George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  The note on Germany restated a surprising proposal Stalin had first put forward on March 10, 1952: that the four occupying powers agree to hold free elections throughout Germany, looking toward the establishment of an independent, reunified, rearmed, but neutral state. This seemed to confirm Bohlen’s sense, from the previous summer, that Stalin was ready to talk; it also echoed, remarkably closely, Kennan’s Program A. Yet few historians today believe that Stalin was sincere, and Kennan at the time was skeptical. The Soviet initiative appeared to be a last-minute effort to split West Germany from its European and American allies on the eve of its integration into a European Defense Community closely linked to NATO. When it failed, as Stalin seems to have expected it would, he at last reconciled himself to the prospect that the Soviet Union would never control any more than the eastern third of its former adversary: short of war, Germany and Europe would remain divided. The Nenni interview gave Western diplomats their first hint of this shift in Stalin’s thinking.39 There is irony, nonetheless, in the fact that Stalin’s ideas appear to have come closest to Kennan’s—if only briefly—during a period in which Kennan was just a phone call, and a few minutes’ walk, away. But neither picked up the phone: each may have been waiting for the other to do so.

  Kennan, of course, had no instructions from Acheson to explore Stalin’s intentions. The March 1952 note had initially intrigued the secretary of state—as had Program A—but he backed off when the British, the French, and the West Germans made it clear that they did not wish to pursue the idea. By late May, Kennan was dismissing the most recent version of Stalin’s suggestion as having been prepared “by hacks supplied only with grudging, cryptic, and guarded instructions and told to make the best of it.”40 And by the end of August—after the Nenni leak and the Joxe interview—he was insisting that the Soviet leader must come to him, not the other way around, a tone more appropriate for a head of state than for an ambassador.

  Stalin’s behavior is more difficult to explain. He certainly knew who Kennan was, having read both the “long telegram” and the “X” article—as well as, through espionage, an unknown number of other Kennan dispatches and policy papers. He had made no effort to call off Soviet propagandists, who had been attacking Kennan for several years: Parker’s 1949 book, for example, had denounced him as “the first and in some ways the most influential agent of America’s warmongers,” a man “of violent hatred not only of the Soviet Union but of all democratic mankind.” The Foreign Ministry briefing prepared for Shvernik when Kennan presented his credentials in May 1952 claimed that he had shared the views of Nazi diplomats prior to World War II, called for the criminal prosecution of Soviet sympathizers in the United States, headed a foundation financing “reactionary organizations and political émigrés” from Eastern Europe, and was plotting war against the U.S.S.R. and the other “people’s democracies.” It concluded, as if this were an offense also, that Kennan “knows the Russian language well.”41

  And yet—Stalin did agree to accept Kennan as the new U.S. ambassador. It’s possible that he was playing a game all along, first by delaying the agrément to the appointment, then by greeting Kennan with an intensified anti-American propaganda campaign, then by trying to compromise him within his own embassy, then by planting a tantalizing question about him with Nenni, then by snubbing him while receiving Joxe—all the while plaguing him with bad service in Spaso House. That’s how it looked to Kennan, and that possibility would parallel the view most historians have of Stalin’s March 1952 note on Germany: that the old man was trying to keep his enemies off balance.

  Another explanation, though, is that he was simply an old man. It’s at least as likely that Stalin had no coherent strategy, that his attention wandered from day to day, and that his subordinates were too terrified to point out the contradictions. It was during this period, after all, that Stalin unwisely launched a purge against his own doctors. Joxe, in contrast to Nenni, had found him showing his age. The French had the impression, Kennan reported, that Stalin “moved his left arm only with difficulty and that his bodily movements were in general labored and jerky.” There had been a revealing moment, also, during the Nenni interview: Stalin suddenly informed his guest that the staunchly anticommunist American Francis Cardinal Spellman had been present at the 1945 Yalta conference—he had not—and that it had been he who had turned Roosevelt against the Soviet Union, thereby confirming the Vatican’s hand behind every development unfavorable to Moscow.42 Perhaps it was just as well that Stalin didn’t know of Kennan’s letter to the pope, if it ever existed. Or maybe, even if it didn’t, he thought it did.

