George F. Kennan

"X"

Unlike the "long telegram", Kennan's well-timed article appearing in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "X", titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", did not begin by emphasizing "traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity"; instead, it asserted that Stalin's policy was shaped by a combination of Marxist–Leninist ideology, which advocated revolution to defeat the capitalist forces in the outside world and Stalin's determination to use the notion of "capitalist encirclement" in order to legitimize his regimentation of Soviet society so that he could consolidate his political power. Kennan argued that Stalin would not (and moreover could not) moderate the supposed Soviet determination to overthrow Western governments. Thus:

... the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.... Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manœuvres of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.

The goal of his policy was to withdraw all U.S. forces from Europe. "The settlement reached would give the Kremlin sufficient reassurance against the establishment of regimes in Eastern Europe hostile to the Soviet Union, tempering the degree of control over that area that the Soviet leaders felt it necessary to exercise". Kennan further argued that the United States would have to perform this containment alone, but if it could do so without undermining its own economic health and political stability, the Soviet party structure would undergo a period of immense strain eventually resulting in "either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power."

The publication of the "X" article soon began one of the more intense debates of the Cold War. Walter Lippmann, a leading American commentator on international affairs, strongly criticized the "X" article. Lippmann argued that Kennan's strategy of containment was "a strategic monstrosity" that could "be implemented only by recruiting, subsidizing, and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents, and puppets". Lippmann argued that diplomacy should be the basis of relations with the Soviets; he suggested that the U.S. withdraw its forces from Europe and reunify and demilitarize Germany. Meanwhile, it was soon revealed informally that "X" was indeed Kennan. This information seemed to give the "X" article the status of an official document expressing the Truman administration's new policy toward Moscow.

Kennan had not intended the "X" article as a prescription for policy. For the rest of his life, Kennan continued to reiterate that the article did not imply an automatic commitment to resist Soviet "expansionism" wherever it occurred, with little distinction of primary and secondary interests. The article did not make it obvious that Kennan favored employing political and economic rather than military methods as the chief agent of containment. "My thoughts about containment," said Kennan in a 1996 interview to CNN, "were of course distorted by the people who understood it and pursued it exclusively as a military concept; and I think that that, as much as any other cause, led to [the] 40 years of unnecessary, fearfully expensive and disoriented process of the Cold War". Additionally, the administration made few attempts to explain the distinction between Soviet influence and international Communism to the U.S. public. "In part, this failure reflected the belief of many in Washington," writes historian John Lewis Gaddis, "that only the prospect of an undifferentiated global threat could shake Americans out of their isolationist tendencies that remained latent among them."

In a PBS television interview with David Gergen in 1996, Kennan again reiterated that he did not regard the Soviets as primarily a military threat, noting that "they were not like Hitler". Kennan's opinion was that this misunderstanding:

all came down to one sentence in the "X" article where I said that wherever these people, meaning the Soviet leadership, confronted us with dangerous hostility anywhere in the world, we should do everything possible to contain it and not let them expand any further. I should have explained that I didn't suspect them of any desire to launch an attack on us. This was right after the war, and it was absurd to suppose that they were going to turn around and attack the United States. I didn't think I needed to explain that, but I obviously should have done it.

The "X" article meant sudden fame for Kennan. After the long telegram, he recalled later, "My official loneliness came in fact to an end... My reputation was made. My voice now carried."

Influence under Marshall

Between April 1947 and December 1948, when George C. Marshall was Secretary of State, Kennan was more influential than he was at any other period in his career. Marshall valued his strategic sense and had him create and direct what is now named the Policy Planning Staff, the State Department's internal think tank. Kennan became the first Director of Policy Planning. Marshall relied heavily on him to prepare policy recommendations. Kennan played a central role in the drafting of the Marshall Plan.

