Born in 1904, Kennan had an unremarkable early life, and – judging by a diary of his dreams – one that was not as prim and proper as it seemed on the daytime surface. He was a Presbyterian from Milwaukee who had studied history at Princeton University, before entering the US Foreign Service. A distant relative, also called George Kennan, who had written about exiles in nineteenth-century Siberia, sparked his initial interest in Russia. His diplomatic stints in Russia (whose language he thoroughly mastered) lay either side of the Second World War, during which he was interned for a while in Hitler’s Berlin before being repatriated. His illustrious mentors in Moscow’s Spaso House US embassy included such ambassadors as William Bullitt and Averell Harriman, the latter one of the few men Kennan was in awe of; his diplomat contemporaries included Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen and Loy Henderson, subsequently ambassadors and senior officials, whom we shall be seeing more of.
Seconded to the National War College, Kennan began to generalize the psychology of chess: ‘Our task is to plan and execute our strategic dispositions in such a way as to compel Sov. Govt. either to accept combat under unfavourable conditions (which it will never do) or withdraw.’ Since the Soviet Union was an empire, by now ruling a majority of non-Russian speakers, Kennan thought that the judicious application of counterforce would not only contain Soviet expansionism but possibly trigger the collapse of the Soviet system. His main caveat was that the US should act ‘only in cases where the prospective results bear a satisfactory relationship to the expenditure of American resources and effort’.9 At the prompting of Navy Secretary Forrestal, Marshall and his deputy Dean Acheson selected Kennan to run the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, which fed seventy major strategy papers, totalling 900 pages, into the newly created National Security Council (NSC), a body Britain would emulate in 2010. Kennan was also part of the CIA’s Office of Special Projects, set up by Marshall and the Agency’s director, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, to mount covert operations.
Kennan found it hard to adjust from being the lone supreme expert to being part of complex bureaucratic teams staffed by equally ambitious men, serving politicians who had to exaggerate and simplify his ideas, whether to secure Congressional funding or obtain popular approval. There was also a tension between the policy-maker and the historian, for the grand strategy of containment (as it came to be called) jibed with John Quincy Adams’s 1821 warning that the young Republic should not go seeking monsters to destroy, a view that still resonated 130 years later. To the alleged disquiet of its intellectual architect, the chess game degenerated into a crude affair of nuclear-armed bombers at all points of the compass, and messy peripheral wars in countries Kennan cared not one jot about. Propping up Third World clients and puppets might also incite the very revolutionary turmoil containment was supposed to prevent. Put out to grass, Kennan spent the rest of his long life (he died in 2005 aged 101), defending policy subtleties that no one else had noticed at the time.
In fact his more cultural-philosophical approach to grand strategy seemed to inhibit practical decision-making and it was White House adviser Clark Clifford who set about turning Kennan’s rather abstract thoughts into concrete policy. In a Top Secret Study dated 24 September 1946, Clifford argued that a robust global US security mission encompassing ‘all democratic countries which are in any way menaced by the USSR’ would eventually trigger the systemic collapse of the Soviet Union, which needed constantly to expand to disguise how a small ruling clique had latched themselves on to the basically decent Russian people. Identifying the potential weakness of the Soviet system was among the highly prescient insights of an article Kennan published anonymously as ‘X’ in July 1947 in the influential journal Foreign Affairs: ‘If . . . anything were ever to occur to disrupt the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument, Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.’10
One further intervention helped shape the emerging consensus on Soviet intentions. Truman relayed an invitation to Churchill to speak in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946. They took a caravanserai of journalists and photographers on a thousand-mile train journey, during which the two men whiled away the time boozing and playing poker. In his speech Churchill revisited an earlier metaphor, coined by Goebbels, to speak of an ‘iron curtain’ behind which historic European peoples were subject to repressive Soviet control. The domestic US response to Churchill’s call for a union of the English-speaking peoples was largely negative, with protesters in New York shouting, ‘Winnie, Winnie, go away, U-N-O is here to stay.’ The conservative Wall Street Journal declared: ‘The United States wants no alliance, or anything that resembles an alliance, with any other nation.’ Stalin mischievously accused Churchill of Nazi-style racism in his harping on about the unity of the Anglo-Saxons, and purported to regard the speech as a ‘call to war’. In a letter to his mother, Truman explained that he was not yet ready to endorse the belligerent Briton’s advanced opinions in public. He wrote to Stalin offering to bring him by ship to Missouri to deliver his own riposte to Churchill’s speech, which Truman falsely claimed not to have read in advance. Indeed the supposition must be that he and Churchill discussed it thoroughly during the long train journey and he applauded enthusiastically as it was delivered.11
At the same time news reported from within the Red Empire was not encouraging. US journalists who penetrated Soviet-occupied Manchuria found factories being dismantled and removed by the trainload. If they managed to interview a local, the person was invariably shot shortly afterwards. Sniper fire kept most reporters embedded in their hotel rooms. Some American liberals began to change their minds under the influence of one of their own – John Fischer, who reported from Russia for a variety of magazines. The columnist Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times put the grim anecdotes into a wider policy framework:
