Department of State Washington
January 3, 1949
The Honorable Dean Acheson 2805 P Street, N.W. Washington, D.C.
Dear Dean:
Your request - that I talk with you before making any decisions about staying or not staying with the Department - leads me to want to put certain things to you on paper before we talk. It should simplify discussion, and save time.
We all have our egos and ambitions, and warm ourselves on the esteem of others, which we generally exaggerate. I am no exception. But the shadows which fall on all of us, these days, are so huge and dark, and so unmistakable in portent, that they clearly dwarf all that happens among us individually, here below; and I really have no enthusiasm for sharing with people I have known - Kerensky, Bruening, Dumba, or the King of Jugoslavia - the wretched consolation of having been particularly prominent among the parasites on the body of a dying social order, in the hours of its final agony.
Please ascribe it, therefore, to reason, and not to an implausible modesty, when I say that I am really not interested in carrying on in government service unless I can feel that we have at least a sporting chance of coping with our problem: - that we are not just bravely paddling the antiquated raft of U.S. foreign policy upstream, at a speed of three miles an hour, against a current which is making four.
The thesis of the X article, you will recall, was that our main problem was a political one and that we had a good chance of coping with it by political means - (at least means short of a full-scale shooting war) - if we would stop moping, face up to the situation cheerfully and realistically, and conduct ourselves rationally, in terms of our own epoch. I still feel that way.
When I took my present job in the Department, I thought there was a good chance that this could be accomplished. Today, I am skeptical. I am afraid that we are not really getting anywhere.
I cannot point to any particular, overriding deficiency which, if corrected, would suddenly put everything to rights. The inadequacy is a cumulative one, made up of a number of components.
Let me list some of the things I think we would require, if we were going to make progress from here on out:
1. First of all, in terms of the tools of trade:
a) The top executive level of the Department must be reinforced.
What we have today is plainly and seriously inadequate. The Hoover Commission is on the right track. At the least, there should be a permanent under-secretary, or the equivalent, and someone to fill the place that Armour was supposed to fill.
b) The members of this top executive level must have some degree of mutual intellectual intimacy, and must work together as a team. They should meet daily, take stock of the world all over again, and figure out their next moves accordingly. None of these men should be specialists by function (no division chiefs). All should be men with general policy competence. And they should not number more than six or seven.
c) The committee system of allotment of work (i.e., the system under which several divisions are asked to agree among themselves as equals and to present an agreed recommendation) must be abolished and a method established whereby a single official is designated as the responsible one in each question.
It does not matter if the designation is arbitrary. The main thing is that responsibility should be fixed.
d) The impossibly cumbersome system for handling occupied area affairs must be simplified.
This should begin in the Department with the designation of a single division to be responsible for the policy in these matters. But it must proceed from there to the solution of the problem of the role of the War Department and the occupational commanders. I cannot tell you how serious this is. The present system is so cumbersome, so inflexible, - in a sense, so top- heavy, - that the connection between cause and effect is almost lost. The proper handling of the problems of Germany and Japan is absolutely indispensable to any successful policy. As things stand today, we have deprived ourselves of our own freedom of action in these areas; and I sometimes think we may be drifting into the vicinity of stupendous and fateful failures. I think a new secretary should refuse to accept responsibility for policy in these areas unless the system is changed.
e) We must accept propaganda as a major weapon of policy, tactical as well as strategic, and begin to conduct it on modern and realistic lines.
This means a change in subjective attitude at the top of the Department. No important step should be decided without a simultaneous determination of the nature of its propagandistic development. And the Department must not hesitate to get out and participate in the intellectual debate on U.S. foreign policy. (The X article shocked people to tears in the Department; but in retrospect I think there should have been not one but twenty).
f) The problem of the foreign service must be taken in hand.
The attitude which has prevailed toward the service for the past 16 years: - to wit, "we think it's lousy; therefore we will do nothing to encourage it; but we won't abolish it, either;" - is inexcusable. Unless there is a readiness to accept the service as a desirable and important institution, and a will to make it what it should be, it should not be retained at all. If, on the other hand, that readiness and will are present, then the service should be placed in the charge of men who understand it, who believe in it as an institution, and who are willing to examine, sympathetically and objectively, into the reasons why it has become what it is today, and to undertake a long-term program to correct existing deficiencies and to make out of it the sort of elite corps which it should be. All this cuts deep. It implies a readiness on the part of Congress, as well as the administration, to support a long-term program of this sort; - for less than ten years will not do it. It implies, in the last analysis, a decision on the part of official Washington that it really wants professional diplomacy, and is not merely inclined to tolerate the existing service as an unwelcome step-child just because someone was so unwise as to let it into the house twenty- four years ago and it would be awkward and unseemly to kick it out in the cold. You may say: Nonsense - This decision has long since been made. But are you so sure it really has? I am not.
