How We Got Where We Are

...In Greece, the civil government, long subjected to blatant American interference, was overthrown by a colonel's junta in 1967, in part to crush rising public sentiment among the Greeks for withdrawal from NATO and demilitarization of the society...

...It accepted and fortified, in popular mythology, the domino theory which regards revolution not as the product of indigenous social forces but as the consequence of "direct or indirect aggression...

...The Marshall Plan directed American productive resources to the economic rehabilitation of countries devastated by war...

...at that point Southern Asia and North Africa would lie open, and Western Europe could hardly survive the shock...

...The army seized Turkey's government in 1960 and, though it later permitted elections to be held, has kept a supervisory eye on it ever since...

...A Cabinet committee was organized to reach community leaders, especially businessmen, with the word...

...Acheson was a principal author of the Truman Doctrine, the engineer of its public acceptance, the theologian of its exegesis...

...Having returned to Washington at the end of 1946, Kennan served as part-time member of the special State Department committee set up to discuss Greek-Turkish aid...

...They unanimously agreed that "the only way we can sell the public on our new policy is by emphasizing the necessity of holding the line: Communism versus democracy should be the major theme...

...Years later, Kennan wrote that the sensation produced by the "X" article made him feel "like 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...

...Just as they did later when China's break with Moscow disclosed an even greater split, U.S...

...A great deal of this unanimity could be traced to Acheson's strong personality and his mastery of the diplomatic apparatus...

...He roused the meeting from its torpor with a powerful evangelical appeal...

...The earliest version of the domino theory soon became gospel...

...When he refused to turn his back on Alger Hiss, and resisted McCarthy's attack on the State Department for allegedly harboring an elastic number of card-carrying Communists, it was not out of softness toward the Communists but because the crudities of McCarthy-ism offended his sense of decorum...

...As with so many other adventures in containment, our intervention rapidly created the conditions to which it was supposed to be a response...

...By this time the Marshall Plan was in operation, and Greece joined it...

...There is no doubt, however, that the cold war snowballed by a process of action and reaction, each side's response to the other's thrust becoming the base for a new round of conflict...

...But in the agitated Washington atmosphere of 1946 it created a sensation...

...my voice now carried...

...But Lippmann was analyzing not any misgivings Kennan might have expressed in private, but a published document which undeniably laid the philosophical groundwork for a policy of military adventurism which Kennan only later opposed publicly...

...It is quite possible that Kennan's objections were less vigorous in fact than they were in retrospect—after he had turned against containment...

...At that we drank a martini or two toward the confusion of our enemies...

...What ended the civil war in Greece was not American power so much as the internal politics of the Soviet bloc...

...Denouncing socialism and its characteristic practice of state trading as incompatible with American free enterprise, he said our economic system could survive at home "only if it became a world system...

...Economic aid, therefore, took second place to winning the civil war which Ach-eson and Mr...

...Truman embraced their counsel without reservation...

...An increasingly hostile propaganda campaign to enflame American opinion against the Soviets, capped by Churchill's widely exploited Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, tightened the lines of mutual distrust...

...In early 1949 the country was in worse shape than it had been in 1945...

...As Democrats originated it and liberals in both the Democratic and Republican parties supported it, a special obligation rests upon them to reevaluate the past if they are to improve the future...

...He deserved McCarthy's libels least of all his victims...

...The declaration of global policy would tap the reservoir of anti-Communist emotion...

...Off-the-record interviews were granted to favored correspondents...

...Americans could generate a sense of horror at the thought that Russia possessed the power to march all the way to the Atlantic, but no reassurance from Russia's failure to do so...

...The Truman Doctrine, though decked out in economic aid to make it palatable, was essentially a policy of unilateral military intervention in another nation's internal affairs, and inevitably involved a high degree of political dictation...

...Americans ought to understand, he wrote, that the Soviet leaders were prisoners of a Marxist ideology which preached the impossibility of permanent peaceful coexistence with capitalism...

...Nobody seems to have asked precisely what kind of leadership history had summoned us to...

...It was taken for granted that the vast expansion of American military and economic power that had already taken place was, like British power, benevolent, freedom-loving, and peaceful, whereas any manifestation of Soviet power must ipso facto represent an evil design to capture the world for totalitarian Communism...

...Once Britain had announced its withdrawal from Greece there was never any question of what the American policy should be...

...At a Sunday staff session to prepare position papers he was asked if they were making a decision or executing one...

