The Intellectual as Diplomat: A Critical Discussion of George F. Kennan
Pachter, Henry
THE WHIM OF HISTORY Will press into a man's hand a flag behind which he rallies people—only to discover that he does not understand them and that they don't know why they follow him. This...
...Like most of his counsel, this is good advice...
...FROM THESE SAMPLES, it should be clear that Stalin was both right and mistaken when he called Kennan the father of the Cold War...
...but the material from this time he chose to include in the book are two gay episodes...
...I stood temperamentally outside the passions of this war...
...there are only a number of national regimes which cloak themselves in the verbal trappings of radical Marxism...
...As one should expect, he refused to carry messages of which he did not approve...
...one cannot repeat platitudes often enough for the Senate...
...Nor did he believe in 1950, between the Berlin blockade and the Korean War, that the Soviet threat was military too...
...The difference between him and Messrs...
...But he feared the falling of the dominoes: the Turks were engaged in delicate negotiations with Moscow, the fickle Arabs might be upset, and when so many people are afraid of what might happen, "the shock of a Communist victory could not be risked...
...His ambition visibly is elsewhere, as when he begins a decisive memorandum to Ambassador Harriman (under whom he served in Moscow) : "Peace, like spring, now has finally come to Russia...
...Just as Kennan professes not to understand why diplomats must explain their policies to Congress, so he professes not to understand what bothered Lippmann: that one cannot "contain" without pushing one's power to the very edge of the Iron Curtain...
...Alperovitz, W. A. Williams, Fleming, and Lasch is comprised in one word: he felt that the U.S...
...3) the concept applied exclusively to Stalin's time when the Soviet empire was monolithic...
...George Kennan's recently published Memoirs offer an excellent opportunity to study the origins of this new coalition and the mind of the man who apparently offers himself as its prophet.* 1. Self-Portrait of the Author THERE ARE TWO KINDS of "memoirs" in this volume...
...Keenan in these encounters, the question cannot be suppressed: was he a diplomat at all...
...As director of the planning staff he occupied a room next to the Secretary and had direct access to him...
...To say so is rather risky, for the news is not welcome and its bearer appears to sin against good taste and morality...
...Of Kennan's hedges only one remains valid: that we should not try to "contain" where we have no power...
...We would place upon the Russians the onus .. . we would have made it evident that we were not averse to the removal of the division of Germany...
...What a trial I must have been to him, running around with my head in the usual clouds of philosophic speculation, full of interests other than my work . . . bombarding him with bundles of purple prose on matters which, as I am sure he thought, it was the business of the President to think about...
...but even this refers to Europe alone...
...yet the caricature actually does not fit our policy-makers but only certain editorialists...
...HENRY PACHTER on his "tight-lipped ancestors," his "18thcentury background," his childhood diseases, dysentery and other "discomforts" which early in his life determined his "detachment" and destined him to be "a guest of [his] own time...
...When the French heard of Plan A, they raised such a howl that the U.S...
...Unfortunately, it is not a matter of accepting or rejecting a definition...
...His contempt of senators, however deserved, was more candid than the Department could afford to show, and heartily as one is tempted to applaud Mr...
...Differing with Kennan, therefore, the Secretary of State decided in favor of Alternative Number One—to create the framework in which the realities of Western security took precedence over the chimera of Stalin's change of heart and of German reunification...
...for eign policy...
...The great enemies of good diplomacy are ideologies and the people who deal in them —the mass media, the politicians and the professors...
...London Express, January 21, 1968 HENRY PACHTER holding one-third of Germany as hostage and he had reason to believe that one day, when the Western Allies would grow weary of their long occupation duties, the free twothirds of Germany would be ready to trade liberty for unity and come to terms with him...
...Kennan was unable to get along with His colleagues, his superiors, representatives of other Departments, and with those institutions which, in these United States and other democracies, are the policymaker's masters: Congress, the press, and public opinion...
...the unread "memos" intertwine with the memories of professional disappointments and of alienation in Washington...
...On Vietnam they certainly are all aligned with Lippmann, Morgenthau, Fulbright, and Kennan...
...Kennan professes to a visceral aversion to the military establishment...
...Inevitably, as befits an 18th-century gentleman, his journeys are sentimental, and he, "alone in the entire governmental establishment," has carried into the 20th a moving sensitivity for suffering, decency, and moral values...
...In his Quixotic fashion he represents the eternal interest of diplomacy as against the military...
