Worldmaking (48 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 BeneÅ¡, 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.”
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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.”
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Walter Lippmann's response to the coup, meanwhile, was unimpeachable: he discarded any residual hope of America getting along with Stalin.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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Dean Acheson, conversely, was about as stable a public servant as ever drew a government salary—and his career was on the up. A product of Groton and Yale, ramrod straight in his bearing, with a well-tended pencil-line mustache, Acheson cut an impressive and imposing figure. The British journalist Alistair Cooke described him wonderfully as a “six foot two Velasquez grandee who has submitted, with a twinkling eye, to his present reincarnation in fine tweeds as a Connecticut Yankee.”
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This well-tailored WASP also had a sting in his rhetorical tail. His acid descriptions of those who crossed him were legendary. In fact they were so unpleasant, and often unfair, that they form a blot on his substantial record as secretary of state. Reasonably, Acheson once observed that the “task of a public officer seeking to explain and gain support for a major policy is not that of the writer of a doctoral thesis. Qualification must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness.”
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But there was no merit in Acheson's barbed observations that Kennan had a “marshmallow mind” and that it surprised him in later years that this “footnote of the Truman presidency” would “masquerade as an important policymaker.”
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Similarly abrasive were his views that Kennan had only an “abstract” sense of the national interest and that he vested too much faith in his “Quaker gospel.”
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Acheson lacked the self-doubt that might have tempered his vitriol. In 1945, for example, Acheson still entertained Lippmannesque hopes of collaborating with Stalin when Kennan was leading the charge for confrontation. In his memoir,
Present at the Creation
, Acheson writes that Kennan “mingled flashes of prophetic insight [with] suggestions … of total impracticality.”
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This was a valid critique in many respects. Yet Acheson was not an original thinker in his own right, and he lacked Kennan's flair for “prophetic insight.” It was on issues of “practicality” that Acheson felt he bested Kennan.

These disagreements of “practicality” took on added importance after it became clear, near the end of 1948, that Acheson would replace Marshall as secretary of state due to the latter's health problems. For example, Acheson played an important role in the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an alliance that connected Western Europe's security with North America's through the binding commitment that an attack on one signatory was an attack on all. At best, Kennan viewed NATO as a form of useful “psychotherapy for nervous Europeans”—in Anders Stephanson's apt description—and at worst it was a meaningless “legalistic commitment” with no bearing on international diplomatic realities. Of particular concern to Kennan was the possibility that NATO—all of whose original signatories were nations with an Atlantic link—might expand to include nations unconnected to Western security. So, “beyond the Atlantic area, which is a clean-cut concept, and which embraces a real community of defense interest firmly rooted in geography and tradition, there is no logical stopping point in the development of a system of anti-Russian alliances until that system has circled the globe and has embraced all the non-communist countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa.”
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Kennan was largely correct in his diagnosis: Turkey came first, and then a flood of nations joined NATO during the 1950s and beyond. Whether NATO was a diplomatic masterstroke, instilling anticommunist unity during the Cold War, or an albatross around America's neck is a matter for debate. But there is no doubt that Kennan's skepticism was and is the minority view.

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On January 3, 1949, Kennan wrote a long letter to Dean Acheson detailing his concerns with current policy. “Please ascribe it … to reason…,” wrote Kennan, “when I say that I am not really interested in carrying on in government service unless I can feel that we have at least a sporting chance of coping with our problem:—that we are not just bravely paddling the antiquated raft of U.S. foreign policy upstream, at a speed of three miles an hour, against a current which is making four.” In a wide-ranging letter, Kennan took aim at the administration's reckless saber-rattling, sustained by a pugnacious and irresponsible Congress and held “accountable” by a bewildered public: