by Benn Steil
THE DAY FOLLOWING THE NATO Agreement, April 5, 1949, Jessup met with Malik to read him a brief statement affirming Allied willingness to hold a foreign ministers meeting subsequent to the lifting of the blockade. But it also affirmed their unwillingness to delay formation of the Bonn government.84 The message was clear: if Moscow wanted to talk first, it should talk now. A West German state was weeks, not months, away.
The text was a compromise between Acheson, who wanted to keep the secret talks going to stave off a public proposal from Moscow, and Bevin, who refused to back anything resembling an Allied proposal. The “Stalin-Malik tactics,” Bevin said, were “to tear us to pieces” by distorting the Allied position and manipulating world opinion. Twisting Allied aims, Stalin hoped, would halt the creation of West Germany, inhibit “ratification of the Atlantic Pact by continental countries,” and “forestall [congressional] appropriation of funds for the Military Assistance Program.”85 These were hard-earned achievements the West could not put at risk.
As usual, Malik had to report to Moscow and await new instructions, which played into Acheson’s strategy. Summoning Jessup back on April 11, Malik read him a statement reporting that Vyshinsky understood no West German government would be established before or during a CFM meeting. His patience tried, Jessup insisted he had not promised, and could not promise, this would not happen during the conference. Malik tried to wangle some indication it would at least not happen “as a surprise” right after they convened, but Jessup held firm. A commitment was beyond his authority.86 They broke off again.
Bevin, frustrated, was convinced the Soviets would, irrespective of Jessup’s protestations, hold the Allies “morally committed” not to move on Germany while a conference were in session. Acheson, however, remained untroubled, insisting that Soviet desires would not affect “the tempo” of Allied efforts to build West Germany. The two were now deadlocked on tactics, with Acheson wanting Jessup to push for Soviet commitments and Bevin wanting to ignore Malik and push the pace of the Bonn talks.87
With the Malik-Jessup channel stalled, Stalin chose, as Acheson expected he would, to go public. On April 26, TASS issued a communiqué summarizing the secret talks. The agency reported that mutual trade and communications restrictions in Berlin could be lifted prior to a meeting of the four foreign ministers if a date for such a meeting could be set.88 Simultaneous with the TASS publication, new Soviet technology jammed all Russian-language Voice of America programming.89
Following a hastily arranged meeting between Jessup and Malik the following day, at which the two sparred over details of the blockade rollbacks and CFM agenda, Jessup emerged onto Park Avenue to face a crush of reporters and flashing cameras. Taking text from his pocket, written by Bohlen in anticipation of the Soviet leaks, he announced that preparations for the creation of the new Federal Republic of Germany would continue uninterrupted. He added, however, that the Allies would continue in their “sincere endeavor” to reach a new four-power agreement90—an endeavor Acheson had long since abandoned.
In the coming week, the Soviets would continue to press for delay of the foreign ministers meeting until late June, taking advantage of Jessup’s private assurances that no West German state would come to be before it convened. While Bevin fretted about Soviet traps, Acheson remained insouciant. The CFM, for him, had no more significance than he was willing to give it. The Soviets could haggle and harangue. The Allies needed only to bear it and run out the clock.
Acheson prevailed. On May 4, Jessup, together with British ambassador Alexander Cadogan and French ambassador Jean Chauvel, reached an agreement with Malik to end both sides’ German trade and communications restrictions91 on May 12, and to convene a CFM conference in Paris on May 23.92 They issued a communiqué the following day.93
THE AIRLIFT HAD SURVIVED THE worst nature could throw at it. Despite snow and high winds, March 1949 saw a record daily average of 6,300 tons—1,500 more than forecast.94 April’s average then climbed to 7,850 tons, with coal deliveries exceeding their target by 50 percent. And to show the world what the Allies were capable of, Tunner organized a herculean twenty-four-hour coal lift, starting at noon on April 15, that delivered 12,941 tons with 1,398 planes, landing nearly one a minute.95
On May 11, Acheson gave a press conference hailing the “great morale, great discipline and superb courage” of those who had made the airlift possible. They had carried out an astounding 277,804 relief flights, delivering 2,325,809 tons of food, coal, and other supplies.
