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

So the question was one of will, not capability.
    When told, on July 12, that the Council of Economic Advisers had seen no need for drastic mobilization measures, Kennan was furious. The problem, he complained to an equally worried Nitze on the seventeenth, lay in the president’s failure himself to take responsibility, and to require that all of his subordinates do so. Key portions of the executive branch had been left “to wallow around in the cluttering impediments of the committee system, complicated by the presence of such personalities as Mr. Johnson and Mr. Snyder and his own White House political advisers.” If this continued, “our world position might well be lost ... for lack of the horse-shoe nail of real executive direction.” Its vigorous exercise, in contrast, would “electrify the Government into an entirely different style of action.” It would certainly impress the Russians, he added a few weeks later, who would see how little of the American national income was going to military spending compared with themselves. The United States would not go bankrupt “even if we were forced to shell out three times as much for defense.” 48
    Kennan did not give up on his strategy of seeking to strain Sino-Soviet ties, but the Korean conflict made it much harder to sell that idea in Washington. He was wondering as early as June 29 whether it might be the Russians’ intention “to keep out of this business themselves . . . but to embroil us to the maximum with their Korean and Chinese satellites.” If so, why not offer the Chinese Communists an inducement not to cooperate? Would it not appeal to them and embarrass Moscow, he asked on July 11, “if we were suddenly to favor and achieve the admission of the Chinese Communists to the U.N. and to the Security Council?” Kennan’s proposal reflected no greater sympathy for Mao Zedong than he had for Chiang Kai-shek: like the decision to deploy the Navy in the Taiwan Strait, this would be a strategic maneuver, not a conciliatory gesture. China, he told the British ambassador Oliver Franks, “would never, in my opinion, be dependable from the standpoint of western interests.” 49
    But when Kennan mentioned this plan to John Foster Dulles—who would have become secretary of state had the Republicans won in 1948 and was now the principal Japanese peace treaty negotiator—“I was shouted down.” It would look to the American public, Dulles insisted, “as though we had been tricked into giving up something for nothing.” Kennan saw the problem and abandoned the idea, but he hoped that history would someday record this as an example of the damage done “by the irresponsible and bigoted interference of the China lobby and its friends in Congress.” A few days later he learned what Dulles was telling newspapermen: “that while he used to think highly of George Kennan, he had now concluded that he was a very dangerous man: that he was advocating the admission of the Chinese Communists to the United Nations, and a cessation of U.S. military action at the 38th parallel.” 50
    The latter charge oversimplified Kennan’s position. He had argued from the first days of the fighting that MacArthur should be free to conduct military operations anywhere on the Korean peninsula, as long as these advanced the political objective of liberating South Korea. What he did oppose, on both military and political grounds, was occupying all of North Korea. Kennan was sure that MacArthur would soon take the offensive, despite defeats that were pushing U.N. forces into a tight perimeter around Pusan. When he did,
    the further we were to advance up the peninsula the more unsound it would become from a military standpoint. If we were actually to advance beyond the neck of the peninsula, we would be getting into an area where mass could be used against us and where we would be distinctly at a disadvantage. This, I thought, increased the importance of a clear concept of our being able to