George F. Kennan : an American life

53 GFK interview, September 8, 1983, p. 2; GFK Diary, August 23 and September 7, 1949. See also Hogan, Marshall Plan, pp. 261–62, and, on the policy of supporting the noncommunist left in Europe, Gaddis, Long Peace, pp. 149–52.

54 GFK interviews, August 25, 1982, p. 13, and September 8, 1983, p. 2. See also Hogan, Marshall Plan, pp. 262–64, and Beisner, Dean Acheson, p. 81.

55 GFK Diary, September 26 and 28, 1949.

56 GFK to Messersmith, July 7, 1949, ibid., 140:1. See also Bohlen, Witness to History, p. 288.

57 James E. Webb to C. Ben Wright, October 16, 1975, Wright Papers, Box 1; GFK Diary, September 16 and 19, 1949. See also GFK, Memoirs, I, 465–66.

58 Hickerson to GFK, October 15, 1949, PPS Records, Box 27, “Europe 1949” folder; Bohlen to GFK, October 6, 1949, Bohlen Papers, Box 1, “Correspondence 1946–49: K” folder, National Archives; David Bruce to Acheson, October 22, 1949, in FRUS: 1949, IV, 343. I have purloined portions of this paragraph and the next two from Gaddis, Long Peace, pp. 69–70.

59 GFK to Bohlen, November 7, 1949, GFK Papers, 140:1.

60 Bohlen to GFK, undated but November 1949, ibid.; GFK to Bohlen, November 17, 1949, ibid.

61 GFK Diary, November 19 and 22, 1949.

62 GFK Diary, August 30, September 1–2, 1949; Acheson handwritten comment on GFK to Acheson and Webb, September 2, 1949, PPS Records, Box 33, “Chronological 1949” folder.

63 GFK Diary, October 4, 13, 24, November 7, 1949.

64 Ibid., November 12, 1949.

65 Ibid., November 16 [misdated 15], 1949; GFK to Dodds, December 29, 1949, ibid., 140:1.

66 GFK to Charles James, December 10, 1949, Douglas James Papers.

67 Lovett to Bohlen, October 21, 1949, and Bohlen to Lovett, December 19, 1949, Bohlen Papers, Box 2, “Correspondence 1949–July 1951: L” folder, National Archives; Hoyer Millar to Makins, December 10, 1949, Makins to Hoyer-Millar, December 15, 1949, British Foreign Office Records, FO 371/74160/AN3813; Hoyer-Millar to Makins, December 23, 1949, ibid., FO 371/81614/AU1017/4. See also “Kennan Maps Rest from U.S. Duties,” New York Times, December 11, 1949.

68 Acheson National War College remarks, December 21, 1949, Webb Papers, Box 20 (courtesy of Michael Devine and Sam Rushay); GFK to Acheson, December 21, 1949, Acheson Papers, Box 64, “Memos—conversations December 1949” folder, Truman Library; GFK National War College lecture, “Where Do We Stand?” December 21, 1949, pp. 32–33, GFK Papers, 299:32.

69 Mary Bundy interview, December 6, 1987, p. 10; Acheson National War College remarks, December 21, 1949, Webb Papers, Box 20; Alsop to GFK, December 31, 1949, Joseph and Stewart Alsop Papers, Part 1, General Correspondence, Box 5, “November–December 1949” folder. These paragraphs draw on Beisner, Dean Acheson, especially p. 654, as well as my review of it in New Republic 235 (October 16, 2005), 32.

SIXTEEN ? DISENGAGEMENT: 1950

1 GFK National War College lecture, “Where Do We Stand?” December 21, 1949, GFK Papers, 299:32. The Adams brothers’ prophecies were in Brooks Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy, and in The Education of Henry Adams (completed in 1905), especially p. 494. The Thoreau quotation is from Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, p. 440.

2 GFK to Acheson, July 18, 1946, in FRUS: 1946, I, 864; GFK lecture to the National Defense Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, January 23, 1947, p. 4, GFK Papers, 298:23; question and answer transcript to GFK’s lecture, “Russia’s National Objectives,” at the Air War College, April 10, 1947, pp. 13–14, ibid., 298:32. Kennan’s own account of his early thinking on atomic weapons is in Memoirs, I, 310–12, and in GFK, Nuclear Delusion, pp. xiv–xvi.

3 GFK to McGeorge Bundy, March 14, 1980, GFK Papers, 7:10; GFK untitled lecture to “Selected Leaders of Industry,” January 14, 1948, p. 27, ibid., 299:2; GFK Diary, March 18, 1949.

4 R. Gordon Arneson memorandum, “Tripartite Negotiations Chronology,” undated, in FRUS: 1949, I, 506–7. The Joint Chiefs of Staff report, “Evaluation of Effect on Soviet War Effort Resulting from the Strategic Air Offensive,” May 11, 1949, is excerpted in Etzold and Gaddis, Containment, pp. 360–64. Nuclear stockpile figures are from Norris and Kristensen, “Nuclear Notebook,” p. 66. For GFK’s lack of access to this information, see Bundy, Danger and Survival, p. 201.

5 PPS/58, “Political Implications of Detonation of an Atomic Bomb by the U.S.S.R.,” August 16, 1949, in PPS Papers: 1949, pp. 122–23; GFK to JLG, October 1, 1993, JLG Papers.

6 GFK Diary, September 13, 19, 20, 23, 24, 1949.

7 Ibid., September 27, 1949; Rhodes, Dark Sun, pp. 374–77. Botti, Long Wait, pp. 1–64, covers the history of these negotiations. For the significance of Fuchs’s espionage for the Soviet bomb project, see Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, pp. 220–23.

8 Rhodes, Dark Sun, pp. 252–54, 374–75, 381. In fact, the Soviet Union had been working on its own “super” since 1946. See Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, p. 295.

9 PPS minutes, November 3, 1949, in FRUS: 1949, I, 573–76; Beisner, Dean Acheson, p. 230. See also GFK Diary, October 12, 1949, GFK Papers, 231:18. GFK’s meeting that day was with “Eisenhower’s colonels,” a group of officers recruited by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, now the president of Columbia University but still a consultant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for the purpose of thinking about national security issues on a five- to ten-year time scale.