5

THE ARTIST

GEORGE KENNAN

A month after Lippmann turned heel at the prospect of government service, a congressional delegation traveled to Moscow, in September 1945, to meet with Josef Stalin. When the State Department instructed the embassy’s number two to prepare for their arrival, George Kennan’s mood darkened. Fluent in Russian and German, a voracious reader of Chekhov and Tolstoy, conservative in diplomatic sensibility and modus operandi, Kennan doubted whether elected politicians could behave intelligently and responsibly overseas. For Kennan there was a clear demarcation of responsibility between politicians and civil servants. Professional diplomats with linguistic and historical skills should cultivate America’s external relations. Members of Congress, meanwhile, should focus their limited attention spans on the domestic sphere. Politicians rarely acted in accordance with the national interest but in their district or state interest, with primary focus on boosting reelection prospects. Kennan agreed with Lippmann that democracies were poor at pursuing a measured long-term foreign policy. American political life was disturbingly provincial, meaning the diplomatic service, a selfless intellectual elite, carried a grave burden of responsibility. “Sometimes I’ve been charged with being an elitist,” Kennan remarked. “Well, of course I am. What do people expect? God forbid that we should be without an elite. Is everything to be done by gray mediocrity?”1

The day after the delegation’s arrival, a meeting with Stalin was organized for 6:00 p.m., leaving the visitors a full day to explore the city. Their Muscovite hosts took them on a tour of the recently extended subway system—a remarkable feat of engineering and design—and plied them with a liquid of undisclosed provenance. At 5:30 Kennan, waiting anxiously near the exit of the Mossovyet station, received word that “the party was being entertained at ‘tea’ somewhere in the bowels of the subway system … To my horror, I discovered that the ‘tea’ served to them [contained] … varying amounts of vodka, depending on the stoutness of character and presence of mind of the individual concerned.” Swaying as they approached their limousines, the vodka had shorn the congressmen of their inhibitions. As the convoy neared the Kremlin gates, one shouted, “Who the hell is this guy Stalin, anyway? I don’t know that I want to go up and see him. I think I’ll get out.” As adrenaline coursed through his body, Kennan, a naturally reticent man, exclaimed, “You’ll do nothing of the sort; you will sit right there where you are and remain with the party.” Crisis averted, the cars continued their journey. Then the same drunken voice broke a tense silence: “What if I biff the old codger one in the nose?” In Kennan’s recollection, “My heart froze. I cannot recall what I said, but I am sure that never in my life did I speak with greater earnestness.” During a mercifully short meeting with Stalin, the congressional provocateur “did nothing more disturbing than to leer or wink once or twice at the bewildered dictator, thus making it possible for the invisible gun muzzles, with which the room was no doubt studded, to remain sullenly silent.”2 So went the trials of life in the diplomatic service.

The next day Kennan was charged with a similarly irksome task: serving as a translator for a bilateral meeting between Stalin and Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. Nicknamed “Red Pepper” for his left-wing politics, the senator was a declared admirer of Stalin’s economic achievements. In the friendliest of discussions, Kennan was compelled to translate Pepper’s fawning questions and Stalin’s happy replies. Pepper later wrote up his experience in an article for The New York Times, noting that “the generalissimo is a realist, notwithstanding the fact that he is engaged in the mightiest effort ever made in a single nation to raise the standard of living of some 200,000,000 people.”3 The experience was highly discouraging for Kennan. Unaware that each translated word had emerged through gritted teeth, Stalin complimented Kennan on his excellent Russian before returning to his chamber and the daily grind of foreign-policy brinkmanship and domestic repression.

At the end of the interview, Pepper asked Stalin whether he had a message for the American people. Stalin’s reply was simple and apropos: “Just judge the Soviet Union objectively. Do not either praise us or scold us. Just know us and judge us as we are.” This was a task that Kennan believed few Americans were capable of completing. The drunken belligerence of the first day and Pepper’s obsequiousness on the second mirrored America’s schizophrenia on how best to approach the Soviet Union. Walter Lippmann epitomized this strain of well-intentioned wishful thinking that viewed Stalin as a rational actor and the Soviet Union as an indispensable ally.

General George Patton, the colorful commander of the Seventh United States Army, conversely, personified the kind of reckless saber rattling that might facilitate a seamless transition to a third world war. In a discussion with Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson in May 1945, for example, Patton, entering his final months as general of the Third Army, complained that “we have had a victory over the Germans [but] we have failed in the liberation of Europe … We must either finish the job now—while we are here and ready—or later under less favorable circumstances.”4 Kennan recoiled from the two extremes, believing it vital to chart a middle course. Still, he believed that complacency was a bigger problem in Washington than pugnacity.

In January 1945, Kennan declared his intention to leave the Foreign Service in a letter to his friend and colleague Charles “Chip” Bohlen. Perplexed by the brouhaha generated by Churchill’s percentages deal, Kennan wondered, “Why could we not make a decent and definite compromise with it—divide Europe frankly into spheres of influence—keep ourselves out of the Russian sphere and keep the Russians out of ours?” He bemoaned the fact that “we have refused to name any limit for Russian expansion and Russian responsibilities, thereby confusing the Russians and causing them constantly to wonder whether they are asking too little or whether it was some kind of trap.” Kennan believed that the correct diplomatic course was clear enough. Washington should “bury Dumbarton Oaks as quickly and quietly as possible,” as multilateral agreements involving an expansionist Moscow were simply untenable. America’s political leadership should then “accept as an accomplished fact the complete partition of Germany along the line of the Russian zone of occupation … The west must be integrated into the Atlantic economy as independently as possible of the east.” The Soviet and Western spheres of influence in Europe were readily apparent to Kennan, as they should have been to anyone with clear vision. The United States had to recognize this division as fact and repulse any Soviet effort to foment discord beyond this by now established sphere. This defensive end should be achieved through deploying the most appropriate available means: political, economic, diplomatic or, as a last resort, military. “The above is admittedly not a very happy program,” Kennan conceded. “It amounts to a partition of Europe. It renounces—and for very good reason—all reliance on cooperation with Russia. But beggars cannot be choosers. We have lost a large portion of our diplomatic assets in Europe.”5

For Kennan, the main culprit was Woodrow Wilson’s sirenical legacy, which had been reenergized during the Roosevelt presidency. Indeed, Wilsonianism threatened to do as much damage in 1945 as it had 1919—as Kennan explained to Bohlen:

The program I have outlined is bitterly modest. But it has the virtue of resting on the solid foundation of reality. If we insist at this moment in our history on wandering about with our heads in the clouds of Wilsonian idealism and universalistic conceptions of world collaboration, if we continue to blind ourselves to the fact that momentary peaceful intentions of the mass of inhabitants of Asia and eastern Europe are only the products of their misery and weakness and never the products of their strength, if we insist on staking the whole future of Europe on the assumption of a community of aims with Russia for which there is no real evidence except in our own wishful thinking, then we run the risk of losing even that bare minimum of security which would be assured to us by the maintenance of humane, stable and cooperative forms of human society on the immediate European shore of the Atlantic.6

Resignation letters are often prescriptive; rarely are they so farsighted. The ideas presented in the letter, born of deep frustration at the author’s marginality, mostly became policy over the next five years.

Kennan was so far ahead of the curve, however, that he was virtually out of sight. While Bohlen appealed successfully to Kennan’s sense of duty in convincing him to remain in his post, his substantive response to his letter was broadly skeptical, observing that “foreign policy of [your] kind cannot be made in a democracy. Only totalitarian states can make and carry out such policies.”7 Still hopeful that the ends-focused wartime alliance with Stalin could survive the peace, Bohlen believed Kennan was temperamentally inclined to envision the worst-case scenario, discounting the possibility of collaboration with Moscow much too readily. When the worst case became unchallenged fact a year later, however, the force and logic of Kennan’s counsel swept all before it. “We should gather together at once,” he wrote, “all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full value.”8 Through 1946 and 1947, Kennan would play a great hand devising “containment”: America’s central strategy toward a divided Europe until the collapse of the Soviet Union. But a different kind of geostrategic game materialized as the Cold War assumed larger dimensions, one that was scarred by zero-sum mentalities on both sides. And at that point Kennan would walk from the table.

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The original Kennans were named McKennan and had arrived from Scotland or Northern Ireland in the late eighteenth century.9 George Frost Kennan was born on February 16, 1904, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Tragically, his mother died of a burst appendix just two months later. According to his older sister, Jeanette, the absence of his natural mother instilled in George a deep melancholy. He was team raised by a collection of mostly indifferent substitutes: several aunts and a stepmother who conformed to the fairy-tale rendering. His father Kossuth “Kent” Kennan was a placid, laconic tax attorney, fifty-two years old when his wife died. His advanced age and solitary nature ensured that no significant bond developed between father and son. Through his early childhood, George was quiet, dreamy, and lonely in his pursuits. He retreated to the attic of the family home to devour books and contemplate the unhappy course of his life. An aunt once chastised him with a counterintuitive demand: “George, stop thinking.”10

Kennan’s preference for his own company hampered his socialization but it also made him a dedicated student. He attended the Fourth Street School in Milwaukee, where swift progress allowed him to skip eighth grade. He was next dispatched to St. John’s Military Academy because Kent hoped the experience might compel his son to shed his retiring, poetic disposition in favor of something more masculine. The result was predictable: George was bullied relentlessly, which failed to bring him out of his shell. He just about survived the experience—although two escape attempts suggest it was a close-run thing—and applied to Princeton with an unconventional rationale. One of Kennan’s favorite contemporary novels—for he generally preferred the greater historical and philosophical ambition of nineteenth-century Russian writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. The book’s main character is an ambitious young midwesterner, Amory Blaine, who abandons his provincial roots to attend Princeton, with naïve hopes of societal acceptance and wider success. Blaine was a thinly disguised Fitzgerald, and Kennan, in turn, was happy to become either. The full course of Blaine’s journey—he ends the book penniless and exhausted, observing that “I know myself, but that is all”—appeared not to have given the young romantic pause.

Princeton proved to be a challenging adjustment for Kennan, just as it was for his literary models. Woodrow Wilson’s reformist platform had not survived his departure—dining-club snobbery still reigned, and the intellectual environment remained unexacting for the brightest students. Only one academic truly commanded Kennan’s attention, Professor Joseph Green, who taught that climate and geography had an unalterable impact on the formation of nations and peoples. This insight stayed with Kennan and would shape his skeptical views on the utility of sending foreign aid to poorer nations—and of the developing world’s tangential connection to American security. Nations shed geopolitical significance, Kennan came to believe, the closer they were to the equator. Beyond that Kennan skipped lectures and read widely in history, philosophy, and literature, gaining much from Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which identified through history an inexorable process through which civilizations rise and fall.11 Spengler observed that the “West”—by which he meant Europe and North America—was approaching a civilizational “winter” and that something more ominous was primed to take its place. He instilled in Kennan’s diplomatic thought a preference for the minor key. That Kennan read Der Untergang des Abendlandes in the original German testifies to an impressive linguistic talent; he learned the basics of the language of Goethe, for example, during a six-month family residence in Kassel, Germany, in 1912.12

Kennan’s analytical abilities grew sharper at college, and his range of reading grew wider—although his development was only vaguely connected to the education provided by Princeton itself. Kennan later observed that “Princeton had prepared my mind for further growth. It had not stimulated in that mind any great latitude of curiosity.” The institution’s stifling social hierarchies did not exactly encourage the life of the mind. Kennan joined a dining club but resigned soon after as he found its showboating, pride in family connections, and witty sophistry crass. He was an elitist who believed instinctively in meritocracy. It was only when Kennan had become surer of his literary and diplomatic gifts that he accepted Princeton as an appropriate home for someone of his delicate sensibilities—he lived there, primarily, from 1950 until his death in 2004. Socially, Kennan recalled of his undergraduate years, “I was hopelessly and crudely Midwestern. I had no idea how to approach boys from the East. I could never find the casual tone. My behavior knew only two moods: awkward aloofness and bubbling enthusiasm.”13 Something had to give, because adjusting to the company of “boys from the East” was sine qua non for his preferred career.

Kennan read and admired Fitzgerald but disapproved of his flamboyant and feckless lifestyle. It typified the materialism that poisoned American life in the Roaring Twenties. Departing Princeton in 1925 for a career in investment banking, say, was unappealing to Kennan, who believed in such a thing as a “calling” and did not covet the accumulation of wealth. Status born of lucre bestowed no particular distinction, he believed. He felt no great attachment to home comforts, abhorred flag-waving patriotism, and wanted to develop his observational antennae through living in other countries. A diplomatic career was thus a logical option for an aspiring cosmopolitan, although securing even entry-level acceptance to the Foreign Service was notoriously difficult. It was as true a meritocracy as existed at that time—which was part of its appeal.

