IV.
On November 4, 1947, Marshall asked Kennan to prepare a brief résumé of the world situation for his use at a cabinet meeting three days later. Completed on the sixth, PPS/13 turned out to be the first comprehensive statement of U.S. grand strategy since the end of World War II. Marshall was impressed enough to read a summary aloud when the Cabinet convened on the seventh, and President Truman, in turn, requested a copy of the full paper. Kennan’s views on American policy had now made their way to the top.
PPS/13 began with a lesson in geopolitics. The simultaneous defeats of Germany and Japan had left power vacuums into which the Soviet Union had tried to move, with a view to extending its “virtual domination over all, or as much as possible, of the Eurasian land mass.” That offensive had now come to a standstill, partly because the postwar radicalism that fueled it was diminishing, but mostly because the United States had surprised the Kremlin by delaying its own military withdrawal from former enemy territories, by offering economic assistance to demoralized Europeans, and by using the United Nations to rally resistance. The question now was what to do next.
Kennan’s answer was less, not more, for these accomplishments had “stretched our resources dangerously far in several respects.” Americans still occupied portions of Germany, Italy, Austria, and Korea, as well as all of Japan: that task could only become more difficult as time went on. However effective the Marshall Plan was proving to be, it set no precedents: it was probably the last major effort of that kind that the United States should make.
[I]t is clearly unwise for us to continue the attempt to carry alone, or largely single-handed, the opposition to Soviet expansion. It is urgently necessary for us to restore something of the balance of power in Europe and Asia by strengthening local forces of independence and by getting them to assume part of our burden.
That meant making allies of defeated enemies: to continue punishing the Germans and the Japanese would only perpetuate the power vacuums that had encouraged Soviet ambitions in the first place. But restoring the balance would also require abandoning actual and potential allies whose defense would now be too costly. Czechoslovakia fell into that category, as did Nationalist China and noncommunist Korea: where territories were “not of decisive strategic importance to us, our main task is to extricate ourselves without too great a loss of prestige.”
The Soviet Union would attempt to exploit discontent in France, Greece, and especially Italy, where American forces would soon withdraw, while keeping its own hand concealed so as “to leave us in the frustrated position of having no one to oppose but local communists, or possibly the satellites.” The United States “should be free to call the play,” determining whether action was to be directed against the U.S.S.R. or only its stooges. The latter would be strongly preferable and would not necessarily lead to war. That danger was “vastly exaggerated in many quarters.”14
Kennan’s was, then, a minimalist strategy, at least as noteworthy for what it rejected as for what it endorsed. It contained none of the Wilsonian idealism that had shaped American foreign policy during and immediately after the two world wars. There was no Truman-like commitment “to support free peoples” wherever freedom was under attack: instead Kennan called for casting some adrift, while defending others who only a few years earlier had grossly violated freedom. The atomic bomb was nowhere mentioned in PPS/13, which stressed the limits of American power and the consequent need to distinguish vital from peripheral interests. The task would be to deploy strengths against weaknesses: “victory” would not be unconditional surrender, but rather a shift in the minds of Soviet leaders that would reverse their expectations about success.
Six days after Marshall presented these recommendations to the president, Kennan sent the secretary of state a report evaluating the Policy Planning Staff ’s accomplishments during its first six months. Consisting of five members—two others would soon be added—the staff had sought to remain small, flexible, and unencumbered by administrative problems. It had prepared, during this period, thirteen formal reports, eleven of which made recommendations that had “found some reflection in subsequent operations.” If work continued at this level over the next six months, the result should be a collection of staff papers relating to all major areas. Together they would constitute “something like a global concept of United States policy.”
Kennan acknowledged suspicions about his organization elsewhere in the State Department, where no such “uniform framework of thought” was possible. But the Policy Planning Staff was meeting a broader requirement, for with the establishment of the National Security Council in July 1947, the department needed a unit that could function as a counterpart to the Pentagon’s planning units “in matters affecting policy as a whole.” If the staff did not already exist, something like it would have had to be created. And with Marshall having appointed Kennan as his representative on the NSC staff, “a desirable symmetry” had been reached in coordinating diplomatic with military strategy.15
What Kennan could not yet say was how critical that appointment would turn out to be. Over the next two years the Policy Planning Staff became the principal source of ideas for the National Security Council. Papers prepared under a PPS prefix were routinely renumbered, with little modification, as NSC papers, and if approved by the president—most of them were—they became national policy. Since Kennan so dominated his own staff, this arrangement had made him, by the beginning of 1948, not just the State Department’s but the nation’s top policy planner.16
V.
He was not generally available to the press. His name was not on the directory in the cold marble lobby. To reach his office, you had to pass portentous murals, lengthy corridors, private dining rooms, and watchful guards. “The buzzers buzz, a door opens, and here he is: Mr. X—George Frost Kennan, of Milwaukee and Moscow.”
He is tall—about six feet—slender, and good-looking in a refined and sensitive way. His eyes are blue, his chin well-formed, his mouth highly expressive, chilling or charming as its owner decrees. His smile, when used, melts an aloof expression into a surprising surge of warmth and friendliness. Nevertheless, [he] is not the type of man one would call “Georgie.” Some, finding him distant, are tempted to address him by his middle name.
