George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950

By Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C.

When George C. Marshall became Secretary of State in January of 1947, he faced not only a staggering array of serious foreign policy questions but also a State Department rendered ineffective by neglect, maladministration, and low morale. Soon after his arrival Marshall asked George F. Kennan to head a new component in the department's structure--the Policy Planning Staff. Here Wilson Miscamble scrutinizes Kennan's subsequent influence over foreign policymaking during the crucial years from 1947 to 1950.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691227993

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George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950

PRINCETON STUDIES IN

INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AND POLITICS

Series Editors

John Lewis Gaddis

Jack L. Snyder

Richard H. Ullman

History and Strategy by Marc Trachtenberg (1991)

George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950 by Wilson D. Miscamble, c.s.c. (1992)

George F. Kennan and the Making of

American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950

Wilson D. Miscamble, c.s.c.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1992 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miscamble, Wilson D., 1954-

George F. Kennan and the making of American foreign policy, 1947-1950 /

Wilson D. Miscamble.

p. cm. — (Princeton studies in international history and politics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-08620-6 (acid-free paper)

eISBN 978-0-69122-799-3 (ebook)

1. Kennan, George Frost, 1904- . 2. United States—Foreign relations—1945-1953.

I. Title. II. Series.

E748.K374M57 1992 327.73—dc20 91-28336 CIP

R0

To Dad and Mum

Contents

List of Illustrations  ix

Preface  xi

Acknowledgments  xv

Abbreviations Used in Text and Notes  xix

CHAPTER ONE

Director of the Policy Planning Staff  3

CHAPTER TWO

Launching the Marshall Plan  43

CHAPTER THREE

Mediterranean Crises: Greece, Italy, and Palestine  75

CHAPTER FOUR

The North Atlantic Treaty  113

CHAPTER FIVE

The Division of Germany  141

CHAPTER SIX

Titoism, Eastern Europe, and Political Warfare  178

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Limits of America's China Policy  212

CHAPTER EIGHT

Japan and Southeast Asia  247

CHAPTER NINE

The Hydrogen Bomb and the Soviet Threat  281

CHAPTER TEN

Korean Dilemmas and Beyond  314

CONCLUSION

America's Global Planner?  346

Appendix A

Policy Planning Staff Papers, 1947–1949  359

Appendix B

Consultants Who Appeared before the Policy Planning Staff, 1947–1949 (Partial List)  363

Bibliography  367

Index  405

List of Illustrations

1. George F. Kennan as Director of the Policy Planning Staff, 1947–1950

2. Kennan as State Department Deputy at the National War College, 1946

3. The early days of the Policy Planning Staff, 1947

4. Kennan in Japan, 1948

5. Kennan's staff circa 1948–1949

Preface

IN JULY 1947, the New York Times Magazine published a feature article by Brooks Atkinson, the Times' drama critic and former Moscow correspondent, entitled America's Global Planner.¹ The subject of Atkinson's journalistic portrait was a foreign service officer, George F. Kennan, whom Secretary of State George C. Marshall had chosen to direct the newly established Policy Planning Staff in the Department of State. Kennan served as director of the Planning Staff through to December 31, 1949. Under him this group investigated a range of foreign policy problems staggering in their diversity and complexity. The core problem which confronted Kennan and dominated American foreign policy during his tenure, however, was how to respond to the antagonism and the apparent threat posed by the Soviet Union. Kennan's contribution in developing American foreign policy in response to the Russians is the subject of this study.

This work is not a biography, nor is it a survey of Kennan's ideas or a simple narrative of Kennan's activities devoid of context. Rather, its examination of Kennan's involvement in policy-making serves as a prism through which to view the wider spectrum of discussion and decision involved in devising the main lines of foreign policy during the crucial postwar period in American diplomacy. Kennan and his Planning Staff are suited uniquely for an investigation of this sort. Under his direction it lay close to the center of policy-making within the State Department which, with President Truman's approval, was the principal source of policy at this time.² The study then primarily casts light on what American policy was and on the process of its development. Assuredly, as a corollary, it identifies Kennan's role and ascertains his contribution. Does he deserve the appellation applied to him by Atkinson over four decades ago? If so, what does it mean?

Kennan's importance has long been recognized and his contribution has been the subject of much comment and controversy. In particular Kennan's role in formulating the so-called containment doctrine—he has been dubbed the architect of containment, the great theorist of containment, and the founding father of containment,—has provoked much discussion and debate.³ Much of this unfortunately has been little more than a rehash of old arguments and a repetition of seeming verities. But the appearance of a number of recent studies specifically devoted to Kennan's thought has served to deepen further our understanding. Notable among these is the penetrating analysis of Kennan's views and ideas provided in John Lewis Gaddis's Strategies of Containment.⁴ This outstanding work, which examines the whole of United States national security policy from World War II through the Nixon presidency, attempts to outline in a composite manner Kennan's geopolitical code as presented in the late 1940s. The works of David Mayers, Anders Stephanson, Walter L. Hixson, and Barton Gellman similarly are in their essence studies of Kennan's ideas and their development over time.⁵ The emphasis here is quite different. This study moves beyond the analysis of ideas to their implementation and systematically appraises the extent to which Kennan's recommendations actually influenced policy. Kennan is viewed less as theorist and more as policymaker. The content of policy and the process of its formulation are the central focus.⁶

My approach has been to adopt what Barry Rubin has termed a middle ground between two extremes: the dry diplomatic history that presents decisions as clear-cut and inevitable by omitting the clash and blend of motives, personalities, abilities, and even accidents that occur in the policy process, and the journalistic account focusing on gossip and personalities to the exclusion of fundamental issues and options.⁷ Necessarily I have explored the nature of the relationships both among certain key policymakers—such as Kennan's with General Marshall and with Marshall's successor, Dean G. Acheson—and among influential groups within the State Department, such as the Division of European Affairs and the Policy Planning Staff. The story of American foreign policy in the late 1940s is partly one of bureaucratic battles at the second echelon of the government. Tracing Kennan's actions provides an entree into these important disputes and their key participants.

