The following monograph contains the recollections of three individuals, George F. Kennan, Andrew J. Goodpaster, and Robert R. Bowie who helped to formulate and, in the case of the latter two, also to implement the foreign policy of the Eisenhower administration. In 1988, after the passage of thirty-five years and removal of the top secret classification from the record, they came together at Princeton University to talk with students and scholars about their activities as government officials.
In May 1953 Dwight D. Eisenhower had been president of the United States for four months. Since the previous November, the month of his landslide election, the war-hero president had concerned himself with a series of events having profound security implications for the United States. The Korean War which ultimately would cause the deaths of thirty-five thousand Americans, millions of Koreans, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese continued in a bloody stalemate across the mountainous peninsula while armistice negotiations were deadlocked over the issue of prisoner exchanges. The United States having found itself in a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union had set off the world's first hydrogen explosion. And initial efforts by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to create a European defense community had failed because of French resistance to admitting a rearmed Germany and concern about communist efforts to expel France from its colony, Indochina. Moreover, in Guatemala, a leftist president had nationalized large tracts of fruit trees belonging to an American company; and in Iran a new government, perhaps also under communist influence, had nationalized oil concessions belonging to the British, threatening the flow of petroleum to world markets. Adding to the uncertainty, the Soviet Union also had a new leader. Stalin had died in March, an event that set off a contest for his successor among Politburo members. Seeing an opportunity to reach out to the Soviet leadership, Eisenhower gave a speech at the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16. He called it "The Chance for Peace," and it was perhaps the most eloquent of his career. Later also referred to as the "Cross of Iron" speech, it inventoried the costs of "a world at arms" and proposed measures to reduce tensions. Unfortunately, the Soviets failed to respond. Yet another concern was the fact that Eisenhower's recently installed national security staff and cabinet secretaries needed policy direction.
The question of the day was what Eisenhower intended to do. Pundits noted that John Foster Dulles, his new secretary of state, had written the foreign affairs plank of the Republican campaign platform. The program called on the U.S. to regain the foreign policy initiative, seek a free, democratic, and unified Germany, and even "roll back" communist control from Eastern Europe. And, the pundits wondered, what was the new president going to do about the Korean War? He had said during the campaign that he would "go to Korea," and he had done so soon after his election. Still, in late spring 1953, no armistice was yet in sight. Would the new president, they asked, overturn the nation's policy of containment and assume a new, more belligerent posture toward Soviet power? President Truman had already modified it, responding to the Soviet testing of an atomic weapon, the communist takeover of mainland China, and the North Korean invasion of South Korea by implementing the recommendations of a planning document, NSC 68. They enlarged the American strategic perimeter to include South Korea, Taiwan, and Indochina and drastically increased defense spending from $13 billion to over $50 billion.
In early May 1953, Eisenhower began to provide answers, though not to the pundits. The new president's directives, classified top secret, were not available to them. The pundits would have to divine them as the administration's policies unfolded. And interestingly, they would spring, not from Eisenhower directly, but rather from a process, an exercise at once deliberative and educational that he put in motion code-named Solarium. For many years, the record being closed, most historians would argue that Eisenhower had replaced Truman's foreign policy of containment with something quite different called, variously, "roll back," "brinksmanship," or simply the "New Look." With the passage of time and the release of more information, a different view began to emerge. Eisenhower's foreign policy seemed increasingly to resemble more what Truman had been doing a forceful brand of containment than the approach that John Foster Dulles had proposed in the 1952 GOP platform.
As a result of the declassification of the Solarium documents in 1985, it became clear that the different view was the correct one. Indeed, what historians discovered, to their amazement, since Dulles had forced him out of the State Department only several months earlier, was that the individual who wrote the main thrust of Eisenhower's policy, mapped out by the Solarium exercise, was none other than the official who, in 1946 in his famous "long telegram" from Moscow and as director of the policy planning staff of the State Department in 1947, had provided the intellectual framework of containment: George Frost Kennan.
The exercise, code-named Solarium for the room on the top floor of the White House where it was conceived, brought together three task forces to examine separately and in detail the most promising approaches being considered at the time by the national security establishment. (1) Task force A was assigned to modify, with additional initiatives, the Truman policy of containment. (2) Task force B was to delineate the perimeters of U.S. security interests on the globe and announce that should the Soviet Union or its allies cross those lines, war would ensue. And finally (3) Task Force C was to propose measures short of war including political, economic, diplomatic, and covert to eliminate Soviet influence from the free world and weaken communist control in both Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself. To compound the irony of his return to the councils of government, Kennan found himself in charge of Task Force A, assigned to perfect the very policy whose architect he had been.
