The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Page 27

  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 modern 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 a
bility 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.”

  In government it does not pay to be right too soon, especially if you are considered on the more dovish side. Kennan was prophetic, and he would be proven right in a surprisingly short time as the tensions between the two nations escalated in the early 1960s and there were constant skirmishes between the two great Communist powers along the Russian-Chinese border. But in 1949–50, in an administration increasingly under siege, dealing with the shocking news of Joe One and Chiang’s departure from the mainland, his ruminations on the coming tensions between Russia and China were not exactly what Acheson wanted to hear. By 1949, David Bruce, another of the bright rising figures at State, noted that his friend Acheson could no longer bear to read Kennan’s cables, believing them too long and windy, finally too literary. His timing was not nearly as good as it had been when he had sent the Long Telegram. But nothing told how quickly the Cold War had escalated, and how the domestic attacks against administration policies had increased, than the fact that Kennan had gone from superstar to outsider in just three years. The problem he posed to Acheson was not merely that he was wordy and argumentative; it was that almost everything he said was right, the affirmation of policies, given different political conditions, that Acheson would gladly have followed but no longer could because of the changed politics of the era. Acheson was too proud to admit it, either at the time or later in his memoirs, but there was in Kennan’s dissent, in his unwillingness to adjust to changing political forces, something of an unspoken rebuke to the secretary, a man who did not like to be rebuked, or to admit that he had been bent on any of his policies.

  It was not just his dissent on the Soviets and China. Among other issues where Acheson and Kennan parted company was the question of whether or not to go ahead with the hydrogen bomb, or the Super as it was known, which was then being pushed by Edward Teller, a former Manhattan Project scientist who had turned bitterly on Robert Oppenheimer. When Truman wanted a special committee to study the issue of the Super, Acheson chose Nitze, a Teller supporter, to head it, which meant that the special committee would almost surely favor going ahead on it. To Nitze the issue of the Super was a pragmatic one—would the bomb work? He had been convinced by Teller that it would. To Kennan, who had grown close to Oppenheimer, a man anguished over what his own weapon had wrought at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was not simply a practical or scientific question but a moral one as well. He thought the Super was nothing less than a potential moral catastrophe. What both Oppenheimer and Kennan believed was that, with the decision to develop the H-bomb, a limitless, unwinnable superpower arms race would be launched, that would, in the end, increase global dangers immeasurably while adding no additional degree of security.

  When Nitze’s committee reported, as expected, that the United States ought to go ahead with the Super, it suggested as well that a major review be undertaken of the total national security picture. Acheson’s hand was very much at work here—this was the study he wanted in order to initiate his long-desired overhaul of national security policies. Nitze would lead it. On January 31, 1950, six days after Acheson’s remark about Hiss, Truman gave the go-ahead for such a comprehensive review.

  Where Kennan thought of Stalin’s Russia as primarily defensive in its policies, albeit with a deep-rooted national paranoia, Nitze offered a very different vision. “In the aggregate,” he noted at the time, “recent Soviet moves reflect not only a mounting militancy but suggest a boldness that is essentially new—and borders on recklessness.” In effect, he was saying that the United States as a great power could not base its policies on Kennan’s assumptions about tsarist Russia, no matter how brilliant their author. What if Kennan was wrong? Kennan after all was a diplomat and a historian, not an intelligence man, and if his view of Russia was wrong, then the United States would have premised its entire security position on a presumption of historic truths, and might end up unspeakably vulnerable.

  To Acheson and his allies, Nitze’s NSC paper would finally begin the process of making America’s military strength compatible with its rhetoric and their vision of its postwar role: the United States would continue to talk big, but it would carry more than just a single big stick—the potentially unusable atomic one; now America would have a more flexible military response. To Kennan, on the other hand, what Nitze (and Acheson) were proposing was a militarization of American policy—in effect, the creation of a national security state, which would drain far too much of the nation’s financial resources and would inevitably create in its Soviet rival a comparable military defense state. The Soviet atomic bomb, he wrote, did not really change the balance of power: “Insofar as we see ourselves in any heightened trouble at the present moment, that feeling is largely of our own making.”

  What was taking place, primarily inside the bureaucracy, was a debate of the most serious and far-reaching nature. Acheson and N
itze moved ahead as covertly as possible. The key person they were marginalizing in their effort was Louis Johnson, the defense secretary. The Joint Chiefs were quietly telling Nitze their needs as Acheson made what was in effect an end run around Johnson. Years later, Omar Bradley would note that the conflict between Acheson and Johnson had created “a rare, awkward, and ironic situation in which the three military chiefs [the commandant of the Marine Corps was not yet a chief] and their chairman were more closely aligned with the views of the Secretary of State than with the Secretary of Defense.” Acheson—and Nitze—were far more sympathetic to their problems, the Chiefs believed, than Johnson was. The minimum price to get U.S. defense systems up to what was wanted, Nitze thought, was somewhere around $40 to $50 billion annually. Otherwise, he and the other hard-liners believed, the United States would not be able to execute its military and defense policies, and the Soviets might dominate the world.