Worldmaking (40 page)

One of the goals of the U.S. delegation, led by Edward R. Stettinius Jr., was to prevent the seating of the so-called Lublin delegation, a grouping of mainly pro-communist Polish political leaders favored by Stalin. This caused considerable strain in the Moscow-Washington relationship. The Soviet delegation had also been greatly irritated by American and British efforts to seat Argentina—a nation openly sympathetic to Germany during the war and a home to Nazi war criminals thereafter—as a founding member of the United Nations. Lippmann was dismayed that both issues had combined to sour relations between the world's two greatest powers. Midway through negotiations, he wrote to James F. Byrnes—an influential foreign-policy adviser to Truman who was appointed secretary of state in July—to register his displeasure:

I have been more disturbed about the conduct of our own policy than I have thought it expedient during a great conference of this sort to say in print … There is a far deeper conflict of interest between the British and the Soviets than between the U.S.A. and the Soviets, but we have allowed ourselves to be placed in a position where instead of being the moderating power which holds the balance, we have become the chief protagonists of the anti-Soviet position. This should never have happened. It would never have happened, I feel sure, if President Roosevelt were still alive, and it will lead to great trouble not only over such matters as the Polish question but throughout the Middle East if we do not recover our own sense of national interest about this fundamental relationship.
155

In paying insufficient attention to the balance of power, the United States had behaved naïvely and irresponsibly. As Lippmann recalled, Moscow “had a good case on Argentina and we wouldn't listen to it.”
156
But Argentina and Poland were of little material significance in the larger scheme of things—unlike the prospect of antagonizing Moscow.

The San Francisco Conference, then, was a distressing affair for Lippmann. He complained to John Maynard Keynes that the preparations were “amateurish and second rate” and that “I do wish we'd had the foresight to make some kind of security pact as underpinning between Britain, France, and North America.”
157
The United Nations had been signed into existence, meaning the maintenance of world peace would once again rest upon an illusion. The United States had lost sight of what mattered most, clinging doggedly to idealist diplomacy born of self-delusion about the nation's purpose in the world. Great Britain did not make such cardinal errors during its century of dominance. Lord Palmerston phrased it best when he remarked, “We have no eternal allies and no permanent enemies. Our interests are eternal, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
158
The Truman administration appeared intent on making an eternal enemy to promote peripheral interests. As Lippmann wrote to a former colleague at the
New York Herald Tribune
: “There are no direct conflicts of vital interest as between the Soviet Union and the United States, and in fact none as between the United States and any other of the four big powers. This seems to me to indicate clearly our role as mediator—that is, intercessor, reconciler, within the circle of the big powers.”
159
Yet Lippmann had strayed from the mainstream. This became abundantly clear when he attended an off-the-record briefing delivered by the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, W. Averell Harriman. Convinced that nothing good would come from vesting faith in efforts to maintain the prewar alliance with Moscow, Harriman remarked baldly that “our objectives and the Kremlin's objectives are irreconcilable.” Stunned by the irresponsibility of the message and the bluntness of the language, Lippmann rose from his seat and strode angrily from the room.
160

Just as Lippmann became strongly opposed to the Truman administration's reckless actions, he received a surprising job offer from the State Department. Archibald MacLeish, a distinguished poet and librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944, had resigned from his position as assistant secretary of state for public information. Secretary of State Byrnes identified in Lippmann the ideal successor to MacLeish. He was respected across the political aisle, was tremendously persuasive in print, and had written two important books on public opinion. Lippmann rebuffed the offer, questioning the logic of the role:

The office itself is a new one, and it is founded, I believe, on the misconception—quite common these days—that public relations are a kind of advertising which can be farmed out to specialists in the art of managing public opinion. At the higher levels of government this is certainly an error: the conduct of public relations is inseparable from leadership, and no qualified public official needs the intervention of a public relations expert between himself and the people.
161

