George F. Kennan : an American life

Turkey was different. Its strategic importance was obvious, but the Turks had staunchly resisted Soviet pressures. They had turned their country into a bowling ball without holes, leaving Moscow looking in vain for a grip. If they kept their nerve, “it is going to be awfully hard for the Russians to find a pretext for monkey business there.” The same was true in the Middle East: was it really likely, given the region’s psychology and its “patriarchal” system, that the Soviet Union could take it over? And then there were regions “where you could perfectly well let people fall prey to totalitarian domination without any tragic consequences for world peace in general.” China was one: feeding it, clothing it, and resolving its social problems would probably be “beyond the resources of the whole world put together.”¹⁷

Kennan, thus, dismantled the Truman Doctrine immediately after the president proclaimed it—a risky move, one might think, for a new policy planner. Again, though, the agile Acheson was ahead of him: he had quietly assured congressional leaders the day after Truman spoke that the United States would act only in areas “where our help can be effective in resisting [Soviet] penetration.” So why the grandiose rhetoric in the first place? Kennan concluded years later that the Truman Doctrine reflected an American urge “to seek universal formulae or doctrines in which to clothe and justify particular actions.” It seemed not to have occurred to anyone that the better approach might be simply “to let the President, or the Secretary of State, use his head.”¹⁸

But democracies never allow their leaders the total freedom to use their heads. “He really had a childlike quality in such matters,” Dean Rusk, who would later become secretary of state, recalled of Kennan. “He was an elitist.... He took the view that the function of Congress was to keep the public off the backs of the foreign policy professionals.” Administrations have to act within boundaries, and the Truman Doctrine was meant to expand those that existed at the time. Its purpose was not simply to frighten Congress into aiding Greece and Turkey, although it had that effect and was meant to. It also set a goal for the future, however unattainable it might for the moment be. It was the geopolitical equivalent of a navigational beacon, pointing the way toward a destination beyond the visible horizon. Machiavelli would have approved: four centuries earlier he had advised his prince to follow the example of “prudent archers” who, “knowing how far the strength of their bow carries, . . . set their aim much higher than the place intended, not to reach such height with their arrow, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to achieve their plan.” Acheson’s arrow flew right over Kennan, but as a policy planner he would benefit from its trajectory, nonetheless.¹⁹

II.

On March 7, 1947—the day Armstrong agreed to publish Kennan anonymously in Foreign Affairs—Acheson, now acting secretary of state, formally asked the National War College to find a new deputy commandant for foreign affairs. Having authorized the creation of a “planning board,” Marshall had found Kennan to be “by far the best qualified man in our Service to fill the top post.” Appropriately, Kennan was lecturing that day on his 1943 Azores bases experience. He had chosen the case, he told his students, because it provided “a rather striking test-tube example” of the dangers that could come from lack of coordination within the government.²⁰

No date was set for Kennan’s return to the State Department, so he continued to teach while helping shape the policy Truman had set in motion. The Foreign Affairs article, never a top priority, now became less of one: having agreed to do it, Kennan lacked the time to write anything new. Armstrong had anticipated this when he suggested the Yale lecture as a suitable text, but Kennan had recently finished another essay he thought would work better. He had written it for Forrestal, whom Kennan remembered “as a man of burning, tireless energy, determined . . . to take both time and problems by the forelock.” One of the first Washington officials to sound the alarm about Soviet behavior, he had been “much concerned that we should get to the bottom of this problem as soon as possible and find out what it was we were dealing with.”²¹

Forrestal’s first guide had been Edward F. Willett, a Smith College professor who had sent him an analysis of “Dialectical Materialism and Russian Objectives” several weeks before Kennan’s “long telegram” arrived. The Navy secretary found Willett’s essay impressive and shared it widely. Kennan, however, thought it abstract and alarmist, and when Forrestal asked for his opinion on Willett, Kennan dodged the request, offering instead his own ideas. They took the form of a six-thousand-word paper on the “Psychological Background of Soviet Foreign Policy,” forwarded to Forrestal at the end of January 1947. Forrestal acknowledged it on February 17 as “extremely well- done,” and promised to pass it on to Marshall. It was safe to assume that the distribution would not stop there.²²

“Now that [the] article has been noted in official circles,” Kennan asked one of Forrestal’s aides on March 10, would the Navy secretary object to its being published anonymously in Foreign Affairs? Forrestal did not, and on April 8 the State Department’s Committee on Unofficial Publications also approved the plan. “I then crossed out my own name in the signature of the article, replaced it with an ‘X’ to assure the anonymity, sent it on to Mr. Armstrong, and thought no more about it.” Kennan made only a few handwritten corrections in the text. He also suggested a note, which Armstrong chose not to use: “The author of this article is one who has had long experience with Russian affairs, both practically and academically, but whose position makes it impossible for him to write about them under his own name.”²³

Kennan’s essay was much less casual than its publication arrangements. He began it, as he had the “long telegram,” with an explanation of how Marxism-Leninism shaped the beliefs and behavior of Soviet leaders. But ideology was now no longer just the “fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability”: it was also the “pseudo-scientific justification” by which Stalin and his subordinates clung to power despite their failure to find popular support at home or to overthrow capitalism elsewhere. Convinced that they alone knew what was good for society, they recognized “no restrictions, either of God or man, on the character of their methods.” That meant, paradoxically, that they could never be secure, because their “aggressive intransigence” had already provoked a backlash: the Kremlin leaders were finding it necessary, in Gibbon’s phrase, “to chastise the contumacy” their own actions had generated. “It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy,” Kennan reminded his readers, “for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.”

“Canonized” by the excesses it had committed, the Soviet system could not now dispense with its own infallibility. Stalin would always be right, for if truth were ever found to reside elsewhere, no basis would remain for his rule. As a result,

the leadership is at liberty to put forward for tactical purposes any particular thesis which it finds useful to the cause at any particular moment and to require the faithful and unquestioning acceptance of that thesis by the members of the movement as a whole. This means that truth is not a constant but is actually created, for all intents and purposes, by the Soviet leaders themselves.

With the party line prescribed, the Soviet governmental machine “moves inexorably along the prescribed path, like a persistent toy automobile wound up and headed in a given direction, stopping only when it meets with some unanswerable force.” People within this system would not respond to persuasion from the outside sources. “Like the white dog before the phonograph, they hear only ‘the master’s voice.’ ”

It followed that the Russians would be difficult to deal with for a long time to come. It did not follow, though, that they had “embarked upon a do-or-die program to overthrow our society by a given date. The theory of the inevitability of the eventual fall of capitalism has the fortunate connotation that there is no hurry about it.” Like the church, the Kremlin could afford to wait. It would retreat in the face of superior force: “Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power.” That made Stalin’s