After Kennan excelled in his written examination, Undersecretary of State Joseph C. Grew presided over his oral interview: “I was … so petrified by the experience that in my first words … my voice broke into a falsetto on the second syllable of Wisconsin and set the board roaring with laughter.”14 Kennan overcame his early nerves and was accepted to the service along with just seventeen other exceptional prospects. After seven months intensive study at the Foreign Service School in Washington, D.C., he took his first job, as a temporary vice consul in Geneva, in the spring of 1927. Set on a distinguished service career, Kennan would observe Europe’s descent into war and division from Prague in 1938, Berlin in 1939, Paris in 1940, and Moscow in 1944. Kennan was a bona fide intellectual, yet his most enduring ideas did not emerge simply from the vacuum of his study. They were mined from the darkest of coal faces.

After a short stint in Geneva, Kennan moved to Hamburg, which he adored. “Why is that while other cities become empty and boring, Hamburg always sings its multi-sonic, buzzing song in which all hope and all fear of humankind finds its expression?”15 He moved to Germany’s capital in 1929, where the State Department funded his Russian studies at the University of Berlin’s Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen, an institution founded during the chancellorship of Otto von Bismarck to prepare diplomats for entry to the Foreign Service. Kennan spent two years in Berlin as an engaged and attentive foreign student, and was tutored primarily by Russian émigrés, all of whom were implacably hostile toward the Marxist experiment that had cast them into Teutonic exile. His tutors mourned the passing of the tsarist ancien régime, emphasized the virtues of benevolent authoritarianism, and castigated Marxism-Leninism for destroying the centuries-old values of a cultured and necessarily hierarchical Russia. So began a lifelong fascination with Russian history, culture, and society—and an enduring antipathy toward any form of collectivism. He had read some Marx at Princeton and found it unpersuasive. Hearing from cultured and elegant émigrés about the ideology’s grotesque realization under Lenin and Stalin was an important moment in Kennan’s career. As he later wrote, echoing Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution, “I was never able to accept or to condone the stony-hearted fanaticism that was prepared to condemn to the loss of all civil rights, to ignominy, persecution, and ‘liquidation as a class’ entire great bodies of people—the ‘bourgeoisie’ and large portions of the peasantry, the majority, in fact, of the Russian population—for no other reason than that their members had been born into certain stations in life.”16

Ironically enough, Kennan’s movement toward Burkean conservatism was spurred by reading Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization in Berlin in 1930. He was cheered to discover that the Founding Fathers were not the paragons of liberty portrayed by Jeffersonians and Jacksonians but were actively hostile to giving the people too much of a say. Kennan posed a provocative question: If Washington, Madison, and their cohort were hostile to democracy “for a population predominantly white, Protestant and British, faced with relatively simple problems, would they not turn over in their graves at the mere thought of the democratic principle being applied to a population containing over ten million Negroes, and many more millions of southern Europeans, to whom the democratic principle is completely strange and incomprehensible?”17 This was not the reaction the Beards would have hoped for.

Through the 1930s Kennan continued to ponder the limitations of participatory democracy—particularly in regard to its dismal effect on foreign policymaking—and the nature and intentions of the Soviet Union. Stationed in Moscow from 1934, Kennan amused Ambassador William Bullitt by carrying on his person at all times a well-thumbed copy of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, from which he would read aloud when the situation demanded. When discussing the challenges confronting Stalin in holding together a vast Soviet Empire, for example, Kennan would quote Gibbon’s observation that “there is nothing more contrary to nature than the attempt to hold in obedience distant provinces.” He later rendered this wise injunction in his own words, applicable to all nations consumed by hubris: “No one people is great enough to establish a world hegemony.”18 For the historian Anders Stephanson, indeed, Gibbon “was perhaps the most important source of guidance in Kennan’s life.” Gibbon’s view that “under a democratical government the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude” lay at “the heart of my political philosophy,” as Kennan recalled.19 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire contained enough cautionary tales to last a diplomatic lifetime.

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Kennan kept a diary from the beginning of his diplomatic career to the end of his life, gifting a significant resource to scholars when it was finally processed and opened in 2009. The diary is replete with prescient geopolitical analysis, unsentimental reflections on the human frailties that lead to conflict, and some bitter denunciations of modernity, mass media, and multiculturalism. Some days Kennan’s entries ran to multiple pages; for weeks he wrote nothing at all. Some days he wrote poetry that was conventional in form; at other points he painted cityscapes that were almost Joycean in their free-form lyricism. In 1935, for example, Kennan recorded the following observations:

Back in Moscow—and extremely unhappy. Boulevards on summer nights. In it and not of. The stark reality of Soviet life compared to the neurotic unreality of our own. The almost theatrical vividness and directness of all things human. Here human flesh lives in one seething intimate mass—far more so, even than in New York. It streams slowly, guilelessly, in thick, full currents, along the boulevards, between the dark trees, under the gleam of the street lights; it is carried—as herded, tired animals are carried, in box-cars—in the long trains of street-cars. And it is human life in the raw, humanity brought down to its fundamentals—good and evil, drunk and sober, loving and quarrelling, laughing and weeping—all that human life is and does anywhere—but all much more simple and direct, and therefore stronger.20

These are the observational skills of a novelist. Much of Kennan’s intellectual identity became vested in the quality of his writing, for it gave him his greatest sustenance. A year later in Moscow, for example, Kennan composed another neo-Burkean view—finished with an Orwellian flourish—on the Russia the revolution had created:

Has not the Russian experiment proven—if it has proven anything—that the proletariat, once given power, does not necessarily exercise it with any particular altruism or intelligence by virtue of its own economic chastity, but readily hands it over to the most ruthless and determined political element, which in turn, as a consequence of its ruling position, only inherits the fears and interests of former regimes and exploits the people, under appeals to their patriotism, for the maintenance of its own foreign and domestic position.21

This is a marvelous description of Marxism-Leninism in practice. Kennan had the skills to offer the most penetrating and elegant insights on the phenomena he observed. In Germany and Russia, his fluency in those languages allowed him to assimilate and read these societies from a perspective that most foreigners were incapable of assuming. His close and vast reading of history enabled him to draw linkages across eras and empires that a novelist might miss. Yet his written English was also magnificent. This combination of attributes ensured that Kennan was promoted faster than any of his colleagues in the Foreign Service.

In September 1938, on the same day as Chamberlain and Daladier served up the Sudetenland to Hitler, Kennan arrived in Prague. He was sanguine about the appeasement that took place in Munich, reasoning that the nations of Central and Eastern Europe—the feeble progeny of Versailles—were easy prey for predators. He blamed their plight on Wilson, who facilitated the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire in the spurious name of “self-determination,” raising hopes of a meaningful future for its constituent members. Doubtful of the viability of small states like Czechoslovakia, Kennan nonetheless sympathized with its people and viewed Nazism as an abomination. Ultimately, however, he believed that Czechoslovakia’s incorporation into a larger German or Russian-ruled empire was in the natural order of things. His conservative views were challenged five days into his job when a striking midwestern woman entered his office and berated him for doing nothing to protect a helpless nation. Her name was Martha Gellhorn, and it was fortunate for Kennan that she was not accompanied by her combustible lover, Ernest Hemingway. Gellhorn subsequently became one of the world’s most celebrated war correspondents: brave, dedicated, and insightful. Kennan found her passion admirable in a way, but he ultimately dismissed her as an idealist with a shallow understanding of history.22 He was similarly unimpressed by a young man named John F. Kennedy, whose father—the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom—had sent him on a “fact-finding” mission to Czechoslovakia. According to Kennan, Kennedy was “obviously an upstart and an ignoramus,” and he resented having to waste time attending to his needs. But with the “polite but weary punctiliousness that characterizes diplomatic officials required to busy themselves with pesky compatriots,” Kennan secured Kennedy safe passage through German lines to Prague and then back to London.23

It was around this time that Kennan entertained a flirtation with authoritarianism. Through his reading of history, and firsthand experience, the nations and eras for which Kennan had developed firmest appreciation included Victorian Britain and Bismarckian Germany. The innocent virtues of the New World did not stand comparison to the best of the Old; Kennan found little in the American tradition of diplomacy that was worth retaining. Alexander Hamilton was a rare voice of geopolitical reason in the early republic, but few American diplomatists since then struck Kennan as particularly convincing. A painful return visit to the United States in 1936 had convinced him that his home had become a materialistic, self-satisfied, and philistine nation. A refrain throughout Kennan’s written work is a lament that America should abstain from instructing others on the paths to progress and liberty until it creates a society of substantive, enduring value.

After departing the United States in a sorrowful state, Kennan had taken a diplomatic posting in Austria, where he had been impressed by the reactionary regime led by Kurt von Schuschnigg. In a manuscript titled “The Prerequisites: Notes on Problems of the United States in 1938,” Kennan lauded Schuschnigg’s success in implementing a comprehensive law unifying medical and financial procedures drafted entirely by “experts,” a process from which the Austrian parliament had been excluded. Kennan thought that America would do well to learn from this success, its fidelity to democracy and transparency was hurting the consistency of its foreign policy and its ability to deal with acute social problems. Kennan’s belief in the efficacy of government by experts, his abhorrence of the messy business of democracy and interest-group activity—particularly those ethnic lobbies that can so distort foreign-policy priorities—is presented with particular force in “The Prerequisites” and in his diary, echoing Lippmann’s The Phantom Public. It was fortunate for Kennan that he failed to find a publisher for his manuscript. It was a fair indication of the reactionary turn of his thinking in the late 1930s and would almost certainly have ended a promising diplomatic career.

Kennan often took his disaffection with American society to remarkable extremes. On March 21, 1940, for example, as Nazi Germany subjugated and terrorized the European continent, Kennan composed a diary entry comparing European civilization favorably to American primitivism:

When they [America’s forefathers] turned their backs on Europe, they closed their eyes to the lessons of that continent’s past; and their backwoodsmen wisdom was not adequate to the building of anything but the most primitive social scene. It is now too late to remedy the situation. The United States is, for better or for worse, a Latin American rather than a European state. Those of us who were given an old-fashioned bringing-up will scarcely ever adapt ourselves to the situation. The best we can do is to try and adapt our children to it.24

That these remarks coincided with Europe’s historical nadir testifies to Kennan’s powerful alienation from American societal and cultural mores.

Yet while Kennan was disappointed by American societal development, he found Nazism repugnant. He blamed the rise of Hitler on Germany’s ignorant and clawing middle classes, newly empowered by the post-Versailles dissolution of the Junker elite. Even after Hitler’s death, Kennan believed that the restoration of monarchy, “limited by an efficient bureaucracy and a powerful upper class,” represented Germany’s best hope for postbellum stability.25 While Kennan’s pseudo-aristocratic prejudices were unappealing, he was also sharp in identifying Nazism’s weaknesses. After being transferred from Prague to Berlin in 1939, Kennan visited the nations that had recently fallen under the Nazi yoke. In Poland, Denmark, Holland, Norway, Belgium, and France, he found Nazi rule to be brutal and self-defeating in its disrespect of each nation’s proud history and identity. Here was an empire of shallow foundation that surely was not built to last. For Kennan it was obvious that “the Nazi ideology, based on nothing other than a glorification of the supposed virtues of the German people themselves, had no conceivable appeal to people, and especially young people, outside Germany itself.”26 In Finland on March 13, 1940, Kennan recorded that it was “a black day … it was hard to think that another place where life was decent and healthy and cheerful had succumbed to the darkness and misery brought over the world by small-souled and ruthless men who control the engines of destruction.”27 In similarly evocative prose, Kennan described Paris after Hitler’s triumphant, goading arrival:

Could one not say to the Germans that the spirit of Paris had been too delicate and shy a thing to stand their determination and had melted away before them just as they thought to have it in their grasp? Was there not some Greek myth about the man who tried to ravish the goddess, only to have her turn to stone when he touched her? That is literally what has happened to Paris. When the Germans came, the soul simply went out of it; and what is left is only stone … The Germans had in their embrace the pallid corpse of Paris.28

In Kennan’s estimation, Stalinism was as baleful a force as Nazism. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he argued strongly against embracing Stalin as a future wartime ally. On June 24, 1940, Kennan wrote to Loy Henderson, head of the State Department’s Bureau of Eastern European Affairs:

It seems to me that to welcome Russia as an associate in the defense of democracy would invite misunderstanding of our position and would lend to the German war effort a gratuitous and sorely needed aura of morality. In following such a course I do not see how we could help but identify ourselves with the Russian destruction of the Baltic states, with the attack against Finnish independence, with the partitioning of Poland and Rumania, with the crushing of religion throughout Eastern Europe, and with the domestic policy of a regime which is widely feared and detested throughout this part of the world and the methods of which are far from democratic.

