George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Shifting Washington’s policy, however, was more difficult than simply objecting to it. There were limits to what even a respected professional could do from a distance when hardly anyone outside his profession had ever heard of him.3 Kennan’s personal views were clear: he wanted to end any pretense of shared interests between the U.S.S.R. and the Western democracies. There should be an outright division of Europe into spheres of influence, with each side doing as it pleased in the territory it controlled. The term “Cold War” had not yet been invented, but its features had formed in Kennan’s mind. He thought it folly not to reshape strategy to fit them: to do anything less was to risk what remained of Europe. “We were . . . in danger of losing, like the dog standing over the reflecting pool, the bone in our mouth without obtaining the one we saw in the water.”4

  Despite Truman’s tough talk in his first meeting with Molotov, neither he nor his advisers were prepared to go that far. Hopes persisted that differences with the Soviet Union reflected diplomatic failures, not fundamentally divergent visions of the postwar world. Not even Harriman, now gravely concerned about Stalin’s intentions, was ready to abandon negotiations, if only to show the American public that they had been given every chance. “I plagued whosoever might be prepared to listen, primarily the ambassador, with protests, urgings, and appeals of all sorts,” Kennan remembered, but to little avail. Even Harry Hopkins was getting impatient with him. “Then you think it’s just sin, and we should be agin it,” he admonished Kennan, after hearing his objections to the attempts Hopkins was making, on Truman’s behalf, to settle the Polish question through talks with Stalin in Moscow. “That’s just about right,” Kennan responded. “I respect your opinion,” Hopkins replied. “But I am not at liberty to accept it.”5

  Faced with conflicting advice about what to do, Truman convinced himself that Stalin’s subordinates were to blame for the deterioration in Soviet-American relations that followed the Yalta conference. Like his predecessor, the new president sought a solution in another face-to-face meeting with the Kremlin boss—who seemed to him much like an American big city boss. It took place at Potsdam, just outside Berlin, during the last two weeks of July 1945. Midway through, the British electorate removed Churchill from office, leaving Stalin the only one of the original Big Three still in power. He had focused, since the war began, on how its conduct would determine the postwar settlement. Truman and Churchill’s successor, Clement Attlee, had hardly had time even to think about this.6

  For Kennan, such thinking was fundamental. He had never understood how the fighting of the war could fail to affect the nature of the peace. He had always doubted that talks around big tables, whether at Tehran, Yalta, or Potsdam, would change much. With no one having listened, with the war at an end, with the agreements reached at Potsdam—as Kennan saw it—having once more papered over cracks, he saw no reason to remain in the Foreign Service. On August 20, 1945, he again submitted his resignation. He had long been contemplating this step, Kennan explained to H. Freeman (Doc) Matthews, the State Department’s director of European affairs. The reasons were personal—Moscow was no place to raise children—but also political: “a deep sense of frustration over our squandering of the political assets won at such cost by our recent war effort, over our failure to follow up our victories politically and over the obvious helplessness of our career diplomacy to exert any appreciable constructive influence on American policy at this juncture.”7

  I.

  Despite the distinction he attained within it, Kennan had rarely found the Foreign Service rewarding. “He was never satisfied,” his friend and British embassy counterpart Frank Roberts recalled, “either with what he was doing or with what policy was [or with] what his effect on that policy could or should be.” His first resignation had come in 1927, only a year after he entered the service: Kennan’s superiors had persuaded him to stay on by offering the training that made him a Soviet specialist. No sooner had he become one than George was floating alternative possibilities—writing, teaching, farming—with his sister Jeanette. Losing his inheritance in 1932 ruled these out, and by the time the Kennans were again reasonably solvent, the war had started. George felt the obligation to see it through to the end, but he continued to write frequently—often wistfully—about doing something else. The farm made the prospect all the more alluring. George’s back-to-back letters to his sister and to Chip Bohlen in January 1945 showed that one part of his brain was thinking about chickens, while another was dividing Europe.8

  Annelise was certainly ready to return to the United States. George cabled the news of his resignation while she was returning from Norway where, with Grace and Joan, she had been visiting Kristiansand for the first time since the Germans occupied it in 1940. “My heart gave a jump,” she replied. “It is a little scary, but only a little. We’ll make out all right, but it will be quite a change.” Her family had been well, but Norway no longer felt like home. “Maybe I took too readily to my adopted country.” Annelise suspected, though, that it was better that way: having “a longing in you for another country makes it impossible to be happy anywhere else.”9

  George himself was longing for countries, or at least cities, other than Moscow. He welcomed the opportunity, therefore, to escort a group of American congressmen to Leningrad and Helsinki in September 1945. In contrast to his first visit, in 1934, the old capital evoked nostalgia, even a sense of coming home. Vivid images crowded his mind, and hence his diary:

  of Pushkin and [his] companion leaning on the embankment looking at the river; of Kropotkin exercising with his stool in the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul; of Alexander I looking out of the Winter Palace during the flood of 1823; of Prince Y[u]supov throwing the body of Rasputin into the Moika; of the crowd making across the square toward the Winter Palace on the night the place was stormed; of the generations of music teachers and pupils going in and out of the Conservatory; of the Italian opera of one hundred years ago; of the night of the grotesque flop of Chekhov’s “Chaika”; of the unhealthy days of Leningrad’s spring thaws, with little groups of black-clad people plodding through the slush behind the hearses to the muddy, dripping cemeteries; of the cellar apartments of the gaunt, dark inner streets, full of dampness, cabbage smell and rats, and of the pale people who manage to live through the winters in those apartments; of the prostitutes of the Nevski Prospect of the Tsarist time; [of] the people cutting up fallen horses in the dark, snow-blown streets during the [German] siege.

