George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis

progeny exude,
May find the warmth to which all souls aspire
in autumn late.
    He meant it to be his last Policy Planning Staff paper. 41

VI.
    Perhaps it would have been, had it not been for Stalin, Mao, and the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, who found a way, on June 25, 1950, to frustrate this and many other American designs. Korea, like Germany, had remained divided at the end of World War II. Unlike Germany, however, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union regarded the country as a vital interest. They were thus able to agree, if tacitly, on a mutual withdrawal of occupation forces, what Kennan had long hoped for in Germany. United Nations–sponsored elections south of the 38th parallel—the dividing line hastily drawn at the end of the war—had by then established the Republic of Korea; and the Soviet Union, without U.N. sanction, had set up the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north. It was no satisfactory solution, but by Cold War standards it looked like a relatively untroublesome one, which was why Acheson felt comfortable excluding South Korea from the “defensive perimeter” he publicly announced in January 1950. The only difficulty was that Stalin, Mao, and Kim read his speech—and probably also, courtesy of British spies operating in Washington at the time, NSC 48/2, upon which it had been based. 42
    There had been indications, Kennan later recalled, that military operations might begin soon somewhere in the communist world, but the intelligence was not site-specific and MacArthur’s analysts in Tokyo discounted it. As a result, North Korea’s attack on South Korea, undertaken with the full knowledge and support of Stalin and Mao, caught the rest of the world by surprise. It came on a Sunday: President Truman was at his home in Independence, Missouri; Acheson was at his Maryland farm; Nitze was fishing in New Brunswick miles away from the nearest road; and Kennan was spending a quiet weekend with his family in East Berlin (Pennsylvania). He knew nothing of the invasion until they returned to Washington late that afternoon and saw the newspaper headlines: “Nobody had thought to notify me, and perhaps there was no reason anybody should have; but I could not help but reflect that General Marshall would have seen that this was done.” 43
    Kennan had asked to be relieved of policy responsibilities. As with most things he did, however, there was a certain ambivalence about this. “It never occurred to me that you [and Acheson] would make foreign policy without having first consulted me,” Nitze remembered him saying sometime in the summer of 1950. Now, with Nitze stuck in the wilds of Canada—the first leg of his trip back had to be by canoe—Acheson welcomed Kennan’s offer to help. The next two months were an extraordinary moment in Kennan’s career: at no other point did he operate nearer to the top levels of government in a major crisis, or with greater freedom to provide advice. Remarkably—but with an eye to history and perhaps biography—he found the time to keep a detailed diary of those crowded days. It showed what he meant about the inadequacies of grand strategic documents that sought to embed, as if in amber, the complexities of a rapidly shifting world. At the same time it revealed several of these inadequacies as having been his own. 44
    The first and most obvious one had to do with the “defensive perimeter” strategy, which reflected Kennan’s principle that because some interests were more important than others, not all needed to be defended. That sounded good in theory; in practice, however, it conflicted with another principle in which Kennan believed strongly—that psychology was as important as industrial-military capability in shaping world politics. Having excluded South Korea from American protection because it was militarily insignificant, he now concluded along with almost everyone else in Washington that it was psychologically vital. So too, he