George F. Kennan : an American life

Germany. He could see only one result of such neutralization, namely, absorption by the communists. . . . [W]hat Kennan really proposes is the neutralization of all of Europe, which would be the actual result of his proposal for the neutralization of Germany. He described Kennan as a headline-seeker.³⁹

Kennan knew nothing of this conversation, but other reactions reached him soon enough. The Reith lectures had “echoed around the world,” the moderator of a special BBC broadcast noted, while introducing him for a follow-up discussion on December 20. The nineteen hundred journalists present in Paris seemed to be spending more time discussing Kennan’s arguments than those of anyone else.

The other panelists were unimpressed. What Kennan had said, Economist editor Donald Tyerman told him bluntly, seemed dangerous. How could he be sure that the Soviet Union would not attack? The question had plagued Kennan since 1948, and he still had no answer. Soviet ideology, he pointed out, had never required the use of force to ensure communism’s triumph, but Soviet leaders were “rubbery,” and “infinitely flexible.” Might they not try to terrify the Europeans, Tyerman persisted, employing what Kennan himself had called the “psychological shadow” of military superiority? No, Kennan replied, all they wanted was to get communist regimes in power. But wouldn’t that have the same effect? Hadn’t Britain declared war in 1914 and 1939 because it feared intimidation, not because it had been attacked? “There I fully agree with you,” Kennan conceded, “and I think that the great danger today is that we will be put in a position where we would have to take the overt act.” How, then, would a neutralized Germany and a nonnuclear NATO make war less likely? He had not suggested either, Kennan claimed. “I did not feel that any outsider like myself could propose a specific plan of disengagement.”

So what had he proposed? the puzzled moderator asked. “You’re not all that much of an outsider.” He was, Kennan responded, in the sense that there were “military considerations” he didn’t know about. And he did know, from his State Department service, the limitations of uninformed advice: “I was trying to tell governments what they ought to think about, not what they ought to do.” But he proceeded to do that anyway: “I can see no solution to this present jam we’re getting ourselves [into] . . . except by some sort of a disengagement of the forces of the great powers in Europe and perhaps later in the Far East.”

All of this exasperated Sir John Slessor, of the Royal Air Force, who wondered how the Europeans would defend themselves in the absence of American and British forces “when we’ve got Sputnik whirling overhead.” Was Kennan really proposing that the Europeans rely, as their only deterrent, on the prospect of local resistance after their countries had been overrun? Resistance groups had given the Germans trouble in World War II, Kennan replied, much too lamely, and NATO “obligations” would remain in place after American and British troops had been withdrawn. But a neutralized Germany would not be in NATO, the moderator pointed out. No, but it would have its own conventional forces, Kennan retorted. Wouldn’t that frighten everybody else, all of the panelists wanted to know, including the Russians?

Kennan fell back, in the end, on something he had once condemned: reliance on “trust” in the conduct of international relations. The figurehead Soviet premier, Nikolay Bulganin, had formally offered to withdraw the Red Army from East Germany and the other Warsaw Pact countries in return for the removal of American and British troops from the European continent: he should be taken seriously. And Kennan himself was certain, on the basis of his residence in Germany as a little boy and as a young diplomat during the 1930s, that the Germans had changed, that they were now “on our side.” How the two claims meshed—how the Russians could confidently leave a unified Germany to itself if the Germans were pro-American—he did not explain.

“My feeling now,” Kennan wrote in his diary after this embarrassing exchange, “is that I have thoroughly exhausted the working capital of knowledge about international affairs with which I left government, five years ago.” He wished “never to open my mouth about them again until I have some opportunity to learn all over again.”⁴⁰

VI.

The Kennans left Oxford on December 28 to drive, via an English Channel ferry, to the Swiss resort town of Crans for what they hoped would be a rest. But the weather-plagued hair-raising trip took five days, and when they arrived, George found the proofs of his Reith lectures waiting. “I haven’t the faintest enthusiasm for this publication,” he lamented, sensing the furor following him around like a baleful ghost. The respected Neue Zurcher Zeitung, unaware of his presence in the country, began a series of attacks on him two days after he arrived. At tea that afternoon, one of his hosts jovially credited Kennan with killing the NATO alliance. Just then a message came from an old friend, Gladwyn Jebb, who wanted Kennan to know that his lectures had greatly complicated Jebb’s task as British ambassador in Paris. All of this worried Kennan, “because unless I can find some means of withdrawing from the discussion of contemporary affairs, I shall never be able to go successfully through the next term at Oxford.”⁴¹

Much worse came, a week later, in an eruption of monumental proportions from an enraged Dean Acheson. “I am told,” the former secretary of state announced in a widely publicized statement on January 11, 1958, “that the impression exists in Europe that the views expressed by Mr. George Kennan . . . represent the views of the Democratic Party in the United States. Most categorically they do not, as I’m sure Mr. Kennan would agree.” Kennan could speak authoritatively “in the field he knows,” which was Russian history and culture and Marxist- Leninist ideology. However, he “has never, in my judgment, grasped the realities of power relationships, but takes a rather mystical attitude toward them.” Had he not provided his “personal assurance” that there was “no Soviet military threat” in Europe? “On what does this guarantee rest, unless Divine revelation?”⁴²

The sarcasm was withering, as only Acheson’s pen could have made it. As he got older, “he got more drastic,” Arthur Schlesinger recalled. “He enjoyed being extravagantly dismissive.” But he was doing so, in this instance, on behalf of the American Council on Germany, an influential pro-NATO organization headed by James B. Conant, the ex-president of Harvard who had also served as U.S. high commissioner and later ambassador in West Germany. With Conant’s approval—and Nitze’s encouragement—the group’s vice-chairman, Christopher Emmet, had asked Acheson to reply to Kennan, lest the Europeans mistake him as a “semiofficial spokesman and super brain-truster for the Democratic Party.” Acheson did not simply jump at this opportunity: he pounced on it. He had written “more for European than American readers,” he explained to Emmet, but “it won’t hurt some of our Democrats to learn that they don’t agree with George.”⁴³

Harry S. Truman accepted instruction quickly. “I do not agree with Kennan,” he assured the press on the day Acheson’s statement appeared. “He is not a policy maker.” He had been a good ambassador, but only when he had Acheson “to tell him what to do.” Conant went further, condemning Kennan’s proposals as “a blueprint for the appeasement of the Soviet Union.” The Washington Post, however, found Acheson’s assault “savage” and “inexplicable,” coming from someone who had himself been the target of unfair attacks: “He seems to regard Mr. Kennan as an adversary scarcely less dangerous than Mr. Khrushchev, and one to be demolished in entirety.” That didn’t faze Acheson, but congratulations from Dulles did. “I am getting too respectable to be safe,” he wrote a friend. “Alice [Acheson] is already suspicious of me. When I got a letter from Foster thanking me for my attack on George Kennan she was about ready to leave me.”⁴⁴

Compliments arrived also from a couple who, had things worked out differently, would have had Kennan as a son-in-law. “Will you send me George Kennan’s skin to hang up as a trophy on my office wall?” Eleanor Hard’s father Bill wrote Acheson after reading his press release. “You took it off him completely.” Anne Hard, who had vetoed the marriage, then added her own reflections:

George, I thought when he was engaged to Eleanor, [had] integrity, and sweetness and kindness and a pedantic mind and I have seen no reason to alter that judgment in following his later career.... I think he is one of