George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  His isolation in the Soviet capital today is worse than he experienced as an interned U.S. diplomat in Germany after Pearl Harbor when the Nazis declared war on the United States, Mr. Kennan said.

  The only modification he offered about this statement was that in Moscow he and other Western officials were permitted to walk about the streets.

  Kennan thought he had made the comment off the record. There was airplane noise, though, and if he did restrict it, he didn’t do so loudly enough. “Correct or incorrect, accurate or inaccurate, it was an extremely foolish thing for me to have said.”55

  He saw at once that he had gone too far. “Don’t be a boy, and don’t feed the little ego,” he scribbled in his notebook, just below his practice press conference, probably on the next leg of the flight to London—the shakiness of the handwriting suggests nervousness or turbulence or both. “Be deliberate. Learn not to mind pauses and silences.... Never be a raconteur unless you are desperate.” Upon his arrival he met Cumming, who was returning from Washington with the suicide pills Kennan had requested from the CIA. “George, why in the hell did you make that remark at Tempelhof?” Cumming asked, after watching him pocket the package. “Particularly since one thing you’ve always drilled in on all of us was: never, never, never, never compare the totalitarian structure of the Soviet Union with that of Nazi Germany?”

  The only explanation Kennan provided was the story of Christopher and his friends playing at the Spaso House fence. “There is no Iron Curtain between children,” he claimed to have been thinking, until the guards corrected him. “I was still under that emotional strain when I made that statement.” “You’ll probably be ‘png’d’ for that [declared persona non grata],” Cumming warned. “Oh, no,” Kennan protested, “they wouldn’t dream of a ‘png.’ ”56

  For a week nothing happened. Kennan met with the other chiefs of mission, cautioned them that there was no longer a “diplomatic cushion between peace and war,” and came away convinced that he had made no impression, either orally or in his long dispatch: “The NATO people, as well as our own military authorities, were completely captivated and lost in the compulsive logic of the military equation.” Nor was there flexibility on Germany. No one had wanted to talk about reunification, or even a mutual withdrawal of occupation forces. The only option was to wait for Moscow’s authority to collapse in East Germany and in turn over all of Eastern Europe—in short, the Toon-Davies plan. “[I]t was hopeless to expect the Soviet Government to agree to any such thing as this.”

  What, then, was an ambassador in the U.S.S.R. to say or do? Walking the streets of London afterward with his embassy counselor Elim O’Shaughnessy, Kennan concluded “that war had to be accepted as inevitable, or very nearly so.” To think that he would have to return to confront more “foul, malicious, and insulting propaganda,” knowing that there was just enough truth behind it to make it impossible to challenge, “seemed to me as bitter [a reflection] as a representative of our country could ever have had.”57

  It fell to Pravda to spare him that prospect, when on September 26 it furiously attacked him for his Tempelhof statement. “Kennan in ecstasy lied,” it shrieked, by claiming that Americans had no social contacts with Soviet citizens: had not the vice president of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union praised the ease with which his delegation talked with Muscovites during their visit a year earlier? Such “truthful and sincere words . . . nail to the pillar of shame the American slanderer under the mask of a diplomat.” But Kennan had committed a much greater offense by

  comparing the situation of Americans in Moscow with what he allegedly experienced when in 1941-42 he was interned by the Nazis in Germany.... [O]nly a person who cannot hold back his malicious hostility to the Soviet Union could talk thus, who not only does not want an improvement in American-Soviet relations but is making use of any opportunity to make those relations worse.

