Kennan and Lovett at State
The selling of the Marshall Plan
This is a terrific business,” Lovett wrote his old Wall Street compatriot Ferdinand Eberstadt in June of 1947. “I now refer to the wartime problems as the ‘good old days.’” To Thomas Lamont at Morgan Bank, he wrote, “At no time in my recollection have I seen a world situation which was so rapidly moving toward real trouble.” At lunch with Forrestal, he worried that England was on the verge of bankruptcy and that Congress would balk at assuming the costly burden of her global role.
Lovett was less enthusiastic and confident about a Pax Americana than his predecessor. He had been reading the Lippmann columns that Acheson attacked so bitterly, and he found himself more often than not in agreement with the columnist. Lippmann’s classic definition of a viable foreign policy—the balance of resources and commitments—appealed to the cautious banker’s mind. At a private session at the Council on Foreign Relations in May, when he was still quietly serving as Acheson’s “understudy,” Lovett offered his world view to a small circle of insiders, including Foreign Affairs editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong and The New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin. Quoting Lippmann with approval, Lovett said that he had been trying to draw up a balance sheet of U.S. commitments and resources. Not surprisingly, he was having difficulty with this literal-minded exercise. The experts at the Council chided him for being too much of a banker, but Lovett was uneasy. It was apparent, he argued, that the U.S. was not planning carefully, that it was already spread too thin around the globe. He had no doubt about the Soviet threat, however, or the need to meet it. Lovett’s preference was for building up resources rather than paring down commitments. He wanted the U.S. to be prepared for “swift sure retaliation.”
When Lovett formally took over from Acheson on July 1, he knew that despite all the spring ferment at the State Department, he was starting virtually from scratch on European recovery. Kennan made this perfectly clear in a memorandum that began: “Marshall ‘Plan’: We have no plan.”
The plan was supposed to come from Europe, but the Europeans, despite their terrible needs, quickly fell to squabbling. From the outset, the French equivocated, continuing to insist that Germany be kept weak. Truman had to send his most experienced negotiator, Averell Harriman, to bring the balky French leaders into line. The U.S. Military Governor of Germany, General Lucius Clay, relentlessly sniped back at the French. Lovett finally had to remind the general firmly that policy was set in Washington, not Berlin. Clay promptly threatened to resign. This was normal procedure for Clay, who threatened to resign almost a dozen times. Accustomed to dealing with the egos of generals from his days in the War Department, Lovett carefully maneuvered to keep Clay satisfied but under control.
Lovett could be self-deprecating, cautious, bland. He could also be wickedly funny, forceful, and effective. More important, he knew when to be which. At meetings of foreign representatives on the Marshall Plan held at the State Department, he refused to sit at the head of the table as chairman: he did not want it to appear as if Washington was running the show. In private, however, he mimicked his stuffier European counterparts to the great amusement of his State Department colleagues. He enjoyed replaying the morning when Henri Bonnet, the très grave French ambassador, arrived at a meeting with his fly open. Bonnet immediately sat down and zipped himself, but he somehow managed to catch his necktie, which had been tucked into his pants, so that the tip protruded from his fly. After much standing up and sitting down again, Bonnet finally had to ask for scissors to cut off his tie. Lovett, in his franglais, would imitate Bonnet struggling to maintain his dignity through this ordeal. Lovett could also be withering about his own associates, especially inflated generals such as Clay. When diplomats sent him impenetrable cables, he would hold them up to the window and, squinting hard, recite nursery rhymes.
Lovett patiently listened to the entreaties of Bonnet and the other European diplomats who came, silk hat in hand, to Washington that summer of 1947. By August, his patience was waning. All the Europeans had produced so far, he told Marshall, were “sixteen shopping lists.” In his speech, the Secretary had offered the Europeans “friendly aid” in putting together a package. Now, Lovett believed, the U.S. would have to do more than gently cajole.
Kennan was coming to the same conclusion. Dispatched to Paris in August to monitor the bargaining sessions between the European countries, he came home within a week predicting that the U.S. would, as he put it to Marshall, “listen to all the Europeans had to say, but in the end, we would not ask them, we would just tell them what they would get.”
In Paris Kennan had been the perfect diplomat. He explained to the Europeans that they were dealing with “a new set of men in Washington with simple honest minds,” by whom he presumably meant Truman, Marshall, and Lovett. Subtlety must “at all costs be avoided” when dealing with these men, he emphasized as he made the rounds of diplomatic receptions and cocktail parties. The Europeans must send “simple honest men” back to Washington to represent them. This approach seemed to soothe the sophisticated European diplomats, and it apparently did not offend the “simple honest men” back in Washington. One of them, Bob Lovett, told Senator H. Alexander Smith that while the Paris sessions were still “unsatisfactory” because they lacked “realism,” Kennan had been “extremely effective.”
