He meant it to be his last Policy Planning Staff paper.41
VI.
Perhaps it would have been, had it not been for Stalin, Mao, and the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, who found a way, on June 25, 1950, to frustrate this and many other American designs. Korea, like Germany, had remained divided at the end of World War II. Unlike Germany, however, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union regarded the country as a vital interest. They were thus able to agree, if tacitly, on a mutual withdrawal of occupation forces, what Kennan had long hoped for in Germany. United Nations–sponsored elections south of the 38th parallel—the dividing line hastily drawn at the end of the war—had by then established the Republic of Korea; and the Soviet Union, without U.N. sanction, had set up the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north. It was no satisfactory solution, but by Cold War standards it looked like a relatively untroublesome one, which was why Acheson felt comfortable excluding South Korea from the “defensive perimeter” he publicly announced in January 1950. The only difficulty was that Stalin, Mao, and Kim read his speech—and probably also, courtesy of British spies operating in Washington at the time, NSC 48/2, upon which it had been based. 42
There had been indications, Kennan later recalled, that military operations might begin soon somewhere in the communist world, but the intelligence was not site-specific and MacArthur’s analysts in Tokyo discounted it. As a result, North Korea’s attack on South Korea, undertaken with the full knowledge and support of Stalin and Mao, caught the rest of the world by surprise. It came on a Sunday: President Truman was at his home in Independence, Missouri; Acheson was at his Maryland farm; Nitze was fishing in New Brunswick miles away from the nearest road; and Kennan was spending a quiet weekend with his family in East Berlin (Pennsylvania). He knew nothing of the invasion until they returned to Washington late that afternoon and saw the newspaper headlines: “Nobody had thought to notify me, and perhaps there was no reason anybody should have; but I could not help but reflect that General Marshall would have seen that this was done.”43
Kennan had asked to be relieved of policy responsibilities. As with most things he did, however, there was a certain ambivalence about this. “It never occurred to me that you [and Acheson] would make foreign policy without having first consulted me,” Nitze remembered him saying sometime in the summer of 1950. Now, with Nitze stuck in the wilds of Canada—the first leg of his trip back had to be by canoe—Acheson welcomed Kennan’s offer to help. The next two months were an extraordinary moment in Kennan’s career: at no other point did he operate nearer to the top levels of government in a major crisis, or with greater freedom to provide advice. Remarkably—but with an eye to history and perhaps biography—he found the time to keep a detailed diary of those crowded days. It showed what he meant about the inadequacies of grand strategic documents that sought to embed, as if in amber, the complexities of a rapidly shifting world. At the same time it revealed several of these inadequacies as having been his own.44
The first and most obvious one had to do with the “defensive perimeter” strategy, which reflected Kennan’s principle that because some interests were more important than others, not all needed to be defended. That sounded good in theory; in practice, however, it conflicted with another principle in which Kennan believed strongly—that psychology was as important as industrial-military capability in shaping world politics. Having excluded South Korea from American protection because it was militarily insignificant, he now concluded along with almost everyone else in Washington that it was psychologically vital. So too, he insisted, was the defense of Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists. Kennan’s first recommendation upon arriving at the State Department on the evening of June 25—it was probably the first on this subj ect from anyone in government—was to ensure “that Formosa did not fall to the communists since this, coming on top of the Korean attack, would be calamitous to our position in the Far East.”45
With the approval of the U.N. Security Council—the Soviet representative, protesting the organization’s failure to seat the People’s Republic of China, had not been present to cast a veto—President Truman announced on June 27 that American troops, under MacArthur’s command, would be coming to the defense of South Korea. Meanwhile, the Navy would begin patrolling the Taiwan Strait. Asked on short notice to brief the NATO ambassadors that day, Kennan acknowledged that the United States was acting not because of the strategic importance of the territory at risk but because “of the damage to world confidence and morale which would have been produced had we not so acted.” The effects could have extended throughout East Asia and even into Europe. He then added—without authority, since the issue had not yet been decided—that the war would be limited : “We had no intention to do more than to restore the
That evening the Kennans attended a long-planned dinner party. On their way in, they met Joe Alsop. “Although he regards himself as a total contemplative,” the columnist wrote of this encounter, “I have always observed that George makes his best sense as a man of action, when there is a good, loud, cable machine at his elbow clacking out horrible problems all over the world. When George broods, he becomes a little silly.”
On this day, the cable machine had been clacking madly, and George was dancing on air because MacArthur’s men were being mobilized for combat under the auspices of the United Nations. He was carrying his balalaika, a Russian instrument he used to play with some skill at social gatherings, and with a great, vigorous swing, he clapped me on the back with it, nearly striking me to the sidewalk.
“Well, Joe,” he cried, “what do you think of the democracies now?”
No matter how well intended, it is never pleasant being knocked about, and I replied quite crossly, “I think about democracy exactly what I always have, but not what you thought when you came to see me.”
Two days later, still elated, Kennan attended a meeting of the NSC staff in the former State Department building next to the White House. Nostalgic for its cool, calm, and spacious interior, Kennan joked to his old friend “Doc” Matthews that the crisis would never have happened if they hadn’t moved to the new headquarters in Foggy Bottom. “To my surprise the colored elevator woman turned around and said with great firmness and enthusiasm: ‘That’s right, sir.’ ”47
A second shift in Kennan’s thinking related to NSC 68. He had not questioned its call to spend more on conventional forces—how else could reliance on nuclear weapons be reduced?—but he and Bohlen had objected to Nitze’s portrayal of a worldwide Soviet threat. Now, though, by authorizing the attack in Korea, Stalin had made Nitze look prophetic. “I stated it as my deep conviction that the U.S. had no choice but to accept this challenge,” Kennan wrote of a meeting with Acheson and his advisers on June 26. It would have to commit whatever was required for the completion of the task. The fighting in Korea was likely to spread, and it was “absolutely essential” to mobilize for that purpose. If, in World War II, “our commanders had been told [that their only task] was to cope with an army of 90,000 Koreans with 100 tanks and small air support and to occupy Korea to the 38th Parallel, they would have considered it a small operation indeed.” So the question was one of will, not capability.
When told, on July 12, that the Council of Economic Advisers had seen no need for drastic mobilization measures, Kennan was furious. The problem, he complained to an equally worried Nitze on the seventeenth, lay in the president’s failure himself to take responsibility, and to require that