I cannot claim to have captured in any full and objective fashion the world of the policymakers mentioned here with its inevitable compromises, ultimate objectives only dimly perceived, and constantly competing pressures that confused and obscured policy vision.⁸ What I have aimed to do—with what success the reader must judge—is to avoid reading history backwards and imposing an artificial coherence on American foreign policy as it developed during 1947 to 1950. The historiography of the origins of the Cold War already is overly burdened with studies of this kind.⁹ My hope is that this work, whatever its limitations, is one which grows organically from the evidence and which consequentially speaks with authenticity of the past.¹⁰

What might be termed interpretative extremism has been an occupational hazard for historians of postwar American diplomacy. But the concern for interpretation has generated more heat than light and has not always furthered the historian's first task of determining what actually happened. I have deliberately avoided grand interpretative assertions and have not sought to develop some neat interpretation which would permit my work to be easily categorized by writers of those perennial reviews of the Cold War literature. Nor have I aimed to make this work of history into one of historiography by endlessly questioning the existing literature. I have benefitted from this literature but have no desire to get bogged down in sterile debates between opposing schools within it.

As the foregoing hopefully makes quite clear my work is neither entrapped in some artificial methodological sophistication nor constrained by the need to conform to some overarching interpretation. It accepts the premise that individuals, such as Kennan, can and do make a difference in foreign policy formulation. Perhaps the focus in this study is overly concentrated on the United States and it is but another contribution to what the British scholar D. Cameron Watt has termed American nationalist historiography (although I should add I am not an American).¹¹ Yet an effort is made here to take account of the influence upon American policy of and the constraints applied to it by other powers and their representatives. In some cases this was quite decisive.

This work is mainly one of a splitter as opposed to a lumper (to borrow J. H. Hexter's terminology which John Gaddis has made so familiar to American diplomatic historians).¹² My hope is that it will be of interest to splitters and lumpers alike. Despite the profuse literature on the origins of the Cold War—some might say because of it!—there is much yet to be understood about American foreign policy during the Truman administration. This work clarifies that American foreign policy from 1947 to 1950 was not simply a working out of a clearly delineated doctrine of containment. Although Truman and his advisers determined as early as 1946 that Soviet actions endangered American security and resolved to meet that danger, no explicit course of action was charted.13 Only in a piecemeal and staggered manner did the Truman administration decide upon the major elements of the American response to the Soviet Union. Kennan operated close to the center of such decisionmaking and this study of his involvements clarifies how each policy element resulted from a complex of factors. This book reveals such factors and suggests that the much discussed containment doctrine did not dictate the policies determined from 1947 to 1950 but rather the policies gave form and meaning to the doctrine.

This study pays attention initially to the circumstances of the Planning Staff's establishment and to Kennan's selection as its director. It then scrutinizes the major elements of American foreign policy during the period from 1947 to 1950. Throughout this work the emphasis has been placed on revealing and comprehending how and why American foreign policy developed as it did. The goal is understanding, not judgment and condemnation.

¹ Brooks Atkinson, America's Global Planner, New York Times Magazine, July 13, 1947, pp. 9, 32–33.

² On the State Department's dominant role during the Truman presidency see I. M. Destler, Leslie H. Gelb, Anthony Lake, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy (New York, 1984), pp. 168–71; and Barry Rubin, Secrets of State: The State Department and the Struggle Over U.S. Foreign Policy (New York, 1985), pp. 49–75.

³ For the direct quotations see Thomas M. Magstadt, Understanding George Kennan, Worldview 27 (September 1984): 7; Norman Podhoretz, The Present Danger (New York, 1980), p. 17; William Taubman, Stalin's American Policy: From Entente to Detente to Cold War (New York, 1982), p. 166.

⁴ John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York, 1982).

⁵ David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy (New York, 1988); Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); Walter L. Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York, 1989): and Barton Gellman, Contending With Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power (New York, 1984). One should also note the fine discussion of Kennan's thought in Michael Joseph Smith, Realist Thought From Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge, La., 1986).

⁶ The fine collective biography by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York, 1986) is quite insightful on these questions but the huge scope of their subject perforce limits the depth of their investigation of the matters examined in this work.

⁷ Rubin, Secrets of State, p. xi.

⁸ This relies on Lisle Rose's discussion of the gulf between the writing of history and the effective making of it in his The Trenches and the Towers: Differing Perspectives on the Writing and Making of American Diplomatic History, Pacific Historical Review 55 (February 1986): 99.

⁹ An example would be Daniel Yergin's Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston, 1977), with its artificially constructed Riga and Yalta axioms.

¹⁰ See Philip Gleason's Methodological Confession of Faith, in his Keeping the Faith: American Catholicism, Past and Present (Notre Dame, Ind., 1987), pp. 216–25; direct quotation on p. 222.

¹¹ D. Cameron Watt, Britain, the United States and the Opening of the Cold War, in Ritchie Ovendale, ed., The Foreign Policy of the British Labour Governments, 1945–1951 (Leicester, 1984), p. 48.

¹² Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. vii–viii.

¹³ Deborah Welch Larson reveals well the fluidity in American policy during 1945–1946 in her Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton, 1985).

Acknowledgments

IN THE COURSE of completing this study I have acquired debts to both people and institutions which I wish to acknowledge, although, of course, the responsibility for the study's contents belongs solely to me.

A number of people who participated in or observed the formulation of foreign policy described in this study were generous in permitting me to interview them. The full list is included in the bibliography but I must make special mention of four individuals. George F. Kennan took time from his busy schedule to speak with me and gave typically insightful and forthright responses to my questions. Mr. Kennan also took time to read many of the following chapters in draft form and carefully replied to specific questions arising from them. Kennan's assistance to me and my regard for him have not diminished the rigor with which I have sought to examine his role, as I trust the reader will agree. Kennan's friend and one-time Planning Staff colleague, John Paton Davies, met with me in his beautiful home in Asheville, North Carolina, and demonstrated there the powers of analysis which made him such a prescient commentator on Asian questions. Paul H. Nitze spoke with thoughtfulness and almost clinical care but with genuine regard for the man he succeeded as director of the Planning Staff, despite their profound differences over policy both then and subsequently. Kennan's largely unheralded but nonetheless effective bureaucratic rival, John D. Hickerson, described in detail and with relish his battles with the planning chief, especially over the North Atlantic treaty.