Although Kennan regarded the Soviet Union as too weak to risk war, he nonetheless considered it an enemy capable of expanding into Western Europe through subversion, given the popular support for Communist parties in Western Europe, which remained demoralized by the devastation of the Second World War. To counter this potential source of Soviet influence, Kennan's solution was to direct economic aid and covert political help to Japan and Western Europe to revive Western governments and assist international capitalism; by doing so, the United States would help to rebuild the balance of power. In June 1948, Kennan proposed covert assistance to left-wing parties not oriented toward Moscow and to labor unions in Western Europe in order to engineer a rift between Moscow and working-class movements in Western Europe. In 1947, Kennan supported Truman's decision to extend economic aid to the Greek government fighting a civil war against Communist guerrillas, though he argued against military aid. The historian John Latrides argued that Kennan's claim that the Soviet Union would go to war if the United States gave military aid to Greece is hard to square with his claim that the Soviet Union was too weak to risk war, and the real reason for his opposition to military aid was that he did not regard Greece as important.

As the United States was initiating the Marshall Plan, Kennan and the Truman administration hoped that the Soviet Union's rejection of Marshall aid would strain its relations with its Communist allies in Eastern Europe. Kennan initiated a series of efforts to exploit the schism between the Soviets and Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia. Kennan proposed conducting covert action in the Balkans to further decrease Moscow's influence.

The administration's new vigorously anti-Soviet policy also became evident when, at Kennan's suggestion, the U.S. changed its hostility to Francisco Franco's anti-communist regime in Spain in order to secure U.S. influence in the Mediterranean. Kennan had observed during 1947 that the Truman Doctrine implied a new consideration of Franco. His suggestion soon helped begin a new phase of U.S.–Spanish relations, which ended with military cooperation after 1950. Kennan played an important role in devising the plans for American economic aid to Greece, insisting upon a capitalist mode of development and upon economic integration with the rest of Europe. In the case of Greece, most of the Marshall Plan aid went towards rebuilding a war-devastated country that was already poor even before World War II. Though Marshall Plan aid to Greece was successful in building or rebuilding ports, railroads, paved roads, a hydro-electricity transmission system, and a nationwide telephone system, the attempt to impose "good government" on Greece was less successful. The Greek economy was historically dominated by a rentier system in which a few wealthy families, a highly politicized officer corps and the royal family controlled the economy for their own benefit. Kennan's advice to open up the Greek economy was completely ignored by the Greek elite. Kennan supported France's war to regain control of Vietnam as he argued that control of Southeast Asia with its raw materials was critical to the economic recovery of Western Europe and Japan, but by 1949, he changed his views, becoming convinced that the French would never defeat the Communist Viet Minh guerrillas.

In 1949, Kennan suggested what became known as "Program A" or "Plan A" for the reunification of Germany, stating the partition of Germany was unsustainable in the long run. Kennan argued that the American people would sooner or later grow tired of occupying their zone in Germany and would inevitably demand the pull-out of U.S. troops. Or alternatively Kennan predicted the Soviets would pull their forces out of East Germany, knowing full well that they could easily return from their bases in Poland, forcing the United States to do likewise, but as the Americans lacked bases in other Western European nations, this would hand the advantage to the Soviets. Finally, Kennan argued that the German people were proud and would not stand having their nation occupied by foreigners forever, making a solution to the "German question" imperative. Kennan's solution was for the reunification and neutralization of Germany; the withdrawal of most of the British, American, French and Soviet forces from Germany with the exception of small enclaves near the border that would be supplied by sea; and a four-power commission from the four occupying powers that would have the ultimate say while allowing the Germans to mostly govern themselves.

Differences with Acheson

Kennan's influence rapidly decreased when Dean Acheson became Secretary of State, succeeding the ailing George Marshall during 1949 and 1950. Acheson did not regard the Soviet "threat" as chiefly political, and he saw the Berlin Blockade starting in June 1948, the first Soviet test of a nuclear weapon in August 1949, the Communist revolution in China a month later, and the beginning of the Korean War in June 1950, as evidence. Truman and Acheson decided to delineate the Western sphere of influence and to create a system of alliances. Kennan argued in a paper that the mainland of Asia be excluded from the "containment" policies, writing that the United States was "greatly overextended in its whole thinking about what we can accomplish and should try to accomplish" in Asia. Instead, he argued that Japan and the Philippines should serve as the "cornerstone of a Pacific security system". Acheson approved Program A shortly after he took up office as Secretary of State, writing in the margin of Kennan's paper that the "division of Germany was not an end onto itself".