...Whipped up by the debate over Greek-Turkish aid, public opinion was peculiarly receptive to a seemingly learned analysis by one who had studied the Russians at first hand...

...They got there, in force, not by conducting revolutions in Greece and Turkey, but by building a fleet and selling arms—no ideological questions asked—to the Arabs...

...The great general found it impossible to lead an ideological charge...

...offer of participation by the Soviet bloc, the sigh of relief in Washington could be heard 'round the world...

...Convinced that the Kremlin had no intention of cooperating with Western capitalism, but based its policy on the assumption of inevitable conflict, Kennan sat down to instruct Washington in the facts of life as he saw them...

...It is astonishing how little dissent was expressed within the Government, how few critical questions were asked, when such a far-ranging policy as the military containment of Communism was adopted...

...Such a response of "firm and vigilant containment," he wrote, would "increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate," and promote tendencies within Russia leading to "either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power...

...As a rising figure in the diplomatic establishment ("my voice now carried") Kennan could not afford to repudiate the "team...

...I have always thought it a cruel irony that the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy should have singled out Dean Acheson as the symbol and apotheosis of softness on Communism...

...Joseph Jones, a former Fortune editor in the State Department who drafted the Truman message on Greek-Turkish aid in 1947 under Acheson's direction and later wrote a book about it (The Fifteen Weeks, Viking, 1955), repeatedly emphasized the Department's total unanimity in dealing with the crisis...

...He advised Mr...

...Two weeks after he became President he dressed down Molotov in a famous confrontation, and embarked on a hard-line policy designed to expel Soviet power from Eastern Europe and exclude it from Asia...

...Truman expressed the view of these interests...

...Yet it might have been asked just how an exhausted Russia which had lost 7,500,000 men and seen its own territory laid waste could launch world conquest against an adversary which controlled most of the world's intact industrial plant and all its nuclear weapons...

...Where President Roosevelt had ignored or moderated the anti-Soviet advice of Ambassador Harriman and others in the State Department, Mr...

...As a means of strengthening democracy and weakening Communism, however, the Marshall Plan succeeded and the Truman Doctrine did not...

...The Department felt called to a high mission...

...Acheson already knew...

...It is to Dean Acheson's credit that he was a principal architect of the Marshall Plan as well as the Truman Doctrine...

...A growing public information apparatus ground out press releases designed to transmit the Red scare to the remotest corners of the country...

...He deplored the deficiencies in his essay that became visible with hindsight—the failure to make clear that he was advocating political rather than military containment, the failure to specify a selective policy addressed to strategically vital areas as opposed to the Truman Doctrine of universal intervention...

...The worst apprehensions were confirmed by Moscow's arrogant occupation of northern Iran beyond the agreed date of withdrawal, but oddly not relieved by the withdrawal when it did take place...

...Clothing a program of military intervention in the rhetoric of economic aid and defense of democracy, it established the habit of systematic mendacity which our Government has practiced ever since...

...It is impossible, of course, to know what changes in Soviet policy, if any, might have occurred had our own policy been different...

...It was of foreboding significance that the public information program to sell the policy to the country was actually drafted before Mr...

...Even in hindsight he neglected to note his most egregious error—the failure to consider as one source of Soviet conduct the fact that Russia had barely escaped destruction at the hands of a Western anti-Communist power whose aggression the West at Munich had sought to channel in Russia's direction...

...Kennan's reputation was made...

...In consequence of Tito's stubborn refusal to subordinate Yugoslav economic interests to those of Moscow, the Cominform on June 28, 1948 publicly denounced him, and thereby revealed to an unbelieving world the yawning fissure in what had been taken for an invincible monolith...

...They were further aggravated by Mr...

...Truman had precipitated...

...Wounded, Kennan felt Lippmann "mistook me for the author of precisely those features of the Truman Doctrine which I had most vigorously opposed...

...aid to Greece and Turkey built into the client societies an unavoidable bias in favor of dictatorship...

...And finally the Doctrine sanctioned and exploited a virulent anti-Communist hysteria at a time when responsible leadership called for damping it down...

...The plain truth is that men like Averell Harriman, Clark Clifford, and Dean Acheson, all of whom supported the Vietnam war so long as there was any prospect of winning it militarily, founded the containment doctrine twenty years earlier on their own mistaken judgments, unexamined assumptions, and a vainglorious aspiration for the worldwide expansion of American power...

