X Article

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Sources of Soviet Conduct, known as the X Article, ran in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, signed only with the letter X. A year earlier, Time magazine had called a Kremlin speech the most warlike pronouncement uttered by any top-rank statesman since V-J Day. The writer behind the pseudonym was George F. Kennan, a State Department diplomat barred from publishing under his own name. His unsigned essay introduced a single word, containment, that would guide American strategy for decades. How did an anonymous author end up shaping the era's defining foreign policy doctrine? And why would he stay silent about his true intentions until his memoirs appeared in 1967?

• 2. The Long Telegram

  ›

  At the Bolshoi Theatre on the 9th of February 1946, Joseph Stalin addressed the Soviet Union the night before the Supreme Soviet election. He spoke only of expanding industry, defending the plan through Marxist-Leninist theory and warning that capitalism carried a built-in drive toward conflict. George Kennan, serving as chargé d'affaires at the American embassy in Moscow, judged the speech routine. He sent Washington only a brief summary. The Soviet Union had recently rejected the Bretton Woods agreement. Evidence of atomic espionage in the United States and Canada had already put officials on edge. President Harry Truman swung between belligerence and restraint toward Moscow, and Washington had concluded its old quid pro quo approach no longer worked.

  Elbridge Durbrow and fellow diplomat H. Freeman Matthews had both read Kennan's earlier telegrams. Both were puzzled that he had said so little about Stalin's speech. On the 13th of February, Matthews drafted a message, signed by Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, asking Kennan for an interpretive analysis of Soviet intentions. The cable described public reaction as having reached, in its words, "a degree not hitherto felt." W. Averell Harriman, recently returned from his post as ambassador to the Soviet Union, urged Kennan directly to write a thorough response.

  Kennan dictated his answer to his secretary, Dorothy Hessman, on the 22nd of February 1946, finishing late at night. He carried the message to the Mokhovaya code room in Moscow to have it telegraphed to Washington. At just over 5,000 words, it became the longest diplomatic telegram the State Department had ever received. It was quickly nicknamed the long telegram, though its formal designation was State Department number 511. The message ran to five parts, covering Soviet background, current behavior, future prospects, and implications for American policy, and it opened with an apology for its own length.

• 3. A Sense Of Insecurity

  ›

  Kennan opened his analysis by describing the world as the Soviet leadership saw it, split into socialist and capitalist camps. In this view, the alliance between the United States and Great Britain was destined to collapse, ending in war between them or a joint attack on the Soviet Union. Kennan called the entire premise absurd, noting that capitalist countries were neither failing nor perpetually at war with each other. He dismissed the notion that Washington and London would deliberately attack the Soviets as "the sheerest nonsense."

  He traced the real motive to something older than ideology. "At the bottom of the Kremlin's view of world affairs," he wrote, "is a traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity." Past Russian rulers had held authority that was, in his words, "archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of western countries." Marxism-Leninism gave that inherited insecurity a modern excuse. Framing the outside world as hostile supplied, as Kennan put it, an excuse "for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand."

  Kennan described Soviet governance as split into two layers: an official government that took part in diplomacy, and an unofficial one working to "disrupt national self confidence" and "stimulate all forms of disunity" abroad. He concluded that Moscow held no real expectation of reconciliation with the West. Rather than proposing specific actions, he urged Americans to maintain courage and self-confidence, arguing that Russia's weakness, its lack of orderly succession, and its reliance on negative propaganda meant the country could "approach calmly and with good heart" the problem of dealing with Russia. His closing warning was that the greatest danger lay in Americans becoming like the adversary they were coping with.

• 4. Washington And Moscow React

  ›

  Matthews cabled Kennan calling the telegram "magnificent," writing that he could not overestimate its importance to those struggling with the problem. Byrnes described it as "a splendid analysis" he had read "with the greatest interest." Harriman was less enthusiastic, calling it "fairly long, and a little bit slow reading in spots," but he sent a copy on to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal anyway. Forrestal circulated it widely across Washington, and its readers eventually included Cuba's ambassador Henry Norweb, British diplomat Frank Roberts, General George C. Marshall, and President Truman himself.

