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Rejected Architect and Master Builder: George Kennan, Dean Acheson and Postwar Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Wilson D. Miscamble
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Extract

This article uses the relationship between George Kennan and Dean Acheson as a lens to track a classic debate over the main lines of postwar American foreign policy, especially in regard to Europe and over such related issues as negotiations with the Soviets, German unification, and the size of and necessity for American conventional and nuclear forces. It clarifies that Kennan did not play the role of powerful architect whose planning provided the blueprint and instructions for building the structure of U.S. policy in Europe. Dean Acheson proved the essential builder of the structures which provided the framework for American foreign policy for four decades. In the process, this article clarifies the nature of the personal and professional dealings of the two men over the period from the end of World War II until Acheson's death in 1971.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , Summer 1996 , pp. 437 - 468
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1996

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References

1 See Kennan, George F., “The Failure in Our Success,” New York Times, 14 03 1994Google Scholar. For a compilation of Kennan's recent writings on foreign policy see his At a Century's Ending: Reflections, 1982–1995 (New York: Norton, 1996).Google Scholar

2 John Lamberton Harper's recent book does a fine job of elucidating the initial Acheson and Kennan “visions” regarding United States policy towards Europe. See his American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. John Lewis Gaddis illustrated well the differences between the Kennan and the Acheson-Nitze expositions of containment in his Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

3 For a recent example of the erroneous portrayal of Kennan as the designer of containment see Dobrynin, Anatoly, In Confidence: Moscow's Ambassador to America's Six Cold War Presidents, 1962–1986 (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 547Google Scholar. The misunderstanding of the relationship was fostered by Acheson's caustic comments following Kennan's 1957 Reith Letures and by his subsequent attempts to diminish Kennan's contribution as a policymaker in the Truman administration. Acheson's efforts are well illustrated by his comment to Stuart Symington that Kennan was a “footnote of the Truman presidency” (Brinkley, Douglas, Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953–1971 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992], p. 92).Google Scholar

4 For a more detailed discussion of Marshall's selection of Kennan as director of the Policy Planning Staff, which notes the role of Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, see Miscamble, Wilson D., George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 10–11.Google Scholar

5 Journal entry 9 March 1947, in Lilienthal, David E., The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, vol. 2: The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950 (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 158.Google Scholar

6 For Acheson's own description of his role in framing the language of the Truman Doctrine see his Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), pp. 217–23.Google Scholar

7 On Kennan's “X” article and Lippmann's response see Miscamble, Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, pp. 65–70Google Scholar. Also see Lippmann, Walter, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1947).Google Scholar

8 For details of the “reverse course,” which emphasized Japanese industrial recovery and economic rehabilitation, see Schaller, Michael, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: Oxford University Press. 1985), pp. 122–40.Google Scholar

9 See Kennan to Acheson, 3 January 1949, Policy Planning Staff Records, National Archives, Washington D.C., Box 33.

10 Comparing Marshall and Acheson, Paul Nitze later noted that the latter “was a more intelligent and brilliant man, but often he could not resist humiliating people whose support he could have used” (Nitze, Paul H., From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision [New York: George Weidenfeld, 1989], p. 67).Google Scholar

11 The above draws on the insightful analysis of Isaacson, Walter and Thomas, Evan, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), pp. 126, 323–24, 362.Google Scholar

12 Salisbury, Harrison E., A Journey for Our Times: A Memoir (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), p. 405.Google Scholar

13 Kennan to Acheson, 3 January 1949, PPS Records, Box 33. Kennan told Acheson: “I'd rather be at Yale, or where-you-will,—any place where I could sound-off and talk freely to people,—than in the confines of a department in which you can neither do anything about it nor tell people what you think ought to be done.”

14 On Kennan's later criticisms of Acheson see Harper, , American Visions of Europe, p. 210Google Scholar; and Kennan interview with Miscamble, 6 March 1989.

15 One should remember that Acheson had co-authored the Acheson-Lilienthal Plan in 1946 and was not constitutionally opposed to negotiation with the Soviets. Furthermore, in 1949 he set about to detach the United States from the Nationalist Chinese and expected to deal in the future with Mao Tse Tung.

