George F. Kennan : an American life

Long before the extent of the debacle became known, Kennan had made it clear that such operations should not be the primary instrument with which to roll back Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. That should be Stalin himself, who would accomplish the objective by continuing to insist that the interests of the satellite states must never conflict with those of the U.S.S.R.

Power, even the taste of it, is as likely to corrupt Communist as bourgeois leaders. Considerations of national as well as personal interest materialize and come into conflict with the colonial policy pursued by the Soviet interests. When this happens, satellite officials may still remain, by force of other factors, Kremlin captives; but at least they are not entirely willing ones.

The optimal strategy, then, would not be to try to overthrow communist regimes in Eastern Europe, but rather to encourage their nationalism: “to foster a heretical drifting-away process on the part of the satellite states.” In this way, the United States might begin to operate “on the basis of a balance of forces in the Communist world, and to foster the tendencies toward accommodation with the West implicit in such a state of affairs.”³⁶

On the whole, Kennan’s strategy of sustaining Tito succeeded. It survived the increasing tendency within the United States not to distinguish between communists: Acheson’s help here was vital. No other Eastern European state openly defied Stalin, but his fear that one or more of them might rattled him sufficiently that he launched devastating purges, over the next few years, eliminating many of his own loyalists in the region. The covert operations Kennan supported at the time—even though he later repudiated them—increased the Soviet Union’s insecurity about its empire. Their purpose, as he put it in August 1949, was to provoke a quarrel “between the Kremlin and the Communist Reformation.” Whether because of these activities or in spite of them, that is exactly what eventually happened.³⁷

VI.

Acheson shared Kennan’s hopes that Titoism would take hold in China as well. Late in February 1949 he asked Truman to approve a Policy Planning Staff recommendation that the United States seek “to exploit through political and economic means any rifts between the Chinese Communists and the USSR,” and the president readily did so. To say that the Russians controlled China and that “we might just as well die or give up,” the secretary of state assured the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the following month, was “a very distinct exaggeration of the whole matter.” The Nationalists were “washed up,” Acheson told Bevin in April, but Chinese inertia and corruption would soon absorb the Communists. It was difficult to say so publicly, but the United States would henceforth pursue “a more realistic policy respecting China.”³⁸

There were, however, important differences between China and Yugoslavia. One was that Tito headed a government already in power that wanted Washington’s help to stay there; Moscow offered only extinction. Mao led a movement about to take power that expected the Americans to try to stop it. Why, otherwise, were they still aiding their longtime ally Chiang Kai-shek? Moscow, from Mao’s perspective, offered ideological legitimation— something Tito did not need—but also protection against American efforts to overthrow him. That the Truman administration was aiding the Nationalists as a way of extracting itself from China while deflecting the China lobby’s wrath was a subtlety wholly lost on Mao. That he needed, for the moment at least, to align himself with Moscow was equally lost on the Americans. When Mao announced, at the end of June 1949, that the new China would “lean” to the side of the Soviet Union, it seemed to Acheson, Kennan, and Davies that he failed to follow the script. On that point, at least, they were right: Mao had been assuring Stalin that he would not become an Asian Tito.³⁹

Mao’s attitude made it difficult to portray him within the United States, therefore, as a “good” communist. Fed up with the Nationalists, Kennan and Davies had been overseeing the preparation of a voluminous “White Paper,” meant for public release, that would document the failures of Chiang’s government. Acheson endorsed the project, overriding objections from Secretary of Defense Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But by the time this 1,054- page volume finally came out in August, relations with Mao had soured: the secretary of state’s letter of transmittal—to which, strangely, neither Kennan nor Davies objected—denounced the communist leaders for having “forsworn their Chinese heritage.” This put Acheson, his biographer has commented, “in the remarkable position of trying to divide Chinese from Russian communists by describing the former as fanatics subservient to the latter.” In the meantime, the hundreds of declassified documents in the White Paper had insulted the Nationalists, while handing the China lobby enough ammunition to keep Acheson on the defensive through the rest of his term.⁴⁰

Kennan, at the time, was worrying about Taiwan, where Chiang was planning to move his government after being ejected from the mainland. But could Washington afford to leave that island, strategically located between Okinawa and the Philippines, in the hands of the incompetent Nationalists, who would surely soon lose it to the Communists? Kennan proposed, in July, a dramatic solution: that the United States move with “resolution, speed, ruthlessness, and self-assurance” to evict the 300,000 Nationalist troops already on the island, in “the way that Theodore Roosevelt might have done it.” This would have “an electrifying effect in this country and throughout the Far East.” The recommendation electrified somebody, because Kennan withdrew it on the day he submitted it. Years later he attributed the idea to Davies, who, when asked about it, denied responsibility for such a “totally implausible” plan. “I imagine that anyone, even of the intellectual eminence of Kennan, is entitled to some mad acts.”⁴¹

Davies was pulling his interviewer’s leg here, for however bombastic Kennan’s language was, his Taiwan proposal was no aberration. There had been discussions within the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, and MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo, of how the United States might persuade Chiang Kai-shek to step down, or remove him from power, or even foster a Taiwanese separatist movement that would deny the island to both the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists. The idea would have been to incorporate Taiwan within the “defensive perimeter” strategy that Kennan had been advocating, without having the United States take sides too obviously in the Chinese civil war. Kennan’s eviction scenario grew out of a Policy Planning Staff study Davies had helped prepare, and as he reminded Kennan, “God knows what the OPC may have been up to.”

But it was now too late for such maneuvers. Chiang was consolidating his authority over Taiwan, and his increasingly vociferous supporters in the United States were determined to keep him there: for them, the island was the base from which the Nationalists would one day eject the Communists from China itself. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, concerned about a growing gap between political commitments and military capabilities, had never liked the idea of using American forces to secure Taiwan. “We didn’t have the forces to throw Chiang off,” Rusk recalled, “and the domestic political ramifications would have been overwhelming.”⁴²

Kennan’s China policy showed that he was no China expert. All that he knew about it, he often acknowledged, had come from Davies. And Davies, in the summer of 1949, was suffering from an occupational hazard of experts: what happens when your country doesn’t do what you expected it to? Stalin had surprised and angered Kennan by revealing the Smith-Molotov exchanges. Now Mao had surprised and angered Davies by embracing Stalin, not splitting with him. Surprises, for experts, can be unsteadying, and on China both Kennan and Davies were staggering. Thanks to them, Acheson was too.

“It is dangerous to talk about a Chinese Tito-ism,” Kennan admitted in September 1949, a few days before Mao, in Beijing, formally proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. “What happens in China is not apt to be a replica of what has happened in Yugoslavia or anywhere else.” Still, Soviet leaders would have to watch the situation with great care, because their authority over China hung only on “the slender thread of a ... tortuous and