he felt that Kennan wasn’t: that he sat in his cell and thought major thoughts, but was not particularly concerned with their application to things as they are now.” Kennan focused on the long term. Acheson wanted to know: “What do I do now?”4
Why, then, did they think they could work together? One reason was that they were good friends: the Kennans and the Achesons saw each other regularly, while the Marshalls determinedly avoided the Washington social scene. “I enjoyed his company, and profited constantly from exposure to the critical discipline of his fine mind,” Kennan recalled. “He was a lovely person.” Acheson’s sharp tongue, John Paton Davies remembered, could not conceal “a great gentleness” in him—“a great gentlemanliness.” It was also the case that Acheson respected Kennan’s accomplishments, whereas other secretaries of state—John Foster Dulles was widely assumed to be the Republican alternative—might not have. Finally, Acheson returned to the State Department with a relatively open mind. Having been out of government for a year and a half, he had no position on several of the issues with which Kennan had been wrestling, and so was ready to listen to him, even if only as one of several voices. Kennan, for his part, was sure that the ship of state would crash into the rocks unless his could again become the dominant voice in setting a new course—but that could only happen now, if it was to happen at all, through Acheson.5
Shortly after receiving Kennan’s letter, Acheson asked him to stay on as Policy Planning Staff director. Kennan readily agreed. And so one of the thinnest skins in Washington went to work for one of the thickest. Both men remembered it, years later, as a difficult relationship. But it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I.
“General policy meeting on Germany in the morning. Smaller one in afternoon. Packed in evening.” That was all Kennan wrote, in the diary he had begun keeping again, about March 9, 1949, a day on which the prospects for Program A suddenly brightened. The next day’s entry read simply: “Took off at 2:00 p.m. for Germany in General Clay’s plane.” Stranded overnight in Bermuda, Kennan did something he had not done for some time: he wrote a poem.
Addressed to a fellow passenger—an unnamed lady—the lines hinted at liberation, whether from conventionality, or from being stuck in Washington, or from the sense of having reached a dead end in his job. Or maybe it was just a poem. The lady responded, in any event, with a dash of reality.
Nevertheless, looking back over the past few weeks, Kennan had reason to be glad that he had not resigned.6
In his January 3 letter, he had advised Acheson to finish a task Marshall left uncompleted: bringing the military administration of occupied Germany and Japan into line with State Department planning on the future of those countries. They would be two of the five power centers that would shape the postwar world, and yet the establishments of Clay and MacArthur were so inflexibly top-heavy that the connection between objectives and actions was being lost: “I cannot tell you how serious this is.” Kennan had already accomplished a partial course correction in Japan, but on Germany, after several months of effort, hardly anyone seemed to be supporting Program A.7
Except, from outside the government, an old but prominent adversary: on December 30 Walter Lippmann had published a column criticizing the rush to form a West German government. Such a regime, he insisted, would combine toxic irredentism with an indefinite dependence on the United States. Acheson was no fan of Lippmann: he had gone out of his way in a National War College lecture a few months earlier to ridicule the journalist’s “somewhat tiring” attacks on Kennan’s “X” article. But the incoming secretary of state had been briefed on Program A as a consultant to the Policy Planning Staff and would have connected it with what Lippmann had now written. Shortly after taking office, Acheson got Truman’s permission to take a fresh look at the German problem, and then asked Kennan to chair an NSC working group assembled for that purpose. In the meantime, Kennan had shared the substance of Program A—still a classified document—with Lippmann, who agreed that the liquidation of military government and a gradual withdrawal of occupation forces should be “a real and present objective, not a remote and theoretical one.” There was thus a Kennan-Lippmann convergence on Germany, which in turn converged on Acheson.8
Was Kennan, as Frank Roberts suggested, trying to win Lippmann’s approval? Kennan had always believed that containment should lead to a settlement with the Soviet Union, but Lippmann’s criticisms may have induced him to advance the timetable. Kennan would not have written his long unsent letter in April 1948 had he not taken Lippmann seriously, and from the time he returned to work later that month, he was pushing simultaneously on several fronts—in a way that he had not done before—to keep the diplomatic channels to Moscow open. The Smith-Molotov exchange had been an effort to do this, but the same objective lay behind Kennan’s opposition to NATO and his support for Program A. Processes, he believed, had to
The Kennan-Lippmann-Acheson convergence gained added significance on January 31, 1949, when Stalin, in a cryptic set of answers to a newspaperman’s questions, hinted at a willingness to lift the Berlin blockade on the condition that the foreign ministers of the occupying powers meet to discuss Germany’s future. He did so without mentioning an earlier insistence that the