16 On the “two-track policy” see Schwartz, Thomas Alan, America's Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Miscamble, , Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, pp. 169–73Google Scholar. Interestingly Acheson might have permitted some informal soundings at the CFM meeting. According to Paul Nitze, Acheson authorized Bohlen “informally to sound out the Soviets on whether they would entertain a proposal similar to Plan A.” Bohlen did so with General V. I. Chuikov, the Soviet Military Governor for the Eastern Zone who volunteered that “the Germans hate us. It is necessary that we keep our forces in Germany” (Nitze, , From Hiroshima to Glasnost, pp. 71–72Google Scholar).

18 Acheson, , Present at the Creation, p. 297Google Scholar.

19 On this see Bell, Coral, Negotiation from Strength: A Study in the Politics of Power (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), pp. 23–40Google Scholar. Acheson admitted exactly this in a letter to Hans J. Morgenthau written in January 1957, when he observed that “my own firsthand attempt to work out something in regard to Germany in May, 1949, added me to the list of those whose experience convinced them that so long as it appeared in Russian eyes that there were soft spots, those soft spots would be probed” (Acheson to Morgenthau, 16 January 1957, in Among Friends: Personal Letters of Dean Acheson, ed. McLellan, David C. and Acheson, David C. [New York: Dodd and Mead, 1980], pp. 121–22).Google Scholar

20 Smith, Gaddis, Dean Acheson, vol. 16 of The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy, ed. Ferrell, Robert H. (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1972), p. 79.Google Scholar

21 He expressed his frustration to the British journalist Henry Brandon—for whom he would stretch out on his office couch and spill his mind in the manner of a psychiatrist's patient—arguing that the United States “had done ‘almost irreparable damage’ with its policies in Germany” (Brandon, Henry, Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent's Memoirs from Roosevelt to Reagan [New York: Atheneum, 1988], p. 43).Google Scholar

22 Minutes of meeting, 18 May 1949, PPS Records, Box 32.

23 The Kennan-Bohlen exchanges over this issue are classic. See Bohlen to Kennan, 6 October 1949; Kennan to Bohlen, 12 October 1949; and Bohlen to Kennan, 29 October 1949, PPS Records, Box 27. On this exchange also see Ruddy, T. Michael, The Cautious Diplomat: Charles E. Bohlen and the Soviet Union, 1929–1969 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986), pp. 94–95.Google Scholar

24 Harper, , American Visions of Europe, pp. 278–312Google Scholar, is helpful on this broad issue.

25 Acheson, , Present at the Creation, pp. 341–43.Google Scholar

26 Lundestad, Geir, “Empire By Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952,” SHAFR Newsletter 15 (09 1984): 1–21.Google Scholar

27 This view is offered by Donovan, John C., The Cold Warriors: A Policy Making Elite (Lexington, MA.: D. C. Heath, 1974), pp. 73–74.Google Scholar

28 Alsop repeated this in a letter to Paul Nitze, 10 December 1949, Papers of Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Box 5.

29 Kennan, , Memoirs, 1: 427.Google Scholar

30 Kennan to Harriman, 29 December 1949, W. Averell Harriman Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Box 267.

31 In a talk at the National War College, Acheson publicly observed that “the pressure of everyday affairs which are borne [by] men like Mr. Kennan is too much to stand year after year, and he has stood them since he entered the service of the United States at the age of twenty-two.” Acheson remarks, 21 December 1949, Papers of James E. Webb, HSTL, Box 20.

32 Acheson's remarks, 21 December 1949, Webb Papers, Harry S Truman Library (HSTL), Independence, MO., Box 20. I have found no contemporary private remarks which contradict these public utterances.

33 Kennan to Harriman, 29 December 1949, Harriman Papers, Box 267.

34 Nitze, , From Hiroshima to Glasnost, p. 86.Google Scholar

35 After listening sympathetically to Oppenheimer argue against the Hbomb and in favor of attempts—including unilateral ones—at disarmament, Acheson told Gordon Arneson: “You know, I listened as carefully as I know how, but I don't understand what ‘Oppie’ was trying to say. How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm ‘by example’;” (Arneson, R. Gordon, “The H-Bomb Decision,” Foreign Service Journal 46 [1969]: 29Google Scholar). Oppenheimer remembered that Acheson “was very depressed” by the whole issue and “wished that he could go along with their idea, but didn't think he would be able to.” The secretary of state simply could not see “how any President could survive a policy of not building the H-Bomb.” These Oppenheimer reflections are drawn from notes of an interview which he gave to Warner Schilling, 11 June 1957. See the transcript in Warner Schilling folder, Papers of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Library of Congress, Box 65.

