A. The problem at hand is one within our economic, technical and financial capabilities.
B. If we did not take such action, the resulting situation might redound very decidedly to the advantage of our political adversaries.
C. If, on the other hand, we do take the action in question there is good reason to hope that the favorable consequences will carry far beyond the limits of Greece itself.
Anyone trying to concentrate troops everywhere would be dismissed as “a military ignoramus.” Why that should not be true in foreign policy was a mystery. After all, bandwagoning could work both ways. There was “a very fair possibility” that, with a relatively small expenditure of money and effort in Greece and Turkey, “we might turn a critical tide and set in motion counter-currents which would change the entire political atmosphere of Europe to our advantage.”
Such a strategy would depart from decades of isolationism extending back to the Monroe Doctrine. But that pronouncement had not been some “higher truth,” divorced from the circumstances surrounding it: indeed the first drafts of Monroe’s message to Congress in 1823 expressed sympathy—little else was possible at the time—for the Greeks’ campaign for independence from the Ottoman Empire. What was happening now was that the United States was being asked defend principles too long admired only on “the comfortable plane of generality.”
Here we can no longer hide behind language, behind any international pooling of responsibility, or behind that smug sense of disentanglement that animates us whenever we dispense pure charity. Here we have to bite and chew on the bitter truth that in this world you cannot even do good today unless you are prepared to exert your share of power, to take your share of responsibility, to make your share of mistakes, and to assume your share of risks.
Kennan concluded his lecture with what he acknowledged
IV.
Marshall returned from the long and fruitless Moscow foreign ministers’ conference on April 28, 1947, determined to set precedents. During the weeks he had been away, it had become clear to him that the European crisis went well beyond the British withdrawal of aid to Greece and Turkey. The clearest warning had come from Stalin himself: when the secretary of state called on him in the Kremlin, the old dictator assured his guest that he did not see the situation as at all “tragic,” while at the same time doodling wolves on his notepad—a favorite tactic for disconcerting visitors. That was enough for Marshall, who ordered Acheson to get the Policy Planning Staff organized. On the day after his arrival in Washington, Marshall summoned Kennan for their first face-to-face conversation.
Something must be done, he insisted, otherwise others would seize the initiative: “I don’t want to wait for Congress to beat me over the head.” Kennan was to leave the war college immediately, review the whole question of Europe’s future, and tell him “what you think I ought to do.” He would have two weeks. Were there any other assignments? Kennan asked. Marshall’s reply became legendary: “Avoid trivia.” And so, “with this instruction and the weight of the world on my shoulders,” Kennan set to work.30
Neither he nor Marshall nor any other individual invented the Marshall Plan. Its roots went back to the early 1920s, when American bankers, with quiet support from the Harding and Coolidge administrations, had helped to stabilize the post–World War I European economy. Roosevelt’s New Deal expanded the government’s responsibility for the domestic economy, and World War II made this a matter of international security, for if—as the experience of the 1930s strongly suggested—depressions made wars likely, then prosperity would be a prerequisite for peace. By the spring of 1947, however, the institutions designed to revive the global economy—the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank—were faltering. Meanwhile Stalin, tutored by Lenin to expect crises among capitalists, was doodling wolves, waiting for history to follow its prescribed path.31
Calls for action converged from several sources. Marshall himself had discussed the European crisis with his British and French counterparts, Ernest Bevin and Georges Bidault, while still in Moscow. Acheson had a State- War-Navy Coordinating Committee report ready for Marshall upon his return. The secretary of state’s economic advisers made their concerns clear, influenced by alarming reports from their chief, William L. Clayton, who was traveling in Europe. Well-informed columnists, notably James Reston and Walter Lippmann, were writing about the issue; their stories pushed officials who had supplied them with information into acting upon it. What Kennan did was to pull all of these threads together into a coherent policy.32
He did so almost single-handedly: there was no eagerness among Kennan’s Foreign Service colleagues to join the new and as yet vaguely defined Policy Planning Staff. Nor was Acheson always helpful. With no background of his own in economics, Kennan had tried to recruit Paul H. Nitze—later to succeed him as staff director—but Acheson blocked the appointment on the grounds that Nitze was “a Wall Street operator,” not “a long-range thinker.” There was not even, for a while, assigned office space. The State Department was moving from its ornate but cramped quarters next to the White House to a spare but more spacious building—vacated by the War Department when it built the Pentagon—in the “Foggy Bottom” section of Washington. The name, Reston explained to his readers, was “not an intellectual condition but a geographical area down by the Potomac.”33
When the staff formally began its operations, on May 5, it had only two other members: Joseph E. Johnson, a Williams College professor with no plans to remain in government, and Carlton Savage, a longtime aide to former secretary of state Cordell Hull. These were not heavy-hitters. It was under these circumstances, Kennan recalled, that
I was supposed to review the whole great problem of European recovery in all its complexity, to tap those various sources of outside advice which we would never be forgiven for not tapping, to draw up and present to the Secretary the recommendations he wanted, and be prepared to defend these recommendations against all government critics, including ones unavoidably more deeply versed in the details of the subject matter than myself, and ones who could be expected to show no charity or mercy toward a man who came as an invader of their hitherto private bureaucratic premises.
He was staggering “under a terrible burden right now,” George wrote his cousin Charlie James, but he was happy to have the sense “that perhaps I can leave a mark in the conduct of our international business.” This was only the beginning, though, “of a long and hard fight and I think I better not do much talking at this stage.”34
The staff soon grew to include more qualified members: Jacques Reinstein, who supplied the economic expertise Kennan had hoped to get from Nitze; Ware Adams, a Foreign Service officer with a background on German and Austrian issues; Charles (Tick) Bonesteel III, an Army colonel assigned to the State Department who supplied a military perspective; and later that summer, at Kennan’s special request, his former Moscow colleague John Paton Davies, who handled East Asian affairs. Kennan was also fortunate to have Dorothy Hessman follow him into yet another job that generated an “endless torrent of prose.”35
He took three weeks—not two—to propose a response to the European crisis, a pardonable delay given the scale of the problem. On May 23, after many late nights and much anguished discussion, he sent Marshall PPS/1,