...he does not see that his conflict is a symptom of a wider question—that of the intellectual in politics...
...That the Chinese "contain" the Soviet Union is certainly not true in the Middle East...
...Kennan was responsible for two great works of postwar politics: containment and disengagement...
...Though Kennan's colleagues never doubted that he had always been and would always be a conservative, the Left mistook him for one of theirs, and so did Professor Morgenthau, Senator Fulbright, and Walter Lippmann...
...The only gain I can see is a certain moral disarmament, a subsiding of the propaganda war and a withering of the crusading spirit...
...Moreover, under Truman and Marshall, his famous "Long Telegram" of February 22, 1946, was adopted as the basis of U.S...
...Perhaps the political pendulum is swinging back to the regional and traditional centers it occupied in the first third of this century...
...but was this a good reason for Truman to send a message to Congress and to stir the masses' anti-Bolshevist emotions...
...once we give that impression, many others will ask for our aid on the same pretext, and we don't wish to give a blank check to all who think they are in similar danger...
...No one was thinking in terms of a military confrontation, and "cold war" meant what it says: a freeze, a maneuvering for position that excludes "hot" encounters...
...The conflict came to a head in the fall of 1949, when the blockade of Berlin forced the Western Allies to decide between two alternatives: either to go ahead with their plan to establish a West German Republic, or to offer Stalin another chance to prevent the partition of Europe and to allow the unification of Germany...
...We should have been THE INTELLECTUAL AS DIPLOMAT hushed by the realization that it was we who had been chosen by the Almighty to be the agents [of this destruction] .. . The passage is much longer...
...Kennan can cast himself in the role of a martyr...
...4. Mr...
...he shudders and turns away, confident that at some time this madness will be gone and there will again be a sensible man one can talk to...
...Kennan's hopes were still for an ultimate disengagement and the return to a world without blocs...
...What we have is at best a cold peace, meaning that no one thinks of invading or liberating a country on the other side...
...When he saw the "Mr...
...Now the two strands of "memoirs" meet to tell the story of an increasingly lonely man...
...In contrast with the Left, PUBLIC NOTICE John P. Roche is Alive & Swell in The White House HENRY PACHTER he recognizes power as the subject of history...
...If the thinker finds a sympathetic prince, he will accomplish his mission...
...Kennan could not really believe that Hitler wanted to conquer territory in the East (apparently reading Mein Kampf was too painful for him, even though he was stationed in Berlin...
...Kennan favored the second alternative, and for that purpose designed "Plan A"—a complex and intricate system of balances and counterbalances providing for step-by-step withdrawal of troops from Germany but also for the retention of bridgeheads by each of the four occupying powers in East and West, and for elections that would be free enough to put Western anxieties at rest but meaningless enough to satisfy Stalin...
...instead of simply deciding where to stop the Russian advance, we must fight "the world Communist conspiracy...
...After the war, he felt that the JCO 1067 order (barring Nazis from executive positions) and the war crimes trials were stupid...
...In 1949 Europe could not have stabilized its political life, and the Marshall Plan could not have produced the economic miracle, had not a political organization of Western Europe first given these nations the security on which their confidence rested...
...While the "doves" today include many conservatives and isolationists, the majority in the peace movement consider themselves as revolutionary or at least located on the Left...
...In Kennan's case there had to be either subordination of the operative offices, or the first disagreement would be played out as a drama of spirit versus opportunism, with the predictably tragic ending for spirit...
...George F. Kennan certainly is no longer alone...
...In publishing his views on containment, therefore, "Mr...
...They are no less belligerent than the old Big Powers and are using their new power irresponsibly...
...American diplomacy has often suffered from this intellectual style: it offers a solution before it has explored the conditions of bargaining...
...Considering all this, it is difficult to see how Mr...
...Golden principles— but the Marshall Plan and containment, of which Kennan is justly proud, could not have succeeded without a slogan, an idea, a principle, without the strong political framework that provided security for the European recovery program, or without the atomic power of the United States that shielded the venture...
...Everyone was so kind to us-they treated me and Clive's wife just like whites...
...Finally, in the most recent months a new isolationism has appeared in the United States, provoked perhaps by the Vietnam War, but widening its revisionist scope to other areas and now probing into the foundations of power policy...
...Kerman thought it possible without recourse to arms...
...George F. Kennan's Memoirs are important because they dramatize the clash between ideal and fulfillment, principle and opportunity, spirit and power...
