Late one moonless night in October 1949, a boat called The Stormie Seas drew close in to the Albanian coast. Nine exiles grabbed guns and equipment and rowed ashore. They darted inland and eastward. After ten miles, they split up into two groups.
The goal was counterrevolution. They were supposed to organize their old friends, make new ones, and begin building a resistance movement against the communists who had seized power during the chaos of World War II. The operation was secret, subversive, likely violent, and highly dangerous. It was also the most aggressive version of containment that George Kennan ever advocated.
Kennan had a long history with spying. During his first posting in Russia, in the 1930s, he had taken great pride in cultivating secret sources. When based in Lisbon, he specialized in intelligence work under diplomatic cover. “My real mission,” he would say later, “was the coordination of American intelligence in Portugal.” In early 1948, he had watched the United States and the just-formed CIA help swing an election in Italy away from the communists. By the middle of that year, Kennan had become a strong advocate of covert action. “He knew that there are things that you have to do in the dark nights and then reconcile yourself with God,” said Walter Pozen, his son-in-law.
That May, Kennan wrote: “Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace.” To stifle the spread of communism the United States should do anything in its power, from propaganda to economic aid to “such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.”
Kennan regretted that the United States lagged in black ops. “The creation, success, and survival of the British Empire has been due in part to the British understanding and application of the principles of political warfare. Lenin so synthesized the teachings of Marx and Clausewitz that the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare has become the most refined and effective of any in history.” The United States had yet to figure it out: “We have been handicapped however by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war.”
He argued for a range of responses, all of which he considered political containment. The United States should fund and support refugee groups with their eyes on overthrowing communist regimes; it should secretly fund anticommunists in free countries. If the Kremlin seemed close to acquiring something, like a “Near Eastern oil installation,” the United States should sabotage the asset. Kennan also urged the creation of an “Office of Policy Coordination” and spent much of the spring and early summer of 1948 working out the details. In one memo to Lovett, he declared: “Time is running out on us. If we are to engage effectively in intelligent, organized covert activities, appropriations must be obtained.”
He wanted the Office of Policy Coordination to be small and to be managed by the State Department. He eventually conceded that the newly formed CIA could run it—with Kennan providing some oversight as an official representative of State. He put forward a list of six men who could lead the organization. His top choice, a handsome track star turned lawyer named Frank Wisner, got the job.
With the organization in place, Kennan and Wisner went to work. The first plan described in the files released decades later by the State Department was to send balloons over communist territory, scattering propaganda leaflets on the prevailing winds. Less dramatically, Kennan helped design the National Committee for a Free Europe, a CIA-organized group that created the pro-American Radio Free Europe, broadcasting into communist countries.
Kennan and Wisner also worked together around this time to import an ex-Nazi named Gustav Hilger to advise the U.S. government. Kennan had known Hilger in Moscow fifteen years before and considered him “the dean of all ‘Russian experts’ and the foremost diplomatic authority on the Soviet Union.” In the meantime, however, Hilger’s résumé had accumulated some nasty stains. Although he played no significant part in the Final Solution, he had spent the war working for the Reich’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and recently released documents now make it virtually certain that Hilger knew about the mass murders of Jews.
It is unclear whether Kennan had any inkling of Hilger’s wartime activities, but he certainly took pleasure in Hilger’s arrival and the two spent a weekend together soon afterward. According to a document released by the CIA in 2006, Kennan thanked Wisner in October 1948 for taking Hilger on at the OPC, and ended by praising Wisner for not only getting Hilger into the country but also sneaking his family out of the Soviet zone of East Germany. “Because the humane and decent thing is sometimes overlooked in the operations of our governmental bureaucracy, it may not be out of place for me to observe that I think you have done the right thing.”
Kennan’s relationship with Hilger caused him problems in the 1980s, when a historian named Christopher Simpson made it a centerpiece of his book Blowback, which savaged the postwar importation of Nazis to America. Some of Kennan’s other plans exploded much sooner. It was not easy to manipulate elections, overthrow governments, and seize oil fields. Moreover, the KGB regularly skunked its American rivals. In 1949, this lesson was underlined in blood on the rocky shores of Albania. Kennan was directly involved in planning these early operations, and they went very badly.