None of the scenarios envisioned forcible overthrow of the Soviet government, but all were designed with the purpose of establishing a stable peace and regular diplomatic relations and in the long run, it was hoped, causing it to collapse from within. Each approach assumed a different level of threat. The first, A, assumed a short-term strengthening of the Soviet competitive position, to be followed after ten or fifteen years by its failure. The second, B, assumed a somewhat less aggressive, more rational set of Soviet intentions. The third, C, assumed that time was on the side of the Soviet Union rather than of the United States but that the United States, by taking action, could reverse the situation. The exercise was conducted at the National War College, Fort McNair, in Washington, D.C., from June 10 to July 15. There were twenty-one participants, with seven in each of the task forces.
Eisenhower's purpose in calling the exercise was to provide a counter to his secretary of state's pessimism and more unilateralist proposals. The president did not take part in the deliberations, but he did recommend participants: it was he who suggested that Kennan chair Task Force A. The president also worked closely with his special assistant for national security, Robert Cutler, in setting the overall agenda, ensuring the integrity of the process, and providing access by the members of each task force to any government agency that could provide assistance. He also set the deadlines and stipulated a daylong rehearsal before formal presentation of findings at a meeting scheduled for July 16 of the National Security Council.
On that day, the conference over, Eisenhower listened to the discussion of all options. He then stood, congratulated the participants for their work, summarized what had been said, and stated his conclusions. Kennan recalled that Eisenhower "spoke with a mastery of the subject matter, a thoughtfulness, and a penetration that were quite remarkable. I came away from it with the conviction (which I have carried to this day)" he said, "that President Eisenhower was a much more intelligent man than he was given credit for being. But like Foster [Dulles] (although in a different way) he didn't reveal [to the public] how discriminating and thoughtful a person he was, or how well he could present all these things."1
The president authorized that the findings be the basis for a new basic national security policy for consideration by the National Security Council. Meanwhile, the NSC Planning Board, he said, should recommend any actions proposed by the Solarium study that could be implemented at once.
The Solarium findings included recommendations for
"a U.S. capability for a strong retaliatory offensive, a base for mobilization, and continental defense";
a "strong, independent, and self-sufficient groupings of nations friendly to the
United States centering on Western Europe (including Germany), on the Far East
(including Japan), and a position of strength in the Middle East." U.S. foreign assistance, they said, would be less necessary over time in Western Europe but would be needed for
"a longer term" in the Far East and the Middle East. The U.S. would need to determine areas in which
"a clearly recognizable advance by Soviet bloc military forces will be considered by the United States as initiating war." It would need to take
"take selected aggressive actions of a limited scope, involving moderately
increased risks of general war, to eliminate Soviet-dominated areas within the
free world and to reduce Soviet power in the Satellite periphery." It also would need to
"take action other than military, to reduce indigenous communist power in the
nations of the free world." The purpose, they said, would be "during the near future to create
a 'climate of victory' to bolster the morale and strength of the free world
while forcing the Soviet bloc on the defensive."2
The Influence of the Solarium Report on Cold War National Security Policy
The findings of the Solarium report which essentially updated and continued (institutionalized) Truman's policy of political, diplomatic, economic, and, where necessary, military containment of Soviet expansion became structural elements in the foundation of United States cold war policy from 1953 to 1991. The Solarium deliberations produced the framework for a policy in which the United States, while developing strength both at home and abroad and taking steps both to stop Soviet expansion and to reduce communist influence, made no plans to overthrow the leadership of the Soviet Union. Instead, the United States proposed to reach out to them avoiding actions that might lead either to a garrison state at home or to military action abroad, seeking ways to communicate, even to negotiate if possible. This policy established the American side of a confrontation whose dynamic brought resolution of several confrontations in Berlin, an arms race that resulted during the Kennedy administration in the Cuban missile crisis, as well as a limited nuclear test ban treaty. It involved a refusal by the Eisenhower administration to intervene to rescue the French in Indochina in 1954 after their army was surrounded by the Viet Minh at the fortress of Dien Bien Phu. But it also involved Central Intelligence Agency actions that toppled governments in Iran and Guatemala. This dynamic brought Eisenhower's condemnation and reversal of the French-British-Israeli invasion of Suez in 1956 and, later, the decision of President Lyndon Baines Johnson to embark on an ill-fated U.S. intervention in South Vietnam. While avoiding nuclear war, this dynamic brought the world perilously close to Armageddon by the early 1980s, as both sides attempted to deter the other through an escalating series of breakthroughs in nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles, air-launched and submarine-launched missiles, and antimissile systems. They would break off talks in 1983, but gradually, with the advent of a new, younger Soviet leadership, arms control and summit conferences between the two sides resumed. By 1987 the dynamic of the policy established by the Eisenhower administration had brought the beginning of arms reduction and, finally, four years later, the demise of the Soviet regime.
