That seems unlikely. Alcohol was not a problem for Kennan, but solipsism was, and in March 1948 it was beginning to catch up with him. He had built a staff around himself, producing analyses remarkable for their clarity, coherence, and depth; its members depended so much on Kennan’s guidance, though, that they drifted in his absence. Designed to resist what he regarded as parochialism in the State Department’s geographical bureaus, the Policy Planning Staff succumbed to just that malady when it accepted Hickerson’s advice on Bevin’s proposal: it embraced an Atlantic perspective but not a global one. Kennan had planted seeds but neglected their cultivation. “My mistake lay in my failure to realize that . . . , despite all that had been said in the reporting from Moscow, in the X-article, and in innumerable private conversations in the State Department, [my views] had made only a faint and wholly inadequate impression on official Washington.”56
Solipsism showed up as well in Kennan’s conviction that only he could reverse MacArthur’s course in Japan: perhaps one reason the two hit it off is that each regarded himself as indispensable. Having insisted that all lines of authority over foreign policy go through him, Kennan assigned himself a task that would take him away from Washington for at least a month. He had no way of knowing that the month he chose would be as crisis-ridden as it was. But even in normal circumstances, it would have been unrealistic to assume, as Kennan seemed to, that all the crises except the one he was working on could wait until he got back. It’s not even clear that the trip was necessary. Other pressures to shift his policies were converging on MacArthur: Kennan affected the timing but not the outcome.57 By doing so in such a labor-intensive way, he fell into a parochialism of his own. He became, however briefly, Asia-centric—and in that too he resembled MacArthur.
Kennan also failed to allow for his own dependence on the staff he dominated. If Davies was right that his Policy Planning colleagues served as a backboard against which Kennan could bounce ideas—if, to use another metaphor, they tethered him, somewhat in the way that Annelise had always done—then this was another good reason for not leaving town. Deprived while on his trip of his staff’s feedback, of his lunches with Fosdick at the Allies Inn, and of Annelise’s sturdy common sense, Kennan fell into a funk if not a panic, with results embarrassingly apparent in the Manila “short telegram.” It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, when loneliness got the better of him, upsetting the precarious balance between his emotions and his avocation.
“George is far away at the moment,” Annelise wrote Frieda Por on March 8, 1948. “I hope he is enjoying it. If it isn’t too strenuous, I know he will.” But the trip was strenuous, and the delicate relationship between Kennan’s head and his stomach now also suffered. Since his frustrating service on the European Advisory Commission four years earlier, his ulcer had given him little trouble. Now, though, it flared up again: by the end of his Japan trip, Kennan was sick in bed, where he began dictating his long report for Lovett and Marshall. Upon his return to Washington at the end of March, he and Hessman spent two days finishing off that document, and then Kennan checked himself into the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was there for two weeks, followed by several more days of recuperation at the farm. Kennan had left his office on February 26. He was not back at work until April 19.58
By then, much had changed. On March 17 Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg signed the Brussels Treaty, a fifty-year defensive military alliance. President Truman welcomed it in an address to Congress on the same day, promising that the Europeans’ determination to protect themselves would be matched by an American determination to protect them. On March 22 Hickerson began secret talks on behalf of the State Department with British and Canadian representatives, looking toward associating the United States and Canada with the Brussels Treaty signatories. On April 3 Congress, spurred by the coup in Czechoslovakia, at last approved the Marshall Plan, and Truman signed the bill into law. And on April 7 Lovett took a revised version of PPS/27 to the president, with a view to securing his permission—which Truman readily granted—to sound out congressional leaders on the possibility of a North Atlantic treaty that would formally link the military security of Western Europe to that of the United States. Kennan could only watch these events take place. He had nothing to do with shaping them.59
Meanwhile, another of Kennan’s recommendations had caused a painful split between Truman and Marshall. On March 19 Warren Austin, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, presented the American plan for an international trusteeship over an undivided Palestine. But on the previous day the president—despite having approved the abandonment of partition—had assured the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann that there had been no change in policy. Embarrassed, Truman blamed the State Department: there were people there, he complained, “who have always wanted to cut my throat.” That was an exaggeration, but Kennan had failed to consider the humanitarian implications of withdrawing American support for a Jewish state only three years after the world had learned of the Holocaust. Nor had he taken into account the impact on Truman’s reelection prospects in the fall, an omission the White House staff quickly remedied. By the end of March the State Department had lost control of U.S. policy in the Middle East. In deciding to recognize the new state of Israel, an uncharacteristically angry Marshall told the president a few weeks later, he had indulged in a “transparent dodge to win a few votes.” Truman replied coolly that he knew what he was doing.60
“The greatest mystery of my own role in Washington in those years,” Kennan wrote in his memoirs, “was why so much attention was paid in certain instances . . . to what I had to say, and so little in others.” The answer, he concluded, was that
Washington’s reactions were deeply subjective, influenced more by domestic-political moods and institutional interests than by any theoretical considerations of our international position. It was I who was naive—naive in the assumption that the mere statement on a single occasion of a sound analysis or appreciation, even if invited or noted or nominally accepted by one’s immediate superiors, had any appreciable effect on the vast, turgid, self- centered, and highly emotional process by which the views and reactions of official Washington were finally evolved.61
But surely policy planning in a democracy, if it is to be effective, must allow for domestic politics, institutional interests, vastness, turgidity, self-centeredness, and emotion. These are not mysteries to most people. That they were to Kennan—that he expected theory to trump subjectivity—was in itself a solipsism that led to failure.
FOURTEEN
Policy Dissenter: 1948
ENSCONCED ON THE SIXTEENTH FLOOR OF THE BETHESDA NAVAL Hospital in Washington through the first half of April 1948, Kennan recalled being “very bleak in spirit from the attendant fasting . . . made bleaker still by the whistling of the cold spring wind in the windows of that lofty pinnacle.”1 But the enforced rest provided an opportunity, as the doctors treated his physical ulcer, for him to alleviate the pain of a mental ulcer that still persisted. From his usual horizontal position (there being no choice this time), Kennan summoned Hessman and began dictating a lengthy letter to Walter Lippmann.
“You have chosen, for some reason, to identify the policy of containment with the ‘Truman doctrine,’ which you deplore,” he admonished the pundit, “and to hold up the Marshall Plan, by way of contrast, as an example of constructive action.” Had Lippmann forgotten their lunches together the previous May, at which Kennan advanced his ideas for the latter initiative? Contrary to what Lippmann claimed, he had never called for resisting the Russians wherever they challenged Western interests. “I do not know what grounds I could have given for such an interpretation.” (Here Kennan ignored—or had repressed—his call in the “X” article for applying “counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and man?uvres of Soviet policy.”) He did point out, accurately, that he had written “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” to counter “puerile
