George F. Kennan : an American life

no concern about Berlin lying within the region the Russians would control. Kennan was relieved to have the confusion cleared up but irate that it had again fallen to him to do it. “Why it should have been left to a junior officer such as myself to jeopardize his own career by going directly to the president on these two separate occasions— why the Department of State could not have taken upon itself this minimal responsibility—was a mystery to me at that time.” It remained so when Kennan wrote that passage in his memoirs more than two decades later.⁴³

Apart from their speed, one of the few benefits of long, uncomfortable transatlantic flights—Kennan took seven between September 1942 and March 1944—was that they allowed time to read: the noise level made conversation impossible. So his traveling companion was Edward Gibbon. It’s not clear how much of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he got through, but it was enough to influence his thinking on the problems of occupying the territories of defeated adversaries. One passage particularly stuck in his mind. “It is incumbent on the authors of persecution,” Gibbon had written, “to reflect whether they are determined to support it in the last extreme.” If they did so, they risked “excit[ing] the flame which they strive to extinguish; and it soon becomes necessary to chastise the contumacy, as well as the crime, of the offender.”⁴⁴

That, Kennan believed, was what the policy of unconditional surrender, agreed upon by Roosevelt and Churchill at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, was likely to do. It suggested no concern over “the amount of responsibility we are assuming in Germany.” It reflected “no desire, and no real plan, for acquiring allies and helpers among the German people.” It implied taking the harshest measures possible “short of actual physical extermination.” It would demand “a ruthlessness now foreign to our troops,” giving them “the worst possible lessons in the practices of government.” And, he added, “[i]t will certainly require, to be successful, a far greater degree of unity of purpose and method than can conceivably be achieved at this time between the Russians and ourselves.”⁴⁵

So what to do? “We must keep quite separate in our minds our program for the treatment of Germany, and the type of surrender document we want. The latter should serve the former.” That meant focusing on the military defeat of Germany, the removal and punishment of “the most conspicuous and notorious Nazi leaders,” and the elimination “of all possibility for further oppression and aggression.” It did not mean thorough denazification:

There is no thornier or more thankless task . . . than that of trying to probe into the political records and motives of masses of individuals in a foreign country. It is impossible to avoid injustices, errors, and resentment. It involves the maintenance of a huge, and necessarily unpopular, investigative apparatus.... We will eventually get caught up in a round of denunciation, confusion, and disunity from which none but the Germans would stand to profit.

Such an approach would leave no Germans running the country, for “[w]hether we like it or not, nine-tenths of what is strong, able, and respected in Germany has been poured into those very categories which we have in mind.”

Leaving some Nazis in power would not be popular. But the German resistance to Hitler had shown itself to be weak and disorganized, and even if it were stronger, “the worst service we could render to the liberal and democratic elements in Germany would be to saddle them with public responsibility at the moment of catastrophe and humiliation.” Far better, then, to let lesser Nazis bear that burden under restrictions the Allies imposed and leave the German people eventually to kick them out. That would be “a profoundly democratic approach.”

The fundamental American interest in Germany, Kennan concluded in a memorandum he sent Admiral Leahy at the White House, was “to see that no European power acquires the possibility of using Europe’s resources to conduct aggression outside the continent of Europe.” In a broader sense, it was also an American objective “to see that western Europe survives and prospers as a major cultural force in the world.” This would require “patient, persistent and intelligent” efforts over a considerable period of time, with the goal of achieving “the maximum degree of federation in Europe.” That, in turn, would depend upon enlisting German resources in the rehabilitation of European life. And what if the Soviet Union—also an occupier of Germany—should disagree? In that case, “we will be right and they will be wrong, and we will have to find ways of persuading them to accept our view.”⁴⁶

Kennan unburdened himself, while in Washington, to his fellow Soviet expert Bohlen, an increasingly influential adviser to Roosevelt and Hopkins, now back from his own internment in Japan: “Chip was very distressed if I didn’t agree with him, and viewed it almost as a betrayal.” He always seemed to be defending “what the Department did, what the government did.” Bohlen pointed out that “we didn’t have the tradition of fighting a war with an eye on the future.” Kennan, not reassured, was sure that demanding unconditional surrender was dangerous, putting “too much weight on our future relationship with the Soviet Union. We ought to keep our hands free.” For what? Bohlen wondered: “We’ve always wanted to win like a boxing match and get the hell out.” The two friends tried to convince each other through most of the night. Kennan went home weeping with anguish. “I suppose, in a way, I loved him like a brother, . . . and this is why we argued so.”⁴⁷

Service on the European Advisory Commission confirmed Kennan’s conviction that the U.S. government was woefully deficient at grand strategy, if by that term one meant the ability to coordinate all available means with fundamental policy ends. Military planners were not qualified to take political considerations into account; but the Department of State—which was qualified—refused to take that responsibility. Strategy was emerging, then, from a confusing mix of competing initiatives, false starts, wasted energy, and as he himself had experienced, emergency appeals to the president himself. It was indeed a hell of a way to run the state that was likely to be running the postwar world. In thinking about these problems, Kennan found himself deriving lessons from the running of other worlds; hence his airborne interest in ancient Rome. He had no position yet in which he could apply this approach, which echoed his argument in the Bad Nauheim lectures that the study of history was the most reliable guide to the making of policy. But one would soon come.

VII.

“Mostly, I was unaware of the war that raged around us,” Joan recalled of the two years she spent in Portugal. “We took in some refugee Jewish children for a while, but I didn’t know anything about Hitler’s campaign against the Jews.” Only seven at the time, though, “I must have understood something.” One day, while the family was picnicking, some airplanes flew over. George and Annelise exchanged uneasy glances, enough for Joan to ask: “Are those German bombers?”

Her parents carefully kept whatever marital problems they were having from her, “[b]ut there are always little clues that children pick up.” One day “[m]y mother threw something at my father, either a vase or a lamp. Naturally, this made an impression.” Whether for this reason or not, Annelise and the children spent the Christmas of 1943 in Lisbon without George, who had flown back to Washington for the initial consultations on his EAC assignment: “Terribly disappointing,” she cabled him, but “[w]ill carry on in the best tradition.” He then went directly to London, where Annelise joined him: Joan realized only later how “blissfully ignorant” she had been of the danger they faced from the continuing German bombing of the city.⁴⁸

Soon the stress he was under caused George’s ulcer to flare up again, forcing a brief hospitalization in January. While he was back in Washington at the end of March, Navy doctors advised him “to discontinue all work for a period of time.” Having received this news with “what I suspect to have been some relief,” the State Department “urged me to make the vacation a good long one, and assured me that I had no need to worry further about the affairs of the EAC—another officer would be sent at once to take my place.”⁴⁹