  Historian John Lewis Gaddis writes that the telegram became "the basis for United States strategy toward the Soviet Union throughout the rest of the Cold War." It also won Kennan, in Gaddis's words, the reputation of being the government's foremost Soviet expert. Reflecting in 1967, Kennan put it simply: "My reputation was made. My voice now carried." By mid-April 1946, at Forrestal's insistence, he had been appointed Deputy for Foreign Affairs at the National War College.

  Louis Halle argues the telegram's timing mattered, since the State Department was, in his words, "floundering about, looking for new intellectual moorings," and needed something to attach itself to. Gaddis and Wilson D. Miscamble counter that the department was already turning against the Soviets, though Miscamble concedes the cable had a "catalytic effect" on departmental thinking. Matthews pointed to a Byrnes speech of the 28th of February, drafted before Byrnes had even read Kennan's message. Historian Melvyn P. Leffler notes the Joint Chiefs of Staff had already resolved that February to resist any expansion of Russian influence in Europe and the Far East.

  A copy of the long telegram leaked to Soviet intelligence, and Stalin himself read it. He directed his ambassador in Washington, Nikolai Novikov, to send a matching telegram back to Moscow, ghostwritten by Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and dispatched on the 27th of September 1946. Novikov's cable accused American foreign policy of reflecting "the imperialistic tendencies of American monopolistic capitalism" and a striving for world supremacy. Kennan later reviewed Novikov's telegram in a 1991 piece for the journal Diplomatic History, writing that its authors had produced the thing only as a way of telling their masters in Moscow, "How true, sir!"

• 5. Pen Name X

  ›

  On the 7th of January 1947, Kennan spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations, meeting at the Harold Pratt House in New York City. The session, themed "Soviet Foreign Relations," was designated "not for attribution" and drew only a small group. Kennan spoke without a written text, having given dozens of similar talks before, arguing the United States needed to "contain" the Soviets in a "non-provocative way."

  International banker R. Gordon Wasson attended and was impressed enough to suggest the Council publish a revised version in its journal, Foreign Affairs. Editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who had not been in the room, wrote on the 10th of January asking Kennan to turn the talk into an article. Kennan replied on the 4th of February that he could not write anything of value on Russia under his own name, but offered an anonymous piece or one under a pen name. Armstrong agreed on the 7th of March, judging that the disadvantage of anonymity was outweighed by the article's potential importance.

  Busy lecturing at the National War College, Kennan had little time to draft something new. In January 1946, Forrestal had already asked him to assess a paper by Smith College professor Edward F. Willett, titled "Dialectical Materialism And Russian Objectives." Unimpressed with Willett's work, Kennan chose to write his own analysis rather than criticize it, producing a roughly six-thousand-word paper called "Psychological Background of Soviet Foreign Policy." Forrestal called it "extremely well-done" and passed it on to General Marshall.

  In a letter of the 10th of March, Kennan asked Forrestal's aide, John T. Connor, whether the paper could be published anonymously in Foreign Affairs. Forrestal agreed, as did the State Department's Committee on Unofficial Publications. Kennan made small corrections, scratched out his own name, and wrote X in its place, adding a note explaining that his position made it impossible to write under his own name. Armstrong published the piece under a new title, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," stripping out Kennan's explanatory note and leaving only the letter X.

• 6. The Logic Of Containment

  ›

  Kennan opened the published article by describing Marxism-Leninism as the "pseudo-scientific justification" for Stalin's continued rule despite a lack of popular support. Quoting Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he wrote that Soviet leaders' "aggressive intransigence" against the outside world compelled them "to chastise the contumacy" they had themselves provoked. To hold power, he argued, the leadership needed to sustain the illusion of external threats, since in the Soviet system "truth is not a constant but is actually created" by the leaders themselves for tactical purposes.

  Soviet leaders were not preparing an immediate overthrow of the West, Kennan wrote, since their ideology already assumed capitalism would eventually fail on its own. Their real ambition was long-term: "filling every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power." To answer this, Kennan proposed containment through "counter-force" applied at shifting points of geographic and political pressure. His "perimeter defense" concept treated every region as equally important, calling for the United States to confront the Russians "with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world."

