Located just outside the village of East Berlin, Pennsylvania, the farm allowed at least one economy. Beginning with this letter, and continuing until the supply ran out, the Kennans used stationery George had brought back from the other Berlin, scratching out the German street address and adding a carefully placed “East” and “Pa.”20
The East Berlin News-Comet reported on July 24 that the Miller farm had been sold to “a Mr. Kennedy of New York and Washington, D.C.,” who with his wife and two children would use the property for leisure activities and as their summer home. The editor, Harriet Tierney, had gotten the news from the town barber, Lavere Burgard, who later corrected the story to say that the name was more like “Cannon” and that the buyer “had something to do with the government.” The George Shetters, who owned the local restaurant, confirmed this information, noting that the gentleman in question had made a long-distance phone call from there. East Berlin had little experience with important outsiders, and so the rumors began to fly. Mrs. Tierney then took it upon herself to settle the matter by driving out to the Miller place to find out who the newcomers were. Satisfied, she wrote another story introducing the Kennan family to East Berlin.21
III.
The psychological distance between the two Berlins was even greater than the physical distance, so for the moment—uncharacteristically—George Kennan was happy. But he was still in the Foreign Service and there was still a war on; hence on September 8, 1942, George loaded his family into the back of a borrowed milk truck, leaving Kimmy—who was to stay behind on the farm—racing desperately after them. Grace went to Washington, where she would spend the year in boarding school, while Annelise and Joan accompanied George back to Lisbon: his new assignment was to be counselor at the American legation in Portugal. The trip this time was by air. “It is just surreal to go so far so fast,” Annelise wrote of the three-day flight via Bermuda and the Azores. “Somehow it doesn’t seem right.” She regretted leaving so soon. “Little by little my roots have fastened in the States,” she assured Jeanette. “I like the country and love the people—in spite of what George thinks of them.”22
George, for his part, accepted the wartime obligation of overseas service but envied those who could perform it in uniform. Military life carried risks, but survivors would return with the laurels “simply by virtue of their participation.” Diplomacy too had its dangers, but there would be no rewards.
In the task they have given me, I cannot succeed. I can hope to do better than other, less experienced men. But what I can do will be known to very few people, and appreciated by fewer still; and the effort will probably end in personal catastrophe for myself and the family.
Internment had at least taught him that “there is nothing worse than a vacillation between hope and despair.” Strength came from having one or the other—“possi-bly they are the same thing.” Kennan recorded these gloomy thoughts because “I feel that if I hold them constantly before me I shall be able to do my job with greater detachment, greater humor, less nervous wear-and-tear, and, paradoxically, greater enjoyment.”23
“I am neither happy nor unhappy,” he wrote Jeanette from Lisbon. He could never feel at home in a place, however beautiful, “where it never snows, where the hot summer is the dead dormant season, and where the grass gets green and the crops are put out in the fall. But I’m doing my job as best I can and—hell—it’s war.” Finances were again a problem: “We are broke, as usual.” Portuguese living costs were high, Grace’s school fees were a drain, and income from the corn crop had been slow to show up: “I hope the people in East Berlin won’t get too excited about our arrears.” Annelise was helping out by working in the legation press office. She found it “fun to get into a field which the Germans have had very much to themselves and see the results.” Nevertheless, she added, “[w]e almost turn handsprings to save 15 dollars a month.”
