Kennan on the farm
Sensitive to the logic of force
It was time for Harriman to come home. His mission of securing wartime collaboration with the Soviets had long since been accomplished. His subsequent mission of sounding the alarm about the need for a policy of firmness had also been accomplished—perhaps, as it seemed to him at times, a bit too successfully. Harriman knew that his strength, the role for which he was best suited, was as a personal fixer, one who could deal at the top. Now it was time for studied analysis, sitting back and figuring out the underlying explanations of Soviet conduct. That, Harriman felt, was a task for others.
When he called on Stalin in January of 1946 to bid him a final farewell, Harriman found himself as unsure as ever about the real motivations of Soviet actions. Despite the sharp differences between their social systems, the Soviet dictator insisted, the two countries “could find common ground.” They even discussed the possibility of a postwar loan and reminisced about Harriman’s old manganese concessions. Yet Harriman left the Kremlin baffled by the enigmatic character of the brutal Bolshevik and his policies. “Stalin,” he later confessed, “remains the most inscrutable and contradictory character I have ever known.”
“Those who place greater emphasis on unilateral action rather than collective security are in ascendancy in the Soviet government,” Harriman told his embassy staff in his valedictory talk. Using the Red Army, they wanted to control as large an area as possible. The new situation required a realistic understanding of Soviet goals and of America’s role in resisting them. “I am not discouraged,” Harriman said. “But I think we have a long, slow scrape ahead.”
Americans had grown weary of global responsibilities, he continued, and wanted nothing more than to “settle all our difficulties with Russia and then go to the movies and drink Coke.” They must be made to realize that “there is no settlement with Russia and that this is a continuous thing.” There were, in fact, signs that this was beginning to sink in. It was “interesting and encouraging,” Harriman said, that Byrnes was being criticized for being too conciliatory. “The boys coming home don’t want it to happen again.”
As he was leaving, Harriman pulled aside his studious and intense counselor at the embassy. “You’re in charge now,” he told Kennan. “Now you can send all the telegrams you want.”
Harriman and his friends from his Wall Street days, such as McCloy, Lovett, and Acheson, occasionally differed over the best tactics for dealing with Moscow. But they did share a common outlook. First of all, they were pragmatic businessmen and negotiators, the type who felt that deals could be made and problems solved by getting the right people around the right table to strike a mutual bargain. In such an atmosphere, a forthright firmness engendered respect, whereas trying to buy friendship with concessions tended to be treated as a reason for suspicion. It was important not to be pushed around.
They were also disciples of the multilateral ideal. A system of free and vibrant world trade, they believed, would lead to greater prosperity and a greater chance of lasting peace. By background and breeding their natural ties were with England and Europe, and they were fully aware that the culture and commerce of the Old World, however decaying, were the bases of their own heritage.
They were also firmly convinced that, in the global age that would arise from the ashes of World War II, the U.S. should not retreat from the struggle for freedom as it had following World War I. In an era of air power and nuclear weapons, security could not be protected by territorial control or by vast oceans. The best guarantee of America’s security—and that of the world—would be the establishment of democratic and representative governments everywhere, ones that by their very nature would be peace loving rather than aggressive.
In addition they were imbued with a special sense of destiny involving both America’s role and their own. Safety in the atomic age would demand some sort of Pax Americana in which the U.S. accepted the obligations of leadership. People like themselves, who understood the need for American resolve and involvement, would have to take the lead. McCloy liked to speak of a “Periclean age,” in which a great nation with selfless ideals was led by great men with equally selfless motives.
This outlook was a very genuine one, indeed a righteous and laudable one. This is what made it particularly hard for a Harriman or an Acheson or a McCloy to understand why Stalin seemed so reluctant to go along.
The Soviets, however, had a starkly different outlook. Rather than embracing free-trading prosperity, they viewed the goal as an insidious form of U.S. economic imperialism. The natural affinity some Americans felt for the English and other Europeans appeared to be evidence of a Western alliance dedicated to the hostile encirclement of the Soviets. The vision of an American-led peace seemed like threatening atomic diplomacy. And the political ideals that Americans considered self-evident were seen by the Kremlin as antithetical to its security interests. Having been invaded so often, Russia tended to view security in terms of dominating and occupying as much territory as possible.
There were those who realized the inherent conflicts involved, ranging from conservatives such as Kennan, who warned against assuming a “community of interests” with Moscow, to liberals such as Lippmann and Wallace, who urged Americans to try to see things from the Soviet perspective. But for most U.S. policy makers, the root causes of Moscow’s belligerent attitude remained an enigma. That is why Stalin’s speech at the Bolshoi Theater on February 9 caused such a stir.
At an election rally on the eve of voting for the Supreme Soviet, Stalin mixed orthodox Marxist dogma with exhortations on behalf of the new five-year plan for economic development. World War II, he contended, had been caused by the inherent contradictions of capitalism. He conceded that the Soviets and their “freedom-loving” Western allies had been fighting for a common cause, the elimination of fascism. But what caught the most attention in the West were his references to the “hostile” international system and “capitalist encirclement.” The incompatibility between Communism and capitalism, he ominously warned, could lead to another war.
Reaction in the U.S. ranged from bafflement to alarm. Justice William Douglas told Forrestal that the speech was “the declaration of World War III.” Said commentator Eric Sevareid: “If you can brush aside Stalin’s speech of February 9, you are a braver man than I am.” Time magazine described it as “the most warlike pronouncement uttered by any top-rank statesman since V-J Day” but noted that Stalin may have made it “for purely Russian reasons.”
When reporters asked Harriman, just back from Moscow, for his assessment, he downplayed the speech as being “directed primarily” to the Soviet public. “They are now being asked to support another five-year plan and that plan will mean hard work.” Americans had already awakened to the Soviet threat, he knew, and there was no cause to rile them further. But Harriman was less sanguine in his private thoughts, which he confided to Admiral Leahy. The first objective of the Kremlin’s policy, he said, was to extend Communist ideology to other parts of the world.
One of those who reacted strongly to the speech was Paul Nitze. The son of a Romance languages professor at the University of Chicago and the grandson of the banker for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Nitze had gone on to distinguish himself at Harvard, where he was a member of the Porcellian with Bohlen, and on Wall Street, where he teamed up with Forrestal at Dillon, Read. He and Forrestal had joined with Harriman and Lovett at one point to handle Paramount’s sale of Columbia Pictures. Clarence Dillon had pulled out of the deal at the last minute, because he did not want to play second fiddle to Brown Brothers Harriman, but the working relations between the two financial houses remained cordial. During the war, Nitze by chance met George Kennan in the dining car of a train to New York. They discussed mutual friends, Bohlen in particular, and Kennan imparted his hard-line views about the Soviets. “I was really taken by what he said,” Nitze later remembered.
Upon reading Stalin’s remarks, Nitze, then a mid-level official at the State Department, immediately went to see Forrestal at the Pentagon, telling him the speech was a “delayed declaration of war on the U.S.” Forrestal of course needed no convincing, but he sent Nitze off to see Acheson, who did. Such fears, said the Under Secretary, “were all nonsense, Paul.”
Yet Acheson, involved once again in the problem of controlling the atom, was depressed by both the speech and the uproar. His unfocused broodings about the dimming prospects for Soviet cooperation prompted him to ask Bohlen for a memo on the subject. In addition, he instructed, the State Department should solicit opinions from its experts in the field, people like George Kennan.
Bohlen was stymied in his attempt to come up with any new handle on the problem. Creative strategic thinking was not his strong point. In his memo for Acheson he listed three alternatives: frankly recognizing Soviet and Western spheres of influence, embarking on a policy of military firmness to challenge Soviet expansionism, and pursuing a Wilsonian “universalist” approach based on the ideals embodied in the U.N. Charter regarding each nation’s right to freedom and self-determination.
The first two of these options, Bohlen argued, lacked domestic support. Adhering to the principles of international law as proclaimed by the U.N., especially if efforts were made to consult with the Soviets directly on any issue, was consequently the wisest course. At least if the U.S. was involved in any dispute, it “would be on a clear moral issue and not as a result of conflict of national interests between the great powers which would tend to divide world opinion.”
Bohlen conceded that this approach had one difficulty, “that of integrating the policies of a dictatorship, directed virtually exclusively towards the furtherance of the national interest of the Soviet state, with the principles of world cooperation and international morality.” This, of course, was not an insignificant problem. Indeed, that was the crux of the whole problem.
The Kremlin was simply showing no interest in international cooperation. Bohlen’s framework, a mixture drawn from Wilson and Roosevelt, did not help explain the apparent hostility of Stalin’s speech. Nor could many in Washington genuinely understand why the Soviets were not eager to work with agencies that promoted international cooperation and free trade, such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund.
As a result of such confusion, two inquiries, one from the State Department and another initiated by the Treasury, were dispatched to Moscow. There they landed on the desk of a man who was seething with pent-up opinions and had just been given the freedom to unleash them, a man who favored more fervently than anyone the first two of Bohlen’s options, a man whose mind was not clouded by well-intentioned assumptions that Russia somehow shared the same values or goals as the U.S.
Ever despondent about Washington’s feckless attitude toward the Soviets, George Kennan was once again threatening to resign. And once again, Bohlen was begging him “don’t do anything foolish.” Adding to Kennan’s dolors was yet another spate of minor ailments (the flu, sinus congestion, tooth trouble), which had forced him to take to bed for a few days in his rooms at the Mokhovaya Street embassy. Thus it was hardly surprising that the latest set of naïve queries brought to his bedroom only served to reduce Kennan to, in his words, “a new level of despair.”
Instead of resigning, however, Kennan decided to unload his frustrated thoughts. “For eighteen long months I had done little else but pluck people’s sleeves, trying to make them understand,” he later recalled. “So far as official Washington was concerned, it had been to all intents and purposes like talking to a stone.”
