Worldmaking
Page 35
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In Anti-intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter observed that 1947 was the year when America’s international preeminence—economically, militarily, culturally, politically—was established beyond doubt. He wrote that it “was no longer possible to look at any foreign political system for moral or ideological illumination.” To reinforce his point, Hofstadter quoted Edmund Wilson’s remarks upon returning from Europe that “the United States at the present time is politically more advanced than any other part of the world.” That this “least provincial of writers” could endorse the nation’s political system without qualification, further observing that the postwar world had witnessed “a remarkable renascence of American arts and letters,” testified to a special moment in time for the United States.80 Not that there was any time to celebrate. Kennan was disinclined to revel in self-congratulation; the worrisome world situation kept his mood somber. There was a full-blown communist insurgency in Greece, acute political instability in Turkey, escalating U.S.-Soviet tension over a divided Germany, and a protracted civil war in China—tilting discernibly in Mao Zedong’s favor—which ensured that its FDR-bestowed status as a fourth “global policeman” was now fully detached from reality. Kennan could see that America’s view from the geopolitical summit was far bleaker than Britain’s in 1815.
Some good news arrived to cheer Kennan in January 1947, when General George Marshall replaced James Byrnes as secretary of state. Winston Churchill had described Marshall as the West’s “organizer of victory,” in reference to the pivotal role he played as army chief of staff during the Second World War. An awe-inspiring presence, Marshall knew and liked Kennan—well, as much as this taciturn man could show—and the feeling was reciprocated. In his memoir, Kennan observed that there was “no one whose memory has less need of a eulogy from me than George Marshall.” He composed a warm and affecting one all the same:
Like everyone else, I admired him, and in a sense loved him, for the qualities I saw in him … for his unshakable integrity; his consistent courtesy and gentlemanliness of conduct; his ironclad sense of duty; his imperturbability—the imperturbability of a good conscience—in the face of harassments, pressures, and criticisms … his indifference to the whims and moods of public opinion, particularly as manifested in the mass media; and his impeccable fairness and avoidance of favoritism in the treatment of subordinates (there was no one in the Department of State whom he called by the first name; every one of us, from top to bottom, was recognized simply by his surname, with no handle to it).81
Marshall emerges through Kennan’s writings as the one unimpeachable figure in public life, a giant among men. And counted among his many achievements was a farsighted decision to follow Kennan’s advice in establishing a Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, and to appoint the author of the Long Telegram to head it.
On January 31, 1947, Kennan had sent a letter to Dean Acheson, Marshall’s number two at the State Department, which emphasized the merits of creating a distinct policy-planning function. “What is important,” wrote Kennan, “is that somewhere in the government there should be an honest, detached, and authoritative assessment of what constitutes national interest in foreign affairs and of how the national interest might be best promoted.” The machinery of U.S. foreign policymaking was fundamentally reactive in its operational method. A separate detachment of policy planners at State would redress this problem in being afforded the space and time to think proactively. “The planner must accept the responsibility of defining overall purpose and approach,” Kennan wrote. “The advisory quality of his function,” he continued, “relieves him of any presumption of immodesty in this undertaking.”
On the planning staff’s ultimate purpose, Kennan identified two broad “objectives of United States policy.” The first was “to assure to the people of the United States physical security and freedom to pursue in their own way the solution of the problems of their national life.” The second was to “bring into existence that pattern of international relationships which will permit the people of the United States to derive maximum benefit from the experiences and achievements of other peoples and to make the maximum contribution to human progress anywhere.” All of which was laudable and uncharacteristically vague. Kennan did offer more detail on America’s economic goals, concurring with Charles Beard that the United States would be a much safer place if the nation reduced its “dependence” upon “the exchange of commodities.”82 Thus the global economy cannot be counted among the many topics about which Kennan was farsighted—Mahan had anticipated the patterns of world trade much more accurately a half century before. Regardless of this misstep, Kennan offered more specifics on the planning staff a fortnight later, observing to Acheson that it “should be started with a minimum of personnel,” and that “these officers should be chosen, without regard to grade, on the basis of their official record, stress being laid on general intelligence, educational background, analytical capability, breadth and depth of experience, political judgment, and imagination.”83 Nothing less than the truest meritocracy was fit for purpose. The policy planning staff was formally convened in the State Department some two months later. Secretary Marshall’s one piece of operational guidance to Kennan was pithy: “avoid trivia.”84
On February 24, Acheson summoned Kennan to discuss an urgent problem. The British government, which counted Greece and Turkey within its protective sphere, no longer had sufficient resources to safeguard their independence. Could the United States assume this burden? Kennan instinctively thought yes in respect to Greece but no in respect to Turkey—where no armed insurgency actually existed (and whose connection to America’s national security was less certain than that of Greece). President Truman said yes to Britain on both counts, and a draft presidential speech was composed and circulated across government on March 9.
