George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  the swaggering arrogance of the drunken peasant-speculator Lopakhin in the last act of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, when he has just purchased at auction the estate on which he grew up as a serf, and now loses control of himself in his excitement and stamps around, reveling in his triumph, impervious to the presence of the weeping family who are leaving the place forever, confident that never again will he need their respect, their help, or their solicitude.

  If this was right, “then we have a bitter problem on our hands.” Restoring sobriety and decorum among such people would take “real thought and skillful action on our part, and probably luck as well.”24

  The contradictions in this letter can only have bewildered its readers. Kennan portrayed a Soviet leadership that both needed a settlement and did not need one. He hoped for diplomacy in a state that, he insisted, had given up on diplomacy. He described anti-Americanism as a shocking development, but he had been arguing, as far back as the “long telegram,” that Stalin’s regime required a hostile outside world. He placed himself at the center of the aging dictator’s concerns despite having noted, before leaving for Moscow, that successful ambassadors there practiced self-effacement. Kennan cast himself in the role of someone Stalin might enjoy eliminating, or at least forcing into an “embarrassing position,” but with whom he would be eager to negotiate. None of these claims were necessarily implausible: they could hardly all be plausible, however, at the same time. “George is an egocentric person, a highly emotional person,” Cumming explained years later. “It’s a strange combination of a well-drilled mind, a fine command of the English language, and yet shot through all of this is this emotional response to external stimuli, which somehow or another his well-drilled mind doesn’t seem to be able to control.”25

  The problem was evident in a second letter Kennan pouched to Matthews two weeks later, complaining about the intelligence-gathering activities of American military attachés in Moscow. These involved the use of cameras, radio receivers, and listening devices to collect information from embassy buildings and vehicles. A favorite opportunity was Aviation Day, in July, when the Americans would invite their British and Norwegian counterparts to the roof of the Mokhovaya to photograph the planes flying over, and then downstairs for drinks. It was done so openly, Kennan pointed out, that the Soviets had their own photographers documenting the activity, apparently with a view to compiling a dossier. Like the Grow diary and Mrs. Kirk’s book, these provocations encouraged retaliation: their continuation placed in jeopardy “the physical security of the members of the [American] mission and their families.” Diplomatic immunity could only extend so far: if relations ruptured or if war broke out, it was entirely possible that the staff “might suffer seriously by virtue of these activities that have been conducted in the past.”

  So he had ordered a halt to them—despite warnings from the attachés that their superiors would not welcome the prohibition—and he would stick to that policy unless otherwise instructed from Washington. Cumming thought this naïve: “The Russians would do it in [the United States] if they didn’t have other ways of getting things.” And Kennan knew, from his own experiences dating back to the days of Joe Davies, how thoroughly the Soviets had compromised the immunity of Spaso House by installing their own bugs, as well as servants who were also spies. “We never talked, really, very much, even in the privacy of [our] bedroom,” Annelise recalled. “It makes you absolutely tongue-tied.” By 1952 there was even a microwave beam aimed at the windows in Kennan’s Mokhovaya office, presumably in an effort to pick up conversations there.26

  Kennan became even more worried about provocations when Joseph and Stewart Alsop published a series of alarming columns, in mid-June, reporting in rapid succession on American reconnaissance flights into Soviet airspace, on similar Soviet flights over Alaska, on progress in developing the hydrogen bomb, on rumors of a new Berlin blockade, and—most disturbing—on his own confidential reports to the State Department about the anti-American campaign in the U.S.S.R., which had caused Kennan to reconsider earlier assurances that its leaders would not risk war. Their reports in turn alerted Henry Luce, whose correspondents hounded Kennan while he was in Bonn and London, trying to confirm the story. Could Bohlen not plead with the Time-Life editors to spare the American embassy in Moscow “the spotlight of further press curiosity”?27