It was Washington’s Birthday. The embassy, closed for the holiday, was quiet and desolate. But Kennan, resisting the temptation to “brush the question off with a couple of routine sentences,” had been galvanized into action. Having produced reams of unsolicited explanations of Soviet behavior, most of which were destined to languish unappreciated in the files of Harriman or others, his opinions had finally been officially sought. “They had asked for it,” he thought. “Now, by God, they would have it.”
He telephoned his secretary, sent for two military attachés, and gathered the small group in his upstairs bedroom at the embassy. Composing his thoughts as he went along, and dividing them neatly into five sections like a Puritan sermon, Kennan proceeded to dictate a 5,540-word analysis that became known as “the Long Telegram.” Its purpose was to awaken as well as to enlighten, to make official Washington sit up and finally listen to its anxious author. Simmering beneath its sober tone were sentences susceptible to quite alarmist interpretations. Both through what it said and the way it was interpreted, Kennan’s analysis was to become the most influential cable in the history of the American Foreign Service.
What caused the Soviets to behave the way they did in international affairs? According to their Marxist propaganda, Kennan reported, they claimed to be motivated by a belief that the inherent conflicts of capitalism would cause Western countries to launch “wars of intervention” against the Soviets. Of course, such “baseless and disproven” rationales were “simply not true.” In reality, “the Soviet party line is not based on any objective analysis of the situation beyond Russia’s borders.” What actually motivated Russia’s rulers, Kennan argued, was a “centuries-old” outlook: “At the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.”
What role, then, did ideology play? Marxism was mainly a “fig leaf” for Russia’s current rulers, one that served to justify police-state tactics, a closed society, and expansionist ambitions. “In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule,” Kennan explained. “This is why Soviet purposes must always be solemnly cloaked in trappings of Marxism, and why no one should underrate the importance of dogma in Soviet affairs.” Marxism was not the cause of Soviet expansionism, Kennan contended, but “its honeyed promises” made traditional Russian instincts “more dangerous and insidious than ever before.”
What did this mean for the Kremlin’s foreign policy? Kennan predicted that “efforts will be made to advance official limits of Soviet power.” The first signs of this expansionism will come in neighboring areas, such as Iran and Turkey. In addition, an international Communist network would attempt to undermine Western resolve by penetrating “labor unions, youth leagues, women’s organizations, racial societies . . . liberal magazines, publishing houses, etc.”
Kennan’s conclusions were dire. The Soviets considered it necessary, he said, that “our traditional way of life be destroyed.” The question of how the U.S. should cope with such a challenge was, therefore, “undoubtedly the greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably the greatest it will ever have to face.”
Within a couple of years, after his warnings had been heeded and more, Kennan would complain that he did not intend his theory of Soviet “containment” (as it was later dubbed) to be interpreted as primarily a military response. In the Long Telegram, however, that was the first strategy he discussed. “Soviet power,” he wrote, is “impervious to the logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to the logic of force.” The Kremlin was likely to back down “when strong resistance is encountered at any point.” A Soviet adversary would “rarely” have to use force as long as he “makes clear his readiness to use it.”
The additional strategies he advocated—better propaganda programs, efforts to build up the economic and spiritual vitality of the West—drew little attention when Kennan’s ominous opus landed in Washington. Nor did the “encouraging” parts of his message: that Soviet leaders were basically cautious, that Marxist theory did not require launching wars against capitalist countries, that Western strength could deter military conflicts. Partly because Kennan, ever anxious to be heard, cloaked his thoughts with portentous prose, the Long Telegram was viewed by those who read it in February of 1946 as having two main messages: the U.S. must forcefully draw the line against further expansion of Soviet influence, and it should unabashedly forge an alliance with Britain and other Western nations for this purpose.
What made the Long Telegram so immensely influential was not what Kennan said (for he had said the same often before) but what Washington was willing to hear. “If none of my previous literary efforts had seemed to evoke even the faintest tinkle from the bell at which they were aimed,” he noted, “this one, to my astonishment, struck it squarely and set it vibrating.”
For ten years he had been ineffectively fretting about the dangers of American mellowness toward the Soviets. Within three years he would be fretting about the dangers of American militarism. But for a brief and critical period, Kennan’s outlook and the pendulum of official U.S. thinking coincided. He had given a resonant voice to the unarticulated unease that was growing in Washington. Kennan, for once, was delighted. “My reputation was made,” he said. “My voice now carried.”
“This telegram from George Kennan in Moscow is not subject to condensation,” a State Department aide wrote in passing it on to Byrnes and Acheson. A “splendid analysis,” Byrnes cabled back. Particularly pleased were the veterans of the Riga-Moscow days of the early 1930s. “It hits the nail on the head,” proclaimed Loy Henderson. “It has been very gratifying for Chip and me and others who have been associated with Russian matters for a long time,” noted Elbridge Durbrow, “to see the thing come into its proper perspective.”
Bohlen and Harriman had long shared Kennan’s basic beliefs about the difficulties of dealing with Moscow. But they had resisted his harsh prescription that the world be split into rival spheres. Their own hard-line attitude was primarily engendered by the contempt Moscow showed for self-determination and freedom, particularly in places like Poland. George Kennan, the indignant Presbyterian elder, could undoubtedly work himself into a moral frenzy about Soviet totalitarianism, just like Harriman and Bohlen; but George Kennan the Bismarckian realist cared little for Wilsonian idealism and was perfectly prepared to concede Poland and other hapless places to the Soviet sphere.
One significant result of the Long Telegram was that it unified the thinking of the various advocates of firmness. Only after people like Bohlen and Harriman began to adopt Kennan’s view of the Soviets and their satellites as a rival power bloc—one that was implacably resistant to accommodating Western democratic ideals—could the attitude of firmness evolve into a policy of containment.
Bohlen, uneasy about the vacuity of his own recent memos, eagerly embraced Kennan’s “exhaustive and excellent analysis.” In a memo to Acheson, the State Department’s Soviet expert proclaimed that Kennan’s cable meant that “there was no need to examine further the motives or the reasons for present Soviet policy.” The U.S.S.R. was “an expanding totalitarian state,” Bohlen added, and the world was being divided into “two irreconcilably hostile camps.” He proposed that the U.S. “should use every method at its disposal” to counter the Soviets.
Harriman, who had seen such outpourings from Kennan before, wired his former aide “congratulations on your long analytical message.” Far more significantly, he sent along a copy to his friend Forrestal. Given your “interest in the philosophy of the present Soviet leaders,” Harriman wrote the Navy Secretary, Kennan’s dispatch was “well worth reading.”
A month before Kennan’s telegram arrived, Forrestal had written Walter Lippmann to argue that the fundamental question facing America was whether it was dealing with a traditional nation-state or a fanatic religion. Forrestal was inclined to believe that Russia was the latter. Convinced that the free world was under siege from international Communism and that the Kremlin’s actions could be explained by its devotion to this dogma, Forrestal had immersed himself in philosophical tracts about Marx, Lenin, and the Bolshevik Revolution.
In Kennan’s telegram he thought he found the intellectual confirmation he so ardently sought. Thus he was prone to miss not only the nuances of the Long Telegram but much of its basic thrust. The way Forrestal read Kennan’s cable, it confirmed his own fervent belief that Marxism was the cause of Soviet expansionism and that halting the spread of international Communism would likely demand a resort to force.
Forrestal hardly knew who Kennan was, but he began spreading his gospel like an evangelist. He entered the Long Telegram in his diary, had scores of copies distributed, and made it required reading for his staff and top officers. By taking him under his wing, Forrestal assured that Kennan’s voice would be loudly heard. In the amplification, however, there was bound to be some distortion.
The telegram was on Dean Acheson’s desk when David Lilienthal, the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, arrived in Acheson’s State Department office. The two men were in charge of shaping the atomic control plan that the U.S. would submit to the U.N., and Lilienthal had walked across Lafayette Park that morning in early March to go over the draft they would present to their full committee the next day. But he found his colleague distracted, almost agitated. For more than ninety minutes, Acheson agonized about foreign policy problems, handing Lilienthal Kennan’s Long Telegram to read. “The atomic bomb,” Lilienthal said when he finished the dispatch, “will be one of the first real tests of our ability to understand the Russian problem.”
Acheson agreed. But he had begun to realize that the task would be harder than he and Lilienthal originally hoped, that it would demand a greater emphasis on safeguards and less reliance on trust and faith. Kennan’s telegram was far too abstract for Acheson’s practical tastes, and its vague recommendations were hardly much help for an action-oriented policy maker. But its warnings resonated. Acheson, as he considered atomic energy and a broad range of other problems, slowly began to grapple with Kennan’s forebodings.
The morning that Acheson and Lilienthal sat reading Kennan’s telegram—Wednesday, March 6, 1946—was one of those moments when a variety of events and ideas seem to collide:
• Just minutes before their meeting began, a cable arrived from the American consul in Tabriz reporting “exceptionally heavy Soviet troop movements” in northern Iran. In a nearby office, a large map of that country was being prepared with red arrows sweeping down from Russia toward Teheran and the Turkish border.
• Newspapers were headlining an address given the previous day in Fulton, Missouri, warning of an “iron curtain” descending across Europe. Already worried about British demands for preferential treatment on atomic energy matters, Acheson decided that the State Department must distance itself from Winston Churchill’s warlike cry. But he feared that the former Prime Minister’s appraisal might in fact be pretty realistic—and he knew for certain that it reflected a sentiment that was growing in Washington.
