I.
While these leisurely and somewhat astigmatic exchanges were going on, a lot was happening elsewhere. On the evening Kennan spoke at the Council, President Truman announced the unexpected resignation of Secretary of State Byrnes and, in an even greater surprise, nominated as his replacement General George C. Marshall, the austere but highly respected wartime Army chief of staff, now back from his unsuccessful mission to China. Byrnes had written Kennan the previous day to confirm his promotion to career minister, and in his response Kennan expressed “keen disappointment” that Byrnes would be stepping down. The regret was probably real, for however much Byrnes might have irritated Kennan at the December 1945 Moscow foreign ministers’ conference, he had since stuck to a policy of what he called “patience with firmness” with respect to the Soviet Union. When the Wallace controversy broke out the following September, Byrnes made it clear that if the president did not fire his secretary of commerce, his secretary of state would quit. Truman backed Byrnes, but their relationship soured, and so three and a half months later, ostensibly for health reasons, Byrnes did resign.6
Kennan’s only previous contact with Marshall had been inauspicious: the general attended his unfortunate Pentagon briefing on Azores bases in the fall of 1943. But Marshall had, while in China, read several of Kennan’s dispatches from Moscow, including the “long telegram.” He would have heard more from Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, who had taken a special interest in advancing Kennan’s career, as well as from former military colleagues now at the National War College. An especially convincing accolade came from Walter Bedell Smith in Moscow, who had been one of Marshall’s wartime aides:
George Kennan… knows more about the Soviet Union, I believe, than any other American. He speaks Russian better than the average Russian. And not only has he served here under four different ambassadors, but he has had about equally valuable service in Germany…. I know all of the Russian experts, here and in Washington, and they are all good, but Kennan is head and shoulders above the lot, and he is highly respected in Moscow because of his character and integrity.
Smith suggested including Kennan on the American delegation to an upcoming Moscow foreign ministers’ conference, but Marshall had a larger responsibility in mind. As secretary of state, he was determined to achieve the policy coordination that had been missing during the war and, in his view, during the first year and a half of peace. Kennan, he thought, could help. “I was very close to Marshall then,” Bohlen recalled. “The telegram from Moscow was the thing that put George in the Policy Planning Staff.”7
Marshall took office on January 21, and three days later Under Secretary of State Acheson, acting on his new boss’s instructions, asked Kennan whether he might be interested in running a new State Department organization “for [the] review and planning of policy.” The group’s function, Acheson later recalled, would be
to look ahead, not into the distant future, but beyond the vision of the operating officers caught in the smoke and crises of current battle; far enough ahead to see the emerging form of things to come and outline what should be done to meet or anticipate them. In doing this, the staff should also do something else—constantly reappraise what was being done.
Despite his hopes to retire from the Foreign Service after completing his National War College duties, Kennan accepted the offer while wondering how to make the transition. “Mind you, I was dying to do this work,” but he couldn’t take time from his war college duties without Admiral Hill’s permission, and yet “I had no authorization to tell him about these plans.” Acheson and Kennan agreed, in the end, that he would take the job at an undetermined date in the spring. But Kennan had “no very clear understanding of what was involved; I am not sure that Mr. Acheson had gained a much clearer one from General Marshall.”8
“Well, gentlemen,” Loy Henderson remembered Acheson telling his staff, “we’re going to have a new office—an office of Policy Planning. George Kennan’s going to be brought in to take care of it. Loy, don’t you think that’s a good idea?” Henderson said that a man like Kennan would be excellent for the job. “A man like Kennan?” Acheson responded. “There’s nobody like Kennan.” The most important requirement for the new unit, Bohlen explained to Sir John (Jock) Balfour, the well-informed British chargé d’affaires, at a dinner party late in January, would be to ensure that all levels of the State Department understood official policy and the motives that lay behind it. People “like Kennan” might also give some talks on this subject. Acheson, also present, had already heard this once too often: “I am constantly being told that ‘people like George Kennan’ should give the boys the low-down about Russia,” he grumbled. “Unfortunately there is only one George Kennan.”9
Certainly there was only one Acheson. Trained as a lawyer, the dapper, defiantly mustachioed under secretary of state had surprisingly little foreign policy experience when Truman appointed him to that position in August 1945. Preoccupied at first with the international control of atomic energy, Acheson had been one of the last of the president’s top advisers—apart from Wallace himself—to give up on postwar cooperation with the U.S.S.R. Kennan’s “long telegram,” Acheson later acknowledged, had had a “deep effect on thinking within the Government,” but it made little impression on him. When Acheson did finally change his mind about Stalin’s intentions, in August 1946, he did so for different reasons, totally and almost overnight.
The provocation was Soviet demands on Turkey for boundary concessions and bases in the Dardanelles. Stalin backed down when Truman sent the Sixth Fleet into the eastern Mediterranean, but Acheson did not back off. The crisis, however belatedly, caused him to connect dots: he suddenly saw how Soviet ambitions, American complacency, and British weakness might combine to upset the balance of power in Europe. Acheson went from assuming the best to suspecting the worst: it was shortly after that he began encouraging Kennan to speak openly about the Soviet danger. His “predictions and warnings could not have been better,” Acheson later acknowledged. “We [had] responded to them slowly.”
But Kennan’s recommendations for American policy had been “of no help.” They amounted to exhortations “to be of good heart, to look out for our own social and economic health, to present a good face to the world, all of which the Government was trying to do.” Composed in the 1960s after he and Kennan had disagreed about many things, Acheson’s complaint may not have reflected what he thought in 1947. His contemporary comments, however, mix respect for Kennan with just enough acidity to suggest that one of the things about which Acheson was unclear, regarding the planning staff job, was whether the Soviet expert that Kennan had been could function equally successfully as the policy adviser Marshall wanted him to become.10
The question became more than hypothetical on February 21, when the British embassy informed the State Department that the British government, staggering under the burdens of postwar recovery and beset by one of the worst winters ever, could no longer provide military and economic assistance to Greece and Turkey. The news shocked Truman and most of his advisers, but Acheson had seen it coming and was ready with a response. A Foreign Office official caught its substance when he reported a growing conviction in Washington “that no time must be lost in plucking the torch of world leadership from our chilling hands.” With Marshall new in his job and about to depart for Moscow, Acheson took the lead in determining how this might be done. And on February 24 he brought Kennan—still at the war college—into the planning process.11