Plan A encountered massive objections from the Pentagon, who saw it as abandoning West Germany to the Soviet Union, and from within the State Department, with the diplomat Robert Murphy arguing that the mere existence of a prosperous and democratic West Germany would be destabilizing to East Germany, and hence the Soviet Union. More important, Plan A required the approval of the British and French governments, but neither was in favor of Program A, complaining it was far too early to end the occupation of Germany. Both public opinion in Britain and even more so in France were afraid of what might happen if the Allies loosened their control over Germany just four years after the end of World War II, and for reasons of geography and history, did not share Kennan's assurance that a reunified Germany would cause difficulties only for the Soviets. In May 1949, a distorted version of Plan A was leaked to the French press with the principal distortion being that the United States was willing to pull out of all of Europe in exchange for a reunified and neutral Germany. In the ensuing uproar, Acheson disallowed Plan A. Kennan lost influence with Acheson, who in any case relied much less on his staff than Marshall had. Kennan resigned as director of policy planning in December 1949 but stayed in the department as counselor until June 1950.

In January 1950, Acheson replaced Kennan with Nitze, who was much more comfortable with the calculus of military power. Afterwards, Kennan accepted an appointment as Visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study from fellow moderate Robert Oppenheimer, director of the institute. In October 1949, the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong won the Chinese Civil War and proclaimed the People's Republic of China. The "Loss of China", as it has become known in the United States, prompted a fierce right-wing backlash led by Republican politicians such as Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, who used the "loss of China" as a convenient club with which to beat the Democratic Truman administration. Truman, Acheson, and other high officials such as Kennan were all accused of being criminally negligent at best in permitting the supposed loss. One of Kennan's closest friends, the diplomat John Paton Davies Jr. found himself under investigation in November 1949 as a Soviet spy for his role in the process, an allegation that would destroy his career and which horrified Kennan.

What especially disturbed Kennan was that Paton Davies was accused of treason for predicting in a report that Mao would win the Chinese Civil War, which in the climate of hysteria caused by the "loss of China" was enough to lead the FBI to begin investigating him as a Soviet spy. Speaking of the Paton Davies case, Kennan warned that "We have no protection against this happening again", leading him to wonder what diplomat would be investigated next for treason. Kennan found the atmosphere of hysteria, which was labeled as "McCarthyism" in March 1950 by cartoonist Herbert Block, to be deeply uncomfortable. Acheson's policy was realized as NSC 68, a classified report issued by the United States National Security Council in April 1950 and written by Paul Nitze, Kennan's successor as Director of Policy Planning. Kennan and Charles Bohlen, another State Department expert on Russia, argued about the wording of NSC 68, which became the basis of Cold War policy. Kennan rejected the idea that Stalin had a grand design for world conquest implicit in Nitze's report and argued that he actually feared overextending Russian power. Kennan even argued that NSC 68 should not have been drafted at all, as it would make U.S. policies too rigid, simplistic, and militaristic. Acheson overruled Kennan and Bohlen, endorsing the assumption of Soviet menace implied by NSC 68.

Kennan opposed the building of the hydrogen bomb and the rearmament of Germany, which were policies encouraged by the assumptions of NSC 68. During the Korean War (which began when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950), when rumors started circulating in the State Department that plans were being made to advance beyond the 38th parallel into North Korea, an act that Kennan considered dangerous, he engaged in intense arguments with Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East Dean Rusk, who apparently endorsed Acheson's goal to forcibly unite the Koreas.

