heard this once too often: “I am constantly being told that ‘people like George Kennan’ should give the boys the low-down about Russia,” he grumbled. “Unfortunately there is only one George Kennan.”9
Certainly there was only one Acheson. Trained as a lawyer, the dapper, defiantly mustachioed under secretary of state had surprisingly little foreign policy experience when Truman appointed him to that position in August 1945. Preoccupied at first with the international control of atomic energy, Acheson had been one of the last of the president’s top advisers—apart from Wallace himself—to give up on postwar cooperation with the U.S.S.R. Kennan’s “long telegram,” Acheson later acknowledged, had had a “deep effect on thinking within the Government,” but it made little impression on him. When Acheson did finally change his mind about Stalin’s intentions, in August 1946, he did so for different reasons, totally and almost overnight.
The provocation was Soviet demands on Turkey for boundary concessions and bases in the Dardanelles. Stalin backed down when Truman sent the Sixth Fleet into the eastern Mediterranean, but Acheson did not back off. The crisis, however belatedly, caused him to connect dots: he suddenly saw how Soviet ambitions, American complacency, and British weakness might combine to upset the balance of power in Europe. Acheson went from assuming the best to suspecting the worst: it was shortly after that he began encouraging Kennan to speak openly about the Soviet danger. His “predictions and warnings could not have been better,” Acheson later acknowledged. “We [had] responded to them slowly.”
But Kennan’s recommendations for American policy had been “of no help.” They amounted to exhortations “to be of good heart, to look out for our own social and economic health, to present a good face to the world, all of which the Government was trying to do.” Composed in the 1960s after he and Kennan had disagreed about many things, Acheson’s complaint may not have reflected what he thought in 1947. His contemporary comments, however, mix respect for Kennan with just enough acidity to suggest that one of the things about which Acheson was unclear, regarding the planning staff job, was whether the Soviet expert that Kennan had been could function equally successfully as the policy adviser Marshall wanted him to become.10
The question became more than hypothetical on February 21, when the British embassy informed the State Department that the British government, staggering under the burdens of postwar recovery and beset by one of the worst winters ever, could no longer provide military and economic assistance to Greece and Turkey. The news shocked Truman and most of his advisers, but Acheson had seen it coming and was ready with a response. A Foreign Office official caught its substance when he reported a growing conviction in Washington “that no time must be lost in plucking the torch of world leadership from our chilling hands.” With Marshall new in his job and about to depart for Moscow, Acheson took the lead in determining how this might be done. And on February 24 he brought Kennan—still at the war college—into the planning process.11
The forum was a committee convened that day under Henderson’s chairmanship to draft recommendations for the president and the secretary of state. Kennan remembered arguing that the United States had to replace the aid the British would now be withholding: “I returned to my home late that evening with the simulating impression of having participated prominently in a historic decision of American foreign policy.” But the minutes of the meeting failed to record his remarks, and Kennan later learned that Truman, Marshall, and Acheson had already decided to extend assistance. “If, on this occasion, I somewhat overrated the effectiveness of my own voice, it would not be the last time that egotism, and the attention my words seemed often to attract on the part of startled colleagues, would deceive me as to the measure of my real influence on the process of decision-taking.”12
The problem now was to defend this departure from traditional noninvolve-ment in European affairs before Congress and the American people. Acheson improvised a solution at a meeting with the president and congressional leaders on February 27 after Marshall—never rhetorically adept—fumbled his own presentation. The world was now divided into two hostile camps, Acheson warned, a situation unprecedented since the days of Rome and Carthage. If Greek communists, with Soviet support, won the civil war the British had so far kept them from winning, the infection—like the rot from bad apples in a barrel—could spread from Iran in the east to France and Italy in the West, with devastating consequences for American interests. The Soviet Union was poised to reap great gains at minimal costs. Only the United States stood in the way.13
That shook the skeptical legislators, and by early March drafts of a presidential speech were circulating justifying aid for both Greece and Turkey in terms of an American obligation to secure “a world of free peoples” against the imposition of dictatorships “whether fascist, nazi, communist, or of any other form.” Kennan read one of these on the sixth and objected to it strongly: “What I saw made me extremely unhappy.” He favored assisting Greece but not Turkey, where there was no civil war. He worried about provoking the Soviet Union, whose ambitions in the region he thought were limited. And why should a crisis in a single country become the occasion for an open-ended commitment to resist oppression everywhere? After complaining to Henderson and Acheson, Kennan produced a less sweeping draft and waited to see what the results would be.14
Two nights later the Achesons hosted a dinner party. The Kennans attended, as did David Lilienthal, still chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and one of the best diarists in Washington. Having read and been much struck by the “long telegram” a year earlier, he was meeting Kennan for the first time:
A quiet, rather academic-looking fellow.... Bald, slight, not impressive except for his eyes which are most unusual: large, intense, wide-set.... He is the first man I have talked to about Russia who seems to have the facts that support my essential thesis: that Communism isn’t what Russia stands for; it is rather simply a political machine with vested interests.
Acheson was anything but quiet that evening: “Dean spent a good deal of the time bubbling over with enthusiasm, rapture almost, about General Marshall,” who had entrusted him with “a historic change in American policy.” Kennan, however, was uneasy, brooding about how to aid the Greeks without their resenting it, anxious that Truman not play up the affair too much, “so that prestige isn’t too deeply involved.” It had been a particularly good moment, Lilienthal concluded, “to have an evening’s talk with these two men.”15
But Truman played up Greece—and Turkey—for all they were worth when he addressed Congress on March 12: the choice the world faced, he insisted, was between governments based on the will of the majority and those that denied it. In what quickly became known as the Truman Doctrine, the president announced “that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Achesonian hyperbole had prevailed, while Kennan’s cautions had been ignored. He had approached the edge of policy making at a critical moment, but had got no further.16
Kennan consoled himself by rewriting the president’s speech two days later in a war college lecture. The need to act did often leave little time to think, he reminded the students: “You have to take a deep breath and decide, for better or for worse.” Truman had decided to ensure that people who wished to achieve national security “are not deprived of the possibility of doing so through lack of our support, when the measure of that support is within reasonable limits.” This final qualification, however, was Kennan’s, not Truman’s.
Greece, Kennan thought, lay within American capabilities. It was small but accessible, and the amount the president had asked for—$400 million—was roughly what New Yorkers spent on consumer goods in a single day. The stakes were high, though, because reports indicated “that unless something was done to instill confidence in us” among the Greeks, “there would be no halting of the advance of Communism in that country, not because people wanted it but because they are hungry, they are tired, they haven’t anything, ... [t]hey are afraid.” Without some hope, they would reluctantly make peace with the other side, and so might desperate people elsewhere in Europe. If that happened, the Soviet Union would not need to mount a military invasion: it would instead work through “subterranean penetration” to make it look as though communism were taking hold spontaneously.
