George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  With the approval of the U.N. Security Council—the Soviet representative, protesting the organization’s failure to seat the People’s Republic of China, had not been present to cast a veto—President Truman announced on June 27 that American troops, under MacArthur’s command, would be coming to the defense of South Korea. Meanwhile, the Navy would begin patrolling the Taiwan Strait. Asked on short notice to brief the NATO ambassadors that day, Kennan acknowledged that the United States was acting not because of the strategic importance of the territory at risk but because “of the damage to world confidence and morale which would have been produced had we not so acted.” The effects could have extended throughout East Asia and even into Europe. He then added—without authority, since the issue had not yet been decided—that the war would be limited : “We had no intention to do more than to restore the status quo ante and no intention to proceed to the conquest of northern Korea.”46

  That evening the Kennans attended a long-planned dinner party. On their way in, they met Joe Alsop. “Although he regards himself as a total contemplative,” the columnist wrote of this encounter, “I have always observed that George makes his best sense as a man of action, when there is a good, loud, cable machine at his elbow clacking out horrible problems all over the world. When George broods, he becomes a little silly.”

  On this day, the cable machine had been clacking madly, and George was dancing on air because MacArthur’s men were being mobilized for combat under the auspices of the United Nations. He was carrying his balalaika, a Russian instrument he used to play with some skill at social gatherings, and with a great, vigorous swing, he clapped me on the back with it, nearly striking me to the sidewalk.

  “Well, Joe,” he cried, “what do you think of the democracies now?”

  No matter how well intended, it is never pleasant being knocked about, and I replied quite crossly, “I think about democracy exactly what I always have, but not what you thought when you came to see me.”

  Two days later, still elated, Kennan attended a meeting of the NSC staff in the former State Department building next to the White House. Nostalgic for its cool, calm, and spacious interior, Kennan joked to his old friend “Doc” Matthews that the crisis would never have happened if they hadn’t moved to the new headquarters in Foggy Bottom. “To my surprise the colored elevator woman turned around and said with great firmness and enthusiasm: ‘That’s right, sir.’ ”47

  A second shift in Kennan’s thinking related to NSC 68. He had not questioned its call to spend more on conventional forces—how else could reliance on nuclear weapons be reduced?—but he and Bohlen had objected to Nitze’s portrayal of a worldwide Soviet threat. Now, though, by authorizing the attack in Korea, Stalin had made Nitze look prophetic. “I stated it as my deep conviction that the U.S. had no choice but to accept this challenge,” Kennan wrote of a meeting with Acheson and his advisers on June 26. It would have to commit whatever was required for the completion of the task. The fighting in Korea was likely to spread, and it was “absolutely essential” to mobilize for that purpose. If, in World War II, “our commanders had been told [that their only task] was to cope with an army of 90,000 Koreans with 100 tanks and small air support and to occupy Korea to the 38th Parallel, they would have considered it a small operation indeed.” So the question was one of will, not capability.

  When told, on July 12, that the Council of Economic Advisers had seen no need for drastic mobilization measures, Kennan was furious. The problem, he complained to an equally worried Nitze on the seventeenth, lay in the president’s failure himself to take responsibility, and to require that all of his subordinates do so. Key portions of the executive branch had been left “to wallow around in the cluttering impediments of the committee system, complicated by the presence of such personalities as Mr. Johnson and Mr. Snyder and his own White House political advisers.” If this continued, “our world position might well be lost ... for lack of the horse-shoe nail of real executive direction.” Its vigorous exercise, in contrast, would “electrify the Government into an entirely different style of action.” It would certainly impress the Russians, he added a few weeks later, who would see how little of the American national income was going to military spending compared with themselves. The United States would not go bankrupt “even if we were forced to shell out three times as much for defense.”48