Three days later, Truman delivered the speech to a joint session of Congress; it announced a set of foreign-policy principles that became known as the Truman Doctrine. Kennan disliked the speech as soon as he saw it, and its key sentence allows us to understand why. About two-thirds of the way through the speech, which was mostly measured in tone and narrow in focus, Truman said, “I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Instead of addressing the specific problems of Greece and Turkey, Truman had summoned universals. Kennan’s calibrated diplomatic gradations had seemingly been discarded for a blank Wilsonian check. The speech “placed our aid in the framework of a universal policy rather than in that of a specific decision addressed to a specific set of circumstances. It implied that what we had decided to do in the case of Greece was something we would be prepared to do in the case of any other country, provided only that it was faced with the threat of ‘subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’”85
A foundational stone had been laid on the path to American involvement in Vietnam—and to many other destructive, purposeless tangents.
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The critical substance of Walter Lippmann’s reaction to Truman’s speech was identical to Kennan’s. But declining the State Department’s job offer meant he could record his concerns publicly. In “T&T” on March 15, Lippmann observed that a “vague global policy, which sounds like the tocsin of an ideological crusade, has no limits. It cannot be controlled. Its effects cannot be predicted. Everyone everywhere will read into it his own fears and hopes, and it could readily act as incitement and inducement to civil strife in countries where the national cooperation is delicate and precarious.” A few weeks after the column appeared, Lippmann and Dean Acheson clashed at a dinner party when the latter accused the former of “sabotaging” the nation’s foreign policy. Lippmann and Acheson exchanged fierce rhetorical blows, creating “a very unpleasant evening,” in the journalist’s recollection.86
Lippmann had actually come around to the logic of resisting Soviet expansionism. His disa
greement with Acheson was on means and parameters. On April 5, Lippmann had published one of his most influential columns, widely reprinted under syndication, titled “Cassandra Speaking”—a Kennanesque piece of historical self-identification. Lippmann observed that Europe was on the verge of economic collapse. This was not hyperbole, he maintained, but “only what responsible men say when they do not have to keep up appearances in public.” It was now imperative that the Truman administration devise measures to shore up political and economic stability in Europe “on a scale which no responsible statesman has yet ventured to hint at.”87 The proposal of a large-scale intervention to save the center of the geopolitical universe garnered Kennan’s instant approval. This was precisely the type of nonmilitary measure envisioned and prioritized in the Long Telegram. Others in the State Department were similarly impressed. The speechwriter Joseph Jones paraphrased Lippmann’s column for an important address delivered by Dean Acheson, of all people, a few weeks later.
James Forrestal also liked Lippmann’s column and suggested that he and George Kennan should meet in person to sketch out the basics of a recovery program for Europe on the appropriate grand scale. Facing the men were two considerable challenges, described by Ronald Steel: “how to sell such a costly program to a suspicious Congress, and how to organize it so that it did not seem either an American ploy to dominate Europe or a blatant anti-Soviet maneuver.”88 Lippmann and Kennan shared a political philosophy, seriousness of purpose, and diplomatic style. It was no surprise, then, that they devised an elegant and logical plan. They met for a long lunch at the National War College and made two substantive proposals. First, the Soviet Union would be invited to participate in the recovery program, and be offered advantageous loan terms. Its participation, however, should be made contingent upon acceptance that the encouragement and facilitation of free trade was sine qua non—recovery would proceed on broadly liberal-capitalist lines. Second, Kennan and Lippmann recommended that the United States encourage the European nations to request assistance themselves.
This would place the onus on Congress to simply accept or reject a European plea for help, a precedent that had met with recent success. It would also compel the European nations to collaborate, which would be useful in developing their political and economic cohesion, ensuring their longer-term vitality, and negating the potential for future conflict within the continent itself. Encouraging greater European unity—with a carrot worth billions of dollars—would also ask some hard questions of Soviet dominance in Eastern and Central Europe. Were Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary gaining anything from residing in the Russian orbit? If Stalin forced the satellite nations to refuse to participate in a generous U.S. aid program, seeds of discord would be successfully sown. Durable empires are not made by cowing nations, crushing their spirit, and then hampering their development. (The architects of the British Empire understood that some degree of co-opting was required.) Kennan better understood the logic of this than Lippmann, because the latter genuinely believed that Moscow would participate in the program, bringing along its neighbors. Lippmann did not view the plan as a ruse to develop one part of Europe at the expense of the other but as a noble attempt to part what Churchill had described in 1946 as the “iron curtain.” The journalist wanted to rekindle a form of ends-oriented U.S.-Soviet cooperation that had fallen into abeyance since Yalta.
