George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Implied in all of this was another homage to Bismarck, who after unifying Germany in 1871 had turned its enemies’ animosities upon themselves. “Our safety depends,” Kennan told the war college students in his lecture the previous December, “on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile or undependable forces of the world.” Adversaries should

  spend in conflict with each other, if they must spend it at all, the intolerance and violence and fanaticism which might otherwise be directed against us, [so] that they are thus compelled to cancel each other out and exhaust themselves in internecine conflict in order that the constructive forces, working for world stability, may continue to have the possibility of life.

  Such a strategy would achieve containment without overcommitment, and Titoism—the first tangible evidence of hostility among communists—made it seem possible. Smith, now back from three years as ambassador in Moscow, caught Kennan’s meaning precisely when he reminded the Policy Planning Staff, on March 1, that “the Russians fear Titoism above everything else.... [T]he United States does not fear communism if it is not controlled by Moscow and not committed to aggression.”28

  But as Davies, together with his staff colleague Ware Adams, reminded Kennan, acting on Smith’s assumption would require shifting the official portrayal of international communism. The Truman administration had been describing it as “a single, coherent, unitary, self-consistent doctrine,” and no doubt Soviet leaders wished that it were. But not all communists were Moscow’s agents. By treating them all as such, Washington’s rhetoric was forcing them into that position. If it could distinguish communism from Russian imperialism, “we would thus ... remove from the communists in China and elsewhere throughout the world a strong force tending to compel them to collaborate with the Soviet Union.” This would give the United States a much more effective weapon “than is the blunderbuss of primitive ‘anti-communism,’ aimed against a vaguely defined, out of date, self-contradictory, and possibly dying, set of political theories.”29

  Kennan’s response is not on record, but shortly after returning from Germany at the end of March, he did tell the staff that the United States should do everything possible “to increase the suspicion between the Kremlin and its agents abroad.” Titoism was a “disintegrating force” within international communism and “should be stimulated and encouraged by all devices of propaganda.”30 The problem would be to make this work in a domestic political climate that was growing more hospitable, not less, to rhetorical blunderbusses.

  Defending communists of any kind had never been popular in the United States, and the onset of the Cold War had made it much less so. The Truman Doctrine was widely regarded as a declaration of war against communists everywhere. During the 1948 presidential campaign, the president denounced “Henry Wallace and his communists,” while former State Department official Alger Hiss—an old friend of Acheson’s—was charged with spying for the Soviet Union, raising fears that communists had infiltrated the U.S. government. Meanwhile, the pro-Nationalist “China Lobby” was whipping up support for Chiang Kai-shek in Congress and the media: Mao’s triumph, it insisted, would be a disaster for the United States. Acheson had dropped Program A because it unsettled allies. To what extent would he support an even riskier Kennan strategy that—at least in the eyes of domestic critics—attempted to distinguish “good” communists from “bad” ones?31

  V.

  As it happened, Acheson did just that. It was an “obvious interest” of the United States, he commented in February, that Tito survive. Once it became clear that Yugoslavia had stopped assisting the Greek communists, Acheson favored relaxing restrictions on trade with that country, even to the point of allowing the sale of a militarily significant steel mill. That got him into trouble with the new secretary of defense, Louis Johnson—Forrestal had resigned after suffering a nervous breakdown, and then committed suicide. When the word got out that the United States was selling steel mills to communists, Johnson fumed, the resulting furor might sink the Democratic Party’s chances in the next election. Acheson stood his ground, however, won Truman’s approval for the sale, and to Kennan’s relief it went through. The American objective, he suggested at the end of August 1949, should not be to promote democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe but rather to encourage other communists like Tito to follow a nationalist line. Acheson got the point. The Yugoslav dictator might be a son-of-a-bitch, he observed the following month, but he was “our son-of-a-bitch.”32

  Nor did Acheson object to less public methods of undermining Soviet authority in Eastern Europe. Kennan had been content at first to let Tito’s example do that, but with Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination available, it was hard to resist the temptation to speed the process. By 1949 Kennan was helping to set up an ostensibly private National Committee for a Free Europe—actually funded through the OPC—to provide financial support and employment opportunities for Eastern European émigrés, as well as anti-Soviet broadcasts to their homelands through its subsidiary, Radio Free Europe. The OPC was also collaborating with “defectors, deserters and escapees” from the region: they were, a Policy Planning Staff paper noted in June, the “most effective agents to destroy the communist myth of the Soviet paradise.” When asked, several months later, about more aggressive initiatives, Kennan replied that “some covert operations should be applied at the appropriate time,” perhaps in Poland even immediately.33

  Did these include the possibility of assassinations? Kennan acknowledged years later that a unit had existed within the OPC “specifically charged with this sort of activity if and when we ever decided to conduct it.” But its chief, Boris Pash, an Army colonel whose military intelligence career went back to the Manhattan Project, had been vague about his authority: “If any such responsibility was written into his charter (and [Pash] couldn’t remember that it was), it was because the list of dirty tricks with which they were charged had been taken over, practically verbatim, from the list of responsibilities of the corresponding division of the wartime O.S.S., which apparently did not preclude this sort of thing.” Kennan was sure “that no assassinations were conducted during our time on the Planning Staff, and [that] the very idea of such a thing was decisively put down by higher authority.”34