It had not, however, “solved the German problem,” Acheson stressed. “Whether a solution can be reached depends upon the willingness of the Russians to make or consider proposals which will not retard . . . the great progress which has been made by the Western Powers in their effort to bring as much of Germany as possible into a condition where it can be a peaceful and constructive member of the community of free nations in Europe.” That community, he said, was being built around the Marshall Plan. The message was clear: the only acceptable alternative to a West Germany in the ERP was a united Germany in the ERP.96 The United States would never permit the Soviet Union to communize the country, a mirror image of Stalin’s determination never to relinquish control in the east.
That night, electricity from Soviet-sector plants began flowing into West Berlin. Just after midnight, a U.S. Army vehicle headed west out of Berlin onto the autobahn in eastern Germany, and a British vehicle headed through the Helmstedt Soviet checkpoint toward Berlin. A passenger train from western Germany entered the Soviet zone, the first in over a year,97 arriving in Berlin at 5:11 a.m. on May 12.98 Huge crowds celebrated. The blockade, or at least the most visible manifestations of it, was over. Feeling his job complete, Clay resigned and headed home three days later.
That no Soviet preconditions applied to the blockade’s lifting underlined the western triumph. The blockade had ended, Acheson said, because the Russians themselves decided “it was unsuccessful.”99 This was a vindication of Kennan’s position that the Kremlin could “recognize situations, if not arguments.”100 “We are asking ourselves,” he wrote in a self-satisfied memo to Webb, “whether it could be that the fortunes of the cold war have shifted so dramatically in the past two years that it is now the Russians who are trying to follow, with regard to us, a policy of firmness and patience and unprovocative containment.”101
Still, the Soviets maintained whatever barriers they could without triggering an American pullout from the coming CFM conference. “The Soviets,” Clay’s acting successor, James Riddleberger, cabled Acheson on May 19, “have now returned to their well-known tactics of slanted interpretation. . . . Berlin remains today in a state of semi-blockade.” Clay had foreseen this, having earlier warned against a premature wind-down of airlift capacity. “The blockade was broken by airpower,” he had cabled Washington on May 1, “and the airpower should be maintained in full until the Council of Foreign Ministers has completed its deliberations.” It would in fact be maintained until September 30.
For their part, the Soviets considered the restrictions justified on two grounds. First, they had expected the Allies to liberalize trade policy broadly, which would bring needed goods to the Soviet bloc and permit a revival of Moscow’s reparations policy. The Allies, however, imposed export-licensing and currency-clearing requirements that, the Soviets insisted, violated commitments they had made in New York. Second, reports from Bonn suggested formation of a West German government was imminent, which meant that the CFM conference would not hinder it. They therefore saw no reason to be more cooperative than was necessary to prevent a withdrawal of Allied concessions.102
STALIN HAD LAUNCHED THE BLOCKADE as leverage in Germany. Yet it had not rolled back the deutschmark. It had not stopped progress toward a West German state. It had not stopped creation of a North Atlantic defense pact. Oddly, the greatest threat to these objectives had come from George Kennan.
Back in late 1948, with the Allies advancing their plans for a German federal republic and a military a
lliance, Kennan began raising awkwardly timed questions as to whether these were even sensible constructs. It was, he argued, flawed strategic thinking to freeze the conflict in Europe “with Russian troops 100 miles from Hamburg.”103 East-west confrontation in Berlin could flare at any moment. Furthermore, partitioning Germany was more likely to fuel nationalist passions than it was to assist integration of the western half into Europe. The only way to end the struggle with the Soviets over Germany and, ultimately, to induce them to leave central and eastern Europe was to unify the country and withdraw all occupation forces.