  All of this, then, puts the suicide pills episode in a broader context than that of “some dame.” Kennan’s loneliness had led to affairs in Berlin in 1940–41, probably at Bad Nauheim in 1942, and surely somewhere in 1951. He had even admonished himself, in his most recent agony over infidelity, that were it not for his youngest (at that time Christopher), he should go into the military and get himself killed in a war.28 What concerned Kennan now, though, if war broke out, was the risk of internment, torture, and the compromise of state secrets: taking a pill under these circumstances would be an act of patriotism, not just an escape from embarrassment. There are, then, multiple explanations for his behavior in late June 1952: it need not have been the fear of blackmail. And the letter to the pope, if de Silva’s account is to be believed? Kennan was indeed egocentric, and he was becoming deeply religious. Not so much so, though, that he would have sought absolution, from the supreme pontiff, for a dalliance with a dame. He had worse things than that on his mind .29

  IV.

  The severely functional office of the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Salisbury reported to the readers of The New York Times Magazine shortly after Kennan arrived, was less impressive than what a deputy price administrator in Washington might occupy. There was a desk in one corner, a table for books and out-of-date American magazines in a second, and a couch, some armchairs, and a coffee table in a third. The fourth corner was empty. The only decorations were photographs of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, the latter slightly larger. The view, though, was spectacular: swiveling in his chair, Kennan could look out across Manege Square to the walls of the Kremlin, only a two-minute walk away. Thanks to the acquisition of the Mokhovaya in 1934, no foreign embassy was closer. And should Stalin seek to see Kennan, few men were better qualified to explain American policy “in terms and language which have real meaning to Soviet minds.”

  Apart from ceremonial occasions like the presentation of credentials, however, visits to the Kremlin had become rare for American ambassadors in recent years. Kirk had met Stalin only once, shortly after arriving in 1949. It was not at all clear when, or even whether, Kennan would be received. The Mokhovaya’s proximity therefore could be frustrating: as if to illustrate this, Salisbury’s article carried a photograph of Kennan staring expectantly from his window at the Kremlin’s dark towers, as if waiting for the invitation.30

  In one sense life was easier: “The world’s most efficient police system protects me from my old enemies—the telephone and the visitors.” Knowing that he would not soon return to the United States, Kennan could see his own country “with detachment, with charity, with serenity—as I imagine the dead look back on life.” There was consolation also in the “comfortable consciousness, underlying all government work, that it was someone else besides yourself who decided that . . . you should be where you are and doing what you are doing.” Duty relieved guilt, “and in its soothing influence lies, I am sure, something of the appeal of totalitarianism.”31

  Still, he could not help looking for signs and portents. The Moscow theater offered Kennan proximity to the Soviet artistic community: its members, he felt, must have been aware of his presence, if for no other reason than that his angels bumped anyone seated around him. Attending a performance of Tolstoy’s Resurrection one night with Robert C. Tucker, a young Foreign Service officer who would become a distinguished professor of Soviet studies at Princeton, Kennan was startled to see the leading man advance to the footlights, appear to address him directly, and say: “There is an American by the name of George, and with him we are all in agreement.” Kennan and Tucker rushed back to the embassy to check the text, only to find tha
t the line referred to Henry George, the late nineteenth-century proponent of the single tax. “But was the actor aware of the play on words? And did he enjoy it as much as we did?” Like astronomers listening for life on other planets, “we were forced to try to gain our feeling for the Russian cultural world” by such indirect means, despite its “presence and vitality . . . all around us.”32

  Exasperated by the silence, Kennan called in Cumming one day in mid-June to ask if the embassy staff had run across anyone who might have known him earlier in Moscow. Cumming suggested Boris Fedorovich Podserob, a former secretary to Molotov, now secretary general of the Foreign Ministry, with whom Kennan had had reasonably good relations during the 1930s. “If you find yourself talking with Podserob,” Kennan replied, “I wish you’d tell him that I regret that there is no person here in the entire apparat with whom I could occasionally come together and have a cup of tea and talk.” Cumming had no Russian and Podserob little English, but they did both have French, so at the next opportunity—a diplomatic reception at the Moskva Hotel—Cumming conveyed the message, bringing O’Shaughnessy along as a linguistic backup: Kennan was picking up his family in West Germany at the time. Podserob appeared interested, remained with the Americans long enough to make sure that he understood, and then departed.

