III.
One of the reasons Kennan pushed so hard for control over covert activities may have been his sense that he was losing control of the rapidly evolving U.S. relationship with Western Europe. The minimalist strategy he advocated in 1947 had rested on two interlocking assumptions: that (a) the promise and provision of Marshall Plan aid would be all that was necessary to reassure the Europeans, because (b) the Soviet Union had no intention of attacking them. The first proposition depended upon the second, for if the Red Army ever did strike, then American economic assistance, however generous it might be, would do the Europeans little good. They had no means of defending themselves; nor had the United States offered them any.
These assumptions, in turn, depended on Kennan’s proficiency as a mind reader. They would hold up only if he had accurately sensed what European and Soviet leaders were thinking. If the Europeans began to show nervousness, or if the U.S.S.R. began to exhibit aggressiveness, all bets would be off. Both developments had occurred by the time Kennan returned to his office at the end of April 1948. “As you know, I came in late on the work which is being done,” he wrote Marshall and Lovett on the twenty-ninth. But he had now familiarized himself with the situation and consulted Bohlen, who agreed with what he had to say. The problem was not doubt about American support if the Soviet Union attacked—the presence of U.S. occupation forces in Germany left no reason for Europeans to worry about that. Rather, it reflected uncertainty about what to do if that happened. All that was needed were “realistic staff talks” to reassure them.23
By this time, though, top-secret negotiations on the possibility of a North Atlantic collective defense treaty had already taken place with the British and the Canadians. Meanwhile Marshall had secured the agreement of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to sponsor a “Vandenberg Resolution” confirming congressional approval. Kennan’s proposed reconsideration went nowhere. His frustration showed while he was in Ottawa at the end of May: did the Europeans not realize that “if the United States gave this guarantee, it would be doing something which would be in the interests of Western Europe but not necessarily in the interests of the United States, since the United States could, at any time, make a deal with the Soviet Union?” “We naturally took him up on this and he withdrew from this exposed position,” Escott Reid, the Canadian assistant under secretary for external affairs, reported to his superiors. It was indeed exposed, with the Smith-Molotov exchange having failed. The exchange left Reid with the uneasy sense “that if you scratch almost any American long enough, you will find an isolationist.”24
Kennan was no isolationist, but as Sir Oliver Franks, now the British ambassador in Washington, recalled, he did tend to see things from an “Anglo-Saxon” perspective: “All those other chaps were rather more difficult. Therefore stick with what you know.” The planning process, in Kennan’s absence, had gone well beyond that. “I have always reproached myself,” he later admitted, “for not taking my own views to the General and making more of an issue of it.” His door still led directly into Marshall’s office, but “I’m afraid I didn’t use it enough. I was always so afraid of abusing this privilege.... I think that I may have been too hesitant [and] that I should have.”25
So what might Kennan have said, had he been bolder? “Look, for goodness sake, let well enough alone, nobody is going to attack you,” he remembered wanting to tell the Europeans.
Don’t talk about this, we’ll get at the question of your military weakness as soon as we can, but give the Marshall Plan a chance to [work]. It’s a field in which we are strong—the economic field—the military one is the field where we are weak. Let’s not call attention to our weakness by making a big splash about the military situation now.
With his State Department colleagues, he would have been blunter:
All right, the Russians are well armed and we are poorly armed. So what? We are like a man who has let himself into a walled garden and finds himself alone there with a dog with very big teeth. The dog, for the moment, shows no signs of aggressiveness. The best thing for us to do is surely to try to establish, as between the two of us, the assumption that the teeth have nothing whatsoever to do with our mutual relationship—that they are neither here nor there.
Finally, he would have questioned the cultivation of Vandenberg. The Republicans were jealous, Kennan believed. They had supported the Marshall Plan but now wanted a plan of their own upon which they could put their stamp. Such people did not deserve “admiring applause every time they could be persuaded by the State Department to do something sensible.”26
As far as we know, Kennan made none of these arguments—at least not openly—within the department. It’s safe to assume, though, that they lay behind the questions he did raise while participating in talks with British, French, Canadian, Belgian, and Dutch diplomats in Washington during the late summer of 1948. Might not the building of military strength distract attention from European economic recovery and the eventual unification of the entire continent? Could there not be two loosely linked alliances—a dumbbell arrangement—made up of the Americans and Canadians at one end, and the British, the French, and the Benelux countries at the other? If there had to be a single alliance, should its membership not be limited to those countries? If it were not, how many countries could the United States afford to defend? There was more than a hint of desperation in these queries, and Hickerson, the principal American negotiator, had no trouble deflecting them. “I consider that a compliment,” he responded when told years later that Kennan considered him the State Department colleague with whom he had disagreed most. “Thank you.”27
IV.
There were still moments, though, when the policy process worked as Kennan thought it should. One came in late June 1948, after members of the Cominform, meeting in Bucharest, openly denounced the Yugoslav Communist Party. Under Josef Broz Tito’s leadership, they claimed, the Yugoslavs were pursuing a policy unfriendly to the U.S.S.R. and in violation of Marxist principles. Because Stalin controlled the Cominform, the complaint carried weight. Kennan had been predicting trouble in Eastern Europe for some time, but he thought it would come in the north, not in the Balkans. He missed the hints of Tito’s heresy conveyed in American diplomatic reporting from the region but rallied quickly, taking only two days to complete PPS/35, “The Attitude of This Government Toward Events in Yugoslavia.” It was the most immediately effective policy paper he ever produced.28
Unusually for Kennan, it was brief—only four and a quarter typed pages—but it compressed a lot into that space. It placed the Cominform’s condemnation of Tito within a historical perspective, while projecting its significance into the future. At one point Kennan distilled into just three sentences his Gibbon-inspired doubts about the stability of empires, his belief that an internationalist ideology could not indefinitely command national loyalties, and his conviction that Stalin, for all his craftiness, had overreached:
A new factor of fundamental and profound significance has been introduced into the world communist movement by the demonstration that the Kremlin can be successfully defied by one of its own minions. By this act, the aura of mystical omnipotence and infallibility which has surrounded the Kremlin power has been broken. The possibility of defection from Moscow, which has heretofore been unthinkable for foreign communist leaders, will from now on be present in one form or another in the mind of every one of them.
The United States should not jump to Yugoslavia’s defense: that would be undignified, and Tito remained a dedicated communist. It should acknowledge, though, that “if Yugoslavia is not to be subservient to an outside power [then] its internal regime is basically its own business,” and ought not to prevent a normal diplomatic and