  V.

  “You should have seen us arrive in great style,” Annelise wrote Cousin Grace and Frieda Por in mid-July, two weeks after all six Kennans had landed in Moscow on their four-engine U.S. Air Force plane: “I almost felt important.” Accompanying them were a Danish couple to take over the Spaso House responsibilities of butler and cook, their three-year-old daughter who would be a playmate for Christopher, and a Danish nurse to manage all of the younger children—plus what seemed to Annelise a fortune in frozen meat, canned goods, whiskeys, and wines. Grace, on vacation from Radcliffe, took several embassy jobs, was pleased to get paid for them, but was not getting much sleep because “young girls are at a premium in the foreign colony.” Joan, who had stayed briefly in Moscow, was now in Kristiansand, not a bad thing since “there was nothing for her to do and she would have been very bored.” Full of energy but not as tractable as he used to be, “Tiffer Tennan” made sure that he was the center of attention: Wendy would “have to wait until she gets bigger.” It was just as well that she had turned out to be a girl.

  Unlike George, Annelise did not find Moscow to be as oppressive as it had been in the late 1930s. There were goods, albeit expensive, in the stores, and people were better dressed than during the war: “They seem pretty friendly in spite of the anti-American campaign that [is] going on. They don’t dare have anything to do with us, but I am sure they would if the taboo was lifted.” With Spaso’s staff and her Danish helpers, Annelise could imagine spending a lot of time in bed, “but somehow it doesn’t work out quite that way. The house is really big and I would like to put a speedometer on myself to see how much ground I cover [in] a day.” Nevertheless, it seemed natural to be back in Moscow: “I’d been in Russia more than any other place since I’d been married.”43

  Things did get better, George acknowledged, after his family arrived. Under Annelise’s supervision and with the assistance of the Danes—whom the police could not easily intimidate—Spaso became more hospitable. There was even an opportunity for George, with Grace, to revisit Tolstoy’s home Yasnaya Polyana, where he had last been in 1935, sick, during a snowstorm, being nursed by the GPU. His ambassadorial angels again respected his privacy, allowing him a long talk with the great writer’s last secretary, Valentin Fedorovich Bulgakov, whose Russian carried “the authentic accent—rich, polished, elegant and musical—of the educated circles of those earlier times. So, I thought to myself, must Tolstoi himself have spoken.”44

  But running the embassy continued to frustrate Kennan. It was, he believed, “absurdly overstaffed.” The Soviet authorities were pressing for its relocation to a site more distant from the Kremlin. Meanwhile the younger Foreign Service officers were treating him, he complained to Bohlen, “with the same weary correctness which we reserved in our youth for chiefs whom we thought were hopelessly behind in their mental processes.” Two in particular provoked Kennan’s ire. They were Malcolm Toon and Richard Davies, later themselves ambassadors, respectively, to the Soviet Union and Poland, who after studying Russian at Columbia had been assigned to Moscow prior to Kennan’s appointment. They had the reputation, Cumming remembered, of being brilliant but troublesome: this the new ambassador certainly found them to be.45

  Toon and Davies had made the mistake, while still at Columbia, of entering an essay contest sponsored by the Foreign Service Journal. Without knowing that they would be workin
g for Kennan, they decided to try their hand at a new “X” article, entitled “After Containment, What?” That strategy had been all right as far as it went, they argued, but it had done nothing to bring about “the destruction of Stalinism.” This would require a sustained effort to detach the Eastern European satellites from Soviet control, beginning right away with East Germany. Admittedly this might risk a third world war, but they concluded—rather too grandly—that such an outcome was unlikely. It “may not have been,” Davies later admitted, “the most judicious proposal” to have put forward at that particular time. “I may have been brash,” Toon added, “but I wasn’t stupid. I certainly would never have written this paper had I known [Kennan] was going to be our ambassador.” He and Davies were “quaking in our boots as to what would happen to us.”