This manuscript had its origins in the doctoral dissertation which I completed at the University of Notre Dame under the wise and judicious direction of Vincent P. DeSantis, who has continued to be both a source of constructive criticism and ready encouragement during the substantial revision and enlargement of the dissertation for publication. Thomas Blantz, C.S.C., and Philip Gleason of the History Department and Alan Dowty of the Government Department of Notre Dame read the original dissertation and offered helpful suggestions. Tom Blantz has gone beyond the call of duty in his continued willingness to assist me with this project. He is a true friend. Richard H. Ullman of Princeton University read the entire manuscript and gave helpful comments on it. Chapter 2 on the Marshall Plan benefitted from the critical comments on an early draft of it generously offered by Robert H. Ferrell of Indiana University. Dr. Forrest C. Pogue, General Marshall's esteemed biographer, assisted me by sharing his knowledge of the reasons for the Planning Staff's establishment. Lawrence S. Kaplan of Kent State University gave comments on the manuscript, particularly the chapter on the North Atlantic Treaty, as did Sir Michael Howard, now of Yale University. Robert Blum, David Anderson, William Stueck and Melvyn Leffler all gave comments on an earlier draft of chapter 7 on China. Thomas Schwartz and Hans-Jurgen Schroder did the same on an earlier draft of chapter 5 on the division of Germany. Joseph M. Siracusa introduced me to the study of American diplomatic history at the University of Queensland (now many years ago!) and he made his work on NSC 68 available to me. My colleagues Thomas Kselman and Donald Critchlow gave me key advice down the home stretch. Other historians who have assisted me in one way or another include Anna Kasten Nelson, the capable editor of the Policy Planning Staff papers written during Kennan's tenure as its director; Robin Winks; and Linda Killen. Jim King, c.s.c. and John Young, c.s.c. gave the manuscript discriminating layman's readings, while Steven Brady, Matt Cronin and Steve Ruemenapp assisted with its final preparation. Finally, I must express my deep gratitude to two Gaddises—firstly Gaddis Smith, Director of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, who arranged for my fellowship year in the stimulating surrounds of Yale which made possible the completion of this study; and secondly, John Lewis Gaddis, Kennan's authorized biographer, who has given me real support on this project, commented on large parts of it in one form or another and urged me to publish it. In a way that is hard to explain John Gaddis's regular invitation to me to participate in the Baker Peace Studies conference which he organizes annually at Ohio University helped maintain my interest in completing this book when, in the midst of seminary studies, it was flagging somewhat. The trip to Athens, Ohio, invariably reignited the flame within me to get back to Kennan.

In a less direct but no less indispensable way I am indebted to the historians of postwar American foreign policy whose work I have drawn from. The extensive bibliography lists these works. In a particular way I am indebted to the other Kennan scholars—John Lewis Gaddis, David Mayers, Anders Stephanson, Walter Hixson, Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas—from whose work I have benefitted in varying degrees. Most of these scholars had access to my early work in dissertation form and I am glad to return the compliment here by making some use of their studies.

In a very basic way archivists and librarians have made my work possible and I must express appreciation to the staffs of the National Archives; the Harry S. Truman Library; the Library of Congress; the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript and Firestone Libraries at Princeton; the MacArthur Archives in Norfolk, Virginia; the George C. Marshall Research Foundation in Lexington, Virginia; the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan; the Butler Library at Columbia University; the Sterling and Mudd Libraries at Yale University; and the Theodore M. Hesburgh, c.s.c. Library at the University of Notre Dame. In particular I must thank Gerald Haines, a one-time staff member of the Diplomatic Branch of the National Archives, and Irwin Muehler, Warren Orvahl, Dennis Bilger, and Liz Safly of the Truman Library. Jean Holliday of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton was most helpful in providing photographs. The Washington Post and Life Magazine generously granted me permission to publish photographs. Mr. Arthur Altschul gave me access to his father's papers at Columbia University and the estate of James V. Forrestal gave me permission to use materials from the Forrestal Papers at Princeton.

The editors of Mid-America: An Historical Review and American Studies: New Essays from Australia and New Zealand kindly have granted permission to use material previously published in article form. Frank Cass Ltd., the publishers of Diplomacy and Statecraft, did the same. Mrs. Catherine Box and Mrs. Ettie Oakman typed the manuscript at varying stages. Generous folk have provided me with fine accommodations on my research trips—Mrs. Heroldine Helm in Independence; Dick and Joanne Rentner in Virginia Beach— (Joanne, again let me apologize for not staying for the dinner party!); Jim and Sue Ragland and the Holy Cross Brothers Communities at Mackin and McNamara High Schools in Washington, D.C.; and John Young, c.s.c. in New Haven.

Institutional debts which I must note are to the History Department of the University of Notre Dame; to the Harry S. Truman Institute for National and International affairs for grants which funded my various research visits to the Truman Library; to the sponsors of the Notre Dame History Department's John Highbarger Award which helped finance my first research visit to Princeton; and to my religious community, the Congregation of Holy Cross who carried me for a year. I also must thank all the fine people at Princeton University Press who contributed to the preparation and production of this book. I am especially indebted to Malcolm DeBevoise, Christine Heslin Benincasa, and Bill Laznovsky for their assistance. It has been a pleasure to work with them.

George Kennan once pointed out that the studying and writing of history is a relatively lonely occupation. I confess that occasionally I found it so but the interest and support of good friends sustained me and I am deeply grateful to them. I want to thank especially my confreres in the Congregation of Holy Cross led by Lucas Lamadrid, who wanted to see his name listed in these acknowledgments. Rector Thomas King, c.s.c., and all the men of Zahm Hall at Notre Dame, where I have the good fortune to live, offered real encouragement. Also I should mention that my students' inquiries about my book and their promises to purchase it prompted its completion. I look forward to autographing their copies! Lastly, I must thank my family who have supported me over a long period on this and all else I have undertaken. My parents and my sister and brother, Jenny and Phillip, have helped keep me honest and committed through their example and love. I'm not sure that my Mum will read all of this book to my Dad but I hope she will read the dedication which is but a token of my love and gratitude to Doug and Bobbie Miscamble of Brisbane, Australia.

