Policy Planning

For the first time in its history, the State Department prepared to plan, instead of improvise, foreign policy. Secretary of State George Marshall brought the Department abreast of America's new diplomatic needs by creating a "policy planning staff."

Composed of 16 men who have specialized in political and economic service, the new staff will formulate worldwide, long-range foreign policy for the U.S., testing that policy against estimates of the international situation projected from 10 to 25 years into the future. The policy planning staff will be to diplomacy what the Army & Navy strategy and policy sections are to military planning. All three will work closely together.

So far, only three men have been picked for the new division: Burton Berry, now chief of the U.S. mission to Rumania; Joe Johnson, chief of the State Department's Division of International Security Affairs and George F. Kennan, who will head the planning staff. Diplomats agree that it would be difficult to find a better man than Kennan. A career diplomat almost from the day he graduated from Princeton in 1925, Kennan is credited with having one of the keenest, broadest-gauged minds in the foreign service. He has spent a total of seven years in Moscow, speaks Russian fluently, and as minister-counsellor under Ambassador Harriman from 1945 to 1946 wrote most of the official reports to Washington, where they were recognized as outstanding. As early as March 1945 he was arguing for the policy of firmness with Russia. Hardworking and a lover of good company, the strain of the war years has cost him, at 43, most of his hair and a good part of his stomach lining--he suffers from ulcers.

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