Effectively, Kennan and Clay had swapped positions between 1947 and 1949. Kennan, who had earlier backed German partition, arguing that “the idea of a Germany run jointly with the Russians is a chimera” and that “we have no choice but to lead our section . . . to a form of independence,” had now become the leading advocate of German neutrality and unity. A study mission to Germany in March 1949, in which he witnessed firsthand the destruction of the war, convinced him that continued occupation could only lead to a renewed conflagration. Incredibly, the same policies of mutual withdrawal and reunification had been advocated by Lippmann in his 1947 pieces attacking Kennan’s “Mr. X” article.104 For his part, Clay, who had earlier opposed partition and moves to end cooperation with Moscow in Germany, had become the leading advocate of Allied-zone secession and integration with the West.105 Talks with Kennan in Berlin disturbed him. He feared that Kennan’s new position suggested “a lack of determination” in Washington to complete formation of a West German government.106
Marshall decided only to hand off “Program A,” as Kennan’s plan became known, to his successor, Acheson, who had never been part of the London Program planning and had no stake in it. Acheson told aides he “knew little about Germany,” and was initially intrigued by Kennan’s case.107 Convinced, like Kennan, that an indefinite occupation of Germany was untenable, he felt it sensible to subject the plan to scrutiny. He thought it might even form the basis of a U.S. proposal within the CFM, if only to smoke the Soviets out and force them to state openly their intentions to dominate Germany. He even wondered aloud how a West German government had become U.S. policy: had it simply been “the brainchild of General Clay”?108
For his part, Clay rounded on Program A. It would be “suicidal to our objectives,” he said. The Russians would cheat, the French would panic, and the Germans would go communist, militarist, or both. It would also require a root and branch rethinking of the Marshall Plan. “[I]t was very difficult to operate a single economy without a central [West German] government,” Clay said of American aims in the country.109 And withdrawing U.S. forces would be “turning the show over to Russia and the Communists without a struggle.”110 The defense secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff united behind him, stressing the dangers of moving American troops three thousand miles westward while Soviet troops moved only a few hundred to the east.111
Before Jessup and Bohlen could carry out confidential briefings for the French and British in early May, however, journalist James Reston published a crude version of the leaked plan in The New York Times: “United States, British, and French troops now standing between the Soviet Army and Western Europe . . . would be withdrawn” to the area of the North German ports.112
Bevin and Schuman were blindsided, thinking they were up against a change in U.S. policy just weeks after the launch of the North Atlantic pact. Acheson tried to assure them the plan was Kennan’s alone, and not a “trial balloon” of the U.S. government.113 And in an off-the-record briefing for American reporters on May 18, 1949, he buried it.
“We will not agree to the withdrawal of occupation troops,” he told them. “One would make a . . . grave error to think that any agreement with the Russians on withdrawal would mean anything.” Whereas he continued to support the unification of the German people, “or as large a part of them as may prove practicable,” his priority was buttressing western Europe against Soviet pressure. Germany was a means to this end. “If a united Germany contributes to that aim, fine; if not, to hell with it.”114
To Kennan’s lament, Acheson was now pushing Kennan’s early containment ideas into the realm of offense. Lippmann had been critical of containment on the grounds that it allowed the Soviets to choose the battlefield. Acheson also saw this flaw, and was determined to challenge Moscow on every front—political, economic, and military—after first creating “situations of strength.” The United States would, he believed, win the Cold War not through incessant repulsing of Soviet advances but through demonstrations of superior capability and will.