The Albanian security machine had known about the landings in advance. Troops patrolled the coastlines, villagers had been warned, and hillside shepherds were on the lookout. Not long after the infiltrators split up, one group was ambushed. Three of the four men were killed and one disappeared. The other group of five trudged south through the mountains at night, hiding in caves during the day. They tried to communicate by radio, using a loud, forty-pound pedal-powered generator that they lugged through the forests. The police shot one of the group as they traversed a ravine. But thanks to luck and daring the four survivors somehow managed to safely retreat out of Albania.
For the next five years, Wisner and his colleagues continued to send refugees into the country. But “everyone was arrested when they arrived,” says Frank Lindsay, a longtime friend of Kennan who was part of the early intelligence operations. Albanian troops intercepted newly arrived insurgents or were waiting when the latest round of rubber boats washed ashore. Some poor operatives parachuted straight into the hands of the police. Others survived only because they missed their intended landing spots.
The communists had thoroughly infiltrated Western planning. Double agents filled the refugee communities from which the CIA recruited; worse, the British liaison to the project was Kim Philby, a Soviet asset. The Americans totally trusted Philby, and he often knew more about operations than did Wisner. The KGB’s understandable suspicion that so rich a source must actually be a triple agent only slightly limited the damage done.
Kennan watched with horror as the Albanian operation and many others ended in abject failure. The CIA, meanwhile, dealt with disaster by pressing deeper into the labyrinth of special ops. Suspicion grew, and in some cases bent toward fantasy. Maybe, Wisner thought, the Adriatic operation had failed because the Soviets had penetrated the agency with a telepathic ray. Soon the CIA was testing whether LSD could help it understand mind control, slipping the drug to men who came into the whorehouses it ran in San Francisco and New York and then watching through one-way mirrors. At its Addiction Research Center in Kentucky, the agency kept a group of subjects on the drug for seventy-seven consecutive days. Containment had turned into psychedelic chicanery. The weird part of the Cold War had fully begun.
IN ASSEMBLING HIS COVERT organization, Kennan turned to James Forrestal, his old ally and patron. Forrestal had helped organize the CIA actions during the Italian elections and he gave his blessing to Kennan’s suggestions for developing a variety of covert operations.
Born in the Hudson Valley, in the town now called Beacon, Forrestal had worked his way into Princeton from a childhood of modest means. Afterward, he took a job on Wall Street, where he advanced quickly, eventually moving to Dillon Read. His unwavering attention to business carried him far and fast, but his family life paid a heavy price. Nitze recalled that when Forrestal planned an evening at the theater with his wife, a glamorous Vogue writer with a drinking problem, he would buy three tickets: one for her, one for him, and one for his assistant. If work kept him at the office, she would not sit alone. Nitze would sometimes deliver documents to Forrestal’s residence on Beekman Place; he found the real estate impressive and the marriage disastrous.
Forrestal told Nitze that he had learned toughness from his home-town blacksmith. He did not like the veneer to be seen through. Nitze once walked in on Forrestal at Dillon Read and found him on the phone making a contribution to a charity in Beacon. “Forrestal was annoyed at my intrusion, probably because he wanted to protect the tough unbending image that he thought enhanced his effectiveness.”
Forrestal joined the government as a liaison between Franklin Roosevelt and the business world. Here too he rose steadily, from presidential assistant to undersecretary of the navy to secretary of the navy, to secretary of defense. Walk into the Pentagon today and his bust greets you, with its piercing eyes and the slightly off-center nose, broken during a boxing match. “He could have been cast as a moving picture star, a smarter and more sophisticated Humphrey Bogart,” Nitze wrote in an unpublished recollection.
During and after World War II, Forrestal was deeply suspicious of Stalin. In the fall of 1945, he argued vehemently that we should not share our secrets with the Soviets, a moment some historians consider the first fateful break with Moscow. The distrust prompted him to circulate the Long Telegram, write the 1947 paper declaring that the Soviet Union threatened the very existence of the United States, and join Kennan in setting up a special department for dirty tricks. Forrestal was always seeking new ideas and new approaches to problems. “He felt that the established echelons of government needed constant jolting up,” Kennan reflected in a 1962 letter.
