George F. Kennan : an American life
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Eisenhower fought back: otherwise, he feared, he would be relinquishing his authority over the conduct of foreign policy. The battle, which consumed most of March 1953, was heated, public, and ultimately successful. It was the first time the White House had defended a Foreign Service officer accused of disloyalty—Truman had done little to assist John Paton Davies and others similarly accused. The victory was all the more important given Dulles’s demands, which had offended many of his State Department subordinates, that they “positively” demonstrate their patriotism. But even as Eisenhower struggled to save Bohlen, he did nothing to retain Kennan who, as the Alsops pointedly noted in their column on April 12, would have accepted a position if one had been offered him. His “unequalled knowledge” and “intuitive brilliance” were assets “the American Government cannot replace at any price.” The Chicago Sun-Times ran an editorial cartoon a few days later showing Dulles in a baseball uniform winding up for a pitch, with an empty second base labeled “George Kennan’s retirement” looming behind him.13
Kennan was the same age as Bohlen, similarly trained, and—in Ferguson’s view, at least—less controversial. He had not been at Yalta and had made no secret of his objections to Roosevelt’s policies. His “X” article had been an attack on Henry Wallace. He was, to be sure, the architect of “containment” and had spoken out against “liberation,” but it would have been hard to portray the author of American Diplomacy as a dangerously naïve idealist. Nor would it have been easy to suspect him of sympathy for the Soviet Union, that country having just kicked him out. And even if Dulles did not think highly of Kennan, Eisenhower did: he knew Kennan from the National War College, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Policy Planning Staff. “I respect the man’s mind as well as his integrity and knowledge,” he had written a friend in 1950. As president of Columbia University, Eisenhower even tried to recruit Kennan to run its Institute of War and Peace Studies. Why did he not, then, as president of the United States, insist that his secretary of state find Kennan a “niche”?14
The Bohlen nomination fight suggests one reason. Kennan was not as vulnerable, but Dulles had attacked him during the campaign and Kennan appeared to have struck back in his Scranton speech. Eisenhower didn’t need another controversy just at this moment. Moreover, Kennan had mentioned retirement in the apology he asked Matthews to convey to Dulles: “This was foolish. I shouldn’t have done it.” Dulles was “a cagey, tricky man,” with no appreciation of what lay behind this gesture: “He simply used this as a way of getting rid of me.” Kennan could have “raised hell” by going to Eisenhower and saying: “Look here, I’ve [had] an honorable career. How can you let me be fired in this way?” But Dulles could have simply said: “I understood you’d wanted to leave the Service.”15
There was, however, a deeper issue, which was that Kennan had made himself hard to place: it’s revealing that Acheson, exasperated by the Tempelhof gaffe, had offered no new appointment either. Unlike Bohlen, always a smooth operator, Kennan had gained a reputation for brittleness. “He doesn’t bend,” Isaiah Berlin recalled. “He breaks.” Years later Robert R. Bowie, who became Dulles’s Policy Planning Staff director, suggested some reasons why.
Kennan had the intuitions and insights—but also the volatility—of a poet, Bowie thought: these made him too “reactive.” Convinced that people in power were taking the wrong direction, he would simplify and thus dramatize his argument, as in his call for toughness toward the U.S.S.R. in the “long telegram” and the “X” article. That would persuade them, but Kennan would then worry that they had gone too far. They were now seeing the Soviets “as an implacable foe, not subject to change, and not open to the ordinary rules of Great Power rivalry.” So Kennan would jump to the opposite camp, where once more he would exaggerate “because he feels it’s so important to get things back into balance. And so it goes.”
With constituencies to hold together and coalitions to maintain, Bowie pointed out, governments can’t manage such fine adjustments. Acheson understood that, but “I don’t think George feels those constraints, or if he does feel them I think he resists them. Getting it intellectually right is of very high value.” Kennan had an “academic” mentality, in that he always wanted to reconsider things. He preferred committing himself not “to a course of action, but to a course of analysis, and therefore if he gets better insights later on, he not only feels free but feels obligated to modify it.” In doing so, his empathy would “go deaf.” That left Kennan surprised when people took what he had said or done in ways he hadn’t anticipated. Of course the Soviets were going to expel him after he compared life in Moscow to internment in Nazi Germany, but he was “genuinely taken aback.” Of course the Scranton speech was going to offend Dulles, but Kennan just “didn’t visualize it.”
