out St. Louis, which like many American cities had grown too fast to clean up after itself. “The new is there before the old is gone. What in one era is functional and elegant and fashionable survives into the following era as grotesque decay.”
about the canned music in the lounge car on the train to Texas: what of the person “who doesn’t like The Rustic Wedding or Rose Marie or Ave Maria, or who has heard them too often, or who doesn’t like music at all through loud speakers, or who doesn’t like music?”
about trying to write while crossing northern Mexico trapped by an Indiana voice, which boomed, with “unquenchable loquaciousness,” through the cars: “What-cha carryin’ that ink around fur?”
Nevertheless, the trip was a welcome respite. With a steam engine helping, the diesel ascended a mountain pass, wound its way down the other side, and brought the train on time into Mexico City on the evening of the twenty-first. The American embassy, where Kennan stayed, was preparing for its Washington’s birthday reception the next day.
The event, held on the veranda, required routine skills: clutching drinks in the left hand to keep the right one dry for shaking others; looking for places to stash empty glasses so they wouldn’t get stepped on; being patient with the wife of a senior colleague who wanted to know about the Russians: “They’re all slaves aren’t they? Why don’t we do something about it?” Outside there were magnificent monuments, handsome boulevards, and frenetic traffic, but in the adjoining neighborhoods people were “living, eating, and begging on slimy sidewalks.” Bearing little relation to its surroundings, the city was an “ostentatious, anxious demonstration of wealth by an ever-changing nouveau riche,” boiling up “like foam to the surface of a society that calls itself revolutionary.”
A weekend in Cuernavaca placed Kennan in a simulated Moorish palace owned by American friends, where the ceiling, wall paneling, furniture, and art—all imported from Europe—were not simulated. “I lay sleepless, through the long night, under the huge crimson draperies which had once served a prince of the Church and still bore his insignia—while mosquitoes buzzed around my pillow.” Outside the night breeze flitted aimlessly among the cloisters: the wind “of exiled royalty, of the hopelessly rich, of the tortured intellectuals,” of people like himself who had wandered in, amid “unhappy antiques, crowded together, like creatures in a zoo.” Kennan’s host, the next morning by the swimming pool, was also curious about the Russians: “I don’t see why we don’t go right over there and drop the bomb on those fellows. What are we waiting for?”
Four forest fires were visible on the road back into Mexico City, a frequent occurrence because the mountains were badly eroded. Water tables were sinking at an alarming rate. Population pressures were overtaking improvements in agriculture, industrial productivity, and public health. Mexico would remain inhospitable to earthly hope, which was why the Virgin of Guadalupe shrine, a brief stop on the way to the airport, moved Kennan deeply. There were of course hustlers outside the cathedral, and there was oppressive ostentation within. But who could doubt the need for “some moral law, even an imperfect one”? And how did this Mexican display of faith and corruption differ from Ilya Repin’s unforgettable painting of a religious procession outside a Russian village in an earlier century?
After several short stops in Central America, Kennan flew on to Caracas, a city that defied even his descriptive powers. So he instead wrote its history: how the Spanish had located it at a comfortable elevation inland, connected to its port by a wagon track; how the British had replaced this with a narrow-gauge railroad; how the Americans had arrived to pump oil out and to pump wealth back in; how the city was now so expensive that this particular American wanted to hide in his hotel, fearing “the financial consequences of any contact with the shops or the taxi drivers.” All the evils apparent at home from imposing a new technology on an unprepared people were magnified a hundredfold in Venezuela. One day the “morphine” would be withdrawn, and “a terrible awakening” would follow.
