George F. Kennan: An American Life (55 page)

Hardly anyone else was, however. Kennan’s long Asian trip and the illness that followed prevented his seeing how pessimistic the mood in Washington and in allied capitals had become. As a result, the job to which he returned in mid-April was not the one he had left in late February. A year into his Policy Planning Staff directorship, Kennan found himself becoming a policy dissenter once again. He had, he discovered, lost his footing. He never quite regained it.

The problems began with a recommendation that went awry. However much Kennan may have doubted himself over the years, he had never lacked confidence in his ability to explain—and even predict—the behavior of the Soviet Union. These skills had made his reputation in the Foreign Service, brought him to the National War College and the Policy Planning Staff, and inadvertently earned him, as “Mr. X,” celebrity status. Whatever else he might have been wrong about, he had a habit of being right about the U.S.S.R.

Kennan’s colleagues took him seriously, therefore, when he suggested in PPS/23, completed on February 24, 1948, that the Marshall Plan’s success might soon compel Soviet leaders to negotiate. Once this had happened—probably after the November presidential election in the United States—the talks should be entrusted to someone who

Lest there be any doubt as to whom he had in mind, Kennan also insisted that the negotiator be fluent in Russian. Containment, in his mind, was meant to end the Cold War, not to freeze it into place. He meant to play as large a role in completing that effort as he had in initiating it. In the meantime, it might be worth seeking “some sort of a background understanding” with the Stalin regime.
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The Czech coup, which Kennan had predicted, took place on the next day, so he departed for Japan on the twenty-sixth with his prestige as high as it would ever be. Shortly after arriving in Tokyo, he told an off-the-record press briefing that “within six months [a] spectacular retreat of Soviet and Communist influence in Europe may be expected.” The head of the Canadian mission in Japan reported Kennan’s comments to Ottawa, where they set off expressions of incredulity. From London, the Foreign Office assured the Canadians—who had passed on the account—that there must have been a mistake. “I can hardly believe that Mr. Kennan can have been accurately reported,” R. M. A. Hankey, head of the Northern Department, commented. It all seemed “so very much too optimistic.” Kennan’s former Moscow colleague Frank Roberts ventured another explanation: concerned by Lippmann’s criticisms “that containment is a fruitless policy,” he now “must prove that it can lead to positive results.”
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But Kennan was not freelancing. Worried that Stalin might overreact to Truman’s tough speech on March 17, the Policy Planning Staff had supported Kennan’s call for a quiet approach. “We have no way of knowing what appraisal Stalin is receiving of American intentions,” Davies pointed out. It was important to ensure that if war broke out, it would not have been through a misunderstanding. Bohlen seconded the suggestion, and on April 23 Lovett secured Truman’s permission to go ahead. Marshall asked Ambassador Smith, in Moscow, to convey the message. The British and the Canadians were not informed: indeed the British embassy in Washington reported that the Truman administration
feared
conciliatory signs from Moscow, lest these strengthen Soviet “apologists,” among them Wallace, now running for president on a third-party peace platform.
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Smith sent Molotov a carefully worded note on May 4, stating that while the United States would defend its interests, “the door is always wide open for full discussion and the composing of our differences.” The two men then met on the tenth, with each professing his country’s peaceful intentions. But on the eleventh, the Soviet news agency TASS released an edited version of this supposedly secret conversation: its apparent purpose was to imply that the United States had proposed a European settlement without consulting its allies. That unexpected development raised “very grave doubts in the minds of His Majesty’s Government as to what may have been intended,” Bevin cabled Marshall, in words more restrained than the anger he felt. Queries from other alarmed Europeans followed, as did a cacophony of excited press commentary.
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“I was appalled at what I had done,” Kennan later recalled. “For two evenings, I walked the streets of Foxhall Village, trying ... to discover where the error had lain.” Finally he asked to see Marshall, for what he expected to be a reprimand. “I think we were right,” he said, “and that the critics are wrong. But where there is so much criticism, there must be some fault somewhere.”

The implications of what had happened, however, were not as reassuring. The Soviets had in the past respected confidentiality, Kennan reminded Marshall, but that could no longer be assumed: “The diplomatic channel to Moscow is really eliminated.” As long as Molotov remained foreign minister, there could be no communication “without making it to the world.”
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That was underestimating the problem, for Stalin himself had read Smith’s note, scribbling a sardonic “Ha, Ha!” next to the passage about an open door for diplomacy. He then ordered the release of the edited exchange and compounded the mischief by inserting himself into the American presidential campaign. On May 12 Wallace published an open letter to Stalin closely paralleling the TASS version of the Smith-Molotov conversation. Stalin responded on the seventeenth, welcoming Wallace’s letter as a possible basis for the peaceful resolution of differences. It was a transparent attempt, Durbrow reported disgustedly from Moscow, to “lend the appearance of substance to the vacuity of Wallace’s declarations . . . and thus to emasculate American policy.”
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The timing did seem more than coincidental. The State Department had evidence, Kennan explained to Smith, that Wallace had known what Stalin was going to do: “We unwittingly ran head on into a neat little arrangement between the Kremlin and some of the people in the Wallace headquarters.” Wallace was indeed coordinating his actions with Moscow, but Kennan chose not to pursue the possibility that a former vice president of the United States had become a Soviet agent. What chiefly concerned him was that something had been “seriously wrong with my own analysis of events.”

