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

run out on the more modest quarters they had rented in Cleveland Park. “Your battle accounts were the best I have seen in our press,” Kennan wrote, thanking him. “Like Tolstoy, you are an artist and should write about what you see and perceive rather than what you think. For the latter, I have respect too, but not as much.” With that barb implanted, Kennan admitted to having been “startlingly wrong” in some of his views about Asia, “and you, it would seem, much righter.” But “not necessarily” for the right reasons. “I can’t help but feel that you overrate my descriptive powers and perhaps just slightly underrate my poor intellect,” Alsop responded, “but you and I will argue as long as we are friends.” 9
    Once out of Washington, Kennan watched with admiration as MacArthur landed American and South Korean forces at Inchon on September 15, and then with foreboding as they swept into North Korea at the beginning of October. No less a figure than George C. Marshall, recruited by Truman to replace the hopeless Louis Johnson as secretary of defense, had cabled MacArthur that he was “to feel unhampered strategically and tactically” in operating north of the 38th parallel. Meeting little opposition, United Nations forces advanced rapidly through the narrow neck of the Korean peninsula and toward the much longer border with China at the Yalu River. Mao Zedong ordered his armies to cross into North Korea on October 19. A week later they attacked South Korean units, but MacArthur kept going. As he neared the Yalu on November 25, the Chinese surprised him with a massive counteroffensive, which soon had his forces retreating in disarray and Washington in a state of panic.
    Kennan had indeed been wrong about some things and right about others. He had warned of intervention, but it was the Soviet Union that worried him: he hardly mentioned the possibility that the Chinese might enter the war. He opposed trying to occupy all of North Korea, but Chinese sources suggest that Mao might have attacked even if United Nations forces had remained south of the 38th parallel. There were strains in the Sino-Soviet relationship, but they originated more from Stalin’s uncertainty about how to handle MacArthur’s advance than from Mao’s determination to assert his independence from Moscow. Still eager to show his loyalty to the Soviet Union, Mao welcomed a war with the Americans, partly for ideological reasons but chiefly because the Truman administration had accepted Kennan’s recommendation to deploy the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. That, as Mao saw it, was intervention in the internal affairs of China. 10
    But none of this was known then. What was clear was that official Washington—having spent the past five months experiencing despair, and then euphoria, and then despair again—was badly rattled. Asked at a press conference on November 30 whether he had considered using the atomic bomb in Korea, Truman acknowledged that he had, and then alarmed everyone by adding that “the military commander in the field” would decide when its employment would be appropriate. The White House quickly backtracked, insisting that only the president could make such a decision, but British prime minister Clement Attlee invited himself to Washington anyway to try to figure out what was going on. The next morning Bohlen called Kennan from Paris to point out that there was now no one in the State Department with “a deep understanding” of the Soviet Union. Kennan must volunteer his services once again. 11
    He immediately did so, received thanks from Acheson, and caught the next train. He spent the evening of Saturday, December 2, with the Davieses and on Sunday morning reported for duty. With the secretary of state tied up at the Pentagon and the White House, it fell to Webb to brief Kennan. Military planners required a decision within thirty-six hours as to whether to withdraw completely from Korea. Attlee would be