Perhaps because the culture was Portuguese and hence familiar, Kennan liked Rio de Janeiro better. The Brazilians had inherited a gentleness “for which one can only bear them respect and affection.” It was striking on the beaches, which displayed every shade of color, “a vast panorama of racial tolerance and maturity which could stand as a model for other peoples.” Still, it was depressing to sense “the gulf between the rich and the poor, the desperation with which people seek to leap over that gulf, and the lack of imagination they show in the enjoyment of their new emoluments when the leap has been successfully completed.” His reputation, by now, had caught up with him: Rio was plastered with “To Death With Kennan” signs, put up by local communists, and he had been accorded four mock funerals. Only in São Paulo, though, where the security was exasperatingly thorough, did he began to feel “like a hunted beast, and to ask myself whether it was really possible that I was as sinister as all this.”
There were further stops in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Lima—the Argentine president, Juan Perón, somehow mistook Kennan for the head of the CIA—but the trip by this time was tiring him out, teaching him little, and making him homesick. He was impressed by a demonstration, in Panama, of how the canal locks worked and, upon arrival in Miami, by the “relaxed, unemotional but utterly objective and self-respecting attitude” with which a railroad ticket clerk explained to a trainee how to change a reservation: “I went out onto the station platform with a sense of deep gratitude and of happy acceptance of this American world, marked as it is by the mediocrity of all that is exalted, and the excellence of all that which is without pretense.”18
Back in Washington, Kennan wrote a long report and submitted it to Acheson on March 29. He acknowledged the imprudence of generalizing about so vast a region, because differences in Latin America were often more significant than similarities. Nevertheless, some patterns were clear. One was location: human development was harder than in North America, with its broad plains, unifying rivers, and temperate climate. Compounding this problem had been the arrival, “like men from Mars,” of the European conquerors: “History, it seems to me, bears no record of anything more terrible having been done to entire peoples.” Slavery followed, as did the splendor and pretense of Latin American cities, built to compensate for the squalor of the countryside from which they sprang. All of this had produced a culture of “exaggerated self-centeredness and egotism,” conveying the illusion “of desperate courage, supreme cleverness, and a limitless virility where the more constructive virtues are so conspicuously lacking.” This was a world “where geography and history are alike tragic, but where no one must ever admit it.”
So what was Washington’s responsibility in an era in which Latin American communists, even if only loosely linked to Moscow, might seek to exploit the hopelessness that surrounded them by seizing power? That part of the world was of little military significance to either the United States or the Soviet Union, but there was a bandwagon psychology in international relations: multiple victories for communism could be demoralizing. One such victory somewhere, however—Kennan thought Guatemala the most likely possibility—might have an inoculating effect, shattering complacency about communism elsewhere. The problem, in any event, would be for the Latin Americans to handle: the United States could not return to the military interventions of the early twentieth century. It might, at most, apply economic pressure quietly. In public, its hands would have to be clean.
The United States could afford to relax, therefore, in managing its hemisphere, for the Latin Americans needed it more than it needed them. That meant tolerating rule by whatever means local rulers considered appropriate: they should not be held to the standards of American domestic democracy. It meant respecting their sovereignty, cooperating with them only when they wanted it. It meant that they, in turn, could not make their countries “the seats of dangerous intrigue against us.” No great power would ever have shown such restraint in dealing with neighboring smaller powers. If the
Latin Americans liked it, fine. If not, the responsibility would be theirs for forfeiting its advantages. This was the best Washington could expect to do, Kennan concluded, in a region where problems would always be “multitudinous, complex and unpleasant.”19
The term “politically incorrect” had not yet been invented, but Edward G. Miller, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, acted as if it had when he read Kennan’s report. Appalled by its candor, worried about leaks, he persuaded Acheson not to circulate it. “I am not sure that he required much persuading,” Kennan remembered. As a consequence, all copies were “hidden from innocent eyes,” except for the one Kennan kept and quoted from in his 1967 memoir. The full document would not be published until 1976, after which historians treated it either as an example of Kennan’s insensitivity to “third world” issues, or as a blueprint for what the United States would do in Latin America for the rest of the Cold War.20 Neither interpretation makes much sense.