  Somehow in that city, “where I have never lived, there has nevertheless by some strange quirk of fate—a previous life, perhaps?—been deposited a portion of my own capacity to feel and to love, a portion—in other words—of my own life.”

  From Leningrad, the trip was by train across former Finnish territory where the war had left few buildings standing. The gulls wheeling overhead mocked ruins below; healthy vegetation concealed land mines. At the new border, everything changed. There was a new station, simple, clean, and in good repair. Newspapers were on sale at a freshly painted kiosk. A fat, sleek horse pulled a peasant cart “with a happy briskness which no Russian horse possesses.” Sidings were full of freight cars hauling neatly packed war reparations east, leading Kennan to wonder whether these might induce “pangs of shame among the inhabitants of the great shoddy Russian world into which they were moving. But on second thought I was inclined to doubt this very strongly.”

  The Finnish locomotive at last arrived, coupled onto the cars, and started off at a speed that seemed “positively giddy after the leisurely lumbering of Russian trains.” A diner offered good if scanty food. The other passengers were friendly and unafraid. The scene suggested “the efficiency, the trimness, the quietness and the boredom of bourgeois civilization; and these qualities smote with triple effect on the senses of a traveler long since removed from the impressions of [a] bourgeois environment.”10

  The youthful Kennan had, from time to time, shown a certain disdain for that environment. Part of the fascination of
Weimar Berlin—even more so of the Soviet Union when he first arrived there—had been that some other society seemed under construction, however harshly, inefficiently, and idealistically. Siberia still offered hints of that, but Stalinism had long since smothered such experimentation in the rest of Russia, leaving only a depressing seediness. The Finnsky Dom, hence, had been a relief after the Mokhovaya: seediness wears one out. And now Finland itself—a bourgeois horizon lying just across the Karelian isthmus—took on an almost mystical appeal, as it would for so many other foreigners in the U.S.S.R. over so many years.11 It was time to leave—but that did not happen quite yet.

  II.

  “Dear Averell,” Kennan had written while Harriman was still at Potsdam in July: “Gibbon stated in the ‘Decline and Fall’ that the happiest times in the lives of peoples were those about which no history was written.” Moscow was quiet, with only the usual annoyances over staffing, housing, and courier services. “Compared to the questions you [are] discussing, . . . these problems seem small.”12 Perhaps so, but Kennan by then was beyond seeing anything as insignificant. His dispatches to Washington—on matters large and small—continued to be filled with portents of trouble to come.

  An agreement between Soviet and Polish tourist agencies would restrict the free travel and residence of foreigners. A visiting journalist’s sympathetic newspaper story revealed how the cultivation of novices could undercut the reporting of professionals. The Kremlin would regard any withdrawal of American troops from western Czechoslovakia—which they had occupied at the end of the war—as a sign of weakness, despite wartime agreements that had assigned that territory to the Red Army. Soviet requests for postwar economic assistance were meant to sustain wartime levels of arms production. An Anglo-French plan to consult Moscow on the future of Tangier would provoke “a colorful revolutionary pronunciamento denouncing all interference in Morocco by great powers and calling on Moroccan proletariat to arise and eject them.”13

  This last warning reflected a larger concern: that the international communist movement—which Stalin had appeared to disavow when he abolished the Comintern in 1943—remained in place and subject to his authority. Paris was the operational center for the European democracies, as were Cuba and Mexico for Latin America. The West had yet to grasp that some of its own citizens could be trained, like pets, “to heel without being on the leash.” To be sure, managing this network required finding the “almost imperceptible line which divides fancied independence of political action from the real thing.” But Soviet leaders had a great deal of experience in doing that.14

  On August 8, 1945, with Harriman back in Moscow, Kennan accompanied him to the Kremlin for a meeting with Stalin. Despite his short stature, scrawny mustache, discolored teeth, pocked face, and yellow eyes, the “Generalissimus,” as he now styled himself, struck Kennan as having “a certain rough handsomeness,” like “an old battle-scarred tiger.”

  In manner—with us, at least—he was simple, quiet, unassuming. There was no striving for effect. His words were few. They generally sounded reasonable and sensible; indeed they often were. An unforewarned visitor would never have guessed what depths of calculation, ambition, love of power, jealousy, cruelty, and sly vindictiveness lurked behind this unpretentious façade.

