The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (29 page)

His answer might have been brave, but it was amazingly arrogant as well, a political disaster for the Truman administration. Truman himself thought
Hiss guilty. When the second trial was about to begin, Truman had told his favorite Secret Service man, Harry Nicholson, “Dean Acheson tells me Alger Hiss is innocent. After reading the evidence in the papers I think the s.o.b. is guilty and I hope they hang him.” Security issues had by then become ever more political, and the debate increasingly partisan, those on the Republican right charging ever more loudly that the Democrats were the party of treason. And now Acheson had taken the most publicized spy case in the nation and connected it to himself and to the heart of the American government. It would have been hard to think of a greater political gift to the Republicans. Typically, Richard Nixon soon gave a speech, saying, “Traitors in the high councils of our own government have made sure that the deck is stacked on the Soviet side of the diplomatic table.” Earlier in the political sparring, a reporter had asked Truman if he thought the Hiss case was a red herring. He had answered in the affirmative. Now, wrote Robert Donovan, “even though he himself had not spoken the words he was stuck with them,” and because of Acheson’s careless answer, “he had a dead cat around his neck also.”

For what was to become known as McCarthyism, a powerful new political virus, was about to be born. On February 9, 1950, fifteen days after the Acheson press conference, and some five months before the North Korean invasion, Joseph McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, who had been looking for an issue and had been advised that Communists in the government might be a hot-button one, rose at a speaking engagement in Wheeling, West Virginia. There he claimed that he had in his hands the names of 205 members of the Communist Party still working in the State Department. Though State had been warned, McCarthy said, nothing had been done. He detailed how many more people now lived under Communism in the last six years, largely because of the fall of China. Then he connected the dots, Hiss to Acheson: “As you know, very recently the Secretary of State proclaimed his loyalty to a man guilty of what has always been considered the most abominable of all crimes—being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust—high treason.” The charges of what became McCarthyism pulled together disparate strands that the far right had been using for several years: that China had fallen not because of overwhelming historical forces that we were powerless to reverse, but because of subversion at very high levels in Washington, which could be traced through disloyal (or hopelessly naïve) China Hands in the State Department, often connected to Alger Hiss.

N
OTHING REVEALED THE
contradictions of the United States as it moved reluctantly from isolationist power to internationalist superpower so much as the almost desperate struggle of Dean Acheson to upgrade the defense budget on a dramatic scale even as he became the chief target of an increasingly angry and alienated right wing. Acheson by early 1950 had already assigned Paul Nitze to produce the key document in the drive, what would eventually be known as NSC 68, and shepherd it through the bureaucracy. The choice was not a surprising one. Nitze’s star was in ascent and he was very much an extension of Acheson himself—his thinking closely paralleling that of the secretary.

Nitze was originally a Forrestal man. One of his most important early sponsors had been George Kennan, much taken by Nitze’s intelligence, who had wanted to bring him as his deputy onto the Policy Planning staff, the State Department’s special think tank, which he headed. Policy Planning was quite influential in those days. It was where the department’s best minds could ponder the consequences of events, at a time when the consequences of events were still considered important, and think in long-range terms about issues that would soon enough be of pressing immediacy. But Acheson had vetoed the suggestion, thinking that Nitze, who had (like Forrestal) originally worked for Dillon Read, one of the top Wall Street investment houses, was too much of a Wall Street operator. Acheson eventually changed his mind, and in the summer of 1949, when Kennan again asked for Nitze, Acheson gave his permission. Acheson and Nitze became ever closer both professionally and personally, even as Kennan was falling into disfavor.

Just four years earlier, Kennan had been a superstar at State, with his brilliant early analysis of Soviet intentions, but now as the Cold War deepened, and lines hardened both internationally and in domestic politics, he was becoming marginalized at State, his influence in steady decline. That he was no longer a major player was proof that the debate, such as it was, had changed, that Acheson was no longer interested in hearing his complicated dissents,
thoughtful and worthy though they might be, and that the administration, whether it realized it or not, was being pulled along by the force of events, crossing over fail-safe points without even realizing it. As the power of the political right increased and the administration found itself ever more besieged by critics, Kennan’s value was depreciating rapidly. In the fall of 1949 he was told to report to one of the department’s regional assistant secretaries rather than to Acheson himself. That meant his access to the secretary was being cut off, and everyone in the department would know it and as his access was being cut off, so his power and influence were being cut off as well. A few weeks later he asked Acheson to be relieved of his Policy Planning duties as soon as possible and requested an indefinite leave.