Kennan, for so long an ignored and awkward analyst, was now a public celebrity. The X-Article had appeared in the July Foreign Affairs. The mysterious “X” was quickly unmasked by Arthur Krock of The New York Times, who had been slipped a copy of it by his fellow Princetonian Forrestal when the article was merely a memorandum for Forrestal’s private use. When Krock read “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” it did not take him long to deduce the identity of “X.” The obscure diplomat was suddenly seen as the visionary behind the Administration foreign policy; the Times dubbed him “America’s global planner.” The publication of the X-Article was seen as an official pronouncement, “an event,” wrote Lippmann, “announcing that the State Department had made up its mind.” Kennan had even given the new policy a name: containment.
Reader’s Digest and Life reprinted long excerpts of the X-Article. Mr. “X” himself was feted at a whirl of parties in Paris, where his appearance caused a minor sensation. Kennan, naturally enough, was quite overwhelmed. It was beginning to dawn on him that the article was taking on a meaning and a life of its own, one disturbingly different from the intent of its author. He “felt like one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster.”
The most painful twinges came from reading Lippmann. In twelve consecutive columns beginning while Kennan was in Paris, Lippmann attacked the “containment doctrine” as a “strategic monstrosity.” To try to “confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point” was folly. It would mean propping up puppet regimes all along the Soviet periphery. The result would inevitably be to “squander our substance and our prestige.” The U.S. should devote its resources to restoring Western Europe, not mucking about in Asia or the underdeveloped world. The columns were reprinted later that fall in a book whose title popularized another new phrase: The Cold War.
Kennan read the columns with horror. He later described Lippmann’s series as a “misunderstanding almost tragic in its dimensions.” He had not meant the X-Article to be a prescription for U.S. policy but rather an analysis of Soviet character. But he had, as had happened before, become overwrought and been betrayed by hyperbole, by what he later admitted was his “careless and indiscriminate language.”
Still, Kennan felt unjustly accused. He had, in fact, strongly and repeatedly opposed the sweeping language of the Truman Doctrine, both to his students at the War College and to Acheson personally. In May, for instance, he had complained to Acheson that “the Truman Doctrine is a blank check to give economic and military aid to any area of the world where the Communists show signs of being successful.” The next month he admitted to a National War College audience, “It may be that we have undertaken too much.” Kennan in that speech had warned against violating Lippmann’s equation of resources and commitments.
Yet here was the famous columnist accusing him of authoring, in Kennan’s words, “precisely those features of the Truman Doctrine which I had most vigorously opposed.” Even worse, Kennan noted, Lippmann had cited as corrections to the excesses of the Truman Doctrine precisely “those features of General Marshall’s approach, and those passages of the Harvard speech, for which I had primary responsibility.” Lippmann’s ignorance of Kennan’s true role was doubly perplexing to Kennan, since he had sat down with Lippmann for their long lunch at the War College that past spring and felt quite in agreement with the famous columnist. If Lippmann, with his sophistication and inside knowledge, was so misreading the X-Article as an official State Department pronouncement of global containment, what must his many readers think?
Kennan longed to clear up the misunderstanding, to set the record straight. But he could not. He had violated a precept of General Marshall’s: “Planners don’t talk.” Marshall had been shocked to see the head of his Policy Planning Staff become an international celebrity. He summoned Kennan to his office and with raised eyebrows (“eyebrows before whose raising better men than I had quailed”) demanded an explanation. Kennan stammered that the article had been cleared for publication by a State Department committee, which was true enough. Marshall, who believed in proper channels, was satisfied, but he repeated his injunction against talkative planners.
Kennan was hopelessly insecure in the presence of someone so secure as Marshall. “I have a feeling that I puzzled him,” he wrote in his memoirs. The General, never one for praise, had been sparing with Kennan as well. Once, while the diplomat was nervously pouring drinks in his office, Marshall had exclaimed, “Kennan, they tell me you are a good head of a planning staff, and for all I know you are, but who the hell ever taught you to put the ice in before the whiskey?” Kennan was not about to jeopardize even such faint praise. While his colleagues were jabbering away with their favorite reporters, he became virtually mum to the outside world. His gag was not just self-enforced. Lovett turned down speaking requests for Kennan by explaining that the department’s chief planner was “under directive from Marshall” not to speak publicly.*
Lovett was far too busy cajoling congressmen to worry about Kennan’s misunderstandings with Lippmann, no matter how fundamental they appeared. He told Jim Forrestal at lunch that he doubted Congress would “produce the sums necessary” to rescue Europe. Forrestal shared his worry. He warned a Cabinet meeting that a new isolationism and a “let Europe go” mood was developing in the country. The result, he said, would be “Russians swarming over Europe.”
In September, the President met with a group of congressional leaders and told them that he planned to call an emergency session of Congress. He wanted Congress to pass an “interim aid” bill to tide Europe over until a full recovery plan could be approved in the next session. The congressmen were unenthusiastic. “Mr. President, you must realize there is growing resistance to these programs,” the Republican House Leader, Charles Halleck, said. “I’ve been out on the hustings and I know. The people don’t like it.”
