Books: Swing of the Pendulum

MEMOIRS: 1925-1950 by George F. Kennan. 583 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $10.

To many Americans under 30, the cold war seems like a scare story concocted by the older generation. But it was all too real, and no one knows it better than George Kennan. He also knows that the issues underlying the conflict have not disappeared, despite the fact that the Communist monolith has splintered into a “Humpty Dumpty” that “will not and cannot be reassembled.” For the U.S., the continuing problem is how to face Communism without being either fatuously optimistic about coexistence or excessively belligerent in opposition. In dealing with that problem, Kennan has often been out of step with his superiors at the State Department. By hindsight, it is evident that he was right more often than wrong.

In this dry, dispassionate account, Kennan, now a member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, makes clear the irony of his career: he was in official disfavor first for being “too harsh” toward Russia, then for being “too soft.” He was burned in effigy by Communist-led mobs in Rio de Janeiro during a Latin American tour in 1950, and burned figuratively by right-wing critics in the U.S. during the decade that followed.

Containment by “X.” Few diplomats have ever drawn on so rich a background in international affairs. From the time he joined the Foreign Service, after graduating from Princeton in 1925, Kennan shuttled from one sensitive crisis point to another. In 1933, he helped reopen the American embassy in Moscow, stayed on through the savage purges that soon followed and thus received, as he writes, “a liberal education in the horrors of Stalinism.” He arrived in Prague on Sept. 29, 1938, the day of the Munich Conference. He was in Berlin from 1939 until Pearl Harbor, when the Nazis interned him and 130 other Americans for 51 dreary months near Frankfurt. (After his release, Kennan recalls sarcastically, he was told that “none of us were to be paid for the months we had been in confinement: we had not, you see, been working.”) He returned to Moscow in 1944, just when Stalin was rolling up his sleeves and getting ready to take over Eastern Europe. He arrived in Washington in time to outline the policy of “containment” against an expansionist Russia in the famous 1947 Foreign Affairs article signed “X.”

Unlike many U.S. liberals, Kennan never went through a Marxist phase. Before and during World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted an accommodation with Moscow, but Kennan remained in opposition until the “movement of the pendulum of official thinking from left to right would bring [U.S. policy] close to my own outlook in the years 1946 to 1948, only to carry it away once more in the other direction, with the oversimplified and highly militarized view of the Russian problem that came to prevail after 1949.”

Keep Out of Our Way. Kennan thoroughly demolishes the argument, put forward by a growing school of New-Leftist “revisionists,” that the U.S., not Russia, was to blame for the cold war. When the Red army stopped at the Vistula River in 1944 and folded its arms while the Nazis bloodily put down the Warsaw uprising, and when Stalin refused to allow the U.S. even to airlift supplies to the dying Polish Resistance, it was obvious, says Kennan, that Stalin meant to swallow Poland, “lock, stock and barrel.”

Within months after V-E day, Stalin’s “dream” of acquiring a buffer zone along Russia’s western border had come true. Kennan dismisses as absurd the notion that Stalin’s expansionist appetite was fed by fears of the U.S. or anger at not being offered enormous sums of American aid. He recalls what a Soviet friend told him in 1944: “This is something you should bear in mind about the Russian. The better things go for him, the more arrogant he is. When we are successful, keep out of our way.”

Washington Subconscious. Abruptly, in 1946, Washington began heeding Kennan’s alarums. For months, he recalls, “I had done little else but pluck people’s sleeves,” warning them of Russia’s intentions, but it was “like talking to a stone.” Then, in an 8,000-word telegram to Washington—”neatly divided, like an 18th century Protestant sermon, into five separate parts”—Kennan reiterated all that he had said before, and everybody began listening. Precisely why is unclear. The subconscious motivations of official Washington, he believes, are as intricate “as those of the most complicated of Sigmund Freud’s erstwhile patients.”

After Kennan returned to Washington in 1946, first as deputy for foreign affairs at the newly established National War College and then to head the State Department’s new Policy Planning Staff, he succeeded in influencing the shape of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the designs for rebuilding Japan’s economy. But then the pendulum began swinging too far the other way. From “the clumsy naïveté” of its wartime cozying-up to Moscow, Washington moved to the opposite extreme and adopted an unbending, monolithic attitude toward the Communist countries. Kennan believes that U.S. policy has been “bedeviled” for two decades by this approach.

The Vital Areas. As Kennan sees it, there are “only five regions of the world—the United States, the United Kingdom, the Rhine Valley with adjacent industrial areas, the Soviet Union and Japan—where the sinews of modern military strength could be produced in quantity.” These, he argues, should be the vital areas of U.S. concern; all the others must be secondary. Since one of the areas is under Communist control, the first task for U.S. policy since World War II has been to see to it that “none of the remaining ones fell under such control.” Accordingly, he sees no application of the containment policy to Viet Nam.

Kennan thinks it was a mistake for the U.S. ever to have become involved there. As he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a precipitate withdrawal would be an even greater mistake. His advice: quit escalating and give diplomacy a chance to settle the war.

There is, however, a serious problem that Kennan has not yet attempted to resolve. His opposition to the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam grows out of his belief that Peking does not now pose a threat to U.S. interests. Yet he concedes that China, under a firm, unifying hand and armed with nuclear weapons, may one day join the five existing “vital” areas as a formidable sixth. It would thus automatically become of prime concern to the U.S. to contain a Communist-ruled China. How to do it is another question, and Kennan has no ready answer. He simply does not think that South Viet Nam was the best place to begin.

Kennan hopes to write a second volume that will cover his tours of duty as U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952 and to Tito’s Yugoslavia from 1961 to 1963. In it, perhaps, he will suggest how to come to grips with the problem of China in a period when the approaches of the cold war are no longer adequate, but new ones have yet to be fashioned. Kennan’s record makes it certain that he will be heard.