But it was not just the three Allied governments that rejected Kennan’s German unity plan. West German leaders themselves would have no truck with it. Both Adenauer and SPD chairman Schumacher insisted that their countrymen, having had “long experience of totalitarian methods,” would never accept Russian terms for unification, or even withdrawal of western troops.115
The Soviets would continue to champion unification and withdrawal of occupation forces for propaganda purposes, but they, too, rejected Kennan’s ideas in practice. “[T]hose who think we should remove our troops,” Chuikov told Bohlen after being briefed on the plan, “don’t understand [that] the Germans hate us.” We must as a matter of national security, he insisted, “maintain our forces in Germany.”116
The shredding of Program A marked the beginning of the end of Kennan’s frontline role in the shaping of postwar Europe. His proposal’s morose, rambling defeatism had stood out in sharp contrast to the bold confidence of “Mr. X.” Moods colored his analysis, and his current one reflected discomfort with the mainstreaming of his once provocative ideas. Faced with the need for action, as in the Berlin crisis, he tended to brood, seek inspiration in Gibbon, and indulge his distrust of convention—even when that convention was his own creation.117
Like Kennan, Acheson had a fine mind, but a practical one, not a ruminative or emotional one. Confronted with a problem, he would insist that “if you can’t do anything about it, just stop thinking about it,” recalled his daughter Mary. “Get on with something!”118 Though Kennan’s office continued to adjoin the secretary of state’s, he would lose the access he had under Marshall. Acheson dismissed Kremlinologists like Kennan as “dangerous” soothsayers pushing “uncommunicable” guesses that “must be accepted by those who have not the same occult power of divination.”119 He ordered that Policy Planning Staff director memos should go to the assistant secretaries rather than to himself personally. Thus seeing his influence wane toward irrelevance, feeling at times like “a court jester,”120 Kennan would in December 1949 choose to depart from the think tank he had fathered at State.121 Under his successor, the less cerebral but more fashionably hawkish Paul Nitze, PPS would be more tank and less think.
THE COUNCIL OF FOREIGN MINISTERS reconvened in Paris, after an eighteen-month hiatus, on May 23, 1949. For the Soviets, the talks commenced on the worst possible note.
The Bonn Parliamentary Council approved the new West German constitution—blandly called “the Basic Law” (Grundgesetz) to highlight its provisional status while Germany remained divided—on May 8.122 Accepted by the Allies on May 12 and quickly ratified by the trizonal Länder,123 it now came into force on the same day the four powers began deliberations—deliberations Moscow had demanded to prevent its creation. It was Vyshinsky’s first major diplomatic failure.
Still, Adenauer worried. “Let us be under no serious illusions,” he told the Bonn Council in his closing speech. “[T]his Paris Conference might have very serious consequences for us. . . . We do not want conditions in the western zones to converge toward those in the eastern zone as a result of the negotiations.”124
State Department position papers for the conference stressed that West Germany was “essential to the success of the European Recovery Program,” but noted that Moscow aimed to keep the country isolated and prevent “integration of Western Europe under US leadership.” 125 For Acheson, however, West Germany was n
onnegotiable. “We are making progress . . . with the integration of Germany into a free and democratic Europe,” he told Douglas, “and we shall not jeopardize this” in Paris.126
With Acheson determined not to make concessions, the conference quickly stalemated when Vyshinsky called for a return to four-power control and a Soviet veto. Acheson dismissed the proposal as “back to Potsdam.” The Allies, he said, would never return to a system that had “failed so disastrously.” The Soviet zone was in a “state of economic collapse.” Shackling West Germany’s recovery to the tottering East was, he said, like “asking a paralyzed person who was three-quarters recovered to go back to complete paralysis.”
Vyshinsky struggled to break down Acheson’s resolute indifference. It was beyond his skills to camouflage Russia’s fraying position in Germany. That position had become precarious in December, following the anti-Communist electoral rout in Berlin, and weaker still with the collapse of the blockade. To Acheson’s claim that western zone industrial production had reached 90 percent of 1936 levels, Vyshinksy responded that it was now 96.6 percent in the east. The Allied delegates guffawed. “I will certainly see,” Bevin said smiling, “that the refugees learned about the paradise which they had left.”