The courtship of Arthur Vandenberg was renewed with ever greater ardor. “Politicians were a race that Marshall got along with but did not understand,” Chip Bohlen recalled. “Their motivation mystified him.” When Lovett and Bohlen urged Marshall to cultivate Arthur Vandenberg, the general resisted at first, replying that he assumed the senator was motivated by the national interest and therefore required no cultivation. But Lovett and Bohlen prevailed; Marshall began devoting hours to the company of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “We could not have gotten much closer,” Marshall later recalled, “unless I sat in Vandenberg’s lap or he sat in mine.”
Acheson’s last contribution before he returned to his old Washington law firm of Covington, Burling in June had been to find the “Vandenberg brand” for a European Recovery bill. The senator had suggested that a “bipartisan committee” would be necessary to soften up Congress, and made it clear that unless Acheson followed his advice, his help would not be forthcoming. Acheson readily agreed, but made sure that the appointments were tightly controlled by the White House. The committee was packed with industrialists, many chosen by Lovett, to ease congressional qualms that the Marshall Plan was a “socialist idea.”
Acheson recommended his old schoolmate and rowing coach, Averell Harriman, to be chairman of the Administration’s Committee on Foreign Aid. Disappointed at not being chosen Secretary of State, Harriman had dutifully toiled as Commerce Secretary, but he felt peripheral. This appointment made him a player again. It also pleased Forrestal, who had always believed that essential questions were best decided by a committee of his friends. “I don’t know how much I can do,” he wrote Harriman, “but one thing I do know: that between Bob, you, and myself we may be able to tie a few strings together that will not come unstuck.” Forrestal, who was feeling battered by interservice rivalries at the Pentagon, added, “I also know that it is a relief to be working in an atmosphere in which one’s associates are hoping for his success rather than the contrary.”
Harriman undertook the foreign-aid job with his usual single-minded intensity. A plodding public speaker, however, he was not particularly well suited to congressional testimony. Indeed, after one deadening performance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a House staffer sympathetic to the Administration cause, Charles Burton Marshall, tore up the transcript of Harriman’s rambling and tentative remarks and substituted a crisper, more upbeat version for the official record.
It was Bob Lovett who really understood how to stroke Congress. He soon discovered, not much to his surprise, that many members had found his predecessor condescending. Forrestal informed him that, at a dinner for Averell Harriman in June, Congressman John Lodge had confided that his colleagues “had the impression they were being talked down to” by Acheson.
Lovett liked to joke to his friends that dealing with Congress was “like getting a shave and having your appendix taken out at the same time.” But if Lovett felt uncomfortable, he did not show it. His disarming friendliness and old-boy politesse came naturally. Whereas Acheson had to feign friendship with Vandenberg, Lovett really became Vandenberg’s friend.
The two spent more waking hours together in the fall of 1947 than they did with their wives. (Lovett worked so hard that at Christmas Truman personally ordered him to take some time off.) The Under Secretary’s daily diary logs numerous long phone conversations with Vandenberg. Almost every evening on his way home from work, Lovett would stop off at Vandenberg’s apartment at the Wardman Park Hotel, just across Rock Creek from his own house. There, over cocktails, the Under Secretary would show the senator the day’s most illuminating classified cables. Typically, those dispatches would describe unrest in Europe, where the local Communist parties in France and Italy were making an all-out push to disrupt and, if possible, bring down government.
The offensive was Stalin’s reaction to the Marshall Plan. Not unreasonably, given Soviet history, he saw a restored Europe, and especially a rebuilt Germany, as a threat to Soviet security. In September, he created the Cominform, a more restrictive, more tightly controlled version of the old Communist International, to assert his control over local Communist parties, which he ordered to stage a wave of general strikes in France and Italy.
The tactics did succeed in disrupting already fragile economies. But they also alienated public opinion, and in retrospect appear to have been the death gasp of Stalinism in Western Europe. At the time, the agitation seemed threatening. Forrestal was so worried that he wondered to Lovett over the phone whether the U.S. should land troops in Italy to quell the disorders. Not until the Italian government asks us, replied Lovett, who was less excitable than his old neighbor from Locust Valley.
In Europe, government and business leaders were not above exploiting this scare. Said Pierre Mendès-France, the French executive director of the World Bank: “The Communists are rendering a great service. Because we have a ‘Communist danger,’ the Americans are making a tremendous effort to help us. We must keep up this indispensable Communist scare.”
Back in the U.S., certain segments of the Administration were fueling a Red scare of their own. Politicians seemingly indifferent to the spread of Communism abroad were determined to root out subversion, real or imagined, at home. Republican isolationists were the fiercest Red-baiters of all. For fiscal conservatives, domestic Red hunts had the virtue of being far cheaper than massive rearmament or reconstruction programs. Truman grudgingly felt the need to pacify the right by showing that he too was vigilant. Some of his lieutenants were overly so. Attorney General Tom Clark, along with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, dreamed up a “nationwide patriotism campaign” to stamp out subversion. A “Freedom Train” containing the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, and the Constitution toured the country, while mass demonstrations of government employees took a “freedom pledge” and sang “God Bless America.” The celebration culminated with a mock bombing run on the nation’s capital at Thanksgiving time.