  “Friends” of the two arranged for Kennan to read their essay: soon thereafter the journal editors dropped it from consideration for a prize, indeed from publication in any form. Meanwhile the ambassador set about getting the miscreants out of Moscow. He requested early transfers—a cumbersome process—and approved unfavorable fitness reports that would plague the two for years to come. Three years earlier, however, Kennan himself had approved covert operations meant to bring about much of what Toon and Davies advocated. Some of his exasperation with them grew out of their open discussion of what should have been kept secret. Some of it may also have reflected concern over the 1952 presidential campaign: John Foster Dulles, no fan of Kennan’s, had condemned “containment” publicly in May and was calling for “liberation” as an alternative.46

  Kennan’s chief concern, however, was that the very success of Western policies—overt and covert—was making the Soviet regime desperate. It was behaving, he wrote to Doc Matthews, like a “savage beast” that “hisses and spits and snarls at us incessantly.” Only flimsy barriers deprived it of the pleasure, in the words of the Russian poet Aleksandr Blok, “of making our skeleton ‘clatter in his fond embrace.’ ” That made it all the more important to avoid provocations like the Toon-Davies article, or efforts to publicize a recent congressional report that had linked Stalin and his subordinates to the 1940 Katyn Forest massacre. It was of course accurate: no “serious student” of Soviet affairs believed otherwise. The truth would not shame the perpetrators of that atrocity, however, since their victims prior to Katyn ran “into the hundreds of thousands and probably millions.” Poking or prodding the beast made little sense, therefore, but perhaps someday, “if we keep cool and use our heads, we will manage to subdue him in such a way that he will cause us less trouble.”47

  Would the Americans, though, stay cool and use their heads? Late in the summer of 1952 Kennan learned, through a military attaché, of a plan he considered so shocking that he was unwilling to reveal its specifics for several decades to come: it involved preparations, if war broke out, to mine the Turkish Straits. The information convinced him that “the Pentagon now had the bit in its teeth.” As had been the case during World War II, there was insufficient vigor “on the political side of the Potomac” to balance military considerations. The scheme hardly seems surprising in retrospect. Turkey had joined NATO a few months earlier, and even prior to its doing so the National Security Council had deemed it a vital American interest to deny the Soviet Union the use of the straits if hostilities occurred.48

  Kennan was now hypersensitive, however, to the danger of blundering into a major war. Kremlin leaders did not want one, he still insisted, but NATO’s actions might provoke one. He felt caught “between immense forces over which I have little or no control.” His only hope was “to handle things in such a manner as to lessen the likelihood of the blindest and wildest sort of reactions on both sides.” With that objective in mind, he pouched a dispatch to Washington on September 8—at ten thousand words, it was one of his longest—that tried to see the situation through Soviet eyes. It made him sound, he admitted years later, like one of the early “revisionist” historians of the Cold War.49

  It was more sophisticated than that. Kennan portrayed a Soviet regime shaped by history and ideology, to be sure, but also subject to “considerable vacillation, doubt and conflict,” not only between individuals and groups but also “within individual minds.” Of course the system required the appearance of external hostility to justify its own internal oppression. That did not mean, however, that it always distinguished what it needed to see from what was really happening. Stalin and his associates combined rationality with its opposite. Because they were secretive and often erratic, “it is not easy to tell when you are going to touch one of their neuralgic and irrational points.”50

