Worldmaking (46 page)

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.)
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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).
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.'”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.