III.
One of the curiosities of Moscow life during this period, Roberts remembered, was that he and Kennan had found themselves in charge of their respective embassies longer than the actual ambassadors were. With Harriman and Clark Kerr often away, Kennan and Roberts collaborated closely: “We were constantly having to compare notes, not merely on how the Soviets were going to carry out Potsdam, but [on] what the Soviets were up to in the Middle East, or wherever.” Both warned their governments that cooperation with Moscow “wasn’t going to be very easy.”21
Ernest Bevin, the former dockworker who had become British foreign secretary, understood this clearly, Roberts assured Kennan. He regarded the failure of the foreign ministers’ conference as a healthy development: it would be a mistake for either government to show haste in trying to resolve the difficulties that had arisen. Harriman had already detected in Bevin a considerable difference from his predecessor, Anthony Eden. Where that “suave diplomat” would dodge Molotov’s blows, the stolid Bevin, like Byrnes, had “simply faced up to them.”22
It soon became clear, though, that Byrnes—more slippery than stolid—was no longer prepared to do so. He relished the plaudits his hard line had won him but hoped to earn more now by breaking the diplomatic stalemate. Making the most of the free hand Truman had given him, fancying himself a wily negotiator, convinced that Molotov lacked the authority to make decisions on his own, the secretary of state decided to deal with Stalin himself. In early December, shortly after Kennan’s return to Moscow, Byrnes announced an agreement with Molotov to hold another foreign ministers’ conference in that city just one week hence. Bevin, not consulted, was furious: he had no choice, though, but to attend.23
He could hardly have been more upset than Kennan, for whom Byrnes’s self-appointed mission to Moscow—reminiscent of Joe Davies—exemplified all that was wrong with American foreign policy. “Those of us who have spent years in diplomacy appreciate better than anyone else the necessity for compromise and for flexibility,” Kennan commented in his diary after commiserating with Roberts. “But when anyone is not able to exude more cheer and confidence than I can put forward at this time about the diplomatic undertakings of our Government . . . , I am sure that it is best that he should not be concerned with them.”24
For the moment, though, concern was unavoidable. Accompanied by Bohlen—who had also not been consulted—Byrnes and his entourage landed in the middle of a Moscow blizzard on the afternoon of December 14. Confusion prevailed from the start, with Harriman having been told to meet the plane at the wrong airport. Kennan rushed to the right one just in time to greet the secretary of state, who spoke standing in snow with no overshoes, while the wind howled through the little group that had welcomed him. Byrnes was then driven to Spaso House to thaw out, but Kennan was given no significant role in the proceedings that followed: whatever respect Byrnes had accorded Kennan’s views in Washington, he chose not to draw upon them in Moscow.25
Kennan was allowed to observe a single short session on the nineteenth. He found Bevin looking disgusted while Molotov presided with “a Russian cigarette dangling from his mouth, his eyes flashing with satisfaction and confidence as he glanced from one to the other Foreign Minister, obviously keenly aware of their differences.” Byrnes was negotiating “with no clear or fixed plan, with no definite set of objectives or limitations.” Relying entirely on his own agility, “his main purpose is to achieve an agreement.”
The realities behind this agreement, since they concern only such people as Koreans, Rumanians, and Iranians, about whom he knows nothing, do not concern him. He wants an agreement for its political effect at home. The Russians know this. They will see that for this superficial success he pays a heavy price in the things that are real.
Afterward Kennan and Roberts dined with Doc Matthews, who had also flown in with Byrnes. “By the end of the evening, [Matthews] looked so crestfallen at the things that he had heard from Roberts and myself [that] I felt sorry for him and had to try to cheer him up.”26
One compensation was the lively presence, in Moscow, of Isaiah Berlin, whom Kennan quickly found to be the best informed and most intelligent foreigner in the city. A dinner conversation, joined by Bohlen, stretched on until two in the morning, with Berlin convinced that the Soviet leadership saw conflict with the West as unavoidable. Did they not realize, Kennan wondered, that if a conflict came about, it would be because of their own belief in its inevitability? Berlin thought not: “They would view it as inevitable through the logic of the development of social forces.” Friends would discover in time that they were enemies, “even though [they] did not know it at the moment.”27
Byrnes, to whom this would soon happen, left Moscow proud of what he had accomplished. Stalin had agreed to token concessions that in no way weakened his control over Eastern Europe, while winning symbolic involvement in an occupation of Japan that left American predominance in place. Both sides would continue to recognize Chiang Kai-shek’s government in China; both would participate in a U.N. effort to control the atomic bomb. Stalin made no promises to remove Soviet troops from northern Iran; nor did he withdraw demands on Turkey for territorial concessions and a naval base in the Dardanelles. From Kennan’s perspective, nothing had changed: all Byrnes had done had been to revive the pretense of common interests, to paper over still more cracks.