• The front pages also contained the latest news of the Canadian spy scandal. Twenty-two scientists and technicians had been arrested as part of an intelligence ring providing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, and Moscow had not even denied the charges. Even as Acheson was considering ways to share control of the atom, there were rumors that the espionage efforts extended into the U.S.
• The previous week had seen a spate of speeches—including ones by Jimmy Byrnes, Arthur Vandenberg, and John Foster Dulles—calling for a firmer American line toward the Soviets. Each had contained the requisite lines about hope for closer cooperation and adherence to the ideals of the United Nations, but their basic thrusts echoed Kennan’s telegram: the world was being divided into hostile East-West blocs and the U.S. must act forcefully to prevent the further spread of Soviet influence.
All of these were new elements in the equation being considered by Acheson that morning. This rapidly changing environment, he told Lilienthal, was bound to affect the outlook for the plan they were trying to shape.
Acheson had been brought back into the effort to control atomic weapons early in January. As Byrnes was leaving for the U.N. meeting in London, he caught Acheson at home in bed with the flu. Now that everyone—from Truman to Vandenberg to Stalin—had agreed that Washington should submit a proposal on atomic development to the U.N., a committee was being formed to draw one up. Acheson was going to be its chairman, the Secretary informed him over the phone.
Acheson’s protests that he knew nothing about the technical side of the subject were brushed aside. There would be, said Byrnes, plenty of help: James Conant, the president of Harvard; Vannevar Bush, the President’s former scientific adviser; General Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project; and John McCloy, who had sat with Stimson at Potsdam and in the Adirondacks drafting the first proposals for atomic control. They were all nice fellows, said the Secretary, and would be fun to work with. Acheson tried one more meager protest, but Byrnes said he had to rush for his plane. Acheson recalled, with perhaps a bit of exaggeration, that his temperature rose six points before he recovered.
When the group started its work, McCloy was among the most optimistic that a plan could be devised that was acceptable to the Soviets. Part of his mandate, as he saw it, was to carry the torch passed to him by Stimson. He eagerly accepted his appointment, flew down from New York, and took the Achesons’ offer to be their house guest.
The first thing Acheson and McCloy decided was that the committee needed the help of a board of technical consultants. To chair that group Acheson chose Lilienthal, a fellow member of the Brandeis-Frankfurter coterie from the Harvard Law School. Without such a panel of experts, Acheson explained, it would be like telling a South Sea Islander to do something about the problem of cows being killed on railroad tracks: no matter how well-intentioned the islander, he could be of little help if he did not know what a cow or a railway was.
The star of the panel was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the mastermind of Los Alamos, the troubled father of the atomic bomb. He too stayed with the Achesons. After dinner each night, a borrowed blackboard was set up in Acheson’s library, where a picture of Stimson had joined the family pictures and silver rowing cup from his Yale freshmen crew along the cluttered walls. There the intense physicist would lecture Acheson and McCloy about the inner working of the atomic bomb.
“He drew little figures representing electrons, neutrons, and protons,” Acheson recalled, “bombarding one another, chasing one another about, dividing and generally carrying on in unpredictable ways.” McCloy and Acheson would pepper Oppenheimer with questions. “It’s hopeless,” their tutor occasionally lamented. “I really do think you two believe neutrons and electrons are little men.” Noted Acheson: “We admitted nothing.”
Throughout February—while Stalin spoke, Kennan analyzed, Soviet troops shifted, and Churchill flew across the Atlantic—the Lilienthal-Oppenheimer panel was off on its own, flying to Oak Ridge and other laboratories, gathering information, and piecing together the details needed for a plan to control atomic energy. The proposals they came up with were innovative, exciting, far-reaching—and perhaps, alas, somewhat naïve.
No cooperative international system, Lilienthal and Oppenheimer concluded, could be based simply on restrictions enforced by a cadre of atomic policemen roaming the globe like Prohibition agents. Instead, a new International Atomic Development Authority should be created and given an active and positive role. It would be responsible for owning and mining the world’s limited number of deposits of uranium and thorium, providing “denatured” material for smaller power plants, and operating on its own all atomic facilities, anywhere in the world, that could be considered dangerous. With its virtual monopoly, the agency could easily discover if any country tried to pursue its own independent weapons program. Other nations would then have ample warning that forceful measures must be taken.
This was the program that Lilienthal brought to Acheson on March 6 and which the Under Secretary asked him to present to the full committee at Dumbarton Oaks the following day. The conference room of that Georgetown mansion provided a setting befitting the historic grandeur of the plan. The three-story-high chamber was graced by carved and painted wooden beams, and priceless tapestries covered the walls. Catching the light from the French doors to the garden was El Greco’s The Visitation.
The scientists took turns reading parts of the proposal. When Lilienthal finished the final section, he dramatically placed the report on the table and announced: “This, gentlemen, is our recommendation of a plan for security in a world of atomic energy.” At the other end of the long table, Acheson put down his copy and took off his glasses. “This is a brilliant and profound document,” he announced in a warm, low tone.
And yet he had qualms, and so did the rest of his committee, qualms prompted by the growing worries about Russia’s motives. So for more than a week the members and their experts worked on the plan, together and separately, debating revisions under Acheson’s careful guidance. There must be more emphasis on inspection, the scientists were told, and on a timetable of clear steps that would protect the U.S. from giving away too much if Russia showed bad faith. The scientists, who had not been reading the cables from Moscow and Teheran or agonizing about Soviet intentions, were reluctant. But they went along.
McCloy, along with Acheson, was among the most fervent supporters of the overall scheme. Its affirmative tone went beyond what he and Stimson had dared to envision. But it appealed to his sense of action, of grasping ahold of the imponderables. There must be no delay, he emphasized. America could not push ahead with its own atomic plants while trying to prevent other nations from doing so. What made the plan so admirable, he said, was that it could be accepted by the Soviets and everyone else. It was workable without being softheaded.
There was, however, in the back of McCloy’s mind, a notion that had captivated Stimson. No plan could fully succeed if the Soviet Union remained a closed society. The grandiose scheme would no doubt mean that the international agency would build atomic plants inside the U.S.S.R. Perhaps this could be used as an inducement or a lever to get the Kremlin to loosen up its police-state society. Perhaps even a broad program of disarmament could be part of the price for sharing in America’s atomic monopoly.
Acheson was somewhat startled by his friend’s naïveté and quickly moved to quash the notion. There was no use “chasing a will-o’-wisp,” he said, nor in trying to solve the Soviet problem in one fell stroke. It would take time and patience if America hoped to achieve Russia’s gradual “civilization.”
After nine days of concentrated work, Acheson called both his committee and their consultants for a final Sunday morning meeting at Dumbarton Oaks. He and McCloy were both anxious that the plan be finished as quickly as possible, fearing that events would overtake them. (There were a few personal considerations as well. McCloy had cabled Acheson before coming down: “Atom bomb has no terrors compared to what will happen to me if I cannot get to Providence for young Douglas’s wedding.”)
Yet the members were still bickering over details. Anne Wilson, who was then Herbert Marks’s secretary and later his wife, passed Acheson a note saying that a coffee break might relieve the tension. It did. Acheson circulated among the members stitching compromises back together, securing agreement on words and phrases. When everyone had retaken his seat, the Under Secretary posed the question: Should the plan be approved? Agreement was unanimous.
Taking no chances on a renewed debate, Acheson personally drafted the letter of transmittal while the others went out for lunch. All of the carefully crafted agreements on timing and stages and safeguards were deftly woven together. “We are impressed,” Acheson wrote, “by the great advantages of an international agency with affirmative powers and functions coupled with powers of inspection.”
In a CBS radio interview the next week, Acheson was asked if the plan was “like a road map showing a safe national highway toward international control?” Replied Acheson: “Yes, except this is no vacation jaunt. It is deadly serious and we must start moving at once.”
Byrnes and Truman, however, felt the need for a more prestigious driver. Selected to present the plan at the U.N. was Bernard Baruch, the seventy-five-year-old “adviser to Presidents,” self-styled park-bench philosopher, and retired stock market speculator. Acheson vigorously protested: Baruch was a pompous man with a reputation for wisdom earned mainly by the dispensation of campaign contributions and the careful image polishing of his publicist, Herbert Bayard Swope. Lilienthal pronounced himself “quite sick” over the appointment of the “vain” self-promoter.
McCloy had helped talk Acheson out of releasing the report publicly, arguing that it should serve as a basis for the U.N. delegate to use as he pleased. But after Baruch’s appointment, Acheson felt little compulsion to keep the plan secret. He wanted a public debate, which he was sure would show the soundness of the package they had put together. So he provided a copy to a Senate committee and, not unexpectedly, its essence appeared in the next day’s newspapers. The State Department then formally released the document.
Approval came from a surprisingly broad spectrum, ranging from liberal commentators to conservative senators. Both The New York Times and the Washington Post endorsed the plan in editorials, and a Senate resolution was immediately introduced to make it the basis for negotiations. (I. F. Stone was among the few liberal dissenters, commenting that the only one of the authors “who is at all progressive in his thinking is Acheson.” Sending along a copy of the article to McCloy, Forrestal joked that he was “glad to note that you do not qualify in the Acheson school of progressivism.”)
Baruch summoned forth all of his great pride to announce that he was too old to be a “messenger boy” and to demand the right to make revisions as he saw fit. Both McCloy and Acheson worked with him closely, hoping to preserve the basics of their plan. But Baruch insisted on elements that would, in Acheson’s words, “almost certainly wreck any possibility of Russian acceptance.” These included automatic penalties for any country violating the final agreement and no veto power for the Soviets or other members.
Carrying his own alternative to the White House, and threatening to resign if the Acheson plan were chosen instead, Baruch got his way. At the U.N., he was able to excite his audience and pave the way for a propaganda victory by opening with a sentence Swope had written for him: “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead.” Andrei Gromyko was also able to score propaganda points with a Soviet proposal for a complete ban on nuclear weapons. Neither side, however, presented a plan that had a chance of being accepted by the other.
