The following address by Willliam B. Pickett at the Kennan Centennial Conference at Princeton University on February 20, 2004 was published in the Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. LXVI, Number 2, Winter 2005: 303-312.

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Remarks by William B. Pickett for the Kennan Centennial, Princeton University, Feb. 20, 2004: “New Look or Containment: George F. Kennan and The Making of Republican National Security Strategy” On October 28, 1992, just a few days before the presidential election in which Bill Clinton defeated George Herbert Walker Bush, the New York Times published an op-ed piece by George F. Kennan. He was responding to a Bush campaign claim that the Republicans had won the Cold War. He said, “The suggestion that any American administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic-political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is intrinsically silly and childish.” [1] Kennan said the Republican policy of relying on military force was, if anything, counterproductive. “The more the American political leadership was seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate military, rather than political, resolution of Soviet-American tensions,” he said, “the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the greater the braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies within the regime.”[2] The United States, he implied, had unnecessarily prolonged the cold war. In retrospect, it is possible to understand Kennan’s obvious frustration. As the nation’s foremost expert on Soviet Russia in the 1940s and 50s and the individual who, more than any other, had provided the intellectual underpinnings of America’s strategy known as the Truman Doctrine, he was aware of key groups on both sides of the iron curtain who, either from fear or vested interest in cold war, had been unwilling to seek a less costly and dangerous route. This Republican claim of cold-war victory was apparently just too much. Kennan, we now know, had earned the right to be aggravated. Just four years earlier, at a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson School, the Dulles Centennial Conference of 1988, he had commented publicly for the first time on newly-released documents at the Eisenhower Library revealing that he personally had a role in shaping national security policy, not just of the administration of Harry S. Truman but also--although briefly and to a modest extent--that of his successor, the Republican, Dwight David Eisenhower.[3] His discomfiture in 1992 was, in part, from the fact that American national security affairs had drifted from the course he had envisioned in 1946. In his famous “long telegram” from the U.S. embassy in Moscow to top foreign policy and defense officials in Washington he characterized the Soviet Union as intransigent and militant, and in 1947 he advised Truman—in his “Mr. X” article in Foreign Affairs—about the need not to conquer or prevent but rather to contain Soviet expansion. But it is now clear that while American national security policy, as Kennan saw, strayed and at times took side trips, it did not lose focus on the real nature of the threat and thus on the appropriate response to it, which he believed, as long as the West remained unified and strong, was long-term, economic, and political. And it was this kind of containment as implemented first by Truman and then by Eisenhower that—as shown by Robert R. Bowie and Richard Immerman in their excellent book on Eisenhower’s cold-war strategy--provided “the indispensable external context” for the “Soviet collapse and the peaceful resolution of the cold war.”[4] My contact with Kennan began in required readings for my graduate courses in Russian and American diplomatic history at Indiana University in the mid-1960s. For the former, I read his The Decision to Intervene, about President Woodrow Wilson’s dispatch of American troops to Siberia and Northern Russia in 1918 following the Bolshevik revolution, troops whose activities had the effect, if not purpose, of aiding the opponents of Lenin’s new Bolshevik government.[5] For the latter course, I read his classic, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950, which spoke of a United States that was isolationist in the 1920s and 30s. In Kennan, the historian, I found a scholar-diplomat par excellence, an individual for whom history was a repository of lessons for the conduct of public affairs. One lesson was the extreme cost—World War II and some 55 million dead--of American refusal to participate in global political and diplomatic affairs. During the 1930s fascist imperialism had gone unchallenged. The Munich conference of 1938 in which the democracies bowed to Hitler’s military pressure on Czechoslovakia became, for Kennan and his generation, a symbol of infamy. Containment, the policy Kennan, as a State Department official and head of the Department’s policy planning staff, helped to fashion in 1946 and 1947, would, he believed, be the best response to a new, postwar totalitarian threat-- this time from the Kremlin. It would bring not isolationism but engagement in world affairs—economically, politically, diplomatically, and if necessary though less likely, militarily.