Profoundly discouraged, Kennan undertook yet another essay—never completed—to explain why this would not work. Unlike Americans, Russians throughout their history had faced hostile neighbors. As a result, they had no conception of friendly relations between states. There was no use “referring to common purposes to which we may both have done lip service at one time or another, such as strengthening world peace, or democracy, or what you will.” Such “fatuous gestures” would only lead Kremlin officials to think “that they should have been demanding more from us all along.”
It should be American policy “to accompany every expression of our wishes by some action on our part proving that Russian interests suffer if our wishes are not observed.” That would require imagination, firmness, and policy coordination, precisely the qualities lacking in Byrnes’s hastily arranged Moscow trip. There should be no top-level appeals over the heads of knowledgeable subordinates. Sledgehammers should be used, when necessary, to swat flies: “[W]e must be prepared to undertake a ‘taming of the shrew’ which is bound to involve a good deal of unpleasantness.” The Soviet system was designed “to produce the maximum concentration of national energies. We cannot face them effectively unless we do all in our power to concentrate our own effort.”28
Reflecting on the outcome of the Moscow conference, Wilgress assured his Ottawa colleagues that he had not intended “to question in any way the integrity or ability of Mr. George F. Kennan.” The fact that he was so highly regarded explained “the temporary ascendancy of the tough school shortly after the taking over of office by Mr. Byrnes.” But recent events had shown its repudiation. It was true that “American college teams usually have two or more quarterbacks,” but “the rules of the game do not permit them to use more than one at a time.”29
Kennan might well have agreed, had he been able to read Wilgress’s dispatch. On January 21, 1946, he wrote to remind his old friend Elbridge Durbrow, now in the State Department, that he wanted to come home. “I have been abroad 18 of the last 19 years. I owe it to myself and particularly to my family not to delay longer in establishing roots in the United States.” He did not wish to leave the Soviet field, since “our country is decidedly short of people who can speak of Russian affairs with any authority, objectivity and courage.” But the Foreign Service was not the place to do this: “There is little that a person like myself can accomplish within the walls of a diplomatic chancery or in subordinate positions in the Department of State.”30
IV.
George F. Kennan would be forty-two on February 16, 1946. Tall, thin, half bald now, with strikingly expressive blue eyes, he had spent all of his p
rofessional life in the Foreign Service. He had become, within the Moscow embassy, almost as compelling a figure as Harriman himself. “I was, in a way, astonished,” Berlin recalled of his first meeting with Kennan. “He was not at all like the people in the State Department I knew in Washington during my service there. He was more thoughtful, more austere, and more melancholy than they were. He was terribly absorbed—personally involved, somehow—in the terrible nature of the [Stalin] regime, and in the convolutions of its policy.” John Paton Davies was struck by Kennan’s intuitive but creative mind, “richly stored with knowledge, eloquent in expression, and disciplined by a scholarly respect for precision.”
It was a delight to watch him probe some sphinxlike announcement in Pravda for what might lie within or behind it, recalling some obscure incident in Bolshevik history or a personality conflict within the Party, quoting a passage from Dostoevsky on Russian character, or citing a parallel in Tsarist foreign policy. His subtle intellect swept the range of possibilities like a radar attuned to the unseen.