Bowie saw one other problem, which was that the higher Kennan rose in the Foreign Service, the more he took things personally. However passionate his prose, the author of the “long telegram” had not seen himself as the target of Stalin’s hostility. The recently expelled ambassador to the Soviet Union did see himself in this way. Kennan was convinced, his friend Bill Bundy added, “that they were deliberately doing nasty things to him, not just to the United States.” His “extreme sensitivity” made it hard for him not to be affected even in situations “where there was nothing you could do about it.” Success in government was a kind of “slavery,” Berlin explained, because the more responsibility you wielded, the less freedom you had to say what you really thought. “The State Department dehydrates you.”16
Eisenhower sensed without saying so that Kennan had outlived his usefulness as a diplomat: he made no effort to reverse Dulles’s decision. At least one White House aide, though, believed that Kennan was being shabbily treated. The secretary of state’s dislike for Kennan’s “theorizing” was understandable, Emmet John Hughes, a presidential speechwriter, pointed out to Chief of Staff Sherman Adams. But there was a difference “between (a) the manifest right to ‘ease out’ a diplomat whose views are felt to be contrary to prevailing policy and (b) the use of this right in a way that is needlessly rude and perhaps offensive not only to one man but to the service he represents.” Dulles had let two months pass without acknowledging Kennan’s resignation. Now he was using “the crude—and silent—expedient of simply failing to offer him a diplomatic post,” a procedure “designed for the dismissal of plain incompetents.” It was a “singular and studied insult.”
“I can appreciate and must respect your wishes [to retire],” Eisenhower wrote to Kennan on July 8, using a draft Hughes had prepared. “Your years of devoted work in the Foreign Service certainly entitle you to such a choice.” It would have been a routine send-off, had it not been for the fact that, at just this moment and in a characteristically subtle way, the president was making Kennan his top, if temporary, policy planner. His assignment—of which Hughes knew nothing—was to liberate Eisenhower from the “liberation” strategy to which Dulles had tried to commit him during the 1952 campaign.
II.
Dulles’s bluster had long made Eisenhower uneasy, but in a Republican Party still dominated by isolationists and McCarthyites, he seemed the only plausible possibility to run the Department of State. Despite the president’s military background, it was not his habit to discipline subordinates: instead, he sought to educate his secretary of state and others within his administration about the probable risks, costs, and consequences of a more aggressive strategy. The mechanism was Project Solarium, an elaborate National Security Council exercise Eisenhower authorized in May 1953. Three “teams” would make the case, respectively, for “containment” as the Truman administration had understood it; for “deterrence,” which would involve threatening nuclear retaliation if the Soviet Union or its allies attempted further gains anywhere; and for “liberation,” which meant using political, psychological, economic, and covert methods to reverse the advances those adversaries had already made. The president asked Kennan, still on the State Depa
rtment payroll, to chair the first group, “Task Force A.”17
Consisting of seven members each, the teams met at the National War College from June 10 to July 15. They had access to everything, Kennan recalled, even the most sensitive intelligence information. “It was all highly secret.... I was not permitted—nobody was permitted—to say anything about it.” The cover story, which Kennan used even in his private diary, was that the work involved updating the school’s curriculum. “We all knew we couldn’t expect to put our own personal opinion through pure, that we would have to come to some sort of a collective idea.... And that we did.”18
Task Force A’s report nevertheless reflected Kennan’s thinking throughout its 152 pages. It identified three great principles, each consistent with what he had been arguing since returning from Moscow in 1946:
First, the U.S. must avoid . . . pursuing in time of peace aims which have essentially a wartime objective: namely, the complete destruction or unconditional surrender of the enemy. Accordingly, we must see to it that our negotiating positions vis-à-vis the Soviet Union appear sincere and reasonable, and that U.S. power appears everywhere as power for peace.
Second, the U.S. must take great pains to create an impression of steadiness and reliability in the formulation and implementation of its foreign policy. This means that special emphasis must be laid on discipline and unity of approach, . . . avoiding every indication of abruptness or erratic behavior.
Third, the positive emphasis of U.S. policy must be placed on . . . the creation generally within the non-Communist area of an atmosphere of confidence and hope. These efforts should not be openly related in each case to the winning of the cold war, but should be addressed in good faith primarily to basic and long-term problems . . . , many of which would exist in important degree even if there were no Soviet Union.
Contrary to Dulles’s claims, the United States and its allies were already stronger than their adversaries. With “the wise and flexible application of [this] integrated national strategy,” that advantage would “bring about the diminution of Soviet-Communist external influence until it ceases to be a substantial threat to peace and security.”
Two great temptations, Kennan warned, might deflect the nation from this course. One was resorting to war, a path “full of risk, empty of calculation, and unwarrantedly hazardous to the continued existence of the U.S.” The other was succumbing to internal “totalitarian” pressures, for that would ruin the reputation of a nation seeking to lead the world in “the defense of free institutions.” Within those limits, the United States could expect the “progressive retraction of Soviet control” from Eastern Europe and China; the “discrediting of Soviet power and Communist ideology” elsewhere; and an increase “in internal stresses and conflicts within the Soviet system,” which would force its rulers “to accept the necessity of adjusting their objectives to those of peaceful co-existence with the Free World.”
