George F. Kennan : an American life

American intentions. But by December, with Kennan’s authority significantly diminished, the world had become a dark and dangerous place. The objective position of the United States could not have changed that dramatically in so short a period of time. What had changed was Kennan’s subjective understanding of it: because Washington was no longer going his way, the world was no longer going Washington’s way.

One of Kennan’s most striking characteristics as a diplomat, as a strategist, and as a policy planner was an inability to insulate his jobs from his moods. Throughout his career he had taken things personally. He was “never able to detach himself emotionally from the issues we had to consider,” Dorothy Fosdick remembered. “He could go into a bad slump when he thought he was not being listened to.” He viewed the world through himself, not as something apart from himself. That could lead to great insights: Kennan’s understanding of the Soviet Union and how to contain it grew largely out of his own self-analysis. But it could also produce volatility: no sooner did the Truman administration reconcile itself to the division of Germany—something Kennan had been advocating since 1945—than he began pushing for reunification. It was as if he were allergic to orthodoxy. “I have the habit,” he acknowledged years later, “of seeing two opposing sides of a question, both of them wrong, and then overstating myself, so that I appear to be inconsistent.”⁵¹

That raised a question, then, about how useful the policy planning process, as Kennan conceived it, really was. He never meant the hundreds of pages he and his staff produced to serve as a systematic philosophy of American foreign relations, although at times they read like that. He did see them, though, “as one man’s concept of how our government ought to behave and by what principles it ought to be guided.”⁵² But what if that concept—and the principles that lay behind it—changed, whether in response to what was happening in the world or, more disconcertingly, in response to Kennan’s own unstable emotions? Reconsiderations are reasonable enough in government. When emotions amplify them, though, they can come across as erratic behavior—even if, by general acknowledgment, brilliance still lies behind it.

FIFTEEN

Reprieve: 1949

“IN THE FACE OF THESE DIFFICULTIES, A DETACHED PHILOSOPHER might not give us a very good chance for avoiding real trouble,” Kennan told the audience he had spoken to at the Pentagon on November 8, 1948. “But strange things have been known to happen. And who are we, in the face of the experiences of the past week, to say that theoretically unfavorable odds should be a source of discouragement?” The event he had in mind was President Truman’s surprise reelection four days earlier. Kennan knew that Marshall, whose health had been deteriorating, would be stepping down at the end of Truman’s first term: like almost everyone else, both expected it to be Truman’s only term. The prospect of a Republican administration, together with the discouragements of the past few months, had Kennan thinking again about resigning from the Foreign Service and accepting an academic position. As it happened, though, it was Truman who got to select the next secretary of state. At the end of November, he asked Dean Acheson to take the job.¹

Acheson had played an important role, as under secretary of state, in advancing Kennan’s career. He encouraged the author of the “long telegram” to speak publicly about its contents, he facilitated Kennan’s move from the National War College to the Policy Planning Staff, and the two cooperated closely in designing the Marshall Plan. They differed only on the public justification for aid to Greece and Turkey, but Acheson, preoccupied with getting the bill through Congress, hardly noticed Kennan’s objections to the Truman Doctrine. Having left government to replenish his finances in the summer of 1947, Acheson could watch Kennan’s subsequent policy planning only as a well-informed outsider. But he thought highly enough of it—after learning that Truman wanted him now to run the State Department—to ask Kennan to defer any decision about retiring. That led Kennan, on January 3, 1949, to send Acheson an unorthodox offer to stay on.

“We all have our egos and ambitions,” he acknowledged. “But the shadows which fall on each of us, these days, are so huge and dark, and so unmistakable in portent, that they clearly dwarf all that happens among us individually, here below.” The disclaimer that followed must have raised an Achesonian eyebrow: “I really have no enthusiasm for sharing with the people I have known—Kerensky, Bruening, Dumba, or the king of Jugoslavia—the wretched consolation of having been particularly prominent among the parasites on the body of a dying social order, in the hours of its final agony.” Acheson was not to think it “implausible modesty”—there was little danger of that after reading this—when Kennan wrote that he wished to remain only if he could feel 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.”

One problem was the State Department. It was drifting away from Marshall’s concept of a planning staff that met regularly, avoided functional or regional parochialism, and conveyed its recommendations to a secretary of state who patiently awaited them. Nor was the department adequately publicizing its policies: the “X” article at the time had “shocked people to tears,” but Kennan now wished there had been twenty like it. Byrnes and Marshall had spent too much time away from Washington: the secretary should not be “an itinerant negotiator,” shuttling from one overseas meeting to another “in order to demonstrate our devotion to the principle of international organization.” Nor should there be further “lofty pronouncements about peace and democracy.” What was needed instead was “hard work, concentration, discipline, and an inner silence.”

“There—dear Dean—are some of the things which I think would have to be done to the hull of the ship of state, if it is to be restored to a really buoyant condition.” Without them, there was no point in anyone trying “to blow wind into the sails of the old hulk.... I’d rather be at Yale, or where-you-will—any place where I could sound-off and talk freely to people—than in the confines of a department in which you can neither do anything about it nor tell people what you think ought to be done.”²

Kennan claimed, in a postscript, to have written this letter before he knew that Acheson would become secretary of state, but it did not read that way. Its tone was one of Kennan interviewing Acheson, rather than the other way around. It sounded like an effort to press the new secretary into the mold of the previous one, thereby restoring the Policy Planning Staff to its rightful place within the State Department hierarchy. This, Kennan must have known, was going to be a stretch.

Acheson had the highest respect for Marshall, so much so that he wrote one of the best short descriptions of how the great man operated: “All elements of the problem were held, as it were, in solution in his mind until it was ready to precipitate a decision.” That was not, however, Acheson’s style. He lacked Marshall’s modesty, self- discipline, and procedural restraint. He was incapable of commanding quietly: of not commenting on competing positions until he had chosen one. Acheson paraded his wit, his wardrobe, and especially his mustache—the latter ornament, the journalist James Reston wrote, was itself “a triumph of policy planning.” Oliver Franks, the British ambassador, recalled that Acheson “bathed in talk.” The idea of “having your thinking done for you, which is what the Policy Planning Staff stood for, was alien to Dean.” The new secretary of state so loved debate, in fact, that at one contentious NATO meeting, having exhausted the British and French foreign ministers, he took over and performed their parts after they had gone to bed.³

“You have to remember this about Acheson,” Kennan pointed out a few years after the older man’s death. “He was basically a Washington lawyer, not a diplomat. The fact that he looked like a diplomat confused people, but it didn’t make him one. He had never lived abroad, knew no foreign languages, knew nothing about the outside world.” Acheson was chiefly, Franks remembered, “a man of action. He wanted actually to get things done. I think