Some of the activities were not so harmless. In November, the Attorney General published a list of eighty-two subversive organizations, including the National Negro Congress and the Walt Whitman School of Social Science in Newark; membership in any of these was generally a bar to government employment. On Capitol Hill, meanwhile. The witch-hunts had begun. The House Un-American Activities Committee trumpeted its investigation of subversion in Hollywood, with Gary Cooper declaring that while he had not actually read Marx, “from what I hear, I don’t like it because it isn’t on the level.”
Most Administration officials, from Truman on down, thought this was mostly nonsense, perhaps even dangerous, but they kept quiet. Forrestal, who genuinely feared subversion from Soviet fifth columnists, floated the idea of requiring journalists to take loyalty tests, but the scheme predictably leaked and sank. Lovett discussed the list of subversive organizations with the Attorney General, but his only contribution was to ask Clark to call them “subversive” rather than “Communist.”
Lovett could ill afford to say or do anything that might distract from his lobbying campaign for the so-called Interim Aid plan designed to tide over Europe until the Marshall Plan could be put in place. Along with Marshall and Harriman, he appeared repeatedly on the Hill to warn of the Communist threat in Europe; he testified every day from November 17 to November 30. Some moments were rocky. Congressman John Vorys of Ohio badgered him one morning with a question Acheson had found uncomfortable (and would again): If Europe, why not China? Lovett was taken aback by his questioner; Vorys had been Skull and Bones at Yale and a flier in Lovett’s beloved Yale Unit during World War I; his wife had invited Adèle Lovett to watch the session with her. As Vorys bore in, a page handed Lovett a note: it was an invitation from Vorys to Lovett to have lunch. In the more private precincts of the House dining room, Lovett was able to calm Vorys down with Yale chatter. Lovett passed off China as “General Marshall’s specialty,” a reference to Marshall’s fruitless mission to China in 1946.
“Never before has Congress been bombarded with such propaganda,” grumbled Congressman Fred Busby of Illinois, but the lobbying worked; the Interim Aid package passed overwhelmingly. When the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee approved the package on November 20, Vandenberg called Lovett to tell him that passage for Interim Aid looked safe, but “we’re headed for the storm cellar on the Marshall Plan,” which Republicans were already denouncing as an “International WPA” and a “bold socialist blueprint.” Averell Harriman dropped by the British Embassy to give a progress report to Lord Inverchapel. Congress, he informed the ambassador, had seen nothing “compared to the flood of organized propaganda which the Administration is about to unloose.”
It was a characteristic of the old foreign policy Establishment that its members could come and go between government and their banks or law firms. Indeed, over time, they constantly seemed to be substituting for each other, like lines in a hockey game changing on the fly.
Everyone, in or out of government, jumped into European recovery. In July of 1947, pending the merger of the old Navy and War departments in September, Forrestal had been nominated to be the first Secretary of Defense, but he found time to agitate for the Marshall Plan, knowing full well that a revived Europe would enhance national security. Acheson took time out from his law firm to form the Citizens’ Committee for the Marshall Plan, patterned after the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, the group that had lobbied for U.S. intervention in World War II. His codirector was former War Secretary Robert Patterson. The committee’s honorary chairman was, inevitably, Henry Stimson. Acheson performed such chores as making speeches to the National-American Wholesale Grocers’ Association in Atlantic City and ghostwriting congressional testimony for the National Farmers Union. Testifying himself, he could not refrain from twitting a congressman or two. “If you didn’t talk so much and listened more,” he lectured one, “I think you would understand better what this is all about.”
John McCloy had become president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—better known as the World Bank—at the end of February 1947, leaving once again his lucrative law practice with Milbank, Tweed. “When he took over,” according to The New York Times, “the bank was eight months old, split by dissension, sadly lacking in prestige, and had not lent one dime.” In McCloy’s view, the bank’s weakness was “too much politics, too little finance.” In a series of meetings and speeches with businessmen and financiers, many of them his friends, he made the case for investing in Europe: to create markets for U.S. trade, to cure the dollar surplus, to stop Communism. His more subtle purpose was to convince Wall Street that the Bank was not full of New Dealers seeking to finance their mushy ideals by making bad loans. He succeeded; the first loan, $250 million to France, was oversubscribed by private investors.
