Overture: The Vexing "Mr. X"
The timing was awkward but, as it turned out, auspicious. At the turn
of 1946, just as the new American president, Harry Truman, was
growing skeptical about continuing the uneasy wartime cooperation
with Soviet Russia, the United States embassy in Moscow was in the
temporary care of a moody and troublesome journeyman, a midcareer
diplomat hitherto unnoticed by the powers in Washington.
His ambassador, W. Averell Harriman, millionaire disburser of
Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union for the common cause against
Hitler, had worn out his welcome in Moscow - and had exhausted his
own patience in trying to sustain cordial relations with Stalin while
putting up with daily life under communism. Late in January 1946,
Harriman turned over the embassy to his deputy. Old money and high
politics tend to patronize careerists: "You're in charge now,"
Harriman told the earnest caretaker. "Now you can send all the
telegrams you want."
Just a few days short of his forty-second birthday, George F.
Kennan had waited a long time for his main chance. He had served
powerful ambassadors across Europe through the 1920s and 1930s with
unsung competence, working his way uncomfortably through the social
obligations that constituted the diplomacy of the era, chafing at the
bureaucratic concerns of those he considered intellectual inferiors.
He had a way of trying people's patience with his propensity for
obtuse musing. "Almost everyone got annoyed with Kennan after they
first got to know him," said Loy Henderson, a senior diplomat whom
Kennan actually admired. "He was so engrossed in his own ideas that
he never learned how to go along or get along."
Kennan had graduated from Princeton in 1925 and had lived
abroad almost continually after 1926; that was an era when the
diplomatic career was a rarefied preserve cut off from American life.
His postings included Geneva, Berlin, and the Baltic states of
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the American diplomatic missions
closest to the still-unrecognized Soviet Union. Tapped at the
beginning of his professional career for special training in Soviet
affairs (an uncle, for whom he was named, had been a recognized
scholar of Tsarist Russia at the turn of the century), the pensive
youth from Milwaukee had grown more conversant with the culture and
politics of Russia than of his native land.
He had become a minor and idiosyncratic member of an
exclusive cadre of Soviet specialists in the State Department,
unknown to the general public or indeed to anyone outside his own
circle. Almost to a man (no women had diplomatic careers at that
time, of course), these tightly focused experts were contemptuous of
Bolshevik manners and pretensions, contemptuous even more of American
liberals of that era who looked upon Soviet Russia as a laboratory of
social reform.
In the New Deal years of the 1930s, intellectuals sympathetic
to the Soviet experiment had gained an upper hand in Washington, from
President Franklin D. Roosevelt on down. Dispatches from the likes of
this Kennan, about purges and the murderous rampages of
collectivization and communization, threatened the prevailing wisdom.
Kennan would have had no interest in getting along or going along
with such left-wing contemporaries in the State Department as Noel
Field or Alger Hiss, for instance.
Kennan began serving in Moscow under Harriman in 1944 and,
along with disenchanted colleagues like the chief of the military
liaison mission, General John Russell Deane, bombarded the lower
levels of Washington bureaucracy with analyses of communist evil -
reports that went unread by the senior officials pursuing Roosevelt's
vision of alliance with the Soviet Union. As victory over Hitler
became assured, however, the simmerings of anti-Soviet thought began
surfacing in Washington again. Even Roosevelt, the week before he
died, began to doubt that he could go on doing business with Stalin
in building a secure peace.
President Truman came into office uninhibited by the
reforming zeal of the old New Deal. Once the victories in Europe and
the Pacific were confirmed in the course of 1945, his fledgling
administration opened new eyes upon the Soviet Union: an ally for six
years, was it now to be an adversary?
In February 1946, just after Ambassador Harriman had
withdrawn, the State Department and the Treasury sent two modest
inquiries to the Moscow embassy left in Kennan's care. Washington
needed an "interpretive analysis" of recent Soviet statements about
international financial institutions, for the purpose of fashioning
American policy. Such inquiries were routine, the normal format for
discussion between a capital and its diplomatic outposts. What was
unusual was that this time the officer responsible for replying was
George Kennan.
After a few days of thought, the chargé d'affaires ad interim
decided to seize the opening that had eluded him through all his
years of bureaucratic servitude. "Now, suddenly, my opinion was being
asked," he wrote, looking back on the moment. "It was no good trying
to brush the question off with a couple of routine sentences
describing Soviet views on such things as world banks and
international monetary funds. It would not do to give them just a
fragment of the truth. Here was a case where nothing but the whole
truth would do. They had asked for it. Now, by God, they would have
it."
At nine p.m. on February 22, Kennan sent a telegram to
Washington - 8,000 words in length but broken into five parts, as its
author described it, "like an eighteenth-century Protestant sermon."
