George F. Kennan: An American Life (67 page)

The contrasts in the ways Kennan and Nitze had advised Acheson were striking. Nitze, balancing scientific evidence against military, political, and moral considerations, came up with a crisp recommendation, capable of being read in two minutes, which Acheson, Johnson, Lilienthal, and ultimately Truman could all accept. “I thought that the most important role of the Policy Planning Staff was not just creating a paper,” Nitze recalled. It was “to
affect
today’s decisions, and to do so in a way which would create or expand the margins of freedom for the future.”
¹⁵

Kennan’s memorandum, more than thirty times the length of Nitze’s, was the most serious effort by any American at the time to grapple with the implications of the nuclear revolution. The ideas it developed—especially “minimum deterrence” and “no first use”—would shape the strategic debates of the 1970s and 1980s, some of which Kennan conducted with Nitze himself. “George was a sensitive, imaginative fellow,” Dean Rusk recalled. “He had the ability to look some distance down the trail, and to see the awesome consequences of the development of these weapons. But to look away from the problem we faced was not the way to prevent war.” As far as the Truman administration was concerned, Kennan’s memorandum was, as Nitze suggested, just a paper: it was of little use in shaping immediate policy. He had become prophetic but no longer relevant. Hence the equanimity with which his indulgent boss reconciled himself to the idea that Kennan needed a break. As Acheson reminded the war college students on the day they both appeared there, “it was not by chance that the Prophets used to go up in the mountains and fast and think and be in solitude.”
¹⁶

Kennan chose instead to go to Latin America. As had been the case with Japan, he had never been there. The Policy Planning Staff had produced only three papers on the region under his directorship, all narrowly focused. And yet Marshall, while in Bogotá for a conference in April 1948, had run into rioting so severe that for a time he had been literally under siege: the only life-threatening situation he encountered as secretary of state came in a part of the world his planners had largely ignored. Kennan may have had that episode in mind when he warned the war college students a few months later that, with half the earth’s wealth but only 6 percent of its population, the United States faced enemies willing “to tear us limb from limb figuratively, or perhaps even physically.” He was less dire in his December 1949 lecture, but he did—unusually—go out of his way to link the civil rights struggle at home with the credibility of American efforts to cooperate with “colored peoples in other parts of the globe.” So he was ready, at the beginning of 1950, not just to remedy his own inattention to problems of race, class, and inequality but to see them for himself.
¹⁷

Feeling slightly guilty for abandoning his family, Kennan left Washington on February 18, taking advantage of the opportunity this time to avoid the discomforts of air travel and to indulge his love of trains. With a change in St. Louis, it was possible then to take a sleeping car all the way to Mexico City. The three-day journey allowed time to write:

Nevertheless, the trip was a welcome respite. With a steam engine helping, the diesel ascended a mountain pass, wound its way down the other side, and brought the train on time into Mexico City on the evening of the twenty-first. The American embassy, where Kennan stayed, was preparing for its Washington’s birthday reception the next day.

The event, held on the veranda, required routine skills: clutching drinks in the left hand to keep the right one dry for shaking others; looking for places to stash empty glasses so they wouldn’t get stepped on; being patient with the wife of a senior colleague who wanted to know about the Russians: “They’re all slaves aren’t they? Why don’t we
do
something about it?” Outside there were magnificent monuments, handsome boulevards, and frenetic traffic, but in the adjoining neighborhoods people were “living, eating, and begging on slimy sidewalks.” Bearing little relation to its surroundings, the city was an “ostentatious, anxious demonstration of wealth by an ever-changing
nouveau riche
,” boiling up “like foam to the surface of a society that calls itself revolutionary.”

A weekend in Cuernavaca placed Kennan in a simulated Moorish palace owned by American friends, where the ceiling, wall paneling, furniture, and art—all imported from Europe—were not simulated. “I lay sleepless, through the long night, under the huge crimson draperies which had once served a prince of the Church and still bore his insignia—while mosquitoes buzzed around my pillow.” Outside the night breeze flitted aimlessly among the cloisters: the wind “of exiled royalty, of the hopelessly rich, of the tortured intellectuals,” of people like himself who had wandered in, amid “unhappy antiques, crowded together, like creatures in a zoo.” Kennan’s host, the next morning by the swimming pool, was also curious about the Russians: “I don’t see why we don’t go right over there and drop the bomb on those fellows. What are we waiting for?”

Four forest fires were visible on the road back into Mexico City, a frequent occurrence because the mountains were badly eroded. Water tables were sinking at an alarming rate. Population pressures were overtaking improvements in agriculture, industrial productivity, and public health. Mexico would remain inhospitable to earthly hope, which was why the Virgin of Guadalupe shrine, a brief stop on the way to the airport, moved Kennan deeply. There were of course hustlers outside the cathedral, and there was oppressive ostentation within. But who could doubt the need for “
some
moral law, even an imperfect one”? And how did this Mexican display of faith and corruption differ from Ilya Repin’s unforgettable painting of a religious procession outside a Russian village in an earlier century?

After several short stops in Central America, Kennan flew on to Caracas, a city that defied even his descriptive powers. So he instead wrote its history: how the Spanish had located it at a comfortable elevation inland, connected to its port by a wagon track; how the British had replaced this with a narrow-gauge railroad; how the Americans had arrived to pump oil out and to pump wealth back in; how the city was now so expensive that this particular American wanted to hide in his hotel, fearing “the financial consequences of any contact with the shops or the taxi drivers.” All the evils apparent at home from imposing a new technology on an unprepared people were magnified a hundredfold in Venezuela. One day the “morphine” would be withdrawn, and “a terrible awakening” would follow.

