Singh
and asymmetric military power at a world scale. Electrified upon reading
Kennan’s “Long Telegram” (1946), Forrestal viewed his fellow Princeton
man as a kindred soul, one who had intuited similar grounds of Orientalist
menace, inscrutability, and immunity to anything but the language of
force in Soviet conduct. It was Forrestal who brought Kennan to Wash-
ington, D.C., from Moscow and into the policy-making apparatus; both
men were solicitous toward the value of rank and privilege, tolerant of
authoritarian deviations from liberal standards, and assured that freedom
from coercion was the provenance of those who, in Kennan’s words, were
already imbued with “Anglo-Saxon traditions of compromise.”
Forrestal framed his own deference for hierarchy in terms of the
prerogatives of corporate capitalism—the idea that practical men of
business, rather than reformers and intellectuals, had won World War
II and needed to be running the world going forward. Among his more
forceful conclusions was that liberal globalism would be disastrous if it
were not steeled with counterrevolutionary animus. As he confided to
diplomat Stanton Griffiths:
Between Hitler, your friends to the east, and the intellectual muddlers who
have had the throttle for the last ten years, the practical people are going
to have a hell of a time getting the world out of receivership, and when the
miracles are not produced the crackpots may demand another chance in which
to really finish the job. At that time, it will be of greatest importance that
the Democratic Party speaks for the liberals, but not for the revolutionaries.For these realists, even more than the wooly moralists they some-
times ridiculed, it was the credibility of U.S. threats of force that
ensured the freedom and mobility of productive capital and supported
its resource needs and allied interests across an ever-widening sphere.
Of a more aristocratic and consciously anti-democratic mien, Kennan