George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Devising one became a final test, for Kennan, of what planning could accomplish. The past year—particularly the implosion of Program A—had given him many reasons for pessimism. But what if one were to approach the German problem, by way of European federation, in consultation with the British and the French? A British Foreign Office friend, Gladwyn Jebb, had suggested talks on what role Germany might play—or at least West Germany—in any future “United Western Europe.” That was all Kennan needed to assign his staff another big task: to devise the optimal federal structure for the noncommunist portions of Europe.47

  He was determined, this time, to do it right. He got Acheson’s approval for the exercise. He met with other top State Department officials—among them Hickerson—to let them know the direction of his thinking. He convened consultants of near-Olympian stature: they included former ambassador to Moscow Walter Bedell Smith; John J. McCloy, soon to depart for West Germany as the first U.S. high commissioner there; J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had run the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb and was now the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; Hans Morgenthau, rapidly emerging as the most influential academic theorist of international relations; and the equally influential theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who was then reviving, as Christian doctrine, the obligation to resist tyranny, whether of the fascist or the communist variety. “Let us proceed,” Niebuhr recalled Kennan saying, “as if there was no Russian threat.” That struck Niebuhr as like saying: “Let us proceed as though there was not sex in the world”—but did at least stimulate discussion.48

  As Robert Tufts recalled of the Policy Planning Staff consultants, though, “[w]e were often surprised to find how really ill-informed these people were on matters on which we’d expected them to provide some insights.” The meetings were “much more interesting for [them] than they were for the rest of us.” That happened in this instance: the heavyweights pontificated but reached no consensus, leaving Kennan free to construct his own.49

  It took shape as PPS/55, not a formal staff paper, but an outline of what he might say during the next stage of the planning process, a trip to Paris and London to consult the allies. There was no point, Kennan insisted, in trying to force the British into any political or economic union with Europe: they would always prefer alignment with the United States, Canada, and what remained of their empire. But only a European union, Kennan also believed, could control the Germans. That left France in a critical role. With some form of “Franco-German understanding and association, . . . Germany could conceivably be absorbed into [the] larger European family without dominating or demoralizing others.” The United States should retain its commitment to defend its NATO allies, plus West Germany and the western occupation zones of Austria, for as long as Europe remained divided. The Franco-German “association,” however, would seek over time to end that division: like the Marshall Plan, it would attract the Soviet Union’s satellites, filling the void left by the failure of Program A to reunify Germany and to reconstitute Europe.50

  But the French officials Kennan consulted, fearing exclusion from any Anglo-American relationship, seemed singularly unreceptive. They showed none of the willingness to think creatively about Germany that he had picked up from François-Poncet a few months earlier. The British were less anxious, although more inclined than Kennan had expected to value their ties to the Western Europeans. They were also on the verge of a major financial crisis, which left little room for thinking on Kennan’s grand scale. He returned to Washington, he recalled, “with empty hands.” Acheson was noncommittal, but “I was under no doubt that he viewed the concept I had presented, closely integrated as it was with my view of the German problem, skeptically and without enthusiasm.”51

  With Britain’s trade imbalance draining its gold and dollar reserves at an alarming rate, Kennan shifted the staff’s attention, in August, to that problem. Never confident of his own economic expertise, he renewed a request that Acheson, as under secretary of state in 1947, had turned down: for Paul H. Nitze, then working in the department’s Office of Economic Affairs, to join the Policy Planning Staff. Kennan had known Nitze since 1946. He had a formidable reputation as a prewar investment banker, as a wartime economic analyst, and as vice-chairman of the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey. Nitze’s State Department work had focused chiefly on trade policy and administering the Marshall Plan, but he agreed with Kennan on Program A and had even helped draft the proposal. Now, with Acheson’s approval, Kennan made him deputy director, on the understanding that Nitze would eventually become his successor.52

  The sterling-dollar crisis showed, with almost textbook clarity, why planning was so difficult. Washington officials since before World War II had seen Anglo-American cooperation as a vital national interest, but Truman entrusted these negotiations to the secretary of the treasury, John W. Snyder, a Missouri political crony who made no secret of his contempt for the Labor government’s “socialism.” That upset Kennan, who knew that a major objective of the Marshall Plan—and even of several CIA covert operations—had been to strengthen the “noncommunist left” in Europe: Snyder seemed determined to rescue the British only if they dismantled their planned economy. James E. Webb, another Truman confidant who had replaced Lovett as under secretary of state, explained that because Acheson was under attack in Congress, it was necessary to give Snyder and Secretary of Defense Johnson a larger foreign policy role. Kennan shot back that the president should be backing up his secretary of state—and should realize “how terribly difficult it would be to find anyone with comparable qualities for this position.” Perhaps Snyder or someone else in the president’s “entourage” should take the job?53

