people in this country.” Russia—“mysterious and inviting, with just enough of wickedness and brutality to complete the allure”—was easier to talk about than the problems of race, slums, and labor unions at home. Having been told so often that only cooperation with Moscow could ensure peace, it was a shock for them to hear that peace would be possible “only through a long, unpleasant process of setting will against will, force against force, idea against idea.”
Professors were also difficult, because many of them had taken positions in public that were not in accord with what Kennan had to say. Their reputations were at stake, their pride was affected, they had made “rosy forecasts” in the hope of enhancing “their own glamour, prestige and importance.” The tendency showed up most clearly in California, where university faculties also seemed to have “a geographical inferiority complex,” resentful of the fact that foreign policy was still an East Coast product, confident that if given the chance they could handle it better, convinced that the future lay as much with countries bordering the Pacific as the Atlantic, certain that the Soviet Union, especially Siberia, fell within that realm.
Two West Coast groups particularly aroused Kennan’s concern. One was atomic scientists at Berkeley, who seemed to have “an unshakeable faith” that if they could only meet Soviet scientists and enlighten them about atomic weapons, all would be well. It had not occurred to them that, far from frightening Kremlin leaders, the bomb’s destructive potential might “whet their desire to find a way of using it.” Kennan also worried about San Francisco intellectuals, among whom he saw signs of communist activity: “I have been connected with Russian affairs for too many years not to know the real thing when I see it.” Everything he said, he was sure, was dutifully reported to the Soviet consul. (Kennan was right about this. A summary of his San Francisco remarks went off to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow on August 28.) Nothing he said was confidential, but if the State Department intended to send speakers on more sensitive topics, “it had better exercise some check on who is admitted to the meetings.”
By the time Kennan reached Los Angeles, another intelligence organization, without his knowledge, was tracking his movements. The local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that a “Mr. George Kennan,” whose name had appeared in left-wing publications in connection with activities taking place at the U.S. embassy in the Soviet Union, was soon to speak in that city. Did FBI headquarters wish “to ascertain the nature of his lecture”? J. Edgar Hoover’s office failed to respond, so an agent took it upon himself to attend Kennan’s talk on August 9, after which he sent in seven pages of notes and apologized for having earlier misspelled the speaker’s name, which should be “Kennon.” This did elicit a crisp reply: “For your information, George Frost Kennan has held many positions in the foreign service of the State Department, ... is considered a foremost authority on Russian affairs, and his recent assignment to Moscow furnished considerable basis for our present foreign policy.”
Kennan ended his trip report with an affectionate tribute to his Gettysburg neighbors, who had come to his lecture “unencumbered—bless their hearts—by any pretensions to knowledge of the subject or by any inordinate sense of responsibility about it.” He had been warned that they might drift off, but this did not happen. They asked few questions, because they were shy, unaccustomed to that sort of thing, and “they don’t think that fast.” But they were “probably the most representative—and for that reason the most important—of the people I reached.”
The speaking tour, Kennan concluded, had been “generally successful,” in that he had been able to convey “a clearer, more realistic, less extreme and less alarmist view of Soviet-American relations” than his audiences had previously been exposed to, as well as “a greater confidence in the sincerity and soundness of the State Department.” Decades later he explained what he meant. He had found, on returning from Moscow, that if he warned people “that we couldn’t have the sort of collaboration we’d hoped for with the Russians,” this would cause them to conclude: “Well, then, war is inevitable.” So he had tried to say, on his trip, just the opposite: “You don’t have to have a war. Just don’t let them—if you can help it—expand their influence any further.”29
“Boy, you missed your calling,” a Milwaukee minister told Kennan after hearing him in his hometown. The tour showed that he could speak extemporaneously to diverse audiences, that he enjoyed doing so, and that he would like to keep it up. Perhaps it might be possible, he wrote Acheson, “for someone who, like myself, is not too far from the Department of State and at the same time not too near it, to accomplish something valuable.” Acheson readily agreed: “I would like to have you accept as many invitations to speak as you can.... I appreciate the extra burden your generous offer places on you; nevertheless, I hasten to take advantage of it.”30
V.
The National War College welcomed its first class, made up of forty-five Army and Army Air Force colonels, forty-five Navy captains, and ten State Department and Foreign Service officers, on September 3, 1946, a year and a day after the Japanese surrender. Vice Admiral Harry W. Hill, the commandant, warned the students that their wartime experiences would bear little relevance to what they would be studying: the atomic bomb might well require “a complete reorientation of old ideas.” It was important, therefore, “that you keep your minds flexible.” The purpose of the new institution,
The students attended the same lectures and worked on the same problems, regardless of the positions they held or the uniforms they wore. They would graduate not only with “mutual respect and understanding,” Kennan explained, “but also a common approach to the major problems of our country in the field of foreign affairs.” Future leaders rubbed elbows with current leaders, who frequently visited. Navy Secretary Forrestal, who had helped to establish the college, came most often, but “[o]ther officers of Cabinet rank, generals, and Senators sat at our feet as we lectured.” The college became an “academic seminar for the higher echelons of governmental Washington generally.”32
“Gentlemen; Admiral Hill. The question we have to consider this morning is a question of the relations between sovereign governments, and it pertains to the measures that they employ when they deal with each other for the main purposes for which states have to deal with each other.” That is how Kennan began his first lecture on September 16, 1946, prosaically titled “Measures Short of War (Diplomatic).” On stage alongside him was a chart listing “Diplomatic Measures of Adjustment for the Redress of Grievances or for the Pacific Settlement of Disputes.” There is no way to know how many inadequately caffeinated students—or policy makers—came close to dozing off at that point, but they soon woke up. For within five minutes Kennan had tossed traditional methods of conflict resolution onto a historical ash-heap.
Great-power clashes in the contemporary world, he insisted, did not take place within any agreed-upon framework of international law: rather, they pitted democracies against totalitarians prepared to employ “varieties of skullduggery ... as unlimited as human ingenuity itself, and just about as unpleasant.” These included “persuasion, intimidation, deceit, corruption, penetration, subversion, horse-trading, bluffing, psychological pressure, economic pressure, seduction, blackmail, theft, fraud, rape, battle, murder, and sudden death. Don’t mistake that for a complete list.” Restrained “by no moral inhibitions, by no domestic public opinion to speak of and not even by any serious considerations of consistency and intellectual dignity,” states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were limited only by “their own estimate of the consequences to themselves of the adoption of a given measure.”
That left the question, then, of whether democracies could deal with such states by any means other than all-