McCloy and Acheson would surely have found it difficult to get their program accepted by the Soviets. Stalin was hardly likely to sit still for a plan that allowed Americans to inspect facilities and mines in the U.S.S.R. and approve each step toward joint control. Nor was such a grand vision of an atomic authority, one that would own mines in various countries and be run by international bureaucrats, a very practical prospect. In retrospect, too, it is clear that the Soviets were secretly determined to spy and build on their own, and would likely have exploited any deal for their own cynical purposes.
At the time, however, there seemed to be a chance, albeit quite small, that the plan could have established an effective framework for international cooperation, an alternative to a frenzied and uncontrolled race for destructive atomic capacity. Such was the sincere dream that Stimson had bequeathed to McCloy and Acheson and many others, one that now slowly began to fade.
The conversion of Dean Acheson to a hard-line stance on dealings with the Soviets was perhaps the most dramatic and significant of any postwar American statesman. In early March he had held the highest of hopes that a system of atomic cooperation could be accomplished. But even as those hopes died, so too did Acheson’s faith that friendly relations could be worked out with America’s lapsed ally.
A sureness of manner, a firmness of outlook, a clarity of vision—these were all part of Acheson’s authoritative, some would say imperious, style. A Hamlet-like attitude toward the Soviets did not suit him well, nor was it to burden him for long. As he later put it: “The year 1946 was for the most part a year of learning that minds in the Kremlin worked very much as George F. Kennan had predicted they would.”
Acheson’s attitudes—unlike those of Harriman, Bohlen, and Kennan—were not shaped by personal exposure to the perfidy of Kremlin leaders or the infirmity of Soviet society. Nor was he prone to Kennan-style abstract agonizing about the forces of history and ideology. Brandeis’s prized pupil was influenced by solid evidence and concrete situations. Even as the maneuvering over atomic control was under way, the early days of spring were providing two such lessons.
Back in December, when Acheson first began work on an American loan to the British, the action was not conceived as an Anglo-American effort to counter Soviet strength. In fact, Acheson harbored hopes, along with Bohlen and Harriman, that it would be followed by a loan to Moscow; they all still believed, at the beginning of 1946, that economic assistance could be used as a lever with the Kremlin and might even pave the way for Russia’s gradual evolution into a cooperative member of the world community. In putting together the $3.75 billion package for Britain, Acheson mainly concentrated on winning concessions from London that would reduce imperial tariff barriers and promote the goal of global free trade.
Perhaps what insured that the loan would be cast in East-West terms was Winston Churchill’s visit to the U.S., as a private citizen, in early March. Less than two weeks before the Senate was due to consider the measure, Churchill made his “iron curtain” pronouncement in Missouri. What aroused the most controversy, however, was not his description of the problem but his solution to it: an unabashed Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets. “I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength,” the former Prime Minister rumbled. And this, he added, required a “fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples.”
The result was a polarizing uproar. The U.S. (like Britain) was still officially an ally of the Soviet Union. President Truman, feeling the need to distance himself from the man he had shared a stage with, lamely contended that he had not read the speech beforehand. “I think it did some good,” he wrote his mother, “but I am not yet ready to endorse Mr. Churchill’s speech.” Claude Pepper and a handful of other senators issued a statement accusing Churchill of being unable to divorce his thinking “from the roll of drums and the flutter of the flag of empire.” Liberals such as Henry Wallace and Walter Lippmann again railed against the appearance of an Anglo-American coalition, which they claimed would serve only to increase Soviet insecurity and hostility.
The night of the speech, the Achesons happened to give a dinner party to which Lippmann and Wallace, as well as Chip Bohlen, were invited. There the argument raged. Acheson, articulate and aggressive as usual, dominated the conversation. Churchill had a point, he said. It was time to stand firm with the Soviets. Bohlen belittled the Soviets’ fears of encirclement; they were the ones on the offensive, not the U.S. Wallace, on the other hand, warned that this could lead to war. “Well, Chip,” Mrs. Lippmann told Bohlen, “all I can say is that in your war I will not be a nurse’s aide.” Her husband for the most part brooded quietly, but in the column he wrote the next day he warned: “The line of British imperial interest and the line of American vital interest are not to be regarded as identical.”
Bohlen relayed such sentiments to the friend in Moscow whose outlook he had come to share, and Kennan responded with his usual “concern and alarm.” Citing Lippmann and Wallace by name in a cable back to Washington, Kennan reiterated his contention that Moscow’s view of the world was based not on facts but on internal necessities. “Nothing short of complete disarmament, delivery of our air and naval forces to Russia and the resigning of powers of government to American communists would even dent this problem,” he cabled. “And even then we believe—and this is not facetious—that Moscow would smell a trap.” In short, Britain and American should work together and not worry about how this would be interpreted in the U.S.S.R.
Harriman was also in substantial agreement with his friend the former Prime Minister. In Washington a few days after the Fulton speech, the two men had a long, private talk. The Russians, Churchill said, will try all the rooms in a house, enter those that are not locked, and when they come to one that cannot be broken into, they will withdraw and invite you to dine genially that same evening. Harriman, a far less felicitous thinker and talker, was as impressed by the glories of Churchill’s rhetoric as he was by the gloominess of his outlook.
Acheson had his own chance to dine with Churchill at the British Embassy in Washington. He too was swayed by the Briton’s gruff charm. Alice Acheson could hardly restrain her outpouring of personal praise, both for Churchill’s statesmanship and his paintings. An accomplished artist herself, she engaged in a spirited but friendly argument over whether the tones and hues of Churchill’s palette might be too high-keyed for his artistic style. “A woman of conviction, your wife,” Churchill said to Acheson, thus earning his lasting affection.
Yet Acheson, despite his argument with Wallace and fondness for Churchill, was worried about whether American policy should be so closely tied to Britain in defiance of Moscow. On the advice of his colleagues at the State Department, he decided not to attend an official reception being given for Churchill in New York. And when the Senate began its hearings on the British loan, Acheson tried to walk a fine line.
The loan, as Acheson tried to cast the issue, represented American support for the principles of freedom, but it should not be seen as an effort to combat the spread of Communism. “We are interested,” he proclaimed, “in an economic system which is the very basis of our life—the system of free individual enterprise.” Senator Vandenberg, however, was more interested in the strategic implications. “If we do not lead,” proclaimed the new convert to internationalism, “some other and powerful nation will capitalize on our failure.”
After passing the Senate on a close vote, the measure went to the House, where even more anti-Communist rhetoric proved necessary. “The economic arguments,” explained Congressman Christian Herter, a respected Republican internationalist from Massachusetts, “are on the whole much less convincing than the feeling that the loan may serve us in holding up the hand of a nation whom we may need badly because of impending Russian troubles.” Added Speaker Sam Rayburn, a Texas Democrat: “I do not want Western Europe, England and all the rest pushed toward an ideology I despise.”
Acheson concluded that the anti-Communist rhetoric was necessary to win support for the British package. And that, of course, meant abandoning any plans for a loan to the Soviets. In a March poll, citizens were asked if “the U.S. is being too soft or too tough in its policy toward Russia.” In a dramatic swing from previous surveys, 60 percent answered “too soft,” while only 3 percent said “too tough.” Acheson was already becoming convinced of the same thing. Just as importantly, he had learned that such sentiment could be tapped to rally support for the critical responsibilities that America would have to shoulder in a changing and dangerous world.
A crucial factor in Acheson’s outlook, during the debate over both the British loan and atomic energy, was the crisis in Iran that was coming to a head at the same time. It vividly illustrated all of the tactics that made Americans most fearful about the Soviet Union. Contrary to what had been agreed just months before, Moscow refused to honor the March 2 deadline for withdrawing the Red Army from the parts of Iran it occupied during the war. It also encouraged a Communist-led separatist movement in the northern province of Azerbaijan—and helped impose Soviet-style secret police there. And finally, Moscow seemed to be involved in toppling the Prime Minister in Teheran and replacing him with an enigmatic man who acted, at least for a while, like a Soviet sympathizer.
Worst of all, this was happening not in Eastern Europe, where it could be argued that Russia had a legitimate interest in establishing a security belt. The only logical explanation was that Moscow’s moves were blatantly expansionist. To Acheson and other students of history, the region at stake was vital to the economic and strategic interests of the West.
Posing the question that everyone now seemed to be asking, The New York Times printed a hard-hitting editorial on “What does Russia want?” Conceding that the Soviets had security needs, it went on to list the places “annexed” since the end of the war. The territory stretched from Eastern Europe to Manchuria, a total of 273,947 square miles. “Where does the search for security end,” asked the editorial, “and where does expansion begin?”
While Byrnes served as the front man, Acheson took on much of the day-to-day authority at the State Department once the Iranian crisis erupted in mid-March. The committee he convened concluded that the challenge must not be minimized: continued occupation of northern Iran by Soviet troops would soon mean that the West would face a fait accompli.
With maps of Red Army movements as an ominous backdrop, Acheson’s committee at first decided to confront the situation as a violation of a 1942 treaty that the Soviets had signed guaranteeing Iran’s sovereignty. But Chip Bohlen objected: the U.S., he pointed out, was not a party to the pact, which had been negotiated by Britain.
What worried Acheson more, however, was that he had been waging a losing battle against American military demobilization; any threat not backed by strength might be called as a bluff. He concluded that for the moment the best approach was to protest to the Kremlin but “leave a graceful way out” if it did not want a showdown. A department official named Alger Hiss, then director of the Office of Special Political Affairs (forerunner to the Policy Planning Group that Kennan and Nitze would later head), drafted the note for Acheson, which was sent to Kennan for delivery to Molotov.