...The Truman Doctrine "committed the United States to defend the status quo everywhere . . Kennan talked to Acheson to protest Mr...

...For a few weeks in February, 1948, they were operating within twenty miles of Athens...

...The public-opinion buildup was vital, and Acheson took charge of it...

...His suspicions must have been reinforced when Truman resorted to crude economic blackmail, offering and then withholding credits for postwar reconstruction, in an effort to force Soviet compliance...

...All these mistakes, in one form or another, became embedded in public attitudes and, as the presuppositions of U.S...

...officials did not mind profiting from the great fact whose existence they refused to recognize...

...Their neurotic view of the outside world arose, he felt, from a basic insecurity...

...The Administration bill, providing $300 million for Greece and $100 million for Turkey, passed the Senate by a vote of 67 to 23 and the House by 287 to 107...

...But in so cleverly engineering public acceptance, Acheson set in train far-ranging consequences for which the last bill has yet to be paid...

...confining the money request to a modest $400 million would conceal the ultimate costs and long-term implications of ideological war...

...While he advised against hysteria and blustering toughness, he called for a long-term American commitment to the "adroit and vigilant" application of "unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful, stable world...

...In later years, President Truman was to describe this declaration of policy as second in importance only to his decision to drop the atomic bomb...

...Actually, there had been little guerrilla fighting during the incubation of the Truman Doctrine...

...foreign policy, set the pattern for increasing military domination of decision and action overseas...

...But, significantly, he never mailed the letter...

...The State Department sent a message of hearty commendation...

...Supplied and encouraged by Communist regimes in Yugoslavia, Albania, and to a lesser degree Bulgaria (Russia confining itself to a proxy role), the guerrillas attacked many towns and controlled substantial territory in the North...

...Truman's special counsel and speech writer, interviewed the highest officials of the military, diplomatic, and intelligence bureaucracies, and filed an implacably hard-line report, excerpts from which have been published in Arthur Krock's memoirs, Sixty Years on the Firing Line (Funk & Wagnalls, 1968...

...The country had been assured that aid would be primarily economic and political, but with the arrival of a military mission in Greece these promises went quickly by the board...

...Truman's ostentatious flourishing of the atomic bomb as another instrument of pressure...

...The Treasury had sent what he regarded as a foolish and naive message expressing anguish over the Russians' refusal to join the World Bank and Monetary Fund...

...To him, the fusing and inter-action of propaganda with policy was a magnificent example of administrative coordination...

...In common with most officials of the State Department, he regarded the one as a logical development of the other...

...The Doctrine promulgated a double standard of international morality, by which America claimed the right to unlimited national expansion on the pretext of barring Soviet expansion...

...Measured strictly by expediency, this was probably a sound political judgment...

...His account of events and the policy proposed to deal with them was dry, factual, unemotional...

...As containment failed to strengthen the democracy it was professedly intended to save, so also it failed to contain either Communism or Soviet national power...

...in the basin of world power," and "stopping only when it meets with some unanswerable force...

...Truman's message itself...

...To all such doubts little attention was paid...

...It sounded "exactly like one of those primers put out by alarmed Congressional committees or by the D.A.R...

...Clifford, Mr...

...Economic motives also came into play...

...Once American intervention was assured, Sofoulis broke with the Communists and, in July, 1947, they went underground...

...One need not assume a kindly benevolence in the Kremlin, or speculate on what might have happened but didn't, to understand our own mistakes...

...after Turkey, Iran would fall, and then the whole Middle East...

...Elaborating on the ideas of the long telegram, he depicted the Soviet leaders as committed by ideology and circumstances to a ruthless policy of expansion, striving to fill "every nook and cranny available...

...Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, perhaps the Administration's most passionate Russophobe, circulated hundreds of copies as required reading for the military establishment and Cabinet...

...Tenseness and controlled excitement" filled the room when Acheson expounded the emerging policy at staff meetings...

...When he had finished, not a single word of dissent was voiced by anybody in the room...

...The assembled Congressional leaders sat on their hands...

...While Congress considered the policy, the public-opinion buildup proceeded...

...He wrote a letter to Lippmann disavowing any attribution to the Russians of aspirations for world conquest...

...He had wanted to proclaim it, Krock reports, several times during 1946, but had been persuaded to await a better occasion...

...The Truman Doctrine "promulgated a double standard of international morality . • The paper containing this propaganda prospectus became "the most significant document used in the drafting of the Truman Doctrine," according to Jones of the State Department, who did the drafting...