36 For the “Quaker gospel” remarks see Acheson quoted in McLellan, David S., Dean Acheson: The State Department Years (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1976), p. 176Google Scholar. McLellan quotes Acheson from an Oral History Interview which he conducted with him in April 1963. (As with much Acheson later claimed to have said to and about Kennan, there is little evidence to support his recollection.)

37 Arneson's memorandum on PPS Draft Paper on International Control of Atomic Energy, 29 December 1949, FRUS 1950, 1: 2–8Google Scholar. For a further Arneson critique of what he termed “the Kennan position” see the memorandum of 24 January 1950, included in his “The H-Bomb Decision, Part II,” Foreign Service Journal 46 (1969): 25–26.Google Scholar

38 Acheson, Dean G., “Peace Goals Demand Firm Resolve,” 8 02 1950, Department of State Bulletin 22 (20 02 1950): 272–74.Google Scholar

39 Gaddis, John Lewis, “NSC 68 and the Problems of Ends and Means,” International Security 4 (1980): 168Google Scholar. Acheson admitted later that its purpose was to “bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’” into a recognition of the necessity to build American military strength. He undoubtedly had in mind the Defense Department, the Bureau of the Budget, and, while he refrained from mentioning him specifically, the president himself. Acheson, , Present at the Creation, p. 374.Google Scholar

40 NSC 68, “A Report to the President Pursuant to the President's Directive of January 31,1950,” 7 04 1950, FRUS 1950, 1: 272–85.Google Scholar

41 Kennan, , Memoirs, 1: 475.Google Scholar

42 See Weathersby, Kathryn, “New Findings on the Korean War,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 3 (1993): 1, 14–18.Google Scholar

43 This was the consensus American position. See McMahon, Robert J., “The Cold War in Asia: Toward a New Synthesis?” Diplomatic History 12 (1988): 317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 On Acheson see McLellan, , Dean Acheson, p. 275.Google Scholar

45 Stewart Alsop recalled seeing the State Department counselor at a party “doing a little jig” as an “expression of [his] delight” at the decision to commit American forces to the defense of South Korea. Alsop, Stewart, The Center: People and Power in Political Washington (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 8.Google Scholar

46 Kennan, , Memoirs, 1: 487.Google Scholar

47 Kennan quoted directly from his diary notes of a 21 July meeting with Acheson at Acheson's Princeton seminars, 13–14 February 1954, Acheson Papers, HSTL, Box 76, p. 1306.

48 John Allison of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs led the charge against Kennan's position which he had persuaded the Policy Planning Staff to adopt. Allison branded it “a policy of appeasement⃛ a timid, half-hearted policy designed not to provoke the Soviets to war.” He presented any failure to reunify the Korean nation as “a shirking of our duty to make clear once and for all that aggression does not pay.” Memorandum from Allison to Nitze, , 24 07 1950, 1950, FRUS 1950, 7: 458–61.Google Scholar

49 Isaacson, and Thomas, discuss the matter well in The Wise Men, pp. 530–31.Google Scholar

50 Kennan diary entry quoted in Kennan, , Memoirs, 1: 500.Google Scholar

51 Acheson to Kennan, September 6, 1950, Acheson Papers, Box 32.

52 He later admitted that “after a few months I began to miss the operational side of life that I had become accustomed to in the Foreign Service. The stimulation of having things to do that I had to do.” Quoted in Lilienthal, Helen M., ed., The Journals of David E. Lilienthal Vol. 7 Unfinished Business, 1968–1981 (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), p. 167.Google Scholar