  Kennan did not give up on his strategy of seeking to strain Sino-Soviet ties, but the Korean conflict made it much harder to sell that idea in Washington. He was wondering as early as June 29 whether it might be the Russians’ intention “to keep out of this business themselves . . . but to embroil us to the maximum with their Korean and Chinese satellites.” If so, why not offer the Chinese Communists an inducement not to cooperate? Would it not appeal to them and embarrass Moscow, he asked on July 11, “if we were suddenly to favor and achieve the admission of the Chinese Communists to the U.N. and to the Security Council?” Kennan’s proposal reflected no greater sympathy for Mao Zedong than he had for Chiang Kai-shek: like the decision to deploy the Navy in the Taiwan Strait, this would be a strategic maneuver, not a conciliatory gesture. China, he told the British ambassador Oliver Franks, “would never, in my opinion, be dependable from the standpoint of western interests.”49

  But when Kennan mentioned this plan to John Foster Dulles—who would have become secretary of state had the Republicans won in 1948 and was now the principal Japanese peace treaty negotiator—“I was shouted down.” It would look to the American public, Dulles insisted, “as though we had been tricked into giving up something for nothing.” Kennan saw the problem and abandoned the idea, but he hoped that history would someday record this as an example of the damage done “by the irresponsible and bigoted interference of the China lobby and its friends in Congress.” A few days later he learned what Dulles was telling newspapermen: “that while he used to think highly of George Kennan, he had now concluded that he was a very dangerous man: that he was advocating the admission of the Chinese Communists to the United Nations, and a cessation of U.S. military action at the 38th parallel.”50

  The latter charge oversimplified Kennan’s position. He had argued from the first days of the fighting that MacArthur should be free to conduct military operations anywhere on the Korean peninsula, as long as these advanced the political objective of liberating South Korea. What he did oppose, on both military and political grounds, was occupying all of North Korea. Kennan was sure that MacArthur would soon take the offensive, despite defeats that were pushing U.N. forces into a tight perimeter around Pusan. When he did,

  the further we were to advance up the peninsula the more unsound it would become from a military standpoint. If we were actually to advance beyond the neck of the peninsula, we would be getting into an area where mass could be used against us and where we would be distinctly at a disadvantage. This, I thought, increased the importance of a clear concept of our being able to terminate our action at the proper point, ... [to] make sure that we did not frighten the Russians into action which would interfere with this.

  Kennan knew how hard it had been to control MacArthur in Japan. Any insensitivity now to instructions from Washington could lead the Soviet Union to commit its forces. Nitze and Bohlen also worried about this, as did Davies, who stressed the additional danger of Chinese intervention. Even if these worst cases did not materialize, Kennan asked on July 31, what chance would there be of getting Soviet help to end the war if MacArthur was approaching “the gates of Vladivostok”? 51

  Restraint had few other advocates in Washington, however, as the planning for MacArthur’s offensive advanced. The Joint Chiefs of Staff disliked having diplomacy constrain military operations, and even within the State Department there were vigorous objections to Kennan’s argument, notably from John Allison, director of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs, who attacked it as “a timid, half-hearted policy designed not to provoke the Soviets to war.” Meanwhile the administration’s critics had become no less vehement
. “This noisy and violent Republican minority in Congress [is] paralyzing . . . an intelligent and courageous approach,” Kennan wrote on August 14. Never before had there been such confusion with respect to foreign policy.

  The President doesn’t understand it; Congress doesn’t understand it; nor does the public, nor does the press.... Only the diplomatic historian, it seems to me, working from the leisure and detachment of a later day, will be able to unravel this incredible tangle and reveal the true aspect of the various factors and issues involved.

