the East Asian equivalent of the Marshall Plan’s requirement that western Germany be included in any program for the recovery of Europe. With strong support in Washington, Kennan’s recommendations sailed through the NSC at the end of September 1948, and on October 9 President Truman approved them. The shift in Japanese occupation policy came to be known as the “Reverse Course”: the course reversed was the one MacArthur had set.47
It was Kennan, in this instance, who had shown agility. He had concealed his resentment of MacArthur’s arrogance, as well as his contempt for the sycophantic establishment that surrounded him. He had won the general’s trust by impressing his aides, found commonalities upon which he and MacArthur could agree, and then
Kennan regarded his role in the tethering of MacArthur as, after the Marshall Plan, “the most significant constructive contribution I was ever able to make in government.” On no other occasion did he make recommendations of such scope that met with such widespread acceptance: “I turned our whole occupation policy.”49
IX.
Fixing policy in Japan, however, was like repairing a bridge on the farm: a lot could happen behind your back while you were concentrating on the task at hand. On February 25, 1948, the day before Kennan left for Tokyo, President Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia reluctantly agreed, under pressure from Moscow, to the formation of a communist government. Kennan for months had been predicting such a development. It would be, he insisted, a
But Kennan failed to anticipate the emotional response to the Prague “coup” in Western Europe and the United States. Less than a decade earlier the British and the French had forced the same Benes to accept the Munich agreement, now universally regarded as having led to World War II. It was difficult to watch a similar tragedy unfold without thinking about World War III—especially when, on March 10, the broken body of the Czech foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, was found sprawled in a courtyard beneath his office. Whether he died from murder or suicide hardly mattered: he was the son of Tomas Masaryk, who with Woodrow Wilson’s encouragement had founded the state of Czechoslovakia after World War I. His death symbolized the suppression, yet again, of the only democratic regime in Central Europe.
An immediate effect was to strengthen a case British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin had begun to make in December 1947: that Great Britain, France, and the Benelux countries should form the “Western Union,” a political and military alliance directed ostensibly against any resurgence of German aggression but in fact against the Soviet Union. Kennan had been skeptical, warning Marshall that any military buildup would divert the countries involved from the more important task of economic recovery. The Russians had no intention of attacking anyone. What they wanted instead was to take control from within, through “stooge political elements.” The Marshall Plan was the best way to keep that from happening.51
By the time the Policy Planning Staff got around to analyzing Bevin’s proposal, however, the Czechoslovak coup had occurred and Kennan was in Japan, unable to guide its deliberations. George Butler, its deputy director, was a Latin American specialist, so he asked a temporary member, Kennan’s former Riga colleague Bernard Gufler, to take on the assignment. Gufler, no expert either, sought help from the Office of European Affairs, whose director, John D. Hickerson, not only shared Bevin’s concerns but wanted to go one step further: the time had come, he believed, for a formal U.S. commitment to the defense of Western Europe. PPS/27, completed on March 23, reflected Hickerson’s reasoning. Fears of Soviet aggression, it concluded, were now so strong that assurances of military support from the United States were needed. Kennan was not consulted: “I was shocked to learn, on my return, that . . . my deputy had produced a Planning Staff paper blessing this idea.”52
This had happened, as Kennan remembered it, because the State Department had panicked. There were indeed grounds for concern. On March 1 a Policy Planning Staff consultant, Yale professor Arnold Wolfers, warned on the basis of a just-concluded trip to Italy that the communists could win the upcoming elections there, and if that happened, the rest of Europe might follow the Italian example. Then on March 5 General Lucius D. Clay, MacArthur’s counterpart in American-occupied Germany, alerted Army intelligence to “a subtle change” he had detected in Soviet behavior suggesting that war might now come “with dramatic suddenness.” Clay’s cable leaked, causing a war scare in Washington, and summaries of both pronouncements finally caught up with Kennan on March 15, while he was on a side trip to Manila. Startled, he tried to evaluate their significance in a hastily composed telegram to Marshall and Lovett. It conveyed the impression, however, that Kennan had panicked.53
He began by reminding his superiors that he had never foreseen Soviet military action unless Kremlin leaders became “dizzy with success” or feared a collapse of their authority in Eastern Europe. But now, strangely, both things seemed to be happening. Possibilities of success at the polls had excited European communists, while Stalin and his associates were becoming increasingly fearful that the Marshall Plan might succeed. This combination of euphoria and desperation posed new dangers: “We must be prepared for all eventualities.”
Italy was the key: if it went communist, then the whole American position in Europe would be at risk. It would “be better that elections not take place at all than that [the] Communists win in these circumstances.” So should the Italian government not outlaw their party prior to the elections? Civil war might follow, but that would give the United States the excuse to reoccupy whatever Italian military facilities it might wish. Such a course would “admittedly result in much violence and probably a military division of Italy.” That would be preferable, though, “to a bloodless election victory, unopposed by ourselves, which would give the Communists the entire peninsula . . . and send waves of panic to all surrounding areas.”54
If a long telegram from Moscow two years earlier had made Kennan’s reputation, then this short one from Manila diminished it. The analysis was contradictory: how, if European communists were relishing their successes, could Soviet leaders be worrying about the success of the Marshall Plan? How could Kennan so suddenly withdraw his assurances about Moscow’s reluctance to risk war, as well as his warnings against using American troops in the eastern Mediterranean? How, in a larger sense, could policy be planned if the top planner abruptly repudiated his own analyses? Hickerson, no admirer of Kennan, consigned his Manila dispatch to bureaucratic oblivion with a crisp comment, scribbled at the bottom of it:
1. Action to outlaw C.P. before election or to postpone election would be certain to cause civil war.
2. Non-communist parties have a good chance of winning election without any such drastic steps.
3. Therefore action recommended by GFK seems unwise.
Privately, Hickerson concluded that Kennan, when drafting this cable, could only have been “roaring drunk.”55
