Few Americans, Kennan was sure, would ever grasp this. Most would continue to wander about in a maze of confusion, with respect to Russia, not dissimilar to that confronting Alice in Wonderland. For anyone who did penetrate the mysteries, there would be few rewards. The best he could hope for would be “the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow, and where few will consent to believe that he has been.”
What Harriman thought of Kennan’s essay is not clear, although he carried a copy with him when he returned to Washington in October 1944. Probably as a result, other copies wound up in the State Department files and in the papers of Harry Hopkins. Kennan was “puzzled and moderately disappointed” by Harriman’s silence. He could understand why the ambassador might not wish to comment on content, since it was “politically unacceptable if not almost disloyal, in the light of the public attitude of our own Government.” But “I did think he might have observed, if he thought so, that it was well written. I personally felt, as I finished it, that I was making progress, technically and stylistically, in the curious art of writing for one’s self alone.”32
That was a shrewd assessment. “Russia—Seven Years Later” was impressive for the way it used the past in order to see the future. Contrary to what almost everyone else assumed at the time, Kennan portrayed the Soviet Union as a transitory phenomenon: it was floating along on the surface of Russian history, and currents deeper than anything Marx, Lenin, or Stalin had imagined would ultimately determine its fate. Decades before the documents opened, Kennan anticipated what they would reveal about the leadership’s ignorance of the outside world. His list of the intellectual adjustments Americans would have to make to understand the U.S.S.R. foreshadowed George Orwell’s dramatization of them, five years later, in his great novel 1984. And the essay was indeed well written.
But as policy prescription, the paper failed. It was far too long and hence too discursive: if Harriman did try to slog through its twenty single-spaced legal-sized typed pages, his eyes probably glazed over when Kennan meandered off into Byzantine influences on Russian architecture, or nineteenth-century Russian music, or the complaint that “the last good novel was written—let me see—at least a decade ago.” Nor was Kennan’s argument always clear. For all the space he gave to it, he failed to explain how Russian culture affected Soviet behavior. He contradicted himself by claiming at one point that Kremlin leaders could never know what their people were thinking, while warning elsewhere of their ability totally to control that thinking. There were no clear recommendations for what the United States should do: this surely would have disappointed anyone who read the essay through to the end. They would have found there, instead, a self-indulgent self-portrait—the lonely expert atop the chilly and inhospitable mountain—which seemed to suggest that only Kennan was qualified to stand on that pinnacle, and that no one would take his conclusions seriously if he reached it. When conveyed in this form, he was correct.
V.
“This is my sixth winter in Moscow,” George wrote Jeanette on January 25, 1945, “and I’m getting pretty well used to them. We are taking things pretty easy and just praying that they will really relieve me here in time to let me get home before the whole spring season is over.” The main subject of this letter—Jeanette having sent Betty MacDonald’s best seller The Egg and I—was chickens: “If we have any of our own on the farm, I’m afraid they’ll have to live by the survival of the fittest.” Jeanette knew her brother well enough to doubt, though, that he would ever take things easily, or that his principal preoccupation was poultry.33
She would have been right, for on the next day Kennan completed his sharpest attack yet on American policy toward the Soviet Union. It took the form of an eight-page personal letter to Chip Bohlen. Kennan wrote it knowing that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin would be meeting at Yalta on February 4, and that Bohlen—the president’s interpreter—would literally have his ear. He sent it four days after Harriman had left to supervise preparations: Hessman, who typed it, remembered that the ambassador’s absences seemed to liberate Kennan. This document too failed to achieve its purpose: given its startling contents, he could hardly have expected otherwise. But it did, with uncanny foresight, prescribe policy. By the middle of 1947 the U.S. government had agreed to almost everything Kennan had recommended. He was still lonely and unappreciated at the beginning of 1945, but that was only because he was two and a half years ahead of everyone else.34
Kennan began by reminding his old friend of a claim Bohlen had made the previous summer: that if Kennan had not been limited by “the narrow field of vision provided by Lisbon and the EAC, . . . I would have had more confidence in the pattern of things to come.” Six months in Moscow had expanded Kennan’s horizons, but without changing his conviction that Soviet political objectives in Europe were not consistent “with the happiness, prosperity or stability of international life on the rest of the continent.” Stalin and his subordinates viewed with suspicion “any source of unity or moral integrity” that they could not control. Rather than allow these to exist, there was no evil they would not be prepared to inflict, “if they could.”
A basic conflict is thus arising over Europe between the interests of Atlantic sea-power, which demand the preservation of vigorous and independent political life on the European peninsula, and the interests of the jealous Eurasian land power, which must always seek to extend itself to the west and will never find a place, short of the Atlantic Ocean, where it can from its own standpoint safely stop.
No one was to blame for this: the situation was deeply rooted in Russian history and in European geography. Nor did Kennan question the need for Moscow’s assistance in defeating Nazi Germany: “We were too weak to win [the war] without Russia’s cooperation.” Nor could anyone doubt that the Soviet war effort had been “masterful and effective and must, to a certain extent, find its reward at the expense of other peoples in eastern and central Europe.”