Patricia Davies regarded Kennan quite simply as “a giant among the dwarves.” But he remained a puzzle, even to his closest friends.31
Durbrow, for example, thought him cool, calculating, and ambitious: “George, in his not too pushy a way, was going to get ahead, by golly, if it was the last thing he did.” He was “very sure of himself. I never saw him fly off the handle. I fly off the handle all the time, myself, so I would have noticed that.” Loy Henderson agreed about the ambition but not the self-control. Kennan was emotionally fragile: “It was difficult for him to take unpleasant things.” Perhaps as a result, ulcers still plagued him, although drinking milk helped. So did physical activity, for which the dacha outside Moscow substituted at least in part for the farm outside East Berlin. Henderson also remembered Kennan tending “to look down in a patronizing way on people whom he didn’t consider as intellectuals. He would make little remarks now and then indicating that the person was not in his class.”
Martha Mautner, however, had a different impression. Kennan “liked to have disciples—people who would sit at his feet, [but he] tended to treat everyone on an equal basis, even the most junior people. He used to talk with us a good deal, I guess as a way of blowing off steam. I thought at the time that it was unusual for someone in his position to be unloading this kind of thing on people like me.” William A. Crawford, a young Foreign Service officer who arrived just as the war was ending, found Kennan very accessible. He ran “informal little confabs” on whatever he thought worth discussing. His personal interest extended beyond professional work: “You felt a very close relationship to him.”32
Dorothy Hessman, who knew Kennan as well as anyone outside his family, saw that his apparent aloofness concealed shyness. He was “very approachable, if you made the first move. He didn’t want to give the impression that you had to respond to any gesture of friendliness that he would make.” There were no Valentine’s Day cards in Moscow, so on one such occasion she and another secretary sent him a little verse. Fond of rhyming, he sent one back. The Kennans regularly hosted sing-alongs in the Finnsky Dom, with George playing the guitar: that was the rehearsal site, also, for Christmas carols. Patricia Davies thought him “very gentle, really, even with rather tiresome people.” Mautner remembered him serving as a crown-bearer, with Frank Roberts, at an Orthodox wedding for two friends: “I can still see them to this day, holding these crowns during this long service, Kennan very tall and Roberts quite short, their arms getting tireder and tireder.”33
Roberts thought Kennan an idealist and a realist at the same time. He was always “trying to find the morally best solution, while at the same time not ignoring the realities of the situation.” Berlin sensed piety: he could not help feeling himself “in the presence of a dedicated preacher, in front of whom one can’t tell off-color jokes. You can’t enjoy yourself too openly. No boisterous laughter permitted. To some extent, he casts a lampshade over the room. Bright lights have to be dimmed a little.”34
Kennan’s Russian, Crawford remembered, evoked respect even among native speakers for its fluency and elegance. Bohlen’s was that of the street, “colloquial, expressive, pungent,” while Kennan’s was “the Russian of Pushkin.” He “loved the Russians,” Berlin insisted. “He responded to Russian books, and the Russian character. I had long conversations with him about Moscow versus Petersburg, the Slavophiles, the Westerners, the development of Russian art.” But Kennan had no illusions about the Soviet Union. “I think that maybe Harriman did, or chose not to look.” Berlin saw Kennan as much more appalled by evil than Bohlen, who liked to regale listeners with accounts of the Big Three meetings, all of which he had attended. “The cynicism of Roosevelt, the bellicosity, the insensitivity, of Churchill, and the cunning of Stalin” shocked Kennan, “whereas for Chip, it was a play with various characters.” It was not his habit to think “about the spiritual awfulness of it.”35
With Bohlen in Moscow for the foreign ministers’ conference, the Davieses got to watch him argue with Kennan. American policy was still off limits—at least before witnesses—but as Patricia recalled: “Oh, boy, on the Soviet Union!” No one struck physical blows, but “the verbal blows were very very heavy.” Given their ferocity, John found it remarkable that the conversations remained friendly: “There were no nasty personal attacks.” But as Patricia pointed out, “They had a very different outlook, my goodness.” Berlin specified, in his characteristic rapid-fire diction, what set Kennan apart from Bohlen:
Interest in ideology. Intellectualism of a certain kind. Ideas. Deep interest in, and constant thought, in terms of attitudes, ideas, traditions, what might be called cultural peculiarities of countries and attitudes, forms of life. Not simply move after move; not chess. Not just evidence of this document, that document, showing that what they wanted was northern Bulgaria, or southern Greece. But also mentalités.