McCloy believed that, in the long run, private investment was Europe’s salvation. The Bank, he said, would be around long after the Marshall Plan was finished. The Bank was the perfect vehicle for McCloy, who over his long career would weave private and public concerns so skillfully that it became difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. He worked closely with his State Department friends; his announcement of the loan to France came, not coincidentally, only hours after the French government forced Communists out of the Cabinet. At the same time, he protected private investment in World Bank securities with some quiet lobbying of his old “Heavenly Twin” at the War Department, Bob Lovett. The Under Secretary’s phone logs show McCloy checking in with Lovett in December of 1947 to make sure that Congress would not cut $3 million out of the Administration’s aid package to France that was to be used to repay loans from the World Bank. McCloy also floated the idea of a loan to finance renewed coal development in the Ruhr. His memory of Germany’s shattered landscape still fresh, he was convinced that Germany had to be rebuilt for Europe to recover. In his disarmingly direct manner, he stated, “Most of Europe’s problems can be broken down in terms of coal. The Ruhr’s got most of it.” German power was still too vivid a memory to others, however. The idea of refueling the source of German power with American dollars was spiked by the Administration.
In its attempts to implement a European recovery plan, the U.S. was getting some discreet help from an old friend of Lovett’s and McCloy’s, and Acheson’s and Harriman’s—Jean Monnet, the French investment banker who had been a regular participant in government and business deals, as well as Washington dinner parties, in the thirties. Monnet was well placed as cochairman of the Committee on European Economic Cooperation, the organization that put together those “laundry lists” for U.S. aid that had so discouraged Lovett in August of 1947. Monnet, in turn, worked with two future paragons of the foreign policy Establishment, George Ball and Paul Nitze. Advised secretly by Ball, a Chicago lawyer who had succeded McCloy as his American counsel, Monnet leaked a copy of a $28 billion shopping list to Nitze, then an up-and-coming young State Department economic adviser. The adverse reaction in Washington helped Monnet persuade his European colleagues to draft a more reasonable request. Monnet did make one gaffe; he joked to a congressman that French peasants had stashed $2 billion in gold bullion in their matresses. Averell Harriman spent most of a day explaining that old French joke in a congressional hearing.
The intimacy of decision making in Washington during the early postwar years was remarkable. The National Security Staff, which in 1985 had fifty specialists, hardly existed in 1947. Clark Clifford was a de facto national security adviser, but he also counseled Truman on domestic affairs, politics, and a whole range of issues. The National Security Council had been created that summer, but it was rarely used; national security meetings, such as they were, consisted mostly of Clifford having breakfast with Jim Forrestal at his home in Kalorama on Wednesday mornings. It is fair to say that almost everyone knew everyone else; they had gone to school together, gone to war together, and gone out to dinner together at least once a month. Not everyone was Ivy League, by any means, but Yale’s secret societies were better represented in the inner councils than any state university. Government was hardly a Masonic order; an Averell Harriman or a Bob Lovett cared far more about a colleague’s ability than the pin in his cravat, and Dean Acheson boasted about the diversity of the State Department. Still, friendships and old ties blurred boundaries between government agencies, between government and business, even between nations.
Chip Bohlen thrived in a world where business could be done face-to-face with like-minded men. He was a poor writer who had as much difficulty composing his prose as others had reading it. He could also be caustic, even cruel to dimmer lights than himself. Foreign Service officers had winced as he publicly dismembered a colleague, Charles Yost, at the Potsdam Conference on some minor matter. He described his sister-in-law’s husband, within his earshot, as “all body and no brains.” But he was more often charming, inquisitive, funny, and hugely persuasive in conversation.
Bohlen’s assignment was to help with congressional liaison and to handle public relations for the selling of the Marshall Plan. He did not much enjoy stroking congressmen, but he was effective at it, and he got on very well with the press. He loved staying up all night playing cards and talking to journalists; he was blunt and honest, and the good ones, such as Reston and the Alsop brothers, the syndicated columnists Stewart and Joseph, swore by him.
Bohlen’s appointment as State Department Counselor in the summer of 1947 was “certainly welcome as it may keep the Bohlen family from the poor house,” he wrote a friend. He was as usual broke, but poverty was highly relative in postwar Washington. He owned a small, charming Georgetown house, book-lined, with Oriental rugs and a garden out back, of the type later bought by successful lobbyists for several hundred thousand dollars. Bohlen purchased it in the thirties when Georgetown was being gentrified by New Dealers. (Their neighbor, when the Bohlens moved into 2811 Dumbarton Avenue, was an old black man with dozens of cats.) Bohlen always felt slightly pinched, unable to afford a summer home or a new car, and he sometimes had to borrow from friends, but he did not greatly suffer, or complain. He loved to gamble, and would fleece suckers at poker unashamedly.
He lost too. “Don’t tell Avis,” he would implore his gambling partners. “He was scared of her,” recalls Cecil Lyon, Bohlen’s friend through St. Paul’s, Harvard, and all the State Department years. “And he was absolutely devoted to her, and she to him.” Avis calmed and soothed Bohlen, moderated his late-night hooting and love of contentious debate. Avis was also astute. “She could get along with men like Joe Alsop and Averell Harriman, men who wouldn’t tolerate butterflies,” recalled Lyon.