Abbreviations Used in Text and Notes

Fig. 1. George F. Kennan as Director of the Policy Planning Staff, Department of State, 1947–1950. Reprinted with permission of George F. Kennan and the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.

George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950

CHAPTER ONE

Director of the Policy Planning Staff

MARSHALL TAKES COMMAND AT STATE

On January 21, 1947, George Catlett Marshall, the organizer of victory as Army Chief of Staff during World War II and the personification of devotion to duty, replaced James F. Byrnes as secretary of state. A grim and menacing world situation faced him and his nation. The West European economies, plagued by severe shortages of food and coal during a brutal winter, appeared on the verge of collapse.¹ Such a collapse when joined to evident political weakness and psychological exhaustion seemed certain to redound to the benefit of local communists, particularly in France and Italy. Further, Great Britain's grave economic difficulties forced her to confront the painful reality that she was no longer a great power, to acknowledge her military weakness and to reduce her commitments throughout the world. Magnifying the threat to America's interests inherent in European economic and military weakness was the Soviet Union's seeming ambition and capacity to exploit it. By the time Marshall took his place in Harry S. Truman's cabinet the United States and the Soviet Union, the only nations to emerge from the war against Hitler's Germany as major powers, faced each other as suspicious adversaries. Their wartime cooperation, such as it was, largely ended with the defeat of the common foe. During the volatile and confusing period from the War's end to Marshall's appointment to head the State Department Soviet-American relations were characterized by a series of disputes—over Eastern Europe, Germany, Iran, economic issues and atomic energy.²

By the end of 1946 many American officials had concluded that the Soviet Union's antagonistic attitudes and actions endangered America's national security and they sought to meet the Soviet challenge.³ As Soviet-American differences increasingly covered the diplomatic landscape the task of discerning Soviet intentions and of developing a suitable American response dominated the formulation of American foreign policy. But this process of developing a policy to check the perceived Soviet threat was still in its infancy when Marshall took office and it was by no means clear that the Truman administration possessed the capacity and the stamina to forge a coherent and sustainable policy. There was no clear course charted. No real direction had been set. Essentially Marshall inherited only a growing disposition to oppose Soviet ambitions and aggrandizement. He faced an enormous task, one at which a lesser person might have balked. But Truman had selected well. The president wanted a strong secretary of state and he got this in Marshall. With Truman's broad approval and full trust, the new secretary of state assumed responsibility to preside over the formulation of policy.

Marshall took control of a largely neglected and ineffective department where morale was exceedingly low.⁴ During the Second World War Franklin Roosevelt substantially excluded the State Department from decision-making preferring to rely on his military advisers and a few personal advisers like Harry Hopkins. On succeeding to the presidency, Truman did not set out to by-pass the department and looked upon his secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, as his principal adviser on foreign policy. But Byrnes, like Roosevelt, generally ignored the department. His under secretary, Dean G. Acheson, later reflected that Byrnes thought of the State Department as himself and Chip [Charles E.] Bohlen and Doc [H. Freeman] Matthews.⁵

The Department of State which Byrnes consigned to Marshall was beset with problems not only of morale but also of an administrative and organizational nature. After the war the department underwent a great expansion because it absorbed many of the functions and personnel of such wartime agencies as the Office of Strategic Services, the Office of War Information, and the Foreign Economic Administration.⁶ Simultaneous with this bureaucratic burgeoning and partly as a consequence of it, confusion existed within the department over procedures and functional responsibilities involved in policymaking. The department writhed in confused channels of communication, lack of direction, and general impotence. Viewed as a whole it was a most unimpressive agency in formulating and developing policy. On the day Marshall moved to the new State Department offices at Foggy Bottom, Truman's Chief of Staff, the taciturn Admiral William D. Leahy, wrote in his diary that from long association with General Marshall on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I am satisfied that he will accomplish a marked improvement in the efficiency of the Department of State.⁷ Leahy proved prescient.

Marshall made full use of the State Department which he strengthened and trusted. During his tenure as secretary and that of his successor, Dean Acheson, the department would enjoy a sort of Golden Age in which it took the principal role in forming policy.⁸ Clearly this owed much to the careful and constructive relationships that Marshall and Acheson maintained with Truman but the restoration of the State Department under Marshall also played a part. Marshall imposed a sense of order within the department and injected new life into its officers by giving them responsibility. Although there had been some apprehension within the department that the general would impose such rigid discipline and procedures that ideas would never make their way to the top, Marshall never used excessive or constricting means to establish orderly staff procedures and clear lines of authority.⁹ He delegated Acheson, who stayed on as his under secretary for some months, to be his chief of staff and to run the department. Matters for his decision and his instruction would come through the under secretary.¹⁰ Believing in staff work and deeply secure in himself, Marshall willingly placed responsibility for policy-making on subordinates from whom he invariably garnered loyalty and respect. The new secretary, in stark contrast to his predecessor, preferred to have problems largely resolved before they reached him.¹¹

In addition to clarifying lines of command Marshall instituted some significant restructuring within the State Department whose complete state of disorganization shocked him.¹² At Acheson's urging he reversed Byrnes's decision to disperse intelligence and research work among the geographic divisions of the department and ordered it centered in one office.¹³ More important, Marshall established the Executive Secretariat when he consolidated a number of supposed coordinating units in the department into one organization. To head this unit he selected Carlisle H. Humelsine, a capable and trusted former aide who had organized a similar unit in the Pentagon during the war years. The secretariat welded the offices of the secretary and under secretary into one and ensured that no paper requiring action came to the secretary without having obtained all necessary clearances at lower levels. It then followed up on every decision made. The Secretariat under Humelsine was not directly concerned with the content of policy but was key to its considered formulation and effective implementation.¹⁴