Memo to Dulles

On 21 August 1950, Kennan submitted a long memo to John Foster Dulles who at the time was engaged in working on the U.S-Japanese peace treaty in which he went beyond American-Japanese relations to offer an outline of his thinking about Asia in general. He called U.S. policy thinking about Asia as "little promising" and "fraught with danger". About the Korean War, Kennan wrote that American policies were based upon what he called "emotional, moralistic attitudes" which "unless corrected, can easily carry us toward real conflict with the Russians and inhibit us from making a realistic agreement about that area". He supported the decision to intervene in Korea, but wrote that "it is not essential to us to see an anti-Soviet Korean regime extended to all of Korea." Kennan expressed much fear about what General Douglas MacArthur might do, saying he had "wide and relatively uncontrolled latitude … in determining our policy in the north Asian and western Pacific areas", which Kennan viewed as a problem as he felt MacArthur's judgement was poor.

Academic career and later life

In 1957 Kennan was invited by the BBC to give the annual Reith Lectures, a series of six radio lectures which were titled Russia, the Atom and the West. These covered the history, effect, and possible consequences of relations between Russia and the West. After the end of his brief ambassadorial post in Yugoslavia during 1963, Kennan spent the rest of his life in academe, becoming a major realist critic of U.S. foreign policy. Having spent 18 months as a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) between 1950 and 1952, Kennan joined the faculty of the institute's School of Historical Studies in 1956, and spent the rest of his life there.

Opposition to the Vietnam War

During the 1960s, Kennan criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam, arguing that the United States had little vital interest in the region. In February 1966, Kennan testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the request of the committee's chairman, Senator J. William Fulbright, where he stated that the "preoccupation" with Vietnam was undermining U.S. global leadership. He accused the administration of Lyndon Johnson of distorting his policies into a purely military approach. President Johnson was so annoyed by the hearings called by his friend-turned-foe Fulbright that he tried to upstage them by holding a sudden and unannounced summit in Honolulu starting on 5 February 1966 with Chief of State Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and Prime Minister Nguyễn Cao Kỳ of South Vietnam, where he declared that the United States was making excellent progress in Vietnam and was committed to social and economic reforms. Kennan testified that were the United States not already fighting in Vietnam that: "I would know of no reason why we should wish to become so involved, and I could think of several reasons why we should wish not to".

Kennan was opposed to an immediate pull-out from Vietnam, saying "A precipitate and disorderly withdrawal could represent in present circumstances a disservice to our own interests, and even to world peace", but added that he felt "there is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant and unpromising objectives." In his testimony, Kennan argued that Ho Chi Minh was "not Hitler" and everything he had read about him suggested that Ho was a Communist, but also a Vietnamese nationalist who did not want his country to be subservient to either the Soviet Union or China.

At the Soviet Embassy

Kennan found himself in strong disagreement with Joseph E. Davies, Bullitt's successor as ambassador to the Soviet Union, who defended the Great Purge and other aspects of Stalin's rule. Kennan did not have any influence on Davies' decisions, and Davies himself even suggested that Kennan be transferred out of Moscow for "his health". Kennan again contemplated resigning from the service, but instead decided to accept the Russian desk at the State Department in Washington. A man with a high opinion of himself, Kennan began writing the first draft of his memoirs at the age of 34 when he was still a relatively junior diplomat. In a letter to his sister Jeannette in 1935, Kennan expressed his disenchantment with American life, writing: "I hate the rough and tumble of our political life. I hate democracy; I hate the press … I hate the 'peepul'; I have become clearly un-American."

Prague and Berlin

By September 1938, Kennan had been reassigned to a job at the legation in Prague. After the occupation of the Czechoslovak Republic by Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War II, Kennan was assigned to Berlin. There, he endorsed the United States' Lend-Lease policy but warned against any notion of American endorsement of the Soviets, whom he considered unfit allies. He was interned in Germany for six months after Germany, followed by the other Axis states, declared war on the United States in December 1941.

Lisbon calls

In September 1942 Kennan was assigned to the legation in Lisbon, Portugal, where he begrudgingly performed a job administering intelligence and base operations. In July 1943 Bert Fish, the American Ambassador in Lisbon, suddenly died, and Kennan became chargé d'affaires and the head of the American Embassy in Portugal. While in Lisbon Kennan played a decisive role in getting Portugal's approval for the use of the Azores Islands by American naval and air forces during World War II. Initially confronted with clumsy instructions and lack of coordination from Washington, Kennan took the initiative by personally talking to President Roosevelt and obtained from the president a letter to the Portuguese premier, Salazar, that unlocked the concession of facilities in the Azores.