Truman was aware that the crisis represented a critical shift to the U.S. of Britain’s traditional role as the guardian of Western interests in Iran. It was a transition that must be handled gingerly. Harriman, he decided, was the man who could help.
In the taxi on the way to the White House, the recently retired ambassador to Moscow marshaled his thoughts on how to decline the pending appointment as ambassador to London. Some of Harriman’s considerations were professional: he had no desire to work for a Secretary of State he had taken to calling “the damn fool.” Other considerations were personal. He and Marie had just spent an enjoyable couple of weeks down at Hobe Sound in Florida with Adèle and Bob Lovett, who was at the time recuperating from his gallbladder operation and about to rejoin Brown Brothers Harriman. Yet tugging at him from the other side was his enjoyable friendship with both Churchill and his daughter-in-law, Pamela. When he reached the Oval Office, his resistance dissolved.
“I want you to go to England,” Truman said. “There is a very dangerous situation developing in Iran.” He explained that the Russians were refusing to pull their troops out, as they had promised the British they would do. “This may lead to war,” said the President. “I must have a man in London who knows the British, a man I can trust.”
“When do you want me to go?” Harriman replied.
In the end, there was little for Harriman to do. American policy makers decided that the Iranian situation was so critical that Britain’s sensitivity about its own role in its historic sphere of influence could be ignored.
From Moscow, Kennan’s cables painted a dire picture. The Soviets, he said, had designs on the whole region. “The U.S.S.R. aims not only at acquiring a privileged position in northern Iran,” he wired at the height of the crisis, “but at virtual subjugation, penetration and domination of the entire country, and Bahrein and Kuwait as well.” Nor, he added, were Turkey or other neighbors, stretching as far as India, immune from Russia’s drive for “ultimate political domination of the entire Asiatic mainland.”
The Soviets indeed had their eyes set on controlling parts of Iran. But as Kennan’s Long Telegram had predicted, they were reluctant to press too hard when faced with strong resistance. After securing Iranian agreement for joint ownership of some important oil concessions, Moscow agreed in late March to pull back its troops.
The U.S. nevertheless insisted that the issue remain on the U.N. agenda until the troops were actually withdrawn. This prompted Andrei Gromyko to stage the first in a long series of dramatic Soviet walkouts form the Security Council. But the continued pressure also helped assure that the troops would in fact depart. By May they had.
Although the U.N. had served nicely as a source of moral support, it was already clear that it would never be, as some of its founders had dreamed, a force in its own right against aggression. It was American resolve, Acheson and others believed, that had caused Moscow to back down. In response to the showdown occurring in Iran, and one that seemed brewing in Turkey, the U.S. had sent the battleship Missouri to fly the flag in the eastern Mediterranean. In addition, Washington soon began supplying aid and pledges of support as a way of encouraging Teheran to secure its control over Azerbaijan.
The successful conclusion of the Iranian crisis illustrated to Acheson, more clearly than any Long Telegram could, the importance of firmly confronting any Soviet probe. Moscow was clearly enticed by weakness and deterred only by strength. With Britain no longer able to protect traditional Western interests in places like Iran, that duty was now inevitably in U.S. hands.
This was a bold new vision of America’s role, one that would be hard for a sheltered nation to accept. But men such as Acheson knew it was necessary. That June, at the urging of Bohlen and other friends, he spent a couple of late nights at his desk at home, a glass of Scotch by his side, writing a discursive speech entitled “Random Harvest” which he delivered at the Harvard Club in Boston. “Our name for problems is significant,” he concluded. “We call them headaches. You take a powder and they are gone. The pains about which we have been talking are not like that. They will stay with us until death. We have got to understand that all our lives the danger, the uncertainty, the need for alertness, for effort, for discipline will be upon us. This is new to us. It will be hard for us.”
McCloy, a less felicitous speaker, struck the same theme that month when he spoke at the Amherst commencement. “There is no war to end all wars,” he told the students. “No war to make the world forever safe. Men who fight for freedom merely win the opportunity to continue the peacetime struggle to preserve and advance it.”
“When the facts seemed to him to merit a change—as he seems to think they now do in the case of the Soviet Union—he switched with the facts,” wrote James Reston in a lengthy New York Times Magazine profile of Acheson in the summer of 1946. Certainly Acheson by then had facts to go on, facts that pointed to a clear conclusion. The Soviets and their satellites could be dealt with in a businesslike way—perhaps even Poland could get coal credits—but any aggressive step, any probes for new areas to dominate, must be dealt with firmly.
If George Kennan’s mind was like that of a Puritan elder—drawing anguished abstractions from a few shards of painful experience—Dean Acheson’s mind could be compared to that of an elegantly cloaked Anglican archbishop. Resounding in its buttressed, soaring chamber were great moral certitudes, dressed in righteous words like “honor” and “duty,” lessons deduced from the evidence of history, such as the failure of appeasement at Munich and the duplicity of the Soviets in Iran.
His world order, once shaped by the needs of the wartime alliance, had crystallized now around a new set of premises. Prime among these was an awareness, based on Kennan’s theories and concrete events, that the Soviets were bent on expansion. If there was to be order and balance in the postwar world, and a renewed system of commerce and prosperity, America would have to assume the role once played by the British. This would demand farsighted commitments by a people quite content to retreat back to their own shores. The one thing that proved capable of galvanizing them was the fear of Communist expansion. By casting the power struggle against the Soviets in terms of a holy crusade against Communism, all elements of Acheson’s package held neatly together.
Thus there was no hesitation, no indecision this time around, when Acheson was handed a note from the Soviets in early August. Addressed to Turkey, with a copy to the U.S. and Britain, it demanded a joint Soviet-Turkish defense system for the Dardanelles and the Turkish Straits. The Foreign Service, the State Department staff, and the War Department staff all agreed: what the Soviets were requesting would mean giving Moscow military bases on the Straits and a major toehold in the eastern Mediterranean.
On its own, this may have been acceptable. The Soviets made a valid point: during the war, German warships had been allowed into the Black Sea by a defenseless Turkish regime. At the Potsdam Conference, the Allies had agreed that the Montreux Convention governing the Straits needed revision; Britain and the U.S. made a generous proposal that would have given Soviet ships special priority during wartime. The whole issue, unfortunately, got somewhat tangled in a pet notion of Truman’s, one the other Allies saw fit to ignore, to internationalize all European inland waterways.
The problem with the Soviet demand was that in August of 1946 it could no longer be considered just on its own merits. For a year Moscow had been exerting clumsy pressure on the Turkish government. Red Army movements in Bulgaria and Iran seemed partly aimed at the Turkish border, and Pravda prominently printed claims by Soviet strategists that the U.S.S.R. had rights to territory in northeastern Turkey. Domination of that critical country, rather than defense of the Dardanelles, seemed the main reason Russia wanted bases there. In addition, the Soviets had created a crescent of crises stretching from Trieste to Teheran, sparking brush fires that made their expansionist motives seem quite clear.
With Byrnes away, Acheson was in charge. As he pored over his maps, he had no doubt what the Soviets were up to. History offered many examples of an emerging power moving into the regions that a waning one could no longer influence. The Soviets saw the entire Middle East as ripe for the picking. Britain was retrenching, and the U.S. had expressed no strategic “interest” in the area. In 1946 it seemed quite conceivable, certainly to Moscow and even to some in the West, that Russia was destined to become the dominant power there.
To Acheson, with his strategic vision and new understanding of Soviet intentions, it was clear that this could result in Russian domination of a vast area of critical importance to the West. If Britain could no longer exert her traditional influence in the Mediterranean and Middle East, the U.S. would have to step forward and assert for the first time that it had a strategic interest in the region.
Acheson summoned Forrestal and a handful of top military aides to the State Department to devise a forceful response. At the outset, they agreed that the Soviet request was not dictated by defensive needs; in times of war, Soviet air power could easily defend access to the Black Sea. Instead it was clearly intended as a step toward dominating Turkey and achieving the old czarist goal of having unfettered access to the high seas—a goal which, however understandable, would eventually lead to Soviet pressure from the Aegean to Gibraltar to the Red Sea.
In the memo for Truman he drafted at the meeting, Acheson bluntly summed up the fear of falling dominoes that had haunted Harriman. “For global reasons,” Acheson wrote, “Turkey must be preserved if we do not wish to see other bulwarks in Western Europe and the Far East crumbling at a fast rate.” With these words, the first concrete steps were taken toward what would soon be known as the Truman Doctrine and the policy of containment.
There were no illusions, certainly not in the minds of Acheson or Forrestal, that the Soviets would be swayed by diplomatic pressures alone. “The only real deterrent to Soviet plans for engulfing Turkey and the Middle East,” Acheson declared at the meeting, “will be the conviction that the pursuance of such a policy will result in a war with the United States.” This risky course, he boldly added, would test whether Kennan was right in predicting that the Soviets were reluctant to go to war to achieve their aims. “We shall learn,” he said, “whether the Soviet policy includes an affirmative provision to go to war now.”
At three-thirty the next afternoon, August 15, they gathered around Truman’s desk to present the most forceful U.S. proposal for dealing with the Soviets since American forces were withdrawn from Siberia twenty-six years earlier. Next to Acheson stood Forrestal and the Pentagon’s top military officials. “In our opinion,” Acheson informed the President, “the establishment by the Soviet Union of bases in the Dardanelles or the introduction of Soviet armed forces into Turkey on some other pretext would [result] in Greece and the whole Near and Middle East, including the eastern Mediterranean, falling under Soviet control and in those areas being cut off from the Western world.”