Kennan in fact focused on the historical, cultural, economic, demographic, and environmental problems afflicting the region: he came closer to getting Latin America right in 1950 than he had Germany—a country he knew much better—in 1949. Nor was he unsympathetic to the Latin Americans. The rich and the poor, he repeatedly stressed, shared tragedies not of their own making. Nor did his memorandum affect what later transpired: it could hardly have done so, since nobody read it. If they had, they would have found it recommending a far more cautious policy than those carried out by the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan administrations, each of whom intervened in Latin America in ways well beyond anything Kennan recommended. It’s hard to see how the policy he suggested would have produced worse results.
Two things made Kennan’s report unacceptable, though, even by the standards of his own day. One was his outsider’s perspective, which upset the State Department’s Latin American experts, much as he would have been upset if forced to read a report from one of them on the Soviet Union or Germany. Crude looks at the whole21 generally unsettle specialists who spend their lives scrutinizing parts of it. The other problem was Kennan’s honesty about Latin America’s tragedies and his call for restraint in attempting to alleviate them. His pessimism was consistent with his own view of life. But it was—to use another term just coming into vogue at the time—deeply un-American.
III.
“I am not one of those who have been attacked,” Kennan assured a hometown audience in Milwaukee on May 5. However, “I must tell you that the atmosphere of public life in Washington does not have to deteriorate much further to produce a situation in which very few of our more quiet and sensitive and gifted people will be able to continue in government.” What worried him was not the reception of his Latin American report but rather the emergence of something that was coming to be called, in honor of the junior Republican senator from Wisconsin, “McCarthyism.”22
It began as a backlash against the apparent “loss” of China. Mao Zedong had completed his conquest of the mainland the previous October, and then spent two months in Moscow. The State Department seemed not to care. It had discredited the Chinese Nationalists, now established on Taiwan, through the White Paper Kennan and Davies had helped to produce in the summer of 1949. On January 12, 1950, Acheson announced in a National Press Club speech that the United States had no plans to defend Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, despite a “defensive perimeter” strategy—which he was announcing publicly for the first time—of protecting other offshore positions including Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines. The secretary of state’s comments reflected the conclusions of a top-secret paper, NSC 48/2, endorsed by Truman at the end of December, that distilled a series of Policy Planning Staff studies, written mostly by Davies, dating back to 1948. Using American forces to prolong the civil war in China, all of these had concluded, would be a disaster. Nor was it clear, even now, that Mao would be a Soviet puppet. The very fact that he had spent so long in Moscow, Kennan believed, meant that problems already existed in the relationship.23
This was not the best time, however, to try to explain these subtleties to the American people. Acheson had won few friends in Congress when he characterized his China policy, shortly after taking office, as one of waiting “until the dust settles.” Then on January 25, 1950, Alger Hiss was convicted of lying under oath about his involvement with Soviet intelligence: the secretary of state further inflamed his critics by telling a press conference that day that he would not “turn my back” on his old friend. Six days later Truman announced that the United States would try to build a hydrogen bomb. Four days after that the news broke of the Fuchs atomic espionage case. It was predictable, therefore, that someone would soon claim that the Department of State had knowingly harbored traitors who had sold out the Chinese Nationalists, given the Russians the atomic bomb, and who knew what else? The only thing unpredictable about the speech Senator Joseph R. McCarthy did in fact make on February 9 was the forum he chose for it: the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia .24
Kennan read the reports on McCarthy while on his Latin American trip, naïvely expecting the outrageousness of the senator’s claims to discredit him immediately. Just the opposite happened, however, with results that would wreck the career of Kennan’s closest Policy Planning Staff colleague and one of his closest friends. Still assigned to liaison duties with Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination, John Paton Davies had found himself being questioned, in November 1949, by two “very low-powered characters” from that organization about a plan he had suggested to recruit American China experts who had retained some credibility with Mao’s regime to advise on psychological warfare operations against it. “It’s all very well to have white propaganda phrased as a direct attack against the Communists,” Davies later explained, “but one has to have some people whose view is more acceptable, who have a standing in China, who can give some guidance as to what might be done under OPC control.”