With the Anglo-American landings in North Africa on November 8, the war news was better. But Annelise’s family in Norway was having a hard winter, and early in 1943 she learned that her father had been arrested. “He will take it,” George told Jeanette, “just about the way our father would have, in similar circumstances.” It was, though, Annelise emphasized, a grave, even life-threatening situation, made all the more frustrating by the fact that there was nothing they could do to help. Meanwhile George’s job offered “no triumphs, no glory, no recognition—not even the satisfaction of physical hardship and combat. When the war is over, I won’t even want to talk about it.”24
There was one unexpected drama, though. On February 22, 1943, the Pan American Airways Yankee Clipper, a long-distance seaplane that set the standard for luxury transatlantic air travel at the time, crashed in the Tagus River as it was landing in Lisbon. Rushing to the scene, Kennan found, among the survivors, his Princeton classmate and fellow Foreign Service officer W. Walton Butterworth, who despite being in shock had managed to swim to shore with a briefcase of classified documents. George got him to a hotel and into a hot tub, filled him full of brandy, and pinned the papers on a clothesline to dry. The clothes, presumably, were left to dry on their own.25
Portugal, with Spain, had maintained an uneasy neutrality in the war. But whereas Generalissimo Francisco Franco had tilted his country toward the Axis, the Portuguese, honoring the spirit if not the letter of their ancient alliance with Great Britain, had inclined in the opposite direction. Politics and geography attracted intelligence services from all sides: Kennan estimated that eleven operated in Lisbon simultaneously, several of them employing double agents. “There were so many spies,” the British diplomat Frank Roberts recalled, “that they completely obliterated each other.” One of Kennan’s unannounced tasks was to try to straighten out at least some of the confusions.26
There were many. The Office of War Information was portraying the Portuguese prime minister, Dr. António Salazar, as a Franco-like fascist. The Board of Economic Warfare was withholding food and arms in an effort to discourage the Portuguese from providing wolfram and other strategic commodities to the Germans. The Office of Strategic Services was organizing a rebellion against Portuguese rule in the Azores. The British were stockpiling fuel there with a view to securing air and naval bases for the forthcoming invasion of Western Europe. Meanwhile Bert Fish, the amiable but placid American minister in Lisbon—Roosevelt appointed him as a favor to a Florida senator—had made no effort to reach any agreement with Salazar on overall Portuguese-American interests. “Ah ain’t goin’ down there and get mah backsides kicked around,” Kennan recalled him explaining. “He’s too smaht for me.”27
Sorting this out required that Kennan focus for the first time on grand strategy. What, exactly, did the United States want from Portugal? To what extent were its practices consistent with its priorities? Were those priorities consistent with one another? Did any single agency or official know everything that was going on, or care? How did all of this relate to winning the war, or to what would happen when peace returned? The problem was not just that of a right and left hand failing to communicate. The more appropriate analogy would have been a confused Hindu deity with multiple arms, each appendage busily at work on projects of which the others were unaware.
Kennan’s first approach was a traditional one: he studied the situation and, in February 1943, drafted a long analysis, sent under Fish’s name to the State Department, which specified, as the critical American interest, obtaining the Azores bases. It suggested letting the British negotiate the arrangements, justifying them under the Anglo-Portuguese treaty of 1373. Any other course, it warned, risked destabilizing the Salazar regime, perhaps even provoking German intervention. When the department did not respond, Kennan followed up with another dispatch pointing out that Salazar seemed inclined toward an alliance with the Western powers. This elicited no reply either, just “that peculiar and profound sort of silence which is made only by the noise of a diplomatic dispatch hitting the Department’s files.”28
By early April, Kennan was complaining privately abo
ut having to clean up the messes inexperienced people had made, while coping with lack of interest and confidence on the part of bosses. The frustrations were such that his ulcer—“that modern mark of distinction”—had returned, requiring a trip home for treatment. He was not as ill as he had been in Moscow, he told Jeanette, but “an ulcer is an inexorable sort of thing. You just have to let down.” George got to Washington in June, retrieved Grace from her school, and spent a few weeks with her on the farm: “I simply love the place.” Both then sailed for Lisbon on July 21, giving George the time, while at sea, to reflect on his country, and its capacity to lead the world.29
IV.