Kennan's Contribution
For several decades, with the release of documents and the publication of monographs, historians have understood that Eisenhower's New Look national security policy, far from being a policy of "rollback" or "massive retaliation," was in fact a continuation of Truman's containment. Accordingly, though surprising, it was not illogical to find that Kennan figured in the formulation of the New Look. But it was a continuation of Truman's policy with a twist. It is important to note that as set forth by the Solarium discussions, while keeping the main parts, the recommendations of Kennan's task force, which formed the nucleus of the Solarium report, took issue with several assumptions and emphases of Truman's policy. They implied that, as enunciated in its post-Korean War incarnation, NSC 68, containment was too pessimistic about Soviet power, involved excessive emphasis on military action (and a supposed deadline for Soviet nuclear danger 1954), and required too high a level of economic mobilization all criticisms Kennan was himself leveling at containment by 1953. He had come to bemoan the loss of what he considered to be the central ideas he had brought forward in 1946 and 1947 long-term resistance to Soviet expansion in Western Europe using political, economic, and diplomatic pressure. The architect-now-critic of containment was thus a logical choice when Eisenhower was seeking an individual to chair Task Force A the task force charged with exploring the continuation, but modification, of Truman's policy.
The Dulles Centennial Conference
The "John Foster Dulles Centennial Conference: The Challenge of Leadership in International Affairs" was held at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University on February 25-27, 1988, to commemorate the centennial of Dulles's birth. An extraordinary gathering of individuals who had formulated and carried out U.S. foreign policy during the Eisenhower administration, the keynote speakers and distinguished panelists provided a retrospective on the national security strategy of the 1950s for an audience of students, political scientists, and historians.3
The session entitled, "Project Solarium: A Collective Oral History with Andrew J. Goodpaster, Robert R. Bowie, George F. Kennan," was made possible by the fact that the Eisenhower Library had recently declassified and made available to scholars the record of the Solarium exercise. Conference organizers selected the panelists Goodpaster, Kennan, and Bowie because of their participation in the exercise or in implementing the resulting policy or (in the case of Goodpaster) both. Kennan, as mentioned, was chairman of the Task Force A.
He had retired from his career as a diplomat. Goodpaster served on Task Force C and then in 1954 became White House Staff Secretary and Defense Liaison (a position similar to today's national security adviser). Bowie, in 1953, was the newly appointed director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff (replacing Paul Nitze in that position) and a member of the Planning Board of the National Security Council. He was in the audience at the presentation of Solarium findings on July 16, 1953. In the months that followed Bowie helped formulate a policy that reflected their guidelines and, after acceptance by the president, elicited State Department support for Eisenhower's national security policy, NSC 162, which contained most of the Solarium findings.