In Kennan’s view, at least, Forrestal ultimately went too far. He helped Kennan considerably in setting up the Office of Policy Coordination. But reflecting back decades later, Kennan would lament OPC’s growth and blame the Pentagon for it. He wanted it small and elite; Forrestal and the Pentagon wanted black propaganda offices franchised in embassies worldwide. “There is no method, there is no way except the method of worry, of constant concern, and of unceasing energy that will give us our security,” the defense secretary said in 1947.
The constant concern eventually devoured Forrestal: by the late 1940s, he had begun a slow-motion nervous breakdown. Isolated and profoundly alarmed, he saw demons everywhere. Nitze’s sister once found him in the bushes near the Plaza Hotel in New York. She asked what he was doing. Watching people, he said. I am just watching people going about their business.
In March 1949, the president replaced Forrestal as secretary of defense. Soon, he had become completely paranoid. Zionists were trailing him and the Soviets had bugged beach umbrellas all over Miami. Early that spring, he was committed to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, where the doctors began treating him with psychotherapy and insulin injections. They considered, but rejected, using electroconvulsive therapy.
After Forrestal was committed, Kennan wrote to him, “I was shocked to learn from this morning’s paper of your illness and I don’t need to tell you that you have my best wishes for a speedy recovery.” For Nitze, Forrestal’s collapse was more personal. The two were similar in both superficial and profound respects. Both had gone from Dillon Read into government, where they became anti-Soviet hard-liners. They had similar taste and style. They worked feverishly and worried obsessively. Each wanted to be more of an intellectual. Each had fought the military bureaucracy and suffered brutally for it. Tellingly, Nitze wrote in his later years that Forrestal’s madness was not surprising, given all the pressures he faced. Rather, “that he held out so long is notable.”
Kennan, too, might have seen a reflection of part of himself in Forrestal; he described his friend in a 1962 letter in words equally applicable to their author. Forrestal “had, I thought something of the ambitious tightness of the parvenu. He smacked a bit of F. Scott Fitzgerald. There was lacking, it seemed to me, the relaxation and languor of the securely well-born.” Both men brooded deeply. But for Kennan, brooding was its own cure. He took long walks alone and wrote dark letters to his friends, undoubtedly helping to exorcise his demons. Forrestal, with his need to maintain the veneer of total control, lacked that release.
Forrestal lasted six weeks in the hospital, until the night of Saturday, May 21, 1949. According to a report long kept secret, he spent most of the evening pacing. At 12:20, he got a cup of orange juice and said he was going to bed; at 12:35, he got up to grab a cup of coffee; ten minutes later, he was apparently asleep. At 1:30, he popped out of bed and the corpsman on duty asked if he wanted a sleeping pill. Forrestal said no, but the corpsman went to ask the doctor whether he could have one anyway. When he returned, Forrestal was gone.
Lower in the building, people heard a thud. Forrestal’s body, dressed in pajamas, was found facedown on the asphalt and cinderblock ledge outside room 384. He had plummeted thirteen floors, bouncing off other ledges as he fell. His bathrobe sash was tied tight around his neck; upstairs, a razor blade was found near his slippers. He had tried to hang himself and then either jumped or fallen out the window. At some point that evening he had copied out lines from a translation of Sophocles’ Ajax, where the Chorus laments, “Better to die, and sleep/The never-waking sleep, than linger on/And dare to live when the soul’s life is gone.”
After his mentor’s death, Nitze clipped one article for his files: a piece by Senator Margaret Chase Smith, of Maine, that began: “There is great joy in the Kremlin. A great American is dead—the man that the Communists hated and feared the most, James Forrestal.”
“He was an architect of the Cold War,” wrote the historian Ronald Steel, “and a casualty of it.”