Sixteen months earlier, Harriman had stood in the same spot and urged Truman to lay it on the line with Molotov. Now Harriman’s longtime colleague was insisting that mere words were not enough. “The only thing that will deter the Russians,” Acheson solemnly told the President, “will be the conviction that the U.S. is prepared, if necessary, to meet aggression with force of arms.”
“We might as well find out,” Truman replied, “whether the Russians are bent on world conquest.” Agreeing with the conclusion reached by Acheson and Forrestal the previous day, the President noted that it was best to figure out the answer now rather than in five or ten years. Thus, he said, he was prepared to pursue the policy “to the end.”
One of the generals whispered a critical question to Acheson. Had he made it sufficiently clear that the policy might lead to war? Before Acheson could answer, the President asked what had been said. On hearing the question, Truman opened a desk drawer and pulled out a large map of the region. A hush came over the room as Acheson and the others huddled to look over the President’s shoulder. Then the self-taught history buff from Independence launched into a lecture about the strategic importance of the eastern Mediterranean and the critical need to keep it free from Soviet domination.
“When he finished,” Acheson recalled, “none of us doubted he understood fully all the implications of our recommendations.” The educational backgrounds of the two men could hardly have been more different, but Acheson was deeply impressed—“awed” he told a friend—by Truman’s grasp of history. The President’s no-nonsense style was also appealing: he understood well, Acheson thought, the need for decisive action.
The battleship Missouri was already in Istanbul. With the President’s approval, a task force led by the new supercarrier Franklin D. Roosevelt was dispatched to join it. In the note Acheson prepared for the Soviets, the U.S. formally declared that the Turkish Straits was a matter of concern to its own strategic interests. The Montreux Convention could be revised, but Turkish sovereignty over the waterway could not be compromised. The American ambassador in Ankara was instructed by Acheson to tell the Turkish government to be “reasonable but firm” in its own response to the Soviets.
At Forrestal’s suggestion, Acheson gave a background briefing to eighteen influential reporters. The Soviets, Acheson told them, “are not trying to control the Straits, but Turkey.” He also held a press conference on what was seen as a related issue: the downing by Yugoslavia of two American planes that had strayed off course. Calling it an “outrageous” act, Acheson acidly proclaimed: “Nobody shoots down planes that are lost between clouds and are trying to get home. That isn’t the ordinary aid to navigation with which they are familiar.”
Even the British, whose traditional sphere of influence the U.S. was suddenly seeking to support, found themselves unnerved by Washington’s tough line. Lord Inverchapel came by the State Department to tell Acheson that the tensions were causing “quite a bit of excitement” both at his embassy and in London. What did the U.S. have in mind? Was it truly prepared to resort to war? The ambassador was a friend, but Acheson responded in formal phrases. The U.S., he said “realized fully the seriousness” of the matter and “was prepared to conduct itself in a manner appropriate to that realization.”
Firmness worked. A few weeks after receiving Turkey’s response to their demands, the Soviets sent back another note, which Litvinov had been called out of retirement to write. It was considered “extraordinarily mild,” and though the Soviets did not drop their desire for some military control of the Straits, they were willing to shelve the issue. Marshal Tito went even further: he actually apologized for Yugoslavia’s attacks on the American planes.
Acheson felt he had learned how to deal with the Soviets; just as importantly, he had discovered how to please the man who shared his taste for action. In addition, when others took to belittling Truman—not an infrequent occurrence at Georgetown dinner parties—the proper Grotonian would stoutly defend him.
Acheson could be condescending, but not to the office of the Presidency or the no-nonsense man who properly insisted on respect for its authority. In Acheson’s presence, Byrnes once addressed the President over the phone as “Harry.” Acheson later scolded him gently. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “he is Harry to no one except Mrs. Truman.” Byrnes ignored the advice, but Acheson, much to Truman’s liking, never failed to call him “Mr. President.”
Chip Bohlen was among the many who suggested it: now that Kennan had returned from Moscow, he should take a leisurely trip across the U.S., getting reacquainted with the country that often seemed so alien to him. In the process, he might help provide the public with a much-needed education about the Soviet threat.
Kennan had spent a few weeks consulting with the newly formed CIA about information gathering in the Soviet Union and in September was scheduled to become, thanks to Forrestal, the Deputy Commandant for Foreign Affairs at the National War College in Washington. The summer months in between, he agreed, would offer a good chance for a cross-country speaking tour.
American attitudes had changed quite a bit since Kennan was last in the country. Instead of running stirring picture spreads on the “valiant” Russian allies, Life was printing such articles as a long, two-part warning by Republican John Foster Dulles on the dire threat of the spread of international Communism. A new breed of politician, just back from the war, was finding ways to tap into a powerful new sentiment. A circuit judge named Joseph McCarthy, who had served as a desk-bound bombing analyst in the Pacific, was stumping on the slogan “Wisconsin needs a tail gunner in the Senate.” Lyndon Johnson, back in Congress after a stint in the Navy, proclaimed: “We must have military strength to fulfill our moral obligations to the world.” Knocking on doors in Boston, another former Navy man, John Kennedy, was finding that voters seemed to respond to his talk about America’s new burden of leadership. And in southern California, Richard Nixon was discovering that these nebulous sentiments could be focused and aroused when the menace of international Communism was raised.
Even though public pressures to demobilize and “bring Daddy home” continued, Americans were bracing for the new challenge. Stalin, Molotov, Iran, Turkey, Communist spies, an iron curtain, the menacing mystery of Marxism: it all added up to a growing anxiety, one that was arousing a new sense of America’s global role and, to an even greater extent, an outpouring of impassioned rhetoric about it.
Kennan began to feel more like a Janus than a Cassandra, casting his wary glances both at the anti-Communist zealots in his audience as well as the naïve Soviet sympathizers. He was particularly anxious that a distinction be made between socialism and Sovietism, the latter being the true danger. It is important, he explained, “to distinguish what is indeed progressive social doctrine from the rivalry of a foreign political machine which has appropriated and abused the slogans of socialism.”
In his report to the department at the end of the tour, Kennan lamented that academic and scientific audiences seemed particularly naïve in their hopes for Soviet collaboration. “In trying to explain things to them I felt like one who shatters the pure ideals of tender youth,” he noted. “Fortunately for them, they didn’t believe much of what I said.”
On the other extreme, Kennan found wild-eyed anti-Communists who spouted fears that the insidious ideology was seeping out from under every bed. Too many people, he reported, “sustained a false sort of hope from the beginning about collaboration and now they are drawing false conclusions from false disillusionment.”
When he took up his duties at the War College, Kennan strove to put forth “a little clearer and more hopeful view” in a sixteen-page lecture. He still had sharp words for “the preposterous and fantastic distortions” of liberals “like Mr. Wallace” who felt a friendlier American attitude could induce the Russians to be more cooperative. It was important to remember, he said, that the “fanatics” who ruled Russia had “inherited many of the traditions of the old czarist state” and had come to power “breathing venom and hatred and implacable hostility toward the entire capitalistic world.” Any attempt at appeasement, he argued, would be met “with unabashed demands for further concessions at every point.”
This naïve liberal line, however, was only one of “two aberrations” that infected the public mind, Kennan added, “and personally I don’t know which of the two is more dangerous.” As he explained it: “The other aberration—into which even more Americans seem to fall—is to throw up the sponge at this point and to conclude that war with Russia is inevitable.”
Russians would probe into areas of weakness, but they had no compulsion to wage wars of aggression when faced with resolute opposition. Propounding a doctrine that would soon become famous, Kennan concluded in his War College lecture: “There is no reason, in theory, why it should not be possible for us to contain the Russians indefinitely by confronting them firmly and politely with superior strength at every turn.”
Despite his subsequent protests that his theories were not intended as a military doctrine, Kennan’s lectures in the fall of 1946 emphasized that component quite heavily. Citing the troubles the U.S. was having with Yugoslavia at the time, he said that a better approach would be if “our negotiations over the future of the port of Trieste would be backed up by quiet but effective augmentations of our military and air strength in that area.”
Coping with the Soviet sphere was possible, Kennan explained in his lectures, “as long as you have the superior force.” The approach must be two-pronged: “It is the question of the manipulation of our political and military forces in such a way that the Russians will always be confronted with superior strength.” To an audience of Foreign Service officers, he said of Soviet leaders: “While they are political gamblers, they are not gamblers when faced with the reality of military force.”
Kennan was coming to the realization that because of the bomb, the concept of total war, which sought the unconditional defeat and occupation of an enemy country, was no longer realistic. Future wars would necessarily be more restricted in scope, conducted by small flexible strike forces to achieve limited political ends. Nuclear weapons were necessary for deterrence, but must not be considered a usable tool in a military confrontation. The U.S. should make it clear that it would never be the first to use the bomb, and it must restructure its military strategies to take this into account. Kennan, who felt somewhat out of his element on the subject, did not press these views strongly at the time. But over the years these convictions would grow.
Kennan’s most direct involvement with national policy during this period was his contribution to a top-secret report prepared by Clark Clifford. The son of a Missouri railroad executive, Clifford, a suave and persuasive lawyer, had just begun what would be a long career in the inner circles of the American foreign policy Establishment. After serving in the naval reserve during the war, he was recruited into the Truman White House as a naval aide. With his felicitous writing style and shrewd common sense, Clifford was soon shifted from military work to serve as a speech writer, legal counselor, and multipurpose political adviser.
For a proposed speech reflecting America’s new hard line, Truman asked Clifford in the late summer of 1946 to prepare a list of international agreements the Soviets had violated. Clifford enlisted the help of his own aide, George Elsey, who argued that the report should be expanded to explore the entire realm of Soviet conduct and its motivations. The starting point for his research, not surprisingly, was Kennan’s Long Telegram.
