neighboring smaller powers. If the Latin Americans liked it, fine. If not, the responsibility would be theirs for forfeiting its advantages. This was the best Washington could expect to do, Kennan concluded, in a region where problems would always be “multitudinous, complex and unpleasant.”19
The term “politically incorrect” had not yet been invented, but Edward G. Miller, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, acted as if it had when he read Kennan’s report. Appalled by its candor, worried about leaks, he persuaded Acheson not to circulate it. “I am not sure that he required much persuading,” Kennan remembered. As a consequence, all copies were “hidden from innocent eyes,” except for the one Kennan kept and quoted from in his 1967 memoir. The full document would not be published until 1976, after which historians treated it either as an example of Kennan’s insensitivity to “third world” issues, or as a blueprint for what the United States would do in Latin America for the rest of the Cold War.20 Neither interpretation makes much sense.
Kennan in fact focused on the historical, cultural, economic, demographic, and environmental problems afflicting the region: he came closer to getting Latin America right in 1950 than he had Germany—a country he knew much better—in 1949. Nor was he unsympathetic to the Latin Americans. The rich and the poor, he repeatedly stressed, shared tragedies not of their own making. Nor did his memorandum affect what later transpired: it could hardly have done so, since nobody read it. If they had, they would have found it recommending a far more cautious policy than those carried out by the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan administrations, each of whom intervened in Latin America in ways well beyond anything Kennan recommended. It’s hard to see how the policy he suggested would have produced worse results.
Two things made Kennan’s report unacceptable, though, even by the standards of his own day. One was his outsider’s perspective, which upset the State Department’s Latin American experts, much as he would have been upset if forced to read a report from one of them on the Soviet Union or Germany. Crude looks at the whole21 generally unsettle specialists who spend their lives scrutinizing parts of it. The other problem was Kennan’s honesty about Latin America’s tragedies and his call for restraint in attempting to alleviate them. His pessimism was consistent with his own view of life. But it was—to use another term just coming into vogue at the time—deeply un-American.
III.
“I am not one of those who have been attacked,” Kennan assured a hometown audience in Milwaukee on May 5. However, “I must tell you that the atmosphere of public life in Washington does not have to deteriorate much further to produce a situation in which very few of our more quiet and sensitive and gifted people will be able to continue in government.” What worried him was not the reception of his Latin American report but rather the emergence of something that was coming to be called, in honor of the junior Republican senator from Wisconsin, “McCarthyism.”22
It began as a backlash against the apparent “loss” of China. Mao Zedong had completed his conquest of the mainland the previous October, and then spent two months in Moscow. The State Department seemed not to care. It had discredited the Chinese Nationalists, now established on Taiwan, through the White Paper Kennan and Davies had helped to produce in the summer of 1949. On January 12, 1950, Acheson announced in a National Press Club speech that the United States had no plans to defend Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, despite a “defensive perimeter” strategy—which he was announcing publicly for the first time—of protecting other offshore positions including Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines. The secretary of state’s comments reflected the conclusions of a top-secret paper, NSC 48/2, endorsed by Truman at the end of December, that distilled a series of Policy Planning Staff studies, written mostly by Davies, dating back to 1948. Using American forces to prolong the civil war in China, all of these had concluded, would be a disaster. Nor was it clear, even now, that Mao would be a Soviet puppet. The very fact that he had spent so long in Moscow, Kennan believed, meant that problems already existed in the relationship.23
This was not the best time, however, to try to explain these subtleties to the American people. Acheson had won few friends in Congress when he characterized his China policy, shortly after taking office, as one of waiting “until the dust settles.” Then on January 25, 1950, Alger Hiss was convicted of lying under oath about his involvement with Soviet intelligence: the secretary of state further inflamed his critics by telling a press conference that day that he would not “turn my back” on his old friend. Six days later Truman announced that the United States would try to build a hydrogen bomb. Four days after that the news broke of the Fuchs atomic espionage case. It was predictable, therefore, that someone would soon claim that the Department of State had knowingly harbored traitors who had sold out the Chinese Nationalists, given the Russians the atomic bomb, and who knew what else? The only thing unpredictable about the speech Senator Joseph R. McCarthy did in fact make on February 9 was the forum he chose for it: the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia .24
Kennan read the reports on McCarthy while on his Latin American trip, naively expecting the outrageousness of the senator’s claims to discredit him immediately. Just the opposite happened, however, with results that would wreck the career of Kennan’s closest Policy Planning Staff colleague and one of his closest friends. Still assigned to liaison duties with Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination, John Paton Davies had found himself being questioned, in November 1949, by two “very low-powered characters” from that organization about a plan he had suggested to recruit American China experts who had retained some credibility with Mao’s regime to advise on psychological warfare operations against it. “It’s all very well to have white propaganda phrased as a direct attack against the Communists,” Davies later explained, “but one has to have some people whose view is more acceptable, who have a standing in China, who can give some guidance as to what might be done under OPC control.”
Davies’s interrogators, however, turned out to be counterintelligence agents searching for spies within the government. “So they misconstrued what I said and passed it on.” Hillenkoetter, still the director of central intelligence, professed to be shocked and turned the information over to the FBI. That meant that Davies would have to go before one of the loyalty review boards the White House had established to investigate such allegations of subversion.25
“We have no protection against this happening again,” Kennan warned Webb shortly after returning to Washington in March 1950, “and no assurance that any one in this Department will even be aware of it when it does happen.” It had not been Wisner’s fault, but until the matter was clarified, there should be no further State Department cooperation with the OPC. The idea of covert operations had been “largely my own,” and Kennan remained convinced of its importance. Anything that interfered with such work—like the harassment of Davies —“seems to me to diminish the chances for defeating communist purposes on a world-wide scale.”26
It was with Davies in mind that Kennan chose to challenge McCarthy—although not by name—in the state they shared. He could do so, he told his Milwaukee audience, because “I am leaving the Government for a long time in the near future.” He had chosen that city because “[m]y boyhood was spent here.” Whenever he returned to talk about international problems, he had the feeling of “rendering an accounting” to people who had a right to expect it and whose understanding “is somehow basic to the success of what we are trying to do.” So what should the State Department have recommended, given the obvious incompetence of the Chinese Nationalist government? He could conceive of “no more ghastly and fateful mistake” than to try to prop up with “our own blood and treasure a regime which had clearly lost the confidence of its own people. Nothing could have pleased our enemies more.”
The speech was courageous: few Foreign Service officers were saying such things openly at the time. But the size of the audience was disappointing, and the publicity was minimal. Kennan was irked to have provoked the wrath, not of McCarthy’s supporters, but of local “communists” who passed out handbills linking “Mr. X” to the development of the hydrogen bomb. The trip, he complained to State Department colleagues upon his return, had
