George F. Kennan : an American life

Big 3 Would Withdraw to Ports in the North Under Proposal.

French Would Go Home.

Presentation of Suggestion Will Depend on Soviet Stand in

Paris Talks.

The impression given the British and the French, Kennan immediately realized, could only have been that the United States was considering pulling its forces out of Germany, had kept this from them, and was about to spring it on them. Bohlen and Jessup—now in Paris—tried to calm the resulting furor by disavowing any intention to remove or redeploy American forces. Acheson still was not ready to give up, however: he reminded Bevin and Schuman that Germany could not remain permanently occupied. Some “gradual reduction and regrouping” of forces would have to occur. At this point, though, the Russians put an end to the discussion. “The Germans hate us,” General V. I. Chuikov, the Soviet high commissioner for the eastern zone, told Bohlen after Acheson asked him to propose Kennan’s plan. “It is necessary that we maintain our forces in Germany.”¹⁹

So who killed Program A? Reston never revealed his source, but there were plenty of possible culprits: Clay, who had moved from discouragement to satisfaction to outrage as Program A reappeared, disappeared, and reappeared again; Murphy, now in an influential position as acting director of the State Department’s Office of German and Austrian Affairs; Hickerson and his colleagues in the Office of European Affairs, who had long seen NATO as a way to bind the western zones of Germany to Western Europe and the United States; the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who thought the idea militarily unfeasible. And Chuikov certainly had not helped. Whoever did it, Kennan ruefully acknowledged, had administered “a spectacular coup de grace” to Program A.²⁰

A year earlier Stalin had killed another Kennan initiative by publicizing it: this was the supposedly confidential Smith-Molotov exchange. But that at least had been the act of an adversary, aimed at compromising the United States in the eyes of its allies. The Reston leak came from one or more American officials, who targeted Kennan while seeking to lock Acheson—and, through him, the United States—into an irreversible commitment to a West German state and hence to a divided Germany that would ensure a divided Europe. Acheson could do no more. “Interest in this approach waned,” he wrote blandly in his 1969 memoir of over seven hundred pages, which devoted only three sentences to Program A.²¹

Kennan took it all badly. The past few days, he wrote the secretary of state, had eliminated any possibility of Germany’s reunification under the auspices of its occupiers: there now appeared to be “no conditions on which we would really find such a solution satisfactory.” This would surely embitter the Germans, raising the possibility of “some violent manifestation” by which they might unify themselves, demanding the departure of all occupying powers. At least as disturbing was what all of this implied about the American planning process:

[W]e spent eight weeks last fall working out what we felt would be a logical program for advance toward the unification of Germany. Piece by piece, . . . the essentials of this program have been discarded, and the logic broken up. Some modification was necessary; but the program emerging from the Paris talks now bears no logical connection with the original concept.

Under these circumstances, Washington might as well let the British and the French solve the German problem, while acknowledging “that we have deferred extensively to their views.”²²

Which Acheson indeed had now done. What Kennan failed to point out, though, was that most American officials had long since given up on German reunification—as he himself had done between 1945 and 1948—so this was hardly a matter of blindly empowering allies. Nor did the Soviet Union want reunification if it could not be on Moscow’s terms. Program A had always been a long shot: even Kennan had not been optimistic about its prospects. Why, then, was he so upset now?

Probably because Program A, for all its enemies, had won more support in Washington than his views on NATO ever did. There was never much chance of reversing the movement toward a military alliance, but his plan for Germany was a cat with multiple lives: it kept reviving after being declared dead.²³ To have it finally buried by a newspaper leak after all of these resurrections was infuriating. It was also alarming, for Kennan had convinced himself that the future of Europe would depend on what was done about Germany. Now, it seemed, that future had been determined by a fluke, rather than by the months of planning Kennan and his staff had devoted to it.

But it was not really a fluke, because it was not at all clear that even the West Germans would have accepted Program A. Kennan thought he understood Germans as well as any American, but he had not lived among them since 1942. He was aware, but only from a distance, of what they had since endured. As a consequence, he overestimated the Germans’ resentment of their American, British, and French occupiers, and—strangely— underestimated their fear of the Russians. He objected especially to the signs he saw of American consumer culture, but there was only a single reference in his 1949 trip diary to the far more radical transformations that Soviet authorities were imposing in their part of Germany. Kennan acknowledged, two decades later, that he had worried more than most Germans about “the iniquities and inadequacies of our occupational establishment.” These had been, on his part, “grievous miscalculations.”²⁴

Program A’s fate also upset Kennan because it confirmed what he should already have known about his new boss. It was Acheson’s habit, when circumstances forced him to change his mind, to do so quickly, without regret, often without acknowledgment that the reversal had even taken place. That had happened in August 1946 when, in response to the Turkish Straits crisis, he had gone from being a Henry Wallace sympathizer to a George Kennan publicist almost overnight. Acheson’s shift on Germany in May 1949 was equally abrupt, but Kennan took it as a repudiation. He lacked the skill, as Acheson would put it in another context, of “graciously” conceding what one “no longer had the power to withhold.”²⁵

Acheson was conceding now, as Kennan saw it, any prospect of resolving Cold War differences within the likely lifetimes of either of them. If Acheson lost sleep over this, there is little evidence of it. Kennan—who could never avoid looking back, or reconsidering, or regretting what might have been—lost a lot.

IV.

He could hardly claim, though, that Acheson had not listened. Program A was a grand scheme that ran up against blunt realities, one of which was the secretary of state’s lack of enthusiasm for the pursuit of lost causes. Where the cause was more promising, he would pursue it, even in the face of controversy. That became clear with respect to another Kennan idea, which was that not all communists everywhere were equally dangerous. The very success of communism beyond the Soviet Union, he had long believed, would corrupt it with nationalism, so that Moscow could only assume the loyalty of its ideological followers where they had not yet seized power—or where, as in Eastern Europe, the Red Army was keeping them in power. China was Kennan’s prime example: under Davies’s tutelage, he had been arguing since 1947 that a victory for Mao Zedong would not necessarily be one for the Kremlin. He had no word then for what he was describing, but Yugoslavia’s defection in 1948 provided one: it was “Titoism,” and one of Kennan’s priorities in 1949 was to persuade Acheson of its importance.

“Tito’s heresy is of the type unlikely ever to be forgiven,” he wrote in an updated Policy Planning Staff paper on Yugoslavia, completed on February 10. By successfully defying the Kremlin, Tito had compromised Moscow’s control of its remaining satellite empire. The repercussions would extend not only through Eastern Europe but also among communist parties in France, Italy, and especially China, where Mao “might already be infected with the Tito virus.”