THE COLD WAR always felt tense and uncertain, but 1948 seemed particularly perilous. The world was cleaving into communist and capitalist spheres. No one knew who would gain where. The West was still unsure whether the antidote of Marshall Plan aid would help France cure its communist infection. Communists supported by the Soviets overthrew the government of Czechoslovakia in February. In China, Mao’s communists were beginning to gain substantial ground against Chiang Kai-shek. Communists almost won the Italian election in April. The civil war in Greece continued. In May, communists assassinated a minister in Athens and the pro-Western government declared martial law over the whole country. Then, in June, Stalin decided he would try to take the West’s most valuable, and most exposed, piece off the board.
On June 24, the Soviets shut down the railroads and roads linking West Berlin with the rest of West Germany. There were technical difficulties, they claimed. The same day, they severed access by water. Soon, they had totally cut off ground-level routes to West Berlin.
The Allies, however, still held the airports, and even Stalin would not take the political risk of shooting down an unarmed plane loaded with food and coal—particularly not after the United States carefully leaked word that scores of bombers capable of dropping atomic weapons were on their way to Britain. Soon the humanitarian aid planes began to land, and land, and land. The rescue, called the Berlin Airlift, turned into a stunning propaganda victory, with the Western allies showing that their generosity and ingenuity could keep a city alive.
But it also showed the Policy Planning Staff the peril of a divided Germany. And it terrified Kennan, who told friends he thought the president should call up the National Guard. In early August, Kennan and a group of colleagues began to think through a possible solution. The United States could not take East Germany, could not yield West Germany to the Russians, and did not seem able to share the country. What were we to do? Nitze, with his German expertise, joined Kennan for the deliberations.
For the first two weeks of August, Kennan, Nitze, and their colleagues struggled to draw up a workable plan. Kennan dominated the proceedings, but Nitze later recalled that the two men were of “the same mind.” In the end, they came up with a dramatic and controversial solution: “the early abandonment of military government, establishment of a German government with real powers, and withdrawal of the occupying forces entirely.”
The lines defining the new Europe were hardening. If Germany remained divided, went the argument, so would the whole continent. A long, bitter cold war would become inevitable. Everything east of Germany, including potentially pro-Western Czechoslovakia and Hungary, would find itself indefinitely leashed to Moscow. With extraordinary prescience, Kennan and his group argued:
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. From such a trend of developments, it would be hard—harder than it is now—to find “the road back” to a united and free Europe.
The proposal differed entirely from Kennan’s prior position. Three years earlier, he had wanted to dismember Germany; now he wanted to unify it. What had changed? In a letter to Anders Stephanson, a perceptive biographer who questioned the turnaround, Kennan explained that he had lost faith in the possibility of a well-governed, federal, divided Germany. The crisis over Berlin also made him realize how grave a threat a divided country posed to that city he loved. Last, Kennan declared, he had simply not understood Germany in earlier years.
Kennan and Nitze had little success in converting the rest of the government. In fact, almost everyone opposed the plan to end the occupation. On the cover of the August 12 proposal, Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett wrote, “This needs much more discussion with the Secretary.”
The plan nonetheless survived. After the improbable reelection of Harry Truman, Kennan presented a more finished version, christened “Program A.” Then, in March 1949, he traveled to Germany, hoping to bring back information he could use to lobby for his plan.
It was an emotional journey. The prewar Germany of Kennan’s memories was gone and the land lay devastated. He was most affected by Hamburg, which the Allies had obliterated in the summer of 1943. There he saw the destruction as a human tragedy so profound that it called into question the idea of a just war:
Here, for the first time, I felt an unshakeable conviction that no momentary military advantage—even if such could have been calculated to exist—could have justified this stupendous, careless destruction of civilian life and of material values, built up laboriously by civilian hands over the course of centuries for purposes having nothing to do with war. . . . If the Western world was really going to make valid the pretense of a higher moral departure point—of great sympathy and understanding for the human being as God made him, as expressed not only in himself but in the things he had wrought and cared about—then it had to learn to fight its wars morally as well as militarily, or not fight them at all; for moral principles were part of its strength. Shorn of this strength, it was no longer itself; its victories were not real victories; and the best it would accomplish in the long run would be to pull down the temple over its head.