Lippmann was of course duly thwarted. On June 4, 1947, while delivering a commencement address at Harvard, Secretary of State Marshall presented the broad sweep of a plan designed to assist the recovery and reconstruction of Europe. During the planning stage, the State Department had decided that creating the impression of a European-requested endeavor would have stretched credulity a little too far. The bulk of the speech was drafted by Kennan’s friend Charles Bohlen, and it drew on Kennan’s and Lippmann’s insights as well as those from other State Department sources, William Clayton most notably. The Marshall Plan, as it became known, had a broad purpose tailored to the chaotic economic circumstances of the time:
It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.89
At the end of the month, Molotov and some eighty advisers, including a retinue of hopeful representatives from Eastern Europe, attended a conference in Paris to discuss Marshall’s offer. Lippmann was delighted by this promising news; Kennan, aghast. Fortunately, Molotov behaved as expected in declining Washington’s offer, taking the leaders of Moscow’s unhappy satellites back east with him. Marshall’s seemingly gregarious observation that U.S. “policy is not directed against any country, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos” did not dupe Vyacheslav Molotov. Superpower rivalry was ideological, above all, and accepting the Marshall Plan also meant accepting the superiority of capitalism over communism. There was not enough cash in the world to sweeten that pill.
Over the next four years, $12.4 billion in aid was disbursed to the sixteen nations of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation—including Great Britain, France, Italy, West Germany, and Austria—freshly created to administer the Marshall Plan from the recipient end. Lippmann had floated an early rationale and played his usually significant role in respect to guiding and illuminating public opinion. But this was George Kennan’s achievement, perhaps his finest policy hour. The Marshall Plan was the perfect realization of logic contained in the Long Telegram. (Few policies henceforth came close to satisfying Kennan.) It was also successful in achieving its declared goals. Tottering on shaky economic and political foundations in 1947, Western Europe regained its footing following Marshall’s speech and embarked upon a remarkable period of sustained growth. The Marshall Plan also presaged closer European economic and political cooperation—in the fashion that Lippmann and Kennan anticipated. Historians and economists continue to debate the actual utility of the plan. The $12.4 billion figure was not vast in the wider scheme of things; America’s GDP in 1948 was $258 billion. Western Europe had greater latent economic potential than any other region on earth. But one need not enter this scholarly debate to observe that the Marshall Plan made an enormous contribution—psychologically at the least and economically transformative at the most—to the rehabilitation of Western Europe. It instilled hope and unity of purpose, which was enough.
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A few months before the creation of the Marshall Plan, the editor of Foreign Affairs, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, invited Kennan to redraft the Long Telegram for publication. Here was an ideal opportunity for Kennan to reach a much larger audience than the National War College lectern could provide. Foreign Affairs was not the International Herald Tribune, but its readership was influential and its circulation respectable. Kennan replied with a caveat: “I really cannot write anything of value on Russia for publication under my own name. If you would be interested in an anonymous article, or one under a pen name, I would be glad to know this.” An undeterred Armstrong replied that “the interest of the projected article more than outweighs from our point of view the disadvantage of anonymity. This letter is an invitation to you, then, to put into the form of an article the ideas you expressed so well in your memorandum and in your talk here at the Council.”90
An article titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” by an author identified as “X” appeared in July’s Foreign Affairs. Nothing published in that journal since—and that includes seminal pieces by Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Samuel Huntington, Paul Wolfowitz, and many others—has had a comparable impact. The New York Times and Newsweek reported on the article’s meaning and wider significance, and mused on the likely identity of its author—“X” was intriguing, an unintended ma
rketing masterstroke. Reader’s Digest and Life printed long excerpts, riling Kennan with their brutal editing, which he believed damaged the article’s integrity. It took less than a month for Arthur Krock to reveal X’s identity in the Times. Perturbed by this media storm, George Marshall summoned Kennan for a dressing down, growling in admonishment that “planners don’t talk.” Kennan protested that he had secured all necessary clearances, which mollified Marshall.91 The secretary of state and others understood that the publicity could serve a useful purpose. James Forrestal, for one, was thrilled that the X Article had secured such a large readership, and that its connection to U.S. policy had been established. The danger posed by the Soviet Union would, he hoped, become evident to all who read the article. The making of a resolute, and costly, foreign policy would become simpler if the public and their political representatives understood the stakes involved in containing Moscow.
“The Sources of Soviet Conduct” covered much of the same ground as the Long Telegram. It begins by re-creating Stalin’s warped perspective on diplomacy: that there could be no meaningful collaboration between the Soviet Union and “powers which are regarded as capitalist.” “This means,” Kennan wrote, “that we are going to continue for a long time to find the Russians difficult to deal with.” It is impossible to engage meaningfully with a totalitarian regime because “truth is not a constant but is actually created, for all intents and purposes, by the Soviet leaders themselves.” Russian history, additionally, provides ample evidence that communist “precepts are fortified by … centuries of obscure battles between nomadic forces over the stretches of a vast fortified plain.” Assaulted in various eras by Mongol hordes from the east, and Napoleon’s and Hitler’s formidable land armies from the west, Russia had a complicated relationship with the outside world, to say the least. Invading armies had visited death and destruction on Russia on a scale experienced by no other nation on earth. In these circumstances, the coupling of Russian history and Marxism-Leninism had real chemistry.