George F. Kennan : an American life

undependable ideology.” If differences did develop, they would be very serious for Moscow. It was entirely possible “that Russian Communism may some day be destroyed by its own children in the form of the rebellious Communist parties of other countries. I can think of no development for which there would be greater logic and justice.”⁴³

VII.

Kennan’s principal focus, however, was never on China: his attention to that issue was, at best, sporadic in 1949. What most concerned him, as Acheson’s China policy was falling apart, was how Europe might come together now that Program A had foundered. Was the continent to be divided indefinitely into Soviet and American spheres of influence, or could it regain an identity of its own? If the latter—decidedly Kennan’s preference—what identity might that be? The question was simple, he told the Policy Planning Staff on May 18: were there to be “two worlds or three”?⁴⁴

The answer was not simple. Europe’s most formidable war-making facilities—the Rhine-Ruhr industrial complex—lay within the boundaries of a country that had used them to start two great wars, the latter of which had left not only it but also Europe divided and for the moment powerless. That situation could not last: the Germans would sooner or later recover their strength, while the determination of their occupiers to control them would wane. At that point Germany would be in a position to dominate Europe again, a frightening prospect if, as Kennan suspected, the aggressive tendencies of the Germans had not changed. For Europe to remain split, though, would also be frightening: the Europeans were “almost the only modern, reasonable—if you will, tired—peoples with whom we can live. If they cease to be that . . . we would be a lonely nation. That terrifies me.”⁴⁵

Program A had proposed resolving this problem by negotiating a withdrawal of occupation forces from Germany, but then embedding the reunified state within a European federation: European values, in this scenario, would contain German ambitions. Now, however, the United States and its allies had given up on German reunification, leaving European integration in limbo. Could the United States, Great Britain, and France incorporate the new West German state within a sufficiently robust system to keep it from cutting its own deal on reunification with East Germany and the Soviet Union? That danger also alarmed Kennan, for if the Germans again linked up with the Russians, as they had in 1939–41, then “we might as well fold up.”⁴⁶ That’s why the future of Western Europe was so important to him in the summer of 1949. If the United States and its allies could not agree on how to reunify Germany in cooperation with the Soviet Union, then they should at least have a plan to keep the West Germans from doing that on their own.

Devising one became a final test, for Kennan, of what planning could accomplish. The past year—particularly the implosion of Program A—had given him many reasons for pessimism. But what if one were to approach the German problem, by way of European federation, in consultation with the British and the French? A British Foreign Office friend, Gladwyn Jebb, had suggested talks on what role Germany might play—or at least West Germany—in any future “United Western Europe.” That was all Kennan needed to assign his staff another big task: to devise the optimal federal structure for the noncommunist portions of Europe.⁴⁷

He was determined, this time, to do it right. He got Acheson’s approval for the exercise. He met with other top State Department officials—among them Hickerson—to let them know the direction of his thinking. He convened consultants of near-Olympian stature: they included former ambassador to Moscow Walter Bedell Smith; John J. McCloy, soon to depart for West Germany as the first U.S. high commissioner there; J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had run the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb and was now the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; Hans Morgenthau, rapidly emerging as the most influential academic theorist of international relations; and the equally influential theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who was then reviving, as Christian doctrine, the obligation to resist tyranny, whether of the fascist or the communist variety. “Let us proceed,” Niebuhr recalled Kennan saying, “as if there was no Russian threat.” That struck Niebuhr as like saying: “Let us proceed as though there was not sex in the world”—but did at least stimulate discussion.⁴⁸

As Robert Tufts recalled of the Policy Planning Staff consultants, though, “[w]e were often surprised to find how really ill-informed these people were on matters on which we’d expected them to provide some insights.” The meetings were “much more interesting for [them] than they were for the rest of us.” That happened in this instance: the heavyweights pontificated but reached no consensus, leaving Kennan free to construct his own.⁴⁹

It took shape as PPS/55, not a formal staff paper, but an outline of what he might say during the next stage of the planning process, a trip to Paris and London to consult the allies. There was no point, Kennan insisted, in trying to force the British into any political or economic union with Europe: they would always prefer alignment with the United States, Canada, and what remained of their empire. But only a European union, Kennan also believed, could control the Germans. That left France in a critical role. With some form of “Franco-German understanding and association, . . . Germany could conceivably be absorbed into [the] larger European family without dominating or demoralizing others.” The United States should retain its commitment to defend its NATO allies, plus West Germany and the western occupation zones of Austria, for as long as Europe remained divided. The Franco-German “association,” however, would seek over time to end that division: like the Marshall Plan, it would attract the Soviet Union’s satellites, filling the void left by the failure of Program A to reunify Germany and to reconstitute Europe.⁵⁰

But the French officials Kennan consulted, fearing exclusion from any Anglo-American relationship, seemed singularly unreceptive. They showed none of the willingness to think creatively about Germany that he had picked up from Francois-Poncet a few months earlier. The British were less anxious, although more inclined than Kennan had expected to value their ties to the Western Europeans. They were also on the verge of a major financial crisis, which left little room for thinking on Kennan’s grand scale. He returned to Washington, he recalled, “with empty hands.” Acheson was noncommittal, but “I was under no doubt that he viewed the concept I had presented, closely integrated as it was with my view of the German problem, skeptically and without enthusiasm.”⁵¹

With Britain’s trade imbalance draining its gold and dollar reserves at an alarming rate, Kennan shifted the staff’s attention, in August, to that problem. Never confident of his own economic expertise, he renewed a request that Acheson, as under secretary of state in 1947, had turned down: for Paul H. Nitze, then working in the department’s Office of Economic Affairs, to join the Policy Planning Staff. Kennan had known Nitze since 1946. He had a formidable reputation as a prewar investment banker, as a wartime economic analyst, and as vice-chairman of the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey. Nitze’s State Department work had focused chiefly on trade policy and administering the Marshall Plan, but he agreed with Kennan on Program A and had even helped draft the proposal. Now, with Acheson’s approval, Kennan made him deputy director, on the understanding that Nitze would eventually become his successor.⁵²

The sterling-dollar crisis showed, with almost textbook clarity, why planning was so difficult. Washington officials since before World War II had seen Anglo-American cooperation as a vital national interest, but Truman entrusted these negotiations to the secretary of the treasury, John W. Snyder, a Missouri political crony who made no secret of his contempt for the Labor government’s “socialism.” That upset Kennan, who knew that a major objective of the Marshall Plan—and even of several CIA covert operations—had been to strengthen the “noncommunist left” in Europe: Snyder seemed determined to rescue the British only if they dismantled their planned economy. James E. Webb, another Truman confidant who had replaced Lovett as under secretary of state, explained that because Acheson was under attack in Congress, it was necessary to give Snyder and Secretary of Defense Johnson a larger foreign policy role. Kennan shot back that the president should be backing up his