George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Acheson had played an important role, as under secretary of state, in advancing Kennan’s career. He encouraged the author of the “long telegram” to speak publicly about its contents, he facilitated Kennan’s move from the National War College to the Policy Planning Staff, and the two cooperated closely in designing the Marshall Plan. They differed only on the public justification for aid to Greece and Turkey, but Acheson, preoccupied with getting the bill through Congress, hardly noticed Kennan’s objections to the Truman Doctrine. Having left government to replenish his finances in the summer of 1947, Acheson could watch Kennan’s subsequent policy planning only as a well-informed outsider. But he thought highly enough of it—after learning that Truman wanted him now to run the State Department—to ask Kennan to defer any decision about retiring. That led Kennan, on January 3, 1949, to send Acheson an unorthodox offer to stay on.

  “We all have our egos and ambitions,” he acknowledged. “But the shadows which fall on each of us, these days, are so huge and dark, and so unmistakable in portent, that they clearly dwarf all that happens among us individually, here below.” The disclaimer that followed must have raised an Achesonian eyebrow: “I really have no enthusiasm for sharing with the people I have known—Kerensky, Bruening, Dumba, or the king of Jugoslavia—the wretched consolation of having been particularly prominent among the parasites on the body of a dying social order, in the hours of its final agony.” Acheson was not to think it “implausible modesty”—there was little danger of that after reading this—when Kennan wrote that he wished to remain only if he could feel that “we are not just bravely paddling the antiquated raft of U.S. foreign policy upstream, at a speed of three miles an hour, against a current which is making four.”

  One problem was the State Department. It was drifting away from Marshall’s concept of a planning staff that met regularly, avoided functional or regional parochialism, and conveyed its recommendations to a secretary of state who patiently awaited them. Nor was the department adequately publicizing its policies: the “X” article at the time had “shocked people to tears,” but Kennan now wished there had been twenty like it. Byrnes and Marshall had spent too much time away from Washington: the secretary should not be “an itinerant negotiator,” shuttling from one overseas meeting to another “in order to demonstrate our devotion to the principle of international organization.” Nor should there be further “lofty pronouncements about peace and democracy.” What was needed instead was “hard work, concentration, discipline, and an inner silence.”

  “There—dear Dean—are some of the things which I think would have to be done to the hull of the ship of state, if it is to be restored to a really buoyant condition.” Without them, there was no point in anyone trying “to blow wind into the sails of the old hulk.... I’d rather be at Yale, or where-you-will—any place where I could sound-off and talk freely to people—than in the confines of a department in which you can neither do anything about it nor tell people what you think ought to be done.”2

  Kennan claimed, in a postscript, to have written this letter before he knew that Acheson would become secretary of state, but it did not read that way. Its tone was one of Kennan interviewing Acheson, rather than the other way around. It sounded like an effort to press the new secretary into the mold of the previous one, thereby restoring the Policy Planning Staff to its rightful place within the State Department hierarchy. This, Kennan must have known, was going to be a stretch.

  Acheson had the highest respect for Marshall, so much so that he wrote one of the best short descriptions of how the great man operated: “All elements of the problem were held, as it were, in solution in his mind until it was ready to precipitate a decision.” That was not, however, Acheson’s style. He lacked Marshall’s modesty, self-discipline, and procedural restraint. He was incapable of commanding quietly: of not commenting on competing positions until he had chosen one. Acheson paraded his wit, his wardrobe, and especially his mustache—the latter ornament, the journalist James Reston wrote, was itself “a triumph of policy planning.” Oliver Franks, the British ambassador, recalled that Acheson “bathed in talk.” The idea of “having your thinking done for you, which is what the Policy Planning Staff stood for, was alien to Dean.” The new secretary of state so loved debate, in fact, that at one contentious NATO meeting, having exhausted the British and French foreign ministers, he took over and performed their parts after they had gone to bed.3

  “You have to remember this about Acheson,” Kennan pointed out a few years after the older man’s death. “He was basically a Washington lawyer, not a diplomat. The fact that he looked like a diplomat confused people, but it didn’t make him one. He had never lived abroad, knew no foreign languages, knew nothing about the outside world.” Acheson was chiefly, Franks remembered, “a man of action. He wanted actually to get things done. I think he felt that Kennan wasn’t: that he sat in his cell and thought major thoughts, but was not particularly concerned with their application to things as they are now.” Kennan focused on the long term. Acheson wanted to know: “What do I do now?”4