(More to the immediate point, he split up the text so as not to
burden the primitive communications channels of the day and so that
it "would not look so outrageously long.") Here was Kennan on his
own - analysis both elegant and prolix, lucid in language but not
always clear on the practical points he was trying to make. It was
the sort of thoughtful essay that over the years had stirred the
respect, and the irritation, of busy superiors and men of politics.
Your inquiry, Kennan began, "involves questions so
intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, . . . that
I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding
to what I feel would be dangerous degree of over-simplification."
Readers thus warned, the flow of words poured forth: Soviet behavior
patterns scrutinized for both academic and operational import; the
Kremlin's "neurotic view of world affairs"; the "traditional and
instinctive Russian sense of insecurity"; the implications for
American policy arising from the neuroses of the Russian soul. Kennan
released all the intellectual emotions of his diplomatic colleagues
steeped in Soviet affairs, pent up as they had been under the
disinterest of the Roosevelt years. As it turned out, his musings
that February evening in 1946 rang down the final curtain on the
alliance of wartime convenience between Soviet communism and western
democracy.
In the later annals of the Cold War, Kennan's dispatch no.
511 became known simply as the Long Telegram - "probably the most
important, and influential, message ever sent to Washington by an
American diplomat," in the words of Clark Clifford, then a modest
Truman aide in the White House. In the State Department, a wary staff
assistant warned the secretary of state that "this telegram from
George Kennan in Moscow is not subject to condensation." The hard-
driving secretary of the navy, James V. Forrestal, clipped a copy of
the diplomatic dispatch to his personal journal and, ignoring its
Secret classification, passed it around the government.
From his later stature as an elder statesman, Kennan
remarked, "If none of my previous literary efforts had seemed to
evoke even the faintest tinkle from the bell at which they were
aimed, this one, to my astonishment, struck it squarely and set it
vibrating." For the Long Telegram told Washington what it was finally
ready to hear: the Soviet Union, an ally in war, was becoming an
adversary in peace.
Kennan was due for home leave after his overseas service
during World War II, and upon the arrival of a new ambassador that
spring he returned to the unfamiliar terrain of Washington. There he
found that quite a few important people wanted to meet the author of
the Long Telegram. Assigned to a sabbatical at the National War
College, Kennan made the rounds of policymakers and commentators
known to him previously only from newspapers and shortwave radio
broadcasts.
Forrestal asked him for a further memo clarifying what the
thoughts of the Long Telegram meant for America's long-term strategy.
Sitting in a northwest corner room at Washington's Fort McNair,
hacking away at a typewriter (as he later pictured himself), Kennan
churned out a new essay, which, with Forrestal's permission, he
submitted to the prestigious New York journal Foreign Affairs.
Unexpectedly, however, he was recalled onto active State Department
duty; he tried to withdraw the article, then in press, for fear that
it would be taken as an official policy statement. He reluctantly
agreed to permit publication under the pseudonym "X."
The "X article" of July 1947 addressed a general public
confused about the Soviet Union; it had all the impact in
intellectual circles that the Long Telegram had registered within the
government a year earlier. As the author's identity quickly became
known, the State Department tried to dismiss the article,
unconvincingly, as merely the views of a scholar on leave.
"The main element of any United States policy toward the
Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and
vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies," Kennan as "X"
argued. "Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western
world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant
application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting
geographical and political points."
The elucidation was nuanced and elegant, but the argument
rode roughshod over all those in Washington who still clung to the
hope that the wartime alliance could be sustained in the postwar era.
It proposed nothing less than a fundamental realignment of all the
assumptions held by the American people about the nation's foreign
policy. Understandably, and to the discomfort of its author, the "X
article" provoked an enduring storm of criticism from both left and
right.
From the prevailing liberal perspective, the first onslaught
came from the era's most influential commentator on public affairs,
Walter Lippmann, who lambasted "Mr. X" in fourteen successive columns
published in newspapers across the nation that autumn. (The
columnist, an intimate in Washington political circles, knew full
well the identity of the author he was criticizing and, indeed,
regarded him as a personal friend.) Lippmann challenged the facts,
the logic, and the implications of the article. Containment, Lippmann
argued, was a "strategic monstrosity" that would require unending
military pressure, straining America's political and economic
resources to the breaking point. The policy was doomed to fail.
Painful though this assault was to Kennan, a private person
unaccustomed to public criticism, an even more strident response came
from the conservative opinion centers of Washington, New York, and
the midwestern heartland, where generations of emigrants from eastern
Europe had made their new lives. Containment reeked of appeasement,
they complained, and amounted to the abandonment of eastern Europe to
communism.
As eloquent on this side as Lippmann on his was James
Burnham, a then-prominent polemicist holding forth from the
philosophy faculty of New York University. Containment, he declared,
was merely "bureaucratic verbalization of a policy of drift - its
inner law is: Let history do it." Burnham and his cohorts on the
right were not content with drift when it came to confronting
communism; they wanted action! "Containment is a variant of the
defensive," Burnham argued, "and a defensive policy . . . can never
win."
