George F. Kennan : an American life

but they originated more from Stalin’s uncertainty about how to handle MacArthur’s advance than from Mao’s determination to assert his independence from Moscow. Still eager to show his loyalty to the Soviet Union, Mao welcomed a war with the Americans, partly for ideological reasons but chiefly because the Truman administration had accepted Kennan’s recommendation to deploy the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. That, as Mao saw it, was intervention in the internal affairs of China.¹⁰

But none of this was known then. What was clear was that official Washington—having spent the past five months experiencing despair, and then euphoria, and then despair again—was badly rattled. Asked at a press conference on November 30 whether he had considered using the atomic bomb in Korea, Truman acknowledged that he had, and then alarmed everyone by adding that “the military commander in the field” would decide when its employment would be appropriate. The White House quickly backtracked, insisting that only the president could make such a decision, but British prime minister Clement Attlee invited himself to Washington anyway to try to figure out what was going on. The next morning Bohlen called Kennan from Paris to point out that there was now no one in the State Department with “a deep understanding” of the Soviet Union. Kennan must volunteer his services once again.¹¹

He immediately did so, received thanks from Acheson, and caught the next train. He spent the evening of Saturday, December 2, with the Davieses and on Sunday morning reported for duty. With the secretary of state tied up at the Pentagon and the White House, it fell to Webb to brief Kennan. Military planners required a decision within thirty-six hours as to whether to withdraw completely from Korea. Attlee would be arriving the next morning. The State Department needed an urgent assessment of what the prospects might be for negotiating something—just what was left unclear—with the Soviet Union.

Kennan, Davies, and their colleague G. Frederick Reinhardt produced, within four hours, four pages of what Kennan remembered as “the bleakest and most uncomfortable prose that the department’s files can ever have accommodated.” There had never been a worse time to approach Moscow, they concluded. There was “not the faintest reason why the Russians should wish to aid us in our predicament.” Diplomacy would work only when there were “solid cards in our hand, in the form of some means of pressure on them to arrive at an agreement [which would be] in their own interests.” Acheson, looking exhausted, was leaving his office when Kennan brought the report to him. Could he come home for dinner? Kennan did, saving the depressing news for the next morning.

Acheson unburdened himself that evening. He joked about a new portrait that seemed to show him impervious to criticism. He spoke “of the strangeness of his position” as if he were the only person in Washington who understood the seriousness of the situation. He sounded, at that moment, like Kennan, who recalled years later that “I had often disagreed with him—our minds had never really worked in the same way; but never for a moment could I deny him my admiration for the manner in which he bore this ordeal.” So Kennan went back to the Davieses, sat up into the early morning of December 4, and wrote out in longhand this letter for his embattled superior:

Dear Mr. Secretary:

On the official level I have been asked to give advice only on the particular problem of Soviet reaction to various possible approaches.

But there is one thing I should like to say in continuation of our discussion of yesterday evening.

In international, as in private, life, what counts most is not really what happens to some one but how he bears what happens to him. For this reason almost everything depends from here on out on the manner in which we Americans bear what is unquestionably a major failure and disaster to our national fortunes. If we accept it with candor, with dignity, with a resolve to absorb its lessons and to make it good by re-doubled and determined effort—starting all over again, if necessary, along the pattern of Pearl Harbor—we need lose neither our self- confidence nor our allies nor our power for bargaining, eventually, with the Russians. But if we try to conceal from our own people or from our allies the full measure of our misfortune, or permit ourselves to seek relief in any reactions of bluster or petulance or hysteria, we can easily find this crisis resolving itself into an irreparable deterioration of our world position—and of our confidence in ourselves.

George Kennan

Both Acheson and Kennan included this document in their memoirs—but only Acheson, who found it “wise and inspiring,” quoted it in full.¹²

It would be too much to claim that this note, together with Kennan’s advice over the next few days, reversed the mood of desperation gripping Washington. He was not alone in pointing out that, as the Chinese Communists drove south, they would outrun their supply lines: it ought to be possible to stabilize the front somewhere in the vicinity of the 38th parallel. That became the consensus on the course to be followed, and ultimately—despite MacArthur’s increasingly erratic mood swings—this is what happened. Kennan’s intervention was important enough, though, for Acheson to read his note aloud at a State Department staff meeting the next day, and to convey his argument against negotiations to Truman and Attlee.¹³

What must have impressed the secretary of state was that Kennan, for once, was not advocating diplomacy. Instead he agreed with Rusk, who evoked the example of the British in the two world wars. “They held on,” Kennan added, “when there was no apparent reason for it.” If there was any validity to the idea of negotiating from a position of strength, then this was “clearly a very bad time for an approach to the Russians.” Acheson may have sounded like Kennan the previous evening, but Kennan now sounded like Acheson. He was even more vehement about the Chinese Communists, with the department’s note-taker struggling to keep up:

He said the Chinese have now committed an affront of the greatest magnitude to the United States. He said that what they have done is something that we can not forget for years and the Chinese will have to worry about righting themselves with us not us with them.... He said we owe China nothing but a lesson.

Kennan went back to the Institute satisfied that the week had been well spent. On December 17 he sent Alsop a Christmas card: “You must not be offended that I could not see you in Washington recently. I was there very briefly—and it was better that way. On the rare occasions when I can push the ubiquitous present out of the way, I am greatly enjoying my associations with the past—i.e., diplomatic history. But the present is a fearful nuisance.”¹⁴

III.

“I am enjoying Princeton and my work here immensely,” George wrote Kent on the second day of 1951, “though I am still harried by outside demands on my time.... I seem to get less done than under the pressures of the State Department.” Nevertheless, the Institute was the ideal place for him now, “and all I would ask would be that I might be left alone to work there.... [T]hanks awfully for the grapefruit. They are delicious.”¹⁵

Kennan was getting a lot done, although the results did not begin to show until January. Between then and the end of April, he completed his article for Foreign Affairs, submitted a forty-page study on American participation in international organizations to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and began studying the relationship between population growth, industrialization, and diminishing water reserves in the eastern United States, while preparing ten original lectures, each of them different, none to be delivered extemporaneously. He was trying, he said in the first of these, given in New York on January 27, “to disentangle the snarled skeins” of contemporary American foreign policy, “to bring order out of the chaos.” But he was also clarifying his own thinking, most successfully in the two lectures he gave—little noticed at the time and less remembered since—