outbreak of hostilities. War, after all, was a means to an end, not an end in itself; it might imply an end “marked by submission to a new political will and perhaps to a new regime of life, but an end which at least did not negate the principle of life itself.” Nuclear weapons lacked these characteristics. “They reach beyond the frontiers of western civilization, to the concepts of warfare which were once familiar to the Asiatic hordes. They cannot really be reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying, the lives of the adversary. They fail to take account of the ultimate responsibility of men for one another.” Shakespeare had seen how thin this thread was:
Take but degree away,—untune that string
And hark what discord follows: ...
Then everything includes itself in power—
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey
And at last eat up himself.
It was vital therefore, Kennan argued, “that we not fall into the error of initiating, or planning to initiate, the employment of these weapons and concepts, thus hypnotizing ourselves into the belief that they may ultimately serve some positive national purpose.”
He was not arguing here for any unilateral relinquishment of nuclear weapons. Some such devices would have to be retained “for purposes of deterrence and retaliation.” What he was advocating was, in peacetime, a posture of what would come to be called “minimum deterrence”—restricting the number and power of bombs in the American arsenal strictly to “our estimate as to what it would take to make attack on this country or its allies by weapons of mass destruction a risky, probably unprofitable, and therefore irrational undertaking for any adversary,” and should war come, a strategy of “no first use.” Such an approach, he admitted, would require consultation with allies and a considerable upgrading of conventional capabilities. But it might obviate the need to build a hydrogen bomb, and it would place the United States in a better position from which to negotiate seriously with the Soviet Union on controlling all nuclear devices. Even an imperfect agreement would be less dangerous than leaving “the shadow of uncontrolled mass destruction weapons” lying across the world.
Now no longer Policy Planning Staff director—he had passed the job to Nitze on January 1—Kennan sent his memorandum to Acheson as a personal paper. “Paul and the others were not entirely in agreement with the substance,” he explained, in a considerable understatement. “I was afraid that this report might be embarrassing to have on record as a formal Staff report.” The course it recommended, he added, was filled with obstacles, so much so that “there is extremely little likelihood, judged by present circumstances, that we would ever successfully make our way to the end of it.” But the nation must see “that the initial lines of its policy are as close as possible to the principles dictated by its traditions and its nature, and that where it is necessary to depart from these lines, people are aware that this
Kennan later doubted, correctly, that the paper was seriously considered. Nor could he remember the secretary of state’s reaction: “It was probably one of bewilderment and pity for my naivete.” Years afterward Acheson claimed to have said that if it was really Kennan’s recommendation that the United States not build the hydrogen bomb, then “he ought to resign from the Foreign Service and go out and preach his Quaker gospel.” There is no evidence, however, that Acheson said anything like this at the time: he was himself deeply troubled by the advice he was going to have to give, and Kennan would not have forgotten such an outburst if it had occurred.13
On January 31 an ambivalent Acheson, an enthusiastic Johnson, and a reluctant Lilienthal recommended to Truman, much as Nitze had suggested, that the United States “proceed to determine the technical feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon.” Johnson, in turn, reluctantly agreed to another Nitze proposal, insisted on by Acheson and Lilienthal: that the State and Defense departments reexamine national objectives in war and peace “in the light of the probable fission bomb capability and possible thermonuclear bomb capability of the Soviet Union.” Truman agreed on the spot and publicly announced his decision on the “super” that same day.14
The contrasts in the ways Kennan and Nitze had advised Acheson were striking. Nitze, balancing scientific evidence against military, political, and moral considerations, came up with a crisp recommendation, capable of being read in two minutes, which Acheson, Johnson, Lilienthal, and ultimately Truman could all accept. “I thought that the most important role of the Policy Planning Staff was not just creating a paper,” Nitze recalled. It was “to
Kennan’s memorandum, more than thirty times the length of Nitze’s, was the most serious effort by any American at the time to grapple with the implications of the nuclear revolution. The ideas it developed—especially “minimum deterrence” and “no first use”—would shape the strategic debates of the 1970s and 1980s, some of which Kennan conducted with Nitze himself. “George was a sensitive, imaginative fellow,” Dean Rusk recalled. “He had the ability to look some distance down the trail, and to see the awesome consequences of the development of these weapons. But to look away from the problem we faced was not the way to prevent war.” As far as the Truman administration was concerned, Kennan’s memorandum was, as Nitze suggested, just a paper: it was of little use in shaping immediate policy. He had become prophetic but no longer relevant. Hence the equanimity with which his indulgent boss reconciled himself to the idea that Kennan needed a break. As Acheson reminded the war college students on the day they both appeared there, “it was not by chance that the Prophets used to go up in the mountains and fast and think and be in solitude.”16
II.
Kennan chose instead to go to Latin America. As had been the case with Japan, he had never been there. The Policy Planning Staff had produced only three papers on the region under his directorship, all narrowly focused. And yet Marshall, while in Bogota for a conference in April 1948, had run into rioting so severe that for a time he had been literally under siege: the only life-threatening situation he encountered as secretary of state came in a part of the world his planners had largely ignored. Kennan may have had that episode in mind when he warned the war college students a few months later that, with half the earth’s wealth but only 6 percent of its population, the United States faced enemies willing “to tear us limb from limb figuratively, or perhaps even physically.” He was less dire in his December 1949 lecture, but he did—unusually—go out of his way to link the civil rights struggle at home with the credibility of American efforts to cooperate with “colored peoples in other parts of the globe.” So he was ready, at the beginning of 1950, not just to remedy his own inattention to problems of race, class, and inequality but to see them for himself.17
Feeling slightly guilty for abandoning his family, Kennan left Washington on February 18, taking advantage of the opportunity this time to avoid the discomforts of air travel and to indulge his love of trains. With a change in St. Louis, it was possible then to take a sleeping car all the way to Mexico City. The three-day journey allowed time to write:
about passing in the night within a few miles of the Pennsylvania farm, where “the old drake would be standing, motionless, on the concrete water trough in the barnyard, ... contemptuous of the cold, of the men who had neglected him, of the other birds and beasts who basked in the warmth of human favor—contemptuous even of the possibility for happiness in general, human or animal.”
about the fellow passenger who, having inspected his luggage labels, could not help asking: “Say, are you the fellow who . . . ?” Confused associations followed, “too close to reality to be wholly denied, too far from it to be flatly admitted.” ab