And, of course, Marshall had the idea of forming a planning group in the State Department. He recalled that I was horrified when I got into the State Department to find. . . that each subdivision was a separate industry—a compartment by itself—which is all of the nonsensical organization things I have ever heard of.¹⁵ Marshall sought to establish a body which might assist him to develop policy coherently and, perhaps, exercise some oversight of the disparate divisions of the department to ensure they avoided working at cross purposes.¹⁶ In his initial months in office and burdened with many pressing concerns he did little directly to create such a body although others in the department were cognizant of the crying need to give strategic direction to policy.¹⁷ Acheson, in particular, railed against the sin of ad hocery (sic) and emphasized the need for more coordination and planning.¹⁸

Appropriately perhaps, it was to Acheson that Marshall, in characteristic fashion, delegated the task of initiating the formation of the new planning group. To this end, during the first week of Marshall's secretaryship—January 24 to be precise—Dean Acheson called to his office George Frost Kennan, a foreign service officer then lecturing at the National War College. He informed Kennan, with whom he had become acquainted following the diplomat's return from Moscow eight months earlier, that Marshall intended to establish a unit to plan and review policy within the State Department. Acheson could not elaborate specifically on its structure or functions because he was exploring unfamiliar terrain but he spoke of the need for something in the nature of a Deputy Under Secretary.¹⁹ He then approached Kennan on his willingness to accept such a position. Kennan's glands for power must have experienced a sudden explosion in activity at the prospect of his appetite for real influence in policy-making being satiated at long last. He indicated his readiness to take on a position where he could really contribute to a successful American foreign policy but pointed out his need to complete his tour of duty at the War College through the end of June.²⁰

Kennan's War College obligations presented a complication and delayed his return to the State Department. Early in February Acheson spoke again with Kennan. He reported that after further consideration the policy coordination and review functions would be placed in the hands of the new secretariat but that Kennan was needed to head the planning unit. He accepted that Kennan could not give himself full-time to his State Department assignment until the conclusion of his work at the War College. But he obtained Kennan's agreement to assist part-time during the intervening period in the preliminary work of setting up a planning organization in the department.²¹ He thereupon asked Kennan to submit an outline of the organization and personnel of a planning unit which he might clear with General Marshall.

The experience of the State Department itself contained little which could serve directly as a model. Planning had not been totally ignored, however, and the idea of a formal planning group was not entirely new. Early in January 1944, Secretary of State Cordell Hull created the Post-War Programs Committee and the State Department Policy Committee. Hull established these committees for a specific purpose—to consider problems arising out of World War II—and each committee consisted of departmental officers with other responsibilities. Hull's successor, Edward R. Stettinius, a master of style over substance, replaced these two committees with what he called the Secretary's Staff Committee made up of the assistant secretaries and other top officials and charged with a grandiose list of objectives, among them policy planning. This goal remained notably unfulfilled and the committee typically performed ineffectually in 1945 and 1946.²² In reality the inheritance regarding planning from within the State Department consisted of a weak concern for the task and a number of either limited or pathetic attempts to manifest this concern. Perhaps there were some lessons on what to avoid but clearly Marshall's decision to establish a planning group did not derive from a desire to revive or revitalize any previous unit within the department. Kennan would have the opportunity in large measure to design and construct a new component in the structure of the State Department.

Marshall gave few detailed instructions to shape the structure and functions of his proposed planning body during the next three months, although he spoke of the need for it within the councils of the administration.²³ Certainly Kennan did not work to some detailed prescriptions provided by Marshall with only one exception. Marshall apparently did not want the Staff to be manned by distinguished outsiders who might restrict and pressure him. The Staff was to be drawn primarily from within the department.²⁴ Kennan sensed that Marshall wanted a unit to fill, at least in part, the place of the Division of Plans and Operations to which he was accustomed in the War Department.²⁵ During World War II Marshall charged the Operations Division of the War Department with responsibility for the Army's part in strategic planning and direction of operations. In retrospect it seems unlikely that he conceived that the planning group in the State Department should perform a similar totality of functions as the Operations Division.²⁶ It is more likely that he viewed the Strategy and Policy group, a component of the Operations Division which focused on policy formulation rather than direction and implementation, as a more suitable model. But Marshall never identified what came to be called the Policy Planning Staff as modeled upon any particular group, despite his taking great pride in creating it. The general's central contribution came in his recognizing the need for a planning group and in his expectation, as Acheson remembered it, that the group would look ahead, not into the distant future, but beyond the vision of the operating officers caught in the smoke and crisis of current battle and also. . . constantly reappraise what was being done.²⁷

While General Marshall gave little detailed guidance most other departmental officials had no opportunity to offer any. The shape and functions of the planning group did not become subjects for formal discussion among the department's senior officers—the assistant secretaries and the directors of the regional offices. Acheson simply informed them of Marshall's intention at one of his under secretary's meetings.²⁸ This minor involvement of the operational divisions, both geographic and functional, deftly contributed to the lack of bureaucratic opposition to the Planning Staff. There was no situation and no forum for tactful opposition to the planning group's creation, although some officials—no doubt eager to defend the prerogatives of their bailiwicks—considered it unnecessary.²⁹ And, it was supported, after all, by the new secretary with his unparalleled stature and reputation. Also most officials did not perceive of this planning group as endangering the essence of their own divisions. The expectation was that it would complement rather than challenge the roles already played by their divisions. Reinforcing this feeling of acceptance by officers was the realization that the Planning Staff would be drawn largely from within the department. The planners would be fellow members of the club and known to them.³⁰ The Planning Staff would be a part of the department rather than being artificially imposed on it or placed in it. Kennan's selection as director symbolized this.