It was clear now that Stalin and his subordinates had no intention of dealing with Marshall and the other architects of containment. This was, in one sense, flattering: “They know very well that to us they would have to make real concessions, that we would not be put off with phony ones.” But the situation was also dangerous, for they would use every opportunity to confuse public opinion and to build up Wallace. Kennan had been “horrified,” he admitted to Smith, “by the ease with which the press and other groups interested in foreign affairs were taken in by this Russian maneuver.”
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He was still seething when he traveled to Canada late in May. The invitation had come about because the Canadians, for whom Kennan had become a kind of Delphic oracle, were still trying to figure out what he had meant weeks earlier when he had expressed optimism about relations with Moscow in his Tokyo press conference. What they got now, however, were grim warnings about the naïveté of such a view. Speaking at the National Defence College in Kingston, Kennan summoned a long list of witnesses to Muscovite perfidy, extending all the way back to the emissaries of Queen Elizabeth I: “One can search in vain through the annals of Russian diplomacy for a single example of an enduring, decent and pleasant relationship between Russia and a foreign state.”

Like early Christians in the late Roman Empire (Gibbon echoed loudly here), the international communist movement was hollowing out Western civilization from within, taking advantage of its “self-flagellating conscience.” Such penitence ignored Russian history and Soviet ideology, encouraging the illusion that Stalin’s behavior depended solely upon whether he was “pleased or irritated or impressed” with Western actions. The Smith-Molotov exchange had made it “terrifyingly clear” that “the Russians are able to raise or lower at will the temperature of American political life.”

The United States and its allies could no longer expect, therefore, any reconciliation with the Soviet leaders, after which “we would all go away and play golf.” The Cold War would continue, “probably through our lifetimes.” The task now must be to manage it, and that would require an approach as “profoundly dialectic” as its Soviet counterpart. It would have to contain “conflicting elements of persuasion and compulsion.” It would be “partly one and partly the other.” It would require allowing what might appear to be “complete and arbitrary inconsistency.” This capacity to “blow hot” one day and “blow cold” the next would be vital, for if “one or the other of these possibilities is denied to us, I assure you with the deepest conviction that we are lost.”
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All of this may have clarified things for the Canadians, but Kennan’s vehemence suggested how much the Smith-Molotov episode had shaken him: for the first time since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, he had failed to anticipate what Stalin would do. With a single sleazy trick, the old dictator had undermined Kennan’s credibility as a Soviet expert. Kennan had let himself become too hopeful too soon. Even worse, he had transformed that hope into a failed policy initiative. His career did not suffer, because he still had Marshall’s support. But his faith in himself did, along with the reputation his expertise hitherto had earned him.

He had already been wrong about Italy. The prospect of a communist takeover there had so haunted Kennan that in his ill-conceived “short telegram” from Manila on March 15, he raised the possibility of canceling the upcoming elections and outlawing the communist party, even at the risk of civil war and an American reoccupation of military bases on the peninsula. The situation was still worrying him as he finished his letter to Lippmann on April 6: Italy was, he wrote, the only remaining weak spot in Western Europe. On the day after Kennan got back to the office, however, it became clear that the Italian Communist Party had suffered a decisive defeat in the April 18–19 elections. Alarmed by events in Czechoslovakia, encouraged by the prospect of Marshall Plan aid, the Italians had turned back a Moscow-inspired conquest from within, on their own and by democratic means. Or so it seemed.

In fact, Italy had been the site, over the past few weeks, of the CIA’s first major covert operation. It’s difficult, even today, to assess the importance of the secret funding the agency cobbled together for the Christian Democrats as against other influences on the election outcome: the Vatican’s implacable anticommunist offensive; the massive Italian American letter-writing campaign warning that a communist victory would end economic assistance from the United States; the extent to which the Czech coup discredited the Italian communists. Those who knew about the CIA’s intervention, however, considered it a great success. Although Kennan had pushed for the agency’s involvement in Italy the previous fall, his Manila telegram and the Lippmann letter suggest that he did not know the full extent of what was going on. When he found out, he rushed to get ahead of what he had not seen coming. From having warned, in mid-March, that Washington was getting Italy horribly wrong, he went to arguing by the end of April that it had gotten Italy brilliantly right—so much so that its actions there should become a model for the future.
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“Political warfare,” Kennan argued in a closely held and therefore unnumbered Policy Planning Staff paper completed early in May, was Clausewitz in peacetime. It employed all means short of war to achieve national objectives. These included overt initiatives like alliances, economic assistance, and “white” propaganda but also the clandestine support of “friendly” foreigners, the use of “black” psychological warfare, and even the encouragement of underground resistance in unfriendly states. The British had long relied on such methods, and Lenin had so synthesized the teachings of Marx and Clausewitz that the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare had become the most effective in history. Americans, in contrast, had traditionally viewed war as an extension of sports, free from any political context at all.

Now, facing global responsibilities and an intensifying conflict with the Soviet Union, the United States could no longer afford such innocence. It should not again have to scramble “as we did at the time of the Italian elections.” The Policy Planning Staff had been studying possibilities: secret support for refugee organizations that might become liberation movements if war broke out; strengthening indigenous anticommunists in countries threatened by Moscow’s political warfare; and, “in cases of critical necessity,” direct action to prevent the sabotage of facilities or the capture of key personnel by Kremlin agents. Tight control would be necessary: “One man must be boss.” And he would have to be “answerable to the Secretary of State.”
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