Friendship in the sense of intimate association and political compromise is not wanted, is not possible, and is not involved . . . The Russian people are admirable . . . but between us and the Russian people stands the Soviet government. Despite its sanctimonious use of the word ‘democracy’ it is a totalitarian government . . . There are no freedoms within the Soviet Union . . . The government is a machine for generating power within the Soviet Union and as far outside as the power can be made to extend; and all attempts to deal with it in terms of friendship are doomed to failure.12
This was very much the view emerging among top US policy-makers, leading to the dumping of Henry Wallace, the former vice president who had been brought back in as secretary of commerce, after he became an apologist for Russia and a proponent of its moral equivalence with the US. Under Truman out went Roosevelt’s casual hunches about other world leaders and in came cold-blooded assessments of long-term threats and how to respond to them.13 The incoming Secretary of State Marshall was dry, laconic, solid and reliable, unfazed by talented subordinates. He had a keen sense of history and thought that no one who had not read about the Peloponnesian Wars should conduct foreign policy. He knew how to delegate policy formation to Under Secretary Dean Acheson, who in turn knew the difference between an endless seminar and how to steer tight groups of experts in the required direction, giving them time and space to air their opinions. Although Acheson was a supple intellect, there was nothing subtle about such obiter dicta as ‘the United States was the locomotive at the head of mankind and the rest of the world was the caboose [guard’s van]’.14
Who were the men who devised and determined US policy during what the journalist Walter Lippmann had already dubbed the ‘Cold War’ in the title of a 1947 compilation of his articles? He probably borrowed the term from the French, who had used la guerre blanche or la guerre froid in the 1930s.15 Much of the top talent hailed from elite East Coast prep schools and Harvard or Yale, who served lengthy spells as Wall Street investment bankers and corporate lawyers, with a few exceptional academics drawn directly from the Ivy League schools.
Some were extremely wealthy, like Averell Harriman, whose sad demeanour belied a fortune of $100 million, and whose, manners as those who crossed him discovered, were those of a crocodile. All of them believed in the obligation of public service, although few were averse to making money too. They may have been gentlemen players – with a strong sense of duty and loyalty when the McCarthyite mob hounded their patrician friends – rather than trained foreign policy professionals, but after the First World War they had ranged far and wide to invest their clients’ money, sometimes doubling up as intelligence gatherers. In an intermission between recurrent bouts of American puritanism, policy was thrashed out, passionately, over highballs and whiskey sours in smart houses in Georgetown. Culturally, these men felt most at home among Europeans, although only Acheson affected British tailoring and a Guards officer’s moustache. Harriman advised him to lose it: ‘you owe it to Truman’, he remarked.16
This was sage advice, as this elite group could easily appear alien to many of their fellow countrymen, especially after their resentments had been mobilized by the likes of newly elected Californian Congressman Richard Nixon, or the new Senator for Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.17 Every time the State Department’s Office of Foreign Buildings sought funds from Congress for a new embassy building – needed to house the increased number of aid programmes, CIA agents and military advisers that accompanied containment – some awkward Congressman would pipe up about constituents’ hard-earned money being frittered on ‘increased booze allowances for cookie pushers’.18 If the foreign policy elite had one collective flaw it was a snobbish disdain towards the ‘rest’ in a world of great powers. According to the future Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Acheson ‘did not give a damn about the little red-yellow-black people in various parts of the world’.19 Yet this was also government on a human scale. Every day Acheson walked the mile and a half to work alongside his friend Judge Felix Frankfurter, with not a car or bodyguard in sight. As the son of an Episcopalian minister and the daughter of a whiskey distiller, he claimed to have known both good and evil from an early age, though in his official role he maintained that the two could exist side by side and he was sceptical of moral absolutes.20
Truman’s foreign policy was complicated by the November 1946 Congressional elections in which the Republicans won 246 to 188 seats in the House, and 51 to 45 in the Senate. Even many Democrats, such as the new Massachusetts Congressman John Kennedy, found it opportune to employ militantly anti-Soviet rhetoric. There was also the problem of Communist sympathizers, when not outright Soviet agents, occupying key government posts. In late March 1947 Truman issued an executive order setting in motion loyalty investigations of employees of the executive branch of government.21 Although Truman was not entirely convinced by the Communist ‘bugaboo’, the investigation sparked rancorous hostility between populist Congressmen and a State Department that held them in contempt. Acheson habitually referred to McCarthy as a ‘primitive’, but the Senator found popular resonance when he portrayed the State Department as a nest of red subversives who had deliberately ‘lost’ China.22 The climate of suspicion crept steadily, like a sinister fog, from the State Department to the CIA and the armed forces, with even the patriotism of Marshall impugned by the demagogues.