Kennan was officially replaced in January 1950 by Nitze, although Nitze had actually taken over the previous November. Nitze was much harder line on almost all issues than Kennan, influenced by Kennan less and less, with the notable exception of Korea, where both of them would oppose MacArthur’s decision to go north of the thirty-eighth parallel in October 1950, believing too much was being risked for too little gain. Otherwise Nitze was in all ways a man much more to Acheson’s liking, and in the decades to follow, he seemed to be the truest disciple of what Acheson believed in. On the basic issue of NSC 68—the effective tripling of the defense budget, which Acheson wanted—Nitze supported the secretary, while Kennan was bitterly opposed to it, thinking it reflected a complete misreading of Soviet intentions and would militarize American foreign policy and bring a constant escalation of the arms race between the two powers.

All of this produced an even greater melancholia in Kennan, a man unusually pessimistic in the best of times, and he became eager to leave Washington and go to Princeton, where intellectual achievement was treated as an end in itself and where he could do his own writing. Yet he was also immensely frustrated by the decline in the value placed on his views, and what he felt was the decision of the men above him to choose the wrong political course—to take what he believed was too simplistic a view of their adversary, one that bracketed the entire Communist world into a monolith controlled by Moscow, rather than seeing it as a complicated universe rife with its own formidable divisions, the many fissures that, he was sure, would eventually reveal themselves, all of them based on nationalism. His was the principal voice arguing against the idea of a monolithic Communism in that era, and in his dark view, no one was listening. In his own sardonic self-assessment, Kennan had become by the summer of 1949, “the court jester, expected to enliven discussion, privileged to say shocking things, valued as an intellectual gadfly on the hides of slower colleagues, but not to
be taken fully seriously when it came to the final responsible decision of policy.”

No one in government who ever dealt with George Frost Kennan thought he was an easy man to work with. He was complicated and difficult, someone who hungered for influence but, on getting it, was uneasy with its accompanying burdens. He was shy and private, more historian than diplomat, almost too nuanced a man to be of service in a place like the State Department, where decisions were normally based on a certain immediacy. He sought a kind of political perfection in a world where decisions were normally made under terrible stress, and thus usually imperfect. Over a distinguished career as one of America’s premier public intellectuals, he often seemed to be carrying on a series of complicated arguments not merely with those who were his colleagues and superiors in the national security complex, and those more hawkish than he or whose views he opposed, but also with himself. It was as if the nuances and ambiguities of policy were on occasion too subtle even for him, and every dissenting point he raised had to be offset by a counterpoint. If he felt on occasion more than a little uncomfortable when being listened to, then he was truly unhappy when
not
being listened to. More than any principal public figure of his era, more even than Acheson, he seemed frustrated by the crudeness of policy debate in American democracy and worried that producing a thoughtful, wise foreign policy for so large and unruly a democracy was the most hopeless of tasks, that the culture was simply too raw and too crass, its political representatives too primitive.

Because he eventually became one of the main dissenters on the Vietnam War, as some fifteen years earlier he had been wary about crossing the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea and heading north, there was a sense, even on the part of some who admired him, that he was not only dovish, but soft in simplistic foreign policy terms. But it would be just as easy to make a far more compelling case that he was the ultimate figure of realpolitik, that he did not want to use American force in Vietnam not because he felt any empathy for the indigenous forces challenging American policy on the battlefield in an anticolonial age, but rather because he did not think that they (or their country) were important enough in the great scheme of things to be worth the expenditure of American lives and capital, especially in wars that would almost surely fail.

He was convinced that bad things would happen if we tried to apply our power where it did not seem applicable. Places like Vietnam and China were outside our reach (and concern) as other places, nearer and dearer to us, were outside the reach of the Soviets. In fact, he believed that there was already an involuntary balance of power forming in the world despite the rhetoric of the two great powers—and in the long run it favored the United States. Power to
him (as, ironically, to Joseph Stalin) was about industrial capacity, which could on demand be quickly turned into military capacity. The only world that should concern us greatly was that of the industrialized powers—which, of course, was largely northern and white, with Japan virtually the only important nation in Asia. Kennan had been in favor of responding to the original North Korean invasion only because of the importance he gave Japan in the greater scheme of things, and his belief that a unified Communist Korea, one that the Americans had not bothered to defend, might unnerve the Japanese. Two days after the North Korean crossing, he told the British ambassador to Washington that, while Korea was not strategically significant, “the symbolic significance of its preservation was tremendous, especially in Japan.” In reality, George Kennan was a very unsentimental man who looked at the world in the most unsentimental of ways.

