democracy.” This would be federalism, not fascism: had not Hamilton pointed out that “the vigour of government is essential to the security of liberty”? Containment required “a more courageous acceptance of the fact that power must be delegated and delegated power must be respected.” As a consequence, “many of our ideas about democracy may have to be modified.”
Kennan concluded his June 18 lecture by thanking the students for the confidence they had shown him: “This experience has given me much more than many of you suspect.”3 The National War College had been—and with less frequency would continue to be—a place that allowed floating ideas before bright people on a confidential basis without worrying about Lippmann-like public critiques. But there was a greater distance than maps might indicate between neat geometric weekdays at Fort McNair and crisis-ridden weekends at the Pennsylvania farm: now, for Kennan, all the weekdays were weekends.
II.
The distance between theory and reality revealed itself almost at once as Kennan’s insistence that the Europeans design the Marshall Plan began to run into difficulties. representatives from the sixteen states expecting American assistance—minus the Soviet Union and the Eastern European satellites whose participation Stalin had forbidden—convened in Paris on July 12, 1947, to work out the amounts required and how the program would be administered. Washington’s plan, Kennan reminded Marshall, was to “have no plan.” But the United States did have certain requirements.
It should consider only proposals that would enable the Europeans to exist without charity so that “they can buy from us” and “will have enough self-confidence to withstand outside pressures.” More fundamental, however, was the traditional concept of American security, which had assumed a Europe of free states subservient to no single great power. “If this premise were to be invalidated, there would have to be a basic revision of the whole concept of our international position,” which might demand sacrifices far beyond those required by a program for European reconstruction. “But in addition, the United States, in common with most of the rest of the world, would suffer a cultural and spiritual loss incalculable in its long-term effects.” It was of course important to respect European autonomy. The American people, however, were “bound to be influenced by whether the European nations are doing a good job of helping themselves.”4
By the middle of August, it was becoming clear that they were not. The Paris conferees estimated that their countries would need $29.2 billion over the next four years—a figure well above what the Americans thought reasonable—and probably more after that. Even worse, there was no common plan for spending the money: the Europeans had simply added up each state’s projected recovery costs without considering the efficiencies to be gained, or the political benefits to be achieved, by integrating their economies. These deficiencies led Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Will Clayton to conclude that “there is no other way to deal with this situation than to impose certain necessary conditions.”5
But Robert M. Lovett, Acheson’s replacement as under secretary of state, still hoped to salvage something of the idea that the Europeans should take the lead, so he sent Kennan on a quick trip to Paris to see what might be done. “I was very interested to meet him,” Sir Oliver Franks, who headed the British delegation, recalled. “What struck me was the combination of rational, lucid exposition with controlled passion.” Having “agonized within himself,” Kennan came to a view “which I regarded as essentially intuitive, and then proceeded to argue with great elegance from the premises he had intuited.”6
Geopolitical and economic interests precluded abandoning the Europeans altogether, Kennan believed, while limited resources and domestic political constraints ruled out giving them everything they wanted. Within those boundaries, there was room to maneuver. The State Department could work behind the scenes to reshape the Europeans’ report. It could then treat that document as a basis for discussion, while deciding for itself what recommendations to make to the president and Congress. And it could include among these a program of interim aid without conditions, even as the conditions for a larger four-year plan were being worked out. In short, “we would listen to all that the Europeans had to say, but in the end we would not
Self-restraint, then, had turned out to be neither “fitting nor efficacious.” In recommending its temporary abandonment, Kennan was acknowledging a paradox of planning: that short-term actions can proceed in opposite directions from long-term objectives and still be consistent with them. Only telling the Europeans what they would get would allow them to know what they should request. Only unconditional emergency aid would make extended conditional aid possible. Only by respecting European viewpoints could the Americans hope to change them.
The Paris trip had been an eye-opener: a collision of theory with reality. But it was also, in a way, exhilarating. Kennan composed a poem on the long flight home that suggested why:
The usual pessimism and self-pity were there, but so too, at the end of the poem, was a new theme, echoing something Bismarck had once said: “By himself the individual can create nothing; he can only wait until he hears God’s footsteps resounding through events and then spring forward to grasp the hem of his mantle—that is all.”8
Franks had it right: Kennan’s performance in Paris was intuitive as well as passionate, but it fit, nonetheless, within a set of grand strategic priorities. The most important one, as Kennan described it a few weeks after his return, was to ensure that “elements of independent power are developed on the Eurasian land mass as rapidly as possible, in order to take off our shoulders some of the burden of ‘bi-polarity.’ To my mind, the chief beauty of the Marshall Plan is that it had outstandingly this effect.”9
III.
The Europeans presented their report—scaled down now to $22 billion—on September 22. “We have as yet no cause to triumph,” Kennan cautioned an audience at the Commerce Department two days later. But there was reason to believe that the tide of postwar extremism had peaked and was beginning to recede. The basis for Kennan’s optimism lay less in the Europeans than in the confusion the Marshall Plan had caused among Soviet leaders.
Marshall’s speech had “laid bare, as if with a scalpel,” their inability to contribute to economic recovery. Stalin