[6] Kennan’s analysis was a sophisticated one, requiring mastery of history’s lessons and a willingness by the nation’s leaders to move in a purposeful and consistent fashion. By the spring of 1950, however, Kennan was no longer on the policy planning staff of the State Department, and he detected problems with American policy planning. As the Truman administration had responded to crises, its national security policy increasingly reflected a fear of Soviet military power. Czechoslovakia fell to the communists and the Soviet Union blockaded land routes to Berlin in the first half of 1948. In 1949, the Soviets built and tested an atomic bomb and the Chinese communists took over the Chinese mainland. Then, in early 1950, Truman’s new adviser (and Kennan’s successor as head of the State Department policy planning staff), Paul Nitze, wrote in National Security Council Memorandum 68 that the Soviets, “Envision complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the non-Soviet world.”[7] It recommended a stockpile of atomic bombs and a program to build a bomb one hundred times more powerful, the hydrogen bomb. It also recommended a crash program of rebuilding American conventional forces with the purpose of seeking some kind of resolution—perhaps rolling back Soviet power in Eastern Europe--before 1954, which it considered “the year of maximum danger.” By that year, NSC 68’s author estimated the Soviet Union would have sufficient nuclear weapons to counter the American nuclear arsenal.[8] Kennan saw the need for some military build-up but was critical of the concept of “a year of maximum danger.” “I had a very strong feeling,” he later recalled, “that the Russians were not going to attack us but that, on the other hand, the strength of their armed forces, the disparity between theirs and ours, was a reality and would not go away.” “Our plans” he said, “ought to be laid, in a military sense, in such a way as to endure for many, many years into the future.”[9] In this, he saw eye to eye with other Soviet experts, especially Charles E. Bohlen, who also spoke out. The disagreement between advocates of rollback (NSC 68) and advocates of containment, and Truman’s apparent agreement with the former (although unwilling in the spring of 1950 to seek Congressional approval for appropriations to implement NSC 68) revealed an uncertainty in Truman’s cold-war strategy that caused one potential Republican candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to believe the nation needed a firmer hand at the tiller.[10] In the summer of 1950, however, with the North Korean communist invasion of South Korea, Truman asked Congress for the appropriation and it passed. The cold war had become both militarized and global. Kennan served a brief stint as U.S. ambassador to Moscow, from May to October, 1952, and with the advent of the Eisenhower administration the following spring, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, on March 14, 1953, fired him from government service.[11] Kennan retreated to the hallowed halls and grounds of Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. Kennan’s final, but until the mid-1980s, little known opportunity for personal influence on American foreign policy came later, in the summer of 1953. President Eisenhower had admired Kennan’s thinking. In 1948, when Eisenhower was president of Columbia University, he had asked Kennan, unsuccessfully it turned out, to serve on a committee sponsored by the Council of Foreign Relations to study the effects of the European Recovery Program.[12] Eisenhower, as chairman of the committee, had agreed with Kennan’s view, embodied that year in NSC memorandum 20/4, that American nuclear monopoly and economic power and the Soviets’ own domestic weakness would prevent the Soviet Union from launching an attack even after they obtained the foreseen numbers of nuclear weapons.[13] Military pressure, Kennan felt—because of the Soviet regime’s priority of survival in power and abhorrence of war--would bring neither a weakening nor a softening of its position. The Soviet leaders, he believed, would not launch an unprovoked attack, but they would use fear of a militant United States at home to justify their existence and continued totalitarian rule. “What was needed,” he believed, “was a reasonable and sensible compromise” between the political and military approaches.[14] This view Eisenhower found compatible with his own determination--something that would increase during his two terms in the Oval Office--to avoid if at all possible the coercive use of American military force. It was thus not surprising that in the late spring of 1953, Eisenhower asked Kennan to be chairman of one of three ad hoc task forces in a top-secret, three-week-long policy planning exercise code-named project Solarium. Its purpose was to examine thoroughly the nation’s security policy in the light of the Korean war, the creation of a NATO defense force, and—the previous March—the death of the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin. It also provided a way for Eisenhower to take control of national security policy. When the exercise was finished, Eisenhower ordered that the recommendations from Kennan’s task force be combined with those from the others (and from the NSC planning board) in yet another memorandum, NSC 162/2.