Indeed, much of Elsey’s final product was a compilation of Kennan’s telegrams and memos interwoven with some written by Bohlen and Harriman. “We should be prepared to join with the British and other Western countries in an attempt to build up a world of our own,” the report declared, “and recognize the Soviet orbit as a distinct entity with which conflict is not predestined but with which we cannot pursue common aims.”
That much Kennan could agree with. But the report represented the first small step in pushing Kennan’s ideas beyond nebulous theory. “The language of military power is the only language which disciples of power politics understand,” the Clifford-Elsey report emphasized. The U.S. must be prepared “to wage atomic and biological warfare” and establish a global doctrine designed to “support and assist all democratic countries which are in any way menaced or endangered by the U.S.S.R.”
Perhaps out of pleasure at seeing the ideas he had once shouted from the wilderness now being officially embraced, Kennan was reticent about resisting those who would extend them a bit further. “I think the general tone is excellent and I have no fault to find with it,” said the flattered analyst when Elsey sent him a draft in September. He suggested only minor modifications: successful containment might alter the Soviet system for the better, and the use of atomic weapons was something that would require “careful consideration” given the conditions prevailing at the time. These and other little fixes were promptly made by Elsey and Clifford.
“How many copies of the report do you have?” Truman asked Clifford after reading it.
“Ten,” replied Clifford.
“I want them all,” the President ordered. “Go to your office and get them.” They must be locked up and kept secret, Truman explained, otherwise any further efforts to work with the Soviets at all would be impossible. “If this got out it would blow the roof off the White House, it would blow the roof off the Kremlin.”
Averell Harriman was lunching with Churchill at Chartwell when the butler announced that a telephone call for the new ambassador was coming through from the White House. As they waited for the connection to be completed, the former Prime Minister asked what the President might want.
Harriman speculated about the recent flap over Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace’s speech decrying the emerging “get tough with Russia” policy. Arguing for a realistic recognition of spheres, but coming to the exact opposite conclusion of Kennan, Wallace had declared: “The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.” Byrnes and others demanded that Wallace be fired, Truman did a clumsy twist about whether he had approved the speech, and finally Wallace was forced to resign.
It was likely, Harriman said, that Truman wanted him to replace Wallace in the Cabinet. Should he accept?
“Absolutely,” said Churchill. “The center of power is in Washington.”
That argument had special appeal for Harriman, who had begun to harbor political ambitions of his own. When the President came on the line and made the predicted offer, the well-traveled envoy flatly responded: “When do you want me there?”
“You don’t seem to understand,” said the perplexed President, who was expecting to face a tough sales job. “I want you to be Secretary of Commerce.”
“Yes, sir,” said Harriman. “I understand. When do you want me there?”
“Just as soon as you can conveniently do it,” Truman happily replied. Within two weeks, by the beginning of October, Harriman was home.
Like Kennan, Harriman was becoming somewhat concerned about the swing of the pendulum. Not that he felt any softer toward the Soviets: Stalin himself made it clear that the Kremlin had opted for a unilateral policy, which could only mean further expansionist probes that the West would have to resist. Yet Harriman was beginning to fear the anti-Communist hysteria was serving no useful purpose. After all, it was a small planet. The U.S. would have to find some way to live with the Russians. And Harriman had always believed that this would require a realistic and businesslike approach.
Forrestal noticed the shift when Harriman dropped by soon after his return. “He was not overpessimistic” was the way Forrestal carefully phrased it in his diary. “He said that he did not believe the Russians would provoke war in the near future, but there was a chance of finding an accommodation which would be the foundation for peace provided they realized we would not make an unending series of concessions.”
Even Forrestal, the firmest of the firm, gave a few indications—at least on occasion—that the pendulum could get out of control. “Just as you and I felt there was too great a swing pro-Russia three years ago,” he wrote Harriman, “I am a little fearful that it may swing too strongly the other way now.” The tendency to “see things precisely in black and white terms,” he added was “the great American temptation.”
Such moments of moderate reflection were rare for Forrestal. As he became increasingly obsessed with Communist expansion—indeed eventually paranoid about it—he viewed the Soviet threat more and more as an ideological one, a Marxist-Leninist apocalyptic peril. But he and Harriman were both, by profession, men who knew how to deal with competitors and adversaries. At least for Harriman, and occasionally for Forrestal, this could provide a context for the Soviet problem.
This was, in fact, one of the things that attracted Kennan to these two men. Conservative and introspective by nature, he admired people who could cope in the world of commerce and industry. “The stag groups of businessmen,” he said of his cross-country tour, were “hardheaded, thoughtful, schooled in the sort of dialectical approach that permitted you to oppose a competitor without finding it necessary, or even desirable, to destroy him.” Thus they were uniquely “capable of understanding that the Soviet-American antagonism might be serious without having to be resolved by war.”
Harriman’s main failing, in Kennan’s eyes, was that he was not very reflective. Seldom did he articulate his own philosophical beliefs with any depth. One of the few times he did was as a favor to Kennan. Shortly after returning from England, Harriman gave a guest lecture at Kennan’s War College class, an off-the-cuff and off-the-record hour talk that provided a rare and cogent explanation of his outlook.
“I know of no one,” a proud Kennan told his students, “literally no one in this country, who is better acquainted with the international environment in which we live.” Harriman in turn cited the two people who helped shape his outlook: George Kennan and Chip Bohlen, men who were less optimistic than others about the prospects for Soviet cooperation and, he said, turned out to be right.
Harriman’s basic thrust was similar to Kennan’s. “The Soviets have declared ideological warfare on us,” he said. Yet at least for the present, they “have no intention to become involved in a shooting war.” Hopes for cooperation failed, said Harriman, because the Kremlin consciously decided to pursue a unilateral policy, which may have been “just as well.” Otherwise America might have been “lulled to sleep” by a façade of Soviet reasonableness. “The warmth of feeling in the hearts of the American people toward the Russian people would have led to all sorts of things, large loans, political agreements.” The result would have been that the West would be faced with “a much more serious situation later.”
In discussing ways to confront the “menace” of Soviet expansion, Harriman gave priority to military force. “It is of paramount importance that we maintain and let the Russians know we have maintained a strong military establishment,” he said. Echoing Lovett, he emphasized that the “most effective” military tool would be a large “air striking force,” one that could “penetrate the centers of their industry.” The U.S. must have “guts enough to face the fact” that the atomic bomb must be developed. “There is no indication so far,” he said, “that we would be any safer in giving Russia the atomic bomb than we would have been in giving it to Hitler.”
Harriman showed himself quite different from Kennan in one respect: rather than dwelling on the forces of history, he focused instead on the actions of people. Whereas Kennan could (and often did) analyze a situation endlessly without mentioning any individual by name, Harriman (by habit a name-dropper) studded his remarks with such phrases as “when I went with Churchill to see Stalin” and “as Litvinov once told me.”
More importantly, Harriman had a keener awareness than Kennan that the lives of real humans with real values were at stake. Kennan’s dark realism about the division of Europe was now generally accepted by American policy makers. Harriman, however, rose to rare heights of eloquence in explaining the moral reasons why America should not rest easy with this outcome. “It is my firm conviction,” he said, “that man is destined not to live under a Communist dictatorship but in a free society. The struggle through the centuries of man for freedom is not going to be overthrown by these people.” This could cause serious problems for the Soviets in Eastern Europe. “They have a lot of difficulties in those countries, particularly if we keep hope alive in them.”
Should “some method of checking Communism” within the U.S. be taken? asked a student. The problem, Harriman replied, was not with people who were attracted to “the humanitarian side of the theoretical Communist doctrine.” The real threat came only from those Communists whose allegiance was to Moscow. Why did the Soviets decide to abandon a policy of cooperation? Such a policy, Harriman explained, “wasn’t to their advantage. The hunting was too great.”
The dispute over why Soviet-American cooperation failed—or more broadly why the Cold War began—has been debated ever since. Did Stalin and the Soviets represent a deceitful, dangerous expansionist threat? Or were they mainly motivated by understandable security concerns which prompted them to seek control over a ring of neighbors that had historically been a corridor for invasions? Were their actions—in Poland and Iran and Manchuria and elsewhere—manifestations of aggression, or were they reactions to a Western bloc attempting to impose its own influence while flaunting the bomb on its hip?
Those who dealt with the Soviets firsthand—most notably Harriman and Kennan and Bohlen—were generally unanimous in their assessments by 1946. “It isn’t a question of wisdom,” Harriman told Kennan’s class. “It is a question of having been exposed to the disease.” At stake was more than merely a power rivalry between traditional nation-states. “The issue,” said Harriman, “is a free society as against dictatorship.”
Some attributed Harriman’s and Kennan’s outlook to the personal slights and inconveniences they suffered in Moscow. But in fact their sentiments were far more genuine and deep. They saw the Soviets were different in a fundamental moral way, and felt this factor was too often ignored by detached politicians and revisionist historians seeking to apportion Cold War blame. Using the terror tactics of a secret state-police force, the Kremlin had brutally imposed, both on its own citizens and those of hapless neighboring countries, a rigid control over all aspects of life and thought and speech.
For Harriman and others who served in Moscow and Eastern Europe, fear of the “dreaded knock on the door” was something they had seen up close. So too were the ruthless tactics used to impose party control, purge any dissent, kill or exile any opposition—be it in Poland or Bulgaria or Russia itself.
Some on the American left have argued that the Soviets initially tried to cooperate with the West by establishing governments in Eastern Europe that tolerated representative democracy. Harriman and Kennan took a more flinty-eyed view, and the subsequent memoirs of those involved in such regimes tend to prove them right. “Wherever they have taken over domination of neighboring countries,” Harriman said at the time, “the brutality of the Red Army and the methods of the secret police in the governments set up have alienated almost all the population.”