The job he held defied description. It could involve preparation for next week’s squabble with the Russians, or something that might not happen for fifteen years. His decisions could affect everything from the cost of living to whether there would be war or peace. Prepared for whatever problem might wind up in its lap, the Policy Planning Staff met in a room without a phone, an intercom, or baskets marked “incoming” and “outgoing”—just a long table and eight green leather chairs. A connecting door led to Marshall’s office.
The profile, by Philip Harkins, appeared in the New York Herald Tribune magazine on January 4, 1948, accompanied by an austere but (this time) current photograph of its subject. Entitled “Mysterious Mr. X,” it was based on an interview with Kennan, although he was still not acknowledging the pseudonym. He would not have allowed access, however, without the State Department’s approval: anonymity, it seemed, was no longer expected, and the “X” article appeared not to have been such a catastrophe after all.
Despite Harkins’s ponderously mixed metaphors—Kennan was “the prize package in the deep freeze that the security-conscious State Department has installed for ‘the cold war’ ”—the article did contain some shrewd insights. Kennan wore no cloak, carried no dagger, did not smoke, drank little, and ate judiciously, “out of respect to a dormant ulcer.” He loved the guitar and with graceful gestures liked to imitate playing it. Circles might show under his eyes at the end of a long day, but he was still ready to draw on Dostoyevsky for insights into the Russian mind. He could even act out scenes from Crime and Punishment to show that although the Soviet government might believe that ends justified means, the Russian conscience shouted “No!” And what of Kennan’s own conscience? It was, Harkins noted, Protestant,
midwestern, and hence “baffling to Europeans and Orientals,” but it had driven a young man from Milwaukee to Moscow and back again. Now it had conspired (more metaphors) “with a terrifying whirlwind of outside forces to put [him] at a radioactive chessboard opposite skillful and determined opponents.”17
It’s not clear what Kennan thought of the Harkins piece—he probably cringed—but his family was impressed: the clipping wound up in several scrapbooks. It felt strange, Jeanette recalled, “to have somebody so close to you and that you love so much, suddenly so important.” Annelise remembered George’s fame as having emerged more gradually: “I really can’t say that I suddenly felt that I was the wife of an important man.” But “I wasn’t stupid.” Invitations started arriving “to dinner here, and to dinner there. People are quick.” Especially “the ambassadresses.”
With George now no longer at the war college, the Kennans were renting a house at 4418 Q Street in the Foxhall Village neighborhood just west of Georgetown. “I was always the one who did everything about the house,” Annelise explained. “And with the children, except if there was something important, I was the one who had to do it. He was very busy.” George lacked the strength “to be social every day of the week,” so the farm became all the more necessary. Weekends at East Berlin were “absolutely sacred,” not least because those were the only days he could spend with Grace and Joan. The Kennans, at one point, even declined a dinner at the Achesons’ : “Whatever they felt, they were very nice about it.” The farm had one other advantage, which was to substitute for summer camp: “We couldn’t afford that.”18
Weekdays normally began with the Policy Planning Staff members arriving at their desks to find stacks of overnight telegrams, distributed by areas of responsibility. There would be only an hour or two to read them before Kennan would call a meeting. “We’d all gather around the table, and George would start talking,” Ware Adams recalled. “Very often none of us would say a word, but we’d just be looking at him. And he, by watching us, seemed to know just what we were thinking.” Robert Tufts, the staff’s economics specialist, confirmed that
Kennan was a very dominant personality, and he certainly did lead those seminars. The rest of us kept our remarks much briefer. But I didn’t have the feeling, and I don’t think others had the feeling, that Kennan was overdoing it. We listened, and we listened carefully, and we thought carefully about what we had to say. We kept it rather brief, not because we thought we would annoy Kennan if we were long-winded, but we tried to make sure what we had to say was to the point.
John Paton Davies thought Kennan handled the staff well. As Foreign Service officers, they were not used to such seminars: “George was operating at an intellectual level several degrees above theirs. Nevertheless, he was most gracious and considerate of the feelings of these people.”
The important papers, Davies added, originated with Kennan and were drafted by Kennan: “We sat by in some awe and tried to make intelligent comments about them. He invited the comments. He welcomed the criticism.” That was a good thing, because “George does have a tendency to go sailing off, and he has to be brought back to earth.” The Policy Planning Staff, he thought, functioned somewhat as Annelise did. Someone would say: “Well, George, that’s going a little far, isn’t it?” He would then “tone it down and it would come into place.” Kennan needed “a backboard against which to play his game. He’s got to bounce it off of somebody who will react against it.”19
One person who did was Dorothy Fosdick, recruited by Kennan in 1948 to help with United Nations affairs. “We were not equals,” she stressed. “Kennan was the prince, and we were the advisers to him.” Being female, however, gave her a special status:
Kennan once told me that women throughout history had been confidential advisers to monarchs. Their role was to listen sympathetically, to provide comfort, to give private counsel. I didn’t see this as demeaning. I’ve never been a self-conscious feminist. He certainly didn’t see me as a threat of any kind. And I could always speak very frankly to him and say exactly what I thought about issues.