One wonders if Lippmann was dodging the issue by questioning the necessity of the office rather than the policies of the administration. It is conceivable that Lippmann's reluctance to serve his nation was conditioned by an aversion to selling President Truman's foreign policy. Regardless, Lippmann continued to avoid government service, embracing his dual position as an insider-outsider throughout the remainder of his distinguished career. To his death in 1974, he remained insistent that America act responsibly in pursuit of achievable goals that were incontrovertibly in the national interest. The ideological crusade against the Soviet Union offended Lippmann's pragmatic instincts and provoked the writing of some magnificent and polemical journalism. As George Kennan observed in 1995, Lippmann was “a man who had carried journalism into something much greater than what the term generally describes, a fine writer with a brilliant mind and an impressive store of what I might call liberal erudition.”
162
He would coin a term—“the Cold War”—to describe the bipolar hostility that would divide Europe, brutalize the developing world, and make thermonuclear war over Cuba conceivable in 1962. Lippmann's term defined the age, which in turn would shape the strategic thought of his successors.

 

5

THE ARTIST

GEORGE KENNAN

A month after Lippmann turned heel at the prospect of government service, a congressional delegation traveled to Moscow, in September 1945, to meet with Josef Stalin. When the State Department instructed the embassy's number two to prepare for their arrival, George Kennan's mood darkened. Fluent in Russian and German, a voracious reader of Chekhov and Tolstoy, conservative in diplomatic sensibility and modus operandi, Kennan doubted whether elected politicians could behave intelligently and responsibly overseas. For Kennan there was a clear demarcation of responsibility between politicians and civil servants. Professional diplomats with linguistic and historical skills should cultivate America's external relations. Members of Congress, meanwhile, should focus their limited attention spans on the domestic sphere. Politicians rarely acted in accordance with the national interest but in their district or state interest, with primary focus on boosting reelection prospects. Kennan agreed with Lippmann that democracies were poor at pursuing a measured long-term foreign policy. American political life was disturbingly provincial, meaning the diplomatic service, a selfless intellectual elite, carried a grave burden of responsibility. “Sometimes I've been charged with being an elitist,” Kennan remarked. “Well, of
course
I am. What do people expect? God forbid that we should be without an elite. Is everything to be done by gray mediocrity?”
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The day after the delegation's arrival, a meeting with Stalin was organized for 6:00 p.m., leaving the visitors a full day to explore the city. Their Muscovite hosts took them on a tour of the recently extended subway system—a remarkable feat of engineering and design—and plied them with a liquid of undisclosed provenance. At 5:30 Kennan, waiting anxiously near the exit of the Mossovyet station, received word that “the party was being entertained at ‘tea' somewhere in the bowels of the subway system … To my horror, I discovered that the ‘tea' served to them [contained] … varying amounts of vodka, depending on the stoutness of character and presence of mind of the individual concerned.” Swaying as they approached their limousines, the vodka had shorn the congressmen of their inhibitions. As the convoy neared the Kremlin gates, one shouted, “Who the hell is this guy Stalin, anyway? I don't know that I want to go up and see him. I think I'll get out.” As adrenaline coursed through his body, Kennan, a naturally reticent man, exclaimed, “You'll do nothing of the sort; you will sit right there where you are and remain with the party.” Crisis averted, the cars continued their journey. Then the same drunken voice broke a tense silence: “What if I biff the old codger one in the nose?” In Kennan's recollection, “My heart froze. I cannot recall what I said, but I am sure that never in my life did I speak with greater earnestness.” During a mercifully short meeting with Stalin, the congressional provocateur “did nothing more disturbing than to leer or wink once or twice at the bewildered dictator, thus making it possible for the invisible gun muzzles, with which the room was no doubt studded, to remain sullenly silent.”
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So went the trials of life in the diplomatic service.