To me, this has more than just professional significance. Our present poverty in people, measured against the job we have to do, approaches the dimensions of a critical shortage. In this, we are paying the price for the mistakes made ten or fifteen years ago in the treatment of the service. Whoever now takes responsibility for Department and foreign service must know that he takes responsibility for the future as well as the present. That means that he must face up to the realities of what the Russians call the problem of "cadres": i.e., to the fact that the normal vagaries of life and education in these United States do not often produce people who can be highly useful and dependable servants of the government in the foreign affairs field, and that to produce such people in the requisite number we need careful selection and consistent training over a number of years.
g) We must adjust top-level operation in the Department to the situation created by the existence of the UN and the general current vogue for multilateral international negotiation.
We must stop this foolishness of regarding the Secretary of State as a sort of itinerant negotiator and of tearing the Department apart physically three or four times a year in order to demonstrate our devotion to the principal of international organization. There could be ways of adjusting ourselves to this new requirement without breaking the whole continuity of the conduct of foreign policy.
h) With respect to at least certain of the operations of the Department, we must free ourselves from the tyranny of the civil service rules and loyalty investigations (as they have heretofore been conducted) and develop a mature and flexible approach to the problem of getting - and keeping - talented outside assistance. The Voice of America is an outstanding case in point.
2. Secondly, in terms of policy.
a) We must recognize that even if we corrected all the deficiencies I have just pointed to, our tools of trade for the conduct of foreign policy, taken together with the resources we have to work with, are far less effective than we have been accustomed to assume; and out of this should arise a new modesty, a new humility, in the conduct of foreign policy, - a modesty which eschews both the arrogance of trying to "go it alone" and the neurotic satisfaction of striking of idealistic attitudes, and accepts the necessity of the creation of - and reliance on - a new world balance of power tolerable to the security of this country and of the western world in general.
In this concept, there is no room for self-delusion and for lofty pronouncements about peace and democracy. This is a time like June, 1940, in England. What we need is a "blood, sweat and tears" resolution, and then - hard work, concentration, discipline, and an inner silence.
b) The basis of any such policy must be an absolute firmness of front vis-à-vis the Russians. I do not mean that we should never negotiate with them. But I mean that we must maintain a flawless governmental discipline in our relations with them. So long as they feel, as they think they have reason to feel today, that they need not bother about the official bearers of U.S. policy: that there are back-doors through which they can get around the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow and the Department itself and make their influence felt where it counts, - that is: so long as they know that there is great domestic-political capital to be made by someone here out of the achievement of another fine-sounding and plausible paper "agreement with Stalin" and suspect that there are those in Washington who would be not disinclined to exploit these opportunities for domestic- political reasons, - they will continue to be wholly unmanageable. In these circumstances, it is fatuous to expect them to deal seriously in the UN or the CFM, about Berlin or Austria or anything else. They would be fools, from their standpoint, to do so; and we would be greater fools to expect them to.
Whoever undertakes, therefore, to handle these high-spirited brethren from here on out, must satisfy himself - and, above all, satisfy them - that he enjoys iron-clad support in his own government, and that they must deal with him or not at all.
When the Soviet press once referred to General Marshall as "stony-hearted and austere, as befits an old soldier," I felt we were closer to success than I had ever felt before - and that it was only a matter of time until we could begin to make progress in the solution of our difficulties. For they knew that they were up against real firmness and integrity of purpose. The Vinson episode, and the hope for the General's departure, have now undone all that. Somehow or other, it must be restored, if we are to get anywhere in the future.
There - dear Dean - are some of the things which I think would have to be done to the hull of the ship of state, if it is to be restored to a really buoyant condition and to become capable of any reasonable sort of progress into the oceans of the future. I don't say they all have to be done. We will never achieve that proximity to perfection. But a number of them will have to be done. Because together they constitute a set of encumbrances so massive, so unanswerable, that until they are removed there is no point in you or I or anyone else bursting his lungs by trying to blow wind into the sails of the old hulk.
