George F. Kennan : an American life

suggest to a single policy maker (Marshall) what he, and hence the nation, ought to do. They were, in this sense, strikingly solipsistic.

Kennan’s strategy would depend, therefore, on the extent to which he could embed it in the minds of others. His policy papers, like his lectures, were a starting point, for strategies require coherence. But they must also inspire confidence, overcome resistance, and adapt to the unexpected. If they fail to take root, they wither. Kennan’s task was now as much cultivation as conception: the farm had prepared him for it, arguably, about as well as the war college had.

VI.

The next set of issues the Policy Planning Staff faced, after getting the Marshall Plan under way, arose as aftershocks of the British withdrawal from the eastern Mediterranean. That unexpected development had left a new power vacuum in an area of strategic importance to the United States, not as the result of an enemy’s defeat in war but from an ally’s weakness in the first years of peace. The danger was the one Kennan had warned of in Western Europe: that the Soviet Union, working through the international communist movement, might fill the void, bringing southeastern Europe and potentially also the Near East within its orbit. The test for his strategy was whether minimalism would meet this threat. Could the Truman administration limit its response chiefly to economic assistance, while waiting for internal contradictions within the Soviet empire to halt its expansion? Or would something more be required?

Lovett posed the question bluntly in the late summer of 1947: what would happen if communists took power in Italy or Greece? The staff papers Kennan produced acknowledged the seriousness of the situation. The Italian Communist Party, now the strongest force in Italian politics, would, if it came to power, menace the interests of the United States in Western Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, even in South America, where there was a large Italian emigrant population. A communist victory in the Greek civil war would produce similar results in Europe. In either instance, the Soviet Union would have extended its political and military control “beyond the high-water mark” it had reached at the end of the war. But constraints on American power limited what might be done: the United States could not, for example, send troops to fight the communists inside Greece or Italy, for that would require deploying forces it did not have to battlefields it would not have chosen. It could, however, secure air and naval bases in those countries while strengthening the Sixth Fleet, which already dominated the Mediterranean.

The idea, Kennan explained, would be to make it clear “that extensions of Soviet military power, by means of concealed aggression, ... will be countered by corresponding advances of the bases of U.S. strategic power.” This is what he had in mind when he spoke to the National War College students of “counter-pressures.” These would not, as the “X” article had implied, correspond precisely to those undertaken by Moscow; rather, “concealed aggression” would produce “corresponding advances” in overall American military strength in the region, which could then be used to exploit Soviet weaknesses. Local communists might destabilize a country internally, but only at the cost of attracting greater U.S. air and naval power into the region, something Stalin could hardly favor. The strategy would require patience and steady nerves, for getting Kremlin leaders to see that their ambitions endangered their interests might take months or even years. It would, however, remain within the limits of American capabilities. It was, in this sense, still minimalist.²⁴

So too was another Kennan recommendation for containing national communist movements. The Central Intelligence Agency’s legal advisers were not sure that Congress, when it established that organization in the summer of 1947, had meant for it to engage in covert activities. “[W]e are handicapped,” Kennan told presidential aide Clark Clifford in August, “by the lack of ability to use the techniques of undercover political operation[s] which are being used against us.” Kennan admitted to Forrestal, now the first secretary of defense, that the American people would probably never approve of policies relying on such methods: “I do feel, however, that there are cases where it might be essential to our security that we fight fire with fire.” Italy and Greece were among them.²⁵

For the most part, the Truman administration followed Kennan’s advice. Italy was the first topic the National Security Council took up when it met for the first time on September 26, 1947, and PPS/9—Kennan’s paper— provided the basis for discussion. NSC 1/1, “The Position of the United States with Respect to Italy,” incorporated with only minor revisions the arguments he had made, and in December Truman approved it. When American troops were in fact withdrawn, Kennan suggested a presidential warning that the United States would not allow the overthrow of Italian democracy. Truman issued the statement on the thirteenth: if it became apparent that the freedom and independence of Italy were being threatened, directly or indirectly, the United States would be “obliged to consider what measures would be appropriate for the maintenance of peace and security.”²⁶

Five days later the president authorized the CIA, “within the limit of available funds,” to conduct “covert psychological operations designed to counteract Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities which ... are designed to discredit and defeat the United States in its endeavors to promote world peace and security.” Kennan had not been alone in favoring this—pressures to undertake disavowable or “black” measures were converging from within the new agency and from Forrestal as well. It was at Kennan’s insistence, however, that the NSC was given the authority to review all such operations: “We would want to examine the situation in all its aspects in case of any suggested operation, and to judge each case strictly on its merits.” And Kennan was the State Department representative on the NSC staff.²⁷

Meanwhile Kennan was battling his former superior Loy Henderson—now director of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs—over what to do about Greece, where the war against the communist guerrillas was going badly. Henderson wanted to send American troops to show “that we will, if necessary, resort to force to meet aggression.” Kennan objected strongly: “We might find ourselves in a difficult position from which it would be hard to withdraw and equally hard to keep other nations from withdrawing the contingents they had contributed.” The argument extended into January 1948, with Marshall in the end settling it in Kennan’s favor by ruling that before any commitment of troops could be made,

we would have to have a definition of the purpose of any action involving armed forces, an assessment of what would be required in the way of forces, and of what logistical support would be needed, an estimate of the probable effects on [the] domestic economy and on public opinion in this country, and a judgment as to whether we would be prepared to accept these implications.

The language was tough enough to have been Kennan’s, as indeed it was: he took the notes in the NSC meeting at which Lovett presented Marshall’s views.²⁸

On the future of the British mandate in Palestine, however, Kennan agreed with Henderson. Awarded by the League of Nations after World War I, it had placed Great Britain in the position of mediating between the Arab and Jewish inhabitants of the region—never an easy task, but an especially difficult one in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust because the international Zionist movement was determined at last to establish a Jewish state. Frustrated and overstretched, the British turned the issue over to the United Nations in February 1947, at the same time that they announced their decision to withdraw from Greece and Turkey. The General Assembly, the following November, voted with American support to partition Palestine between the Arabs and the Jews, but the Arabs immediately rejected this two-state solution. The question confronting the United States, then, was whether to help the United Nations impose partition against the will of the Arabs—a decision that might well require the use of military force—or to seek some other outcome.

Kennan and Henderson adamantly favored the latter approach. “Any assistance the U.S. might give to the enforcement of partition,” the Policy Planning Staff concluded on January 20, 1948, would produce “deep-seated