...Kennan shows that American policy-makers are constantly squandering fine opportunities because they have to consider whether what they do will look good to Congress and to public opinion, and this irritates foreign governments needlessly...
...On other continents the Cold War rages more intensively than ever, and in particular areas it even turns into hot war...
...Five years later, the Berlin Conference broke up over precisely this issue, and Kennan admits that anyway Stalin would have rejected Plan A in 1949 like all previous and later proposals...
...could not prevent Stalin's conquest of Eastern Europe...
...rest assured that we merely wish to draw a clearer line between your acreage and ours...
...the dividing line now runs through each party and separates doves from hawks rather than Right from Left or Conservative from Liberal...
...It is incomprehensible to me how anyone can say that the Cold War is over—even in Europe —as long as the wall stands in Berlin and people get shot for trying to cross from one country into another, or as long as Moscow can forbid Austria to join her natural market...
...In this conviction he was so radical that he advised against FDR's efforts to maintain at least the appearance of democracy in the Eastern countries...
...Well-meaning idealists "only add to the total volume of violence taking place in the affairs of nations...
...but that has not changed the condition itself, the power struggle and the policies which are still, in his words of 1946, "balancing the spheres of influence...
...But we must not blame Stalin for not getting the message, for even Walter Lippmann was deceived...
...the question was under what conditions the West could conduct it at all...
...When the Communists seized power in Prague (in February 1948), Mr...
...U.S...
...I blame Mr...
...Kennan's personal recollections, the diaries of his travels, the sharply etched sketches of people he met (though strangely enough, with the sole exception of Stalin, he has not chosen to include any of his foreign diplomatic contacts), the literary efforts to capture the mood of a landscape, the loneliness of a night spent on a tugboat, a conversation with a Hamburg whore—all written in a literate 19thcentury style which has been much admired by the reviewers...
...he reports that Harriman regarded himself as an operator rather than as an observer [read: I regarded him as an operator rather than a thinker...
...I know of no clearer definition of the Cold War than Kennan's pronouncement that "American policy must be based on the fact of Europe's division...
...Kennan has adopted a moral tone that seems to be incommensurate with his generally "cool" approach...
...Yet Keenan was in Moscow during the two periods of their greatest torment, the purges and the war...
...he himself is "not a man for causes," and if other people have aims, he pities them for being victims to such "weakness of human beings...
...but it could work only if accepted in toto...
...The information Kerman provides here is incomplete...
...As Abraham said to Lot: "If thou wilt take the left hand, I will go to the right...
...E.g., what if Stalin accepted it but would not allow free elections...
...For Keenan is thoroughly convinced that ideas and "causes" always spoil common sense in politics...
...For a long time, Kennan was the foremost, best-known, and most articulate spokesman of "disengagement" and a sort of hero to the pacifist Left...
...2. Mr...
...more normally, it is likely to generate tension...
...Too bad that a nice follow like Masaryk had to be plunged out of the window...
...indirectly he provoked the third, cold war...
...X." article in the June 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, he uttered a howl in 12 installments, entitled "The Cold War...
...It was a variation of the term "dry war" which was used before World War I in reference to the Anglo-German competition...
...Cold Peace AT THIS POINT, Kennan felt that his usefulness had been exhausted...
...Remonstrating against his own and the War Department THE INTELLECTUAL AS DIPLOMAT twice in wartime, he was admitted to the awesome presence of FDR, who—surprise...
...The American government is anxious to shift the responsibility of defense from its own shoulders to its allies...
...In opposing a policy of "disengagement" to the so-called Cold War, he merely presented the other horn of the same dilemma...
...the fourth, coexistence, has been used by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin long before Khrushchev made it into a slogan...
...By his own confession, Mr...
...De Gaulle is the latest of this motley company—or, vice versa, one might call Lippmann and Kennan premature Gaullists...
...Mr...
...Containment" is not a doctrine: "When I think of foreign policy, I do not think in terms of doctrines...
...In proving these strange claims, Kerman uses techniques best known in stories about miracles: he claims that he was able to predict these defensive moves because he had correctly analyzed the Soviet need for a defensive move...
...Just as Metternich did not think much of the Holy Alliance, so Kennan deplored the language of the Truman Doctrine: Americans must always have an ideology, he moans...
...Kennan has no sympathy for them...
...This may be the best of Mr...