Once a week, the Bohlens partook in an institution known as the Sunday Night Supper (called by Joe Alsop, perhaps more aptly, the Sunday Night Drunk). It was servants’ night out; the Bohlens, the Stewart Alsops, Joe Alsop, the Frank Wisners (he was later head of the CIA’s department of dirty tricks and a tragic Cold War suicide), the Bob Joyces (he was a veteran FSO), and the Tommy Thompsons (he was soon to become Bohlen’s and Kennan’s equal as a Soviet expert) would have well-lubricated potluck dinners, often inviting the Lovetts, Harrimans, Achesons, or Kennans to join them. Bohlen, in his baggy suits and spotted ties, sipping on Scotch and puffing Camels, would hold forth and argue with his friends, sometimes past three in the morning. “They would all argue at the top of their lungs,” Mrs. Stewart Alsop recalls. Joe Alsop would fish for information, offering up rumors and wheedling, “That’s right, eh? Eh?” If Bohlen remained silent, Alsop would infer confirmation. Bohlen would tire of Alsop from time to time, and the dinner would be off for a few weeks. But it would always resume. Bohlen, in the midst of one debate, yelled at Alsop, “Get out of my house!” Alsop yelled back, “I will not! This is my house!” (It was.) The two remained close friends; the Alsops’ column was particularly knowing that winter.
Bohlen’s coziness with the press was matched by Lovett’s. When Time decided to run a cover on Lovett in the spring of 1948, Lovett protested that he did not want any publicity, but ended up entertaining Jim Shepley, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, over Lovett Mists at Sea Change, in Hobe Sound. When the glowing profile appeared, praising Lovett as the “New Broom at State,” Lovett’s diary recorded a call to Shepley: “Thanks for his restraint in article in Time. Very appreciative.” Lovett was even tighter with The New York Times. After one press conference in March, Lovett called Lester Markel, an editor. Lovett’s secretary recorded: “Mr. L thanked him and asked him to thank Reston. L said there ought to be assurance from outside the Department that the Dept. is an extremely competent organization. Mr. Markel will see what he can do to bring this about.” Arthur Krock shamelessly catered to Lovett, phoning him once with reassurances after some leaks from the White House had been critical of his performance. Krock promised to put an end to it, in the Times at least, and read Lovett a column praising him, as well as their mutual friend Jim Forrestal.
With such friends, Lovett was not above propagandizing. When the State Department uncovered evidence that the Soviets had agreed with the Nazis to carve up Europe as part of their infamous nonaggression pact in 1939, Lovett decided to make good use of the embarrassing documents. “Mr. L thinks it would be a good idea to have printed up the Molotov-von Ribbentrop agreement,” his secretary recorded, “and publish it as a white paper when the opportunity offers. Mr. Forrestal heartily agrees.” The opportunity offered in early January, when Time printed a gloomy piece warning that support in Congress for the Marshall Plan was soft. By this time, any pretense that the European Recovery Program was not intended as an anti-Soviet measure was dropped. Before publicizing documents that showed the Soviets taking great delight in the Nazi invasion of Norway, Holland, and Belgium in 1940, Lovett called Acheson at his law firm. Did Acheson think it would be considered “propagandizing” for the European Recovery Plan? Acheson said maybe, but it was a chance worth taking.
The Establishment laid siege to Capitol Hill that winter of 1947–48. General Marshall, usually understated, told Congress that the vote on the ERP was “the greatest decision in our history.” He warned Congress that if the U.S. decided it was “unable or unwilling effectively to assist in the reconstruction of Western Europe, we must accept the consequences of its collapse into the dictatorship of police states . . . there is no doubt in my mind that the whole world hangs in the balance.” Harriman’s bipartisan committee examined the Marshall Plan objectively and delivered to Congress a three-inch-thick report. It heartily approved every aspect.
Actually writing the ERP was a logistical nightmare. The groundwork fell largely to Paul Nitze, Forrestal’s former partner at Dillon, Read and Chip Bohlen’s old Porcellian clubmate. Nitze worked up a series of “brown books” on every country, measuring their balance of payments, needs and requirements down to the smallest detail. To accomplish this feat Nitze had to borrow all the calculating machines of the Prudential Life Insurance Company in Newark, the same ones that he and Lovett had used right after the war for an inventory of the Air Force. The “brown books” were presented to John Taber, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and the first and largest hurdle.
Taber was a small-town lawyer and farmer from upstate New York. Nitze was a smooth Harvard Wall Streeter. Taber decided to teach Nitze a lesson. “Mr. Nitze,” he said at the outset of the first hearing, “I have seen your brown books and we’re not going to use them. We’re going to go country by country alphabetically, and you’re going to justify every commodity you want to ship.” Nitze winced. The laborious process got as far as “P” in the first country, Austria. The item at issue was twenty-five thousand tons of pulse beans. Taber peered down at Nitze and asked him, “Have you ever grown pulse beans?” Nitze conceded that he had not. “Well, I have,” said Taber. He had also been to Austria and the climate was perfect for growing pulse beans. “So why should we send them twenty-five thousand tons?” the congressman inquired. Nitze was feeling lower and lower. “Can I call experts from the Agriculture Department?” he asked. “No,” replied Taber. “You tell me.” Nitze took a deep breath and began to mumble something about nutritional levels and caloric intake. Taber rose from the table, literally pulling his hair. “This man knows nothing! I’m going to call Bob Lovett and tell him that this whole exercise is going to have to be put off one full year until the Department of State finds out what it is doing!” He stalked out. Nitze sat there, slumped over in his chair, watching six months of twelve-hour days, not to mention European recovery, go down the drain.