Immediately after the war Truman sought to amortize a wartime debt of $250 billion. One obvious target was the defence budget, which he cut from $90 billion to $10.3 billion, and hoped to cut further. In 1947 the armed forces shrank to 1.5 million men, the majority occupation troops living pampered existences in Germany and Japan. Mainly because he disliked its Republican chief, General William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, in September 1945 Truman abruptly wound up the wartime OSS. These cuts in defence expenditure were hard to reconcile with the worsening state of US–Soviet relations and the unpreparedness of the US armed forces was to be shockingly revealed in the opening months of the Korean War. But the turning point came when Britain’s formal admission of impending bankruptcy forced the US to put a much larger footprint on the wider world.
On 21 February 1947 the British embassy in Washington told Acheson that it wished to deliver an important note. Acheson called the contents ‘shockers’: the British government was abandoning commitments to support Greece and Turkey because it could no longer bear the financial strain. In a moment that Acheson over-dramatically compared with creation in Genesis, he urged economic and military assistance for Greece and Turkey. Intensive discussions ensued: were the British bluffing? Were they expecting the Americans to refuse aid to Greece and Turkey, to make it easier for Britain to accommodate rather than confront the Soviet Union? The removal of the British Empire as a global shock absorber might bring a third world war much closer. Should the US regard Greece and Turkey as separate issues, or did it need to treat the threat of Communism at a more global conceptual level? Then there was Greece itself. What level of involvement in Greece was appropriate when the ‘extreme Right’ was ‘not averse to playing on the fears of the Greek public to brand all opposition as Communistic and foreign inspired, with the hope of justifying strong measures to stamp out Left factions and to render impotent any real Center republicanism’? The ‘extreme Left’ was equally adroit at playing this game by ramping up the threat of Fascism to destroy all manner of opponents of Stalinism.23
With a Republican Congress demanding 20 per cent tax cuts, pumping money towards the Aegean was going to be a tough sell, particularly since the threat to Turkey was unproven and it was Yugoslavia rather than the Soviet Union that was supporting the Reds in Greece. Although an eloquent public speaker, Secretary of State Marshall flunked it at the first informal gathering of select Congressional leaders, making what was not yet called containment sound as anodyne as another aid programme, until Acheson took the rhetorical reins. The present was comparable to the struggle of Athens and Sparta, Rome and Carthage. Simple fractions helped too, as Acheson spoke of the prospect of two-thirds of the world’s population and three-quarters of its land area turning a bloody red, an initial outing for the ‘domino theory’ of states falling sequentially to the red menace.
Senator Arthur Vandenberg, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, urged Truman to make his pitch to a joint session of Congress. Although the text of the speech was batted back and forth with appropriate amendments, it is important to stress that it was the President himself who insisted, ‘I want no hedge in this speech. This is America’s answer to the surge of Communist tyranny.’ The minor sleights of hand in the address when delivered on 12 March 1947 included the rash promise that money sent to Greece would not be embezzled, and that the US was not simply pulling British chestnuts out of the fire. There was a lot of tear-jerking detail about Greece’s immense suffering during the war, and particularly its legions of tubercular children. Truman was less forthcoming about Turkey, which had been neutral, but it was going to get its share of the $400 million too. This was apparently not much to ask. Fiscal conservatives were reminded that it was a tenth of 1 per cent of the $341,000,000,000 the US had spent winning the war. The President then turned to the ‘broad implications’ of his proposal. The United Nations could not function properly if its individual elements were subject to internal or external coercion. Truman spelled out the stark choices:
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based on the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based on the will of the minority forcibly imposed on the majority. It relies on terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.24
The authors of th
e Truman Doctrine were careful to disavow anything as militant as an ideological crusade, and nor were they interested in Churchill’s idea of a further grand summit to negotiate a deal with a bombless Stalin. It was not a matter of rolling back Communism from places like Hungary or Poland, but of ensuring that Communism did not spread. In 1940 Roosevelt had warned that the US should never become ‘a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force’. The US needed to restore Germany and Japan to the free community of nations. This was to ensure that no potential aggressors would ever be able to use their enormous industrial resources and technical flair against the United States itself.25 The US should build up its armed might, and assume responsibility for restoring the economic health of the free world.
Truman was fortunate that the Congressional Republican leadership included the internationalist Vandenberg. Despite objections to the potentially open-ended nature of these commitments, in April the aid packages were approved by Congress. Congress allocated $400 million to Greece alone, with Loy Henderson despatched to Athens to bang heads together. A rapidly deteriorating economy worsened the security situation. As a result much of future US support went towards military assistance programmes, namely a 450-strong military advisory group under General James Van Fleet, which helped the Greek government crush Communist guerrillas in what on both sides was a prototypical dirty war. An added bonus of such resolution was that when Stalin got cold feet about indirectly aiding the Greek Communists, his efforts to rein in the Yugoslav comrades further soured his relations with their leader Marshal Tito.26
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 7