The Three Panelists: Goodpaster, Bowie, and Kennan
Andrew J. Goodpaster, a graduate of West Point and decorated veteran of World War II, won the Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star for gallantry in combat during the Italian campaign. At the time of the Solarium exercise he was a lieutenant colonel. Having earned a graduate degree in engineering and a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton, he was by this time perhaps the army's leading expert on the role of nuclear weapons in war. (At the request of the Army Chief of Staff in 1946, Goodpaster had organized the Advanced Study Group at the Pentagon, the first effort by the military to address this issue.) Prior to the summer of 1953 he served as special assistant to General Alfred Gruenther, Eisenhower's chief of staff as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. After the death of General Paul T. Carroll in early 1954, President Eisenhower asked Goodpaster to take Carroll's place as White House Staff Secretary and Defense Liaison. In this capacity, Goodpaster briefed Eisenhower every morning on the world situation and handled all communications between the president and the Departments of State and Defense, the CIA, and the NSC. He was, said one of Eisenhower's biographers, "the one man from whom Eisenhower had no secrets." After Eisenhower's departure from the presidency in 1961, Goodpaster, who by this time had been promoted to brigadier general, continued to serve him, eventually as personal liaison with President Johnson. During the 1960s Goodpaster asked for and received orders to troop command. He quickly rose to the rank of four-star general and from 1969 to 1974 served as NATO supreme commander.4
Robert R. Bowie received his bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University and his law degree from Harvard. He practiced law in Baltimore and was assistant attorney general of Maryland from 1941 to 1942. From 1942 to 1946 he served in the U.S. Army Legal Division, Services of Supply in Germany, rising to the rank of colonel. From 1945 to 1946 he was Special Assistant to General Lucius Clay, then Allied commander of occupation forces in Germany. From 1953 to 1957 he was general counsel and special adviser to the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany and, during the same period, as mentioned, directed the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department and served as the department's representative on the NSC Planning Board.. Later, from 1977 to 1979, he was deputy director of the CIA for national intelligence. He was a professor of law at Harvard University from 1946 to 1955 and organized and served as director of the Harvard Center for International Affairs from 1957 to 1972. At retirement in 1980 he was Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs.5
George F. Kennan was by 1953 the leading and most influential postwar United States expert on the Soviet Union. Educated at St. John's University and Princeton University, he was an expert in Russian language and culture who joined the State Department in 1926, becoming part of a State Department group that kept track of events in the Soviet Union, a country with which the U.S. did not have diplomatic relations for another seven years. During World War II he was minister-counselor under Ambassador Averell
Harriman at the United States embassy in Moscow. In 1946 he wrote a telegram from Moscow, the so-called long telegram, in which he characterized the Soviet system under Stalin as brutal and bent on hostile expansion through intimidation and subversion. It was broadly influential as a foundation for American policy toward Stalin's Russia in the postwar period. As director of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department in 1947, he elaborated on this theme in an article entitled,
"The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published in the journal Foreign
Affairs under the pseudonym Mr. X. This article, when its author was later identified, exposed Kennan as the source of the ideas for President Truman's doctrine of containment. Kennan served as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1952 to 1953.
By the time of the Solarium exercise, however, he was no longer a government official (although from 1960 to 1963 he would serve as U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia). After the outbreak of war in Korea and the militarization and globalization of containment via NSC 68 (drafted by Paul Nitze, his successor at the State Department policy planning staff), he became disenchanted with the course of Truman's foreign policy. With the election of Eisenhower as president and the appointment of John Foster Dulles to replace Dean Acheson as secretary of state in 1953, Kennan found himself out of a job. He retired to become professor of historical studies at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J., where he made his home. When, in the spring of 1953, he received a call from the White House inviting him to participate in the Solarium exercise, he was surprised but flattered and, of course, willing to serve.6
Key Issues of the Solarium Session
The Solarium session of the Dulles centennial conference was the first time the three principals Kennan,
Goodpaster, and Bowie had been together since the Solarium conference thirty-five years earlier. It was in this sense a study in historical memory an opportunity to reflect on past actions and their importance in light of the passage of thirty-five years. To prepare for the session, the moderator, historian, Richard Immerman, gave each principal the pages from the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1953
that contained the record of the exercise. Memories thus refreshed and still sharp, the principals responded to questions from both the moderator and the audience a gathering of some thirty-five or forty historians, political scientists, graduate students, and former officials. These responses, which elicited additional memories as the session progressed, revealed general agreement about the conclusions and value of the 1953 exercise. They were essentially as follows:
These conclusions, seen from the vantage of thirty-five years despite the intervening tribulations ranging from the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, to the Carter Doctrine in the Persian Gulf seemed by the time of the Dulles centennial in 1988 to have been correct. The Soviet empire, having become worn down by brutal misrule, corruption, and after 1985 opened to new ideas by Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts at reform, seemed by that time ever more precarious. The cold war had lasted considerably longer and been more costly than they had expected or desired, but by 1988 it had moved in the direction that Eisenhower, Dulles, Kennan, Goodpaster, and Bowie had hoped and for which they had planned thirty-five years earlier.