The rhetoric soared as the controversy raged over the coming
years. Burnham belittled containment as a "teacup edition" of what
ordinary Americans wanted from their foreign policy; the doctrine, as
he understood it, drew a magic line behind which "every communist,
like a Brunhilde behind a wall of fire that even Siegfried has sworn
to respect, can sleep secure." Alexander Wiley, the powerful
Republican senator from Wisconsin, denounced Kennan and his State
Department colleagues for pursuing what he made bold to call "panty-
waist diplomacy."
Kennan did not reply to these critics (though years later he
commented sadly that his friend Lippmann had argued upon
a "misunderstanding almost tragic in its dimensions"). Kennan's was
not the style of the radio discussion programs that were starting to
make an impact among Americans far from the intellectual centers.
Moreover, he was once again a serving United States diplomat,
restricted by protocol from speaking out on his own.
Only four decades later did another reason for Kennan's
reticence come to light. Commentators and even powerful senators were
not privy to some most unusual policy discussions proceeding in deep
secrecy within the top echelons of the Truman administration. Even as
containment was being scorned as appeasement and timidity in the
first months of 1948, a high-level staff within the State Department
was devising a remarkable initiative to confront communism
aggressively through clandestine action. The secret program would
start with innocuous propaganda and persuasion, then proceed directly
into sabotage, subversion, and paramilitary engagement.
While critics were lambasting what they considered the
defensive doctrine of containment, its author was at work designing a
massive offensive. When the diplomatic archives were finally
unsealed, they revealed the architect and champion of American covert
action against east European communism to be "Mr. X" himself, George
F. Kennan.
Among Kennan's many idiosyncrasies was a fascination, rare for a
conventional diplomat, with the practice and product of intelligence
as it was then understood - the clandestine collection of secret
information. As early as September 1945, while serving as the
ambassador's deputy in the Moscow embassy, Kennan had been impressed
with the work of the American intelligence officer serving in the
Soviet Union under diplomatic cover. Since "the normal channels and
facilities now available to us" were not turning up the most
important and sensitive information, he informed the State
Department, using the euphemisms of polite diplomats, "large scale
special efforts on various lines . . . are therefore justified."
His sabbatical abruptly terminated at the end of 1947, Kennan
became head of the State Department's new Policy Planning Staff.
Kennan turned to one theme of Mr. X's exposition that his militant
critics tended to overlook: containment, to be effective,
required "adroit and vigilant application of counterforce." Lippmann
was one who did spot this point, and warned that it would
require "recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array
of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets." Lippmann may have
been appalled by that prospect, but it seemed just fine to Kennan.
Seeking useful tasks to perform, he set his planning staff to the
design of the counterforce. In the process, he expanded the practice
of traditional intelligence into a new realm of political cold
warfare.
An early Policy Planning product, a memo of February 5, 1948,
called policymakers' attention to hundreds of thousands of refugees
from eastern Europe and the Soviet Union languishing as war-displaced
persons in western Europe. Kennan's staff urged that they be
mobilized "to fill the gaps in our current official intelligence, in
public information, and in our politico-psychological operations."
That was a modest beginning.
By April, Kennan was ready with a more ambitious
comprehensive program for "organized political warfare." He shared
the draft of his bold initiative with a few trusted colleagues among
the department's Soviet specialists, including his old mentor Loy
Henderson and a promising contemporary, Charles E. Bohlen. Kennan's
proposal was submitted to the National Security Council (NSC), the
top policymaking body of the Truman administration, even as
the "teacup" image of Mr. X's containment was gaining public currency.
On June 18, 1948, Truman and his NSC formally committed the
United States government to an unprecedented program of counterforce
against communism, moving beyond propaganda and economic warfare to
authorize "preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-
sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures" and then
even "subversion against hostile states, including assistance to
underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation
groups." And all of these activities were to be carried out under
such ruses and deceptions, the Truman administration directed, that
the U.S. government could "plausibly disclaim any responsibility."
Thus was drawn the first battle line of the Cold War, without
the knowledge of the public and, indeed, contrary to what the public
believed its government's foreign policy to be. Kennan's secret
operational plan for the counterforce quickly took on a life of its
own across the government, caroming wildly out of its author's
control. By the 1950s right-wing ideologists, little knowing what the
defeated Democratic administration had already attempted, pounded the
hustings with the battle cry of rolling back the Iron Curtain.
Years later, looking back in dismay on the whole sorry
episode, Kennan portrayed himself as "one who has inadvertently
loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly
witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and
wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster."
Copyright (c) 2000 by Peter Grose. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company.