  Kennan could not resist, however, making one last effort to sort it all out. On the twenty-third, he sent Acheson some parting recommendations before leaving for Princeton: “I am afraid that, like so many of my thoughts, they will be too remote from general thinking in the Government to be of much practical use to you.”52

  This proved to be true. For as Kennan detached himself from the clacking cable machines and began to contemplate what had happened over the past two months, the euphoria he had felt during the early days of the Korean conflict gave way to a more characteristic pessimism—some of it merited, much of it not—about what the United States could hope to accomplish in East Asia. The immediate problem was MacArthur: “We are tolerating a state of affairs in which we do not really have full control over the statements that are being made—and the actions taken—in our name.” But there were larger long-term issues as well.

  One had to do with Korea’s future once the fighting had stopped. It had been necessary to resist the invasion, since the “psychological radiations” from a failure to do so would have been so devastating. But did the United States really wish to commit itself, indefinitely, to keeping the Korean peninsula outside of the Russian and Japanese spheres of influence within which it had historically been included? The latter would obviously be the better option, but defeat in war and occupation by the Americans had so weakened Japan that it could no longer play that role. Was there any alternative, then, to tolerating Soviet control, as long as it was not manifested “in ways calculated to throw panic and terror into other Asian peoples and thus to achieve for the Kremlin important successes going far beyond the Korean area”?

  The war in Korea had led the Truman administration, in addition to ordering naval patrols in the Taiwan Strait, to increase economic and military assistance to the French in Indochina: this amounted to “guaranteeing the French in an undertaking which neither they nor we, nor both of us together, can win.” Would it not be preferable “to permit the turbulent political currents of that country to find their own level, unimpeded by foreign troops or pressures, even at the probable cost of an eventual deal between Viet-Nam and the Viet-Minh, and the spreading over the whole country of Viet-Minh authority”?

  Finally, and most controversially, Kennan insisted that the United States could not indefinitely, using its own strength, keep Japan resistant to Soviet influence. Only the Japanese, through their own choices, could do that; yet how could they exercise that freedom if the Americans kept troops there? Any peace treaty anchored to a continued military presence would never have legitimacy in the eyes of the Japanese. The implied duress would divert their attention to the problem of “how to get United States troops out” rather than “how to meet Soviet pressures against Japan.”

  The best solution, then, would be to seek a comprehensive settlement with the Soviet Union—partly explicit, partly tacit—that would terminate hostilities in Korea, admit Communist China to the United Nations, allow a plebiscite to determine Taiwan’s future, bring about the neutralization and demilitarization of Japan, and reduce American military capabilities to a “mixed combat force, commanded and operated as a unit, capable of dealing a sharp blow on a limited front almost anywhere in the world on short notice.” None of this could be left to MacArthur: “It would take a real diplomatic envoy, backed by Presidential authority but instructed to operate quietly, patiently and inconspicuously.”

  Kennan admitted that such a project would provoke “violent and outraged opposition.” It would pour oil on fires already kindled by Republican charges “that our Far Eastern policy has been over-lenient to Communism and therefore neglectful of our national security.” But all of that, he too grandly concluded, “is not really my competence, and I do not think I should discuss it in this paper.” It was, as Acheson later summarized it, “a memorandum typical of its gifted author, beautifully expressed, sometimes contradictory, in which were mingled flashes of prophetic insight [with] suggestions ... of total impracticality.”53

  VII.

  Precisely so, which raises the question of what Kennan was trying to say, or do, or mean. He did not deliberately set out to irritate his boss, who was at the time and even in retrospect surprisingly restrained in his response to this document, which was yet another demonstration, or so it seemed, of Kennan’s volatility. Acheson saw him as “not a very useful policy adviser,” Nitze answered crisply years later, when asked what the secretary of state really thought of Kennan. “But there did seem to be a certain affection on Acheson’s part for Kennan, and vice versa,” Nitze’s interviewer protested. “There was,” he acknowledged. Isaiah Berlin, like Joe Alsop, saw in Kennan a dual personality, one part professional, the other elsewhere:

  Provided he had before him the machine, whatever it is, which encodes the telegrams, he behaved like an exceptional State Department official. His famous dispatches were concrete, clear, useful and truly important. Once he got away from that, he was in the empyrean, a mystic and a visionary, you see. You couldn’t tell which way he would turn. In short, a kind of Jekyll and Hyde.

