though, are more difficult to sort out. Great Britain and Germany would have been included in the plan even if he had not recommended this: it would have made no economic sense without them. Kennan’s argument that the European crisis was psychological in character and could be reversed by psychological means was more original, although he framed that recommendation as a long-term solution: it was Marshall, Bohlen, and Acheson who saw that a speech made on short notice could accomplish the same thing.
Two features of the Marshall Plan, however, were particularly Kennan’s, one of them a success, the other a failure. The success was offering aid to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Had Stalin agreed to take it, he could have killed the program by ensuring that the U.S. Congress would never vote the necessary appropriations. But Kennan was sure—in a way that no one else in Washington except Bohlen could have been—that Stalin was not that clever and t
hat the offer would catch him off guard. That was what happened: the offer lured him into displaying his own confusion, a devastating blow in a system that claimed infallibility. It was a lot to have accomplished with very little.
Kennan’s other priority—explicitly stated in the conclusion to PPS/1—was for the Marshall Plan to supplant the Truman Doctrine, with its implied obligation to act wherever Soviet aggression or intimidation occurred, without regard to whether American interests were at stake or the means existed with which to defend them. Unfortunately for Kennan, however, the literary arrow he had shot into the air before he had even heard of the Truman Doctrine or the Marshall Plan was now, in the wake of Marshall’s speech, about to make its unexpected impact.
V.
The State Department announced the Policy Planning Staff ’s establishment, along with Kennan’s appointment as its director, on May 7. He combined “great strength of character, not to say toughness, with high-minded idealism,” Jock Balfour informed London, but this was “tempered by a healthy respect for the practicability of any given course.” Kennan had thought the Truman Doctrine an “unnecessary and perhaps even dangerous” overdramatization of the need to aid Greece and Turkey. He knew a great deal about the Soviet Union but had not “given way to the hysteria which colours the views of so many of his countrymen.” Balfour even reported on the Kennans’ living arrangements: he would continue some lecturing at the National War College because his family wanted to hang on to the house it provided for as long as possible.41
Kennan became even more visible a few weeks later when the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop ran the first public story on the “long telegram,” identifying him as its author. It was, they claimed, highly significant that Marshall had given this new responsibility to the man who had produced “the most important single state paper on the Soviet Union.” Worried that the still-secret document had leaked, Kennan hastened to assure Acheson that he had not been the source. He pointed out, however, that the telegram contained little “which has not subsequently been stated as American policy on many occasions and by many other people.”42
George F. Kennan : an American life Page 36