When crises would arise, Kennan would take Fosdick to lunch at J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite restaurant, the Allies Inn. With the FBI director and his partner Clyde Tolson usually seated nearby, Kennan would “pour out his heart to me.” That was what he saw as a woman’s role: “to listen, to console, to quietly advise—and I regarded it at the time as a very high compliment. He knew he could trust me not to repeat what he’d said.”20
Chip Bohlen, another confidant, was never a member of the staff—his official title now was Counselor in the State Department—although he participated frequently in its discussions. If inclined during the war to be optimistic about relations with Moscow, the British embassy in Washington noted, Bohlen had for some time shared the harsher view of Soviet policy “which the less career-minded and more profound Kennan has always expressed.” Adams nonetheless found the contrasts fascinating. “They were both thinkers, but in different ways”: Kennan was the dreamer, Bohlen the practical one. “It was interesting to see two people so unlike agreeing as much as they did,” something that had not been true in the past and would not be in the future.
As Kennan had hinted to Marshall, others in the State Department doubted the Policy Planning Staff’s usefulness. “I think it was all right,” Loy Henderson observed neutrally, “but it was kind of a paper thing. It had no way of enforcing itself. The geographic bureaus were where the real power was.” Henderson and the other assistant secretaries, Davies explained, resisted planning. They felt that “you had to ride like a bush pilot on the seat of your pants. You couldn’t anticipate how things were going to go, therefore you took your cues from what was happening right in front of you. That was real. The rest was day-dreaming, or speculative, and therefore did not contribute very much.” But Marshall respected Kennan and was used to working with planners. Kennan’s assignment was to provide a broad outlook, which Marshall valued because he understood that “you can’t proceed from 1A to 1B to 1C and so on down. You had to have an overview.”21
That was how Kennan understood his responsibilities. “Look,” he remembered telling the staff, “I want to hear your opinion. We’ll talk these things out as long as we need to. But, in the end, the opinion of this Staff is what you can make me understand, and what I can state.” There was, he believed, no such thing as a collective document, because “it has to pass, in the end, through the filter of the intelligence of the man who wrote it.”
I knew that I could not go to [Marshall] and say to him: “Well, you know, this paper isn’t a very good one. I didn’t really agree with it, but the majority of the Staff were of this opinion.” The General would not have accepted this from me. He would have said: “Kennan, I put you there to direct this staff. When I want the opinion of the staff, I want your opinion.” So, I did insist that the papers had to reflect my own views.
Kennan recalled listening to the staff with respect and patience. He quickly discovered, though, that when “people get to talking, they talk and they talk. But they don’t talk each other into conclusions.” He once admonished them:
We are like a wrestler who walks around another wrestler for about three minutes and can never find a place where he wants to grab hold. When you get into that situation, you then have to take the imperfect opportunity. There’s going to come a time in each of these discussions when I’m going to say: “Enough.” And I will go away and write the best paper I can.
At such moments, Tufts remembered, Kennan would disappear, and a paper would soon appear. “He could dictate a better paper than most of us could write, even after editing.”
Having worked with Kennan since 1944, Dorothy Hessman knew how to keep up with him, even when his intensity caused him to lose track of time, place, and posture: “I was sitting by the desk one day, and he was pacing back and forth behind me, and suddenly his voice sounded a little strange. So I turned around and looked and he had sat down in the leather armchair with
his feet over one arm and his back over the other and then stiffened up—so that he lay there across this chair.” On other occasions, however, he needed an audience. Marshall Green, a young Foreign Service officer who went with Kennan to Japan early in 1948, found that one of his jobs was to “look intelligent.” Kennan would speak to Green, while Hessman took it down. This gave his writing a conversational flavor, and “when he was through, he didn’t have to change a word of it.”22
During the two and a half years that Kennan ran the Policy Planning Staff, it produced over seventy formal papers: the complete set came to more than nine hundred single-spaced pages. “The world was our oyster,” he later wrote, “there was no problem of American foreign policy to which we could not address ourselves—indeed, to which it was not our duty to address ourselves—if we found the problem serious enough and significant enough to warrant the effort.” Kennan meant the papers to serve, not as a theoretical framework for the conduct of international relations, but rather as applications of certain “methods and principles” to “practical situations.” No other office in the State Department produced so many papers on so many issues over so many months, “from a single point of view.”
That was, if anything, an understatement. Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff papers were the most thorough specification of interests, threats, and feasible responses that anyone had yet worked out within the U.S. government, and it would have been difficult to find anything comparable in any other government at the time. They were an intellectual tour de force: an extraordinary attempt to devise a global grand strategy. But they were also, as Kennan acknowledged, “one man’s concept of how our government ought to behave and by what principles it ought to be guided.”23 They rested on the premise that a single policy planner (Kennan) could suggest to a single policy maker (Marshall) what he, and hence the nation, ought to do. They were, in this sense, strikingly solipsistic.
George F. Kennan : an American life Page 39