Letter from George Kennan to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, with Attached Speech
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OCR Page 1 of 23remmedfile
007659
THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
s RECORDS
1088-a
SCHOOL OF HISTORICAL STUDIES
May 26,1951
For
Dear Dean:
Pursuant to our conversation of the day before yester-
day I want to add a few thoughts that occur to me in connec-
tion with your coming appearance on the Hill.
1) I enclose a copy of a lecture I recently delivered
at Princeton University on World War II. I think the pas-
sage on pages 12 to 14 dealing with the wartime conferences
and the final passage on pages 17 and 18 dealing with the
limitations of war as a vehicle for the achievement of
democratic objectives may contain thoughts which could
possibly be useful to you.
2) With regard to contact between General MacArthur and
the Department of State, I think you should know that the
reason I was sent to Japan in the spring of 1948 was that the
Department of State appeared to have no adequate facilities
for getting information (about activities of SCAP and condi-
tions in Japan) necessary for proper study of the Japanese
peace treaty problem. In particular, we had difficulty
finding out what had really been done about the purges and
about the decentralization of industry. It looked to us as
though a huge percentage of Japanese corporate wealth had
been effectively nationalized under the decentralization pro-
gram, and we were unable to learn where this matter really
stood, how much of this wealth had been redistributed to
private owners in Japan, etc. It seemed to us that the pros-
pects for future stability and indigenous resistance to commu-
nist pressures depended on the answers to questions of this
sort, and our channels of communication with SCAP did not
seem to be adequate to provide us with such information.
I believe that in one of the Policy Planning Staff
papers submitted to General Marshall at that time I recom-
mended that he grasp the nettle involved in the problem of
the State Department's relationships with General MacArthur
and see whether we could not have a full-fledged diplomatic
representative in Tokyo who would not be a subordinate of the
General in his military command, who could report independently
to the Department of State, and who could entertain relations
with the Japanese Government and the other diplomatic missions
in Tokyo in a manner from which the Supreme Commander was
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