  This was, after all, the same Kennan who, as related by “the English journalist Parker,” had sneered at the crowds celebrating Hitler’s defeat outside the American embassy in May 1945: “They think that the war has ended and it is just beginning.”58

  Kennan’s first instinct was to defend himself. What he had said was not new, he assured the State Department—that was true as far as it went, but he failed to mention the comparison to Nazi Germany. Instead he cited his conciliatory attitude toward the Soviet Union to explain Pravda’s anger. It had alarmed “elements” who wanted him out of Moscow, because if he ever did talk with Stalin, the old man would realize the extent to which his subordinates had “consistently misinformed him about [the] outside world.” The delay in Kennan’s agrément, his protests over the propaganda campaign, the provocateur in the embassy, the prestige he enjoyed among foreign diplomats in the city, the fact that his experience in Soviet affairs went back “farther than it is wise for even Soviet memories and acquaintances to go”—all of this had made his ambassadorship an issue within the Kremlin hierarchy beyond what the “dominant group” was willing to allow.59

  “Cannot anticipate Department’s reaction,” George cabled Annelise from London, “but think it quite possible they may wish me to return and brave it out. Meanwhile there is no change in my plans, and see no reason for any change in yours at the moment.... Lots of love, and don’t worry.” The attack on Kennan, Acheson did indeed announce, had been “wholly unjustified,” since he had accurately described life in the Soviet Union. Nor was the State Department planning to recall him, its press spokesman commented on the twenty-ninth, noting that “we haven’t had a peep” out of Moscow regarding his status.60

  By that time, though, Kennan had begun to grasp the paradox that confronted him. He had given up on Washington for being too warlike, but now Moscow was giving up on him for just the same reason. “What the United States Government started on one day,” he lamented in his diary, “the Soviet Government finished on the next.” In this exposed position, with the world watching,

  I realized for the first time that . . . I was actually the victim of a loneliness greater than any I had ever conceived, and that it was up to me to brace myself for the prospect that nowhere would I be likely to find full understanding for what I had done . . . ; that there would never be any tribunal before which I could justify myself; that there would be few friends whom I could expect ever wholly to understand my explanations.

  Then, on October 3, Moscow produced not a peep but a cannon blast: Andrey Vyshinsky, the foreign minister, summoned the American chargé d’affaires, John McSweeney, and handed him a note declaring Kennan persona non grata for having made “slanderous attacks hostile to the Soviet Union in a rude violation of generally recognized norms of international law.” It demanded his immediate recall. Kennan thereby became the first—and so far the only—U.S. minister or ambassador to be so ejected in over 230 years of Russian-American diplomatic relations.61

  This produced, however, no major crisis. Preoccupied by the heated presidential contest between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, most Americans hardly noticed. Even Jeanette, writing from Highland Park, devoted three pages to the election but just two sentences to George’s travails. The only significant demand for severing diplomatic ties came from a right-wing Republican senator, William Knowland of California: Acheson brushed it aside, with Kennan’s approval. Despite his public support, the secretary of state blamed Kennan more than he did Moscow. Kennan’s had been, Acheson wrote in the single paragraph he devoted to the affair in his massive memoir, an “unusual statement by an experienced diplomat.” He held the barb for the end. “I sent . . . Bohlen to accompany Ambassador Kennan to Switzerland, there to await the arrival of Mrs. Kennan and their children with such patience and taciturnity as he could summon.”62

  In fact, Kennan was already in Geneva visiting Joan, who had just enrolled at the International School, when the news of his expulsion reached him. He took refuge in a movie theater to “make myself comprehend the whole incredible reality of what had occurred”
—only to find, with disgust, that he was becoming absorbed “in the damned film.” So he turned to copying out lines in his notebook from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII:

  Nay then, farewell.

  I have touched the highest point of all my greatness;

  And, from that full meridian of my glory

  I haste now to my setting; I shall fall

  Like a bright exhalation in the evening,

  And no man see me more.