[15] This new policy, often referred to as “The New Look,” superceded NSC 68. It discarded the latter’s concept of a year of maximum danger. The Soviet Union, it said, posed an on-going, long-term threat. Abandoning any possibility of rolling back Soviet power by military force, it embraced nuclear deterrence and patient but persistent political and economic containment. By the end of Eisenhower’s term in office in 1961, despite Kennan’s view of a less threatening Soviet Union, American national security preparations were in high gear. Eisenhower’s efforts to maintain deterrence combined with a series of foreign policy crises--beginning with the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1955 and including the Soviet launching of sputnik, the first space satellite, in 1957 and Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum in 1958--to cause many Americans to fear that the United States had allowed the Soviets to get ahead, first in bombers and then in missiles. The danger, they and presidential advisers said, was from surprise attack--a nuclear Pearl Harbor. While Eisenhower, perhaps better than anyone else, understood the danger, his aerial intelligence-gathering operations had caused him to suspect that the United States, not the Soviet Union, was ahead. He also knew that beyond a certain point, when considering nuclear weapons, relative advantage was meaningless. He nevertheless, to appease his critics, increased defense spending and accelerated testing of nuclear weapons.[20] And the American people and their Congressional representatives--influenced by apparent Soviet missile developments and by the claims during Eisenhower’s lame-duck second term of the candidates for president, such as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, that the United States had fallen tragically behind in the arms race--came increasingly to feel that security depended upon possession of more and better weapons.[17] By this time what political scientist, Derek Leebaert, has called a “spending constituency for national security and everything that might accompany it,” had become the dominant Washington lobby. Eisenhower, in early drafts of his farewell address, called it “a military-industrial-congressional complex” and a “scientific-technological elite.”[18] By the end of his presidency, the U.S. had produced a ring of American military and air bases around Soviet territory, sent American reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory, and built thousands of nuclear weapons on a variety of launch vehicles. As early as 1959 the United States had 2000 strategic bombers, 14 aircraft carriers, 114 Polaris missiles on 9 submarines, and 200 intercontinental ballistic missiles.[16] In retrospect, Kennan’s work, while accomplishing less than he had hoped, did, nudge American policy in a favorable direction—away from both NSC 68 and the 1952 Republican national convention’s militant advocacy of an American effort to roll back communism and “liberate” the countries of Eastern Europe. The Solarium report, as had the earlier containment policy, recommended that the United States, with allies, develop areas of economic and political strength and stability as a basis for negotiations that, with a steady weakening of the Soviet system caused by spontaneous internal difficulties, would bring a peaceful resolution of conflicts.[19] NSC 162’s guidelines expressed Eisenhower’s belief in American possession of a deterrent military force, both conventional and nuclear, combined with a resolve to use neither to roll back Soviet power, and his efforts to negotiate--beginning with a test ban treaty--an end to the nuclear arms race. It was at the Dulles Centennial Conference in 1988 that I, by then a professor, had the opportunity both to meet Kennan and hear him speak at a session devoted to the newly-released Solarium documents. He recalled the Solarium exercise with satisfaction but also with misgivings. The Eisenhower administration, Kennan said, generally accepted his own task force’s proposals for the financing of national defense, the size of the military, and relations with the allies; but, he said, the political parts “were not taken seriously.” The State Department, for example, refused to accept the recommendation that the United States should offer to withdraw from West Germany in exchange for Soviet withdrawal from East Germany. This, he felt, at the least would have put the onus on them, if they refused, for the failure of German reunification.[21] This recommendation, it is clear in retrospect, ran against Eisenhower’s need, given Soviet intransigence and the Korean war, for a separate West Germany as the keystone of a new NATO defense force, one of Eisenhower’s primary considerations upon entering the presidency.[22] Despite such misgivings Kennan believed that what the new president set out to accomplish was sound. Indeed, he recalled that Eisenhower, in his summary at a full meeting of the NSC on July 16, 1953 of the various Solarium task force recommendations, demonstrated his intellectual ascendancy over everyone in the room, including himself.[23] Kennan believed that despite periodic crises and hysterias containment remained American policy after 1953. A review of the events generally confirms this observation.