...like Pavlov's dog, "most Americans react to the stimulus `Communism' with the standard response, `wipe out.' " Kennan and others have written against this attitude, which is easy to ridicule...
...To purge himself of Lippmann's charges, Kennan has added three explanations to the "Mr...
...Kennan may share in the credit for defusing this propaganda aspect of the Cold War...
...X." article became the government's manifesto of the policy of "containment...
...The reason may have something to do with the economy of the Erziehungsroman: only the enemy can provide the occasion for metaphysical breast-beating...
...In this sense Bernard Baruch used it during the negotiatons about atomic disarmament...
...Kennan seems to have in mind a confused American model, the philosopher as the substitute for the prince...
...Why then was he dissatisfied...
...but the record shows that he supported the wars in Greece and in Korea, and that he advised General Marshall to keep military forces in Japan and other Eastern countries, wherever the tide of Communism seemed to rise...
...They all wander around in a laby rinth of ignorance and error and conjecture, in which truth is intermingled with fiction . . . unjustified assumptions have attained the validity of premises . . . there is no recognized theory to hold on to .. . One wonders: Kennan was a major architect of American policy, for three years the director of the planning staff in the State Department...
...He felt that the inevitable showdown over spheres of influence in a divided Europe should not be awaited but provoked...
...The clash that developed is so characteristic that its description alone is worth the price of the book to anyone interested in the relationship between ideas and politics...
...Kennan...
...Coming back after the war to Germany where he had been educated, he winces at the spectacle of this horde of my compatriots [the occupation force] camping in luxury amid the ruins of a shattered national community, oblivious of the tragedy around them, inhabiting the villas the Gestapo and SS had abandoned...
...When hours may decide the fate of generations, the moment of decision must become the moment of action," said President Johnson, who probably lives at the other end of the philosophical spectrum from Mr...
...THE WHIM OF HISTORY Will press into a man's hand a flag behind which he rallies people—only to discover that he does not understand them and that they don't know why they follow him...
...At different times, Anthony Eden offered plans for "thinning out" and "withdrawal...
...In HENRY PACHTER itself" a Communist victory in Greece would not have bothered Kennan in 1947...
...Why then did Kennan insist so tenaciously that his plan should be offered...
...What is the relationship between these four words...
...These emendations, however, do not strike me as entirely candid...
...But "cold war," and "cold warriors" today implies a moral opprobrium which makes it all but impossible to talk about it as a condition which, unfortunately, continues to exist...
...even when he seemed to have achieved stature as a leading thinker of the opposition, he was misplaced among his admirers...
...But this proves nothing...
...Plan A was so well-balanced that no paragraph could be broken away from it without upsetting the entire scheme...
...Neither of us believes in this "world Communism" and "world capitalism" stuff kT^I anyway...
...Fit this with Kennan's image of himself as a child of the 18th century, fated to be the judge of the 20th, and you see le philosophe among the operators and gogetters...
...For "disengagement" is not the property of any party...
...it is a literary work, an Erziehungsroman, the story of a great conversion that begins with forebodings of the hero's calling and through tribulations leads him to resignation and to the wrestling in the desert from which, in the subsequent volume, he will emerge as the prophet: "to carry the public up to a clear view of the occurrences of these last years...
...Neither plan was negotiable, and one of the elementary rules of diplomacy is that there must be room for give-and-take...
...Even during World War II Keenan warned the U.S...
...For all of them, the idea of "disengagement" and "neutralism" became attractive either as a means to prevent the Cold War from escalating into a hot war, or to promote their own national aims...
...X." really was saying to the Russians: Please don't mind our propaganda, as we will disregard yours...
...But Stalin at that time still preferred a Europe full of political chaos and economic uncertainty where he could hope to win richer spoils, and he attributed warlike intentions to anybody who tried to stop him, however peacefully...
...since he chose to appear as the martyr of a cause, we have to judge him on his own premises...
...Cold War IN STARK CONTRAST to all this coolness, Mr...
...He mourns for the British Empire because the vacuum left has been filled by young nations...
...The soldier is apt to substitute the means for aims, or to escalate the means beyond the raison of the ends...
...The split-up of NATO, the decomposition of the West into a number of smaller units is almost a fact...
...The term "tragic" does not sufficiently characterize Kennan's dilemma as he faced the military-diplomatic power complex...
...and the foreign resident, weary of both Russia's war and Russia's winters, finds himself wanly wishing that the approaching political season might not be like the Russian summer...
...Kennan also hints that later on he saw eye to eye with Kennedy...