For Kennan, communism was “an enemy to everything one believed in. He was a grave observer of spiritual phenomena, some white, some black. Nothing much in between. One was either with us or against us. At that time, it certainly felt like that.”36
Annelise monitored George’s intensity closely. “She [held] him down to earth,” Patricia Davies recalled. He could be “rather impractical in many ways, maybe even slightly grandiose,” but Annelise had ways “of pricking bubbles.” It was difficult for him to get a big head, or even “the slightest little swelling. The prick would be there.” She was “an extraordinary person, very strong,” and with a good sense of humor. And George relied on her in all kinds of ways. Embassy colleagues could tell when Annelise was away, because he would come down to the office “in the darndest getups.” Patricia wouldn’t say anything to George about the weird combinations of socks, shirts, and ties, but she did mention it to Annelise one day, after she got back: “I just thought you ought to know.” “Oh, of course,” she explained, “I always lay everything out because you know he’s color blind.”37
That was George Kennan on the eve of becoming famous: he saw what others saw, but in different colors. He had always done so, whether because of loneliness, sensitivity, ambition, intelligence, imagination, impatience, or patriotism. He had a historian’s consciousness of the past, which gave him a visionary’s perspective on the future. Within the mundane present, however, he could come across—like his selections of socks, shirts, and ties in Annelise’s absence—as a bit weird. How did it feel, Patricia Davies asked him one day toward the end of 1945, to be so much more of a hard-liner than anyone else? “I foresee that the day will come,” he replied somberly, “when I will be accused of being pro-Soviet, with exactly as much vehemence as I am now accused of being anti-Soviet.” She thought it then “one of the silliest things I’d ever heard,” but years later after this had indeed happened, “I brought it up with him. He had forgotten, although it was no surprise to him that he had said it.”38
V.
“I am insisting on leaving here this spring,” Kennan wrote
Bill Bullitt on January 22, 1946, the day after he asked Durbrow to expedite his return to the United States. “I hope to publish after I get home a book on the structure of Soviet power.... I have had exceptional opportunities to learn about things here, and I would like to feel that I had justified them.” Moreover if, “like everyone else who has been bitten by this bug, I am destined to spend the rest of my life reading, talking, and arguing about Russia,” he might as well establish his credibility.39 Precisely one month later, in a final exasperated attempt to awaken Washington, Kennan sent the State Department a very long telegram. After that, nothing in his life, or in United States policy toward the Soviet Union, would be the same.
Like most legends, the Kennan “long telegram” of February 22, 1946, has become encrusted with certain inaccuracies, two of which originated with the author himself. The telegram was not, as he described it in his memoirs, “some eight thousand words” in length: the actual total was just over five thousand. Nor was it a response to “an anguished cry of bewilderment” from the Treasury Department over the U.S.S.R.’s refusal to join the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, despite having participated in the wartime Bretton Woods conference that designed them. Kennan’s explanation of that development had gone out early in January, with the pointed reminder that the Kremlin leadership considered “ultimate conflict between Soviet and Capitalist systems [to be] inevitable.”40
Rather, it was Stalin himself who provoked the “long telegram” by making a speech meant, superfluously, to win him an election. He delivered it, with great fanfare, in the Bolshoi Theater on February 9, the eve of the first postwar balloting for the entirely symbolic Supreme Soviet. Districts throughout the country had all nominated their candidates by a unanimous vote. “Since prevailing local philosophy rules out hand of Divine Providence as origin of such singular uniformity of inspiration,” Kennan cabled the State Department, “it must be attributed and is to a more earthly and familiar agency.” Stalin used his address to congratulate the army, party, government, nation, and—by implication—himself for winning the war. He mentioned American and British allies, but only perfunctorily. He said nothing about foreign policy, but he did call for a peacetime level of industrial production three times what it had been before the war. He justified the sacrifices this would require with a turgid analysis—straight out of Marx and Lenin—of capitalism’s tendency to produce conflict: it had happened in 1914 and 1939, and it was sure to happen again. The Soviet Union sought only peace, but it would have to be prepared.41
George F. Kennan : an American life Page 29