by David Milne
To ensure that this abused child was restrained in the extent of abuse it could mete out, Kennan crafted a seminal strategic concept:
In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansionist tendencies … It will be clearly seen that the Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.
The next eight presidents would all subscribe to variations on this policy. The containment of Soviet expansionism was designed to ensure that the free world remained inoculated from Marxist contagion. In the meantime, the Soviet Union would wither on the vine:
Russian communists who speak of the “uneven development of capitalism” should blush at the contemplation of their own national economy … It is difficult to see how these deficiencies can be corrected at an early date by a tired and dispirited population working largely under the shadow of fear and compulsion … The possibility remains (and in the opinion of this writer it is a strong one) that Soviet power, like the capitalist world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well-advanced.
If the United States remained resolute and kept its head, the Soviet Union would not pose as serious a challenge as promised by Stalin’s and Molotov’s bluster. “For no mystical, messianic movement—and particularly not that of the Kremlin—can face frustration indefinitely without eventually adjusting itself in one way or another to the logic of that state of affairs.”92
Kennan’s article evoked a strong reaction in Walter Lippmann. Aware of the article’s vast potential impact, he wrote twelve successive “T&T” columns, all of which appeared in the late summer of 1947, criticizing X’s rationale, prescriptions, and predictions. Lippmann accused X of making some egregious errors: downplaying Russia’s history at the expense of Marxist ideology, proposing a strategy so broad in application that it would lead to perpetual conflict in areas of marginal significance, and misplaced confidence in the fallibility of the Soviet system. In the most damning indictment, Lippmann accused Kennan of authoring a “strategic monstrosity” that was likely to cause geopolitical exhaustion: “The Americans would themselves probably be frustrated by Mr. X’s policy long before the Russians were.” The articles were published collectively as a book titled The Cold War in the fall. With “the Cold War” and “containment,” Kennan and Lippmann had provided the language that defined the postwar era.
Lippmann’s twelve-stage critique of Kennan’s article was brilliant at times and garnered a lot of publicity. His first column impugned X for observing that Soviet power “bears within itself the seed of its own decay.” “Do we dare to assume as we enter the arena and get set to run the race,” asked Lippmann sarcastically, “that the Soviet Union will break its leg while the United States grows a pair of wings to speed it on its way?”93 In Lippmann’s mind, the Soviet Union was an established fact that was here to stay. Both assessments had some merit, but Kennan more accurately identified the process through which the Marxist-Leninist experiment would unravel; Lippmann had been duped by a Soviet economic and political system that resembled a Potemkin village. Containment was entirely appropriate because Russian communism would prove evanescent. The Soviet Union’s economic virtues bore no serious comparison to those of the United States and the West; Moscow’s reluctant empire was not likely to remain quiescent.
Lippmann was on surer ground in following through on the faulty logic contained in Kennan’s advocacy of the “adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” “The Eurasian continent is a big place,” wrote Lippmann, “and the military power of the United States, though it is very great, has certain limits which must be borne in mind if it is to be used effectively.” Of particular concern to Lippmann was containment’s apparently broad application, unencumbered in presentation by any clearly established hierarchy of American interests. This made the Third World a battleground of dubious worth: “The policy can be implemented only by recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets.” The problem with lavishing resources, and vesting credibility, on such areas and regimes is that “satellite states and puppet governments are not good material out of which to construct unassailable barriers. We shall have either to disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat and loss of face, or must support them at incalculable cost on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue.”94 With this observation, Lippmann had peered into the future.
In the last of the twelve articles, Lippmann identified a continuity of aims between X and the authors of the Truman Doctrine. All had been foolishly driven by Wilsonianism, disregarding the Mahanian tradition in American diplomatic history that understood that certain values do not travel well. Washington policymakers should protect the security and interests of the nation and its closest strategic partners—not treat the world as a single battleground on which the champions of John Locke should be pitted against those of Karl Marx. Any poor nation should be free to opt for the latter just as it might prefer the former. Their decision was irrelevant, as weak and peripheral nations did not affect the West’s core economic and security interests. And fighting proxy wars in such places was foolish on multiple levels:
Our aim will not be to organize an ideological crusade. It will not be to make Jeffersonian democrats out of the peasants of eastern Europe, the tribal chieftains, the feudal lords, the pashas, and the warlords of the Middle East and Asia, but to settle the war and to restore the independence of the nations of Europe by removing the alien armies—all of them, our own included … Alien armies are hateful, however well behaved, just because they represent an alien power and are, therefore, a perpetual reminder that the people on whom they are quartered are not masters of their own destiny.95
Lippmann’s polemic was highly impressive. In fact, Kennan mostly agreed with him, which made its ferocity harder to dismiss or absorb.