When Kennan returned to America, he deployed his favorite and most powerful instruments: his beloved secretary, Dorothy Hessman, and her typewriter. He dictated a long, passionate memo, restating his and Nitze’s arguments from August in starker terms. In form, it resembled the Long Telegram or the X article. He began by describing the opacity of the situation—“the complexities of the German problem today are so terrific that the problem may be said to have its own dialectics”—and then its importance. “This is one of the moments, as Bismarck put it, when you can hear the garments of the Goddess of Time rustling through the course of events.” Once again, Kennan sought to guide the reader through a mysterious labyrinth, and once again he had a firm counterconventional conclusion: we should let the German people run their own country.
He presented his argument in person to Dean Acheson, who had replaced Marshall as secretary of state in January. But Acheson was unconvinced. Opinion was building steadily against Program A. His Russian memos had made Kennan a sage, but his German memos made him a crank. The U.S. military opposed him. The rest of the State Department had little use for his argument. The Soviets seemed wholly disinclined to withdraw from the country that had destroyed so much of Russia during the war—and from whose mines, as we now know, the USSR was already extracting uranium used in its nuclear arsenal.
In the spring of 1949, Acheson, Kennan, and Nitze set off to Paris for a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers. On the agenda would be discussions with the Soviets about the fate of Germany and, potentially, another opportunity to make the case for Program A. But on the eve of their departure, James Reston of the New York Times published a story based on a leaked version of the proposal: “U.S. Plan Weighed: Big Three Would Withdraw to Ports in the North Under Proposal.” The story credited the idea to Kennan.
Reston’s piece killed any last hope for the plan. Program A was too bold an idea, presented too casually. The Europeans read the article with fury, envisioning a return to American isolationism. Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saw the plan as naïve. Lucius Clay, the American military commander in Germany, declared it close to capitulation. Acheson, who was already leaning strongly against Program A, repudiated it.
Crushed, Kennan wrote a grumpy memo to the secretary of state explaining how hard he had worked on the plan and how sensible he still thought it. Nitze, characteristically, let the news roll off his back. His job was to help Acheson get the best deals he could, even if the ideal plan was out. The Soviets were not going to accept the big idea, and the Allies hated it. Too bad. He could still work on smaller projects, such as how to increase trade between East and West Germany.
While in Paris, Kennan and Nitze received the devastating news of Forrestal’s death. It was perhaps fitting that just as their old mentor left the scene, Kennan and Nitze had begun a subtle battle for influence over a new mentor. Forrestal had brought the two men to Washington; now each was important in his own right. And the person they needed to sway was the new secretary of state.
JAMES FORRESTAL SHARED Kennan’s and Nitze’s weaknesses. Dean Acheson shared the two men’s strengths. He could write almost as brilliantly as Kennan and see nearly as far into the foreign policy future. He had Nitze’s resilience and his understanding of power.
The son of an Episcopal bishop of Connecticut, Acheson had the classic upbringing of the WASP elite: Groton, Yale, Harvard Law. He had clerked for Justice Louis Brandeis, become a powerful lawyer, and been named an undersecretary of the Treasury. In 1945, Truman made him undersecretary of state. In 1946, he won the president’s undying loyalty with a simple act of kindness. After the Republicans drubbed the Democrats at the polls, Truman’s train pulled into Washington’s Union Station. Only one man was there to meet him and cheer him up: Dean Acheson. Three years later, in appointing Acheson, Truman said: “Twenty guys would make a better secretary of state than you. But I don’t know them. I know you.”
Acheson even looked the part—or perhaps he gave the part the look. Ruggedly handsome, he was the answer to a tailor’s prayer: he wore elegant suits, and his stern, proud face harbored the most famous mustache in Washington. “Though it once seemed to climb his cheeks, like a vine seeking sunlight, it now is comparatively self-controlled and at peace with itself, quietly aware of its responsibilities,” wrote the New Yorker in a 1949 profile. The only feature slightly off the mark was his rather large nose. Years later, Nitze bought his wife a horse for her birthday that had a particularly grand proboscis. He invited his former chief to the stables and told him the horse’s name: Mr. Acheson.