...but there is no commiseration of comparable intensity with the suffering of the Russian people...
...As the author reveals himself a crier in the wilderness, we also begin to understand why he gives us information one normally would not care to have about a minor statesman * George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1929-1950, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1967...
...It is essential to realize that Communism had nothing to do with this aversion...
...He also predicted that this policy would have to be implemented by an ideology and a military policy which fitted it...
...moreover, Korea is not in Europe, and the war there rested on no better foundations than the one in Vietnam...
...but this is not the language one expects from a man who chose the profession of a diplomat...
...In fact, his definition of containment could easily stand for Khrushchev's definition of coexistence if you change your position from facing East to facing West...
...Union "to support resistance" to its efforts to expand the area of its dominant influence —if anything, this meant to encourage the establishment of a West German government and of a West European Defense system...
...Kennan thinks that containment and disengagement are complimentary: the first was supposed to lead to the second, though it actually led to the third—cold war...
...Eventually he came to write these for himself only...
...Kennan for trying in 1967 to appear as the martyr and precursor of the revisionist school which denies this...
...In our century it has become increasingly difficult to find the right relationship between these extremes...
...nor does the public, nor does the press...
...But it does not absolve him of co-responsibility for the Cold War.* In the context of the late forties, containment meant the buildingup of positions of strength around the Soviet * The term "cold war" should be understood as merely descriptive and morally neutral...
...They do not have the humility of the gentlemanpolitician who knows the limitations of statecraft...
...It was precisely this implementation that later on caused Kennan to repudiate the alleged "doctrine" of containment...
...The first include Mr...
...To do him justice, therefore, we must once more probe the relationship of values and means in Mr...
...twice sided with him...
...he obtained from General MacArthur important changes in the occupation policy...
...For the preservation of peace, he says, "a reasonable balance of power and understanding of the spheres of influence was sufficient...
...propaganda has usually oversimplified the issues...
...X" article: (I) he admits he ought to have made it clear that containment was to be achieved through political rather than military arrangements...
...This misunderstanding may have its source in a generational sea change which also signifies a general realignment of political philosophy—from the globalist democratic idealism of FDR and Truman to the "cool" nationalism of the sixties...
...This is no ordinary memoir of a diplomat...
...Most likely, Kennan will again be unhappy about the way his dreams have come true...
...Did Keenan really expect the busy Harriman to read 30 pages of this...
...Appropriately, the book ends with the outcry: The President doesn't understand [U.S...
...he shared in preparing the Marshall Plan and in formulating the Truman Doctrine...
...the Congress doesn't under stand it...
...In Kennan's universe the political interest is always on the back burner of human interests, and the aims to be realized in politics are strictly limited: the princes who fought each other remained gentlemen, did not exterminate each other if they could help it, and did not allow politics to devour their own lives...
...Today there is no such thing as `commu HENRY PACHTER nism' in the sense that there was in 1947...
...But since power no longer is speaking with the voice of the Spirit, Kennan recognizes that the intelligentsia's role is outside the gates of power...
...Apparently Kennan assumed that the democracies would be patient enough to negotiate for years without result...
...To make the drama even more meaningful, the actual disagreement was not one between two different ideas (which is not really the stuff of a tragedy) but between the idea and its "implementation...
...He certainly did not...
...This, I think, was the origin of the term, and to understand it one must remember that at that time there was no Nato, and no West German government...
...In case after case, Mr...
...and it does not seem likely...
...Once more Kennan had figured out a chess game and neglected the political environment, the people who would have to make it work...
...For him the totalitarian mentality is a book with seven seals...
...The other memoirs, of course, are the "memos in purple prose" with which Kennan bombarded the State Department and which all too often were returned to him without comment...
...Only the 18th-century scholar will under stand that there is no conflict between the sentimental philosophe and the cynical politique: in the hierarchy of values the latter is usually subordinated, and his entire realm is hedged in on all sides by the morality, religion, and conventions of his class, the ensemble of which constitutes civilization...
...In its presence the victors had a certain duty of self-effacement and humility...
...Being an ardent diarist, he must have written something about this ordeal...
...Lippman foresaw that, basing our policy on the fact of Europe's partition, as Kerman did, we would only perpetuate, fix, and fortify that partition...
...the decisions that had to be made right there and then presaged a long and arduous confrontation at the edge of the Iron Curtain...
...The answer, of course, is that he did not care to be one...