Of course, Kennan’s first reaction was anger. He too abhorred the Truman Doctrine but was unable to vent his frustrations to millions of avid readers in the way Lippmann could. After Lippmann’s first article went to press, Kennan asked permission to publicly respond, which Marshall denied. Kennan was annoyed that Lippmann had emphasized the perils of containment’s military application, when its author in fact viewed war as an absolute last resort. Kennan began to wonder whether he had made his meaning clear, eventually conceding that the ambiguities and gaps contained in the article had invited Lippmann’s critique. In his memoirs he confessed his “failure to make clear what I was talking about when I mentioned the containment of Soviet power was not the containment by military means of a military threat, but the political containment of a political threat.” In identifying a “series of constantly shifting geographical and political points,” Kennan had erred in proposing a strategy that was “at best ambiguous, and lent itself to misinterpretation.” This led him to identify another “great deficiency”—his “failure to distinguish between various geographic areas, and to make clear that the ‘containment’ of which I was speaking was not something which I thought we could, necessarily, do everywhere successfully, or even needed to do everywhere successfully, in order to serve the purpose I had in mind.” In April 1948, Kennan composed a long letter to Lippmann, from his sickbed at Bethesda Naval Hospital (it should be noted here that Kennan, who lived to 101, was more robust than his complaints suggest):
I wrote a long letter to Mr. Lippmann, protesting the misinterpretation of my thoughts which his articles, as it seemed to me, implied. I never sent it to him. It was probably
best that I didn’t. The letter had a plaintive and overdramatic tone, reflecting the discomfort of flesh and spirit in which it was written. I took a more cruel but less serious revenge a year or two later when I ran into him on a parlor car of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and wore him relentlessly down with a monologue on these same subjects that lasted most of the way from Washington to New York.
The core of Lippmann’s critique had been justified in these circumstances. Of this “misunderstanding almost tragic in its dimensions,” Kennan graciously said, “I accept the blame for misleading him. My only consolation is that I succeeded in provoking from him so excellent and penetrating a treatise.”96 Lippmann and Kennan became close allies as the former’s prophesies came to pass. On the X Article, Kennan later wrote that he felt “like one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster.”97
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At the end of 1947, his annus mirabilis, Kennan’s policy influence began to follow the same trajectory as the boulder. At the Policy Planning Staff meetings he chaired, and across government in general, Kennan began to notice that his views were now in the minority. In January, Kennan registered reservations about the Truman administration recognizing Israel as an independent state. He was concerned that the United States agreeing to serve as Israel’s chief supporter would inevitably inflame Arab nationalism in the region. This was not a controversial opinion in 1947–1948—indeed, Henry Kissinger, a freshman at Harvard at that time, also believed that U.S. interests would be injured by supporting Israel’s creation.98 Yet President Truman (if not Secretary of State Marshall and Secretary of Defense Forrestal, who shared some of Kennan’s doubts) declared his support for Israel’s path to nationhood, and of America’s vital interest in ensuring its long-term survival. Unconvinced by this reasoning, Kennan had drafted a paper on Palestine for the Office of United Nations Affairs, which cautioned against America taking a strong position on the Arab-Israeli conflict. As Kennan recorded in his diary, it “came back with a long memorandum attacking it.” He was particularly irritated that contained in this critical reply “was no hint of criticism of the Zionists, who were apparently blameless. The solutions toward which the memorandum pointed were all ones which would have put further strain on our relations with British and Arabs, and on the relations between British and Arabs. Such a policy could proceed only at the expense of our major political and strategic interests in the Middle East.” Sensitivity to the Holocaust did not enter Kennan’s analysis at any point. He believed Washington should step back and allow events to take their natural Darwinian course, irrespective of outcome:
Unless the inhabitants of Palestine, both Jews and Arabs, and the international elements which stand behind them, are finally compelled to face each other eye to eye, without outside interference, and to weigh, with a sense of immediate and direct responsibility, the consequences of agreement or disagreement, I think they will continue to react irresponsibly … We Americans must realize that we cannot be the keepers and moral guardians of all the peoples in this world. We must become more modest, and recognize the necessary limits to the responsibility we can assume.99
The final two sentences distilled Kennan’s worldview. It was America’s obligation, as the world’s single most powerful nation, to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union, an abhorrent regime. Beyond that, Washington should learn from history’s other great empires and resist the temptation to assume unsustainable burdens in volatile regions. Zionist attempts to found a nation in the Middle East should live or die by Jewish resources alone.