  But Cardinal Wolsey offered little consolation for Kennan’s personal and professional humiliations, and was of no help at all in resolving a major logistical difficulty, which was how to get the family out of Moscow.63

  That task fell chiefly to Annelise, who had already had some difficult weeks. Accompanied by Toon, she had taken Grace to Leningrad, but the police harassed them throughout the visit. They then sailed to Stockholm on a Soviet ship that had not been much better: upon docking, “we were like two colts being let out in the spring after having been in the barn!” Grace went from there back to Radcliffe, while Annelise met Joan in Denmark and dropped her off in Geneva. Then in Bonn, visiting John and Patricia Davies, Annelise came down with ptomaine poisoning. After recovering, she flew back to Moscow on September 18, using the Air Force plane that was to take George out the next day. It “wasn’t much fun,” she recalled, being buzzed by a Soviet fighter on the descent, and upon landing “the first thing I heard about was the microphone they had found.” But Wendy and Christopher could not be without at least one parent. “George flew to London this morning and I am left behind,” Annelise wrote Jeanette on the nineteenth, in an unusual acknowledgment that she was beginning to feel sorry for herself: “It seems like a mistake.”64

  She learned from McSweeney, immediately after he saw Vyshinsky on October 3, that George had been declared persona non grata. As surprised as everyone else, Annelise now had to organize an abrupt departure. She had agreed to dine and attend a dance concert that evening with the wife of the British ambassador, who was also away. With the news still secret, “I felt like a fool—I couldn’t tell her. I thought: ‘This is the last time. I’m never going to do this again.’ ” By the time she returned to Spaso, the word was out. “They asked: ‘When can you leave?’ I said: ‘I can leave as soon as that plane can get in!’ ”

  It came on October 8. Annelise gave a party that afternoon for the entire embassy staff, the American journalists, the crew of the plane, and Father Louis Robert Brassard, a Catholic priest serving the diplomatic community in Moscow. He offered her a ticket for that evening’s performance of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Annelise was reluctant to go by herself, so he came up with another one using his Belgian embassy connections, and she took Mrs. McSweeney. “That was my last night in Moscow.”65

  The next morning Annelise, the two children, and their three Danish servants left for Cologne, where George was to meet them, on the now ubiquitous Air Force plane. “Embassy staff and quasi totality of non satellite diplomatic corps were present at her departure,” O’Shaughnessy cabled the State Department: the military attachés showed up in full uniform. “Whether or not I had been up to my job,” George recalled, in admiration, “she had been up to hers.”66

  VII.

  The postmortems began at once: how could so skilled a diplomat have said such a stupid thing? Kennan at first feigned insouciance. “I have a good conscience about the matter,” he wrote his old Princeton classmate Bernard Gufler at the end of October. The Soviets would not have expelled him unless he was making them “uncomfortable” by “coming too close to the exposure of some of their frauds and outrages, which it seems to me it was my job to do.” He was happy not to have to go back, and expected to spend another year and a half in Washington before becoming eligible for retirement.67

  But had it indeed been his job, a British Foreign Office professional wondered, to deliver “an unforgivable insult to Soviet ears” and to do it, of all places, in Berlin? “As ‘Mr. X’, and perhaps as a too-penetrating observer, [Kennan] has never in reality been persona grata; once he stepped outside what the Russians consider the role of an ambassador, the Soviet leaders may have taken some malicious pleasure in making him look rather foolish.” Kennan had weakened the position of all Western diplomats in Moscow, Joxe complained. He would never be allowed back in the U.S.S.R. An Irish journalist called Kennan’s Tempelhof outburst “one of the worse gaffes of postwar diplomacy.”68

  Given how often Kennan had stressed the need to avoid provocations, one of the Moscow embassy’s junior provocateurs, Dick Davies, wondered if he had done it on purpose. Having built himself up as “the right man in the right spot at the right time,” Kennan found it intolerable that Stalin had not received him and that the atmosphere in Moscow had been so hostile. “[T]here is a great hand pressing down on all of us,” Davies remembered him saying one evening as they watched his angels—“goons,” the younger man called them—insulating a theater audience from them during an intermission. Kennan believed that he had somehow failed, “both in terms of his own self-image and of the image he felt he had in the eyes of others.” He could not resign: that would have been an admission of failure. “So how to get out of this? . . . [P]erhaps that was the way.”69