Second Soviet posting

In January 1944, he was sent to London, where he served as counselor of the American delegation to the European Advisory Commission, which worked to prepare Allied policy in Europe. There, Kennan became even more disenchanted with the State Department, which he believed was ignoring his qualifications as a trained specialist. However, within months of beginning the job, he was appointed deputy chief of the mission in Moscow upon request of W. Averell Harriman, the ambassador to the USSR.

"Long Telegram"

In Moscow, Kennan again felt that his opinions were being ignored by President Truman and policymakers in Washington. Kennan tried repeatedly to persuade policymakers to abandon plans for cooperation with the Soviet government in favor of a sphere of influence policy in Europe to reduce the Soviets' power there. Kennan believed that a federation needed to be established in western Europe to counter Soviet influence in the region and to compete against the Soviet stronghold in eastern Europe.

Kennan served as deputy head of the mission in Moscow until April 1946. Near the end of that term, the Treasury Department requested that the State Department explain recent Soviet behavior, such as its disinclination to endorse the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Kennan responded on February 22, 1946, by sending a lengthy 5,363-word telegram (sometimes cited as being more than 8,000 words), commonly called "The Long Telegram", from Moscow to Secretary of State James Byrnes outlining a new strategy for diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The ideas Kennan expressed in the Long Telegram were not new but the argument he made and the vivid language he used in making it came at an opportune moment. At the "bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is the traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity". After the Russian Revolution, this sense of insecurity became mixed with communist ideology and "Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy".

Soviet international behavior depended mainly on the internal necessities of Joseph Stalin's regime; according to Kennan, Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his autocratic rule. Stalin thus used Marxism-Leninism as a "justification for the Soviet Union's instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand … Today they cannot dispense with it. It is the fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability".

The solution was to strengthen Western institutions in order to render them invulnerable to the Soviet challenge while awaiting the mellowing of the Soviet regime. Using propaganda and culture was vital to Kennan, it was important that America presented itself correctly to foreign audiences and the Soviets would limit the cultural cross contamination of America and USSR. It is notable that Kennan shared his telegram with his friend and collaborator at the British Embassy in Moscow, Frank Kenyon Roberts, whom he had first met in Lisbon in 1943. As his Embassy's chargé d'affaires, Roberts drew on some of Kennan's ideas in March 1946 when he presented his own, lengthy analyses of Soviet policies in which he encouraged the British government to take a firm stance towards the Soviet Union and to relinquish hopes of Anglo-Soviet cooperation. Roberts' arguments went down well in Whitehall, which meant that Kennan influenced British policies as well as American ones, and contributed to the development of the Anglo-American Cold War partnership.

Ambassador to the Soviet Union

In December 1951, President Truman nominated Kennan to be the next United States ambassador to the USSR. His appointment was endorsed strongly by the Senate. In many respects (to Kennan's consternation) the priorities of the administration emphasized creating alliances against the Soviets more than negotiating differences with them. In his memoirs, Kennan recalled, "So far as I could see, we were expecting to be able to gain our objectives … without making any concessions though, only 'if we were really all-powerful, and could hope to get away with it.' I very much doubted that this was the case."

At Moscow, Kennan found the atmosphere even more regimented than on his previous trips, with police guards following him everywhere, discouraging contact with Soviet citizens. At the time, Soviet propaganda charged the U.S. with preparing for war, which Kennan did not wholly dismiss. "I began to ask myself whether … we had not contributed … by the overmilitarization of our policies and statements … to a belief in Moscow that it was war we were after, that we had settled for its inevitability, that it was only a matter of time before we would unleash it."

In September 1952, Kennan made a statement that cost him his ambassadorship. In an answer to a question at a press conference, Kennan compared his conditions at the ambassador's residence in Moscow to those he had encountered while interned in Berlin during the first few months of hostilities between the United States and Germany. While his statement was not unfounded, the Soviets interpreted it as an implied analogy with Nazi Germany. The Soviets then declared Kennan persona non grata and refused to allow him to re-enter the USSR. Kennan acknowledged retrospectively that it was a "foolish thing for me to have said".