...If he believed this, it is incomprehensible that he could have launched the nation on such a fateful course with the casual air of an American Legionnaire swinging a jaunty cane in a patriotic parade...

...More broadly, the absence of dissent reflected the fact that by early 1947 the assumptions of the Cold War had been largely accepted throughout the diplomatic establishment and the Truman Administration...

...When Molotov rejected a half-hearted U.S...

...With the deepening of national revulsion at the consequences of attempted containment in Southeast Asia, a comforting rationalization has developed among liberal Democrats...

...He signed it "X", but Arthur Krock, a friend of Forrestal's, promptly identified the author in The New York Times as Kennan...

...Apparently it never occurred to him to question his facile assumption that the Soviets were just the Nazis all over again, or to make sure that he was presented with alternative courses to the one everybody was recommending...

...There was only one point of view," he wrote...

...The occasion was provided by Britain's note of February 21, 1947, announcing that it would terminate military guardianship over Greece at the end of March...

...under the circumstances there could be only one decision...

...He saw no alternative, especially in Greece, to a policy of helping the established government subdue insurrection by opening the road to economic revival...

...Acheson met with one group of newsmen after another...

...Whether or not the Soviets were prepared to cooperate in organizing an effective international instrument of collective security, the Truman Doctrine registered our own Government's decision to short-circuit the United Nations except where it might be bent to the service of our national interest...

...Meanwhile, however, U.S...

...But when he saw a draft of the message a few days before Mr...

...He would make a statement of global policy but confine his request for money right now to Greece and Turkey...

...Widely reprinted and exhaustively discussed, the "X" article produced the same sensation on the public level as the long telegram had produced in the Washington bureaucracy...

...In the summer of 1946, President Truman assigned an able lawyer from St...

...Truman's sweeping generalities and what he suspected to be the Pentagon's infiltration of military expansionism into a program of political and economic aid...

...In their first bid for control in 1944, the Greek Communists had been smashed by Britain and the Royalists, while Stalin, faithfully adhering to his agreement with Churchill, lifted not a finger to help them...

...They argue that in the years immediately following World War II containment was a necessity dictated by presumed Soviet expansionism and the frenzies of a megalomaniac Stalin, but that changing times and the dispersion of Communist power have altered the postulates on which American policy should be based...

...Truman regarded even Byrnes as too soft on Russia...

...Reading the shallow and dogmatic long telegram in later years, Kennan was "horrified...

...ROBERT LASCH recently concluded his distinguished career as editor of the editorial page of the St...

...One of the few dissenters, curiously enough, was George F. Kennan, whose memos from Moscow had fed the sources of anti-Communism within the Administration and who was to become the ideologue of containment...

...As Under Secretary of State to James Byrnes, he had shrewdly profited from Byrnes' mistake in treating Mr...

...He came to be much admired for his snappy way of making decisions ("the buck stops here," he liked to say), but in this case he and the nation might have benefited from some second thoughts and even a bit of conflicting advice...

...Five days after the British note, a set of specific recommendations for action had been agreed on by the White House, State Department, and Pentagon...

...Truman needed no urging to proclaim his Doctrine...

...Accordingly, we must expect the Soviets to pursue a policy of expanding their power wherever they could, until met with superior force...

...To halt what Harriman called a "barbarian invasion of Europe" he set out, under the plausible pretext of establishing free democratic governments in Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria, to secure an "open door" for American economic influence, which would mean ultimately political power as well, in the border countries recaptured by Soviet troops from the Nazis...

...The Truman Administration was stacked with representatives of big business and finance—men like Harri-man, Robert Lovett, James Forrestal, Will Clayton, Dulles—who, having built for war the world's mightiest productive machine, now demanded an expansion of American power to guarantee peacetime markets and investment opportunities...

...Acheson always cast himself as a respectful adviser presenting the facts for Presidential decision, and never seemed to press his own views...

...Within a week after receipt of the British note, a coordinating committee of State, War, and Navy press agents started working out a public information (for which read "propaganda") outline...

...Louis Post-Dispatch...

...Even the President read it, so Kennan came to believe...

...How We Got Where We Are by ROBERT LASCH If the moral bankruptcy of the Vietnam war has convinced Americans that a foreign policy addressed to the military containment of Communism has reached dead end, it is important to understand the origins of that policy...

...Truman to envelop Greek-Turkish aid in a ringing declaration that would "scare hell out of the country...

