regard to whether American interests were at stake or the means existed with which to defend them. Unfortunately for Kennan, however, the literary arrow he had shot into the air before he had even heard of the Truman Doctrine or the Marshall Plan was now, in the wake of Marshall’s speech, about to make its unexpected impact.
V.
The State Department announced the Policy Planning Staff ’s establishment, along with Kennan’s appointment as its director, on May 7. He combined “great strength of character, not to say toughness, with high-minded idealism,” Jock Balfour informed London, but this was “tempered by a healthy respect for the practicability of any given course.” Kennan had thought the Truman Doctrine an “unnecessary and perhaps even dangerous” overdramatization of the need to aid Greece and Turkey. He knew a great deal about the Soviet Union but had not “given way to the hysteria which colours the views of so many of his countrymen.” Balfour even reported on the Kennans’ living arrangements: he would continue some lecturing at the National War College because his family wanted to hang on to the house it provided for as long as possible.41
Kennan became even more visible a few weeks later when the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop ran the first public story on the “long telegram,” identifying him as its author. It was, they claimed, highly significant that Marshall had given this new responsibility to the man who had produced “the most important single state paper on the Soviet Union.” Worried that the still-secret document had leaked, Kennan hastened to assure Acheson that he had not been the source. He pointed out, however, that the telegram contained little “which has not subsequently been stated as American policy on many occasions and by many other people.”42
“Keep an eye on George F. Kennan,” The Christian Science Monitor advised its readers a few days after the Alsops’ column appeared. United States News ran a brief biography stressing Kennan’s qualifications for the new job and noting—inaccurately—that while serving in Moscow, he had organized a dance band called “Kennan’s Kampus Kids.” He was “tall, lean, smooth-shaven and bald,” The Baltimore Sun reported early in June, alongside an improbable photograph from the 1920s showing an anxious young man with a full head of hair. Meanwhile, the Policy Planning Staff was posing for The Washington Post. Its photograph showed an older and more confident Kennan, elegant in a three-piece suit, leaning back in his chair with his chin in one hand and a pen in the other, legs crossed, a notepad balanced on his knee, as if waiting. The staff, journalist Ferdinand Kuhn noted, was as new and as sensible as the air-conditioned Virginia Avenue building where the State Department now had its headquarters. Its members would operate with a “passion for anonymity.”43
That was the intention, but late in June the July issue of Foreign Affairs came out. With its somber cover and stolid contents, the quarterly made no effort to reach a mass audience: it cost $1.25 a copy, a lot in 1947, and its circulation was just over 19,000. There were articles that month on peacemaking, trade charters, international law, self-government in U.S. territories, Latin American population problems, and the Dutch-Belgian economic union. These raised few eyebrows, but one that did—at least in Moscow—was an essay by Yevgeny Varga, one of Stalin’s economic advisers, that cited the Greek-Turkish crisis and the Truman Doctrine as evidence that Washington and London were cooperating to preserve capitalism. Varga seemed to be challenging Leninist orthodoxy about capitalist contradictions, and he got into trouble at home for having done so. Immediately preceding his article was one that made no reference at all to those recent events. Its title was “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” and its author was listed, without explanation, as “X.”44
No one paid much attention until July 8, when New York Times columnist Arthur Krock pointed out that its argument was “exactly that adopted by the American government after appeasement of the Kremlin proved a failure.” Obviously the author had studied the Soviet Union for years “at the closest range possible for a foreigner.” His analysis had been so accurate that the State Department had used it to predict how Molotov would respond, at the Paris conference the previous week, to the American offer of Marshall Plan aid. The views of “X,” Krock concluded, “closely resemble those marked ‘Top Secret’ in several official files in Washington .”45
This set off a scramble for copies of Foreign Affairs. Krock had not named Kennan, but he knew who he was writing about because Forrestal had let him see the draft, with Kennan’s name still on it, that had gone to Armstrong. By the end of the day, the United Press was reporting “X” ’s identity: the tip-off was not just the argument but also the prose. “If Kennan didn’t write that article,” one diplomat commented, then it was done by someone who could “imitate his writing style.” No one else, Hessman later confirmed, would have quoted from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. The State Department did not deny the rumor, and on July 9 the Daily Worker, the organ of the Communist Party of the United States, exposed the plot: “ ‘X’ Bared as State Dep’t Aid [sic]: Calls for Overthrow of Soviet Government.” That clipping made its way into Grace Kennan’s scrapbook. “The first nasty article,” she noted carefully, “but it’s about Mr. X who may or may not be Daddy.”46
The next issue of Newsweek treated the “X” article—and Kennan’s ascent within the State Department—as a long-delayed vindication for the Soviet specialists Kelley had begun training two decades earlier. This “tightly knit little career group,” having survived “the appeasement and war years,” had concluded from them that dealing with Stalin was impossible. The “X” article, reflecting their thinking, explained the reasons behind the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, while charting “the course that this country is likely to pursue for years to come.”47
Far from being anonymous, Kennan was now extremely conspicuous: “Feeling like one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster, I absorbed the bombardment of press comment that now set in.” Equally unsettling was what Marshall might say. He had been pleased to see Kennan’s appointment publicized, because it suggested seriousness within the State Department about constructing a postwar grand strategy. He was not at all happy, however, to find what purported to be that strategy—along with its alleged author—emblazoned across the pages of national newsmagazines.
He called me in, drew my attention to this anomaly, peered at me over his glasses with raised eyebrows (eyebrows before whose raising, I may say, better men than I had quailed), and waited for an answer. I explained the origins of the article, and pointed out that it had been duly cleared for publication by the competent official committee. This satisfied him.
Marshall never mentioned the matter to Kennan again, “[b]ut it was long, I suspect, before he recovered from his astonishment over the strange ways of the department he now headed.”48
Kennan might soon have faded back into the anonymity he and Marshall wanted, had it not been for another unexpected event: Walter Lippmann brought his copy of Foreign Affairs with him to his summer fishing camp in Maine. When he returned to his home in Washington, Time magazine reported, America’s “best-known pundit” had no fish, but he did have a juicy target at which he now took aim: “Two secretaries hovered beside him. Western Union stood by to pick up his copy daily at 1 o’clock and transmit it to New York, while Mr. Lippmann, in red silk Chinese trousers and a grey-&-black silk shirt, sat at his antique desk and wrote.” And wrote, and wrote.
Lippmann produced fourteen columns on “Mr. X” for the New York Herald Tribune, the first of which appeared on September 2, 1947. Widely syndicated and republished as a short book entitled The Cold War—one of the first public uses of that term—they argued that Kennan had spawned a “strategic monstrosity” that would relinquish the initiative to Stalin, exhaust the United States, and force