Reflecting on this letter in his memoirs, Kennan recalled that his reaction “embodied the essence of the disagreement that was to hold me in opposition to our governmental policy for some five years to come…”29 He believed quite simply that the Soviet Union was unworthy of American support at any cost. Although primarily a realist in his diplomatic thought, Kennan was intermittently driven by strong considerations of morality, which often trumped notions of narrow self-interest. The logic of the adage “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” did not hold true when applied to a leader as heinous as Stalin.

Kennan remained at the heart of Hitler’s empire through 1941, writing to his Norwegian wife, Annelise, that “life in Berlin has been much as you knew it. The major change has been the wearing of the star by the Jews. That is a fantastically barbaric thing. I shall never forget the faces of people in the subway with the great yellow star sewed onto their overcoats, standing, not daring to sit down or to brush against anybody, staring straight ahead of them with eyes like terrified beasts—nor the sight of little children running around with those badges sewn on them.”30 Berlin was becoming almost unbearable for Kennan, particularly as it was the capital of a nation whose history and achievements he greatly admired. After Germany declared war on the United States in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Kennan and his embassy staff were arrested and sent to an internment camp in Bad Nauheim, a fashionable spa town near Frankfurt. The retiring Kennan now found himself in charge of some 130 men, women, and children of the U.S. embassy, a fatherly role in which he did not thrive. To make things worse, the government stopped paying Kennan and his staff during the six months of their confinement. “We had not, you see, been working,” recalled Kennan drolly.31

Kennan returned to the United States in a diplomatic swap in the early summer of 1942. One of the first things he read upon returning home was an article by Walter Lippmann, published on June 6, 1942, which opined that “if there is to be peace in the world, that peace has to be made in full partnership between the English-speaking sea and air powers and the massive land power of Russia.” It struck Kennan that America’s intelligentsia remained as delusional about Stalin as it had been ten years previously, when Walter Duranty of The New York Times reported gushingly on Stalin’s grand success in lifting a nation out of agricultural poverty and propelling it toward the panacea of large-scale industrialization.32 A few (hundred thousand? million?) missing kulaks, Duranty rationalized, constituted a bearable cost when placed against some remarkable strides in pig iron production. Such was the warped logic of the Grand Alliance, in Kennan’s view. Defeating Germany at the cost of the independence of Eastern and Central Europe—and America’s reputation as a decent nation—was not a price worth paying. Not for the first or last time, despondency descended.

Kennan’s next move was to Lisbon, where he served as ambassador. Throughout the course of 1943, he began to consider the most appropriate way to defeat and rehabilitate Germany. Kennan disliked the “unconditional surrender” formula that President Roosevelt had crafted during the Casablanca conference in January 1943, testily observing that this was “only another way of saying that the war had to be fought until the Allied and Russian armies met somewhere.”33 American and Soviet troops might meet in bonhomie, but it was unlikely to end well, for advancing armies, flushed with victory, tend to abandon their reverse gear. Land captured at a steep blood cost is a painful thing to relinquish. On Germany itself, Kennan was mindful of the lessons of Versailles. Before the aggressor had even been defeated, he was sensitive to the need for its swift rehabilitation:

Let the impact of defeat, therefore, be as tremendous as possible. Let the immediate impressions of failure be so vivid and unforgettable that they become a part of the national consciousness of the German people for all time. But having done this, let us then abandon the concept of punishment in the treatment of Germany—for prolonged punishment can never be effective against an entire people.34

Strongly opposed to a rigorous policy of denazification, Kennan viewed a robust and viable West Germany as an essential bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Like it or not, members of the Nazi party were so large in number that their removal from public life would hamper the nation’s prospects for recovery. Devoid of wartime camaraderie—Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt went to great pains to bond with each other, bringing their publics with them—Kennan was thinking coldly in the longer term, prioritizing stability ahead of justice.

From Lisbon, Kennan was posted to London for a brief stint in January 1944 and then on to Moscow in the spring, where he was appointed minister-counselor, second in rank to Ambassador W. Averell Harriman. Placed close to the heart of a regime he reviled, Kennan would never have a better opportunity to persuade his superiors to abandon the pipe dream of collaboration with a man such as Stalin and accommodation with an ideology as insidious as Marxism-Leninism. It was from the embassy in Moscow that Kennan drafted the telegram that would transform his career and, with it, world affairs.

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When Kennan arrived in Moscow in May 1944, the essentials of his foreign-policy philosophy had mostly been established. The process of their cohering was fascinating and iconoclastic. A compulsive writer, Kennan kept a conventional diary, composed poetry, started an ambitious biography of Anton Chekhov in the 1930s that he never completed, and at one stage recorded a remarkable “dream diary” in which he detailed and unpicked the scenarios that had intruded on the preceding night’s sleep. Kennan had read Sigmund Freud attentively while recuperating from illness in Vienna in 1938. But he also followed the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in lavishing attention on his “inner life.”35

Regarding external stimuli, Kennan was generalist in the mode of the Founders, reading widely in history, literature, philosophy, and certain of the natural sciences that pertained to land economy. Like Woodrow Wilson, he abhorred the narrow specialization of scholarship that had become de rigueur in the modern American research university. An elegant accessibility was his hallmark as a writer, and he wrote for the general reader throughout his career inside and outside government. In that respect he followed Lippmann in vesting little faith in the discipline of political science—and its subfield international relations—which encouraged in its faithful pupils a futile and damaging tendency to view the causes of war and peace as a puzzle waiting to be solved with the right formula.

From such misguided premises come rigid and utopian visions. Wilson was right to reject narrow scholarship during his academic career, but he pursued a fatally singular vision as president, which suggested to Kennan that he had failed to read widely and attentively in a variety of sources. (This was in fact an accurate characterization, connected to Wilson’s efforts to overcome dyslexia.) Makers of foreign policy should avoid offering one answer to an infinite variety of conundrums—no matter how consistent and laudable that answer appeared. The ideal diplomat should read Spengler and Gibbon, to be sure, but also Plato, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Dickens, the great Russian novelists, and the Bible. From this variegated feast should emerge skepticism and a desire for pure experience, leading ultimately to the accumulation of an old-fashioned attribute: wisdom. “For people who think as I do, the judgment and instinct of a single wise and experienced man,” Kennan wrote to a social science–inclined correspondent in 1950, “whose knowledge of the world rests on the experience of personal, emotional, and intellectual participation in a wide cross-section of human effort are something we hold to be more valuable than the most elaborate synthetic structure of demonstrable fact and logical deduction.” Putting it even more bluntly in “great man” terms, Kennan wrote, “The perception of the most competent individual intelligence is thus our absolute ceiling in the development of ideas related to foreign policy.”36 The United States should forget about modish theories and educate the cleverest freethinkers to the best of the nation’s ability. It was these men—Kennan did not entertain the possibility that women might have something meaningful to contribute to the making of diplomacy—who would rise meritoriously and infuse America’s external relations with modesty, civility, and farsightedness, redounding always to the nation’s advantage.

“I have always been regarded by the United States establishment as an odd-ball,” recalled Kennan in an interview with Encounter in 1976, “and I am a strange mixture of a reactionary and a liberal. In this philosophical sense, I do consider myself a lonely person.” There were many sources of his disillusionment, but the overarching cause can be condensed into one word: modernity. Rather than viewing the Industrial Revolution as an unalloyed blessing for nations seeking to outrun the Malthusian trap of population outstripping food supplies—leading to famine and brutal demographic realignment—Kennan was impressed by Charles Beard’s damning portrayal of the endemic dehumanization of the modern age. “I am persuaded that the Industrial Revolution itself was the source of most of the bewilderments and failures of the modern age,” Kennan observed.37 Industrialization facilitated the growth and sustenance of a larger population. This larger population necessarily congregated in cities where jobs were plentiful; these jobs in turn were largely demeaning and purposeless, producing fripperies that previous generations had largely lived without, fomenting the alienation of labor that Marx and Engels identified and their political champions exploited.

A small population scraping a living through tilling the land was preferable to a large urban population engaged in labor that created substantially more wealth but robbed people of the essentials of how to live. The single-minded pursuit of “economic growth” was a risible imperative that by now afflicted all nations. Kennan was a keen farmer who followed Jefferson in believing a close connection to the soil was vital for anyone seeking purpose and emotional stability in the modern world: “I don’t trust human beings to live successfully too far away from nature.” With pride and regret, he conceded to his interviewer that “I am, I suppose, an 18th-century person, and I’m persuaded that those of our forefathers who had their roots really back in the 18th century had more convincing values and better tastes than those whose roots were in the society that issued from the industrial revolution.”38 He followed the sociologist Thorstein Veblen in deploring the “conspicuous consumption” that blighted the nation.39 Accompanying this was profound regret at the environmental and societal degradation caused by the proliferation of the automobile and the ugly urban sprawl that was erected to facilitate the demographic shift to the suburbs.

From this variety of fascinating sources came a manner of diplomatic thinking that combined important elements of Mahan, Beard, and Lippmann; Wilsonianism would always remain an ideational adversary of regrettable resilience. Kennan shared with Mahan a sense of proportion and balance, agreement on the vital importance of the Atlantic Alliance, a deep ethnocentrism, and opposition to arbitration and multilateral institutions. Kennan was at one with Beard in believing that the United States should attend to its own problems before attempting to export its values. He also shared with the revisionist historian a strong belief that there were actually few foreign-policy crises that required a direct military response. The historian Bruce Kuklick puts it well when he detects in Kennan a “quietist if not pacifist dimension.”40 Later in his life, Kennan would go so far as to describe himself “with some qualifications” as an “isolationist.”41

Finally, Kennan followed Lippmann in bemoaning the dangers that participatory democracy posed to the making of a wise foreign policy. He viewed public opinion as a grave impediment to elected politicians and professional diplomats doing their jobs effectively. Like Lippmann, Kennan also viewed himself as operating in the realist tradition and shared a common contempt for the fledgling United Nations. On August 4, 1944, Kennan had written, “International political life is something organic, not something mechanical. Its essence is change … An international organization for preservation of the peace and security cannot take the place of a well-conceived and realistic foreign policy.”42 These words could have been Lippmann’s. Yet there was, at the time, a major difference of opinion between the two men on what constituted a “realistic foreign policy.” Put simply, Lippmann favored an accommodation with Moscow whereas Kennan preferred nonmilitary confrontation. The latter strongly believed that the success of the D-day landings had created a propitious moment for the United States to issue a stern warning to Stalin to respect majority opinion in Eastern and Central Europe:

We no longer owed them anything, after all (if indeed we ever had). The second front had been established. The Western Allies were now on the European continent in force. Soviet territory had been entirely liberated. What was now at stake in Soviet military operations was exclusively the future of non-Soviet territory previously overrun by the Germans. We in the West had a perfect right to divest ourselves of responsibility for further Soviet military operations conducted in the spirit of, and with the implications of, the Soviet denial of support for the Warsaw uprising.43

This was no simplistic anticommunism. Kennan believed the Kremlin’s expansionist designs were driven not by Marxian ideology but by traditional concerns about security and vulnerability. But this did not make Moscow’s goals any more palatable or acceptable to the West. He had met with the exiled Polish prime minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk at the British embassy in Moscow in July 1944. Detecting hopeful naïveté on the part of Mikołajczyk, and cynical bonhomie on the part of his British hosts and American guests, for Kennan the dinner and reception were excruciating. “I found the evening a hard one,” he recorded in his diary. “I wished that instead of mumbling words of official optimism we had the judgment and the good taste to bow our heads in silence before the tragedy of a people who have been our allies, whom we have saved from our enemies, and whom we cannot save from our friends.”44 Kennan could not abide lies among friends. If America and Britain were to force the issue over Polish independence, so be it, although it needed to happen quickly to make any difference. Encouraging false hope was dishonorable.

*   *   *

False hope it was, as Kennan believed Yalta’s obfuscations amply displayed. Where Lippmann celebrated President Roosevelt’s clear-sighted delineation of the national interest in the Crimea, Kennan detected unworthy and deliberate ambiguity over the fate of Eastern Europe: “The Yalta declaration, with its references to the reorganization of the existing Polish-Communist regime ‘on a broader democratic basis’ and to the holding ‘of free and unfettered elections … on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot,’ struck me as the shabbiest sort of equivocation, certainly not calculated to pull the wool over the eyes of the Western public but bound to have this effect.”45

Kennan had made repeated attempts to warn Averell Harriman, his superior at the embassy, of the nature of Moscow’s intentions and the need for a swift and forceful diplomatic response, but each had been met with indifference. A scion of the railroad dynasty, Harriman was a multimillionaire who consciously rejected ostentation and pomp. Tall and conventionally handsome, a naturally commanding presence, Harriman was worldly born, whereas Kennan had discovered the world, such as it was, with no natural advantages. These were two men of very different backgrounds and sensibilities. No reclusive poet, or Freudian dissector of dreams, Harriman’s worldview was closely aligned with that of his similarly wellborn president, Franklin Roosevelt, cognizant as he was of the larger gentlemanly stakes involved in defeating Hitler. Hence Harriman did not yet view Stalin as beyond the pale. That his perspective would change throughout the course of 1945 owed much to Kennan’s persistence in dispatching one skillfully crafted entreaty after another, until the message finally conformed to events in the eyes of the besieged recipient.