A half hour later, Taber returned. To Nitze’s surprise he was calm. He told Nitze quietly that he could call his experts and proceed. Nitze, relieved, went back to Lovett’s office and asked him what happened. “I couldn’t get a word in edgewise for about fifteen minutes,” Lovett answered, “but when he finished I said, ‘You know, I could ask you a question that I bet you couldn’t answer. How many rivets are in the wing of a B-29?’ Taber replied, ‘You used to be Assistant Secretary for Air. You know that, not me.’ I said, That’s just the point. Now why don’t you let Nitze call those experts. I’ve got another question you can’t answer.’ Taber said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘If it takes eight yards of pink crepe to tie around an elephant’s leg, how long does it take to swat a fly?’ Taber said that was a ridiculous question. I said, ‘Well, why don’t you stop asking Paul Nitze ridiculous questions!’”
Only Lovett could have so teased and scolded a self-inflated congressman and gotten away with it. Nitze went back to testify for forty-three sessions. He lost fifteen pounds. By early March 1948 the Marshall Plan was still in trouble, denounced by Republican leader Robert Taft as a “European TVA.” As Bohlen reported to Lovett early that month, “Taber had telephoned him and torn the Department apart . . . Communists in the State Department, etc.” All the testimony, all the good press, all the cajoling and jollying, still had not convinced Congress. The Administration needed something more persuasive. It needed a war scare.
George Kennan watched the lobbying effort with distaste. To a journalist who chastised him for failing to help sell the Marshall Plan, he replied that he was a diplomat, not a salesman. He resented having to curry favor with Congress. “My specialty,” he recalled telling the reporter, “was the defense of U.S. interests against others, not against my own representatives.”
Kennan felt uncomfortable in the social world of Chip Bohlen. He did not enjoy boozy debates; he took invective personally, and would sulk. At one of the Sunday Night Suppers, while Bohlen and the Alsop brothers were having at it in the next room, Kennan sat on the couch for most of the night with Mrs. Stewart Alsop, talking morosely about his unfortunate youth, the maiden aunts, the military academy, the social slights at Princeton. On weekends, Kennan would invite friends out to his Pennsylvania farm, but few relished the prospect. A ramshackle affair, it was in constant need of repair. Guests were pressed into service. Mrs. Alsop, who was very fond of Kennan but not his farm, recalls a weekend spent on her hands and knees painting radiators.
Kennan’s bond with Bohlen was intellectual, which was the most that the alienated loner could hope for in a relationship. His friendship with Chip, he wrote Charlie Thayer, “represents the maximum of what I am destined to have.” It had been forged in the isolation of Moscow; in social Georgetown, it began to wither.
Kennan, feeling increasingly isolated during the early months of 1948, was beginning to sense that the pendulum he had shoved so mightily with the Long Telegram and the X-Article had swung too far. The dire warnings that were being passed on to Capitol Hill and that Lovett was sharing with Vandenberg over cocktails made Kennan feel uneasy. His own view, expressed in a “Resume of World Situation” to Marshall, was that the worst was already over in Europe. “The danger of war is vastly exaggerated in many quarters,” he began. Containment was working. True, the Soviets should be expected to try to consolidate their power within Europe. This was perfectly natural (and to Kennan, who believed in spheres of influence, acceptable). Kennan specifically warned Marshall that the Soviets would “clamp down completely on Czechoslovakia,” a predictable defensive reaction to the Marshall Plan. In February, Kennan went further, suggesting that the time was approaching to “talk turkey” with the Soviets about a mutual reduction of forces in Europe. He also offered a characteristically prescient warning: “To oppose the efforts of indigenous Communist elements within foreign countries must generally be considered as a risky and profitless undertaking, apt to do more harm than good.”
Kennan was beginning a long journey back into the wilderness. The diplomat who had done so much in 1946 to convince official Washington that the Soviets had to be contained—by the threat of force as well as political and economic pressure—felt by 1948 that he had created a monster. He believed that his ideas had been not so much adopted as vulgarized, coarsened, and distorted by the failure of policy makers to understand essential nuance. But more than that, his own views had begun to change.
The Soviets were still a threat, to be sure, and the fate of Europe still hung “in the balance.” But Kennan began to argue in 1948 that—contrary to many of his earlier warnings—it was possible to bargain with the Soviets. Their behavior could be modified; they could be made to see “situations, if not arguments.” Not right away, perhaps, and only through painstaking and careful diplomacy. But an effort should be made to lessen Stalin’s paranoia, to defuse the tensions that could lead to war.