KENNAN'S SELECTION—THE LOGICAL ONE

Marshall's exact reasons for selecting Kennan cannot be determined definitively. As Marshall had spent all of 1946 preoccupied with his mission in China to reconcile the Kuomintang and Communist factions it seems unlikely that he possessed sufficient familiarity with the records and qualifications of suitable candidates to make the choice himself. The historian Lloyd C. Gardner assumed so, arguing instead that Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal sent Kennan to Marshall to head the Policy Planning Staff to tutor Marshall in what the intense and ideological Forrestal considered his weak areas, economic understanding and an awareness of the nature of communist philosophy.³¹ Kennan himself suspected he received the appointment because of Forrestal's influence.³² Unquestionably, Forrestal took a particular interest in Kennan's career from early 1946 onwards and brought him before Marshall's attention but to suggest that Forrestal arranged Kennan's appointment exaggerates his importance and neglects the influence of both Walter Bedell Smith and Dean Acheson.³³

Beetle Smith, an aide to Marshall at Fort Benning and in the office of Chief of Staff before serving as Dwight Eisenhower's deputy in the European campaign, now served as ambassador in the Soviet Union. He was a trusted friend whose judgement Marshall respected. On January 15 he wrote the secretary-designate congratulating him on his appointment and cautioning him on the difficult task ahead. He then offered some advice:

You will, of course be briefed until you are full up to the ears, and I shall not add a word. But I will venture one suggestion. George Kennan, now senior state department instructor at the Army War College, and until recently my Minister-Counsellor here, 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 strongly recommend that you bring him with you [to the forthcoming conference in Moscow] as one of your staff. 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.³⁴

Such effusive praise from a tough-minded soldier assuredly had an impact on Marshall. In his reply to Smith he tersely informed him that I am considering Kennan matter but, indicative of Smith's influence, the secretary of state already had investigated the possibility of including Kennan as part of the delegation he would lead to the Moscow Council of Foreign Ministers meeting scheduled for March.³⁵

Acheson never claimed that he suggested Kennan for this position but close associates of both men assumed this to be the case.³⁶ At a dinner party at his home early in March, 1947, Acheson confided that he had induced him [Kennan] to come back into the Department of State to help in setting up planning and research.³⁷ What seems most likely is that Bedell Smith and perhaps Forrestal broached Kennan's name to Marshall and testified to his capabilities. In discussion with Acheson Marshall settled on Kennan as the person to head the planning unit he proposed. Acheson gave this decision enthusiastic endorsement and was delegated to recruit Kennan for the position. No other candidates were considered.³⁸ As Carlton Savage, a founding member of the Policy Planning Staff, later remarked: Kennan was such a logical one for it.³⁹

EDUCATION OF A DIPLOMAT

What had made Kennan the logical choice? He was born in Milwaukee in 1904, the only son of Kossuth Kent and Florence James Kennan. His mother died just two months after his birth and his relationship with his father, fifty-two at the time of Kennan's birth, was strained to say the least. His childhood was not happy and secure in the conventional sense. He has described himself as a moody, self-centered, neurotic boy, who was shy and confided in no one. He remembered his father as a man whom I must have hurt a thousand times in my boyhood, by inattention, by callousness, by that exaggerated shyness and fear of demonstrativeness which is a form of cowardice and a congenital weakness of the family.⁴⁰ With such searing if overly remorseful self-analysis it is little wonder that lonely, diffident, isolated, fumbling, awkward, introverted, self-pitying, aloof are but some of the adjectives used by others to describe the boy Kennan.⁴¹ These should suffice to give a sense of his early experience, although this subject is gladly consigned to his biographer for further investigation.

Two episodes in Kennan's childhood bear more direct import on his future career. As an eight-year-old he made his first visit to Europe and stayed with his family in Germany for six months. There, his natural facility with languages was displayed for the first time and apparently he was speaking German quite respectably by the time he left.⁴² His gift with languages proved an important element in his subsequent career. Even more important, Kennan developed some identification and sense of connection with the cousin of his grandfather for whom he had been named. The elder George Kennan had explored Siberia and authored an account of the Czarist prison system that had won him much acclaim in Europe and North America and indeed among Russian liberals and dissidents.⁴³ On his only visit with his older relative and namesake Kennan's fascination with Russia had its origins.⁴⁴ The fascination was not fleeting.⁴⁵

Kennan's personal travails continued through his adolescence and early adulthood. Dispatched to St. John's Military Academy at age thirteen, Kennan suffered there from loneliness.⁴⁶ Worse was to come. Spurred on by its seductive depiction in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise Kennan applied and was accepted to Princeton University. There he suffered greatly from and was appalled by the pervasive social snobbery, which effectively excluded him, and he spent an undistinguished four years as an undergraduate.⁴⁷ In his own words: I left college as obscurely as I had entered it.⁴⁸ In his Memoirs Kennan recalled the young Princeton graduate he once was as a dreamer, feeble of will, and something of a sissy in personal relations.⁴⁹ Two more recent observers have portrayed astutely the young Kennan's character as containing a curious blend of arrogance and insecurity, haughtiness and self-pity, sensitivity and coldness, assertiveness and shyness.⁵⁰ With this curiously blended character Kennan set about to pursue a career. He carried from Princeton neither well-formed opinions regarding public affairs nor deep convictions regarding international relations, but despite this he decided to try for the newly formed Foreign Service and, to his surprise, he passed the qualifying examination.⁵¹ A quarter century of service as a diplomat lay ahead.

Few diplomats rise initially in meteoric fashion and Kennan was not numbered among the chosen few. He had a long road to travel before he would exert real influence over policy. Beginning in the fall of 1926 he studied for seven months at the Foreign Service School in Washington and then set off to serve in the lowly post of vice-consul first in Geneva and then in Hamburg. Even in this early period he had a particular ambition. "I have strong hopes of learning enough Russian during the first part of my service to present the Department with a fait accompli when Russia is finally recognized, he wrote his father. That would be more or less in the family tradition—to go to Russia."⁵² Kennan settled reasonably adeptly into the role and persona of the diplomat. In this new role as representative (however lowly) of a government rather than of just myself, the more painful personal idiosyncrasies and neuroses tended to leave me, he explained. I welcomed the opportunity to assume a new personality behind which the old introverted one could retire.⁵³ Kennan's increasing comfort in the role of diplomat did not prevent an attempt on his part in 1928 to resign from the Foreign Service. Moved by personal concerns Kennan returned to Washington but a broken engagement removed the impetus for him to resign.⁵⁴ Instead his fortuitous presence in the city afforded him the opportunity to gain selection for a training program for language specialists. He would have three years of graduate study in Europe while remaining in the Foreign Service.