The first of Kennan’s persuasive broadsides was launched on September 1944, a long paper titled “Russia—Seven Years Later,” which offered a searing critique of both Soviet intentions and the complacency that undergirded America’s effective nonresponse. Kennan wrote that “we should realize clearly what we are faced with … the Soviet government has never ceased to think in terms of spheres of interest.” Kennan offered up a solution:

Instead of going as supplicants to the Russians, we should go to them as one bringing a friendly warning. Our position should be as follows: We would regret to have to make it plain to our public that Russia alone, of all the great powers, was unwilling to submit her future actions to the judgment of international society. We would regret this because it would only fortify and widen in our public opinion those very suspicions of Russia which we ourselves have been helping to eliminate.46

An impassive Harriman did not reply to his exercised subordinate, although he cabled sections of Kennan’s paper to Washington, where they were met with a similarly deafening silence. It was a discouraging snub that led to Kennan’s abortive attempt to leave the service in 1945. But he never held these slights personally against Harriman, whom he respected in spite of their differences. “I often think,” Kennan recalled with winning self-deprecation, “what a trial I must have been to him, running around with my head in the usual clouds of philosophic speculation, full of interests other than my work, inclined to delegate responsibility and to forget about it cheerfully so long as all went well, bombarding him with bundles of purple prose on matters which, as I am sure he thought, it was the business of the president to think about, not mine—and all this when there was detailed, immediate work to be done. Small wonder that he was often peremptory.”47

*   *   *

In his memoirs, Kennan recorded a vivid account of Moscow’s celebrations following the declaration of victory in Europe. News traveled slowly to Russia, so it was not until May 10—two days after VE-day—that crowds began to congregate on the streets. Tens of thousands of Muscovites gathered in a “commodious” square outside the U.S. embassy to express appreciation for their wartime ally. “We were naturally moved and pleased by this manifestation of public feeling,” Kennan recalled, “but were at a loss to know how to respond to it. If any of us ventured out into the street, he was immediately seized, tossed enthusiastically into the air, and passed on friendly hands over the heads of the crowd, to be lost, eventually, in a confused orgy of good feeling somewhere on its outer fringes.” As Kennan was unwilling to “court this experience,” he and his staff assembled on the balcony and waved in a friendly fashion to the delirious masses below. But to get into the spirit of things, he arranged for the Hammer and Sickle to be hung alongside the Stars and Stripes. As the crowds cheered for more, Kennan delivered a short speech in Russian, which consisted in his shouting, “Congratulations on the day of victory. All honor to the Soviet allies!” He recalled that this “seemed to me to be about all I could suitably say.” The crowd grew larger with each passing hour, stirring disquiet among the Soviet authorities. The United States was a valued wartime ally, to be sure, but it also represented capitalism in its most unvarnished form: a vile, exploitative ideology anathema to all good Soviet citizens. The crowds, the cheers, the touchingly instinctive and unmediated affection—all were a slap in the face for Soviet propagandists. As Kennan recalled, “It is not hard to imagine what mortification this must have brought to both party and police. Without their solicitous prearrangement not even a sparrow had fallen in a Moscow street for twenty-seven years, and now, suddenly—this!” Efforts to break up the celebrations were to no avail. The authorities even set up a brass band on the other end of the square, hoping to create a Pied Piper effect. But the crowds stayed put, instilling in Kennan an ephemeral cheer.48

Near the end of the day, Kennan received a phone call from Ralph Parker, a former New York Times journalist who had married a Russian, settled in Moscow, and was known to him as being politically “far to the left.” The two men nonetheless enjoyed semicordial relations, and Kennan readily consented to Parker’s request that he visit the embassy to enjoy the balcony view of the square’s cheering occupants. As Parker gazed at the remarkable scene, he observed to Kennan, “Isn’t this wonderful?” Kennan agreed that in a way it was, but that the scene also made him sad. “Asked to explain,” Kennan recalled, “I observed that these people out there in the crowd had been through so much, and they naturally now hoped for so much from victory; yet the world was still full of troubles; Russia faced major problems of reconstruction; things would not be put back together again all at once; peace could scarcely be what these people dreamed of it as being.” Parker identified something more sinister. Four years later a book was published in Russia under Parker’s name titled Zagovor protiv Mira (Conspiracy Against Peace). Parker recounted his evening trip to the embassy in starkly different terms from Kennan: “I noticed on Kennan’s face, as we watched this moving scene, a strangely unhappy and irritated expression. Then, casting a last glance at the crowd, he moved away from the window and said bitterly: ‘They rejoice … They think the war has ended. But it is really only beginning.’” An angered Kennan later described the book as “the most unscrupulous, mendacious, and nauseating sort of Stalinist propaganda.”49

Parker’s retelling was a fabrication, although it captured something of his interlocutor’s unspoken thoughts. Kennan did favor a confrontation with Moscow, just so long as it wasn’t a military one. Throughout 1945, as Truman strained to master the presidency following FDR’s sudden death, Kennan continued to craft strong critiques of the complacent tenor of U.S. policy toward Moscow, all with little appreciation, or indeed acknowledgment, of his efforts. In the early months of his presidency, Truman had not impressed Kennan. The president was a machine politician from Missouri, partial to guttural language, who poked fun at what he described as the “striped pants brigade” at the State Department. He appeared only dimly aware of the world beyond America’s shores. This was assuredly not a combination of traits to instill much confidence in an elitist professional diplomat and cosmopolitan. Clark Clifford recounted of Truman that he had a “black-and-white” view of world affairs, “and, by God, he was going to see to it that the men in the white hats prevailed.”50 This Wilsonian echo was worrying, as was the appearance of parochialism and obtuseness. But there was more to Truman than met the eye. Surveying biblical scenes of destruction in Berlin on July 16, 1945, Truman recorded in his diary that “I thought of Carthage, Baalbeck, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis, Peking, Babylon, Nineveh; Scipio, Rameses II, Titus, Hermann [Arminius], Sherman, Jenghis Khan, Alexander, Darius the Great.”51 Truman was clearly a devoted reader of history.52

Soon after assuming the presidency, Truman confided to his wife that “I like Stalin. He is straightforward. Knows what he wants and will compromise when he can’t get it.”53 At the Potsdam Conference of July 16 to August 2, however, President Truman proved himself to be less sympathetic than his predecessor to Stalin’s “defensive” perspective on Eastern Europe’s “independence”—asking some hard questions of the Soviet Union’s ultimate designs. At the beginning of the conference, the Red Army wielded effective control over Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and the Baltic states. Soviet troops were also positioned in northern Iran, and Stalin had indicated to Churchill at Yalta that he had no intention of withdrawing them.54 Having missed the ideal opportunity to confront Stalin twelve months before, Kennan believed that President Truman should abandon hope of influencing events in Eastern Europe and engage with Stalin on the more honest level of “spheres of influence,” just as Churchill had proposed to a mindless chorus of American disapproval.

Fighting a losing battle over Eastern Europe was merely a distraction, albeit one that wasted valuable time. It was Truman’s naïve views on collaboration with Moscow over Germany’s future that Kennan believed were truly detached from reality—posing serious risks to a situation that was unfolding, not one that had unfolded. A communiqué summarizing the agreement made at Potsdam was regrettably peppered, as Kennan described it, with “such words as ‘democratic,’ ‘peaceful,’ and ‘justice’ [which] went directly counter to everything I had learned, in seventeen years of experience with Russian affairs, about the technique of dealing with the Soviet government.” The notion that Germany would be jointly run through a quadripartite control mechanism—with the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union each controlling stakes of variable size—was folly. As early as May 1945, Kennan believed that the Western powers had no choice but to combine their areas of control to form a legitimate, noncommunist “West German” state. In dispensing futile protests about the sanctity of Eastern Europe, mainly to placate a domestic audience, and entertaining the illusory possibility of collaboration with Stalin over Germany, the Truman administration was “in danger of losing, like the dog standing over the reflecting pool, the bone in our mouth without obtaining the one we saw in the water.”55

Potsdam was eventful for other reasons. On July 16, the opening day of the conference, a military test, supposedly shrouded in secrecy, took place near Alamogordo, a small town in New Mexico’s vast desert, that had vast repercussions for the conference—and indeed for the world. As J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project, looked on nervously from a bunker some seventeen miles away, an implosion-type plutonium device was detonated for the very first time. Informal bets were taken among researchers and observers on a range of possibilities: Would the device actually detonate? Would it conform to its projected maximum explosive yield of twenty kilotons? Would it destroy Alamogordo, the state of New Mexico, or indeed the face of the planet? The answer arrived when a searing flash illuminated the lunar landscape and a vast fireball was thrown high into the sky, eventually darkening to form a sullen, gray, mushroom-shaped cloud eight miles high. (Its yield was eighteen kilotons, and the earth, beyond a one-thousand-foot crater, fortunately retained its crust.) The roar of the shock wave took forty seconds to hit Oppenheimer and his fellow creators; its reverberations were felt two hundred miles away. Surveying a surreal scene, the director of the test, the Harvard-based professor of physics Kenneth Bainbridge, turned to Oppenheimer and remarked, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Oppenheimer shunned the profane, remembering a line from the Bhagavad Gita that followed Vishnu as he assumed a multiarmed form in order to impress a prince. Vishnu exclaims, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”56

At Potsdam, on July 24, 1945, President Truman informed Stalin in deliberately anodyne terms that the United States was now in possession of “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” In his memoir, Truman recalled that “the Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’”57 Observing the same scene, Soviet marshal Georgii Zhukov realized that Stalin’s apparent lack of interest belied a detailed understanding of the significance of Truman’s message. Following Truman’s announcement, Zhukov joined Stalin for a private meeting with Molotov, where Stalin briefed his foreign minister on the substance of the brief exchange. “Let them,” said Molotov impassively. “We’ll have to talk it over with Kurchatov and get him to speed things up.” Igor Kurchatov was head of the Soviet A-bomb project, so it was immediately obvious to Zhukov that his superiors were discussing the detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb, and they weren’t at all flustered.58 This was because Soviet spies, such as the German-born British citizen Klaus Fuchs, had penetrated the Manhattan Project. They had kept their paymasters fully apprised of developments, who in turn had fed blueprints and formulas to Soviet atomic scientists. Truman need not have bothered informing Stalin about the A-bomb.

On August 6 and 9, 1945, the world’s second and third atomic bombs were dropped on two Japanese cities. In Hiroshima, an area of approximately five square miles was incinerated in a flash—80,000 people were killed instantly. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki killed approximately 40,000 people within seconds of detonation. In the months and years that followed, as Japanese citizens who were in and around the blast zone died from burns and radiation sickness, the combined death toll rose to approximately 225,000.59 Walter Lippmann was disgusted that Truman made the decision to drop the bombs, observing that “one of the things I look back on with the greatest regret, as an American, is that we were the ones that first dropped atomic bombs.”60 Kennan said little of this new weapon at the time, recording nothing in his memoir on his reaction to Truman’s decision. As the months and years passed, however, it became clear that Kennan viewed the existence of nuclear weapons as an affront to the notion of civilization. In creating the bomb, Oppenheimer and his colleagues had made “a philosophical mistake,” as Kennan described it, and interestingly this was an assessment with which Oppenheimer came to agree.61 “Even the tactical atomic weapon,” Kennan wrote in later years, as lower-yield variations on the device were tested, “is destructive to a degree that sickens the imagination.”62 A pure morality had entered Kennan’s calculus once again, conditioning his views on a weapon that made the job of the diplomatist vital in the existential sense.

While Kennan was troubled by Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb, he was gladdened by his decision to cancel Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union after Japan’s surrender on August 15—the day on which the Second World War formally ended. Typically, Kennan believed the United States had played tough with Moscow about a year too late, observing that “we should have considered at least an extensive curtailment of this program at the time of the Warsaw uprising in the summer of 1944.”63 Nonetheless, Truman had acted correctly on this matter, and a firmer sense of purpose was becoming evident in the White House.