Significantly, Kennan understood that Communism was not monolithic. In his Policy Planning memos, he predicted that fissures would show in Stalin’s bloc (already Tito was showing independence in Yugoslavia), and he early on foretold that China and Russia would fall out, that Chinese Communism would be peculiarly adapted to China. “We may doubt that Communism—itself a rather vague concept—will be the right thing for the Chinese,” he wrote that winter. “We may be sure it will be given a distinctly Chinese flavor.”
Kennan’s mellowing was partly due to his belief that containment was working and that it was time to look to the next phase, a mutual reduction of forces. As he later explained in his memoirs, he believed that by standing up “manfully but not aggressively” to Soviet leaders, “they could be brought to a point where they would talk reasonably about some of the problems flowing from the outcome of the war . . . Formidable as they were, they were not supermen. Like rulers of all great countries, they had internal contradictions and dilemmas to deal with.” As Kennan watched Europe coalesce around the Marshall Plan and the Kremlin struggle with emerging Titoism, he felt the time had come to talk, or at least to sound out the Soviets about establishing some sort of dialogue aimed at reducing tensions and heading off the arms race.
There is a certain logic and consistency to Kennan’s account of his evolving views. Yet his retrospective explanation is somewhat too tidy and rational. It glosses over what appears to be a true change of heart, and it fails to account for Kennan’s own human quirks.
The fact is that Kennan throughout his own career was more intuitive than logical. Over the years, as Barton Gellman notes in Contending with Kennan, scholars have vainly tried to reconcile his apparent contradictions, to make coherent sense of his philosophy. Some, like Eugene Rostow, simply throw up their hands. Kennan is “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling,” sneers Rostow. More understanding critics recognize in Kennan what John Lewis Gaddis calls “noncommunicable wisdom”—a play on Dean Acheson’s frustrated plaint that what Kennan’s superiors really needed from him was “communicable wisdom, not mere conclusions, however soundly based in experience or intuition.”
Kennan was a thinker, not a warrior. However hardheaded he professed to be about standing up to the Soviets, he never lost a statesman’s innate preference for words over weapons. Though he recognized that a strong, alert military force is “probably the most important single instrumentality in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy,” he deeply mistrusted the ability of U.S. leaders to use it wisely and sparingly.
Between 1946 and 1948, his doubts on this score hardened into near despair. Asked at the War College in 1946 if the U.S. did not have something more constructive to offer than military force, Kennan groped uneasily. “I would be happier,” he said, “and I think we would be on sounder ground if we had things that were constructive to offer people in fields beside the military fields. I am still trying to think it out. . . . I just don’t know.” By the winter of 1947–48, he was increasingly convinced that the military men and the politicians were heedlessly shoving the diplomats aside. Kennan’s essential elitism, his disdain for government by the masses, figured heavily in his deepening disenchantment. It made him exceedingly leery of popular passions that were hardening the government’s anti-Communist line. As he wrote in his private notes:
When I returned from Russia a year and a half ago . . . I was conscious of the weakness of the Russian position, of the slenderness of the means with which they operated, of the ease with which they could be pushed back. It was I who pressed for “containment” and for aid to Europe as a form of containment.
Today I think I was wrong. Not in my analysis of the Soviet position, but in my assumption that this government has the ability to “operate” politically at all in the foreign field.
Kennan had profound doubts about the capacity of democracy to use force as an effective tool of foreign policy. Not only was the military chain of command “addicted to doing things only in the most massive, ponderous, and unwieldy manner,” but so was the American public. “A democracy,” Kennan wrote in a note to himself, “is severely restricted in its use of armed forces as a weapon of peactime foreign policy. It cannot manipulate them tactically on any extensive scale, for the accomplishment of measures short of war.” A democracy is suited only to all-out wars. “It soon becomes a victim of its own propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value, which distorts its own vision of everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue.”
Kennan’s philosophy of cool realpolitik was not matched by inward dispassion. He was moody and emotional, and ever insecure. He could not help but feel that he was partly to blame for the overreaction to his at times overwrought and imprecise X-Article. Yet mindful of Marshall’s injunction that “planners don’t talk,” and both repulsed by and inept at bureaucratic maneuvering, he felt helpless to redress the balance. In a way, one senses, he almost preferred his lonely intellectual existence. There was in Kennan an essential contrariness, a need to play the misunderstood iconoclast, to cast himself as a remote Cassandra in the long-running tragedy of U.S.-Soviet relations.
On February 25, 1948, Kennan handed General Marshall his paper calling for peace feelers to the Soviets and departed on a tour of Japan. His timing was unfortunate. That same day, Washington plunged into crisis, the first real war scare of the Cold War. Kennan’s moderation, his call for restraint and accommodation, would be overwhelmed by events.