He did wonder, though, “why we must associate ourselves with this political program, so hostile to the interests of the Atlantic community as a whole, so dangerous to everything which we need to see preserved in Europe.” Why not instead divide Europe “into spheres of influence—keep ourselves out of the Russian sphere and keep the Russians out of ours?” That would allow honesty in dealing with Moscow, while “within whatever sphere of action was left to us we could at least [try] to restore life, in the wake of the war, on a dignified and stable foundation.”
Instead, the Roosevelt administration was refusing to specify American interests in Europe, while going ahead with plans for a new League of Nations with “no basis in reality,” a course that could only accentuate differences with the Soviet Union while giving the American public “a distorted picture of the nature of the problems the postwar era is bound to bring.” As that was happening, political and territorial settlements were being made that would leave the food-producing regions of Germany in Soviet hands, the American and British zones flooded with refugees, and no realistic prospect for cooperative tripartite administration of that country. American influence would be confined “to the purely negative act of destroying Nazi power.”
So what to do? “We should gather together at once into our hands all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full value.” Plans for the United Nations should be set aside “as quickly and quietly as possible.” The United States should abandon Eastern Europe altogether. And Washington should accept Germany’s division into a Soviet and a consolidated Anglo-American zone, with the latter integrated as much as possible into the economic life of Western Europe. Each of the victors would take reparations from its zone only, on a “catch as catch can” basis. Kennan admitted that this “bitterly modest” program would amount to a partition of Europe. “But beggars can’t be choosers.”
Bohlen received Kennan’s letter at Yalta. He wrote back hurriedly that although its recommendations might mak
e sense in the abstract, “as practical suggestions they are utterly impossible. Foreign policy of that kind cannot be made in a democracy. Only totalitarian states can make and carry out such policies.” What Bohlen meant, he explained in his memoirs, was that democracies
must take into account the emotions, beliefs, and goals of the people. The most carefully thought-out plans of the experts, even though 100 percent correct in theory, will fail without broad public support. The good leader in foreign affairs formulates his policy on expert advice and creates a climate of public support to support it.
More privately, Bohlen remembered worrying about Kennan’s “damn-it-all-the-hell-with-it-let’s-throw-up-our-hands” attitude. “Obviously you couldn’t do that.” Roosevelt understood that Americans, who had fought a long, hard war, deserved at least an attempt to make peace. If it failed, the United States could not be blamed for not trying. Or as Bohlen put it in his reply to Kennan at the time: “Quarreling with them would be so easy, but we can always come to that.”
Kennan’s letter went nowhere because he destroyed all copies of it—or thought he had—at Bohlen’s request: “That it was written to him while he was at Yalta challenged what the President was trying to do.” But Hessman quietly kept a copy, and as it happened Bohlen did also, even publishing portions of it years later in his memoirs, to Kennan’s surprise. Despite all of Roosevelt’s efforts to get along with Moscow, Bohlen acknowledged, Stalin did “exactly as Kennan had predicted and I had feared.” Even so, Bohlen could not agree “that we should write off Eastern Europe and give up efforts to cooperate with the Soviet Union”—at least not yet.35
VI.
John Paton and Patricia Davies arrived in Moscow, after years of Foreign Service duties in China, at the end of March 1945. They found Harriman functioning at the level of Roosevelt, Stalin, and their respective advisers, mostly from his Spaso House bedroom, where the ambassador would review dispatches late into the night in a dressing gown, in front of the fireplace. “We’d sit around there and chat,” Patricia remembered, while Harriman would feed the fire. “There was something about the way he did it that drove George absolutely up a tree! You could just see him holding himself back, and his eyes, those large eyes, practically popping out of his head.” Kennan would whisper, when Harriman could not hear: “That man doesn’t know how to build a fire!”36
The risk that Harriman might incinerate Spaso House was not Kennan’s only source of anxiety. New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger found him resentful that Harriman had concealed everything from him connected with Yalta. Martha Mautner, who had just joined the embassy staff, saw that Harriman had “both ears to the ground—he was very sensitive to political considerations.” Frank Roberts, now serving in the British embassy in Moscow, recalled Kennan as insisting to Harriman: “You must get home to the president what a terrible villain Stalin is, what awful things he has done.” Harriman’s reaction was: “We’re allies, and we’re fighting the war together. There is a moral consideration which obviously you’re quite right to put to me, but I don’t think I need to put it now to the president.” John Paton Davies remembered Harriman as “a great team player.” He felt “that Kennan was too skeptical, not really at all with the Roosevelt point of view.” Kennan, in turn, “suffered agonies of frustration” over his inability to influence Washington.37
