Those Who Thought Ahead

By DAVID AIKMAN/WASHINGTON

Some walked slowly, stooped but not dimmed by years, like George F. Kennan, 83, who helped set up the first U.S. embassy in the Soviet Union 54 years ago. Others, still bouncy in the heyday of their careers, flew in from faraway posts, like Winston Lord, 49, the U.S. Ambassador to China. The twelve men who assembled in the State Department last week represented one of the most impressive gatherings of U.S. diplomatic talent in recent years. All are former directors of the policy-planning staff, a branch of the State Department established 40 years ago this month to consider how to rebuild Europe and cope with the Soviets.

The reunion, a felicitous idea during this period, when the strategic planning of a wiser era seems so lacking, was the brainchild of Richard Solomon, who has held the policy-planning post since March 1986. Some 300 officials crammed into two small rooms to hear the planners' off-the-record discussion of "future foreign policy challenges for the U.S." One topic was the same one that dominated such meetings when the staff was first formed: What are the Soviet Union's global aims? There was a sense that the cold war that has shaped the world during the past 40 years has become far more complex. Yet the question the planners faced in 1947 is no less pressing today: How should the West respond?

Secretary of State George Shultz presided over a private dinner for the group and eloquently described what he believes to be one of the principal dilemmas of current U.S. diplomacy: how to restore a public consensus on foreign policy goals when the nation is divided over the fundamental issues involved.

A similar set of challenges faced the U.S. in late April 1947, when Secretary of State George Marshall returned from a disheartening visit to Europe and the Soviet Union. The war-ravaged countries of the old Continent, Marshall reported to his countrymen in a radio broadcast, were close to economic disintegration. The Soviet Union, he warned, was becoming increasingly aggressive in its ambitions toward Western Europe. "The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate," the general declared.

Searching for an innovative response, Marshall sought out Kennan, who had provided early warnings of the Soviets' expansionist aims in his astute cables as a foreign service officer in wartime Moscow. Kennan, then 43, was ordered to put together a staff that could formulate "long-term programs for the achievement of U.S. foreign policy." Marshall's only advice: "Avoid trivia." Working with a staff of six out of an office adjoining the Secretary's, Kennan forged the intellectual framework for the most successful American foreign policy program in the postwar era: the Marshall Plan for European economic recovery. Having coined the term containment to describe U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union, Kennan was able to give it a positive rather than militaristic component through what Dean Acheson later described as "one of the greatest and most honorable adventures in history." By the end of 1952, the U.S. had spent more than $13 billion on the Marshall Plan and launched Western Europe on its path to vitality.

The 13 men who followed Kennan as director of policy planning -- s/p (for staff and planning) in the curious jargon of the State Department -- all had their brushes with epochal events. Paul Nitze, who at 80 is still active as President Reagan's arms-control adviser after service under eight Presidents, recalls a 1953 fight with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to exclude a sentence on Chinese expansionism from an Eisenhower speech just before the Korean War armistice. (Nitze won.) In the summer of 1962 Walt W. Rostow and his staff predicted that Nikita Khrushchev would soon embark on high-risk foreign policy moves. Rostow and other officials met each Thursday over lunch at the State Department to think through a response. "We said that if the U.S. stayed firm, he'd back away," recalls Rostow, 70. Indeed, when President John F. Kennedy imposed a naval blockade in October to pressure the Soviets to dismantle missiles they were installing in Cuba, Khrushchev backed down.

Rostow says flatly his policy-planning days were the "nicest job a man ever had," a judgment that seems to be shared by every other director of the office. Yet, as the White House bureaucracy extended its reach during succeeding presidencies, policy planning did not always have the same influence. It flourished under Henry Kissinger, who gave Lord and his entire staff of more than 20 the department's Distinguished Honor Award.

Solomon, today's director, has ideal qualifications. A China scholar, he joined Kissinger's staff in 1971 and later headed the political-science department at the Rand Corp. Each morning he meets with Shultz for 45 minutes to discuss long-range policies, and he goes along on major diplomatic missions. Most important of all, he says, he has time to think. Given the daily evidence of the dangers of ill-conceived initiatives concocted in secret, this legacy of a more thoughtful era is something to contemplate.