53 Kennan to Acheson, 24 November 1950, Acheson Papers, HSTL, Box 32.

54 Kennan, quotes from his report in Memoirs, 2; 29.Google Scholar

55 Kennan to Acheson, 4 December 1950, Acheson Papers (Yale), Box 17.

56 For further discussion of this episode see Miscamble, , Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, pp. 326–31.Google Scholar

57 Kennan, George F., “America and the Russian Future,” Foreign Affairs 29 (1951): 351–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 The lectures, of course, were published as American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951).Google Scholar

59 Kennan to Acheson, 26 May 1951, Acheson Papers (HSTL), Box 66.

60 On the broad issue see Kaufman, Burton I., The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility and Command (New York: Knopf, 1986), pp. 192–201.Google Scholar

61 Kennan, , Memoirs, 2: 106.Google Scholar

62 This summation of Kennan's formula is from Brandon, , Special Relationships, p. 44.Google Scholar

63 Acheson provides a good account of his own activities in Present at the Creation. A more succinct version of Acheson's efforts especially regarding Europe is available in Harper, , American Visions of Europe, pp. 298–329.Google Scholar

64 Acheson's own later description suggests his accomplishment and his pride in it: “These lines of policy, which have guided the actions of our country for nearly two decades, were no sonorous abstractions—much less what President Lincoln called ‘pernicious abstractions’—written down in a sort of official book of proverbs. Nor were they rules or doctrines. Rather they were precedents and grew by the method of the Common Law into a corpus diplomaticum to aid the judgement of those who must make decisions. Its central aim and purpose was to safeguard the highest interest of our nation, which was to maintain as spacious an environment as possible in which free states might exist and flourish. Its method was common action with like-minded states to secure and enrich the environment and to protect one another from predators through mutual aid and joint effort” (Acheson, , Present at the Creation, p. 727Google Scholar).

65 Harper suggest the Europe of late 1952 became “an idee fixe” for Acheson and he quotes Averell Harriman's later remark that “the World stopped moving” for Acheson from that point on. Harper, , American Visions of Europe, p. 327.Google Scholar

66 On the Stalin Note, in which the Soviet Union proposed a four-power conference supposedly to negotiate a united, independent and neutral Germany, see the excellent paper by Ruud van Dyk, “The Stalin Note: Last Chance for Unification?” (Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, 25 June 1994).

67 On Kennan's attitude as he began his term as ambassador see Salisbury, Harrison, A Journey for Our Times, p. 404.Google Scholar

68 Acheson, , Present at the Creation, pp. 696–97.Google Scholar

69 Kennan recounted details of his meeting with Dulles in Kennan to Oppenheimer, 15 March 1953, Oppenheimer Papers, Box 43. See also Kennan, , Memoirs, 2: 170–89.Google Scholar

70 Acheson's efforts are discussed at considerable length and well in Brinkley's, Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, pp. 6–74Google Scholar. Brinkley argues that: “More than any other person, Acheson deserves credit, for better or for worse, for shifting the Democratic Party's foreign policy agenda away from Stevensonian liberalism and back to the conservative, unyielding cold war tradition of Harry Truman.”

71 Reith, Kennan's Lectures were published as Russia, the Atom and the West (New York: Harper, 1958)Google Scholar. On his refinement of his ideas on Germany in the years prior to 1957 see his letter to Walter Lippmann, where he posits that “there is no doubt but that we have gotten ourselves on the wrong track in our policy toward Germany and Western Europe in these past two years.” Kennan to Lippmann, 15 January (with enclosure of 13 January), Walter Lippmann Papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, Box 81. In October 1955 he wrote to Chester Bowles that “there is no question in my mind but [t]hat the United States Government made a great mistake (and one in which it was unfortunately encouraged by Dr. Adenauer) in placing the effort to integrate Germany militarily into the West—or rather a part of Germany—ahead of all other possibilities, and then committing itself rigidly to this policy, admitting no alternatives, and pursuing it in such a way as to prejudice not only the only conceivable solutions to the unification problem but also any progress toward a genuine ⃛ integration of Germany into the European community” (Kennan to Bowles, 16 October 1955, Chester Bowles Papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, Box 141). Early in 1957 Kennan addressed a dinner meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations and, according to Frank Altschul's recapping of his remarks, advocated “the desirability of holding before the Soviet Union and the satellite states some tempting offer of a general European settlement.” Altschul recalled that Kennan referred “to the possibility of a neutralized belt and, in any event, to a broad European security system which might warrant the gradual liquidation of NATO.” See Altschul to Kennan, 4 January 1957, Frank Altschul Papers, Columbia University, File 113.