...Of course, once we have declared we are doing that, we may be called to match our actions to our words, even when we cannot match our power to them...
...One must sympathize, in a way, with Keenan...
...but his suspicions are most intensely aroused when the military get an opportunity to determine policy...
...One might call him a disciple of Clausewitz in his reverent observance of the hierarchy: if moral values restrict the realm of politics, political values restrict the area of the military...
...THE INTELLECTUAL AS DIPLOMAT The question was not whether to start or to avoid the Cold War...
...he was interested, at best, in negotiating to kill time while the status quo deteriorated and the Germans grew nervous...
...With this Kennan denies any connection, but he might claim allegiance to the fourth...
...In rejecting these consequences of containment, Mr...
...Kennan's system...
...United States foreign policy has at all times differentiated between Russian, Chinese, Yugoslav, and recently also Rumanian Communists...
...Kennan's recollection...
...of the farseeing statesman whose plans extend into the next decade as against the near-sighted "operator" who is tossed about by the problems of the day...
...Kennan found it impossible, in fact he found it unnecessary, to check his ideas with "the operators" who would have to make them work, the Assistant Secretaries of State in charge of the various areas...
...A better word than repudiate would be "amend...
...Keenan delivers himself of angry outbursts like this: "Neither then [in 1933] nor at any later time did I consider the Soviet Union a fit ally or associate, actual or poten tial, for this country...
...X, therefore, for telling us in 1946 that Stalin's designs on Europe were the sole cause of the so-called cold war...
...faint and fleeting, tinged with reminders of rigors that recently were and rigors that are soon to come...
...2) containment was to be applied mainly to Europe and had no application to areas where the United States had no power...
...Much, sickeningly much that was innocent and precious had gone down with the rest...
...they feel it ought not to have tried to stop Stalin, even where Mr...
...policy toward the Soviet Union, and the still more famous "Mr...
...Nor can I agree with his assertion that the coup of Prague, as well as the Berlin blockade and the invasion of South Korea, were purely defensive moves...
...As a result, the term "radical" loses its meaning...
...This does not necessarily mean that his ideas are wrong or that liberals and radicals could not use them...
...Today, however, the Sino-Soviet conflict "is itself the greatest single measure of containment...
...It is necessary to emphasize this moral mainspring of Kennan's thinking, lest his operational proposals I will have to report appear cynical...
...I do not blame Mr...
...government not to manifest friendship for the Russians in public, and after the war he warned that collaboration in the occupied areas would not be possi ble...
...It also has placed "containment" in a military context, whereas in Kennan's conception the Soviet threat was not of a military nature and could not be met by primarily military measures...
...worse, taking the long view of history, Keenan was content to wait out a period of Nazi rule in Europe at the end of which, he trusted, difficulties of communications would erode the Nazi empire, and nationalist forces would complete its disintegration...
...the Cold War is on anyway, and the question is of winning or losing it...
...For even Dulles, Kennan asserts, had no intention of "liberating" any countries...
...Philip Blaiberg: "A t the hospital yesterday we were treated wonderfully...
...Stalin was not interested in negotiating a peace treaty for Germany...
...Indeed, the plan was beautiful and honest, and in this respect it was comparable to another plan designed by other American intellectuals—Acheson, Lilienthal, and Oppenheimer—also conceived to look good and to be rejected: the Baruch Plan for the control of atomic energy was perfect, well-balanced, and fair...
...It should be clear, however, that he considers himself a conservative...
...Walter Lippmann, however, saw what Kennan to this day cannot understand: that not even Talleyrand and Metternich were playing chess in a vacuum, and that in this 20th century certainly no diplomatic stance can be insulated from a nation's feelings, its ideologies, and its institutions, nor from its power and the will to use it...
...Muriel Haupt, mother of Clive Haupt, whose heart was transplanted to Dr...
...Neutralism" is almost the fashion now...
...government had to repudiate its author...
...Yet, he goes on, let no one think that we are defending "democracy" in Greece...
...To postpone, as Kerman then proposed, the establishment of a West German government would have meant to prolong the uncertainty that paralyzed Europe...
...He held exactly the position an intellectual would want: his assignment was to think about long-term lines of conduct...
...I think in terms of principles...
...Truman's fate in the Korean War later showed that this is not possible...
...He was capable of understanding the logic of Hitler's actions, and he thought that Stalin's "greedy demands" left Hitler "no choice but" to attack Russia...