But it was not yet pervasive, and Kennan blamed this delay in Truman grasping reality on Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, whom he suspected was still enthralled by the notion of peacetime collaboration with Stalin at the expense of America’s core relationship with Great Britain. In his diary, Kennan recalled the substance of the Moscow Conference in December 1945, attended by the emissaries of the wartime Big Three: Byrnes, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, and Molotov. Bevin had not wanted to attend, believing that Moscow, through its aggressive and contemptuous actions in Eastern Europe and Iran, did not deserve the respect a conference bestowed. Byrnes thought otherwise. The process and personalities were captured nicely by Kennan:

As for Byrnes, Bevin saw in him only another cocky and unreliable Irishman, similar to ones that he had known in his experience as a docker and labor leader. Byrnes had consistently shown himself negligent of British feelings and quite unconcerned for Anglo-American relations … When Harriman raised his glass to the future success of the conference, Bevin assented and added: “And let’s hope we don’t all get sacked when we get home.” Molotov left the minute luncheon was over.64

Later that evening, Kennan attended a special performance of Zolushka (Cinderella) at the Bolshoi. Perplexed as to why such a first-rate performance had fallen flat on the large audience, Kennan discovered that Stalin had been part of the audience. “For this reason,” Kennan wrote, “the audience, except for the diplomatic corps, was apparently composed almost exclusively of secret police people, who were doubtless afraid that any excessive display on their part of enthusiasm for the performance might look as though they were being diverted from their duties.”65 Kennan was appalled at the regimentation of thought and action demanded by the Soviet system; that it scarred a Russian cultural event of the highest artistic merit made it all the more insidious. But a small part of Kennan yearned for a similar measure of disciplined uniformity in the U.S. government. There was something unsettling about the haphazard nature of foreign policymaking, and Byrnes was particularly susceptible to departing from the script. Truman ultimately came to share Kennan’s belief that Byrnes had performed abysmally at the conference, failing to warn Stalin of serious repercussions if the Red Army did not retreat from Iran. “I do not think we should play compromise any longer,” wrote Truman in reference to Byrnes on January 5, 1946. “I am tired of babying the Soviets.”66 Prospects of exerting influence appeared to be improving for the embassy’s resident Cassandra.

*   *   *

In February 1946, Kennan had taken ill with “cold, fever, sinus, tooth trouble, and finally the aftereffects of the sulpha drugs administered for the relief of these other miseries.” Languishing in his sickbed, with Harriman out of town, Kennan had no choice but to field the relentless deluge of incoming telegraphic mail. “Among the messages brought up on one of these unhappy days,” Kennan wrote, “was one that reduced us all to a new level of despair—despair not with the Soviet government but with our own.” This telegram, dispatched from the Treasury Department, invited the embassy to make sense of Moscow’s unwillingness to cooperate with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Kennan recalled that “the more I thought about this message, the more it seemed to me obvious that this was ‘it.’ For eighteen long months I had done little else but pluck people’s sleeves, trying to make them understand the nature of the phenomenon with which we in the Moscow embassy were daily confronted … So far as official Washington was concerned, it had been to all intents and purposes like talking to a stone.” Kennan’s ailments, low mood, and visceral reaction to Treasury’s ignorance combined to instill a firm resolution to read them the riot act: “It would not do to give them just a fragment of the truth. Here was a case where nothing but the whole truth would do. They had asked for it. Now, by God, they would have it.” Kennan summoned his secretary, Dorothy Hessman, to transcribe his thoughts, a process that would take quite some time. The telegram—or “Long Telegram” as it subsequently became known—amounted to some fifty-five hundred words. This “outrageous encumberment of the telegraphic process,” as Kennan described it, arrived in Washington on February 22.67 Its remarkable impact testified to the new reality that Washington and Kennan were finally in accord over the nature of the Soviet threat: “My official loneliness came in fact to an end,” Kennan recalled, “at least for a period of two or three years.”68

Kennan’s Long Telegram was insightful and measured, and it took care to assail the Soviet Union as a system, not Russia as a nation. The population trapped inside Stalin’s dystopia, Kennan wrote, “are by and large, friendly to [the] outside world, eager for experience of it, eager to measure against it talents they are conscious of possessing, eager above all to live in peace and enjoy [the] fruits of their own labor.” But these people have little option but to privilege survival over principle in a state ruled through savage internal repression. “At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is [the] traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,” Kennan observed, but this flaw in the nation’s historical consciousness was ruthlessly exploited by an ideology that fed off paranoia and insularity. He continued:

Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means. After establishment of Bolshevist regime, Marxist dogma, rendered even more truculent and intolerant by Lenin’s interpretation, became a perfect vehicle for sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted. In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability.

The combination of Marxian ideology and Russia’s peculiar psychology had created a perfect anti-Western, anticapitalist storm.

In regard to the actual threat posed to American interests, Kennan believed that Stalin was naturally cautious, taking what was possible where “it is considered timely and promising,” but temperamentally disinclined to push to the point of open conflict. Thus “these efforts are restricted to certain neighboring points conceived of here as being of immediate strategic necessity, such as Northern Iran, Turkey, possibly Bornholm.” Soviet grand strategy, unlike the expansionist dogma of Nazi Germany, “is neither schematic nor adventuristic. It does not work by fixed plans … [It is] impervious to the logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to the logic of force.” Moscow was always likely to desist from adventurism in the face of serious Anglo-American resistance, making Stalin a rational actor in this one important respect. Here was cause for hope, because if Moscow’s “adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns.” Give Stalin an opening and he will exploit it ruthlessly. Communicate a clear sense of boundaries, however, and the postwar world could be as peaceable as the era that followed the Congress of Vienna.

In reference to multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and United Nations, Kennan believed that “Russians will participate officially in international organizations where they see the opportunity of extending Soviet power or of inhibiting or diluting power of others. Moscow sees in UNO [United Nations Organization] not the mechanism for a permanent and stable world society founded on mutual interest and aims of all nations, but an arena in which aims just mentioned can be favorably pursued.” In this sense Kennan did not believe that Moscow was exceptionally culpable; rather, the creators of the United Nations had declined to heed the self-serving proclivities of all states. Soviet policy toward “colonial areas and backward or dependent peoples,” meanwhile, “will be directed toward weakening of power and influence and contacts of advanced Western nations, on theory that in so far as this policy is successful, there will be created a vacuum which will favor Communist-Soviet penetration.” The Third World would become a battleground only if the West vested in it sufficient prestige to make it a proxy fight worth having. Best of all was to ignore what Kennan would later dismiss as the “periphery.”

The tone of Kennan’s telegram was generally dispassionate, shielding the reader from the anger he clearly felt when dictating it to Hessman. But Kennan failed to present the entirety of his case with scholarly detachment. The prescriptive part of the telegram was condensed in the following terms: “In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”

This line has been often quoted by scholars keen to identify in Kennan a visceral anticommunism.69 But words such as “fanatically,” “broken,” and “destroyed” are the exceptions rather than the rule. To take just one example, Kennan was careful to stress that the United States had vexing issues of its own to address. Paramount was the requirement that policymakers apprehend the Soviet threat with “courage, detachment, objectivity, and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it … We must see that the public is educated to realities of the Russian situation.” This vital pedagogical undertaking had to be completed in sober terms and with a cool head, a manner of comprehension and communication that Americans, a people tending toward absolutes, had historically found challenging. “I am convinced,” Kennan wrote, “that there would be far less hysterical anti-Sovietism in our country today if realities of this situation were better understood by our people. There is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown.” If America heeded his warning, and ignored its sorry history of simplifying complex events and relationships, then the nation, and its allies, had nothing to fear, and civil liberties would be protected. If extremism was given free rein, however, then the newly atomic world would become incredibly dangerous: “We must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”

This was a bravura performance that justly found an influential audience. Before Kennan’s telegram, nobody in the employ of the U.S. government had articulated a cohesive American strategy toward Moscow in the postwar world—Lippmann had performed this role from the outside. As Truman’s aide, George Elsey, remarked, “Kennan tied everything together, wrapped it together in a neat package, and put a red bow around it.”70 Kennan’s gift to American grand strategy was circulated quickly and widely upon its arrival—championed by Harriman, who was in Washington at the time—and was read by the secretaries of war and the Navy, and later by Truman himself. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal was bowled over by its force of argument. He had the telegram copied and sent to other members of the cabinet, also insisting that it become required reading for senior members of the armed forces. The telegram was cabled to America’s embassies and missions abroad. Kennan was soon receiving glowing endorsements from the audience he respected most: professional diplomats.

The U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Henry Norweb, wrote to Kennan, describing the telegram as “about the best piece of political reporting I have seen in my thirty years in the Service … It is a masterpiece of ‘thinking things out,’ realism devoid of hysteria, of [a] courageous approach to a problem.”71 It met with near universal acclaim from fellow diplomats, politicians, and members of the military. A rare dissenting voice was that of General Lucius Clay, the American military governor in Germany who was still managing to get along with his Soviet counterparts. Of course, the connected Walter Lippmann also soon got the gist of Kennan’s telegram, which caused him considerable concern. He redoubled his journalistic efforts to convince Americans of the merits of U.S.-Soviet collaboration. Lippmann also wrote to General Dwight D. Eisenhower to compliment him on “the speech you made the other day in which you spoke of how vicious it is to be thinking of another war … I almost feel that the soldiers are going to have to save the peace which the diplomats and politicians will, if they don’t look out, most surely wreck.”72 Lippmann was depressed that Kennan’s telegram had engendered such unity of anti-Soviet purpose.

The main problem with Lippmann’s championing of “closer diplomatic contact” with Moscow, Kennan told Forrestal, was that it “reflects a serious misunderstanding of Soviet realities.”73 The growing closeness between Kennan and Forrestal—who bonded for reasons beyond a common dismay with Lippmann’s apparent naïveté—was the critical spur to Kennan becoming a person of influence. Forrestal had enjoyed a spectacularly successful career with the venerable investment bank Dillon Read before becoming secretary of the Navy in 1944. He was ambitious, drove himself and his subordinates to the point of exhaustion, and was a formidable presence in Truman’s cabinet, gaining influence vis-à-vis the fading Byrnes. Forrestal had become Kennan’s champion in Washington, and the transformative effect on the diplomat’s career, which had stalled through the war years after starting so brightly, was immediate. Within three months, Kennan, now age forty-two, was hurried back to Washington (with his young family) to become deputy commandant for foreign affairs at the National War College, an institution established that same year to educate diplomats and midranking military officers. In the summer of 1946, Kennan was dispatched on a nationwide speaking tour, before being instructed to deliver seventeen lectures at the college in the autumn—detailing at greater length the strategic purpose of the Long Telegram. Like Mahan, Kennan had secured for himself a happily contemplative setting on the northeastern seaboard. The Truman administration tasked Kennan with performing the function he had deemed essential in his telegram: educating the public and the military, in measured tones, on the actual threat posed by the Soviet Union to American interests. This threat, Kennan maintained, was surmountable if the right type of knowledge was applied.

*   *   *

Kennan spoke to a variety of audiences over the summer, ranging from atomic scientists in California, captains of industry in New York City, and academics at the elite universities. Among the intellectuals and scientists he encountered, across the full range of disciplines, Kennan detected two worrying trends: first a Lippmannesque tendency to view Moscow as a credible ally; second a Beardian inclination to view the Soviet Union as a noble experiment that the United States, scarred by poverty and societal discord, had no special right to judge. Kennan nonetheless generally impressed his audiences, and the State Department, with the clarity of his message, which focused on America’s failings as well as the USSR’s. Anticipating the development of a significant domestic problem, he told an audience at the University of Virginia, “I deplore the hysterical sort of anticommunism which, it seems to me, is gaining currency in our country.”74

After concluding his national tour, Kennan delivered a series of lectures at the National War College, their contemporary focus illuminated by telling references to Gibbon and Clausewitz. Kennan had neglected to mention the atomic bomb—or the potential benefits of the U.S. monopoly on that weapon—in the Long Telegram. It was a peculiar omission given the weapon’s vast geopolitical ramifications. Kennan addressed this lacuna by observing that the destructiveness of atomic weaponry made it vital that the United States confront the Soviet Union with nonmilitary means, so as to avoid fighting a third total war with consequences for humanity far graver than those of the two that preceded. It was inevitable that Moscow would develop and test a similar device. And there was no question of America pressing its atomic advantage during the interregnum. The reputational damage would be too severe, the very notion offensive. “Does not [the] significance of atomic weapons,” Kennan observed hopefully, “mean that, if we are to avoid mutual destruction, we must revert to strategic political thinking of [the] XVIII century? Total destruction of enemy’s forces can no longer be our objective.” Here was the nuclear age’s silver lining, reasoned Kennan, who was of course fond of the eighteenth century. His affinity for eras that predated the establishment of representative democracy (and factories, roads, large cities, etc.) was made clear in his observation that “there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.”75

On September 16, 1946, Kennan delivered an important speech, “Measures Short of War (Diplomatic),” which detailed a full spectrum of U.S. strategies for the atomic age. Kennan first dwelled on the totalitarian repertoire, in which “no holds are barred.” Stalin could apply or threaten a combination of any of the following: “persuasion, intimidation, deceit, corruption, penetration, subversion, horse-trading, bluffing, psychological pressure, economic pressure, seduction, blackmail, theft, fraud, rape, battle, murder and sudden death.” Some of these options clearly fell outside Truman’s executive purview, hence American strategy had to draw from three less diabolical nonmilitary strategic clusters: psychological, economic, and political.