He was a brooding figure, much given to pessimism about political events and often, for someone so intelligent and wise, surprisingly insensitive to the moods and feelings of others around him. Deciding to marry a young Norwegian woman, he had written his father in what has to be one of the most muted notes of all time when it comes to describing a youthful romantic impulse: “She has the true Scandinavian simplicity and doesn’t waste many words. She has the rare capacity for keeping silent gracefully. I have never seen her disposition ruffled by anything resembling a mood, and even I don’t make her nervous.” Unlike the other senior policy makers of the era, most of whom came from an already privileged American elite, he was the product of a very modest middle-class home in middle America, the son of a tax lawyer in Milwaukee. But in his own way, he was a considerable snob, decidedly uncomfortable with what he considered the great American unwashed who, in his view, might hinder the ability of the elite to make decisions in a democracy.

Even longtime friends like the distinguished Sovietologist Chip Bohlen, a man unusually sensitive to Kennan’s moods, did not find him easy to get on with. When Kennan finally left the State Department after twenty-seven years, he was surprised to find that there was no one to say good-bye to. He had made almost no friends, shared few private thoughts, never gone out of his way to show interest in the men with whom he worked. But of his originality as a foreign policy analyst there was no doubt. Because history became his genuine passion, he tended to see the world in terms of deep historical forces that, in his mind, formed a nation’s character in ways almost beyond the consciousness of the men who momentarily governed it, as if these historical impulses were more a part of them than they knew, a reflection of a nation’s true DNA. To him the Soviets were really the Russians, and their new rulers, only a mod
ern incarnation of the tsars, clothed in more egalitarian rhetoric, naturally reflected the fears, paranoia, and isolation from neighbors that had been so much a part of the country’s past. It was important, he believed, to see what was happening after World War II more as a reflection of traditional Russian impulses and
fears
than of the global ambitions of an overly aggressive Marxist state.

Even as a young man in the late 1930s he had described the Russian character as being formed by “the constant fear of foreign invasion, [and] the hysterical suspicion of other nations.” Nor could the influence of the Byzantine church be underestimated, “its intolerance, its intriguing and despotic political systems.” In 1943, when most of Washington officialdom still harbored a good deal of optimism about the ability of the United States to get along with the Soviets after the war, Kennan had argued precipitously, given the existing attitude of most of his superiors, that there were hard times ahead and that the Soviets, for historical reasons, would be difficult to deal with when the war was over. In the midst of World War II, however, almost no one, save perhaps Averell Harriman, had wanted to listen to him. Harriman, scion of a great railroad family, was a critical figure in the international politics of the 1940s, Roosevelt’s special emissary to both Churchill and Stalin. He was not a great intellectual himself, but he was a great
listener
and a superb synthesizer of other men’s ideas, and arguably one of the two or three ablest public men of a prolonged era that, in his case, lasted some four decades. Harriman was impressed by Kennan even though he was then a relatively junior figure in the Moscow embassy. In 1946, Kennan sent back to Washington his famous Long Telegram, a stunning analytic cable of eight thousand words, making a compelling case for how difficult it would be to deal with the Soviets, citing their
Russian
antecedents, and their nation’s cruel history. He had cabled just the right words at just the right moment, seeming to explain to much of Washington why Moscow was proving so difficult to deal with, and coinciding with Winston Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he claimed that an Iron Curtain had descended over half of Europe. Kennan had called for what would soon be known as Containment in dealing with the Soviets. The piece was published in the prestigious journal
Foreign Affairs,
its author identified only as “Mr. X”—and it caused a sensation first in Washington and then nationally. He was suddenly the diplomat as star. “My reputation was made,” he later wrote. “My voice now carried.” His theory of Containment became, for a time, the foundation of Washington’s policy toward Moscow, and his cable marked the end of a time when very much idealism still existed about the future of the wartime alliance.

His time as a star did not last very long; he was too independent of mind,
too cut off from changing political tides. By 1948, because he traced foreign policy tensions back to what he saw as their historical roots, Kennan thought Washington’s reaction to the Soviets had already gone too far, that the Red Army, vast as it was, would not invade anyone. Stalin had done it once with Finland in 1939 and had gotten his fingers burned. Kennan also foresaw inevitable tensions in the relationship between the Chinese and the Russians, caused largely by the vast differences in their histories. He was sure that a proud new China, Communist government or not, that had just won its own revolution, would not want to remain a Soviet satellite for very long. On this he was bolstered by State Department experts like John Davies, who saw China much as Kennan had seen Russia. If Stalin was a de facto tsar, with a tsar’s fears and ambitions, then Mao would be but the latest in a line of Chinese emperors with an emperor’s fears and ambitions. Russian tsars and Chinese emperors, Kennan was absolutely sure, would not get on well together. In 1947, Kennan wrote, “The men of the Kremlin would suddenly discover that this fluid and subtle oriental movement which they thought they held in the palm of their hand had quietly oozed away between their fingers and there was nothing left there but a ceremonial Chinese bow and a polite giggle.”