  Kennan returned to Moscow on July 1, and an invitation to talk soon followed, although not in the form he had expected. A young Russian appeared inside the Mokhovaya, having somehow got past the Soviet militia who controlled access to the building. “I was startled,” Cumming recalled. “Is this a joke or something?” “No, it’s not a joke.” So he went out and talked to the man. “He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite identify him. His clothes looked good, but disheveled. He wanted to see the ambassador.” “Don’t you recognize me?” he said. “I have interpreted for you a number of times on your calls to the Foreign Office. I have asked to see you so you can identify me.” Cumming then remembered him, asked a colleague to keep an eye on the visitor, and went in to inform Kennan.

  “Do you think I should see him?” “I don’t know, George. It’s entirely up to you. He has either broken through the militiamen outside, or they ’ve allowed him to enter.” But the American Marines guarding the embassy reported no scuffle. “So it was obvious to me that the militia had let him come in.” Part of Kennan’s office was exposed to the microwave beam, but the corner with the sofa and the armchairs was not. Kennan asked his visitor to sit there and to speak in English, so that Cumming could follow the conversation. He then identified himself as the son of Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov, the minister for state security, who he said had been arrested. “That was the first knowledge that any of us had that Abakumov had disappeared.” Kennan recalled what came next: “Like the sons of other high figures here, I think what’s going on is very dangerous. We know the comings and goings of the leaders here, and we would be in a position to mount an action to remove them.”

  “Look here,” Kennan replied. “I did not come here to violate the laws of the Soviet Union, or to encourage anyone else to do it. I think you’d better leave this room and this building immediately.” The young man protested that he would be arrested as soon as he stepped outside: “They saw me come in here.” Could the Americans not smuggle him out in a car, or allow him to leave through one of the steam tunnels that connected the Mokhovaya to the central heating plant? “No,” Kennan insisted, “you’ll have to go out the way you came in.” He was escorted to the front entrance. Cumming, with Kennan, watched from the window as the militiamen seized him. “One crooked his arm up behind his back, they put him in a car with the curtains down, and they drove off. The interesting thing was that there were crowds moving back and forth on the street. Nobody even turned a head to look at this. You don’t do that in the Soviet Union.”

  Kennan concluded that this was a message to him from Stalin: “I know, you son of a bitch, what you’re here for. I’ll send the fitting sort of fellow to you. Let’s see what you do.” Cumming was at first more skeptical, because “George always tended to regard things personally, as a provocation of some kind.” There had been other incidents of Russians trying to break into the Mokhovaya: one, at just this time, involved a demented man who ran past the militia, stationed himself in the commissary, seized a hammer, demanded asylum, and threatened to kill himself if he did not get it. With Kennan’s approval, the Soviet authorities were allowed into the embassy to remove him. That intruder, however, had not proposed an assassination plot. This one did, and the fact that he was a Foreign Ministry interpreter—Cumming confirmed this by finding him in a photograph, taken a year earlier, of the ceremony at which Gascoigne, the British ambassador, had presented his credentials—lent plausibility to Kennan’s hypothesis. No genuine conspirator would have used so conspicuous a method of signaling his intentions, without any prior assurance of how he would be received.33

  The intruder was in fact Nikolay Nikolayevich Yakovlev, the son not of Abakumov but of a Soviet marshal who had just been arrested—so too had young Nikolay. A third Nikolay, General Vlasik, the head of Stalin’s security detail, “came to see me in my solitary confinement and offered a deal: my only chance to survive . . . was to go to the American Embassy, to see Kennan himself, and make him believe a story which had been prepared for me.” Yakovlev was given no other information, “but the whole plot was clear to me even without that.”