  With Acheson’s support and after much effort, Kennan was able to shift the administration’s position, allowing the negotiators to work out a mutually acceptable plan to devalue the British pound in return for American concessions on trade and investment, but without any attempt to undo British socialism. After all of the “fireworks” for the benefit of Congress, Kennan grumbled, the president did exactly what he had advised doing: “But I got no credit for it. My name was never mentioned. I was disgusted with this. Acheson, however, being much more of a domestic political character than I was, found it all in order.” He was there, after all, “to serve Harry Truman’s political interests as well as his interests as head of state. I couldn’t have cared less about his political interests.”54

  A few weeks later Webb took Kennan to a meeting at the White House: it was one of the few occasions on which he actually met Truman. “The President looked slightly tired, but was his usual likeable self,” Kennan wrote in his diary that evening. “I could understand how such strong loyalties could develop between him and his associates.” But

  I was glad, upon reflection, that I had had so little contact with him; for I would not like to be in a position where personal loyalty and affection forced me to close my eyes to the obvious deficiencies in the conduct of foreign policy in this period and to profess enthusiasm for what must remain a confusing and ineffective method of operation.

  Two days later, on September 28, 1949, Kennan told Webb that he wanted to go on leave from the State Department the following June. He also asked—sooner than that—to be “relieved of the title and responsibilities as Director of the Planning Staff.”55

  VIII.

  Acheson had not eased him out: indeed he had just promoted Kennan. Having spent seven years in Washington, Bohlen was eager to go abroad again, so Acheson asked Kennan to replace him as State Department counselor while continuing to run Policy Planning. Kennan made it clear, though, that this would be a temporary arrangement: “I am very conscious of the increasing complexity of government,” he wrote his old mentor George Messersmith, “and sometimes wonder whether that complexity is not growing beyond the nervous and intellectual and physical strength of even the greatest human individuals.”56

  Webb, who was now in charge of State Department administration, thought tha
t it was exceeding Kennan’s strength. He had entered the Foreign Service, Webb later pointed out, “when brilliant individual action” was possible. Now, though, diplomacy required a large, complicated organization in which execution and feedback were at least as important as planning: “High-level statements simply do not implement themselves.” Kennan’s resignation arose, most immediately, from an effort by Webb to address that problem. He had instituted a new procedure by which Policy Planning Staff papers were to pass through his own staff, consisting of assistant secretaries for regions and functions, before going to Acheson. That more than quadrupled the distribution list, proliferating possibilities for objections. A paper on Yugoslavia came back with some on September 16, leaving it, Kennan believed, “in a state of suspended animation.” He took this to mean that Policy Planning would henceforth be “a sort of drafting secretariat for the Assistant Secretaries’ group.”

  The whole raison d’être of this Staff was its ability to render an independent judgment on problems coming before the Secretary or the Under Secretary through the regular channels of the Department. If the senior officials of the Department do not wish such an independent judgment, or do not have confidence in us to prepare one which would be useful, then I question whether the Staff should exist at all.

  Webb had, in effect, closed Kennan’s door into Marshall’s office, and Acheson, who now occupied that space, had done nothing to reopen it. This changed little in an operational sense: Kennan had always been one of several advisers to Acheson, who would have tolerated no other arrangement. Symbolically, though, Webb’s requirement rankled—and it provided cover for the larger reason that lay behind Kennan’s resignation.57

  This was his sense that, even if the door to the secretary’s office had remained open, Acheson was no longer listening to him: indeed, on the issue of European integration, Kennan believed, no one was. Hickerson had expressed “grave doubts” as to whether Germany could be absorbed into any Western European association to which the United States and Great Britain did not belong. Any effort to form an “Anglo-American-Canadian bloc,” Bohlen warned from Paris, would mean that “we will not be able to hold on to the nations of Western Europe.” A meeting of U.S. ambassadors in that region concluded unanimously in late October that no European integration would be possible without British participation because the continental powers would otherwise fear German domination.58

  “That you were right in your premonitions about . . . talking to the British about European union I gladly concede,” Kennan wrote Bohlen early in November. “The path of lesser resistance and lesser immediate trouble in this matter would have been to keep silent.” Nor did he have any intention of challenging the ambassadors: “Even if the Secretary agreed one hundred percent with my view, I would not ask him to move in the face of such a body of opinion.” But the existing policy, Kennan warned,

  (a) gives the Russians no alternative but to continue their present policies or see further areas of central and eastern Europe slide into a U.S.-dominated alliance against them, and in this way makes unlikely any settlement of east-west differences except by war; and

  (b) promises the Germans little more in the western context than an indefinite status as an overcrowded, occupied and frustrated semi-state, thus depriving them of a full stake in their own resistance to eastern pressures and forfeiting their potential aid in the establishment of a military balance between east and west.