Kennan's decision to stay gave him a choice of languages—Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Russian. Of course he chose Russian immediately but this choice, made so early in Kennan's career, contributed directly to his selection as Director of the Policy Planning Staff. It is difficult to conceive of a Chinese, Japanese, or Arab specialist being appointed to this post in 1947. The China Lobby already had begun its devastating assault on the China hands. The Japan specialists remained in relative obscurity as General Douglas MacArthur and the military oversaw the occupation of Japan. The Arabists already were involved in a losing argument within the administration over the Palestine question. But the selection of a Russian specialist made sense precisely because Soviet-American relations had come to dominate American foreign policy.

Kennan began to study Russian language, literature, history, and culture, while serving briefly as vice-consul in Tallinin in Estonia and as Third Secretary in Riga, Latvia. From 1929 through 1931 he pursued formal studies in the Seminary for Oriental Languages in the University of Berlin. Afterwards he returned as Third Secretary to the so-called Russian Section of the legation in Riga where the United States, in the absence of diplomatic relations with the government of the Soviet Union, kept a wary watch on the activities of Stalin and his associates.⁵⁵ Here, from 1931 to 1933, Kennan handled reportage on economic matters, and, as he later put it with understated precision grew to mature interest in Russian affairs.⁵⁶ Much has been made of the hardline, avidly anti-Bolshevik thrust of the training which Kennan and his fellow Russian specialists received during this period and its supposed enduring impact on them.⁵⁷ Unquestionably the overseer of this program, Robert Kelley—who headed the Division of Eastern European Affairs, loved Czarist Russia and rabidly opposed American dealings with the Soviet Union—insisted on the trainees being solidly grounded in Russian history and culture at the expense of knowledge of Soviet ideology and practice.⁵⁸ Undoubtedly the antagonistic views towards the Soviet regime of Kelley and the Russian emigre teachers exerted some influence but they were not imposed on Kennan. He was simply not the type to accept the party line.

The first picture Kennan formed of the Soviet Union was not flattering but it was not in any striking manner inaccurate. Poring through the Soviet newspapers, journals, and magazines from his Riga outpost he was struck by Soviet propaganda—at the unabashed use of obvious falsehood, at the hypocrisy, and, above all, at the savage intolerance shown toward everything that is not Soviet.⁵⁹ But such views did not diminish his desire to visit the Soviet Union and to observe it more closely. The Eastern European Division refused his request to travel in the Soviet Union in 1932.⁶⁰ Kennan possessed little admiration for the Soviet system but he avoided entrapment in rigidly doctrinaire anti-Soviet views. He continued to oppose recognition of the Soviet regime up to 1933 because of its continued support for revolutionary activities but his views were not set in concrete by the Riga experience. And soon they were to be shaped by a different reality. Franklin D. Roosevelt had become president and he planned to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.

MOSCOW THE FIRST TIME

In November 1933, Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, arrived in Washington and began negotiations with Roosevelt leading to the American recognition of and establishment of relations with the Soviet Union.⁶¹ Kennan chanced to be in the city. During his studies in Berlin he had met and married an attractive, young Norwegian, Annelise Sorensen, a graceful and balanced woman who exercised something of a calming impact on her emotional and highly strung husband. Their first child, Grace, was born in Riga. Using the age and ill-health of his father and the older man's desire to see his new granddaughter Kennan wangled a leave. He headed for Washington, however, not Milwaukee. There, through the intervention of Loy W. Henderson and Charles E. Bohlen, two other Russian specialists who would be longtime colleagues, Kennan met the dashing William C. Bullitt whom Roosevelt had named as American ambassador to Moscow after successfully completing his talks with Litvinov. After some discussion, as the now familiar story goes, Bullitt asked, Do you know Russian? Kennan replied, yes. Bullitt then asked, I'm leaving on Monday for Moscow. Could you be ready in time to come along? He could and he was.⁶²

Kennan's response to Bullitt's request says something of the young diplomat's ambition and his burning desire to be involved in American relations with the Soviet Union at the outset.⁶³ Impressed by Bullitt's enormous charm, confidence and vitality Kennan traveled with his new superior across the Atlantic and Europe.⁶⁴ In a state of high excitement they reached the Soviet border on December 4 and Moscow on December 11. Heady days followed. Bullitt presented his credentials to President Mikhail Kalinin on December 13 and began a whirlwind series of meetings and banquets to launch the relationship on a strong footing and to make the necessary physical arrangements for the American mission.⁶⁵ Bullitt's hopes were high. He realized there had been little contact between the diplomatic corps and the Soviet government but he planned to change all that. He wrote home to Roosevelt that the men at the head of the Soviet Government today are really intelligent, sophisticated, vigorous human beings and they cannot be persuaded to waste their time with the ordinary conventional diplomatist. On the other hand, they are extremely eager to have contact with anyone who has first-rate intelligence and dimensions as a human being. They were, for example, delighted by young Kennan.⁶⁶ Bullitt, after thus setting himself up for inevitable disillusionment with his grand expectations of being able to bridge the communication gap with the Soviets, returned to the United States to recruit the rest of his delegation. He delegated Kennan to continue the work of establishing the mission. In difficult, almost hectic, circumstances Kennan did what he could to prepare residential and work premises for the ambassador and his staff who returned in March of 1934.

On Bullitt's return Kennan was appointed as Third Secretary and, except for some time in Austria in 1935 because of ill health, he served in Moscow until the summer of 1937.⁶⁷ This period established Kennan as a serious political analyst of the Soviet Union and afforded him the opportunity to immerse himself in Russia and to deepen his loving yet tortuous relationship with this vast land.⁶⁸ He traveled whenever he could although he felt constrained by the restrictions placed upon him.⁶⁹ These restrictions bothered him. He wrote to his friend Charlie Thayer from his sick bed in Austria in May of 1935 that Moscow had me somewhat on the run. I was too fascinated by Russia to take the restrictions of a diplomatic status with equanimity, and was inclined to feel bitter about things.⁷⁰ But this time in Moscow was important for Kennan. He developed strong and lasting personal friendships with Charles Bohlen and Charlie Thayer which tempered some of his apparent aloofness and distance. And he developed, as one writer has put it, an intellectual intimacy with some associates, notably Henderson and Bohlen, and with them began to refine and conceptualize various impressions of Soviet life.⁷¹ Here in Moscow at close range, more so than in Riga, were formed Kennan's lasting views of the Soviets.

