only perpetuate the power vacuums that had encouraged Soviet ambitions in the first place. But restoring the balance would also require abandoning actual and potential allies whose defense would now be too costly. Czechoslovakia fell into that category, as did Nationalist China and noncommunist Korea: where territories were “not of decisive strategic importance to us, our main task is to extricate ourselves without too great a loss of prestige.”
The Soviet Union would attempt to exploit discontent in France, Greece, and especially Italy, where American forces would soon withdraw, while keeping its own hand concealed so as “to leave us in the frustrated position of having no one to oppose but local communists, or possibly the satellites.” The United States “should be free to call the play,” determining whether action was to be directed against the U.S.S.R. or only its stooges. The latter would be strongly preferable and would not necessarily lead to war. That danger was “vastly exaggerated in many quarters.”14
Kennan’s was, then, a minimalist strategy, at least as noteworthy for what it rejected as for what it endorsed. It contained none of the Wilsonian idealism that had shaped American foreign policy during and immediately after the two world wars. There was no Truman-like commitment “to support free peoples” wherever freedom was under attack: instead Kennan called for casting some adrift, while defending others who only a few years earlier had grossly violated freedom. The atomic bomb was nowhere mentioned in PPS/13, which stressed the limits of American power and the consequent need to distinguish vital from peripheral interests. The task would be to deploy strengths against weaknesses: “victory” would not be unconditional surrender, but rather a shift in the minds of Soviet leaders that would reverse their expectations about success.
Six days after Marshall presented these recommendations to the president, Kennan sent the secretary of state a report evaluating the Policy Planning Staff ’s accomplishments during its first six months. Consisting of five members—two others would soon be added—the staff had sought to remain small, flexible, and unencumbered by administrative problems. It had prepared, during this period, thirteen formal reports, eleven of which made recommendations that had “found some reflection in subsequent operations.” If work continued at this level over the next six months, the result should be a collection of staff papers relating to all major areas. Together they would constitute “something like a global concept of United States policy.”
Kennan acknowledged suspicions about his organization elsewhere in the State Department, where no such “uniform framework of thought” was possible. But the Policy Planning Staff was meeting a broader requirement, for with the establishment of the National Security Council in July 1947, the department needed a unit that could function as a counterpart to the Pentagon’s planning units “in matters affecting
What Kennan could not yet say was how critical that appointment would turn out to be. Over the next two years the Policy Planning Staff became the principal source of ideas for the National Security Council. Papers prepared under a PPS prefix were routinely renumbered, with little modification, as NSC papers, and if approved by the president—most of them were—they became national policy. Since Kennan so dominated his own staff, this arrangement had made him, by the beginning of 1948, not just the State Department’s but the nation’s top policy planner.16
V.
He was not generally available to the press. His name was not on the directory in the cold marble lobby. To reach his office, you had to pass portentous murals, lengthy corridors, private dining rooms, and watchful guards. “The buzzers buzz, a door opens, and here he is: Mr. X—George Frost Kennan, of Milwaukee and Moscow.”
He is tall—about six feet—slender, and good-looking in a refined and sensitive way. His eyes are blue, his chin well-formed, his mouth highly expressive, chilling or charming as its owner decrees. His smile, when used, melts an aloof expression into a surprising surge of warmth and friendliness. Nevertheless, [he] is not the type of man one would call “Georgie.” Some, finding him distant, are tempted to address him by his middle name.
The job he held defied description. It could involve preparation for next week’s squabble with the Russians, or something that might not happen for fifteen years. His decisions could affect everything from the cost of living to whether there would be war or peace. Prepared for whatever problem might wind up in its lap, the Policy Planning Staff met in a room without a phone, an intercom, or baskets marked “incoming” and “outgoing”—just a long table and eight green leather chairs. A connecting door led to Marshall’s office.
The profile, by Philip Harkins, appeared in the
Despite Harkins’s ponderously mixed metaphors—Kennan was “the prize package in the deep freeze that the security-conscious State Department has installed for ‘the cold war’ ”—the article did contain some shrewd insights. Kennan wore no cloak, carried no dagger, did not smoke, drank little, and ate judiciously, “out of respect to a dormant ulcer.” He loved the guitar and with graceful gestures liked to imitate playing it. Circles might show under his eyes at the end of a long day, but he was still ready to draw on Dostoyevsky for insights into the Russian mind. He could even act out scenes from
It’s not clear what Kennan thought of the Harkins piece—he probably cringed—but his family was impressed: the clipping wound up in several scrapbooks. It felt strange, Jeanette recalled, “to have somebody so close to you and that you love so much, suddenly so important.” Annelise remembered George’s fame as having emerged more gradually: “I really can’t say that I suddenly felt that I was the wife of an important man.” But “I wasn’t stupid.” Invitations started arriving “to dinner here, and to dinner there. People are quick.” Especially “the ambassadresses.”
With George now no longer at the war college, the Kennans were renting a house at 4418 Q Street in the Foxhall Village neighborhood just west of Georgetown. “I was always the one who did everything about the house,” Annelise explained. “And with the children, except if there was something important, I was the one who had to do it. He was very busy.” George lacked the strength “to be social every day of the week,” so the farm became all the more necessary. Weekends at East Berlin were “absolutely sacred,” not least because those were the only days he could spend with Grace and Joan. The Kennans, at one point, even declined a dinner at the Achesons’ : “Whatever they felt, they were very nice about it.” The farm had one other advantage, which was to substitute for summer camp: “We couldn’t afford that.”18
Weekdays normally began with the Policy Planning Staff members arriving at their desks to find stacks of overnight telegrams, distributed by areas of responsibility. There would be only an hour or two to read them before Kennan would call a meeting. “We’d all gather around the table, and George would start talking,” Ware Adams recalled. “Very often none of us would say a word, but we’d just be looking at him. And he, by watching us,
