out war. Kennan had no definitive answer: the course they were taking, he reminded the students, was meant to develop one. But he did have suggestions, the first of which echoed Clausewitz. It was that psychology could itself become a strategy. The past decade had made it clear that everything the United States did produced psychological effects internationally. There had been no sustained effort, though, to tie these together in such a way as to serve a purpose.
Another suggestion had to do with economics, because democracies for the foreseeable future—he meant chiefly the United States—would possess a disproportionate share of the world’s productive capacity. Given the Soviet Union’s reliance on autarchy, that advantage might not produce immediate benefits, but the students should consider its cumulative effect “when exercised over a long period of time and in a wise way.” It could be especially useful among satellites with little to gain from Soviet domination: economic pressure might well provoke “discontent, trouble, and dissension within the totalitarian world.”
Finally the students should not neglect an important political weapon, which was “the cultivation of solidarity with other like minded nations.” In this respect, Kennan acknowledged, the United Nations had been more helpful than he had expected, because it provided a way to connect power with morality. Without that link, competition over spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and the Near East might have come across simply as power politics. With it, the United States had been able “to build up a record for good faith which it is hard for anyone to challenge.”
Each of these “measures short of war” fell within the realm of international affairs, which must now embrace all forms of power, even military capabilities: “You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.” Power, in turn, reflected the nation wielding it: “We are no stronger than the country we represent.” Hence no one could afford indifference “to internal disharmony, dissension, intolerance and the things that break up the real moral and political structure of our society at home.” Integrating force with foreign policy did not mean “blustering, threatening, waving clubs at people and telling them if they don’t do this or that we are going to drop a bomb on them.” But it did mean maintaining “a preponderance of strength” among the democracies: this was “the most peaceful of all the measures we can take short of war because the greater your strength, the less likelihood that you are ever going to use it.”
What was required, therefore, was coordination across each of the categories of available power: “We must work out a general plan of what the United States wants in this world and we must go after that with all the measures at our disposal, depending on what is indicated by the circumstances.” The nation needed in peacetime a “grand strategy no less concrete and no less consistent than that which governs our actions in war.” If applied wisely, then “these measures short of war will be all the ones that we will ever have to use to secure the prosperous and safe future of the people in this country.”
Kennan finished with that but got a tough first question: was it possible for the United States to have a grand strategy? “[W]e don’t aspire to anything particularly except what we have; [so] what, mainly can our grand strategy consist of ?” The point was well taken, Kennan acknowledged. “What has the United States got really to offer to other people?” Thinking quickly, he improvised an answer that raised a larger question:
[W]e have freedom of elections, freedom of speech, freedom to live out your life politically; but a great many people in this world would say that is not enough; we are tired; we are hungry; we are bewildered; to hell with freedom to elect somebody; to hell with freedom of speech; what we want is to be shown the way; we want to be guided. [You] don’t believe in abstract freedom but only in freedom from something or freedom to something; and what is it you are showing us the freedom to?
Kennan would not attempt a reply. “I am going to let you try to think it out for yourself. I am still trying to think it out.” But he did offer a place to start: “Perhaps it is better that we don’t come to people with pat answers but say, instead, ‘You will have to solve your own problems, we are only trying to give you the breaks.’ ”33
It’s unlikely that anyone dozed, therefore, through Kennan’s opening National War College lecture. It redefined international relations in an ideological age, it assessed totalitarian strengths and weaknesses, it sketched out democratic responses, it stressed the multiple forms that power can assume, it called for diplomacy to become grand strategy, and it concluded with Kennan’s imaginative leap into the minds of those for whose allegiance the United States and the Soviet Union would be competing. It was a satisfactory start, not least because of the work it left for his students—and for Kennan himself—still to do.
VI.
Kennan had long liked the idea of becoming a teacher. He had regularly raised it with Jeanette as an alternative to the Foreign Service, and his Bad Nauheim lectures had revealed unexpected pedagogical skills. That was hardly the ideal environment, though: the war college came closer. “I am enjoying the work very much,” George wrote Kent early in October. “It is the first time in years that I have been relatively free from administrative duties and able to give a good portion of my time to purely intellectual pursuits.” He was supervising four civilian professors— one was Brodie, on leave from Yale—while giving occasional lectures and listening to many more. He was consulting on foreign policy in Washington and speaking to audiences elsewhere, as Acheson had encouraged him to do. He was getting, from all of this, a stimulus, as well as a degree of appreciation, “which I haven’t experienced anywhere else. In consequence, I feel quite bucked up.” Dorothy Hessman, who had followed Kennan from Moscow, thought the situation ideal for him: “There was no ambassador or Secretary to say ‘he can’t say that.’ ”34
By his count, Kennan composed seventeen lectures or articles, each about the length of the “long telegram,” between September 1946 and May 1947: the list did not include occasions on which he spoke extemporaneously or from rough notes. He gave most of the lectures at the National War College but also spoke at the Naval and Air War Colleges, at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania (where the Army War College would soon relocate), at Yale, Princeton, Virginia, Williams, at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association, and—as it turned out, famously—at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The indefatigable Hessman kept up, typing as many as three drafts for some of the lectures while managing a proliferating correspondence. This “veritable outpouring of literary and forensic effort” was meant to educate audiences on the nature of the postwar world and what the American response to it should be; but like all good teachers, Kennan was also educating himself along the way.35
His chief concern, in the fall of 1946, was still that too few Americans saw anything between diplomacy and war: if the first failed, the second must follow. Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt’s former vice president, now Truman’s secretary of commerce and a leading Democratic Party liberal, dramatized the polarity in a New York speech on September 12, warning that “ ‘[g]etting tough’ never bought anything—whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers. The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.” The president, he insisted, had read his speech and agreed with it. A confused week followed, at the end of which Truman made it clear that he did not agree and demanded Wallace’s resignation. Everywhere he went, Kennan complained while the controversy was still raging, “I find people with their faces buried in their hands and an air of tragedy about them saying collaboration with Russia has proved to be impossible and, therefore, all is lost.” When would the war start?36
Kennan used his first appearance before a university audience—an off-the-record lecture at Yale’s Institute of International Studies on October 1—to take on Wallace. The result was an evisceration, arguably unnecessary since the target by then had largely eviscerated himself. The talk was a response, though, not just to Wallace but to a
