George F. Kennan: An American Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

in Washington, Kennan wrote a long report and submitted it to Acheson on March 29. He acknowledged the imprudence of generalizing about so vast a region, because differences in Latin America were often more significant than similarities. Nevertheless, some patterns were clear. One was location: human development was harder than in North America, with its broad plains, unifying rivers, and temperate climate. Compounding this problem had been the arrival, “like men from Mars,” of the European conquerors: “History, it seems to me, bears no record of anything more terrible having been done to entire peoples.” Slavery followed, as did the splendor and pretense of Latin American cities, built to compensate for the squalor of the countryside from which they sprang. All of this had produced a culture of “exaggerated self-centeredness and egotism,” conveying the illusion “of desperate courage, supreme cleverness, and a limitless virility where the more constructive virtues are so conspicuously lacking.” This was a world “where geography and history are alike tragic, but where no one must ever admit it.”
    So what was Washington’s responsibility in an era in which Latin American communists, even if only loosely linked to Moscow, might seek to exploit the hopelessness that surrounded them by seizing power? That part of the world was of little military significance to either the United States or the Soviet Union, but there was a bandwagon psychology in international relations: multiple victories for communism could be demoralizing. One such victory somewhere, however—Kennan thought Guatemala the most likely possibility—might have an inoculating effect, shattering complacency about communism elsewhere. The problem, in any event, would be for the Latin Americans to handle: the United States could not return to the military interventions of the early twentieth century. It might, at most, apply economic pressure quietly. In public, its hands would have to be clean.
    The United States could afford to relax, therefore, in managing its hemisphere, for the Latin Americans needed it more than it needed them. That meant tolerating rule by whatever means local rulers considered appropriate: they should not be held to the standards of American domestic democracy. It meant respecting their sovereignty, cooperating with them only when they wanted it. It meant that they, in turn, could not make their countries “the seats of dangerous intrigue against us.” No great power would ever have shown such restraint in dealing with neighboring smaller powers. If the Latin Americans liked it, fine. If not, the responsibility would be theirs for forfeiting its advantages. This was the best Washington could expect to do, Kennan concluded, in a region where problems would always be “multitudinous, complex and unpleasant.” 19
    The term “politically incorrect” had not yet been invented, but Edward G. Miller, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, acted as if it had when he read Kennan’s report. Appalled by its candor, worried about leaks, he persuaded Acheson not to circulate it. “I am not sure that he required much persuading,” Kennan remembered. As a consequence, all copies were “hidden from innocent eyes,” except for the one Kennan kept and quoted from in his 1967 memoir. The full document would not be published until 1976, after which historians treated it either as an example of Kennan’s insensitivity to “third world” issues, or as a blueprint for what the United States would do in Latin America for the rest of the Cold War. 20 Neither interpretation makes much sense.
    Kennan in fact focused on the historical, cultural, economic, demographic, and environmental problems afflicting the region: he came closer to getting Latin America right in 1950 than he had Germany—a country he knew much better—in 1949. Nor was he unsympathetic to the Latin Americans. The rich and the poor, he repeatedly