  Most people have mood swings, if not that extreme: few, however, turn theirs into prophetically impractical policy memoranda. Toward what empyrean, then, was Kennan drifting?54

  One way to answer that question is to return to Kennan’s December 1949 National War College lecture, which focused on the underlying systems of international relations: over the past two centuries, he argued, states and statesmen had been carried along by structural shifts that few of them fully understood. Kennan’s distinctiveness lay in his ambition, as a policy planner, to detect such evolutions in international systems and to align statecraft with them. It was another Bismarckian reach for the hem of history.

  He reached, however, just as the international system was undergoing its most radical shift in centuries. Kennan’s frame of reference was the balance of power system of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, in which several great powers—most recently the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Russia, and Japan—had balanced one another. This was, for him, the default: the gravitational center to which world politics must sooner or later return, however drastic the disruptions of recent decades. That those disruptions had themselves altered that structure—that bipolarity had replaced multipolarity—was not, and in some ways would never be, visible to him.

  He was hardly alone in this. Who would have anticipated, in 1950, that a divided Germany could form the basis, over the next four decades, for a peaceful Europe? That despite devastating regional wars that left Korea divided and unified Vietnam, there would be no world wars? That the United States and the Soviet Union, soon to have tens of thousands of thermonuclear weapons pointed at one another, would agree tacitly never to use any of them? That the only empires of consequence left anywhere in the world would be those run from Washington and Moscow? That China and Taiwan, still under separate regimes and without admitting it, would half a century later share a common capitalist ideology?

  The answer, obviously, is that no one did. What set Kennan apart from his contemporaries was not his failure to see this future, but rather his constant concern for how policies and structures related to one another. With the latter shifting in ways that not even Kennan understood, his anxieties came across as contradictions, volatility, even to Alsop and Berlin as a dual personality disorder. Acheson paid little more attention than they did to grand international systems. But he did know, from his legal training, that decis
ions—however expedient, hasty, or ill informed—built practices, which established precedents, which over time made law, which then became structures. It was enough, he believed, to have some vague sense of the destination toward which you were stumbling, to be of good cheer, and not to look back. The hyperconscientious Kennan could never reconcile himself to such an attitude. Which was why he now chose to depart, at last, for his own empyrean.

  Part IV

  SEVENTEEN

  Public Figure, Private Doubts: 1950–1951

  KENNAN’S EMPYREAN WAS THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY, one of the first American think tanks. Founded in 1930, located on a large tract of meadows and woods outside of Princeton, the Institute—never a part of Princeton University—made itself famous by creating a position for Albert Einstein when he left Germany after the Nazis came to power. He remained there for the rest of his life. During its early years, the Institute recruited mostly mathematicians: like its model, All Souls College, Oxford, it had no students and hence no teaching responsibilities. Its fellows’ only obligations were to ponder, research, occasionally publish—and to stay out of each other’s way. How did Kennan get along with Einstein? “I never went to see him,” he admitted ruefully, half a century after the great physicist’s death. “This was partly a reflection of my youthful arrogance. I felt I knew nothing about his subject and knew it. Einstein knew nothing about my subject, and didn’t know it .”1

  Oppenheimer became the Institute’s third director in 1947, determined to broaden the diversity of its fellows without changing what was expected of them. This led him to offer Kennan a visiting appointment, over objections from several mathematicians who wondered what contribution a Foreign Service officer with no advanced degree and no scholarly publications would be able to make. Kennan accepted it despite the continuing efforts of Princeton’s president, Harold Dodds, to give him a university professorship. “I want to make sure,” Kennan wrote, “that I do not move from a sphere in which I have occasionally . . . accomplish[ed] things despite a great number of diversions to one where I keep the diversions and dispense with the accomplishment.”2