his argument, as in his call for toughness toward the U.S.S.R. in the “long telegram” and the “X” article. That would persuade them, but Kennan would then worry that they had gone too far. They were now seeing the Soviets “as an implacable foe, not subject to change, and not open to the ordinary rules of Great Power rivalry.” So Kennan would jump to the opposite camp, where once more he would exaggerate “because he feels it’s so important to get things back into balance. And so it goes.”
With constituencies to hold together and coalitions to maintain, Bowie pointed out, governments can’t manage such fine adjustments. Acheson understood that, but “I don’t think George feels those constraints, or if he does feel them I think he resists them. Getting it intellectually right is of very high value.” Kennan had an “academic” mentality, in that he always wanted to reconsider things. He preferred committing himself not “to a course of action, but to a course of analysis, and therefore if he gets better insights later on, he not only feels free but feels obligated to modify it.” In doing so, his empathy would “go deaf.” That left Kennan surprised when people took what he had said or done in ways he hadn’t anticipated. Of course the Soviets were going to expel him after he compared life in Moscow to internment in Nazi Germany, but he was “genuinely taken aback.” Of course the Scranton speech was going to offend Dulles, but Kennan just “didn’t visualize it.”
Bowie saw one other problem, which was that the higher Kennan rose in the Foreign Service, the more he took things personally. However passionate his prose, the author of the “long telegram” had not seen himself as the target of Stalin’s hostility. The recently expelled ambassador to the Soviet Union did see himself in this way. Kennan was convinced, his friend Bill Bundy added, “that they were deliberately doing nasty things to
Eisenhower sensed without saying so that Kennan had outlived his usefulness as a diplomat: he made no effort to reverse Dulles’s decision. At least one White House aide, though, believed that Kennan was being shabbily treated. The secretary of state’s dislike for Kennan’s “theorizing” was understandable, Emmet John Hughes, a presidential speechwriter, pointed out to Chief of Staff Sherman Adams. But there was a difference “between (a) the manifest right to ‘ease out’ a diplomat whose views are felt to be contrary to prevailing policy and (b) the use of this right in a way that is needlessly rude and perhaps offensive not only to one man but to the service he represents.” Dulles had let two months pass without acknowledging Kennan’s resignation. Now he was using “the crude—and silent—expedient of simply failing to offer him a diplomatic post,” a procedure “designed for the dismissal of plain incompetents.” It was a “singular and studied insult.”
“I can appreciate and must respect your wishes [to retire],” Eisenhower wrote to Kennan on July 8, using a draft Hughes had prepared. “Your years of devoted work in the Foreign Service certainly entitle you to such a choice.” It would have been a routine send-off, had it not been for the fact that, at just this moment and in a characteristically subtle way, the president was making Kennan his top, if temporary, policy planner. His assignment—of which Hughes knew nothing—was to liberate Eisenhower from the “liberation” strategy to which Dulles had tried to commit him during the 1952 campaign.
II.
Dulles’s bluster had long made Eisenhower uneasy, but in a Republican Party still dominated by isolationists and McCarthyites, he seemed the only plausible possibility to run the Department of State. Despite the president’s military background, it was not his habit to discipline subordinates: instead, he sought to
Consisting of seven members each, the teams met at the National War College from June 10 to July 15. They had access to everything, Kennan recalled, even the most sensitive intelligence information. “It was all highly secret.... I was not permitted—nobody was permitted—to say anything about it.” The cover story, which Kennan used even in his private diary, was that the work involved updating the school’s curriculum. “We all knew we couldn’t expect to put our own personal opinion through pure, that we would have to come to some sort of a collective idea.... And that we did.”18
Task Force A’s report nevertheless reflected Kennan’s thinking throughout its 152 pages. It identified three great principles, each consistent with what he had been arguing since returning from Moscow in 1946:
First, the U.S. must avoid . . . pursuing in time of peace aims which have essentially a wartime objective: namely, the complete destruction or unconditional surrender of the enemy. Accordingly, we must see to it that our negotiating positions vis-a-vis the Soviet Union appear sincere and reasonable, and that U.S. power appears everywhere as power for peace.
Second, the U.S. must take great pains to create an impression of steadiness and reliability in the formulation and implementation of its foreign policy. This means that special emphasis must be laid on discipline and unity of approach, . . . avoiding every indication of abruptness or erratic behavior.
Third, the positive emphasis of U.S. policy must be placed on . . . the creation generally within the non- Communist area of an atmosphere of confidence and hope. These efforts should not be openly related in each case to the winning of the cold war, but should be addressed in good faith primarily to basic and long-term problems . . . , many of which would exist in important degree even if there were no Soviet Union.
Contrary to Dulles’s claims, the United States and its allies were already stronger than their adversaries. With “the wise and flexible application of [this] integrated national strategy,” that advantage would “bring about the diminution of Soviet-Communist external influence until it ceases to be a substantial threat to peace and security.”
Two great temptations, Kennan warned, might deflect the nation from this course. One was resorting to war, a path “full of risk, empty of calculation, and unwarrantedly hazardous to the continued existence of the U.S.” The other was succumbing to internal “totalitarian” pressures, for that would ruin the reputation of a nation seeking to lead the world in “the defense of free institutions.” Within those limits, the United States could expect the “progressive retraction of Soviet control” from Eastern Europe and China; the “discrediting of Soviet power and Communist ideology” elsewhere; and an increase “in internal stresses and conflicts within the Soviet system,” which would force its rulers “to accept the necessity of adjusting their objectives to those of peaceful co-existence with the Free World.”
Kennan even got Task Force A to endorse his own Program A. The United States should seek “a reunified, sovereign, independent Germany with a democratic form of government.” All foreign occupation forces would withdraw, or at least retreat to enclaves supplied by sea. The new state would have its own military establishment, except for “atomic or other weapons of mass destruction.” And it would operate free from political control by either the Soviet Union or the West. If Stalin’s successors accepted these proposals, they would have rolled back their own influence in Central Europe. If they rejected them, they would “bear the onus of remaining in East Germany
