George F. Kennan : an American life

it into dependency on “a coalition of disorganized, disunited, feeble or disorderly nations, tribes and factions.” Only a miracle could make “containment” work: that concept assumed a competition in which “the Soviet Union will break its leg while the United States grows a pair of wings to speed it on its way.”

The basis for Lippmann’s complaint was his certainty that Kennan had inspired the Truman Doctrine, a conclusion he reached by reasoning backward. Had not Truman claimed the need to assist victims of totalitarianism everywhere? Had not Kennan insisted that the United States must “confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world”? It followed, in Lippmann’s mind at least, that the “X” article was “not only an analytical interpretation of the sources of Soviet conduct. It is also a document of primary importance on the sources of American foreign policy— of at least that part of it which is known as the Truman Doctrine.”⁴⁹

This could not have been more wrong. Kennan’s “Psychological Background” paper, completed at the end of January 1947, had indeed preceded Truman’s March 12 speech, but there is no evidence that it influenced the drafting of that address and abundant evidence that Kennan had sought to remove the language in it to which Lippmann later objected. Kennan had made his own objections to the Truman Doctrine clear in his National War College lectures, and in PPS/1 he recommended scrapping the idea altogether. Those positions were not public, but Lippmann had excellent sources within the government: Kennan had even consulted him, on Forrestal’s recommendation, with respect to the Marshall Plan. Lippmann later acknowledged having found Kennan upset by the Truman Doctrine. “[W]e were in pretty good agreement, I thought.”

Then the “X” article came out. Lippmann interpreted it as representing a faction within the State Department —opposed to the Marshall Plan—that favored the “military encirclement of the Soviet Union.” They were using Kennan to promote that objective. Hence Lippmann’s public attack: Kennan had either misled him or been captured by hard-liners. Lippmann could have cleared up the matter with a single phone call, but unlike Reston, Krock, and the Alsops, he was not an investigative reporter. It was not his habit to seek out information but rather to wait for it to come to him. When it did, he pronounced on its significance. And what he had, at his fishing camp in the late summer of 1947, were two apparently parallel texts: Truman’s speech and Kennan’s article. That was sufficient.⁵⁰

“Mr. Lippmann,” Kennan recalled ruefully, “mistook me for the author of precisely those features of the Truman Doctrine which I had most vigorously opposed.” Privately, Kennan suspected a more personal reason for Lippmann’s anger. Armstrong had banished Lippmann—and any mention of Lippmann—from the pages of Foreign Affairs after the editor’s wife left him to marry the columnist in 1938. Lippmann in turn, Kennan believed, resented the fact that he had published the “X” article in Armstrong’s journal, the only one in which Lippmann could not appear.⁵¹

Armstrong, pleased with all the attention, could not resist a bit of needling. “I see that Mr. Lippmann, having gone to Europe saying that the policy of containing Russia was based on fallacies and would fail, comes back saying that it has succeeded so well that it should be abandoned,” he wrote Kennan in November. Kennan, by then, was resigned to Lippmann’s inconsistencies: “I have never doubted that in the end the paths of Mr. Lippmann and myself would meet,” he replied. “History will tell which was the more tortuous.”⁵²

Whatever motivated Lippmann, Kennan also bore—and later acknowledged—responsibility for what had happened. His language did imply relinquishing the initiative to the Kremlin: it was difficult to read any other meaning into “the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and man?uvres of Soviet policy.” He failed to say where the United States would find the means to do this, apart from maintaining its own self-confidence. He neglected to revise his draft in the light of the questions the Truman Doctrine had raised in his mind, which he in turn had raised with his war college students. He had time to do this: his final draft did not go to Armstrong until April 11, a day short of a month since Truman had made his speech. His insistence on anonymity secured the article a level of scrutiny it might not have received had he used his own name. And even after that anonymity had evaporated, Kennan continued to seek refuge in it: when Lippmann pounced, Kennan interpreted his own official responsibilities as precluding a public response, preferring instead to suffer in silence. Kennan’s “containment” therefore became synonymous, in the minds of most people who knew the phrase, with Truman’s doctrine.⁵³

Herbert Butterfield, whom Kennan read later in life, wrote of “the tricks that time plays with the purposes of men, as it turns those purposes to ends not realised.” Time played a trick on Kennan just as he was attaining national and international prominence. His Council on Foreign Relations talk, his essay for Forrestal, and its subsequent publication in Foreign Affairs, all looked backward to the despair of 1946 when war or appeasement appeared to be the only alternatives open to the United States. Kennan’s criticisms of the Truman Doctrine, however, looked forward to the purposefulness of 1947: having decided to resist the Soviet Union, how might the United States do that with maximum effectiveness at minimal cost?⁵⁴

But time does not tolerate such Janus-like postures. However distinct visions of the past and the future may be, conclusions drawn from them coexist in the present, intertwine, and often surprise. That was what happened to Kennan. He did indeed, as Kissinger acknowledged, come closer than anyone else to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era. But after 1947 he could never regard the doctrine with which he was credited as his own. That produced a dejection extending over dozens of Kennan birthdays to come.

THIRTEEN

Policy Planner: 1947–1948

KENNAN RETURNED TO THE NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE FOR WHAT he described as a farewell lecture on June 18, 1947. It seemed like centuries, he told his former students, since he had gone to work at the State Department. His months of teaching were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within “neat, geometric patterns” that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was “like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experienced it.”

There was, however, an analogy that might help. “I have a largish farm in Pennsylvania. The reason you never see me around here on weekends (or rather, the reason you would never see me around here if you were here on weekends) is that I am up there trying to look after that farm.” It had 235 acres, on each of which things were happening. Weekends, in theory, were days of rest. But farms defied theory:

Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbor comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven’t kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children’s pet kittens. In burying the kitten, you look up and notice a whole section of the barn roof has been blown off and needs instant repair. Somebody shouts from the bathroom window that the pump has stopped working, and there’s no water in the house. At that moment, a truck arrives with 5 tons of stone for the lane. And as you stand there hopelessly, wondering which of these crises to attend to first, you notice the farmer’s little boy standing silently before you with that maddening smile, which is halfway a leer, on his face, and when you ask him what’s up, he says triumphantly, “The bull’s busted out and he’s eating the strawberry bed.”