  I accepted the offer without much deliberation: by then I had been severely beaten several times and had many teeth broken; so, for me, there was not much of a choice. In a few days I was put back in shape and was fit enough to go to Kennan. I must have been very nervous, Kennan was very frosty, and gave me a nasty turn-around. I was taken back to [the] Lubyanka and never saw Vlasik again, but obviously he wasn’t pleased with my performance, since though the beatings ceased I was let out only after Stalin’s death.

  Yakovlev later became one of the first Soviet historians of the Cold War, well known for his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy (based only on American sources, no Soviet documents being available at the time), his attacks on prominent dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov (which he probably had no choice but to make), and his tortured ambivalence about George F. Kennan.34

  Was the Yakovlev intrusion a test Stalin devised? Salisbury thought so at the time, and there is some evidence to support this possibility. It emerges, circuitously, from an interview the Kremlin boss granted to the Italian socialist Pietro Nenni, a recent recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize, on July 17, 1952. Such meetings were rare enough to send embassies all over Moscow scrambling for information, and in a report to Acheson on the twenty-fifth, Kennan summarized what he had learned about this one. His source was the Italian ambassador, Mario Di Stefano, an old friend from earlier service together in the U.S.S.R. Stalin had been in good health, Nenni told Di Stefano, had shown a keen interest in Italian politics, and had reconciled himself to the indefinite division of Germany. Nenni then asked about Kennan: “whether I really entertained friendly feelings toward Russia.” Di Stefano replied “that I had come here in the hopes of bettering the situation and of getting some idea of the thinking of the Kremlin on present international problems.”35

  Kennan made no immediate effort to assess this query, although it would not have struck him as an idle one: had Stalin asked Nenni to make it? Salisbury, who also talked with Di Stefano, concluded that he had: “I wish Kennan and I had known each other better in those times and had been able to talk more freely.” Salisbury had something else to regret, which was that the indefatigable Alsops scooped him. It was “at least conceivable,” they wrote in their syndicated column on August 8, that “Nenni’s questions about Ambassador Kennan . . . might mean that the men in the Kremlin are considering some sort of approach to the American Government through Kennan.” Combined with the information about Germany, the Nenni interview “seems to hold out two rather small and quite possibly deceptive crumbs of comfort.”36

 
The next day the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera ran a front-page story with the headline: “Stalin Tries an Oblique Maneuver Aimed at a Relaxation of Tension With America: A Report of the American Ambassador in Moscow.” He and Di Stefano were distressed by the leaks, Kennan cabled Acheson: “Suppose it quixotic to wish means could be found to make Alsop[s] understand how difficult they make my task here by reckless and needless references to personalities, particularly myself in their column.” It turned out, though, that the French too had the story—probably provided by the garrulous Nenni—which strengthens the likelihood that Stalin had instructed him to mention Kennan’s name.37

  Then, on August 23, Stalin received the new French ambassador, Louis Joxe, for a twenty-minute visit. Kennan was furious. Joxe had not informed him that he was seeking the meeting: he had been “ill-advised” to proceed without receiving any indication that Stalin wished to see him. The “obvious purpose” was to drive a wedge between the French, the British, and the Americans, since neither Kennan nor Gascoigne had received an invitation. (Someone in Washington, on reading this telegram, scribbled in the margin: “Did GFK ever ask?”) Joxe’s reception “may have been . . . intended as a reproach to me or as a means of embarrassing me,” Kennan wrote Doc Matthews, “by conveying the implication that had I made a similar request I also would have been received.” But he professed to be content:

  What these people need is to be left alone for a while and taught that other people are capable of doing without them, and I am quite sure that when the proper time comes for me to see Stalin (and this might be at any time for any number of reasons) my usefulness on that occasion will be enhanced, rather than otherwise, by virtue of the fact that I have refrained from bothering him until I really had something to talk about.

  After reading a similar complaint from Gascoigne, however, Sir Pierson Dixon of the British Foreign Office put a different spin on the situation: “There is a certain puckishness about Stalin, and I dare say he could not resist the temptation of setting the Chancelleries buzzing by seeing the new French ambassador on the eve of the latest Soviet note on Germany.”38