its disposal “an elaborate and far-flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history.” Not only that, western societies contained a “wide variety of national associations or bodies which can be dominated or influenced by such penetration,” including “labor unions, youth leagues, women’s organizations, racial societies, religious societies, social organizations, cultural groups, liberal magazines [and] publishing houses.” In these circumstances, the only “manly” course of action open to the United States (Kennan was fond of using such gendered language to make his point) was to contain Soviet expansion with “the logic of force” in the hope that structural weaknesses within the communist system, chief of which was the Stalin regime’s lack of legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Russians, would lead to its eventual disintegration.37
It was an emotional, rhetorically overwrought performance, which sat uneasily with Kennan’s later, much-vaunted reputation as a Cold War “re-alist”; but, for an audience grasping for ways to make sense of the bewil-deringly complex postwar world, it hit home. Recalled from Moscow in April 1946, Kennan toured the United States, giving as many as thirty lectures on the Soviet challenge before taking up residence at the National War College in Washington, where he developed his notion of strategic “containment” into an article published the following year in the influential journal
Meanwhile, events seemed to be conspiring to confirm Kennan’s analysis of Soviet behavior. In March 1946, while speaking in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill used the phrase “Iron Curtain” to describe Moscow’s growing control over communist-dominated governments in eastern Europe. A year later, with the Soviet Union sending probes into areas of the Mediterranean and Middle East previously controlled by the British, President Truman appeared before Congress to request huge appropriations to aid the threatened governments of Greece and Turkey. A few months after the “Truman Doctrine” committed the United States to a global policy of saving “free peoples” from communist aggression, Secretary of State George C. Marshall used a June 1947 commencement address at Harvard to outline a massive program of financial assistance to the war-devastated economies of Europe. Predictably, the Soviets refused to take part in the Marshall Plan and, in October, at a conference of eastern European com-
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munist party officials in Warsaw, revived the Comintern (which Stalin, in a wartime gesture of goodwill, had abolished in 1943) in the shape of the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform. Soon the Cominform was launching Münzenberg-style front operations all over the west, ped-dling a seductive image of the Soviet Union as a champion of world peace and the war-mongering United States as its principal enemy. The briefly fluid international situation of the immediate postwar period had frozen into a bipolar world order in which two ideologically opposed enemies used every means available to them, short of direct military confrontation, to frustrate the ambitions of the other.