George F. Kennan : an American life

Kennan’s lecture that day summed up, with uncharacteristic modesty, what he thought he had learned as a policy planner. It had to do with the limitations of knowledge: just as it was not given to human beings to know the “totality of truth,” so no one could see anything as unlimited in its implications as “the development of our people in their relation to their world environment.” One could only fall back on Saint Paul’s reminder that “[w]e know in part and we prophesy in part.”

That made methods as important as objectives. Civilization best prospered when men stopped preoccupying themselves with purpose and began to apply restraints and rules on the means by which purposes were sought. From that perspective, strategy became “outstandingly a question of form and of style.” Because “few of us can see very far into the future,” all would be safer “if we take principles of conduct which we know we can live with, and at least stick to those,” rather than “try to chart out vast schemes.”⁶⁸

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Kennan had set up the Policy Planning Staff, in the spring of 1947, with vast schemes in mind: had not Marshall told him to “avoid trivia”? The Marshall Plan was the first and most successful of these, but Kennan intended that others would follow. The papers he and his staff produced, all nine hundred pages of them, set courses for great destinations. They were to have been the navigational system for the ship of state—Kennan’s own metaphor—in the postwar world. And he was to have been chief navigator.

In the long run, the ship reached the destinations specified: a secure and still-democratic United States; a peaceful and prosperous Germany and Japan; a reunified Europe capable of choosing its own future; a fragmented and ultimately moribund communist ideology; and a great-power peace more durable than any since the founding, three centuries earlier, of the modern state system. But it was, from Kennan’s perspective, a very long run: these objectives looked no closer at the end of 1949 than they had been at the beginning of 1949, when he had accepted Acheson’s invitation to stay on. That is why Kennan lost faith in himself as a navigator: the nation appeared to be as adrift as it had been before he took over.

Acheson agreed with Kennan on destinations but favored more flexible course settings. He didn’t care how long the voyage would take, what it would cost, or whether deviations might occur along the way. Preferring action to brooding, he distrusted perfectionism, tolerated contradictions, and was determined to enjoy the trip. “Even if it was an emotional situation,” Acheson’s daughter Mary recalled, he would still say: “What can you do about it? And if you can’t do anything about it, just stop thinking about it, and get on with something!” The secretary of state himself told the war college students, on the morning he shared the platform with Kennan, that “the more difficult a situation is, the more challenge there is to our powers, [and] the more keenness there is in life.”

No one would have said of Acheson what Joe Alsop—a collector—wrote to Kennan on the last day of 1949: that he was “a flawless piece of Soong eggshell ware.... I hardly know how things will go on without you.”⁶⁹

SIXTEEN

Disengagement: 1950

KENNAN’S NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE LECTURE ON DECEMBER 21, 1949, was one of the last to be delivered from that platform during the first half of the twentieth century. It was certainly his last as Policy Planning Staff director. It reflected, appropriately enough, some personal planning: having arranged at least a temporary disengagement from the Department of State, he was trying to decide how to use it. His topic that day was a question: “Where Do We Stand?” The answer, Kennan told the students, depended on where “you think we have come from, and where you think we are going.” Finding it required remedying an inattention to history—the tendency to view all problems “as though the world, like ourselves, had been born only yesterday.”

He then took the students on a time machine trip, with stops at half-century intervals. It began in 1749 with Russia confined to the edge of Europe just as the British colonies occupied the edge of North America. Only half of the Empress Elizabeth’s courtiers could read and write, while the future site of Washington was a wilderness plagued by wolves. France dominated Europe, and Europe ruled the world, although a few far-sighted advisers to Louis XV were shifting their attention from the Bourbons’ longtime rivals, the Austrian Hapsburgs, to the rising but still peripheral kingdom of Prussia.

Half a century later a revolution in France had swept away its monarchy, setting off wars that brought Russian armies into the heart of Europe. Great Britain now had a global maritime empire, diminished only by the defection of the Americans, who had established their own frontier republic. It had practiced, under the Federalists, a foreign policy of “great dignity and reserve,” but Jeffersonian idealists would set the nation—with no sense of irony—on the path of conquest and empire. Still, territorial acquisitions stayed within the continent: the United States refrained from involvement in European affairs.

By 1849, the Americans had expanded south to the Rio Grande and west to the Pacific, sowing the seeds of a civil war to be fought over slavery. Russia appeared stagnant under the despotism of Nicholas I, although revolutionary ideas had infected its intellectuals, artists, and the army officers who had fought the French. The European great powers had suppressed a new wave of revolutions in 1848, but a young Prussian called Bismarck was plotting ways to use the nationalism those upheavals had generated to make a unified Germany the strongest state in Europe.

The German Empire had reached that point by 1899 and was beginning to challenge British naval supremacy. Japan was now a comparably dominant power in Asia, while Russia, about to finish its Trans-Siberian Railway, was coming under pressure from both rivals even as it was hoping, like them, to carve up China. The United States, having built its own navy, defeated Spain, and taken the Philippines, was seeking to secure its interests by invoking the Open Door, the first of a series of unilaterally proclaimed principles that demanded the displacement of power politics by “juridical norms.” Meanwhile Lenin, from the obscurity of exile, was constructing a movement in which ends justified means, convinced that only out of “the bloody, violent destruction of the old order could anything positive be expected to emerge.”

These trends alarmed two Americans, Brooks and Henry Adams, the great-grandsons and grandsons, respectively, of John and John Quincy Adams, in different but complementary ways. Brooks was warning, as early as 1900, that rapid industrialization over the past half-century might now allow some combination of power on the Eurasian continent to end the British hegemony that had so far shielded the United States. Henry, even farther- sighted, was worrying about a scientific revolution that might someday harness the atom itself: infinite power, he suggested in 1905, could soon rest in the hands of finite men. It was just as well, Kennan concluded, that neither had lived to see 1949, by which time both of their visions had become realities.

“Gentlemen, reflect [for] a moment on what that means,” he admonished the war college students. Most of them, like him, had been born into the “Booth Tarkington innocence” of America prior to World War I: “the shady streets and the wooden houses and the backyards in which the kids played at cowboys and Indians.” Debilitated by decades of effortless security, American thinking about foreign policy had become “childish and naive,” something the nation could no longer afford.