seemed to know just what we were thinking.” Robert Tufts, the staff’s economics specialist, confirmed that
Kennan was a very dominant personality, and he certainly did lead those seminars. The rest of us kept our remarks much briefer. But I didn’t have the feeling, and I don’t think others had the feeling, that Kennan was overdoing it. We listened, and we listened carefully, and we thought carefully about what we had to say. We kept it rather brief, not because we thought we would annoy Kennan if we were long-winded, but we tried to make sure what we had to say was to the point.
John Paton Davies thought Kennan handled the staff well. As Foreign Service officers, they were not used to such seminars: “George was operating at an intellectual level several degrees above theirs. Nevertheless, he was most gracious and considerate of the feelings of these people.”
The important papers, Davies added, originated with Kennan and were drafted by Kennan: “We sat by in some awe and tried to make intelligent comments about them. He invited the comments. He welcomed the criticism.” That was a good thing, because “George does have a tendency to go sailing off, and he has to be brought back to earth.” The Policy Planning Staff, he thought, functioned somewhat as Annelise did. Someone would say: “Well, George, that’s going a little far, isn’t it?” He would then “tone it down and it would come into place.” Kennan needed “a backboard against which to play his game. He’s got to bounce it off of somebody who will react against it.”19
One person who did was Dorothy Fosdick, recruited by Kennan in 1948 to help with United Nations affairs. “We were not equals,” she stressed. “Kennan was the prince, and we were the advisers to him.” Being female, however, gave her a special status:
Kennan once told me that women throughout history had been confidential advisers to monarchs. Their role was to listen sympathetically, to provide comfort, to give private counsel. I didn’t see this as demeaning. I’ve never been a self-conscious feminist. He certainly didn’t see me as a threat of any kind. And I could always speak very frankly to him and say exactly what I thought about issues.
When crises would arise, Kennan would take Fosdick to lunch at J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite restaurant, the Allies Inn. With the FBI director and his partner Clyde Tolson usually seated nearby, Kennan would “pour out his heart to me.” That was what he saw as a woman’s role: “to listen, to console, to quietly advise—and I regarded it at the time as a very high compliment. He knew he could trust me not to repeat what he’d said.”20
Chip Bohlen, another confidant, was never a member of the staff—his official title now was Counselor in the State Department—although he participated frequently in its discussions. If inclined during the war to be optimistic about relations with Moscow, the British embassy in Washington noted, Bohlen had for some time shared the harsher view of Soviet policy “which the less career-minded and more profound Kennan has always expressed.” Adams nonetheless found the contrasts fascinating. “They were both thinkers, but in different ways”: Kennan was the dreamer, Bohlen the practical one. “It was interesting to see two people so unlike agreeing as much as they did,” something that had not been true in the past and would not be in the future.
As Kennan had hinted to Marshall, others in the State Department doubted the Policy Planning Staff’s usefulness. “I think it was all right,” Loy Henderson observed neutrally, “but it was kind of a paper thing. It had no way of enforcing itself. The geographic bureaus were where the real power was.” Henderson and the other assistant secretaries, Davies explained, resisted planning. They felt that “you had to ride like a bush pilot on the seat of your pants. You couldn’t anticipate how things were going to go, therefore you took your cues from what was happening right in front of you. That was real. The rest was day-dreaming, or speculative, and therefore did not contribute very much.” But Marshall respected Kennan and was used to working with planners. Kennan’s assignment was to provide a broad outlook, which Marshall valued because he understood that “you can’t proceed from 1A to 1B to 1C and so on down. You had to have an overview.”21
That was how Kennan understood his responsibilities. “Look,” he remembered telling the staff, “I want to hear your opinion. We’ll talk these things out as long as we need to. But, in the end, the opinion of this Staff is what you can make me understand, and what I can state.” There was, he believed, no such thing as a collective document, because “it has to pass, in the end, through the filter of the intelligence of the man who wrote it.”
I knew that I could not go to [Marshall] and say to him: “Well, you know, this paper isn’t a very good one. I didn’t really agree with it, but the majority of the Staff were of this opinion.” The General would not have accepted this from me. He would have said: “Kennan, I put you there to direct this staff. When I want the opinion of the staff, I want your opinion.” So, I did insist that the papers had to reflect my own views.
Kennan recalled listening to the staff with respect and patience. He quickly discovered, though, that when “people get to talking, they talk and they talk. But they don’t talk each other into conclusions.” He once admonished them:
We are like a wrestler who walks around another wrestler for about three minutes and can never find a place where he wants to grab hold. When you get into that situation, you then have to take the imperfect opportunity. There’s going to come a time in each of these discussions when I’m going to say: “Enough.” And I will go away and write the best paper I can.
At such moments, Tufts remembered, Kennan would disappear, and a paper would soon appear. “He could dictate a better paper than most of us could write, even after editing.”
Having worked with Kennan since 1944, Dorothy Hessman knew how to keep up with him, even when his intensity caused him to lose track of time, place, and posture: “I was sitting by the desk one day, and he was pacing back and forth behind me, and suddenly his voice sounded a little strange. So I turned around and looked and he had sat down in the leather armchair with his feet over one arm and his back over the other and then stiffened up—so that he lay there across this chair.” On other occasions, however, he needed an audience. Marshall Green, a young Foreign Service officer who went with Kennan to Japan early in 1948, found that one of his jobs was to “look intelligent.” Kennan would speak to Green, while Hessman took it down. This gave his writing a conversational flavor, and “when he was through, he didn’t have to change a word of it.”22
During the two and a half years that Kennan ran the Policy Planning Staff, it produced over seventy formal papers: the complete set came to more than nine hundred single-spaced pages. “The world was our oyster,” he later wrote, “there was no problem of American foreign policy to which we could not address ourselves—indeed, to which it was not our duty to address ourselves—if we found the problem serious enough and significant enough to warrant the effort.” Kennan meant the papers to serve, not as a theoretical framework for the conduct of international relations, but rather as applications of certain “methods and principles” to “practical situations.” No other office in the State Department produced so many papers on so many issues over so many months, “from a single point of view.”
That was, if anything, an understatement. Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff papers were the most thorough specification of interests, threats, and feasible responses that anyone had yet worked out within the U.S. government, and it would have been difficult to find anything comparable in any other government at the time. They were an intellectual tour de force: an extraordinary attempt to devise a global grand strategy. But they were also, as Kennan acknowledged, “one man’s concept of how our government ought to behave and by what principles it ought to be guided.”23 They rested on the premise that a single policy planner (Kennan) could