In reference to psychological warfare, Kennan included “informational activity like propaganda, or radio broadcast or distribution of magazines.” Thankfully, Kennan observed, “our government has begun to appreciate the fact that anything it does of any importance at all has a psychological effect abroad as well as at home.” Second, America’s economic arsenal included trade embargoes, aid programs, and the granting or refusal of trading preferences. Finally, Kennan defined political warfare broadly, which he took to mean “the cultivation of solidarity with other like-minded nations on every given issue of our foreign policy.” These were the nonmilitary weapons at America’s disposal. But Kennan understood that maintaining a strong conventional military held everything together. “You have no idea,” Kennan told his audience to appreciative laughter, “how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.”76

This was a diplomatic toolbox with implements to suit nearly all occasions. The communist parties in Western Europe had to be opposed with energy and purpose. This might entail the surreptitious funding of anticommunist political parties, infiltrating trade unions, or brandishing the “armed force in the background” to achieve the desired effect. (This was certainly the case during the Italian general election of 1948, when the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet made its presence felt in various ports.)77 The purpose of American strategy was not to confront the Soviet Union directly or provoke war over any of its “allies” in Central and Eastern Europe. Rather, America had to ensure that Moscow’s influence spread no farther on the European continent—and military action was the last possible resort, unlikely to be required given Stalin’s sensitivity to the “logic of force.” To counter communist subversion in Greece, for example, Kennan recommended that the United States dispatch “about three ships all painted white with ‘Aid to Greece’ on the sides, and to have the first bags of wheat driven up to Athens in an American jeep with a Hollywood blonde on the radiator.”78 Five decades before the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye coined the term, Kennan understood the meaning of “soft power.”

In January 1947, President Truman delivered his second State of the Union address, a speech infused with idealistic Wilsonian energy, rejecting by association Kennan’s subtle geopolitical particularism: “Our goal is collective security for all mankind … The spirit of the American people can set the course of world history. If we maintain and strengthen our cherished ideals … then the faith of our citizens in freedom and democracy will be spread over the whole earth and free men everywhere will share our devotion to those ideals.”79

A presidential vignette on a “little bit of totalitarianism” residing in all of us clearly would not have worked. Nor would any number of Kennanisms on America displaying justified modesty in its interactions with other nations, on Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia being lost causes, and on the pernicious effects of universal suffrage. Kennan’s conservative style of thinking was poisonous to the ambitions of presidential speechwriters. Nonetheless, the sweeping commitments detailed in Truman’s speech worried him all the same; the president didn’t have to channel Kennan directly to talk some sense. At this juncture Kennan and his government were happily as one on the practicalities of how best to combat Marxism-Leninism. But as long as Wilson’s rhetorical ghost lingered, this unity of purpose was likely to be short-lived.

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In Anti-intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter observed that 1947 was the year when America’s international preeminence—economically, militarily, culturally, politically—was established beyond doubt. He wrote that it “was no longer possible to look at any foreign political system for moral or ideological illumination.” To reinforce his point, Hofstadter quoted Edmund Wilson’s remarks upon returning from Europe that “the United States at the present time is politically more advanced than any other part of the world.” That this “least provincial of writers” could endorse the nation’s political system without qualification, further observing that the postwar world had witnessed “a remarkable renascence of American arts and letters,” testified to a special moment in time for the United States.80 Not that there was any time to celebrate. Kennan was disinclined to revel in self-congratulation; the worrisome world situation kept his mood somber. There was a full-blown communist insurgency in Greece, acute political instability in Turkey, escalating U.S.-Soviet tension over a divided Germany, and a protracted civil war in China—tilting discernibly in Mao Zedong’s favor—which ensured that its FDR-bestowed status as a fourth “global policeman” was now fully detached from reality. Kennan could see that America’s view from the geopolitical summit was far bleaker than Britain’s in 1815.

Some good news arrived to cheer Kennan in January 1947, when General George Marshall replaced James Byrnes as secretary of state. Winston Churchill had described Marshall as the West’s “organizer of victory,” in reference to the pivotal role he played as army chief of staff during the Second World War. An awe-inspiring presence, Marshall knew and liked Kennan—well, as much as this taciturn man could show—and the feeling was reciprocated. In his memoir, Kennan observed that there was “no one whose memory has less need of a eulogy from me than George Marshall.” He composed a warm and affecting one all the same:

Like everyone else, I admired him, and in a sense loved him, for the qualities I saw in him … for his unshakable integrity; his consistent courtesy and gentlemanliness of conduct; his ironclad sense of duty; his imperturbability—the imperturbability of a good conscience—in the face of harassments, pressures, and criticisms … his indifference to the whims and moods of public opinion, particularly as manifested in the mass media; and his impeccable fairness and avoidance of favoritism in the treatment of subordinates (there was no one in the Department of State whom he called by the first name; every one of us, from top to bottom, was recognized simply by his surname, with no handle to it).81

Marshall emerges through Kennan’s writings as the one unimpeachable figure in public life, a giant among men. And counted among his many achievements was a farsighted decision to follow Kennan’s advice in establishing a Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, and to appoint the author of the Long Telegram to head it.

On January 31, 1947, Kennan had sent a letter to Dean Acheson, Marshall’s number two at the State Department, which emphasized the merits of creating a distinct policy-planning function. “What is important,” wrote Kennan, “is that somewhere in the government there should be an honest, detached, and authoritative assessment of what constitutes national interest in foreign affairs and of how the national interest might be best promoted.” The machinery of U.S. foreign policymaking was fundamentally reactive in its operational method. A separate detachment of policy planners at State would redress this problem in being afforded the space and time to think proactively. “The planner must accept the responsibility of defining overall purpose and approach,” Kennan wrote. “The advisory quality of his function,” he continued, “relieves him of any presumption of immodesty in this undertaking.”

On the planning staff’s ultimate purpose, Kennan identified two broad “objectives of United States policy.” The first was “to assure to the people of the United States physical security and freedom to pursue in their own way the solution of the problems of their national life.” The second was to “bring into existence that pattern of international relationships which will permit the people of the United States to derive maximum benefit from the experiences and achievements of other peoples and to make the maximum contribution to human progress anywhere.” All of which was laudable and uncharacteristically vague. Kennan did offer more detail on America’s economic goals, concurring with Charles Beard that the United States would be a much safer place if the nation reduced its “dependence” upon “the exchange of commodities.”82 Thus the global economy cannot be counted among the many topics about which Kennan was farsighted—Mahan had anticipated the patterns of world trade much more accurately a half century before. Regardless of this misstep, Kennan offered more specifics on the planning staff a fortnight later, observing to Acheson that it “should be started with a minimum of personnel,” and that “these officers should be chosen, without regard to grade, on the basis of their official record, stress being laid on general intelligence, educational background, analytical capability, breadth and depth of experience, political judgment, and imagination.”83 Nothing less than the truest meritocracy was fit for purpose. The policy planning staff was formally convened in the State Department some two months later. Secretary Marshall’s one piece of operational guidance to Kennan was pithy: “avoid trivia.”84

On February 24, Acheson summoned Kennan to discuss an urgent problem. The British government, which counted Greece and Turkey within its protective sphere, no longer had sufficient resources to safeguard their independence. Could the United States assume this burden? Kennan instinctively thought yes in respect to Greece but no in respect to Turkey—where no armed insurgency actually existed (and whose connection to America’s national security was less certain than that of Greece). President Truman said yes to Britain on both counts, and a draft presidential speech was composed and circulated across government on March 9.

Three days later, Truman delivered the speech to a joint session of Congress; it announced a set of foreign-policy principles that became known as the Truman Doctrine. Kennan disliked the speech as soon as he saw it, and its key sentence allows us to understand why. About two-thirds of the way through the speech, which was mostly measured in tone and narrow in focus, Truman said, “I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Instead of addressing the specific problems of Greece and Turkey, Truman had summoned universals. Kennan’s calibrated diplomatic gradations had seemingly been discarded for a blank Wilsonian check. The speech “placed our aid in the framework of a universal policy rather than in that of a specific decision addressed to a specific set of circumstances. It implied that what we had decided to do in the case of Greece was something we would be prepared to do in the case of any other country, provided only that it was faced with the threat of ‘subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’”85

A foundational stone had been laid on the path to American involvement in Vietnam—and to many other destructive, purposeless tangents.

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The critical substance of Walter Lippmann’s reaction to Truman’s speech was identical to Kennan’s. But declining the State Department’s job offer meant he could record his concerns publicly. In “T&T” on March 15, Lippmann observed that a “vague global policy, which sounds like the tocsin of an ideological crusade, has no limits. It cannot be controlled. Its effects cannot be predicted. Everyone everywhere will read into it his own fears and hopes, and it could readily act as incitement and inducement to civil strife in countries where the national cooperation is delicate and precarious.” A few weeks after the column appeared, Lippmann and Dean Acheson clashed at a dinner party when the latter accused the former of “sabotaging” the nation’s foreign policy. Lippmann and Acheson exchanged fierce rhetorical blows, creating “a very unpleasant evening,” in the journalist’s recollection.86

Lippmann had actually come around to the logic of resisting Soviet expansionism. His disagreement with Acheson was on means and parameters. On April 5, Lippmann had published one of his most influential columns, widely reprinted under syndication, titled “Cassandra Speaking”—a Kennanesque piece of historical self-identification. Lippmann observed that Europe was on the verge of economic collapse. This was not hyperbole, he maintained, but “only what responsible men say when they do not have to keep up appearances in public.” It was now imperative that the Truman administration devise measures to shore up political and economic stability in Europe “on a scale which no responsible statesman has yet ventured to hint at.”87 The proposal of a large-scale intervention to save the center of the geopolitical universe garnered Kennan’s instant approval. This was precisely the type of nonmilitary measure envisioned and prioritized in the Long Telegram. Others in the State Department were similarly impressed. The speechwriter Joseph Jones paraphrased Lippmann’s column for an important address delivered by Dean Acheson, of all people, a few weeks later.

James Forrestal also liked Lippmann’s column and suggested that he and George Kennan should meet in person to sketch out the basics of a recovery program for Europe on the appropriate grand scale. Facing the men were two considerable challenges, described by Ronald Steel: “how to sell such a costly program to a suspicious Congress, and how to organize it so that it did not seem either an American ploy to dominate Europe or a blatant anti-Soviet maneuver.”88 Lippmann and Kennan shared a political philosophy, seriousness of purpose, and diplomatic style. It was no surprise, then, that they devised an elegant and logical plan. They met for a long lunch at the National War College and made two substantive proposals. First, the Soviet Union would be invited to participate in the recovery program, and be offered advantageous loan terms. Its participation, however, should be made contingent upon acceptance that the encouragement and facilitation of free trade was sine qua non—recovery would proceed on broadly liberal-capitalist lines. Second, Kennan and Lippmann recommended that the United States encourage the European nations to request assistance themselves.

This would place the onus on Congress to simply accept or reject a European plea for help, a precedent that had met with recent success. It would also compel the European nations to collaborate, which would be useful in developing their political and economic cohesion, ensuring their longer-term vitality, and negating the potential for future conflict within the continent itself. Encouraging greater European unity—with a carrot worth billions of dollars—would also ask some hard questions of Soviet dominance in Eastern and Central Europe. Were Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary gaining anything from residing in the Russian orbit? If Stalin forced the satellite nations to refuse to participate in a generous U.S. aid program, seeds of discord would be successfully sown. Durable empires are not made by cowing nations, crushing their spirit, and then hampering their development. (The architects of the British Empire understood that some degree of co-opting was required.) Kennan better understood the logic of this than Lippmann, because the latter genuinely believed that Moscow would participate in the program, bringing along its neighbors. Lippmann did not view the plan as a ruse to develop one part of Europe at the expense of the other but as a noble attempt to part what Churchill had described in 1946 as the “iron curtain.” The journalist wanted to rekindle a form of ends-oriented U.S.-Soviet cooperation that had fallen into abeyance since Yalta.

Lippmann was of course duly thwarted. On June 4, 1947, while delivering a commencement address at Harvard, Secretary of State Marshall presented the broad sweep of a plan designed to assist the recovery and reconstruction of Europe. During the planning stage, the State Department had decided that creating the impression of a European-requested endeavor would have stretched credulity a little too far. The bulk of the speech was drafted by Kennan’s friend Charles Bohlen, and it drew on Kennan’s and Lippmann’s insights as well as those from other State Department sources, William Clayton most notably. The Marshall Plan, as it became known, had a broad purpose tailored to the chaotic economic circumstances of the time:

It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.89

At the end of the month, Molotov and some eighty advisers, including a retinue of hopeful representatives from Eastern Europe, attended a conference in Paris to discuss Marshall’s offer. Lippmann was delighted by this promising news; Kennan, aghast. Fortunately, Molotov behaved as expected in declining Washington’s offer, taking the leaders of Moscow’s unhappy satellites back east with him. Marshall’s seemingly gregarious observation that U.S. “policy is not directed against any country, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos” did not dupe Vyacheslav Molotov. Superpower rivalry was ideological, above all, and accepting the Marshall Plan also meant accepting the superiority of capitalism over communism. There was not enough cash in the world to sweeten that pill.