...Not only had the basic decision for a militant policy been approved at all levels of government, but the ponderous machinery of the public-opinion buildup had already been set in motion...

...It worked through a regional organization which enabled the recipients to share policy decisions and allocations collectively...

...One day later the Congressional leaders were taken in tow, and thirteen days after that, Truman was standing before a joint session of Congress, somberly declaring that totalitarian regimes "imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States...

...Six days after Britain's note of February 1947—that it was withdrawing forces from Greece—had been received in Washington, Congressional leaders, with the conspicuous exception of Senator Robert Taft, were invited to the White House...

...It committed the United States to defend the status quo everywhere, with a special predilection for army dictatorships...

...Truman had ejected Wallace, his Secretary of Commerce, from the Cabinet for publicly disagreeing with Secretary of State Byrnes, and Mr...

...Soviet intractability in Eastern Europe and the Middle East had convinced most American leaders not that the Russians were morbidly sensitive about protecting the strategic approaches to their country, but that they had embarked on a career of world conquest...

...They "don't want to invade anyone—it is not in their tradition," he wrote...

...Containment, openly proclaimed, began in 1947 with the Truman Doctrine of aid to Greece and Turkey, but its roots went back to the days immediately following Franklin D. Roosevelt's death two years earlier...

...As translated by eager cold warriors like Forrestal, the doctrine became one of worldwide military intervention...

...Truman, who in 1941 had expressed the hope, according to The New York Times, that the Russians and the Nazis would kill each other off, saw no essential difference between Hitler and Stalin...

...Kennan's boulder, carelessly dislodged at the top of the cliff, has indeed plunged and crashed a long way, and it still goes rolling destructively along...

...Impressed, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, preening his feathers as the new Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told Acheson that if the country were given facts like these in strong terms, the Administration could expect support...

...As he relates in Present at the Creation (Norton, 1969), Acheson replied: "The latter...

...During the first year of the aid program the numbers, morale, and equipment of the guerrilla forces steadily increased...

...From them, in combination with the errors of Soviet policy-makers, who have often behaved as if they were members of the same union as ours, flowed a generation of Cold War, culminating in the grand calamity of the Indochina war, capped by a "Nixon Doctrine," which under the guise of reducing American forces in Asia reaffirms the intention to stay there in perpetuity...

...As Acheson relates in his memoirs, Secretary of State George Marshall, home for a few days between trips, assumed the task of expounding the Administration's decision, and "flubbed" it...

...Because these lands controlled the historic invasion routes to Russia, and before the war had been ruled by fascist and bitterly anti-Soviet forces, Stalin had good reason to suspect the benevolence of a Truman-Churchill move to restore Western hegemony...

...In a speech at Baylor University while his Greek-Turkish aid message was in the final stages of ghostwriting, Mr...

...Tito obligingly closed his borders to the Greek guerrillas, and by late 1949 the civil war was over...

...John Foster Dulles, appointed Republican adviser to the State Department in recognition of his Party's victory in the Congressional elections of 1946, went around the country making truculent speeches for the formation of a Western military bloc against Russia...

...The historical record does not bear them out...

...He urged less emphasis on military aid to Greece and none at all to Turkey, advised against casting the program in terms of ideological conflict, and warned that the Russians might reply with war...

...Louis, Clark Clifford, to prepare a comprehensive report on U.S.-Soviet relations...

...But in fact, they were contradictory...

...All felt that "a new chapter in world history had opened, and they were the most privileged of men...

...America must be prepared to use atomic and biological weapons if necessary, he argued, and should entertain no proposal for disarmament so long as any possibility of Soviet aggression existed...

...Whatever the scope and vigor of Kennan's objections to the Truman Doctrine as it emerged from the policy-making process, there was no time to heed his misgivings even if anybody had wanted to...

...The Kremlin's break with Tito shot away the philosophical basis of containment—the assumption that any Communists anywhere must be servants of Russian national interest—but nobody in the U.S...

...By early 1947, the cold war psychology had become deeply entrenched in Washington...

...Containment as here propounded differed from what he had in mind...

...No time was left," as he later recalled, "for measured appraisal...

...It avoided overt political interference...

...After a total expenditure in Greece and Turkey of $8.8 billion up to 1968—the most intensive dose of aid administered anywhere except in Vietnam—we found the Russians to be embarrassingly close and agonizingly powerful competitors in the Eastern Mediterranean from which we had set out to exclude them...

