George F. Kennan : an American life

been a waste of his time.²⁷

IV.

Despite the investigation of him, Davies had taken on a new responsibility. “Paul Nitze apparently discovered that he couldn’t get along without him,” Annelise wrote George on February 23, while he was still in Latin America. She had had dinner the night before with the Nitzes, after which they had seen All the King’s Men, starring Broderick Crawford, a cinematic evocation of Huey Long that eerily anticipated McCarthy.²⁸ Nitze had delayed Davies’s next assignment, which was to have been Germany, to enlist him in an extraordinary effort to triple or quadruple defense spending in the United States —over the violent objections of its secretary of defense, Louis Johnson. It was a strange thing for someone suspected of sympathy with communists to be doing.

The idea, in a way, had originated with Kennan. He had long seen the need for a credible military deterrent but assumed that the American atomic monopoly could provide this. As long as it lasted, the Soviet Union would not attack: conventional defense could be entrusted to small, well-trained units like the Marine Corps, capable of responding rapidly in limited conflict situations. The capacity for massive mobilization would have to be in place, of course, but an actual mobilization should not be necessary in peacetime. The Soviet atomic bomb, however, shook Kennan’s confidence. He admitted to Acheson and the Policy Planning Staff, at a meeting in October 1949, that it might now be impossible “for us to retaliate with the atomic bomb against a Russian attack with orthodox weapons.”

Nitze at that point asked an important, if delicate, question: might this situation require increasing the conventional military forces of the United States and its Western European allies? Otherwise, what peacetime deterrent would there be? The delicacy lay in the fact that such armaments—and armies—would be considerably more expensive than atomic bombs and the bombers needed to deliver them. The costs could lower living standards in Europe while unbalancing budgets at home. Neither was a palatable alternative, given the Marshall Plan’s accomplishments and Truman’s determination to keep defense spending under tight control. The problem, Acheson acknowledged, was “what peoples and governments will do rather than what they can do.”²⁹

The hydrogen bomb debate distracted everyone over the next few months, but Nitze kept the idea of a conventional buildup alive by skillfully coupling his call for developing thermonuclear weapons with a recommendation to review all national security requirements. That won Acheson’s support for the “super” and ultimately even Lilienthal’s. Neither Truman nor Johnson understood what Nitze had in mind, but Acheson saw it clearly, and Kennan had a sense of it. If the United States was ever going to reduce its dependence on nuclear weapons, he wrote on the eve of his departure for Latin America, then this might require “a state of semi-mobilization.”³⁰

Acheson later implied that he had sent Kennan south to get him out of town while Nitze’s review was getting under way. That’s unlikely, because Kennan had been planning his trip for well over a year. He also sympathized with Nitze’s objective, which was to strengthen nonnuclear as well as nuclear means of deterrence. Kennan did believe, however, that this could be done only by drastically reducing “the exorbitant costs of national defense.” In this respect, he shared the views of Truman, Johnson, and other fiscal conservatives. Nitze, drawing on domestic policy studies undertaken by White House economic advisers, took a different approach. He pointed out that increased expenditures would create new jobs, generating the additional tax revenue that would allow balancing the budget at a higher level while correcting the American deficiency in conventional arms. It was a posthumous enlistment, in the Cold War, of John Maynard Keynes.³¹

It’s also unlikely, though, that Acheson or Nitze regretted Kennan’s absence as they developed this line of argument. Kennan had opposed the presidential decision that allowed Nitze’s review to proceed. He knew little about economics, Keynesian or otherwise. His preference for prophecy was isolating him within the government. And he was becoming increasingly wary of policy papers whose content had to reflect a consensus and whose implementation he could not control: “You understand how hard this was for someone like myself, who felt that what you do has to be flexible, according to the situation of the moment.” Kennan’s real problem with the new initiative, Nitze believed, was that it was to be “a group paper, not his.”³²

NSC 68, “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” prepared mostly within the Policy Planning Staff, went to Truman on April 14, 1950. It was worthy of Kennan in several ways. One was length: the report came to sixty-six legal-size pages. A second was style: although classified top secret, it read as if meant to be proclaimed, even preached—its most memorable phrase, which Davies contributed, was the need to “frustrate the Kremlin’s design.” A third was its acceptance of containment: there need be neither appeasement of the Soviet Union nor a war fought with it. A fourth was the imprint of a distinctive personality: despite Nitze’s claim, he dominated the drafting, much as Kennan had always done. A final similarity was historical significance: since its declassification in 1975, historians have regarded NSC 68, alongside Kennan’s “long telegram” and “X” article, as a foundational statement of United States grand strategy in the Cold War.³³

But both Kennan and Bohlen objected to NSC 68, when they finally read it, for much the same reason that Kennan had opposed the Truman Doctrine. In order to “sell” the idea of a major military buildup—in this case, to Truman himself—the document exaggerated the threats the United States confronted. It portrayed a Soviet Union resolved to risk war as soon as its capabilities exceeded those of the Americans and their allies: that point would come, it claimed, if nothing was done, as early as 1954. It rejected distinctions between vital and peripheral interests, emphasizing instead the damaging psychological effects of losing even remote regions to communism. It saw all parts of the world as equally important because all threats were equally dangerous. And because it ruled out both appeasement and all-out war, it called for responding to aggression wherever and at whatever level it might take place. At Acheson’s suggestion, NSC 68 contained no estimate of what all this would cost. The amounts would be huge, though, which led Bohlen to conclude, shortsightedly, that “there was absolutely no chance that [it] would be adopted.”³⁴

Acheson was unrepentant. Of course NSC 68 exaggerated, he admitted in his memoirs. Its purpose was “to so bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’ that not only could the President make the decision but the decision could be carried out.... If we made our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise.” There were times, his great mentor Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had said, when “we need education in the obvious more than the investigation of the obscure.” Kennan, when asked about this shortly after Acheson’s account came out, had his own Holmes reference ready: the great man had also observed “that he couldn’t write out his philosophy of the law; he could express it only as it applied to specific cases.” Documents like NSC 68, Kennan argued, “assume a static world. They freeze policy, making it impossible to respond to external changes.”³⁵

The issue, fundamentally, was the tension between planning policy and executing it. Kennan’s approach, one historian observed, relied heavily on the “noncommunicable wisdom of the experienced career official” and had little patience with the “rigidities, simplifications, and artificialities” involved in administering large organizations. Acheson, in turn, had to think about exactly this: “I recognized and highly appreciated the personal and esoteric skill of our Foreign Service officers, but believed that insofar as their wisdom was ‘non-communicable,’ its value, though great in operations abroad, was limited in Washington.” Davies, on this point, sided with Acheson. “Kennan and Bohlen thought that NSC-68 was an extreme reaction and a misreading of Soviet intentions,” he recalled, “because it was so schematic. As indeed it was. It was highly schematic, it was a counter to the Communist Manifesto.” The Soviet Union “was a growing threat to the United States that had to be met. Whatever it cost, we had to do it.”³⁶

V.