Kennan even got Task Force A to endorse his own Program A. The United States should seek “a reunified, sovereign, independent Germany with a democratic form of government.” All foreign occupation forces would withdraw, or at least retreat to enclaves supplied by sea. The new state would have its own military establishment, except for “atomic or other weapons of mass destruction.” And it would operate free from political control by either the Soviet Union or the West. If Stalin’s successors accepted these proposals, they would have rolled back their own influence in Central Europe. If they rejected them, they would “bear the onus of remaining in East Germany solely on the basis of naked power.” This policy would achieve beneficial results “under either eventuality.”19
The Task Force A report easily overshadowed the others in the force of its logic and the quality of its prose. It showed that “containment” and “liberation” were not mutually exclusive, indeed that the first could bring about the second. It stressed the extent to which irresponsibility in choosing means—whether by too casually risking war or by too fecklessly indulging McCarthy—could corrupt the ultimate end, which was to preserve the American way of life. It was a far more effective attack on Dulles than Kennan’s Scranton speech had been. And most important, it carried the authority of Eisenhower, who had entrusted him with preparing it in the first place.
All three task forces presented their recommendations to the president and his top advisers at a White House meeting on July 16, 1953. As Kennan began speaking, he was amused to find a “silent and humble but outwardly respectful” Dulles sitting in the first row: “I could talk, and he had to listen.” Eisenhower, fully in charge, dominated the discussion that followed. What he said convinced Kennan that “he was prepared to accept the thesis we had put forward, that our approach to the Soviet Union, as it had been followed in the immediately preceding years, was basically sound.” Some adjustments might be necessary, but “there was no need for a drastic change.” If, therefore, Dulles had triumphed “by disembarrass-ing himself of my person, I . . . had my revenge by saddling him, inescapably, with my policy.”20
Historians, on the whole, have sustained that judgment. Kennan would find much to criticize in the Eisenhower-Dulles strategy as it evolved over the next seven and a half years: his chief concerns were its reliance on nuclear retaliation as a way of minimizing containment’s costs, and its refusal to seek a reunified Germany. But in its doubts that the Soviet Union would risk war, in its determination to apply Western strengths against Communist weaknesses, in its willingness to wait for contradictions within the latter system to shatter its unity while sustaining strength and self-confidence in the United States and among its allies—in all of these things, the “New Look,” as it came to be called, was closer to Kennan’s strategy than NSC 68 had been.21
Kennan’s departure from government, therefore, was not as lonely as he made it look in his memoirs. For even though Dulles gave him no appointment, Eisenhower accepted the basic elements of the strategy Kennan had designed under Marshall’s supervision: it was not irrelevant that Eisenhower worked for Marshall longer during the war than Kennan had after it. And so Kennan’s final act as a policy planner was to explain all of this to a newly deferential secretary of state, as well as to the president and the vice president of the United States, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and the director of the CIA. It may not have been a “niche,” but it was a more prestigious platform than he had occupied before—or ever would again.
III.
“We reflect that you are a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and have much unfinished to do,” Oppenheimer had cabled Kennan on October 6, 1952, three days after the Soviet Union declared him persona non grata. “We hope the time will come when you will be happy to reflect on this too.” Kennan responded gratefully: “No mark of confidence received means more to me.” It was not yet clear that he would be leaving government, but when he did, the best contribution he could make would probably be “the independent pursuit of truth . . . in the field of public affairs.” His time away from the Institute had made him appreciate all the more its benefits. Oppenheimer renewed the invitation in March 1953, on the day he read in The New York Times that Kennan would be retiring: “I want you to be quite sure that in addition to the formal welcome, of which your membership here is a warrant, there is a deeper welcome that awaits you whenever and in whatever form you can accept it.”22
There were, as usual, other opportunities. Freedom House wanted Kennan to become its president: he politely declined. The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies hoped that he would help build a research center in Washington for refugees from government like himself: Kennan liked the idea but balked at having to do fund-raising. Allen Dulles made it clear that if his older brother did not wish to employ Kennan, he did; Walter Bedell Smith, the younger Dulles’s predecessor at the CIA, enthusiastically seconded this proposal. Kennan respected both men, but the organization’s increasing reliance on covert operations worr
ied him; its cooperation with the Ford Foundation had not gone well; and it had, he believed, mishandled the Davies case, an unresolved issue for which he felt personally responsible. With one exception, Oppenheimer and Kennan’s other Princeton friends all felt that he should make the break from government a clean one, “and not permit the situation to be obscured by getting loaned to the CIA. The more I thought about it, the more this seemed to me to be the correct answer, too.”23
That left the Institute, Kennan’s preference all along, and the arrangements were quickly made. Dean Rusk, the new president of the Rockefeller Foundation, had no problem persuading Robert Lovett, John J. McCloy, and his other trustees to approve a grant of $15,000 for Kennan’s work during the 1953–54 academic year. “If he wanted to be at Princeton,” Rusk recalled, “then this was the natural thing to do to make it possible.” Oppenheimer added another $5,000, which with Kennan’s Foreign Service pension brought his income close to what he had been making as an ambassador—a respectable but not munificent sum for someone maintaining a house, a farm, and a family. His responsibilities would be to seek a more “solid foundation” for his views on “utopian tendencies” in U.S. foreign policy, Kennan explained to Princeton University president Harold Dodds, and to study the internal politics of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. “Curiosity has thrown me into contact with one, experience with the other. I would like to get both off my chest in a scholarly form before I turn to other things.”24