The next day Kennan was charged with a similarly irksome task: serving as a translator for a bilateral meeting between Stalin and Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. Nicknamed “Red Pepper” for his left-wing politics, the senator was a declared admirer of Stalin's economic achievements. In the friendliest of discussions, Kennan was compelled to translate Pepper's fawning questions and Stalin's happy replies. Pepper later wrote up his experience in an article for
The New York Times
, noting that “the generalissimo is a realist, notwithstanding the fact that he is engaged in the mightiest effort ever made in a single nation to raise the standard of living of some 200,000,000 people.”
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The experience was highly discouraging for Kennan. Unaware that each translated word had emerged through gritted teeth, Stalin complimented Kennan on his excellent Russian before returning to his chamber and the daily grind of foreign-policy brinkmanship and domestic repression.

At the end of the interview, Pepper asked Stalin whether he had a message for the American people. Stalin's reply was simple and apropos: “Just judge the Soviet Union objectively. Do not either praise us or scold us. Just know us and judge us as we are.” This was a task that Kennan believed few Americans were capable of completing. The drunken belligerence of the first day and Pepper's obsequiousness on the second mirrored America's schizophrenia on how best to approach the Soviet Union. Walter Lippmann epitomized this strain of well-intentioned wishful thinking that viewed Stalin as a rational actor and the Soviet Union as an indispensable ally.

General George Patton, the colorful commander of the Seventh United States Army, conversely, personified the kind of reckless saber rattling that might facilitate a seamless transition to a third world war. In a discussion with Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson in May 1945, for example, Patton, entering his final months as general of the Third Army, complained that “we have had a victory over the Germans [but] we have failed in the liberation of Europe … We must either finish the job now—while we are here and ready—or later under less favorable circumstances.”
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Kennan recoiled from the two extremes, believing it vital to chart a middle course. Still, he believed that complacency was a bigger problem in Washington than pugnacity.

In January 1945, Kennan declared his intention to leave the Foreign Service in a letter to his friend and colleague Charles “Chip” Bohlen. Perplexed by the brouhaha generated by Churchill's percentages deal, Kennan wondered, “Why could we not make a decent and definite compromise with it—divide Europe frankly into spheres of influence—keep ourselves out of the Russian sphere and keep the Russians out of ours?” He bemoaned the fact that “we have refused to name any limit for Russian expansion and Russian responsibilities, thereby confusing the Russians and causing them constantly to wonder whether they are asking too little or whether it was some kind of trap.” Kennan believed that the correct diplomatic course was clear enough. Washington should “bury Dumbarton Oaks as quickly and quietly as possible,” as multilateral agreements involving an expansionist Moscow were simply untenable. America's political leadership should then “accept as an accomplished fact the complete partition of Germany along the line of the Russian zone of occupation … The west must be integrated into the Atlantic economy as independently as possible of the east.” The Soviet and Western spheres of influence in Europe were readily apparent to Kennan, as they should have been to anyone with clear vision. The United States had to recognize this division as fact and repulse any Soviet effort to foment discord beyond this by now established sphere. This defensive end should be achieved through deploying the most appropriate available means: political, economic, diplomatic or, as a last resort, military. “The above is admittedly not a very happy program,” Kennan conceded. “It amounts to a partition of Europe. It renounces—and for very good reason—all reliance on cooperation with Russia. But beggars cannot be choosers. We have lost a large portion of our diplomatic assets in Europe.”
5

For Kennan, the main culprit was Woodrow Wilson's sirenical legacy, which had been reenergized during the Roosevelt presidency. Indeed, Wilsonianism threatened to do as much damage in 1945 as it had 1919—as Kennan explained to Bohlen:

The program I have outlined is bitterly modest. But it has the virtue of resting on the solid foundation of reality. If we insist at this moment in our history on wandering about with our heads in the clouds of Wilsonian idealism and universalistic conceptions of world collaboration, if we continue to blind ourselves to the fact that momentary peaceful intentions of the mass of inhabitants of Asia and eastern Europe are only the products of their misery and weakness and never the products of their strength, if we insist on staking the whole future of Europe on the assumption of a community of aims with Russia for which there is no real evidence except in our own wishful thinking, then we run the risk of losing even that bare minimum of security which would be assured to us by the maintenance of humane, stable and cooperative forms of human society on the immediate European shore of the Atlantic.
6