While he had the looks and résumé of a secretary of state, Acheson had the temper of a sailor. He would explode in fury in the office, and once he came close to punching a Republican senator during a committee hearing. His wit, too, was legendary. At the Paris meeting, Acheson told a Soviet representative that his proposal was “as full of propaganda as a dog is of fleas, though in this case it was all fleas and no dog.”
The wit could cut, particularly when directed at his friends. Acheson once compared Kennan to “an old horse pulling a buggy over a bridge who would stop periodically to see if it was he who was making all the noise.” After Acheson’s death, Nitze tried to raise money for a chair to be named after him at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. “I couldn’t find a soul who Acheson hadn’t offended and who didn’t resent this.”
A late-budding cold warrior, Acheson trusted Stalin far longer than did Kennan or Nitze, and was more open in the conflict’s early days to sharing nuclear technology with Russia. He cowrote the Acheson-Lilienthal Report in early 1946, calling for an international organization to take control of all fissile material and for the United States to share its nuclear technology with Moscow. But like so many other people in government, he came around. “The year 1946 was for the most part a year of learning that minds in the Kremlin worked very much as George F. Kennan had predicted they would,” he wrote in his memoirs.
Intellectually, Acheson seemed closer to Kennan than to Nitze. They wrote some of the sharpest letters in Washington, and both were capable of thinking strategically. Kennan went out of his way to appeal to Acheson’s intellectual side. Two weeks before Acheson’s swearing in, Kennan sent him a long memo on the problems confronting them and the magnitude of the changes needed. It began, “I really have no enthusiasm for sharing with people I have known—Kerensky, Bruening, Dumba, or the King of Jugoslavia—the wretched consolation of having been particularly prominent among the parasites on the body of a dying social order, in the hours of its final agony.”
Nitze never wrote a sentence that vivid in his life. Nor was he intellectually at Kennan’s or Acheson’s level. He had yet to attain real responsibility, or to have written anything that attracted the attention of the people who mattered. He was still only a numbers man, if a smart one. But his temperament suited Acheson. The secretary liked to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes’s line that “man is born to act,” a maxim that fit Nitze, even at this early stage.
Nitze would later describe Acheson’s fascination with a book by Clarence Day that Holmes had given him, This Simian World. The author argued that people are just monkeys. Yes, we can think, and this separates us from other animals. But we are not going to find answers in the endless quest for truth. Instead, we should just accept who we are, do the best we can, and not try to live up to unreachable ideals and values. Reflecting on this book, Nitze recalled a palm reader he had seen in college. She “opened my hand and stared at it for five minutes, saying not a word. When she finally spoke, she said, ‘I can say nothing about this man; he has a purely practical hand.’ ”
THE POLICY PLANNING Staff was the ideal environment for George Kennan. The offices were sparse: the conference room had one round table, scattered with ashtrays, and comfortable chairs. There were no in-boxes or out-boxes. On the walls hung two maps: one of the United States and one of the world. It was a place for Kennan to think and to hold forth. Sometimes, the rest of the staff would just sit and listen, with no one else uttering a word.
The place attracted brilliance. John Paton Davies, likely the wisest U.S. analyst of China in the middle of the century, worked there. Dorothy Fosdick, a speechwriter for (and lover of) Adlai Stevenson, joined, too—and would often find Kennan unloading his emotional burdens on her at lunchtime. She went on to write a well-respected book, Common Sense and World Affairs, and to serve as the top foreign policy adviser to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson from 1955 until 1983.
Kennan ran PPS for two and a half years, and for much of that time he got his way. His country pursued a policy of containment resembling the one he had advocated in the X article and his National War College lectures. The Marshall Plan; covert manipulation of the Italian election; non-combat support for the Greek struggle against communism; quiet establishment of the Office of Policy Coordination. Kennan believed that the world had five strategic centers—the United States, Great Britain, Germany and central Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan—and he wanted four of them kept out of the hands of Moscow. In this he helped the United States succeed, particularly through his full-throttle intervention into policy toward Japan in 1947 and 1948. When it appeared that the United States might withdraw, Kennan insisted that the U. S. occupation still had essential work to do, and the rehabilitation of America’s former enemy became, once again, a primary political goal. In Asia’s other great power, Kennan helped limit American support for the corrupt Chinese Nationalists, preventing deep U.S. involvement in that nation’s civil war.