Over the next four years, $12.4 billion in aid was disbursed to the sixteen nations of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation—including Great Britain, France, Italy, West Germany, and Austria—freshly created to administer the Marshall Plan from the recipient end. Lippmann had floated an early rationale and played his usually significant role in respect to guiding and illuminating public opinion. But this was George Kennan’s achievement, perhaps his finest policy hour. The Marshall Plan was the perfect realization of logic contained in the Long Telegram. (Few policies henceforth came close to satisfying Kennan.) It was also successful in achieving its declared goals. Tottering on shaky economic and political foundations in 1947, Western Europe regained its footing following Marshall’s speech and embarked upon a remarkable period of sustained growth. The Marshall Plan also presaged closer European economic and political cooperation—in the fashion that Lippmann and Kennan anticipated. Historians and economists continue to debate the actual utility of the plan. The $12.4 billion figure was not vast in the wider scheme of things; America’s GDP in 1948 was $258 billion. Western Europe had greater latent economic potential than any other region on earth. But one need not enter this scholarly debate to observe that the Marshall Plan made an enormous contribution—psychologically at the least and economically transformative at the most—to the rehabilitation of Western Europe. It instilled hope and unity of purpose, which was enough.

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A few months before the creation of the Marshall Plan, the editor of Foreign Affairs, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, invited Kennan to redraft the Long Telegram for publication. Here was an ideal opportunity for Kennan to reach a much larger audience than the National War College lectern could provide. Foreign Affairs was not the International Herald Tribune, but its readership was influential and its circulation respectable. Kennan replied with a caveat: “I really cannot write anything of value on Russia for publication under my own name. If you would be interested in an anonymous article, or one under a pen name, I would be glad to know this.” An undeterred Armstrong replied that “the interest of the projected article more than outweighs from our point of view the disadvantage of anonymity. This letter is an invitation to you, then, to put into the form of an article the ideas you expressed so well in your memorandum and in your talk here at the Council.”90

An article titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” by an author identified as “X” appeared in July’s Foreign Affairs. Nothing published in that journal since—and that includes seminal pieces by Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Samuel Huntington, Paul Wolfowitz, and many others—has had a comparable impact. The New York Times and Newsweek reported on the article’s meaning and wider significance, and mused on the likely identity of its author—“X” was intriguing, an unintended marketing masterstroke. Reader’s Digest and Life printed long excerpts, riling Kennan with their brutal editing, which he believed damaged the article’s integrity. It took less than a month for Arthur Krock to reveal X’s identity in the Times. Perturbed by this media storm, George Marshall summoned Kennan for a dressing down, growling in admonishment that “planners don’t talk.” Kennan protested that he had secured all necessary clearances, which mollified Marshall.91 The secretary of state and others understood that the publicity could serve a useful purpose. James Forrestal, for one, was thrilled that the X Article had secured such a large readership, and that its connection to U.S. policy had been established. The danger posed by the Soviet Union would, he hoped, become evident to all who read the article. The making of a resolute, and costly, foreign policy would become simpler if the public and their political representatives understood the stakes involved in containing Moscow.

“The Sources of Soviet Conduct” covered much of the same ground as the Long Telegram. It begins by re-creating Stalin’s warped perspective on diplomacy: that there could be no meaningful collaboration between the Soviet Union and “powers which are regarded as capitalist.” “This means,” Kennan wrote, “that we are going to continue for a long time to find the Russians difficult to deal with.” It is impossible to engage meaningfully with a totalitarian regime because “truth is not a constant but is actually created, for all intents and purposes, by the Soviet leaders themselves.” Russian history, additionally, provides ample evidence that communist “precepts are fortified by … centuries of obscure battles between nomadic forces over the stretches of a vast fortified plain.” Assaulted in various eras by Mongol hordes from the east, and Napoleon’s and Hitler’s formidable land armies from the west, Russia had a complicated relationship with the outside world, to say the least. Invading armies had visited death and destruction on Russia on a scale experienced by no other nation on earth. In these circumstances, the coupling of Russian history and Marxism-Leninism had real chemistry.

To ensure that this abused child was restrained in the extent of abuse it could mete out, Kennan crafted a seminal strategic concept:

In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansionist tendencies … It will be clearly seen that the Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.

The next eight presidents would all subscribe to variations on this policy. The containment of Soviet expansionism was designed to ensure that the free world remained inoculated from Marxist contagion. In the meantime, the Soviet Union would wither on the vine:

Russian communists who speak of the “uneven development of capitalism” should blush at the contemplation of their own national economy … It is difficult to see how these deficiencies can be corrected at an early date by a tired and dispirited population working largely under the shadow of fear and compulsion … The possibility remains (and in the opinion of this writer it is a strong one) that Soviet power, like the capitalist world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well-advanced.

If the United States remained resolute and kept its head, the Soviet Union would not pose as serious a challenge as promised by Stalin’s and Molotov’s bluster. “For no mystical, messianic movement—and particularly not that of the Kremlin—can face frustration indefinitely without eventually adjusting itself in one way or another to the logic of that state of affairs.”92

Kennan’s article evoked a strong reaction in Walter Lippmann. Aware of the article’s vast potential impact, he wrote twelve successive “T&T” columns, all of which appeared in the late summer of 1947, criticizing X’s rationale, prescriptions, and predictions. Lippmann accused X of making some egregious errors: downplaying Russia’s history at the expense of Marxist ideology, proposing a strategy so broad in application that it would lead to perpetual conflict in areas of marginal significance, and misplaced confidence in the fallibility of the Soviet system. In the most damning indictment, Lippmann accused Kennan of authoring a “strategic monstrosity” that was likely to cause geopolitical exhaustion: “The Americans would themselves probably be frustrated by Mr. X’s policy long before the Russians were.” The articles were published collectively as a book titled The Cold War in the fall. With “the Cold War” and “containment,” Kennan and Lippmann had provided the language that defined the postwar era.

Lippmann’s twelve-stage critique of Kennan’s article was brilliant at times and garnered a lot of publicity. His first column impugned X for observing that Soviet power “bears within itself the seed of its own decay.” “Do we dare to assume as we enter the arena and get set to run the race,” asked Lippmann sarcastically, “that the Soviet Union will break its leg while the United States grows a pair of wings to speed it on its way?”93 In Lippmann’s mind, the Soviet Union was an established fact that was here to stay. Both assessments had some merit, but Kennan more accurately identified the process through which the Marxist-Leninist experiment would unravel; Lippmann had been duped by a Soviet economic and political system that resembled a Potemkin village. Containment was entirely appropriate because Russian communism would prove evanescent. The Soviet Union’s economic virtues bore no serious comparison to those of the United States and the West; Moscow’s reluctant empire was not likely to remain quiescent.

Lippmann was on surer ground in following through on the faulty logic contained in Kennan’s advocacy of the “adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” “The Eurasian continent is a big place,” wrote Lippmann, “and the military power of the United States, though it is very great, has certain limits which must be borne in mind if it is to be used effectively.” Of particular concern to Lippmann was containment’s apparently broad application, unencumbered in presentation by any clearly established hierarchy of American interests. This made the Third World a battleground of dubious worth: “The policy can be implemented only by recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets.” The problem with lavishing resources, and vesting credibility, on such areas and regimes is that “satellite states and puppet governments are not good material out of which to construct unassailable barriers. We shall have either to disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat and loss of face, or must support them at incalculable cost on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue.”94 With this observation, Lippmann had peered into the future.

In the last of the twelve articles, Lippmann identified a continuity of aims between X and the authors of the Truman Doctrine. All had been foolishly driven by Wilsonianism, disregarding the Mahanian tradition in American diplomatic history that understood that certain values do not travel well. Washington policymakers should protect the security and interests of the nation and its closest strategic partners—not treat the world as a single battleground on which the champions of John Locke should be pitted against those of Karl Marx. Any poor nation should be free to opt for the latter just as it might prefer the former. Their decision was irrelevant, as weak and peripheral nations did not affect the West’s core economic and security interests. And fighting proxy wars in such places was foolish on multiple levels:

Our aim will not be to organize an ideological crusade. It will not be to make Jeffersonian democrats out of the peasants of eastern Europe, the tribal chieftains, the feudal lords, the pashas, and the warlords of the Middle East and Asia, but to settle the war and to restore the independence of the nations of Europe by removing the alien armies—all of them, our own included … Alien armies are hateful, however well behaved, just because they represent an alien power and are, therefore, a perpetual reminder that the people on whom they are quartered are not masters of their own destiny.95

Lippmann’s polemic was highly impressive. In fact, Kennan mostly agreed with him, which made its ferocity harder to dismiss or absorb.

Of course, Kennan’s first reaction was anger. He too abhorred the Truman Doctrine but was unable to vent his frustrations to millions of avid readers in the way Lippmann could. After Lippmann’s first article went to press, Kennan asked permission to publicly respond, which Marshall denied. Kennan was annoyed that Lippmann had emphasized the perils of containment’s military application, when its author in fact viewed war as an absolute last resort. Kennan began to wonder whether he had made his meaning clear, eventually conceding that the ambiguities and gaps contained in the article had invited Lippmann’s critique. In his memoirs he confessed his “failure to make clear what I was talking about when I mentioned the containment of Soviet power was not the containment by military means of a military threat, but the political containment of a political threat.” In identifying a “series of constantly shifting geographical and political points,” Kennan had erred in proposing a strategy that was “at best ambiguous, and lent itself to misinterpretation.” This led him to identify another “great deficiency”—his “failure to distinguish between various geographic areas, and to make clear that the ‘containment’ of which I was speaking was not something which I thought we could, necessarily, do everywhere successfully, or even needed to do everywhere successfully, in order to serve the purpose I had in mind.” In April 1948, Kennan composed a long letter to Lippmann, from his sickbed at Bethesda Naval Hospital (it should be noted here that Kennan, who lived to 101, was more robust than his complaints suggest):

I wrote a long letter to Mr. Lippmann, protesting the misinterpretation of my thoughts which his articles, as it seemed to me, implied. I never sent it to him. It was probably best that I didn’t. The letter had a plaintive and overdramatic tone, reflecting the discomfort of flesh and spirit in which it was written. I took a more cruel but less serious revenge a year or two later when I ran into him on a parlor car of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and wore him relentlessly down with a monologue on these same subjects that lasted most of the way from Washington to New York.

The core of Lippmann’s critique had been justified in these circumstances. Of this “misunderstanding almost tragic in its dimensions,” Kennan graciously said, “I accept the blame for misleading him. My only consolation is that I succeeded in provoking from him so excellent and penetrating a treatise.”96 Lippmann and Kennan became close allies as the former’s prophesies came to pass. On the X Article, Kennan later wrote that 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.”97

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At the end of 1947, his annus mirabilis, Kennan’s policy influence began to follow the same trajectory as the boulder. At the Policy Planning Staff meetings he chaired, and across government in general, Kennan began to notice that his views were now in the minority. In January, Kennan registered reservations about the Truman administration recognizing Israel as an independent state. He was concerned that the United States agreeing to serve as Israel’s chief supporter would inevitably inflame Arab nationalism in the region. This was not a controversial opinion in 1947–1948—indeed, Henry Kissinger, a freshman at Harvard at that time, also believed that U.S. interests would be injured by supporting Israel’s creation.98 Yet President Truman (if not Secretary of State Marshall and Secretary of Defense Forrestal, who shared some of Kennan’s doubts) declared his support for Israel’s path to nationhood, and of America’s vital interest in ensuring its long-term survival. Unconvinced by this reasoning, Kennan had drafted a paper on Palestine for the Office of United Nations Affairs, which cautioned against America taking a strong position on the Arab-Israeli conflict. As Kennan recorded in his diary, it “came back with a long memorandum attacking it.” He was particularly irritated that contained in this critical reply “was no hint of criticism of the Zionists, who were apparently blameless. The solutions toward which the memorandum pointed were all ones which would have put further strain on our relations with British and Arabs, and on the relations between British and Arabs. Such a policy could proceed only at the expense of our major political and strategic interests in the Middle East.” Sensitivity to the Holocaust did not enter Kennan’s analysis at any point. He believed Washington should step back and allow events to take their natural Darwinian course, irrespective of outcome:

Unless the inhabitants of Palestine, both Jews and Arabs, and the international elements which stand behind them, are finally compelled to face each other eye to eye, without outside interference, and to weigh, with a sense of immediate and direct responsibility, the consequences of agreement or disagreement, I think they will continue to react irresponsibly … We Americans must realize that we cannot be the keepers and moral guardians of all the peoples in this world. We must become more modest, and recognize the necessary limits to the responsibility we can assume.99

The final two sentences distilled Kennan’s worldview. It was America’s obligation, as the world’s single most powerful nation, to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union, an abhorrent regime. Beyond that, Washington should learn from history’s other great empires and resist the temptation to assume unsustainable burdens in volatile regions. Zionist attempts to found a nation in the Middle East should live or die by Jewish resources alone.

