George F. Kennan : an American life

would not accept it. The plan would at least show the Germans that Moscow, not Washington, was dividing their country: that would “place us in a more favorable position to continue the struggle both in Berlin and in Germany as a whole.”⁴⁵

A similar resignation informed Kennan’s final report to Marshall on the North Atlantic Treaty, completed on November 23, 1948. It was too late now to prevent such a development, “but I was, after all, still the head of his planning staff, and I thought he should at least have available to him the view I took personally of the entire NATO project.” PPS/43, “Considerations Affecting the Conclusion of a North Atlantic Security Pact,” carried with it the warning “that there will be adverse views in the European office.” Marshall did not need the reminder: this document, even more than Program A, would be art for art’s sake.

A security guarantee, Kennan acknowledged, might stiffen the Europeans’ self-confidence, in itself a desirable outcome. But their insistence on it was “primarily a subjective one, arising in their own minds as a result of their failure to understand correctly their own position.” Their best course would still be to achieve economic recovery and internal political stability. Rearmament could easily divert such efforts. That would particularly be the case if the view took hold that war was inevitable and that therefore “no further efforts are necessary toward the political weakening and defeat of the communist power in central and eastern Europe”—in short (Kennan did not need to make this explicit), what covert operations were meant to accomplish.

If there had to be a military alliance, its members should include only the North Atlantic countries, where there was “a community of defense interest firmly rooted in geography and tradition.” To go further would invite still further demands for protection: there would then be “no 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.” By then, one of two things would have happened: the alliances would have become meaningless, like the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, or the United States would have become hopelessly overextended, in which case it would have ignored warnings about the increasing discrepancy between its resources and its commitments.

The fundamental issue was what kind of Europe the United States wanted. Official policy looked toward the eventual withdrawal of both American and Soviet forces and, accordingly, “toward the encouragement of a third force which can absorb and take over the territory between the two.” But an alliance including most Marshall Plan recipients would mean “a final militarization of the present dividing-line through Europe.” It would not only prevent a German settlement: it would also impede the satellites’ ability to throw off Russian domination, “since any move in that direction would take on the aspect of a provocative military move.” The United States should not do anything to make the status quo unchangeable by peaceful means. Process should not define purpose.⁴⁶

But perhaps his strategy—with respect to both Germany and NATO—had asked too much of the Europeans, Kennan admitted to a Pentagon audience that same month. The Marshall Plan’s success had provoked Moscow into appearing to be aggressive: “We knew that there would be . . . a baring of the fangs designed to scare us.” By asking the Europeans to put economic recovery before military security, “we were in effect asking them to walk a sort of a tight-rope and telling them that if they concentrated on their own steps and did not keep looking down into the chasm of their own military helplessness we thought there was a good chance that they would arrive safely on the other side.” The problem was that too many people in Europe—but also in Washington—had looked down. That was leaving the Soviet Union with no way out: it was making the division of Europe “insoluble by any other than military means.”⁴⁷

This was a shrewd assessment, not just of the Europeans, but also of Kennan himself. To mix his own metaphors, he had been asking them to ignore the snarling dog with which they shared a continent, even as they walked, unperturbed, across the tightrope the Marshall Plan had thrown to them. They could do this only with self- confidence, but he had taken it upon himself to tell them when they had reached that state. If, as Kennan had often noted, fear was a subjective condition, then surely self-confidence was too: he believed, however, that his objective view of Soviet intentions should override European subjectivity. He was after all, or at least he had been, the expert. His strategy amounted, in the end, to saying: “Trust me.”⁴⁸

VIII.

“George has been much better this fall,” Annelise wrote Frieda Por late in 1948. “I am keeping my fingers crossed. He looks better too, and I think he has put on a little weight.” His workload had by no means diminished. Since returning from the hospital in April, he had prepared major policy papers on the Soviet Union, Germany, China, Japan, Yugoslavia, the proposed North Atlantic Treaty, and covert action, some of them in several versions. He delivered four lectures at the National War College, and one each at the Pentagon, the Naval War College, and the Canadian Defence College. He found the time to do public lectures in Milwaukee, Detroit, Birmingham, and New York, as well as informal presentations for Air Force officers, the Harvard faculty, Princeton alumni, Louisville newspapermen and bankers, and his Pennsylvania neighbors. He continued to run the Policy Planning Staff and to serve as its representative on the National Security Council—although he gave up the latter responsibility at the end of the year. And all the while he was deeply involved in Berlin crisis management: the only diary entry Kennan made during these months recorded a sleepless night spent coordinating communications among American officials in that city, Paris, and Washington.⁴⁹

Psychologically, though, he was more depressed than he had been when his physical ailments laid him low. For it was becoming clear that his grand strategy was no longer to be that of the United States. Kennan had suffered setbacks on seeking a “background understanding” with the Soviet Union, on managing covert operations, on heading off the North Atlantic Treaty, on calculating the relationship between military means and national ends, and—most significantly for him—on clearing the way for a European settlement based on German reunification. Only on Yugoslavia and China had he had his way.

If Kennan had been, in the eyes of the Canadians, a Delphic oracle in the spring of 1948, he was by the end of the year a beleaguered and increasingly bypassed oracle. His gloom was hard to miss when he returned to the war college on December 21 to deliver the final lecture of the semester. He promised the students “a completely unvarnished and unsparing picture of what appears to me personally to be our present international position.” The underlining in the transcript was his own.

One thing not easily forgiven in life, he told them, was “to be elevated many times above the level of your fellows in privilege and riches and comfort and power. The rich man is rarely loved and never pitied.” The United States had 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6 percent of its population. The remaining 94 percent included people who “would not hesitate to tear us limb from limb figuratively, or perhaps even physically, if they would thereby get a share of our wealth or reduce the power we hold.” They would do this despite the fact that “never before in its history has the world known, or is it likely to know, a great power which has conducted itself more decently and more moderately in its foreign relations.” The United States was “a misunderstood country throughout the world.”

There was no more dangerous sense, Kennan cautioned, than that of being a victim. This was how persecution manias began. Practiced on a national scale, they could lead to fanaticisms like those of the Nazis and the Communists. Nevertheless, the world really was filled with jealousy and devoid of pity. The prevailing view was that “we have been favored by the Gods, . . . and that it is high time that the Gods shifted their favor and that our faces were ground into the dirt.”⁵⁰

It’s hard not to see projection happening here. Kennan’s letter to Lippmann, written in April at the height of his influence as Policy Planning Staff director, portrayed a world in which events were aligning themselves with