  Kennan wrote this document—or rather dictated it, since Hessman had now made it to Moscow—for a meeting of American chiefs of missions in Western Europe, to be held in London on September 24–26, 1952. These took place periodically, but it was unusual for the ambassador to the Soviet Union to be invited. That Kennan was asked to come suggests the seriousness with which his views were still taken, despite his having no instructions from Washington and no one to whom to talk in Moscow. The State Department would be remiss, one of Nitze’s aides wrote of Kennan’s lengthy dispatch, “if, in the light of this penetrating diagnosis of Soviet motivations and intentions, it did not review NATO objectives and activities.” But Under Secretary of State David Bruce, who organized the event, was less impressed: he had reached the point, he later recalled, where he no longer read Kennan’s reports “because they were so long-winded and so blatantly seeking to be literary rather than provide information.”51

  Two Spaso House incidents deepened Kennan’s pessimism before he departed. One was the discovery that, during the mansion’s recent renovation, a sophisticated listening device had been installed inside the wooden Great Seal of the United States that hung in the ambassador’s study, a “gift” the Soviet government had presented to Harriman shortly after the end of the war. The embassy’s technicians found it by having Kennan dictate loudly to Hessman while they swept the room with their own detectors—a more sophisticated method than the ones he and Charlie Thayer had used in trying to fumigate Spaso against more primitive bugs during Joe Davies’s ambassadorship. With a grim sense of history, Kennan used as his text his own compilation of Neill Brown’s dispatches from the early 1850s, which Bullitt had sent to Washington in 1936: the State Department had just published these in 1952. The exposure of the new apparatus terrified the Burobin staff, while the guards at the gate scowled even more menacingly. “So dense was the atmosphere of anger and hostility,” Kennan remembered, “that one could have cut it with a knife.”52

  The other incident was more innocent but, for him, more significant. It involved Christopher—not quite three at the time—and a late summer afternoon he spent playing in a sand pile in the front garden, while his father sat reading a book. Bored with this,

  the boy wandered down to the iron fence, gripped two of the spikes with his pudgy little fists, and stood staring out into the wide, semi-forbidden world beyond.... Some Soviet children came along the sidewalk on the other side of the fence, saw him, smiled at him, and gave him a friendly poke through the bars. He squealed in pleasure and poked back. Soon, to much mutual pleasure, a game was in progress.

  At this point the guards—presumably under orders now to be even more vigilant—shooed the children away. The revelation that the beast could not tolerate even this most minimal poking caused Kennan’s patience to snap. Had he been a better ambassador, he later admonished himself, this would not have happened: “But give way it did; and it could not soon be restored.”53

  VI.

  On the afternoon before his departure, Kennan asked to see Salisbury, Whitney, Eddy Gilmore, and Henry Shapiro, the principal American correspondents in Moscow. He was concerned about leaks in Washington, which seemed to suggest that his views of the Soviet Union were more critical than what he was saying publicly. Kennan assured the journalists, Salisbury recalled, that “he would say absolutely nothing while on this trip abroa
d; if he had something on his mind, he would call us in when he returned.” Salisbury accompanied him to the airport the next morning, September 19, 1952. “He was in a silent, withdrawn mood.”54

  The ambassadorial plane flew Kennan to West Berlin, accompanied this time not by his family but by the gadget found in the Great Seal. Expecting reporters when he landed at Tempelhof, determined to have safe answers ready, Kennan conducted an interview with himself in a small notebook while still airborne:

  Where are you going? I am on my way to London to attend a meeting of some of our European chiefs of mission with the Under Secretary of State, Mr. Bruce.

  Is the situation more hopeful than it was when you went in last spring? The situation is not worse.

  Have you seen Stalin? There has been no occasion for me to ask to be received by Premier Stalin.

  What do you think of the last Soviet note on Germany? It shows that the Soviet leaders do not wish the discussion of precisely those matters which will have to be discussed first if there is to be a really free and united Germany.

  Upon arrival, though, one of the questions caught him off guard: were there many “social contacts” with Russians in Moscow? “Why, I thought to myself, must editors send reporters of such ignorance to interview ambassadors at airports?” The New York Times reported what he said next:

  George F. Kennan, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, declared today that he and other Western diplomats resided in Moscow in an “icy-cold” atmosphere of isolation so complete that he could not talk even to his guides or servants except on simple business....