Kennan and Bohlen agreed that the Soviet leaders they observed could be understood only in the context of traditional Russian political practice. Ideology held limited significance. Stalin owed more and bore a closer resemblance to Ivan the Terrible than he did to Marx. David Mayers has pointed out correctly that Kennan appreciated that in Stalin's Russia ethical barbarism had been wedded to the modern techniques of tyranny.⁷² As translator for Bullitt's successor, Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, at the Great Purge trials, Kennan had this reality seared into his mind. Some, like the vapid Davies whom Kennan held in contempt, sought to disguise or to excuse the Stalinist brutalities in the interests of fostering improved relations with the Soviet Union.⁷³ Blessed with intellectual integrity and a mixture of courage, arrogance, and plain contariness which forced him to make his opinion known, Kennan rejected this approach but his voice carried no weight at this point. Davies recommended he be transferred for his health and 1938 found him back in Washington assigned to the Russian desk in the State Department.⁷⁴

PRAGUE TO LISBON

Kennan spent a desultory year on the Russian desk.⁷⁵ It was his first extended stay in the United States in over a decade and he evoked no enthusiasm for what he saw. He even drafted some chapters for a proposed book which advocated a form of authoritarian government for the United States. America's elite would run things freed from meddlesome politicians and powerful special interests and ethnic groups.⁷⁶ Such views also developed in part from his increasing frustration with the ragged and unprofessional way in which American foreign policy was formulated and implemented. By now he held a firm conviction that the application of his abilities would improve matters significantly. On occasion he tried to convey his views of the Soviet Union. Addressing an audience at the Foreign Service School, which he once had attended, Kennan explained that we will get nearer to the truth if we abandon for a time the hackneyed question of how far Bolshevism has changed Russia and turn our attention to the question of how far Russia has changed Bolshevism. In making recommendations with respect to American policy he argued that the primary quality of this policy must be patience. We must neither expect too much nor despair of getting anything at all.⁷⁷ But his lectures at this time failed to attract policymakers of consequence. He gladly got out of Washington and returned to Europe. He arrived in Prague on September 29, 1938, the day of the Munich Conference. Europe, once again, marched inexorably toward war.

Kennan's reputation in the Foreign Service slowly grew and his service in Prague further enhanced it.⁷⁸ Kennan had strong views on the role of the foreign service officer and he strove to live up to his own standards. He had developed a contempt for the effete, prissy, and overly social dimension of much of what passed for diplomacy in Europe. As early as 1935 in a letter trying to encourage Charlie Thayer to join the Foreign Service he outlined his vision of a corps of younger officers who will be scholars as well as gentlemen, who will be able to wield the pen as skillfully as the tea-cup, and who, with their combination of academic training and practical experience will come to develop a point of view [regarding the Soviet Union] much stronger and more effective than that of the Paris emigre crowd who made so much fuss about themselves.⁷⁹ Kennan carried this general outlook to his diplomatic practice in German-occupied Prague. He reported extensively and took pride in his own efforts, although few read what he wrote.⁸⁰ The sense of being ignored gnawed deep into his sensitive personality but it did not dissuade him from offering his views in long memorandums. More would follow and these would be read but his hour had yet to come.

Upon the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939, Kennan was transferred from Prague to the American embassy in Berlin where, now a First Secretary, he served as administrative officer until the advent of Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war against the United States in December 1941. Kennan had no regard for the Nazis and he drafted a report in 1940 which argued that the only way to prevent German domination of Europe was to destroy the Nazi regime.⁸¹ He differentiated this regime from the German people as a whole and he extended his sympathies to the internal opposition to Hitler, especially its aristocratic elements. He exerted no special effort to assist the victims of Nazi terror but Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas exaggerate in describing him as callous.⁸² Kennan considered the ill-treatment of the Jews to be a fantastically barbaric thing but he walked no extra mile in aiding them.⁸³ David Mayers is more insightful when suggesting that Kennan was chillingly passive and correctly bureaucratic when something bolder was required, although this criticism could be extended far beyond American diplomats in Berlin.⁸⁴ As for Kennan, he implemented the visa regulations strictly in accord with the law and resented the threats made to him to engage the assistance of Jewish groups in the United States and their congressional supports.⁸⁵ Such activities ended with Hitler's decision to honor his alliance with the Japanese after their December 7 attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The U.S. found itself formally at war with the Nazis and Kennan, together with the remainder of the embassy staff, found himself taken into custody and interned for five months.⁸⁶

Upon his release from internment Kennan served firstly during 1942–1943 in Lisbon as Counselor and then charge d'affaires and next during 1943–1944 in London as Counselor to the European Advisory Commission (EAC). In each case Kennan demonstrated his initiative and deepening sense that he, more so than those formally charged with the responsibility, knew the correct course for American diplomacy. In Portugal the issue of obtaining American military rights to air and naval bases in the Azores saw him objecting to the instructions of the American military establishment conveyed to him by the State Department cipher. Recalled to Washington, he managed, through the intervention of Admiral Leahy and of Harry Hopkins, to gain entry to President Roosevelt who resolved matters in Kennan's favor.⁸⁷ During his work as political adviser to Ambassador John Winant on the EAC Kennan similarly intervened directly with the president to sort out the question of the boundaries for the Soviet Union's proposed occupation zone in Germany. Again Roosevelt accepted the diplomat's recommendations.⁸⁸ In the broad scheme of wartime decision making these are but minor episodes whose significance derives mainly from what they reveal about Kennan. Here stood a man, now turned forty and eager to play a larger role in foreign policy-making. He seized with alacrity what few opportunities passed his way but more generally he felt ignored and on the periphery—a position he did indeed occupy. Whatever personal insecurities may still have resided within him his convictions regarding his professional competence were not modest, especially when he compared himself to the incumbents of senior policy-making positions. Kennan at this time resembled a volcano rumbling within and building towards an explosion. The eruption would occur to most notice two years later in Moscow.

RUSSIA SEVEN YEARS LATER

W. Averell Harriman, the American ambassador in Moscow, needed to strengthen the political section of his embassy staff and to obtain a deputy head of his mission. After some false starts he succeeded in securing Kennan as Counselor of his embassy.⁸⁹ The early