Another central piece of his strategy was for the United States to pry apart the communist nations. Many people in America thought a red was a red. But Kennan knew the color came in different shades; in the X article, he had argued that exploiting those differences was essential to a truly political containment.
On June 30, 1948, a diplomatic communiqué came in to Kennan’s office: the Cominform had expelled the Yugoslav Communist Party. Josip Tito, undeniably a communist, was now also undeniably on his own. Kennan was elated. According to Joseph Alsop, visiting for an interview as the news came in, Kennan grabbed his guitar and started strumming in excitement.
Within two days, Kennan had written a memo that would outline U.S. policy to come. The Balkan rift mattered immensely. “By this act, the aura of mystical omnipotence and infallibility which has surrounded the Kremlin power has been broken.” But the United States must not offer too strong or too sudden an embrace. Doing so might strengthen Tito’s enemies, and Yugoslavia was still an antagonistic and communist country. Kennan proposed a careful balance. The United States would patiently and gradually begin talking to Belgrade. Eventually we would offer trade concessions. Nothing would be done too fast, but nothing would be neglected. Kennan’s advice was followed, and, partly because of the successful American maneuvering, Yugoslavia remained independent, leaving Stalin to obsess over how to assassinate his rival. It was one of Kennan’s clearest successes.
Nonetheless, Kennan’s overall influence was beginning to fade. He tried to stop the formation of the Atlantic military alliance, NATO, because he feared that, as with the formation of a West German government, it would solidify the division of Europe. As suggested by his criticism of the Truman Doctrine, he did not want the United States mucking around in parts of the world where he felt we had little at stake. On these grounds, he opposed the recognition of the state of Israel. He thought the UN hopeless. By the time of his Program A, he was becoming known as a figure like Justice Holmes: a man recognized mainly for his formidable dissents.
As Kennan lost influence, Nitze gained it. The two men agreed on much, but Nitze was in sync with the times, far more confident than Kennan in his country’s ability to do good and far more willing to believe in the promise of international organizations. He supported the creation of NATO. He saw nothing wrong with the Truman Doctrine. He believed the UN could play a useful role in global affairs.
In the summer of 1949, Kennan brought Nitze on as his deputy at PPS. Kennan had already decided he wanted to leave, and he was clearly entertaining the notion that Nitze might replace him. When the junior man showed up for his first day of work, on July 29, Kennan gave him his office and moved his own workspace into the conference room.
At first, Kennan still dominated the PPS meetings, and the relationship started as one of eager student and admired teacher. During an economic crisis in Britain late that summer, Kennan delegated Nitze to handle most of the talks with the British. At the end, Nitze came to him with a summary. Kennan recorded in his diary the great mirth he felt when he and Nitze revised the paper together, inserting paragraphs that Kennan had written about the crisis before the meeting even took place.
Acheson took PPS’s advice seriously on nearly every issue and would often come in to preside, turning up on Wednesday afternoons to review big ideas. He maintained a strong affection for Kennan. At one point in Nitze’s early days, it was insinuated that Kennan had leaked important information to a newspaper reporter. Kennan was mortified, but Acheson set him at ease with a charming note, saying not to worry about it. “No one can both know you and suspect you. And the rest don’t matter. This is life in a disorderly democracy.”
Nitze was excited but nervous about his new job. He wrote to his mother in August: “Washington is hot, damp and close to being unbearable. Congress is in a mean and discouraged mood, the world rocks and creaks, the Russians gloat over our problems and cleverly spread dissension amongst us and I am supposed to come up with good and workable ideas on all problems what-so-ever.”
As suggested by that letter home, Nitze’s career could still have gone off in any number of different directions. He was an economics expert, a German expert, and an all-around bright guy. But soon came the event that put him on the track he would follow for most of the rest of his career—and that brought him head-to-head with Kennan.