Perhaps because the culture was Portuguese and hence familiar, Kennan liked Rio de Janeiro better. The Brazilians had inherited a gentleness “for which one can only bear them respect and affection.” It was striking on the beaches, which displayed every shade of color, “a vast panorama of racial tolerance and maturity which could stand as a model for other peoples.” Still, it was depressing to sense “the gulf between the rich and the poor, the desperation with which people seek to leap over that gulf, and the lack of imagination they show in the enjoyment of their new emoluments when the leap has been successfully completed.” His reputation, by now, had caught up with him: Rio was plastered with “To Death With Kennan” signs, put up by local communists, and he had been accorded four mock funerals. Only in São Paulo, though, where the security was exasperatingly thorough, did he began to feel “like a hunted beast, and to ask myself whether it was really possible that I was as sinister as all this.”

There were further stops in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Lima—the Argentine president, Juan Perón, somehow mistook Kennan for the head of the CIA—but the trip by this time was tiring him out, teaching him little, and making him homesick. He was impressed by a demonstration, in Panama, of how the canal locks worked and, upon arrival in Miami, by the “relaxed, unemotional but utterly objective and self-respecting attitude” with which a railroad ticket clerk explained to a trainee how to change a reservation: “I went out onto the station platform with a sense of deep gratitude and of happy acceptance of this American world, marked as it is by the mediocrity of all that is exalted, and the excellence of all that which is without pretense.”
¹⁸

Back in Washington, Kennan wrote a long report and submitted it to Acheson on March 29. He acknowledged the imprudence of generalizing about so vast a region, because differences in Latin America were often more significant than similarities. Nevertheless, some patterns were clear. One was location: human development was harder than in North America, with its broad plains, unifying rivers, and temperate climate. Compounding this problem had been the arrival, “like men from Mars,” of the European conquerors: “History, it seems to me, bears no record of anything more terrible having been done to entire peoples.” Slavery followed, as did the splendor and pretense of Latin American cities, built to compensate for the squalor of the countryside from which they sprang. All of this had produced a culture of “exaggerated self-centeredness and egotism,” conveying the illusion “of desperate courage, supreme cleverness, and a limitless virility where the more constructive virtues are so conspicuously lacking.” This was a world “where geography and history are alike tragic, but where no one must ever admit it.”

So what was Washington’s responsibility in an era in which Latin American communists, even if only loosely linked to Moscow, might seek to exploit the hopelessness that surrounded them by seizing power? That part of the world was of little military significance to either the United States or the Soviet Union, but there was a bandwagon psychology in international relations: multiple victories for communism could be demoralizing. One such victory somewhere, however—Kennan thought Guatemala the most likely possibility—might have an inoculating effect, shattering complacency about communism elsewhere. The problem, in any event, would be for the Latin Americans to handle: the United States could not return to the military interventions of the early twentieth century. It might, at most, apply economic pressure quietly. In public, its hands would have to be clean.

The United States could afford to relax, therefore, in managing its hemisphere, for the Latin Americans needed it more than it needed them. That meant tolerating rule by whatever means local rulers considered appropriate: they should not be held to the standards of American domestic democracy. It meant respecting their sovereignty, cooperating with them only when they wanted it. It meant that they, in turn, could not make their countries “the seats of dangerous intrigue against us.” No great power would ever have shown such restraint in dealing with neighboring smaller powers. If the Latin Americans liked it, fine. If not, the responsibility would be theirs for forfeiting its advantages. This was the best Washington could expect to do, Kennan concluded, in a region where problems would always be “multitudinous, complex and unpleasant.”
¹⁹

The term “politically incorrect” had not yet been invented, but Edward G. Miller, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, acted as if it had when he read Kennan’s report. Appalled by its candor, worried about leaks, he persuaded Acheson not to circulate it. “I am not sure that he required much persuading,” Kennan remembered. As a consequence, all copies were “hidden from innocent eyes,” except for the one Kennan kept and quoted from in his 1967 memoir. The full document would not be published until 1976, after which historians treated it either as an example of Kennan’s insensitivity to “third world” issues, or as a blueprint for what the United States would do in Latin America for the rest of the Cold War.
²⁰
Neither interpretation makes much sense.

Kennan in fact focused on the historical, cultural, economic, demographic, and environmental problems afflicting the region: he came closer to getting Latin America right in 1950 than he had Germany—a country he knew much better—in 1949. Nor was he unsympathetic to the Latin Americans. The rich and the poor, he repeatedly stressed, shared tragedies not of their own making. Nor did his memorandum affect what later transpired: it could hardly have done so, since nobody read it. If they had, they would have found it recommending a far more cautious policy than those carried out by the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan administrations, each of whom intervened in Latin America in ways well beyond anything Kennan recommended. It’s hard to see how the policy he suggested would have produced worse results.

Two things made Kennan’s report unacceptable, though, even by the standards of his own day. One was his outsider’s perspective, which upset the State Department’s Latin American experts, much as he would have been upset if forced to read a report from one of them on the Soviet Union or Germany. Crude looks at the whole
²¹
generally unsettle specialists who spend their lives scrutinizing parts of it. The other problem was Kennan’s honesty about Latin America’s tragedies and his call for restraint in attempting to alleviate them. His pessimism was consistent with his own view of life. But it was—to use another term just coming into vogue at the time—deeply un-American.