He did so in a ten-page single-spaced typed letter, intended only for Jeanette, which began with all the forebodings about America that his encounters with it—however brief—tended to set off. There had been a “retrogression” in civilian life “no less inexorable than our military advance.... I sometimes wonder whether, as in the case of declining Rome, its pace is not the price we are paying for the victory in arms.” Familiar worries followed about industrialization and urbanization, compounded now by the question of where ten million veterans would find jobs after the war. Hundreds of intellectuals were planning the future of postwar Europe. “Is there no one with sufficient leisure to contemplate a postwar America?”
Here, though, there was a shift in Kennan’s thinking. In 1938 he had seen authoritarianism as a solution for the nation’s problems. Since that time he had witnessed European authoritarianism and worse: the greatest danger to the United States, he now believed, could come from a homegrown dictatorship. The cause would be the “petty-bourgeois jealousy which resents and ridicules any style of life more dignified than its own—a phenomenon of which we saw much in Nazi Germany.”
The entire experience of mankind indicates that it is always the few, never the many, who are the real obstacles in the path of the dictator. Equalitarian principles are the inevitable concomitants of dictatorship. They produced Napoleon as inevitably as they produced Hitler and Stalin. The powers of sovereignty, as Gibbon observed, will inevitably “be first abused and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude.”
It followed, therefore, that some “enlightened and responsible” minority—not necessarily one of wealth—must gain power “if anything is to impede in our country the organic progress of political form from demagoguery to dictatorship.”
Only in this way could two more vulnerable minorities be protected. One was blacks, “a gentle and lovable people” who had never adjusted to urban life, followed “every sort of quack or extremist,” and thus were fanning “a racial antagonism from which no one except the outright enemies of our people could possibly profit, and which may have the gravest of consequences to the negroes themselves.” Jews were the other endangered group. Twenty centuries of experience had shown that they would never assimilate, but Hitler had made it impossible even to mention this problem: instead “our leftist press [howls] down as a fascist and anti-semite anyone who suggests that it might be officially recognized and given governmental consideration.” Both issues needed to be resolved if “[b]eat the negroes” and “beat the Jews” were not to become the slogans “for the solution of difficulties utterly unconnected with those unfortunate groups.”
With respect to foreign policy, the aftermaths of wars were decisive moments when lines were drawn that could last for generations. The United States had had the opportunity to do that after World War I but “muffed” it. “If we muff this, too, can we be sure that we will be given a third?”
Heretofore, in our history, we have had to take the world pretty much as we found it. From now on we will have to take it pretty much as we leave it, when this crisis is over.
Without an American effort to set postwar standards of international conduct, they would find their own level—probably that of the “rising masses” of Asia—at which “no humane, well-meaning people like our own could exist. Our position—and with it all that we prize in internal liberty—is one that can be maintained only by the firm, consistent and unceasing application of sheer power, in accordance with a long-term policy.”
That would require professionalism: a state, like a business, must, if it wished to survive, find the courage to select “a few people in whose intelligence and integrity it has confidence” and to delegate to them over long periods of time not only responsibility for the execution of policy but also its formulation. In fact, though, the United States was approaching the postwar era with no such vision. Diplomacy was not “improvisation” or “exhibitionism” or “missions-to-Moscow”—here Kennan was slamming Joe Davies’s recently released movie by the same name, which dramatized his Moscow experiences in a way that even sympathizers with the Soviet Union thought whitewashed the Stalin regime.
“Against the pageant of history we cut a small and distinctly episodic figure,” George concluded. “Ignorant and conceited, we now enter blindly on a future with which we are quite unqualified to cope.” He assured Jeanette, at the end of these “lugubrious” observations, that he had not lost hope. There were in the American character great reserves of decency and humor and good nature. But if these assets were to yield a return, “then new forms must be found, new ideas must gain currency, new associations of collective effort must come into being.”30
“Don’t take it too seriously,” he added in a postscript from Lisbon, written before sending off this long screed.31 Jeanette knew him well enough not to. She understood her value to George as a confidante, as a therapist, and even—as in this letter—as a soapbox. He had long relied on, and benefited from, her patience: she provided a mirror in which he could, from time to time, examine himself.