  Why, then, did they think they could work together? One reason was that they were good friends: the Kennans and the Achesons saw each other regularly, while the Marshalls determinedly avoided the Washington social scene. “I enjoyed his company, and profited constantly from exposure to the critical discipline of his fine mind,” Kennan recalled. “He was a lovely person.” Acheson’s sharp tongue, John Paton Davies remembered, could not conceal “a great gentleness” in him—“a great gentlemanliness.” It was also the case that Acheson respected Kennan’s accomplishments, whereas other secretaries of state—John Foster Dulles was widely assumed to be the Republican alternative—might not have. Finally, Acheson returned to the State Department with a relatively open mind. Having been out of government for a year and a half, he had no position on several of the issues with which Kennan had been wrestling, and so was ready to listen to him, even if only as one of several voices. Kennan, for his part, was sure that the ship of state would crash into the rocks unless his could again become the dominant voice in setting a new course—but that could only happen now, if it was to happen at all, through Acheson.5

  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.

  I.

  “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.

  Frown not, fair pilgrim, on this magic isle

  Where unseen fairies toll the bells of night.

  Dismiss not lightly, nor with scornful smile

  The things that strike the ear and meet the sight

  In this implausible, unlikely land:

  Fresh lawns, dark cedars, picture-postcard sky,

  A limpid sea, strange objects on the sand,

  White roofs in moonlight; and the aching cry

  Of strings of lights along a distant shore

  Across a darkened sea. Do not deplore

  These things—and others—just because they lie

  Amid the vast dread ocean of a dream.

  The island’s real; and real—I trust—am I.

  The distant continents—

  are what they seem.

  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.

  What seem to you the frown, the smile of scorn,

  Dismissal, the deploring of a dream,

  Are none of these. The islands are forlorn

  Not for their magic or because they seem

  Unreal, but just because one cannot stay

  More than an instant in such happy air

  Before each is impelled upon his way—

  Aware of loss but saying “I must not care.”

  This is the sadness of a bitter time,

  And this the final, but unfinished, rhyme.

  Nevertheless, looking back over the past few weeks, Kennan had reason to be glad that he had not resigned.6

  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.7

  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.8

  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.9

  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.10

  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.11

  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,

  The Secretary said that he was sorry to hear Mr. Kennan say this because he had been almost persuaded by the cogency of Mr. Kennan’s argument.... [H]e did not understand . . . how we ever arrived at the decision to see established a Western German government or State. He wondered whether this had not been the brainchild of General Clay and not a governmental decision.

  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.”12

  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.13

  II.

  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

  Once fashionable Berlin suburbs, where people camped out in the surviving dark cold houses “like barbarians in the palaces of Italy.”

  Tall bare poplars, “which had waited and watched through the final years of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era and the war and the bombings and the arrival of the Russian army,” now standing “alone again through another night, until the battered cars of the
first early subway train came clattering past.”

  Ruins, which still stood “in awful and imposing desolation: the piles of rubble flowing down to the sidewalk, twisted iron beams and the remnants of walls standing out above them, portions of rooms hanging giddily in the air like stage settings.”

  Chauffeurs, outside a brightly lit American club, “stamping up and down and muttering in the cold night air, . . . like an evil caricature of the bundled Russian coachmen of olden times, waiting for their masters outside the night-clubs of St. Petersburg and Moscow.”

  Occupiers, who in the midst of devastation were unable to stop “handing each other drinks and discussing through the long evenings the price of antiques, the inadequacies of servants, and the availability of cosmetics in the PX.”

  But also kids, with no memory of a different Berlin, who treated the devastated city as an immense playground: “What other children had infinite supplies of bricks and other building materials for building dams in the flowing gutters [or] such magnificent settings for hide-and-seek? Where else could you, if the policeman wasn’t looking, detach one of the little steel dump cars on the rubble-removal tracks and roll it down whole city blocks to a make-believe railway station far away? Who else had such natural embattlements and redoubts for conducting snowball fights?”

  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.”