Conclusion
Eisenhower's Administrative Method
One can only wonder what would have happened had succeeding presidents, beginning with John F. Kennedy in 1961, retained the Eisenhower method of planning and deliberations. It is perhaps impossible to exaggerate the difficulty of attempting to produce a national security policy. The task requires taking into consideration such imponderables as the whims of foreign leaders and collective decision-making bodies as well as the necessarily fragmentary and sometime erroneous information from a variety of intelligence agencies. After scrutiny of the presidencies that followed including those that brought such events as the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam escalation, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Iran-Contra affair students of presidential history have come to praise the Eisenhower model. "Plans are nothing but planning is everything," Eisenhower used to say. "The secret of a sound, satisfactory decision made on an emergency basis," he said, "has always been that the responsible official has been 'living with the problem' before it becomes acute."7 Truman had had little experience with handling such matters and depended heavily on recommendations of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department. And Kennedy, at least at first, did not try, preferring to manage such matters from the Oval Office. All presidents after Eisenhower, it turns out, kept the National Security Council, but none of them, it would seem, understood very well how to use it.8 Not surprisingly considering his career as a strategist, planner, and commander; Eisenhower knew both the importance in matters concerning life or death and the destinies of nations of getting the best possible information before deciding on a course of action and of selecting and organizing his planners in a way that increased the probability that they would help him discover the correct one.9
The Solarium exercise was thus worth studying thirty-five years later. Eisenhower, its participants could see in retrospect, considered it so important that he attended to the smallest details of preparation. The briefing room, he said, needed to have a raised podium and be air-conditioned. He desired that the exercise bring together some of the best thinkers and most experienced individuals to explore dispassionately and free from public scrutiny and comment the three most feasible approaches for the desired policy outcome. The final product needed to be a kind of debate in which participants in their preparation had access to each other and to the best intelligence available. Then, gathered in one big room, they could argue their positions before an audience of those responsible for carrying out policy.10 It was perhaps not surprising that the Solarium exercise produced guidelines that, although based largely on the report of Task Force A, drew elements from each of the three approaches. These guidelines as incorporated into official policy by the National Security Council under President Eisenhower became part of the foundation for his foreign policy. The Solarium exercise involved Eisenhower's national security advisers in the details of their mission, sought their creative cooperation based on specific guidelines, and let them know, in his commentary on their findings, what his policy would be.
The Usefulness of the Session for Further Declassification of Documents
Still another, if subsidiary, value of the Dulles centennial session on Solarium was its helpfulness in obtaining the declassification and release of the remaining portions of the report of Task Force C. The three principals, in the months that followed after responding to challenges from the audience about the necessity, thirty-five years later, of making these portions available helped researchers obtain their declassification and release.
The Hidden George F. Kennan Revealed
Perhaps the most human as well as enlightening revelation of the declassified Solarium papers and the session at the Dulles centennial conference concerned George F. Kennan's service to two administrations, the second clandestinely. Prior to the release of the Solarium documents, historians had concluded that Eisenhower, rather than pursuing some other, perhaps more militant policy such as "roll back," continued Truman's policy of containment, albeit a version of the more active, costly, and multifaceted, post–Korean War variety. What they did not realize until release of the documents and Kennan's comments about them at the Dulles Centennial Conference in 1988 was an important reason for that continuity: that the same individual, Kennan, was involved in the formulation of Eisenhower's foreign policy, too. Indeed, in a rare moment of gloating, Kennan recalled during the 1988 session the satisfaction he had taken looking down at Secretary of State John Foster Dulles from the conference podium during the final plenary session of Solarium on July 16, 1953, and thinking: "Since it was only three months since he had fired me from the Foreign Service, this gave me a certain satisfaction, I must say. I could talk, and he had to listen, for about a half an hour." It is important to note, however, that Eisenhower's actual foreign relations, as opposed to plans, and the way the United States pursued its interests abroad as the cold war unfolded were not undertakings for which Kennan claimed authorship or credit, either at the Dulles centennial conference or later. Indeed, he had been and continued to be an outspoken and articulate critic of their too frequent reliance on military force at the expense of diplomacy. This, he believed, gave aid and comfort to the Kremlin hardliners and needlessly prolonged the cold war.11
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Britannica Student Encyclopedia, s.v.
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Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Greenstein, Fred I. The Hidden Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader. New York: Basic Books, 1982.
Greenstein, Fred I., and Richard H. Immerman.
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Immerman, Richard. John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1999.
Kennan, George F. The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.
. At Century's Ending: Reflections 1982-1995. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996
Pickett, William B. "The Eisenhower Solarium Notes." Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Newsletter. 16, no. 2 (June 1985).
. Dwight David Eisenhower and American Power. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1995.
. "General Andrew Jackson Goodpaster." In The Human Tradition in America since 1945, edited by David Anderson. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2003.
William B. Pickett is a professor of history at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, Indiana.
The editor extends his gratitude to Professors Fred I. Greenstein and Richard Immerman for their indispensable assistance in the preparation of this monograph.