the necessity of dealing with the world as it is.” Particularism, in contrast, questioned “legalistic concepts.” It assumed appetites for power that only “counter-force” could control. It valued alliances, but only if based on communities of interest, not on the “abstract formalism” of obligations that might preclude pursuing national defense and global stability. Universalism entangled interests in cumbersome parliamen-tarianism. Particularism encouraged purposefulness, coordination, and economy of effort—qualities the nation would need “if we are to be sure of accomplishing our purposes.”37
Kennan had not set out to become a philosopher, but his job was turning him into one. He was making the point, in PPS/23, that while ideals existed in people’s minds, capabilities determined what states could do. Ends for this reason were infinitely expandable; means could never be. Calculating relationships between ends and means required calibration: there was no place here for the untethered aspirations Americans had traditionally floated above the world, before they took over the responsibility for running the world. Now they would have to learn to operate like everyone else. The argument paralleled Hans Morgenthau’s in his classic text,
VIII.
He was still enough of a Foreign Service officer, though, to distrust desk-bound perspectives. “The Director and members of the Staff must do more travelling and get about more,” Kennan advised Marshall late in 1947. There was real danger that their isolation might separate them from reality in their work and cause them to “cease to have their feet on the ground.”39
Japan offered an opportunity. The country anchored Kennan’s East Asian strategy, but he had never been there. He knew that the first George Kennan, who had spent time in Japan, regarded its people as the Asians with whom Americans had the most in common. The second Kennan wondered whether it had been necessary to risk war with Japan while on the verge of war with Nazi Germany: the diplomat John Van Antwerp MacMurray, Kennan liked to point out, had argued as early as 1935 that such a course could only benefit the Soviet Union. From the moment he joined the Policy Planning Staff, Davies encouraged Kennan to challenge the punitive aspects of American occupation policy in Japan and to oppose any premature peace treaty that might leave the country unable to defend itself against the U.S.S.R. “Of all the failures of United States policy in the wake of World War II,” Kennan wrote in his diary at the end of January 1948, “history will rate as the most grievous” the mismanagement of defeated enemies forced to surrender unconditionally. He had Japan chiefly in mind.40
Shifting policy, however, would require taking on General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander for the Allied powers in Japan: so far neither the president, nor the State Department, nor the Pentagon had dared to attempt it. MacArthur had gone from winning the war in the Pacific—as he liked to think of it—to running the most successful military occupation—as he also liked to think of it—since Caesar invaded Gaul and Britain. Determined to remake Japan from top to bottom, MacArthur compensated its victims, purged its government, broke up its big industries, redistributed land, secured votes for women, and demanded the teaching of democratic values. His reforms went beyond anything progressivism or the New Deal had accomplished in the United States, even though MacArthur considered himself a right-wing Republican.41 The intoxications of power and the satisfactions of exile overrode ideological consistency and political practicality in the general’s mind: he had, by his own choice, not set foot in the United States since 1939, but in the spring of 1948 he was eagerly awaiting a draft from his party—which never came—for its presidential nomination.
With little interest in Europe, less knowledge of the Soviet Union, and no inclination at all to defer to Washington, MacArthur cultivated a shogunlike remoteness that made it seem disrespectful, even impertinent, to ask how Japan might fit into the strategy of containment. He was, in Kennan’s view, a major threat to its success: MacArthur’s policies seemed almost designed “for the purpose of rendering Japanese society vulnerable to Communist political pressures and paving the way for a Communist takeover.”42
Tutored by Marshall on what to expect, Kennan left for Japan on February 26, 1948, only two days after submitting PPS/23. He felt, he later recalled, as if he were establishing diplomatic relations with a suspicious foreign government. Accompanying him were a Pentagon representative, General Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Schuyler, Marshall Green, and Dorothy Hessman. The Seattle-Tokyo leg of the flight, which required thirty hours and two refueling stops, was as hair-raising as any of Kennan’s wartime transatlantic journeys, and even more exhausting. Upon arrival he was received, it seemed to Green, as a spy from the State Department. Kennan was told later that MacArthur, furious at his being sent, had said: “I’ll have him briefed until it comes out of his ears.”
MacArthur began by subjecting his guests to an interminable lunch: “We were so weary we were falling off our chairs.” The general turned his back on Kennan, giving Schuyler a two-hour table-pounding monologue on the occupation’s accomplishments. It concluded with the claim that the great events of the next thousand years were sure to take place in “the Orient,” and that Americans now had the opportunity, in Japan, to plant the seeds of Christianity and democracy throughout the region, thereby “fundamentally alter[ing] the course of world history.”43
The general was a universalist in need of tethering, and that is what Kennan—once he had recovered—set out to do. After a day of uninformative briefings by MacArthur’s staff, Kennan sent a polite reminder “that I had questions of some moment which I was under instructions to discuss personally with him.” There was no direct response, but an aide soon arrived to conduct an audition. Satisfied, he extended an invitation for Kennan to lecture, on the next day, to a group of senior officers. It was a second tryout, in which Kennan’s improvisational skills served him well: having had much greater exposure to Soviet developments than any of them, “I think I was able to add to their knowledge and to clarify some of their impressions.” MacArthur was not present, but Kennan got the sense “that he was, in some way or other, excellently informed of what I had to say.” Green, who did attend, found the talk “absolutely brilliant,” like an eye “piercing into eternity.” A summons then arrived for Kennan to spend the evening of March 5 alone with the great man.44
They could have started the conversation—no record confirms that they did—by reminiscing about Milwaukee: MacArthur’s father’s family was from the city, and young Douglas had spent two years living with his mother in a local hotel while preparing for the examinations that would get him into West Point in 1899.45 A second shared interest turned out to be the defensive perimeter strategy. MacArthur had no intention of using American troops to Christianize Asia, favoring instead the creation of an arc of island bases running from the Aleutians and Midway through Okinawa and the Philippines. His reforms, he claimed, had not weakened Japan’s economy or compromised its security, but “academic theo-rizers of a left-wing variety” had influenced some of them. Changing priorities might make sense: this would require, however, the consent of the Far Eastern Commission, the international body established upon Japan’s surrender to oversee the occupation. Inconveniently, its membership included the Soviet Union.
Knowing the “flealike agility” with which MacArthur had used this argument in the past when asked to align his policies with Washington’s, Kennan was ready for it. The commission’s mandate, he pointed out, extended only to supervising surrender terms, not to determining Japan’s postwar future. The FEC could not be abolished, but making this distinction would leave it with little to do. MacArthur liked the idea, slapping his thigh in enthusiasm and telling Kennan this was “exactly the right line for us to take.” The rest of the conversation proceeded smoothly, and they parted amicably. Green admired the way Kennan handled MacArthur. The State Department, he was saying, wanted the general to remain in charge, but without the nuisance of the FEC: “[T]his appealed to MacArthur, because MacArthur was an intelligent man.”46
Kennan’s lengthy report, however, called for an end to MacArthur’s reforms, a reduction in his authority, a revival of the Japanese economy, and the eventual transfer of political control to the Japanese themselves. It was