Elsewhere the geopolitical augurs were similarly gloomy. In February 1948, a Soviet-backed coup in Czechoslovakia removed the last remnants of independent-mindedness from its government. Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk died in mysterious circumstances two weeks later. President Edvard Beneš, who had initially accepted a strong communist presence within a coalition government, and who had been forced to sign off on the coup d’état under threat of Soviet invasion, resigned in June and died, from natural causes, at the end of the year. From Berlin, General Lucius Clay informed Washington that while he had previously believed a war with the Soviet Union was unlikely “for at least ten years … within the last few weeks, I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitude which I cannot define but which now gives me a feeling that it may come with dramatic suddenness.” Kennan found this assessment alarmist in the extreme. His response to Czechoslovakia’s humbling was a repeat of ten years earlier. The nation was destined to fall under the domination of a larger neighbor; Kennan had given up hope of an independent Czechoslovakia soon after the D-day landings, when the Roosevelt administration missed the opportunity to confront Stalin over his wider intentions in Eastern Europe. Kennan recalled that “Washington, particularly the military establishment and intelligence fraternity (where the military predominated) … overreacted in the most deplorable way to the combination of Clay’s telegram and the Czech coup.” On March 16, the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency prepared an analysis that held that war was “not probable within the next sixty days.” The notion of waging war over Czechoslovakia—which had been a dead man walking since the summer of 1944—appalled Kennan. The worst aspect was that few policy advisers appeared capable of understanding Stalin’s perspective, which Kennan identified as “defensive reactions … to the initial successes of the Marshall Plan initiative and to the preparations now being undertaken on the Western side to set up a separate German government in Western Germany.”100 In a letter to Walter Lippmann, now a firm friend, Kennan observed that “the Russians don’t want to invade anyone. It is not in their tradition … The violence is nominally domestic, not international, violence. It is, if you will, a police violence, not a military violence. The policy of containment related to the effort to encourage other peoples to resist this type of violence and to defend the internal integrity of their countries.”101 Walter Lippmann’s response to the coup, meanwhile, was unimpeachable: he discarded any residual hope of America getting along with Stalin.102
Germany had become a major bone of contention between Kennan and the Truman administration. Having initially supported the creation of a distinct West Germany, to consolidate America’s strategic position on the continent, Kennan had come to oppose the establishment of a sovereign separate state. On June 18, the Western occupying nations had announced that the zone would have a new currency—the deutsche mark—to assist its economic rehabilitation. In response, Stalin ordered the immediate closure of all access routes to West Berlin, leaving the zone’s residents about a month’s food supplies. To get around these restrictions, the United States and Great Britain began to operate a round-the-clock airlift, which successfully supplied the west of Berlin until May 1949, when Stalin simply gave up. It was a stirring victory for Truman and the West, although the airlift was fraught with danger. On August 12, 1948, an anxious Kennan submitted document PPS 37 to Secretary Marshall:
We can no longer retain the present line of division in Europe and yet hope to keep things flexible for an eventual retraction of Soviet power and for the gradual emergence from Soviet control, and entrance into a free European country, of the present satellite countries … If we carry on along present lines, Germany must divide into eastern and western governments and western Europe must move toward a tight military alliance with this country which can only complicate the eventual integration of the satellites into a European community.103
In the midst of this grand confrontation with Stalin, Kennan’s emollient proposal, anticipating happier times, sank without a trace. Dean Acheson, in particular, began to harbor serious doubts about the quality of Kennan’s counsel and even identified in him a form of defeatism or pacifism. Acheson later said that Kennan reminded him of his father’s horse, “which used to startle itself with the noise of its own hooves when it crossed wooden bridges.”104 Acheson turned out
to be a primary author of Kennan’s policy decline.
Meanwhile, James Forrestal, a catalyst for Kennan’s rise, had set out on a path to self-destruction. Truman appointed Forrestal as the nation’s first secretary of defense in 1947, combining the War and Navy Departments. This reshuffle was part of a wider reorganization of U.S. government, enshrined in the National Security Act of 1947, which established the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. The United States was girding itself for a long and costly struggle with the Soviet Union. This was effectively a promotion for Forrestal, but his tendency to work unforgiving hours, combined with a fragile temperament, began to affect his mental equilibrium, setting alarm bells ringing in the goldfish bowl that was Washington. In 1948, Forrestal made the unwise decision to meet secretly with Thomas Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate, where he agreed to serve as his secretary of defense in the likely event that Dewey beat Truman. Drew Pearson, a syndicated journalist with a nose for political scandal, publicized the details of this meeting, and Truman forced his secretary of defense to resign, which happened on March 31, 1949. Forrestal suffered a nervous breakdown soon after and was hospitalized a few weeks later. After a series of unsuccessful medical interventions, which likely exacerbated his mania, Forrestal committed suicide on May 22 by throwing himself from the sixteenth floor of Bethesda Naval Hospital.105