Davies’s interrogators, however, turned out to be counterintelligence agents searching for spies within the government. “So they misconstrued what I said and passed it on.” Hillenkoetter, still the director of central intelligence, professed to be shocked and turned the information over to the FBI. That meant that Davies would have to go before one of the loyalty review boards the White House had established to investigate such allegations of subversion.25
“We have no protection against this happening again,” Kennan warned Webb shortly after returning to Washington in March 1950, “and no assurance that any one in this Department will even be aware of it when it does happen.” It had not been Wisner’s fault, but until the matter was clarified, there should be no further State Department cooperation with the OPC. The idea of covert operations had been “largely my own,” and Kennan remained convinced of its importance. Anything that interfered with such work—like the harassment of Davies—“seems to me to diminish the chances for defeating communist purposes on a world-wide scale.”26
It was with Davies in mind that Kennan chose to challenge McCarthy—although not by name—in the state they shared. He could do so, he told his Milwaukee audience, because “I am leaving the Government for a long time in the near future.” He had chosen that city because “[m]y boyhood was spent here.” Whenever he returned to talk about international problems, he had the feeling of “rendering an accounting” to people who had a right to expect it and whose understanding “is somehow basic to the success of what we are trying to do.” So what should the State Department have recommended, given the obvious incompetence of the Chinese Nationalist government? He could conceive of “no more ghastly and fateful mistake” than to try to prop up with “our own blood and treasure a regime which had clearly lost the confidence of its own people. Nothing could have pleased our enemies more.”
The speech was courageous: few Foreign Service officers were saying such things openly at the time. But the size of the audience was disappointing, and the publicity was minimal. Kennan was ir
ked to have provoked the wrath, not of McCarthy’s supporters, but of local “communists” who passed out handbills linking “Mr. X” to the development of the hydrogen bomb. The trip, he complained to State Department colleagues upon his return, had been a waste of his time.27
IV.
Despite the investigation of him, Davies had taken on a new responsibility. “Paul Nitze apparently discovered that he couldn’t get along without him,” Annelise wrote George on February 23, while he was still in Latin America. She had had dinner the night before with the Nitzes, after which they had seen All the King’s Men, starring Broderick Crawford, a cinematic evocation of Huey Long that eerily anticipated McCarthy.28 Nitze had delayed Davies’s next assignment, which was to have been Germany, to enlist him in an extraordinary effort to triple or quadruple defense spending in the United States—over the violent objections of its secretary of defense, Louis Johnson. It was a strange thing for someone suspected of sympathy with communists to be doing.
The idea, in a way, had originated with Kennan. He had long seen the need for a credible military deterrent but assumed that the American atomic monopoly could provide this. As long as it lasted, the Soviet Union would not attack: conventional defense could be entrusted to small, well-trained units like the Marine Corps, capable of responding rapidly in limited conflict situations. The capacity for massive mobilization would have to be in place, of course, but an actual mobilization should not be necessary in peacetime. The Soviet atomic bomb, however, shook Kennan’s confidence. He admitted to Acheson and the Policy Planning Staff, at a meeting in October 1949, that it might now be impossible “for us to retaliate with the atomic bomb against a Russian attack with orthodox weapons.”
Nitze at that point asked an important, if delicate, question: might this situation require increasing the conventional military forces of the United States and its Western European allies? Otherwise, what peacetime deterrent would there be? The delicacy lay in the fact that such armaments—and armies—would be considerably more expensive than atomic bombs and the bombers needed to deliver them. The costs could lower living standards in Europe while unbalancing budgets at home. Neither was a palatable alternative, given the Marshall Plan’s accomplishments and Truman’s determination to keep defense spending under tight control. The problem, Acheson acknowledged, was “what peoples and governments will do rather than what they can do.”29
George F. Kennan : an American life Page 52