...Clifford saw Soviet policy as based on the expectation of a coming war for the world, and counseled the use of military power—"the only language they understand"—to block their expansion...

...If he sensed a military distortion of his views, nevertheless he was at this very period writing the famous tract, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published in Foreign Affairs, which was to establish him as the philosopher of containment...

...Truman's appearance before Congress...

...Such was the thinking that dominated the Administration to the virtual exclusion of dissent or even discussion...

...In 1946 and early 1947 the Communists had 10,000 to 12,000 guerrillas in the mountains of the North, but were seeking legal power, or a share of it, through coalition with the Liberal Party under Sofoulis...

...Only then could the American mission turn to the economic reconstruction which from the beginning had been Greece's foremost need...

...Out of government and heading for a disastrous campaign for President as a third party candidate, Wallace became the principal spokesman for the opposition...

...With what Acheson called "incredible speed," the new policy moved through the various stages of detail work and approval...

...Within two years a modest investment of $300 million expanded fourfold, and most of it went into weapons and training of troops while Greece writhed in poverty...

...Military domination of U.S...

...He drew a chilling contrast between American freedom and Soviet tyranny, locked in fateful contest at the ancient crossroads of the world...

...If Kennan was privately urging a distinction between military and political containment, the distinction did not come through in his published paper...

...One day when Acheson was discussing with his aides how to merchandise the Truman Doctrine, he leaned back in his chair, gazed across the street at the White House, and after some thought said, as Jones recounts, "If F.D.R...

...Acheson, in testimony before a Senate committee, described Soviet foreign policy as "an aggressive and expanding one...

...Acheson, aware that an egg had been laid, asked President Truman's permission to speak...

...Far from being the evil infiltrator who lost China, he was in fact a founding father of the cold war...

...If Russia took Greece, then Turkey's position would be untenable...

...policy-makers went right on building military barriers to a centrally controlled "Communist imperialism" long after the falsity of central control had been exposed...

...Senator Vandenberg conducted missionary work among influential Republicans...

...He pointed out the dangers of placing aid to Greece "in the framework of a universal policy rather than in that of a specific decision addressed to a specific set of circumstances...

...He ran through the dominoes until he had his listeners staring at Russian hordes flooding the beaches of the Atlantic Coast...

...Henry Wallace tried to give that kind of advice, but Mr...

...With such a world view in his mind, Mr...

...Walter Lippmann challenged the Kennan thesis in a brilliant series of newspaper commentaries which he later published as a book...

...The top desk men, according to Jones, viewed it as a historic delegation to the United States of "world leadership, with all its burdens and its glory...

...The hypothesis might have been advanced that Soviet truculence reflected weakness rather than strength, combined with almost psychotic memories of 1919, when the West had tried to strangle the Soviet Revolution at birth...

...Government was willing to admit it...

...He painted the Red menace in lurid tones...

...he was disturbed...

...There were other voices of dissent and warning or worried concern, such as Lippmann's and The Progressive's, but in general the country accepted the Administration case...

...only by exalting an external menace could they justify their repressive dictatorship and sustain their own leadership of the Russian people...

...were alive I think I know what he'd do...

...Not since Rome and Carthage, he said, had there been such a polarization of power...

...He was a captive of his own reputation...

...Working under Ambassador Harriman in Moscow, Kennan had burst out of bureaucratic obscurity in early 1946 with a long telegram to the State Department analyzing Soviet policy...

...Again, the timing was perfect...

...There were, of course, anti-Communist motives for the Marshall Plan...

...His editorials on foreign affairs won him a Pulitzer Prize several years ago...

...It was agreed to "relate military aid to the principle of supporting democracy," to assure the nation that "our new policy is not warlike but on the contrary the best way we know of avoiding war," and to proclaim the intention "of this Government to go to the assistance of free governments everywhere...

...The note was received almost with elation in the State Department...

...We have here," he wrote, "a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the United States there can be no permanent modus vivendi" The challenge could be met without recourse to a general military conflict, Kennan concluded, by blocking Soviet expansion at the critical points...

...Within a month of Harry Truman's accession to the Presidency, the whole direction of the Roosevelt policy had been reversed...

...He had advocated, so he thought, the exertion of political and economic influence, not to foil a hypothetical world conquest but to sustain a tolerable balance of power...

...Others perhaps will be more deeply impressed with the fact that policy had become the reflection of propaganda instead of the other way around...

...Truman like an untutored bumpkin...