  Charles Burton Marshall, a member of Nitze’s Policy Planning Staff who saw Kennan in Germany soon after his expulsion, was even more certain of this. If there were to be no contacts with the Soviet leadership, Marshall remembered him saying, then there was no point to remaining in Moscow, but there was a compelling reason to come home. Eisenhower would be elected president and would probably appoint John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state. Recognizing his own limitations, Dulles would make Kennan his under secretary. Kennan would agree, on the condition that Eisenhower and Dulles repudiate McCarthyism unequivocally. It was thus necessary to return to Washington, for there would be a lot to do in getting the new administration under way.70

  The only source for this conversation is Marshall’s memory three decades later. It’s possible, though, that Kennan could have said something like this. He needed a better explanation for what had happened than that he had lost control of himself, as he had initially admitted to Cumming, over an interrupted children’s game. And he was capable of erratic grandiosity. He had felt neglected in Moscow while simultaneously placing himself at the center of Stalin’s concerns. Why should he not have assumed that Washington, which had also neglected him, was now eagerly awaiting his arrival?

  Two pieces of contemporary evidence suggest that he did. Kennan had alerted the State Department back in July that he might have to resign if John Paton Davies were convicted of perjury. Both presidential candidates were busy, he knew, but it might be worth letting them know “that this cloud hangs over my own future,” for “they will both find that the problem of replacing me [in Moscow] is not the simplest of problems.” Then on October 7, four days after it had become clear, for a different reason, that he would have to be replaced, Kennan suggested to Bohlen that he be reassigned to the National Security Council to assess Soviet developments for the president and the secretary of state. He did not specify which ones, but he knew that Truman and Acheson would not be there much longer. Bohlen responded positively, but—on Acheson’s instructions—he did not encourage Kennan to hurry home.71

  If Kennan had not meant to provoke his own expulsion, Paul Mason, the assistant under secretary in the British Foreign Office, observed, then “his lack of self control is extraordinary.” So Adam Watson, of the Washington embassy, sought an explanation from Bohlen, now back from seeing Kennan in Geneva. Kennan had hoped to keep the Kremlin from grievous miscalculations like those of Hitler with respect to the British in 1939 or Stalin’s in setting off the Korean War, Bohlen surmised. But the “Hate America” campaign, together with his own isolation, had quickly convinced Kennan that this would not be possible. Feeling “that sense of escape from prison which people have when they emerge from behind the Iron Curtain,” he had spoken unguardedly at Tempelhof, belie
ving his comments to be off the record. Kennan had not done so to “see whether they would throw him out,” Bohlen insisted, but Watson could not help wondering “whether subconsciously he did not feel inclined to take some risk.”72

  In fact, Bohlen himself was mystified. “Why he did it, I don’t know,” he recalled when asked about the incident years later. “George is certainly an experienced enough man . . . to realize that you can’t make a statement [like that] without having it get in the papers.” It had been “one of the most extraordinary things in George’s career.” But Bohlen was able to determine, to his satisfaction, why the Soviets responded in the way that they did. Two years after Eisenhower appointed him as Kennan’s successor—Bohlen had arrived in Moscow in April 1953, five weeks after Stalin’s death—he found himself in a conversation with Politburo members Anastas Mikoyan and Lazar Kaganovich at a diplomatic reception. All Kremlin leaders including Stalin, they assured Bohlen, had held Kennan in high regard “as a serious and intelligent student of Soviet affairs.” They particularly respected ambassadors “who stood up firmly for their country’s interest,” as opposed to those “who attempt to ingratiate themselves with the Soviet Government by hypocrisy or other means.” They regretted the remarks that had led to Kennan’s expulsion and were still not able to understand how he could have “departed from the accepted tenets of diplomacy.”

  Bohlen defended his friend, pointing out how “tricky” it was to deal with the press in impromptu settings, something with which Soviet officials had little experience: the expulsion had been “far and away beyond the requirements of the situation.” But the problem, Mikoyan explained, was where Kennan had made his remarks: “In Berlin it was too much. That we should be insulted precisely from Berlin was intolerable.” Both men seemed to be saying, Bohlen concluded, “that it was Stalin himself who had ordered George’s expulsion.”73