secretary of state—and should realize “how terribly difficult it would be to find anyone with comparable qualities for this position.” Perhaps Snyder or someone else in the president’s “entourage” should take the job? 53
With Acheson’s support and after much effort, Kennan was able to shift the administration’s position, allowing the negotiators to work out a mutually acceptable plan to devalue the British pound in return for American concessions on trade and investment, but without any attempt to undo British socialism. After all of the “fireworks” for the benefit of Congress, Kennan grumbled, the president did exactly what he had advised doing: “But I got no credit for it. My name was never mentioned. I was disgusted with this. Acheson, however, being much more of a domestic political character than I was, found it all in order.” He was there, after all, “to serve Harry Truman’s political interests as well as his interests as head of state. I couldn’t have cared less about his political interests.”54
A few weeks later Webb took Kennan to a meeting at the White House: it was one of the few occasions on which he actually met Truman. “The President looked slightly tired, but was his usual likeable self,” Kennan wrote in his diary that evening. “I could understand how such strong loyalties could develop between him and his associates.” But
I was glad, upon reflection, that I had had so little contact with him; for I would not like to be in a position where personal loyalty and affection forced me to close my eyes to the obvious deficiencies in the conduct of foreign policy in this period and to profess enthusiasm for what must remain a confusing and ineffective method of operation.
Two days later, on September 28, 1949, Kennan told Webb that he wanted to go on leave from the State Department the following June. He also asked—sooner than that—to be “relieved of the title and responsibilities as Director of the Planning Staff.”55
VIII.
Acheson had not eased him out: indeed he had just promoted Kennan. Having spent seven years in Washington, Bohlen was eager to go abroad again, so Acheson asked Kennan to replace him as State Department counselor while continuing to run Policy Planning. Kennan made it clear, though, that this would be a temporary arrangement: “I am very conscious of the increasing complexity of government,” he wrote his old mentor George Messersmith, “and sometimes wonder whether that complexity is not growing beyond the nervous and intellectual and physical strength of even the greatest human individuals.”56
Webb, who was now in charge of State Department administration, thought that it was exceeding Kennan’s strength. He had entered the Foreign Service, Webb later pointed out, “when brilliant individual action” was possible. Now, though, diplomacy required a large, complicated organization in which execution and feedback were at least as important as planning: “High-level statements simply do not implement themselves.” Kennan’s resignation arose, most immediately, from an effort by Webb to address that problem. He had instituted a new procedure by which Policy Planning Staff papers were to pass through his own staff, consisting of assistant secretaries for regions and functions, before going to Acheson. That more than quadrupled the distribution list, proliferating possibilities for objections. A paper on Yugoslavia came back with some on September 16, leaving it, Kennan believed, “in a state of suspended animation.” He took this to mean that Policy Planning would henceforth be “a sort of drafting secretariat for the Assistant Secretaries’ group.”
The whole
Webb had, in effect, closed Kennan’s door into Marshall’s office, and Acheson, who now occupied that space, had done nothing to reopen it. This changed little in an operational sense: Kennan had always been one of several advisers to Acheson, who would have tolerated no other arrangement. Symbolically, though, Webb’s requirement rankled—and it provided cover for the larger reason that lay behind Kennan’s resignation.57
This was his sense that, even if the door to the secretary’s office had remained open, Acheson was no longer listening to him: indeed, on the issue of European integration, Kennan believed, no one was. Hickerson had expressed “grave doubts” as to whether Germany could be absorbed into any Western European association to which the United States and Great Britain did not belong. Any effort to form an “Anglo-American-Canadian bloc,” Bohlen warned from Paris, would mean that “we will not be able to hold on to the nations of Western Europe.” A meeting of U.S. ambassadors in that region concluded unanimously in late October that no European integration would be possible without British participation because the continental powers would otherwise fear German domination.58
“That you were right in your premonitions about . . . talking to the British about European union I gladly concede,” Kennan wrote Bohlen early in November. “The path of lesser resistance and lesser immediate trouble in this matter would have been to keep silent.” Nor did he have any intention of challenging the ambassadors: “Even if the Secretary agreed one hundred percent with my view, I would not ask him to move in the face of such a body of opinion.” But the existing policy, Kennan warned,
(a) gives the Russians no alternative but to continue their present policies or see further areas of central and eastern Europe slide into a U.S.-dominated alliance against them, and in this way makes unlikely any settlement of east-west differences except by war; and
(b) promises the Germans little more in the western context than an indefinite status as an overcrowded, occupied and frustrated semi-state, thus depriving them of a full stake in their own resistance to eastern pressures and forfeiting their potential aid in the establishment of a military balance between east and west.
“You may have your ideas where one goes from here on such a path and at what point it is supposed to bring us out on the broad uplands of a secure and peaceful Europe,” Kennan added, with some bitterness. “If so, I hope you will tell the Secretary about them.... I find it increasingly difficult to give guidance on this point.”59
Bohlen responded angrily: “I had hoped we could profitably correspond on such subjects, but frankly I am not interested in polemics.” “You should not have been offended at my letter,” Kennan replied. “We have always argued warmly, and with gloves off. You know me well enough to take into account my polemic temperament.” There was no point, however, in continuing the debate. “A decision has fallen.... Perhaps it was the right one. None of us sees deeply enough into the future to be entirely sure about these things.” But the depths of these disagreements had diminished his usefulness, he was sure, “and I will be happier than ever if, as I hope, it will be possible for me . . . to subside quietly into at least a year or two of private life.”60
“My planning staff, started nearly three years ago, has simply been a failure,” Kennan wrote in his diary in mid-November. The State Department’s operational units would reduce to meaninglessness any recommendation they did not originate. They would sabotage anything the secretary of state might decide on his own, knowing that no one could review every aspect of their work, and that the people who were trying to get action would soon be gone. Even if Acheson shared Kennan’s views, “he would not be able to find others who did.” The only way out would be to have a doctrine that could be “patiently and persistently pounded into the heads of the entire apparatus, high and low.” But since no such mechanism existed within the government, the only alternative was “an intensive educational effort,” conducted through the great universities, to reshape public opinion in the broadest