The outlook of the Americans who had served in Moscow was not monolithic. Kennan believed that the division of the world into hostile spheres was inevitable, while Harriman and Bohlen clung to the view that the American struggle should include fostering hopes for freedom in Eastern Europe. Harriman and Bohlen, who had believed in the high-minded public pledges signed by Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta, also attributed the Cold War to a conscious Soviet decision in early 1945 to abandon those agreements and pursue a course of expansion. Kennan, on the other hand, scoffed at dating the Cold War at all; the sources of the tensions that arose after the war, he felt, were no different from those that existed before the war, or during the sixteen years that the U.S. refused to recognize the Bolshevik regime—or for that matter from the tensions that existed before the revolution.
Yet these men, and most who served in Moscow with them, agreed on one essential point in 1946: because of what they knew firsthand about the nature of the Soviet Union, its fanatic ideology and even more fanatic dictator, it would not be a fit ally for the West, and in fact would be a dangerous adversary.
Like Harriman, James Forrestal had triumphed in the competitive world of Wall Street. Such hard-nosed instincts were one of the things that prompted Kennan’s admiration. Although he was prone to carry his views to extremes, Forrestal’s early awareness of the Soviet threat also impressed Kennan. But above all, Forrestal had a quality that was, to Kennan, disappointingly lacking in Harriman: a willingness to wrestle with ideas. “Forrestal was not so much a man of reflective and refined intelligence,” Kennan explained in a letter to a friend, “as he was a man who appreciated those qualities in others.”
It was hardly a dispassionate compliment. What made this trait so appealing to Kennan was that it was his own “refined intelligence” that Forrestal began to dote on in the fall of 1946. Taking Kennan under his wing, the Navy Secretary sponsored him for his position at the War College, avidly distributed copies of his cables and speeches, and set up Pentagon lunches for him with top policy makers.
Such flattering patronage, in turn, made the once-alienated diplomat even more eager to please. In fact, Kennan later admitted that a paper he wrote for Forrestal, which became the most famous and important article of his career, had serious shortcomings—ones that he said originated because of “what I felt to be Mr. Forrestal’s needs at the time.”
Forrestal was as eager to pick Kennan’s brain as Kennan was to have someone finally eager to pick it. On a leisurely cruise down the Potomac on the Navy yacht Sequoia, they spent an evening with Chip Bohlen discussing Soviet motives. Kennan became a frequent visitor to Forrestal’s office, and was invited to a dinner party at the Secretary’s Georgetown home.
Kennan did not fit in well at the Georgetown dinner, and his relationship with Forrestal never became a social one. Although their intellectual interests were similar, their personal styles were not. Forrestal had come to Princeton as an Irish-Catholic outsider and resolutely worked his way into the top ranks of campus life. Kennan had arrived nine years later just as much of an outsider and resolutely remained that way. A good friend of the Lovetts and Bohlens and McCloys, Forrestal had earned a prominent position in the Washington social scene. His marriage, to a vivacious and heavy-drinking former fashion editor at Vogue, Josephine Ogden, was an unhappy one. The Kennans, on the other hand, were a close and inward family and unfailingly retreated to their Pennsylvania farm for weekends, occasionally bringing hapless guests who later privately complained about spending the entire time doing chores and listening to abstract geopolitical discourses.
While others in Washington wondered about Soviet motives, Forrestal was plagued by neither nuances nor doubts. Marxist-Lenin dogma, treacherous and insidious and evil, was dedicated to the destruction of the capitalist world and would do so unless forcefully checked. He had searched for a document that would expose the “whole truth” about Communism, and thought he had found it with his overeager reading of the Long Telegram. Now he wanted to enlist Kennan as his philosophical aide-de-camp in the crusade.
Although pleased to be graced by such a powerful patron, Kennan faced a problem. He despised the Soviet system with a fervor approaching Forrestal’s, and he was alarmed by the threat of Russian expansionism. But he did not see Communist dogma as the primary source of the menace. Ideology was important. It explained some things and acted as a “fig leaf” to justify others. But Communism was not the real enemy. Russia was. Its perverse paranoia and historical expansionism had been abetted and amplified, but not caused, by the Marxist doctrine usurped by its new Bolshevik czars.
The distinction was partly an academic one, but it had certain ramifications. Like Harriman, Kennan was not convinced that war with the Soviets was inevitable. Because the security of their country took precedence over considerations of a global Communist crusade, Kremlin leaders were unlikely to embark on reckless wars of aggression. Strengthening the free world, economically and militarily, could serve to contain Soviet expansionism.
Forrestal never quite seemed to grasp these nuances, and Kennan, gratified by his patronage, seemed reluctant to press them. He did, however, take the opportunity to make some of his points (although hardly in a manner designed to shake Forrestal’s convictions) when Forrestal sent along a study he had commissioned earlier in the year.
In his effort to find a paper that explained the dire nature of the Communist threat, Forrestal assigned the subject to Edward Willett, a Smith College professor. The forty-three-page product, entitled “Dialectical Materialism and Russian Objectives,” heavily emphasized the role of ideology. “The basic philosophy of communism,” the professor wrote, “not only is conducive to, but indeed demands, an ultimate conflict between communism and Capitalistic democracy.”
Kennan sent Forrestal five pages of detailed comments. “If we can maintain a state of affairs in which the chances of a violent effort to overthrow our system of society are unfavorable,” Kennan argued, “then such an effort may not be made.” Yet Kennan did concede that containment might involve a military showdown. “I do not think it at all out of the question that this government should take up arms in defense of the political independence of nations outside the Western hemisphere.”
The most prescient part of Kennan’s analysis was his awareness, not shared by Willett or Forrestal or many others, that the real threat from Moscow was not the ideology of Marxism. What the Kremlin sought, he said, was not more Communism but more Soviet control, the establishment of “governments amenable to their own influence and authority.” They had “no desire” to see countries move toward a socialist system “except under the guidance of persons who recognize Moscow’s authority.” Even if there were a Communist revolution in the U.S., Kennan argued, “the only reaction of the men in the Kremlin would be to stamp it as a form of fascism” unless it was led by people acting under their control.
Gently correcting a professor’s mistakes was hardly an edifying task, so Kennan asked Forrestal whether he “would mind my writing on the same subject in my own way.” The resulting paper, which Kennan titled “Psychological Background of Soviet Foreign Policy,” attempted to lay out the subtle relationship between “ideology and circumstances” that accounted for the Kremlin leadership’s “particular brand of fanaticism.”
Much in his essay Kennan had written before: Soviet belief in the hostility of the outside world, originally a product of Marxist ideology and “the powerful hands of Russian history and tradition,” was now being fostered by leaders who found it “necessary to justify the retention of their dictatorship by stressing the menace of capitalism abroad.” Despite Communist preachings, there was no reason to believe that Moscow would embark on “a do-or-die program to overthrow our society by a given date,” Kennan explained. “The theory of the inevitability of the eventual fall of capitalism has the fortunate connotation that there is no hurry about it.”
Although he stressed once again that the Soviet Union must be regarded as “a rival not a partner,” Kennan struck a more hopeful note than he had before. The Soviets were “a tired and dispirited population,” economically crippled and facing severe leadership problems. Perhaps it was on the wane. Certainly its power should not be hard for the West to counter.
This task could be accomplished by “firm and vigilant containment.” It was a word Kennan had used before in his speeches, but in his paper for Forrestal he returned to it three times. He left vague the exact nature of the “force” that would be used to accomplish this containment, but he phrased the idea in a way that inevitably appealed to the action-oriented Navy Secretary. The goal, Kennan said, was “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”
The prospects for such a policy elicited a rare sense of elation in Kennan. The “vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points” would involve massive global commitments. Yet this should cause no “thoughtful” American to complain, Kennan declared. “He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.”
Certainly this ideal played well with Forrestal, who printed up copies of Kennan’s paper and showed them all over town. He still missed some of the nuances. “Nothing about Russia can be understood without understanding the implacable and unchanging direction of Lenin’s religion-philosophy,” Forrestal explained to his old boss Clarence Dillon in a letter accompanying the essay. Yet Kennan’s basic idea was something Forrestal understood well: the need for forceful containment of Soviet probes around the world.
A study group at the Council on Foreign Relations, which had been grappling with the Soviet issue without much success, invited Kennan up to New York to lead a discussion there in early January. Drawing from the essay he was just completing, he explained the “diversity” of factors that motivated Soviet conduct. Ideology, cultural traditions, and the insecurity of Russian rulers all played a role. Yet it was “perfectly possible,” he added, “to contain Russian power” in a “non-provocative way.”
Why was it reasonable to believe, one council member asked, that a policy of containment could work? “They are very cautious in a military sense,” Kennan replied, “never allowing their commitments to exceed their capabilities.” Would the Soviets accept a plan for international control of atomic energy? Perhaps, said Kennan, but only very slowly, because inspection ran counter to “their most deep-seated inhibitions.” The Soviets, he added, did not “have any intention to use the bomb” because they knew an atomic exchange would defeat all of their aims. “They are wiser than we are in that sense.”
What turned out to be the most important question came after the discussion. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of the council’s authoritative magazine Foreign Affairs, asked if Kennan had a copy of his speech. No, Kennan replied, but there was a paper he was finishing for Forrestal that covered the same ground.
After getting Forrestal’s consent and clearing the essay with the appropriate State Department committee, Kennan wrote Armstrong that he would be pleased to have him publish it. There was one qualification: since he was about to become the head of a new policy planning unit at the State Department, he would prefer that the article be anonymous. That would be no problem, replied Armstrong. He would schedule the article for the July issue. So Kennan scratched off his name, replaced it with an “X,” and sent the paper up to New York.