Kennan and the Eisenhower administration

Kennan returned to Washington, where he became embroiled in disagreements with Dwight D. Eisenhower's hawkish Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. Even so, he was able to work constructively with the new administration. During the summer of 1953 President Eisenhower asked Kennan to manage the first of a series of top-secret teams, dubbed Operation Solarium, examining the advantages and disadvantages of continuing the Truman administration's policy of containment and of seeking to "roll back" existing areas of Soviet influence. Upon completion of the project, the president seemed to endorse the group's recommendations.

By lending his prestige to Kennan's position, the president tacitly signaled his intention to formulate the strategy of his administration within the framework of its predecessor's, despite the misgivings of some within the Republican Party. The critical difference between the Truman and Eisenhower policies of containment had to do with Eisenhower's concerns that the United States could not indefinitely afford great military spending. The new president thus sought to minimize costs not by acting whenever and wherever the Soviets acted (a strategy designed to avoid risk) but rather whenever and wherever the United States could afford to act. In 1954, Kennan appeared as a character witness for J. Robert Oppenheimer during the government's efforts to revoke his security clearance. Despite his departure from government service, Kennan was frequently still consulted by the officials of the Eisenhower administration. When the CIA obtained the transcript of Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" attacking Stalin in May 1956, Kennan was one of the first people to whom the text of the "Secret Speech" was shown.

On 11 October 1956, Kennan testified to the House Committee of Foreign Affairs about the massive protests going on in Poland that Soviet rule in Eastern Europe was "eroding more rapidly than I ever anticipated". The fact that a nationalist faction of the Polish Communist Party led by Władysław Gomułka overthrew the Stalinist leadership in Warsaw over the objections of Khrushchev, who was forced to reluctantly accept the change in leadership, led Kennan to predicate that Poland was moving in a "Titoist" direction as Gomułka for his all commitment to Communism also made it clear that he wanted Poland to be more independent of Moscow. In 1957, Kennan departed the United States to work as the George Eastman Professor at Balliol College at Oxford. Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote that Kennan expected the Fellows of Balliol College to be engaged in conversation "polished by deep tradition, refinement, moral quality" and was instead disgusted to find that Fellows were engrossed in "a lot of idle gossip about local affairs, academic titles. He was horrified about that. Profound disappointment. England was not as he thought. An idealised image has been shattered".

Kennan wrote about the Fellows of Balliol College in a letter to Oppenheimer: "I've never seen such back-biting, such fury, such fractions in all my life". In the same letter, Kennan wrote that the only Fellow with whom he could have a "serious conversation" was Berlin, and the rest were all obsessed with spreading malicious gossip about each other. However, Kennan was popular with the students at Balliol College as his twice weekly lectures on international relations were as he put it "tremendously successful", indeed to such an extent that he had to be assigned a larger lecture hall as hundreds of students lined up to hear him speak. In October 1957, Kennan delivered the Reith lectures on the BBC under the title Russia, the Atom and the West, stating that if the partition of Germany continued, then "the chances for peace are very slender indeed". Kennan defended the partition of Germany in 1945 as necessary, but went on to say:

But there is a danger in permitting it to harden into a permanent attitude. It expects too much and for too long of a time of the United States, which is not a European power. It does less than justice to the strength and abilities of the European themselves. It leaves unsolved the extremely precarious and unsound arrangements which now govern the status of Berlin—the least disturbance of which could easily produce a new world crisis. It takes no account of the present dangerous situation in the satellite area. It renders permanent what was meant to be temporary. It assigns half of Europe by implication to the Russians.... The future of Berlin is vital to the future of Germany as a whole: the needs of its people and the extreme insecurity of the Western position there alone would constitute reasons why no one in the West should view the present division of Germany as a satisfactory permanent solution even if no other factors are involved.