  Containment would succeed over time, Kennan argued, because the Soviet economy was rudimentary and its leadership lacked any orderly procedure for succession. Sudden disruption could change the state overnight "from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies." Unlike Napoleon or Adolf Hitler, Soviet leaders operated under no ideological compulsion to accomplish their purposes in a hurry. "Like the Church," Kennan wrote, the Kremlin deals in ideological concepts "of long-term validity" and has "no right to risk the existing achievements of the revolution for the sake of vain baubles of the future."

  The likely outcome, Kennan predicted, was "either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power," as indefinite frustration forced Moscow to adjust to reality. Success would depend on America managing its own affairs well, not just containing an adversary. He closed the essay by writing that to avoid destruction, "the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions," adding that "there was never a fairer test of national quality than this."

• 7. Exposure And Rebuttal

  ›

  Armstrong wrote to Kennan in May 1947 that it was "a pleasure for an editor to deal with something that needs practically no revision," wishing only that it could carry Kennan's name. A five-month gap between writing and publication meant the piece never mentioned the Truman Doctrine or the recent communist uprisings in Greece and Turkey. Foreign Affairs then had a little over 19,000 subscribers and cost $1.25 a copy, and the July issue sold at its usual pace until journalist Arthur Krock wrote about the X article in the New York Times on the 8th of July. Krock argued the piece matched exactly the policy Washington adopted once appeasing the Kremlin had failed, and that its author had studied the Soviet Union "at the closest range possible for a foreigner."

  Krock's column triggered a rush for copies, though he had not named Kennan himself. Forrestal had let Krock see a draft that still carried Kennan's name, and other diplomats recognized the prose and its quoting of Gibbon. The Daily Worker, the Communist Party's newspaper, broke the identity story on the 9th of July under the headline "'X' Bared as State Dep't Aid: Calls for Overthrow of Soviet Government." A Newsweek piece on the 21st of July credited the article with charting "the course that this country is likely to pursue for years to come," prompting Marshall to summon Kennan for a private meeting that, Kennan later said, left Marshall astonished at "the strange ways of the department he now headed."

  Walter Lippmann answered across fourteen columns in the New York Herald Tribune, the first appearing on the 2nd of September 1947, later collected in his book The Cold War. Lippmann called the article a "strategic monstrosity" that handed the Soviets the initiative, leaving America dependent on "a coalition of disorganized, disunited, feeble or disorderly nations, tribes and factions." He mistakenly credited Kennan's essay with inspiring the Truman Doctrine, a policy Lippmann opposed. Kennan had actually finished his draft in late January 1947, before Truman's speech of the 12th of March, and Gaddis notes Kennan had tried to remove the very language Lippmann objected to.

  Kennan privately agreed with parts of Lippmann's critique, regretting how rushed the writing had been. He did not send his final draft until the 11th of April, a month after the Truman Doctrine speech, yet left it unrevised despite his own doubts. His position inside the State Department kept him from answering publicly, and he stayed silent until the first volume of his memoirs appeared in 1967.

• 8. Legacy And Blind Spots

  ›

  In his 1979 memoir, Henry Kissinger wrote that Kennan "came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history." The X Article had, by then, widely introduced the term containment into public debate. Gaddis argues that Kennan's silence during Lippmann's attack let containment become, in most people's minds, "synonymous... with Truman's doctrine," even though Gaddis believes later readers placed too much weight on what he calls the "conspicuous but misleading 'X' article."

  Kennan himself admitted his article caused confusion by using the term "counterforce" rather than "counter-pressure" without ever explaining the distinction. After publication, he reassessed his own perimeter defense concept, shifting toward what he called "strongpoint defense," focused on particular areas rather than treating every region as equally vital.

  Kennan recalled in his memoirs that his "entire diplomatic experience took place in rather high northern latitudes." Historian Thomas Borstelmann argues that this narrow experience fed a contempt for the peoples of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, whom Kennan tended to lump together as "impulsive, fanatical, ignorant, lazy, unhappy, and prone to mental disorders and other biological deficiencies." In his 1967 memoir, Kennan linked Soviet despotism itself to an "attitude of Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy." In a 1942 lecture, he had already argued that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution proved Russians were not "westernized" but remained a "17th century semi-Asiatic people."

  Borstelmann adds that these views were far from unique to Kennan, reflecting assumptions common throughout the American policymaking circles of his era.