Letters

X Article

The X Article was one of the most important pieces in establishing the United States' foreign policy of containment during the Cold War. It was published under a pseudonym, because the author—George Kennan—was an employee of the State Department and it would have been inappropriate of him to have published such an article as such.

The impact of the article has been such that even after the end of the Cold War, there have been other foreign policy experts, who have aspired to have the same impact: “The article ['The Soviets' Terminal Crisis'], which predicts the demise of Communism around the world and urges the Western countries to give no aid to Communist countries trying to stave off collapse, is an obvious, and perhaps intentional, reminder of another famous contribution to the policy debate—the 1947 article in Foreign Affairs by George F. Kennan, who at the time identified himself merely as 'X.'

“It took only a couple of days for Arthur Krock, a New York Times columnist to identify X as Mr. Kennan. In the case of Z, however, the hordes of government officials, reporters, scholars and the just plain curious are still sifting through the clues available to his identity. These clues are numerous but they allow nothing better than educated guesses…

“Whoever Z may be, the question remains whether his article has the depth or importance of Mr. Kennan's famous 'X' article on containment. Some, including Mr. [William] Safire, who wrote a column praising its analysis on the very day it appeared in The Times, believe that it is a major statement.”—Richard Bernstein, “A Scholarly Mystery: 'Z' Writes Darkly of Communism, but Who Is 'Z'?” The New York Times, January 12, 1990.

How It's Used

“At dinner [Mr. Devereaux] asked searching questions about the political and economic situation in Austria. He knew much more about it than we did. He asked whether we had read the X Article in Foreign Affairs.”

"The [Long T]elegram caused a sensation in Washington, where it was immediately and widely circulated among senior policy-makers. Its impact on the secretary of state, Dean Acheson, led to [George] Kennan's swift appointment as director of foreign policy planning. There was, however, no mention in the Long Telegram of the key strategy for which Kennan has gone down in history. The notion of containment only emerged 17 months later when Foreign Affairs magazine carried Kennan's analysis under the pseudonym 'X'."

“It would be naive to suppose that this paper, in its entirety, is going to become the basis of a new consensual strategy, any more than the Mr. X article translated directly into NSC-68. There will be plenty more American politics around foreign policy between now and then. While George Bush and Dick Cheney are still in the White House, the rhetoric and the policy will change only so much. A pre-emptive bombing campaign against Iran's suspected nuclear facilities remains a possibility. Moreover, Democrats in power could lurch toward political isolationism and, more particularly, economic protectionism. But these mid-term elections suggest that many American voters would welcome a bipartisan foreign policy. The people may still be two nations on issues such as abortion and gay marriage, but red and blue are mixing on foreign policy.”

"I can count on one hand the number of pseudonymous pieces I've authorized in my career, but the ones I've run turned out to be worth the risk, a risk that I did my best to minimize by doing due diligence before the pieces were published. Ours would be a lesser world if George F. Kennan had not written as 'Mr. X,' or the Federalist Papers had not appeared, or The New Yorker had not allowed Edward Conlon a pen name for his cop's diary, or if Dan Swanson hadn't been able to pose as James North to write Freedom Rising.”

“In his 1947 'Mr. X.' article in Foreign Affairs, Kennan laid out the doctrine of Soviet containment—essentially the intellectual scaffolding of the Cold War. Then he spent the next decades disavowing his authorship of it. Thompson observes that Kennan later wrote that he felt like 'one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly watches its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster.'

“[Paul] Nitze would have none of this. According to Thompson, 'Nitze was in sync with the times, far more confident than Kennan in his country's ability to do good.' In 1950, he presided over the drafting of Document NSC-68, which rejected Kennan's recommendation that America forswear first use of nuclear weapons; the document also called on the United States to fight communism worldwide and to invest in a massive arms buildup. Decades later, Thompson writes, Nitze crossed out a line in a student's master's thesis that argued that in NSC-68 he had advocated military containment over political means. In the late 1950s and in the '70s, Nitze warned that America was in danger of becoming the weaker combatant in the superpower contest and needed to rearm.”

Also Known As (AKA)

Mr. X Article

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