This particular reassessment showed Kennan beginning to connect his obtuseness regarding America and his astuteness with respect to the world. His experiences in Czechoslovakia and Germany had purged him of the simpleminded view, expressed in the “Prerequisites” essay of 1938, that a dictatorship might be good for the United States. He was not so sanguine as to assume, however, that one could never arise there: he understood how it had happened in Germany and refused to rule out the possibility that American reserves of decency and good nature might be exhaustible. However exceptional his own views of it were, he never believed that his country could exist as an exception to what was happening elsewhere.
Kennan’s most significant argument, however, was that the United States, for better or for worse, had gone beyond discovering the world: whatever it did now would shape the world. That was a task, he believed, for which the nation was unprepared, and his Portuguese experiences had done nothing to reassure him. He began to develop, as a result, a new sense of responsibility within the duties assigned to him: at several points over the next few years Kennan took risks that jeopardized his own Foreign Service career because he thought that the national interest demanded that he do so. Obliged to operate for the first time at the level of grand strategy, he found the rules of his profession falling short. He chose, successfully but dangerously, to violate them.
V.
“It was a good thing that I returned when I did,” George wrote in his postscript to Jeanette, “for the Minister here died . . . when I was on the boat, and it was high time I was getting back to my little parish.” Fish’s death left Kennan in charge of the legation at a critical moment. The British, he learned, had concluded a secret agreement with the Portuguese on August 17, 1943, allowing them to use the Azores bases. They had informed the State Department, but it had given the Lisbon legation no guidance as to what the American response should be. “We have no idea of the views of our Government,” Kennan complained on September 9, despite the fact that this development “is of the greatest importance for the future correlation of military and political power in the whole Atlantic area.” James C. Dunn, the department’s adviser on political relations, replied lamely that the Anglo-Portuguese negotiations had been handled “in the highest quarters” and that “we have no clear
er picture than you of the general plan.”32
Finally on October 8, the day the British landed on the islands, the department instructed Kennan to assure Salazar that the United States respected Portuguese sovereignty “in all Portuguese colonies.” No further explanation was provided. Minutes before he was to meet Salazar on the tenth, however—the prime minister having returned to Lisbon to receive Kennan’s message—the department rescinded the instruction. At this point, exasperated but thinking quickly, Kennan decided to exceed his instructions. He reminded the puzzled Salazar that there had been no general discussion of the Portuguese-American wartime relationship and proceeded to conduct one. He then told the State Department what he had done, only to receive an equally puzzled reminder that it had always been American policy to “promote our trade and have pleasant relations with the Portuguese people.”33
Then, on the sixteenth, another department cable arrived instructing Kennan, “by direction of the President,” to “request” the American use of Azores facilities on a scale far larger than anything the British had asked for or obtained. Convinced that such an unexpected communication would provoke Salazar’s wrath—if not his resignation—Kennan took a second unusual step: he refused to carry out a White House order and asked permission to return to Washington to explain why, if necessary to the president himself: “I am willing to take full personal responsibility for this position.”34
That message made its way back to FDR, who asked for Kennan’s reasons in writing and, when given them, replied that he would “leave to your judgment and discretion the manner of approach to these negotiations.” Vastly relieved, Kennan went to the Foreign Office in Lisbon and told “a whopping lie”: that the State Department had now authorized him to extend a previously contemplated but delayed acknowledgment of Portuguese sovereignty over all Portuguese possessions, including the Azores. This elicited an appreciative message of gratitude from the Portuguese minister in Washington “for the guaranty thus given.” But it in turn puzzled the State Department, causing the under secretary of state, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., to tell a colleague that the Portuguese diplomat had thanked him “for some damn guarantee, and said that he always knew we would want facilities in the Azores. Now what in the name of hell did he mean by that?”35
George F. Kennan : an American life Page 22