  The OPC was already at work in Albania. Kennan had endorsed an operation there the previous April but remained unsure about its objectives. Should the United States, working with the British, seek to overthrow the regime of Enver Hoxha, still loyal to Moscow but caught between Tito’s Yugoslavia and the failing communist insurgency in Greece? Should Tito be encouraged to do that? What might the Soviet reaction be? But when Bevin asked Acheson, in September, whether the United States would agree to “bring down” Hoxha, the secretary of state replied—cautiously—in the affirmative. Caution would have been advisable, for over the next three years the OPC and the British secret intelligence service MI6 tried repeatedly to infiltrate agents and even paramilitary forces into Albania, with unvaryingly disastrous results. The principal reason was not Kennan’s insufficient oversight of the OPC, but the fact that MI6’s liaison officer to Wisner’s organization was the spy Kim Philby, who exposed each of the Albanian expeditions to Soviet intelligence and, through them, to Hoxha. Kennan had reason to regret his role in these activities, but the responsibility for their failure went well beyond him.35

  Long before the extent of the debacle became known, Kennan had made it clear that such operations should not be the primary instrument with which to roll back Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. That should be Stalin himself, who would accomplish the objective by continuing to insist that the interests of the satellite states must never conflict with those of the U.S.S.R.

  Power, even the taste of it, is as likely to corrupt Communist as bourgeois leaders. Considerations of national as well as personal interest materialize and come into conflict with the colonial policy pursued by the Soviet interests. When this happens, satellite officials may still remain, by force of other factors, Kre
mlin captives; but at least they are not entirely willing ones.

  The optimal strategy, then, would not be to try to overthrow communist regimes in Eastern Europe, but rather to encourage their nationalism: “to foster a heretical drifting-away process on the part of the satellite states.” In this way, the United States might begin to operate “on the basis of a balance of forces in the Communist world, and to foster the tendencies toward accommodation with the West implicit in such a state of affairs.”36

  On the whole, Kennan’s strategy of sustaining Tito succeeded. It survived the increasing tendency within the United States not to distinguish between communists: Acheson’s help here was vital. No other Eastern European state openly defied Stalin, but his fear that one or more of them might rattled him sufficiently that he launched devastating purges, over the next few years, eliminating many of his own loyalists in the region. The covert operations Kennan supported at the time—even though he later repudiated them—increased the Soviet Union’s insecurity about its empire. Their purpose, as he put it in August 1949, was to provoke a quarrel “between the Kremlin and the Communist Reformation.” Whether because of these activities or in spite of them, that is exactly what eventually happened.37

  VI.

  Acheson shared Kennan’s hopes that Titoism would take hold in China as well. Late in February 1949 he asked Truman to approve a Policy Planning Staff recommendation that the United States seek “to exploit through political and economic means any rifts between the Chinese Communists and the USSR,” and the president readily did so. To say that the Russians controlled China and that “we might just as well die or give up,” the secretary of state assured the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the following month, was “a very distinct exaggeration of the whole matter.” The Nationalists were “washed up,” Acheson told Bevin in April, but Chinese inertia and corruption would soon absorb the Communists. It was difficult to say so publicly, but the United States would henceforth pursue “a more realistic policy respecting China.”38

  There were, however, important differences between China and Yugoslavia. One was that Tito headed a government already in power that wanted Washington’s help to stay there; Moscow offered only extinction. Mao led a movement about to take power that expected the Americans to try to stop it. Why, otherwise, were they still aiding their longtime ally Chiang Kai-shek? Moscow, from Mao’s perspective, offered ideological legitimation—something Tito did not need—but also protection against American efforts to overthrow him. That the Truman administration was aiding the Nationalists as a way of extracting itself from China while deflecting the China lobby’s wrath was a subtlety wholly lost on Mao. That he needed, for the moment at least, to align himself with Moscow was equally lost on the Americans. When Mao announced, at the end of June 1949, that the new China would “lean” to the side of the Soviet Union, it seemed to Acheson, Kennan, and Davies that he failed to follow the script. On that point, at least, they were right: Mao had been assuring Stalin that he would not become an Asian Tito.39

  Mao’s attitude made it difficult to portray him within the United States, therefore, as a “good” communist. Fed up with the Nationalists, Kennan and Davies had been overseeing the preparation of a voluminous “White Paper,” meant for public release, that would document the failures of Chiang’s government. Acheson endorsed the project, overriding objections from Secretary of Defense Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But by the time this 1,054-page volume finally came out in August, relations with Mao had soured: the secretary of state’s letter of transmittal—to which, strangely, neither Kennan nor Davies objected—denounced the communist leaders for having “forsworn their Chinese heritage.” This put Acheson, his biographer has commented, “in the remarkable position of trying to divide Chinese from Russian communists by describing the former as fanatics subservient to the latter.” In the meantime, the hundreds of declassified documents in the White Paper had insulted the Nationalists, while handing the China lobby enough ammunition to keep Acheson on the defensive through the rest of his term.40