  The subject that day was the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan, with Harriman expressing pleasure at being once again allies. There was no avoiding the implications of the American atomic bomb, however, used two days earlier at Hiroshima. It must have been “a very difficult problem to work out,” Stalin acknowledged, and “very expensive.” It would bring victory quickly, and it would mean “the end of war and of aggressors. But the secret would have to be well kept.”15

  Kennan could not have agreed more, except that it was the Soviets from whom he wanted to keep the secret. “My first reaction was: ‘Oh God, if we’ve got something like this, let’s be sure that the Stalin regime doesn’t get it.’ ” He warned Harriman that “it would be a tragic folly for us to hand over the secrets of atomic energy production to the Russians.” More formally, he cautioned the new secretary of state, James F. Byrnes:

  There is nothing—I repeat nothing—in the history of the Soviet regime which could justify us in assuming that the men who are now in power in Russia, or even those who have chances of assuming power within the foreseeable future, would hesitate for a moment to apply this power against us if by doing so they thought that they might materially improve their own power position in the world.

  It was, thus, “my profound conviction that to reveal to the Soviet Government any knowledge which might be vital to the defense of the United States, without adequate guaranties for the control of its use in the Soviet Union, would constitute a frivolous neglect of the vital interests of our people.” Unusually, Kennan asked that the State Department make his view “a matter of record,” and to see that it was considered in “any discussions of this subject which may take place in responsible circles of our Government.”16

  The Generalissimus, in the meantime, had paid Kennan a compliment. The occasion was the congressional visit in mid-September. To Kennan’s surprise, Stalin agreed to see the American legislators, probably with the hope of speeding action on a $6 billion postwar reconstruction loan Molotov had requested the previous January. With Harriman away again, it fell to Kennan to escort the delegation to the Kremlin, and to serve as interpreter. Several members arrived tipsy from having enjoyed “tea” somewhere in the Moscow subway, and just before entering Stalin’s office one asked: “What if I biff the old codger one in the nose?”

  My heart froze. I cannot recall what I said, but I am sure that never in my life did I speak with greater earnestness. I had, as I recollect it, the help of some of the more sober members of the party, [and] our companion came meekly along. He sat . . . at the end of a long table, facing Stalin, and did nothing more disturbing than to leer and wink once or twice at the bewildered dictator, thus making it possible for the invisible gun muzzles, with which the room was no doubt studded, to remain sullenly silent.

  Oblivious to this near-disaster, Stalin greeted his visitors politely and at the end of the meeting went out of his way to praise Kennan—with whose views espionage had already familiarized him—for the excellence of his Russian. Deputy Foreign Minister Vyshinsky added dutifully: “Yes, damn good.”17

  Byrnes and Harriman were at that time attending the first postwar conference of Soviet, American, British, French, and Chinese foreign ministers, held in London in mid-September. It was not a success. Molotov was difficult, no agreements were reached on the principal agenda item, peace treaties with former German satellites, and the meeting broke up without even a public communiqué. Harriman was pleased that Byrnes had held firm: there had been, he assured the Moscow embassy staff, no more “telling the Russians how much we love them.” Kennan, for once, was also content. The Kremlin would have to face the fact, he cabled Byrnes, “that if it has not been thrown for a loss, it has at least been stopped without a gain.” This was in effect a reversal: the first serious one, for Soviet diplomacy, since the war began. Whether there would be recriminations within the leadership remained to be seen. Byrnes took the trouble to reply personally, saying that he had found Kennan’s dispatch “highly illuminating,” with “much food for thought.”18

  The football metaphor failed to impress Dana Wilgress, the Canadian ambassador in Moscow, with whom Kennan shared it. He had great respect for Kennan, Wilgress reported to Ottawa, “but he suffers from having been here in the pre-war days when foreign representatives became indoctrinated with anti-Soviet ideas as a result of the purges and subtle German propaganda.” With “only one down to go,” it was the Anglo-Saxons who were “in a huddle about what formation to try next.” That might be, Lester Pearson, Wilgress’s counterpart in Washington, commented, but Byrnes had made it a point, at a meeting with Truman, Attlee, and Canadian prime minister William L. Mackenzie King, “to express great respect for Kennan’s judgment
and wisdom.... There is no doubt that whatever Kennan says carries great weight in the State Department.”19

  The Truman-Attlee-King meeting, held in mid-November, focused on the international control of atomic energy and what the Soviet Union’s relationship to that process might be. Whether Kennan knew of Byrnes’s praise is not clear, although he was in Washington at the time: having received his resignation, Kennan’s superiors had called him back for consultations, just as they had done almost two decades earlier. “I took up with Mr. Kennan the question of his resignation,” a State Department official noted in a memorandum he left unsigned. “I made it clear to him that I did not think that this was the time for any of our capable senior officers to quit; their services were too badly needed.” Perhaps encouraged by the sense that the Washington mood was shifting and that his voice was beginning to be heard, Kennan agreed that “no action would be taken on his resignation . . . , that it would simply be held in abeyance.”20