No doubt Kennan was frustrated: that was his normal state. His differences with Harriman, however, were not as great as they appeared to Roberts or Davies—or probably even to Kennan—at the time. The ambassador had been advocating a tougher line toward the Soviet Union since the Warsaw Uprising. “Unless we take issue with the present policy,” he had written Harry Hopkins in September 1944, “there is every indication the Soviet Union will become a world bully wherever their interests are involved.” Harriman did not always confide in Kennan, so he may not have realized the extent of his boss’s support for a firmer stance. And they did differ over how quickly such a shift could happen. Kennan, who resented domestic political influences on foreign policy, wanted it to take place at once. Harriman, like Bohlen, knew that this was impossible: “We couldn’t shock people in Washington because we would lose our influence.” It was, therefore, Harriman’s patience that worried Kennan, not any significant disagreement over the postwar intentions of the Soviet Union, or how the United States should handle them.38
The key to changing American policy, Harriman knew, was changing the mind of the president himself. Roosevelt’s declining health—obvious to all who saw him at Yalta—made this difficult: exhausted leaders tend not to embrace new initiatives. Even so, the gap between Stalin’s promises of “democratic” regimes in Eastern Europe and the practices of Soviet officials there was becoming too large even for Roosevelt to ignore. When, at the beginning of April, Stalin interpreted a German surrender offer in Italy as evidence of an Anglo-American plot to divert the remaining fighting to the Eastern front, the president was furious. Had he lived, Kennan later speculated, subsequent history “might have been quite different.” But he was dying, and so he never saw Harriman’s request for permission to tell the Soviet leader that if his government continued its policies, “the friendly hand that we have offered them will be withdrawn and to point out in detail what this will mean.”39
On the morning of April 13, Joan Kennan, then nine, was lying quietly in bed in the Mokhovaya apartment, playing with a kitten. “My father came into the room and said, ‘Joanie, the President is dead,’ and then sat on my bed looking so serious and so sad that I knew this was something very significant.” She could not recall her father ever speaking to her about world affairs, so “I was rather pleased that he thought me old enough to comprehend, at least partly, the significance of such a major event.”40
Harriman had been planning a trip to Washington when the news reached him earlier that morning. Knowing the importance of being in the right spot at the right time, he accelerated his departure and so was on hand to advise an inexperienced Harry S. Truman on what he should do. With Bohlen present taking notes, Harriman warned that Stalin had interpreted American restraint as weakness: the view had developed in Moscow that “the Soviet Government could do anything that it wished without having any trouble with the United States.” That left the West facing a “barbarian invasion of Europe.”41
It’s not clear what Kennan would have said if given the opportunity, but what Harriman said was close enough. He had not been oblivious to the concerns of his anxious subordinate, and now he had the ear of a president with no firm views of his own. The effect on policy, however, was for the moment minimal. Truman gave Molotov a tongue-lashing when he passed through Washington on April 23—even Harriman, who was there, thought it excessive—but the president did not immediately give up on his predecessor’s efforts to enlist Stalin’s cooperation in shaping the postwar settlement.42
There were several reasons for this. One had to do with Molotov’s destination: he was en route to San Francisco, where the conference establishing the United Nations—Roosevelt’s most cherished project—was to open on April 25. With hopes for the new organization as high as they had ever been, the United States could hardly undercut it before it had begun to function. A second reason was military: Pentagon planners, unsure whether the top-secret program to build the atomic bomb would produce a usable weapon, still counted on Soviet assistance in defeating Japan. Finally, Truman had other close advisers to whom he listened. One was Joe Davies, whose persistent desire to give the Soviet Union the benefit of every doubt countered Harriman’s determination to do the opposite.43
From Moscow, Kennan saw little that encouraged him. Taking advantage of Harriman’s absence, he peppered the State Department with an almost daily litany of complaints about Soviet behavior:
April 20, 1945: One of the fundamental tenets of Soviet control is that the people shall be exposed to no propaganda influences except those of the Soviet propaganda apparatus.
April 23: Words mean different things to the
Russians than they do to us. . . . In official Soviet terminology the Warsaw Provisional Government and even Soviet Estonia are “free.”
April 27: All information reaching Embassy indicates that Russians are seizing and transporting to Soviet Union without compunction any German materials, equipment or supplies which they feel could be of use to them.
April 28: Personally I believe that the Soviet Government actually wishes to discourage the maintenance here of large diplomatic staffs, believing that most of the functions they perform are more to the advantage of the foreign governments than of the Soviet Government.
April 30: It is now established Russian practice to seek as a first and major objective, in all areas where they wish to exercise dominant influence, control of the internal administrative and police apparatus, particularly the secret police. . . . [A]ll other manifestations of public life, including elections, can eventually be shaped by this authority.
May 3: If we feign ignorance or disbelief of a situation [the unilateral transfer of German territory to Poland] which . . . is common knowledge to every sparrow in eastern Europe, . . . [this] could only mean to the Russians that we are eager to sanction their unilateral action but we are afraid to admit this frankly to our own public.
May 8: More than thirty hours after signature of the act of surrender [by Germany to Allied forces in France], there had still been no recognition in Moscow of the fact that the end of the war was at hand.... For Russia peace, like everything else, can come only by ukase, and the end of hostilities must be determined not by the true course of events but by decision of the Kremlin.
George F. Kennan : an American life Page 26