  Kennan, at the time, was worrying about Taiwan, where Chiang was planning to move his government after being ejected from the mainland. But could Washington afford to leave that island, strategically located between Okinawa and the Philippines, in the hands of the incompetent Nationalists, who would surely soon lose it to the Communists? Kennan proposed, in July, a dramatic solution: that the United States move with “resolution, speed, ruthlessness, and self-assurance” to evict the 300,000 Nationalist troops already on the island, in “the way that Theodore Roosevelt might have done it.” This would have “an electrifying effect in this country and throughout the Far East.” The recommendation electrified somebody, because Kennan withdrew it on the day he submitted it. Years later he attributed the idea to Davies, who, when asked about it, denied responsibility for such a “totally implausible” plan. “I imagine that anyone, even of the intellectual eminence of Kennan, is entitled to some mad acts.”41

  Davies was pulling his interviewer’s leg here, for however bombastic Kennan’s language was, his Taiwan proposal was no aberration. There had been discussions within the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, and MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo, of how the United States might persuade Chiang Kai-shek to step down, or remove him from power, or even foster a Taiwanese separatist movement that would deny the island to both the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists. The idea would have been to incorporate Taiwan within the “defensive perimeter” strategy that Kennan had been advocating, without having the United States take sides too obviously in the Chinese civil war. Kennan’s eviction scenario grew out of a Policy Planning Staff study Davies had helped prepare, and as he reminded Kennan, “God knows what the OPC may have been up to.”

  But it was now too late for such maneuvers. Chiang was consolidating his authority over Taiwan, and his increasingly vociferous supporters in the United States were determined to keep him there: for them, the island was the base from which the Nationalists would one day eject the Communists from China itself. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, concerned about a growing gap between political commitments and military capabilities, had never liked the idea of using American forces to secure Taiwan. “We didn’t have the forces to throw Chiang off,” Rusk recalled, “and the domestic political ramifications would have been overwhelming.”42

  Kennan’s China policy showed that he was no China expert. All that he knew about it, he often acknowledged, had come from Davies. And Davies, in the summer of 1949, was suffering from an occupational hazard of experts: what happens when your country doesn’t do what you expected it to? Stalin had surprised and angered Kennan by revealing the Smith-Molotov exchanges. Now Mao had surprised and angered Davies by embracing Stalin, not splitting with him. Surprises, for experts, can be unsteadying, and on China both Kennan and Davies were staggering. Thanks to them, Acheson was too.

  “It is dangerous to talk about a Chinese Tito-ism,” Kennan admitted in September 1949, a few days before Mao, in Beijing, formally proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. “What happens in China is not apt to be a replica of what has happened in Yugoslavia or anywhere else.” Still, Soviet leaders would have to watch the situation with great care, because their authority over China hung only on “the slender thread of a ... tortuous and undependable ideology.” If differences did develop, they would be very serious for Moscow. It was entirely possible “that Russian Communism may some day be destroyed by its own children in the form of the rebellious Communist parties of other countries. I can think of no development for which there would be greater logic and justice.”43

  VII.

  Kennan’s principal focus, however, was never on China: his attention to that issue was, at best, sporadic in 1949. What most concerned him, as Acheson’s China policy was falling apart, was how Europe might come together now that Program A had foundered. Was the continent to be divided indefinitely into Soviet and American spheres of influence, or could it regain an identity
of its own? If the latter—decidedly Kennan’s preference—what identity might that be? The question was simple, he told the Policy Planning Staff on May 18: were there to be “two worlds or three”?44

  The answer was not simple. Europe’s most formidable war-making facilities—the Rhine-Ruhr industrial complex—lay within the boundaries of a country that had used them to start two great wars, the latter of which had left not only it but also Europe divided and for the moment powerless. That situation could not last: the Germans would sooner or later recover their strength, while the determination of their occupiers to control them would wane. At that point Germany would be in a position to dominate Europe again, a frightening prospect if, as Kennan suspected, the aggressive tendencies of the Germans had not changed. For Europe to remain split, though, would also be frightening: the Europeans were “almost the only modern, reasonable—if you will, tired—peoples with whom we can live. If they cease to be that . . . we would be a lonely nation. That terrifies me.”45

  Program A had proposed resolving this problem by negotiating a withdrawal of occupation forces from Germany, but then embedding the reunified state within a European federation: European values, in this scenario, would contain German ambitions. Now, however, the United States and its allies had given up on German reunification, leaving European integration in limbo. Could the United States, Great Britain, and France incorporate the new West German state within a sufficiently robust system to keep it from cutting its own deal on reunification with East Germany and the Soviet Union? That danger also alarmed Kennan, for if the Germans again linked up with the Russians, as they had in 1939–41, then “we might as well fold up.”46 That’s why the future of Western Europe was so important to him in the summer of 1949. If the United States and its allies could not agree on how to reunify Germany in cooperation with the Soviet Union, then they should at least have a plan to keep the West Germans from doing that on their own.