  “You may have your ideas where one goes from here on such a path and at what point it is supposed to bring us out on the broad uplands of a secure and peaceful Europe,” Kennan added, with some bitterness. “If so, I hope you will tell the Secretary about them.... I find it increasingly difficult to give guidance on this point.”59

  Bohlen responded angrily: “I had hoped we could profitably correspond on such subjects, but frankly I am not interested in polemics.” “You should not have been offended at my letter,” Kennan replied. “We have always argued warmly, and with gloves off. You know me well enough to take into account my polemic temperament.” There was no point, however, in continuing the debate. “A decision has fallen.... Perhaps it was the right one. None of us sees deeply enough into the future to be entirely sure about these things.” But the depths of these disagreements had diminished his usefulness, he was sure, “and I will be happier than ever if, as I hope, it will be possible for me . . . to subside quietly into at least a year or two of private life.”60

  “My planning staff, started nearly three years ago, has simply been a failure,” Kennan wrote in his diary in mid-November. The State Department’s operational units would reduce to meaninglessness any recommendation they did not originate. They would sabotage anything the secretary of state might decide on his own, knowing that no one could review every aspect of their work, and that the people who were trying to get action would soon be gone. Even if Acheson shared Kennan’s views, “he would not be able to find others who did.” The only way out would be to have a doctrine that could be “patiently and persistently pounded into the heads of the entire apparatus, high and low.” But since no such mechanism existed within the government, the only alternative was “an intensive educational effort,” conducted through the great universities, to reshape public opinion in the broadest sense. “All of this impels me to the thought that if I am ever to do any good in this work, . . . it must be outside the walls of this institution and not inside them.”61

  IX.

  For once, Kennan was keeping a Washington diary: it was the only time he did so for more than a few days while serving as Policy Planning Staff director. He began it in August 1949, shortly after bringing Nitze onto the staff. He knew, even then, that he would be leaving and seemed to think it important to record the reasons why. In addition to Kennan’s daily schedule, the diary documents the sterling-dollar crisis, his organizational disagreements with Webb, his growing sense of isolation over Western European integration, and hints at his future. It also shows, despite their differences, Kennan’s continuing respect and affection for Acheson, which the secretary of state fully reciprocated.

  Acheson was grateful to Kennan for having rescued the British negotiations from the Anglophobic Snyder. They shared a dislike, soon to become a loathing, for Secretary of Defense Johnson. And they still enjoyed each other’s company: Acheson too had a farm—his was in Maryland—to which he invited the Kennans for an overnight visit on September 1. When, on the next morning, Joseph and Stewart Alsop reported that Kennan had drafted key paragraphs of a recent Truman speech on Anglo-American relations, Kennan feared that Acheson might suspect him of leaking that information to the two journalists. “Dear George, Don’t worry about,” Acheson reassured him. “Nobody can both know you and suspect you. This is life in a disorderly democracy.”62

  Kennan and Acheson had the pleasure—if it could be called that—of hosting the notoriously prickly Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, at the State Department on October 13. A few days earlier Kennan had entrusted to his diary the undiplomatic lecture he would like to deliver on that occasion; a few days later he recorded a Bill Bullitt prediction that any country allocating 30 to 50 percent of its food to sacred animals would never develop economically. On November 7 Acheson observed the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution by receiving Andrey Vyshinsky, the former prosecutor in the Moscow purge trials, now Molotov’s replacement as Soviet foreign minister. Kennan sat in on the conversation, concluding from it that Vyshinsky was really a bourgeois at heart and would secretly prefer to work for Acheson: “It is much too late for this, of course.” That evening Kennan attended the celebratory reception at the Soviet embassy, the first time he had been invited since returning from Moscow: “It was all the same—if anything, more false and grotesque than ever.”63

  With Acheson’s encouragement, Kennan was still maintaining a regular schedule of public speaking. In New York, on November 10, he addressed the Academy of Political Science on the subject of American history. He chose as his text Secre
tary of State John Quincy Adams’s Fourth of July address from 1821, which had proclaimed that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” It would become Kennan’s favorite quotation, and it reflected the shift in his thinking while on the Policy Planning Staff: the danger was now not that Americans would attempt too little internationally but that they would try to do too much. If that happened, Adams had warned, the United States could become “the dictatress of the world,” but no longer “the ruler of her own spirit.” Kennan was proud of this excursion into the past, but it got no publicity whatever. “You speak off-the-record,” he complained, “and worry for weeks about the resulting leaks. Speak publicly, and it is as secure as a safe. No one knows what you said.”64

  On November 16 Kennan spent the day in Princeton. He was there to talk with Oppenheimer about an issue weighing heavily on them both: the recently announced news that the Soviet Union had successfully tested its first atomic bomb, and the still-secret possibility that the United States might respond by building a “super” bomb, a weapon far more powerful than the ones that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was time, though, that afternoon, to walk around the university. “The early dusk was already falling on town and campus. It was Princeton as I remembered it from the moments of my greatest loneliness as a student.”

  A light was on in his old window in the house where he had rented a room as a freshman. “Perhaps some other student was now there, much like myself, in many ways,” and yet with the “subtle, undefinable differences” that distanced generations. The dormitory windows let light, voices, and radio sounds into the night air. The swimmers in the gymnasium were plowing dutifully through the water. “Far below, on the athletic fields, football teams were working out under flood lights, the bright uniforms of the tiny figures gleaming like armor.” All of them regarded the people like himself at times as nuisances, at best as “regrettable and temporary necessities.” In their minds, “we were already consigned to the ash-heap of history.” Kennan and his contemporaries, however, would not be pushed.