Kennan by Frank Costigliola;

Author:Frank Costigliola;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

BEFORE MOSCOW, 1950–1952

Kennan’s troubles in Moscow came on the heels of other strains. Feeling increasingly out of place in the State Department, he took leave in 1950–1951 to pursue a research project at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He confided in his diary three pressing concerns: his differences with Acheson and others in the State Department, his dread of imminent war, and his agonizing over a sexual affair and continued attraction to other women. Adding to the unhappiness was pain from a dislocated collarbone suffered while riding his old-fashioned bicycle.

His feeling of estrangement seemed especially humiliating after his success at diplomacy. In June 1951, Kennan, at Acheson’s request, initiated talks with Yakov Malik, the Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations, to lay the groundwork for a cease-fire in the Korean War. Fearful that the fighting could escalate into another world war, Kennan warned the Department that “we are moving much closer to the edge of the precipice than most of us are aware.” Weeks of patient diplomacy with Malik in New York paid off with the rough outline of a settlement. Trying to play the Russians off against the Chinese, Kennan told Malik that while the Soviet Union “was run by people who took a serious and responsible attitude,” the Chinese Communists, by contrast, were “excited, irresponsible people.”3 Here was Kennan, revisiting the implicitly racist, rational-emotional dichotomy that underlay the long telegram and the “X” article, but with the Russians now slotted into the normative position of rational actors. While Kennan yearned to conduct this kind of diplomacy with the Russians to settle the larger issues of the Cold War, he could not. Acheson and Truman preferred instead utilizing the heat of East-West tensions to forge a tight Western alliance that included a rearmed West Germany.

He felt like an “intellectual gadfly,” Kennan admitted to Acheson in September 1951.4 Though tolerated, he no longer ranked as the influential seer of the State Department. Indeed, on issue after issue, he thought otherwise. He advocated downplaying the United Nations, especially the General Assembly. He wanted the United States to end its strategic dependence on the atomic bomb and “renounce any intent to use it” except in retaliation for an atomic attack. His vision recalled, though Kennan would have choked at the idea, the power-sharing principle of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Policemen. Kennan would have a chastened Germany and Japan organize their respective spheres while the United States pulled back from global predominance. He favored grouping continental Europe around a Franco-German core that would “stand on its own feet and constitute an effective third force.” He believed that “our best chance of avoiding war with the Soviet Union lay in the opening up of a wide area in central Europe which was neither ‘ours’ nor ‘theirs.’ ” Such a grouping, which would invariably result in leadership by Germany, might eventually take in the Soviet satellites. NATO had little place in this setup. He dismissed the Middle East and Southeast Asia as regions

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