Elsewhere the geopolitical augurs were similarly gloomy. In February 1948, a Soviet-backed coup in Czechoslovakia removed the last remnants of independent-mindedness from its government. Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk died in mysterious circumstances two weeks later. President Edvard Beneš, who had initially accepted a strong communist presence within a coalition government, and who had been forced to sign off on the coup d’état under threat of Soviet invasion, resigned in June and died, from natural causes, at the end of the year. From Berlin, General Lucius Clay informed Washington that while he had previously believed a war with the Soviet Union was unlikely “for at least ten years … within the last few weeks, I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitude which I cannot define but which now gives me a feeling that it may come with dramatic suddenness.” Kennan found this assessment alarmist in the extreme. His response to Czechoslovakia’s humbling was a repeat of ten years earlier. The nation was destined to fall under the domination of a larger neighbor; Kennan had given up hope of an independent Czechoslovakia soon after the D-day landings, when the Roosevelt administration missed the opportunity to confront Stalin over his wider intentions in Eastern Europe. Kennan recalled that “Washington, particularly the military establishment and intelligence fraternity (where the military predominated) … overreacted in the most deplorable way to the combination of Clay’s telegram and the Czech coup.” On March 16, the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency prepared an analysis that held that war was “not probable within the next sixty days.” The notion of waging war over Czechoslovakia—which had been a dead man walking since the summer of 1944—appalled Kennan. The worst aspect was that few policy advisers appeared capable of understanding Stalin’s perspective, which Kennan identified as “defensive reactions … to the initial successes of the Marshall Plan initiative and to the preparations now being undertaken on the Western side to set up a separate German government in Western Germany.”100 In a letter to Walter Lippmann, now a firm friend, Kennan observed that “the Russians don’t want to invade anyone. It is not in their tradition … The violence is nominally domestic, not international, violence. It is, if you will, a police violence, not a military violence. The policy of containment related to the effort to encourage other peoples to resist this type of violence and to defend the internal integrity of their countries.”101 Walter Lippmann’s response to the coup, meanwhile, was unimpeachable: he discarded any residual hope of America getting along with Stalin.102

Germany had become a major bone of contention between Kennan and the Truman administration. Having initially supported the creation of a distinct West Germany, to consolidate America’s strategic position on the continent, Kennan had come to oppose the establishment of a sovereign separate state. On June 18, the Western occupying nations had announced that the zone would have a new currency—the deutsche mark—to assist its economic rehabilitation. In response, Stalin ordered the immediate closure of all access routes to West Berlin, leaving the zone’s residents about a month’s food supplies. To get around these restrictions, the United States and Great Britain began to operate a round-the-clock airlift, which successfully supplied the west of Berlin until May 1949, when Stalin simply gave up. It was a stirring victory for Truman and the West, although the airlift was fraught with danger. On August 12, 1948, an anxious Kennan submitted document PPS 37 to Secretary Marshall:

We can no longer retain the present line of division in Europe and yet hope to keep things flexible for an eventual retraction of Soviet power and for the gradual emergence from Soviet control, and entrance into a free European country, of the present satellite countries … If we carry on along present lines, Germany must divide into eastern and western governments and western Europe must move toward a tight military alliance with this country which can only complicate the eventual integration of the satellites into a European community.103

In the midst of this grand confrontation with Stalin, Kennan’s emollient proposal, anticipating happier times, sank without a trace. Dean Acheson, in particular, began to harbor serious doubts about the quality of Kennan’s counsel and even identified in him a form of defeatism or pacifism. Acheson later said that Kennan reminded him of his father’s horse, “which used to startle itself with the noise of its own hooves when it crossed wooden bridges.”104 Acheson turned out to be a primary author of Kennan’s policy decline.

Meanwhile, James Forrestal, a catalyst for Kennan’s rise, had set out on a path to self-destruction. Truman appointed Forrestal as the nation’s first secretary of defense in 1947, combining the War and Navy Departments. This reshuffle was part of a wider reorganization of U.S. government, enshrined in the National Security Act of 1947, which established the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. The United States was girding itself for a long and costly struggle with the Soviet Union. This was effectively a promotion for Forrestal, but his tendency to work unforgiving hours, combined with a fragile temperament, began to affect his mental equilibrium, setting alarm bells ringing in the goldfish bowl that was Washington. In 1948, Forrestal made the unwise decision to meet secretly with Thomas Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate, where he agreed to serve as his secretary of defense in the likely event that Dewey beat Truman. Drew Pearson, a syndicated journalist with a nose for political scandal, publicized the details of this meeting, and Truman forced his secretary of defense to resign, which happened on March 31, 1949. Forrestal suffered a nervous breakdown soon after and was hospitalized a few weeks later. After a series of unsuccessful medical interventions, which likely exacerbated his mania, Forrestal committed suicide on May 22 by throwing himself from the sixteenth floor of Bethesda Naval Hospital.105

Dean Acheson, conversely, was about as stable a public servant as ever drew a government salary—and his career was on the up. A product of Groton and Yale, ramrod straight in his bearing, with a well-tended pencil-line mustache, Acheson cut an impressive and imposing figure. The British journalist Alistair Cooke described him wonderfully as a “six foot two Velasquez grandee who has submitted, with a twinkling eye, to his present reincarnation in fine tweeds as a Connecticut Yankee.”106 This well-tailored WASP also had a sting in his rhetorical tail. His acid descriptions of those who crossed him were legendary. In fact they were so unpleasant, and often unfair, that they form a blot on his substantial record as secretary of state. Reasonably, Acheson once observed that the “task of a public officer seeking to explain and gain support for a major policy is not that of the writer of a doctoral thesis. Qualification must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness.”107 But there was no merit in Acheson’s barbed observations that Kennan had a “marshmallow mind” and that it surprised him in later years that this “footnote of the Truman presidency” would “masquerade as an important policymaker.”108 Similarly abrasive were his views that Kennan had only an “abstract” sense of the national interest and that he vested too much faith in his “Quaker gospel.”109 Acheson lacked the self-doubt that might have tempered his vitriol. In 1945, for example, Acheson still entertained Lippmannesque hopes of collaborating with Stalin when Kennan was leading the charge for confrontation. In his memoir, Present at the Creation, Acheson writes that Kennan “mingled flashes of prophetic insight [with] suggestions … of total impracticality.”110 This was a valid critique in many respects. Yet Acheson was not an original thinker in his own right, and he lacked Kennan’s flair for “prophetic insight.” It was on issues of “practicality” that Acheson felt he bested Kennan.

These disagreements of “practicality” took on added importance after it became clear, near the end of 1948, that Acheson would replace Marshall as secretary of state due to the latter’s health problems. For example, Acheson played an important role in the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an alliance that connected Western Europe’s security with North America’s through the binding commitment that an attack on one signatory was an attack on all. At best, Kennan viewed NATO as a form of useful “psychotherapy for nervous Europeans”—in Anders Stephanson’s apt description—and at worst it was a meaningless “legalistic commitment” with no bearing on international diplomatic realities. Of particular concern to Kennan was the possibility that NATO—all of whose original signatories were nations with an Atlantic link—might expand to include nations unconnected to Western security. So, “beyond the Atlantic area, which is a clean-cut concept, and which embraces a real community of defense interest firmly rooted in geography and tradition, there is no logical stopping point in the development of a system of anti-Russian alliances until that system has circled the globe and has embraced all the non-communist countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa.”111 Kennan was largely correct in his diagnosis: Turkey came first, and then a flood of nations joined NATO during the 1950s and beyond. Whether NATO was a diplomatic masterstroke, instilling anticommunist unity during the Cold War, or an albatross around America’s neck is a matter for debate. But there is no doubt that Kennan’s skepticism was and is the minority view.

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On January 3, 1949, Kennan wrote a long letter to Dean Acheson detailing his concerns with current policy. “Please ascribe it … to reason…,” wrote Kennan, “when I say that I am not really interested in carrying on in government service unless I can feel that we have at least a sporting chance of coping with our problem:—that we are not just bravely paddling the antiquated raft of U.S. foreign policy upstream, at a speed of three miles an hour, against a current which is making four.” In a wide-ranging letter, Kennan took aim at the administration’s reckless saber-rattling, sustained by a pugnacious and irresponsible Congress and held “accountable” by a bewildered public:

The thesis of the X article, you will recall, was that our main problem was a political one and that we had a good chance of coping with it by political means—(at least means short of a full-scale shooting war)—if we would stop moping, face up to the situation cheerfully and realistically, and conduct ourselves rationally, in terms of our own epoch. I still feel that way. When I took my present job in the Department, I thought there was a good chance that this could be accomplished. Today, I am skeptical. I am afraid that we are not really getting anywhere.

Kennan identified problems at multiple levels. The Truman administration had to “accept propaganda as a major weapon of policy,” and the State Department “must not hesitate to get out and participate in the intellectual debate on U.S. foreign policy.” Communicating the proper purpose of U.S. diplomacy required eschewing “both the arrogance of trying to ‘go it alone’ and the neurotic satisfaction of striking of idealistic attitudes … In this concept, there is no room for self-delusion and for lofty announcements about peace and democracy.” The existence of the United Nations, “and the general current vogue for multilateral international negotiation,” was making America’s task in containing the Soviet Union all the more difficult. Stalin did not take the organization seriously—except as a useful device for easy wins, where applicable—but a guileless swell of world opinion viewed it as a bastion of collaborative altruism, beyond reproach and cynical carping. This delighted Moscow, for “it is fatuous to expect them to deal seriously in the UN … They would be fools, from their standpoint, to do so; and we would be greater fools to expect them to.” Kennan had begun to give up hope of America communicating with a firm but modulated voice in world affairs: “And if this is the set-up, I’d rather be at Yale, or where-you-will,—any place where I could sound-off and talk freely to people,—than in the confines of a department in which you can neither do anything about it nor tell people what you think ought to be done.”112 Kennan had crafted a declaration of independence conditioned by frustration with his government and envy at Walter Lippmann’s independence and influence. There was no point remaining in a government that had veered away so drastically from Kennan’s worldview. Yet he still retained a little hope that the secretary of state would come around to his way of thinking.

It was not to be. Kennan’s letter simply confirmed Acheson’s doubts about the absence of “practicality” in his diplomatic thought, informed by antidemocratic sentiments and a yearning for a halcyon age that never was. Through the course of 1949, Kennan continued to languish on the periphery—as Truman’s rhetoric grew fiercer, as a virulent anticommunism gathered strength under Senator Joe McCarthy’s crudely effective direction—pining for the happier days of 1946 and imagining the pleasures that might accompany scholarly retreat. A spring visit to Hamburg, Kennan’s favorite German city, had brought home to him the importance of preserving peace. The indiscriminate Allied bombing campaign had created a scene of devastation that even Kennan, with his imaginative gifts, could scarcely have visualized. The realist snapped and the artist took over:

Here, for the first time, I felt an unshakable conviction that no momentary military advantage … could have justified this stupendous, careless destruction of civilian life and of material values … And it suddenly appeared to me that in these ruins there was an unanswerable symbolism which we in the West could not afford to ignore. If the Western world was really going to make valid the pretense of a higher moral departure point … then it had to learn to fight its wars morally as well as militarily, or not fight them at all.113

Here was a sentiment remarkable in its moral force, about as detached from Acheson’s perspective as one could imagine. In two mournful diary entries, Kennan confronted the obvious fact that his perspective on world affairs had become a lonely one. On November 19, 1949, he wrote that “it is time I recognized that my planning staff, started nearly three years ago, has simply been a failure, like all previous attempts to bring order and foresight into the designing of foreign policy by special institutional arrangements within the Department.” Three days later, he lamented that “my concept of the manner in which our diplomatic effort should be conducted is not shared by any of the other senior officials of the Department … If I am ever to do any good in this work, having the courage of my convictions, it must be outside the walls of this institution and not inside them.”114 In Kennan’s mind, America’s Soviet policy had fluctuated wildly from 1943 to 1949: from accommodation, to surety of purpose, to overreaction, to something else entirely. It was he who had remained constant and in command of his faculties—a baseline on a volatile graph.