To resolve the "German question", Kennan advocated a version of his "program A" of 1949 calling for the complete withdraw of most of the British, French, American and Soviet forces from Germany as a prelude to German reunification and for the neutralization of Germany. Besides his call to a solution to the "German question", Kennan also predicated that Soviet rule in Eastern Europe was "shaky", and the best thing the Western powers could do was to pursue a firm, but essentially non-confrontational policy towards the Soviet Union to persuade Khrushchev it would not be dangerous for him to let Eastern Europe go. The Reith lectures caused much controversy, and involved Kennan in a public war of words with Acheson and the vice president Richard Nixon about the correct solution to the "German question". The West German foreign minister, Heinrich von Brentano, stated about Kennan's Reith lectures: "Whoever says these things is no friend of the German people".

Ambassador to Yugoslavia

During John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential election campaign Kennan wrote to the future president to offer some suggestions on how his administration should improve the country's foreign affairs. Kennan wrote, "What is needed is a succession of... calculated steps, timed in such a way as not only to throw the adversary off balance but to keep him off it, and prepared with sufficient privacy so that the advantage of surprise can be retained." He also urged the administration to "assure a divergence of outlook and policy between the Russians and Chinese," which could be accomplished by improving relations with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev who had wanted to distance himself from the Communist Chinese. He wrote: "We should... without deceiving ourselves about Khrushchev's political personality and without nurturing any unreal hopes, be concerned to keep him politically in the running and to encourage the survival in Moscow of the tendencies he personifies". Additionally, he recommended that the United States work toward creating divisions within the Soviet bloc by undermining its power in Eastern Europe and encouraging the independent propensities of satellite governments.

Although Kennan had not been considered for a job by Kennedy's advisers, the president himself offered Kennan the choice of ambassadorship in either Poland or Yugoslavia. Kennan was more interested in Yugoslavia, so he accepted Kennedy's offer and began his job in Yugoslavia during May 1961. Kennan was tasked with trying to strengthen Yugoslavia's policy against the Soviets and to encourage other states in the Eastern bloc to pursue autonomy from the Soviets. Kennan found his ambassadorship in Belgrade to be much improved from his experiences in Moscow a decade earlier. He commented, "I was favored in being surrounded with a group of exceptionally able and loyal assistants, whose abilities I myself admired, whose judgment I valued, and whose attitude toward myself was at all times … enthusiastically cooperative … Who was I to complain?" Kennan found the Yugoslav government treated the American diplomats politely, in contrast from the way in which the Russians treated him in Moscow. He wrote that the Yugoslavs "considered me, rightly or wrongly, a distinguished person in the U.S., and they were pleased that someone whose name they had heard before was being sent to Belgrade".

Kennan found it difficult to perform his job in Belgrade. President Josip Broz Tito and his foreign minister, Koča Popović, began to suspect that Kennedy would adopt an anti-Yugoslav policy during his term. Tito and Popović considered Kennedy's decision to observe Captive Nations Week as an indication that the United States would assist anti-communist liberation efforts in Yugoslavia. Tito also believed that the CIA and the Pentagon were the true directors of American foreign policy. Kennan attempted to restore Tito's confidence in the American foreign policy establishment, but his efforts were compromised by a pair of diplomatic blunders, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, and the U-2 spy incident.

Relations between Yugoslavia and the United States quickly began to worsen. In September 1961, Tito held a conference of nonaligned nations, where he delivered speeches that the U.S. government interpreted as being pro-Soviet. According to historian David Mayers, Kennan argued that Tito's perceived pro-Soviet policy was in fact a ploy to "buttress Khrushchev's position within the Politburo against hardliners opposed to improving relations with the West and against China, which was pushing for a major Soviet–U.S. showdown". This policy also earned Tito "credit in the Kremlin to be drawn upon against future Chinese attacks on his communist credentials". While politicians and government officials expressed growing concern about Yugoslavia's relationship with the Soviets, Kennan believed that the country had an "anomalous position in the Cold War that objectively suited U.S. purposes". Kennan also believed that within a few years, Yugoslavia's example would cause states in the Eastern bloc to demand more social and economic autonomy from the Soviets.