If at least a few of these things can't be done today (and I am not at all sanguine about it), then this is because there is an almost total public lack of appreciation for the realities of our world position and our national needs. In this case, our problem is one not of operation but of education - of urgent, desperately-needed, last-hour education - education against time, against change, against the pressures of an insistent, prodding world reality which is already breathing down our necks. And if this is the set-up, I'd rather be at Yale, or where-you-will, - any place where I could sound-off and talk freely to people, - than in the confines of a department in which you can neither do anything about it nor tell people what you think out to be done.
All this, then, by way of prelude. I will call you up this week; and - with your kind permission - we will talk this out.
Sincerely,
George F. Kennan [Handwritten note:]
Dear Dean - Please note the date on this. It was not occasioned by today's announcement. Congratulations:
GFK
COMMENT ON MR. GREENVILLE CLARK'S MEMORANDUM OF DECEMBER 1ST, 1948 REGARDING UNITED WORLD FEDERALIST'S POLICY
Mr. Clark believes that a "sound and complete policy" has now been found by UWF with respect to the transformation of the United Nations into an effective Federation and the settlement of the main issues between the Soviet Union and the West.
The solution, he thinks, is one big negotiation with Russia on both these interdependent matters.
This negotiation "might extend over several years since the obstacles are great and the utmost patience will be required." (Having had some rather extensive negotiating experience with Russia, I can keenly appreciate the force of this statement).
"It has been a necessary thing to make it plain to Russia that her further expansion would be promptly opposed."
Presumably, therefore, the negotiation would proceed on the basis that the vast Central European territory into which Russia has already forcibly expanded since the end of the war is now hers without further question.
It is not clear as to what the situation would be if other states, now free and independent, should fall into the Russian orbit by the usual methods, during the "several years" which the negotiations would require.
I do not advocate going to war with Russia for the restoration of the integrity and independence of Czechoslovakia, and other States which she has forcibly subdued to her will.
But I am opposed to any plan of negotiation with Russia which tacitly recognizes her right to keep her heel on the necks of the millions of people of these Central European States forcibly brought under her dominion since the end of the war.
Any negotiation which recognizes such right, or ignores the question, cannot possibly bring peace to the world, even though agreement were reached on every other point of difference.
There will be no peace in the world until Russia returns to her prewar boundaries.
The obvious question is: How can this be accomplished short of war?
Possibly it may never be accomplished but I believe that it can be; but not under the present policies and procedures of the democracies.
Regardless of the Marshall Plan or similar plan, Western Europe cannot in the foreseeable future return to a position of financial independence with a decent standard of living for its peoples so long as it continues to function as eighteen or twenty separate and independent economic compartments as it does now.
As a practical matter, the United States does not possess sufficient reserves of strength to carry Western Europe on its back, for long, as it is doing now.
The only solution, it seems to me, is Union or Federation of the remaining free States of Europe. And I am inclined to favor the inclusion in such a union of the United States and Canada.
Such a Union would present to Russia an aggregation of political, economic and military power so great that further Russian expansion westward would be impossible, and the probabilities are that the natural pull from the West on Russian Satellite States lying in between would be so much greater than the pull from the East that most, if not all, of these States would in time successfully reassert their independence.
Everything possible should be done to increase trade, travel and cultural intercourse and exchanges between the West and the East.
On the question of trade alone, Russia will have enormous difficulties in holding the Satellite States in her sphere of influence. The Western and Eastern economies are complementary which is not at all true of the Russian and Satellite economies.
The goods and services which the Satellite countries require are for the most part the identical goods and services of which the Russians are themselves buyers; and the goods which the Satellite countries wish to sell are for the most part the same sort of goods which the Russians wish to sell.
There is thus no natural economic basis for inclusion of retention of the Satellite countries in the Russian sphere of influence.
If we go on as we are or if we negotiate as Mr. Clark suggests "for several years," we will wake up one day and find Russia in possession of the atom bomb and then we will face a different situation.
Anyone having any doubt as to the ultimate aims of Stalin ought to read the article by "Historicus" in the January issue of "Foreign Affairs."
Houston, Texas - 17th January, 1949 W. L. CLAYTON