72 Kennan to Oppenheimer, 24 October 1957, Oppenheimer Papers, Box 43.

73 Acheson's statement released on 11 January 1958, by the American Council on Germany, Acheson Papers, HSTL, Box 139.

74 Kennan to Altschul, 26 January 1958, Altschul Papers, File 113b.

75 On the reaction of friends see for example, Frank Altschul to Kennan, 14 January 1958, Altschul Papers, File 113b; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to Herbert Feis, 29 January 1958, Herbert Feis Papers, Library of Congress, Box 26; Chester Bowles to Kennan, 28 January 1958, Bowles Papers, Box 141; Philip Jessup to Dean Acheson, 19 March 1958, Philip C. Jessup Papers, Library of Congress, Container B–3.

76 Acheson to Jessup, 25 March 1958, Jessup Papers, Container B–3.

77 Brinkley, , Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, p. 83Google Scholar. According to Brinkley, Dulles wrote Acheson his only letter to him as secretary of state on this matter and told his predecessor: “I was glad to note your statement on the Kennan thesis. His lectures were doing considerable harm abroad to United States policies which are common to both the preceding and present United States Administrations.”

78 Kennan to Oppenheimer, 17 December 1957, Oppenheimer Papers, Box 43.

79 On Acheson's deriving pleasure see for example his breezy comments to William Tyler: “I have been after poor George again in an article in Foreign Affairs, in its next issue. It does a more detailed, more restrained, but perhaps even more cruel dissection. I am told that he has been ill, which makes the whole operation seem more regrettable, but one can hardly do as much damage as George has done and then rush off to immunity in the hospital.” Acheson to Tyler, 25 February 1958, in McLellan and Among Friends, p. 137.

80 Acheson, Dean G., “The Illusion of Disengagement,” Foreign Affairs 36 (1958): 371–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

81 Acheson to Kennan, 13 March 1958, Acheson Papers (Yale), Box 17. Acheson also added after the above quoted paragraph: “I hope the same is true of you, although I am more accustomed to public controversy and criticism than you are. So you are entitled to a few earthy expletives.”

82 Kennan to Acheson, 20 March 1958, Acheson Papers (Yale), Box 17. Kennan eventually did reply to Acheson in the pages of Foreign Affairs. See his “Disengagement Revisited,” Foreign Affairs 37 (1959): 187–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

83 Acheson reported this to Louis Halle in a letter of 20 June 1958, Louis J. Halle Papers, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA., Box 1.

84 Acheson to Kennan quoted from Brinkley, , Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, p. 91.Google Scholar

85 Kennan to Acheson, Halle Papers, Box 10.

86 Kennan to Acheson, 21 October 1969, Acheson Papers (Yale), Box 17.

87 Steel, Ronald, “Commissar of Containment,” New York Review of Books 14 (12 02 1970): 15–21.Google Scholar

88 For Raymond Aron's criticism of Kennan plans see Kennan, , Memoirs, 2: 253Google Scholar. See also Aron, Raymond, Memoires (Paris: Julliard, 1983.)Google Scholar

89 I find convincing Louis Halle's comments to Kennan in April of 1966: “You and Walter [Lippmann] have, all along, felt an urgency about the reunification of Germany and the reunification of Europe that I have not felt—if only because I could not regard as urgent what did not seem to me to be possible. I have not in the past seen the possibility of any diplomatic settlement or single series of diplomatic settlements that would produce the desired result. (What cannot be changed must be lived with.)” Halle, to Kennan, 27 April 1966, Halle Papers, Box 10.

90 Reston, James, Deadline: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 13.Google Scholar

91 On Kennan as the “conscience of American foreign policy” see Herken, Gregg, “The Great Foreign Policy Fight,” American Heritage 37 (1986): 80.Google Scholar