[24] Despite crises in Hungary and Suez in 1956; in the Formosa Straits in 1955 and 1958; and Berlin in 1958, 1959, and 1961; and after the downing of an American spy plane over Soviet territory in 1960, Eisenhower avoided armed conflict. The two sides signed an armistice in Korea in 1953 and then met in Geneva in 1955, at Camp David in 1959, and in Paris in 1960. Deviations from Eisenhower’s efforts to avoid use of coercive force occurred with the landing of U.S. troops in Lebanon during unrest in 1958, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the United States’ intervention in Vietnam in 1965, and the enormous Carter-Reagan arms build-up in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1989. But, as the Solarium report had predicted, the Soviet Union remained in control of its satellites until 1989--using Warsaw Pact troops to rein in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The People’s Republic of China remained firmly in place, but its relations with the Soviet Union had fallen apart by 1960. Alliances in the Western Europe, the Middle East, and Far East, along with negotiated treaties for a limited nuclear test ban, strategic arms control and détente during the Nixon years, and, finally, arms reductions, allowed—although for a much longer period than Kennan had hoped--for changes within the Soviet system to play out. Technological, economic, social, and cultural change combined with the forces of nationalism, to favor individual freedoms and national autonomy if not independence.[25] These forces began working against the Soviet Union in the 1950s, because it was then, in the words of historian John Lewis Gaddis, that internal “reforms intended to restore competitiveness shattered authority, both internally and within the international communist movement.”[26] They became unstoppable and, as it turned out, irreversible in the 1980s, after the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost allowed new kinds of freedom.[27] The gulfs between the ruling party and the Soviet people, and between the center and the Soviet periphery began to widen.[28] The intermediate nuclear forces treaty negotiated by the Republican president, Ronald Reagan, and Gorbachev in 1987 was the first to eliminate an entire class of nuclear missiles. The Soviet leader then, having withdrawn Soviet troops from Afghanistan, announced a unilateral withdrawal of 500,000 Red Army troops from Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet empire began.[29] Clearly, Kennan in 1992 had been correct to deny that the Republican Party--and the United States for that matter—deserved sole credit for the end of the Soviet system. And history has shown that he was correct in his assertions of 1947 and 1953 that just as diplomacy without strength is fruitless, strength without diplomatic restraint is counterproductive. ********* [1] George F. Kennan. At a Century’s Ending: Reflections 1982-1995 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 185. [2] Ibid.; See also George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1950-1963, Vol. II (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 138-144. [3] William B. Pickett, ed., George F. Kennan and the Origins of Eisenhower’s New Look: An Oral History of Project Solarium (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, 2004), passim. [4] Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 256. [5] George F. Kennan, The Decision to Intervene: Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920, Vol. II (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), passim. [6] George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), passim; Robert H.Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 248-249. [7] William B. Pickett, Eisenhower Decides to Run: Presidential Politics and Cold War Strategy (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 65. [8] For a recent recounting and analysis of the implications of these decisions see Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 317-322. [9] Pickett, ed., George F. Kennan, 28. [10] Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 65-66. [11] Kennan, Memoirs, 119, 160-167, 180-181. [12] Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 19, 29, 31, 60, 65-66, 187. [13] Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 60-61. [14] Kennan, Memoirs, 141. [15] Bowie and Immerman, 154-155. [16]Ibid, 135; According to the Natural Resources Defense Council’s estimate, the United States by 1960 had 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads, 15,000 tactical nuclear warheads for a total of 22,000 nuclear warheads. http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/fig9.gif [17] Derek Leebaert, The Fifty Year Wound: The True Price of America’s Cold War Victory (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2002), 250-251. [18] Leebaert, 249; for an account of the U.S. nuclear build-up that by the 1968 had reached over 32,000 nuclear weapons see Stansfield Turner, Caging the Genies: A Workable Solution for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Weapons (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1999). [19] Campbell Craig, Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 69. [20] William B. Pickett, Dwight David Eisenhower and American Power (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1995), 116. [21] Pickett, ed. George F. Kennan, 19. [22] Bowie, telephone conversation with the author 2-18-04; Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 214. [23] Bowie, telephone conversation. [24] “What he [Eisenhower] said on that occasion [Eisenhower’s summary of the Solarium reports on July 16, 1953] gave me the impression that in general he was prepared to accept the thesis we [task force A] had put forward, that our approach to the problem of the Soviet Union, as it had been followed in the immediately preceding years, was basically sound.” Pickett, ed., George F. Kennan, 20-21. [25] Kennan. At a Century’s Ending, 185. [26] John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 1997), 191. [27] Kort, 249-256. [28] David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York: Vintage, 1994), 162-179. [29] Michael Kort, The Soviet Colossus: History and Aftermath (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 356-380.