...In an ideal setting, say in England, where all participants might come from the same school, the relationship might be one of crossfertilization...
...With him were looking for a variety of different reasons, the German Right (who appreciated the fact that Stalin was holding one-third of their country for ransom), the European Left (among them such great socialist leaders as Kurt Schumacher, Pietro Nenni, and Aneurin Bevan, who all appreciated the fact that in any Soviet-American showdown they would be caught in the middle), American isolationists (who feared that we were "overextended" or "overcommitted") and eventually the anti-American Right nationalists abroad (who hoped to achieve elbow-room for independent policies on the world stage...
...As though Pearl Harbor was no reason to fight—we had to "make the world safe for democracy...
...He speaks ironically of "my friends" whose problem it was to terminate the Berlin blockade and to save at least part of Germany for the West, whereas "I was trying to look ten or twenty years into the future...
...For Stalin was quite as happy with the unsettled status quo—which still left all of Germany open to anarchy, subversions, interference by Soviet forces, and to other uncertainties—just as Kosygin was to be later with the unsettled status quo in Vietnam and the Middle East...
...Stalin was They've Got Heart CAPE TOWN, South Africa-i-Said Mrs...
...A "doctrine" is the definition of a category of situations that require the identical answer...
...This from a diplomat and foremost adviser of the State Depart ment on Soviet affairs...
...specifically, the idea in question was Kennan's "containment" theory...
...Other people, who assumed that Soviet intentions were offensive, also had predicted these moves...
...Kennan had approved the military moves in Greece and Korea...
...Kerman prematurely accepted the wall between East and West that Khrushchev was to build later...
...The Communists were in danger of losing the elections, and without the coup Russian power was fated to decline in Czechoslovakia...
...the Polish Foreign Minister Rapacki offered a plan to denuclearize central Europe...
...A peace treaty for Austria along the lines of Plan A was on the table until 1955, and then Molotov only signed it under extreme pressure...
...of the intellectual who remains conscious of values transcending the realm of the political...
...Most emphatically, therefore, Kennan denies and repudiates the paternity of any efforts to invoke the containment principle with reference to the Vietnam War or any other situation that arose after Stalin's death and the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet conflict...
...Coexistence," a laudable concept if proposed sincerely, has turned into a device to stabilize one front while maneuvers are pushed elsewhere...
...This was, however one viewed it, a tragedy of appalling dimensions...
...Can one really mind that the Russians asked him to leave Mos cow a half year after he had been appointed Ambassador...
...Vice versa, we also may have to defend countries that cannot be called democratic by any stretch of the imagination...
...There have been three classical models of that relationship, the Greek, the German, and the French: the philosopher as the instructor of the prince, the philosopher as the ideologist of the prince, and the philosopher as the critic of the prince...
...THE INTELLECTUAL AS DIPLOMAT Kennan's composure remained unruffled: the Russians had held the real power anyway, so what was the difference if they kicked out the figurehead bourgeois ministers...
...It invalidated the original concept of containment and disposed of the problem to which it was addressed...
...Yet the same George Kennan, ten years later, became the hero of the liberal Left, of pacifists and of neo-isolationists, when he coined the slogan "disengagement" and seemed to call for a radically new policy, a policy either based on the premise that the Cold War was over or designed to overcome it...
...This happened to George F. Kennan, a diplomat's diplomat, civilized survivor of the Great Century which conceived of diplomacy as an art, and architect of the policy of "containment" which Walter Lippmann has denounced as the origin of the Cold War...
...Like Fourier waiting in his den every Friday for the millionaire who would donate the money for the first phalanstere, Kennan was content to wait until Stalin might be converted to his Plan A. What happened, however, was something different...
...Kennan's repudiation of the Cold War, therefore, applies to its ideological aspect alone, but is unconvincing with respect to its material organization...
...We are thus left with the picture of a man more lonely than most others—misunderstood by those who hail him...
...Nothing could have been farther from Kennan's intentions than to provide an ideology for a crusade...
...Kennan therefore might have answered Walter Lippmann: It is not a question of deciding for or against the Cold War...
...3. Self-Portrait as Don Quixote GWEN HIS MORAL STANCE and other intellectual equipment, Kennan was, of course, unlikely to fill a position that in our age the telegraph has reduced to the status of a gold-braided letter carrier...
...He is neither an isolationist nor a "peacenick...
...We would look good in the history books...
Vol. 15 • March 1968 • No. 2
