George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Andrey Gromyko, the wartime Soviet ambassador in Washington, had advised Stalin that “it is hardly conceivable that the USA government at present may appoint a more acceptable candidate.” Whether for that reason or some other, the Kremlin boss then gave his approval, allowing the White House to confirm that Kennan was indeed Truman’s choice. Salisbury, for once, was grateful to the censors: “By killing my adverse speculation [they] spared me an embarrassing error.”53

  A week later, in bed at the Princeton house with a sprained back from having fallen off his bicycle, the ambassador-designate wrote out in longhand, for his future embassy counselor Hugh Cumming, what he hoped to accomplish:

  It seems to me that the best an ambassador can hope to do in Moscow is to reside there patiently, cheerfully, and with a reasonable modicum of dignity, burdening the rest of the Mission as little as possible with his household and his presence, holding himself available for such chores of negotiation as may come his way, gaining what understanding he can of the local scene from such fragmentary evidence as the regime finds it impossible not to divulge to him, keeping himself prepared to give advice on Soviet-American relations whenever it can be useful to the Government, and helping himself and his associates to remain of good heart and bear themselves with confidence and dignity in an atmosphere of hostility and insults, of suspicion and misinterpretation of their every action, of attempts to belittle their world and their beliefs—an atmosphere of lies and distortions, in other words, of which the very essence is the unceasing effort to induce people to abandon the evidence of their senses and of all objective criteria and to accept as valid a version of reality artificially created, unconnected with objective fact, and calculated to reduce them to a state in which no reactions are operative but those of fear and respect for the mysteries of Soviet power.

  This might seem an “overly modest set of aspirations,” Kennan added, “but I think you will agree with me that it is job enough for any man; and if I am able to acquit myself of it with as few mistakes and as much distinction as have my immediate predecessors, I shall be satisfied.”54

  Cumming would probably also have agreed—a very long telegram once having made its way from Moscow—on the appropriateness of a very long sentence now making its way back.

  EIGHTEEN

  Mr. Ambassador: 1952

  “GEORGE F. KENNAN, THE STATE DEPARTMENT’S ‘MR. X,’ IS LEAVING for Moscow this spring to take over a job for which he has been preparing for 25 years—and which he doesn’t want.” This is how the journalist Louis Cassels introduced the new U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union to the readers of Collier’s in March 1952. Based on a conversation with Kennan at the farm on the day after Truman announced the appointment, the article portrayed an envoy who “probably knows as much about Russia’s history, literature, and national characteristics as many members of the Politburo.” He would be the first since the opening of relations with the U.S.S.R. to need no interpreter when meeting Stalin. He “certainly ought to know his way around,” the president was said to have commented. Even Pravda had honored the ambassador-designate by awarding him “its highest decorations for Western statesmen—‘spy,’ ‘warmonger,’ and ‘tool of Wall Street.’ ”

  Why, then, did Kennan not want the job? The “deep dark truth about Mr. X,” Cassels revealed (not quite accurately), “is that he has never had any great ambition to be ambassador to Russia, or anywhere else.” What he wanted instead was “to write a dozen or so books that have been stillborn in his wide-ranging mind during his hectic two and a half decades as a public servant.” The Institute for Advanced Study had given Kennan that opportunity, so why had he agreed to go to Moscow? Because, Cassels suggested (not inaccurately), Kennan believed in predestination.

  He was, after all, the son of three men. One was his real father, a stern Scotch Presbyterian with a strong sense of duty and—owing to his youthful travels in Europe—an international outlook rare in turn-of-the-century Wisconsin. Kossuth Kent Kennan would not have wanted George to decline the job for which the Foreign Service had trained him, at public expense, over so many years. “I’ve never had the opportunity of serving in the armed forces,” the younger Kennan added. “I don’t think any man has the right to refuse to serve his country in any position where he might be useful.”

  A second “father” was the first George Kennan. When given the choice, in 1928, of studying Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Russian, young George had chosen the last out of deference to his famous ancestor. The many parallels in their lives, down to sharing the same birthday, “almost makes me believe in astrology,” the mature George admitted. Then, while studying Russian in Berlin, he had encountered a third “father,” Anton Chekhov, whose plays and short stories Kennan came to regard “as Russia’s and perhaps the world’s greatest literature.” Trained in medicine, Chekhov made his reputation as a writer—a trajectory Kennan envied as he weighed his professional obligations against his literary inclinations. And it had been Chekhov, he believed, who had posthumously persuaded him to buy the farm. George knew he had to do it when Annelise compared the place with the run-down Russian estate in The Cherry Orchard.

  No visitor could regard its owner as an aloof intellectual after seeing him tramping around “in torn khaki trousers, plaid cotton shirt, heavy leather boots and a Russian-style fur hat.” Kennan did much of the work himself to hold down expenses: “He is not independently wealthy, as some people suppose.” Finances, not fame, preoccupied him on the day the newspapers reported his appointment: “Well-wishers found him behind a paper-strewn desk in the parlor of the farmhouse, struggling with ‘the books’ and trying to make out his income-tax return.”

  Cassels concluded his profile by reporting one further step Kennan had taken to put down roots: in a “full-cycle return to the faith of his fathers,” he had recently joined the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton. “I drifted away from the church when I was a young man,” Kennan explained. “But I have come back to it. I still see much in formal religion that is imperfect, but I know now that a man with no religion is a very hideous character. I have a great horror of people who have no fear of God.”

  Arthur Link, who knew Kennan well, was certain of his belief in predestination: “He was reared a Presbyterian, but he’s been much more influenced by Russian Orthodoxy: the acceptance of things as they are, without getting too high expectations; [the view] that the world is fundamentally evil and that really there’s not a great deal that you can do about it.” Kennan himself, recalling his stay as a young man at the Pskovo-Pechorsky monastery in Estonia, assured a Russian Orthodox bishop late in 1951 that “I have never felt anything but the deepest respect for the grandeur of [the Church’s] spiritual tradition, the power and beauty of its ritual, and the warm current of human feeling that flows through all of its life.”

  Princeton was a long way from Pskovo-Pechorsky, however, so First Presbyterian would have to do. He worried that he would be “a very imperfect Christian,” Kennan wrote its pastor on accepting membership early in 1952, but he would be bearing a burden “far away and in loneliness.” The Soviet Union was

  the most impressive example of hell on earth that our time has known—and to reside there as the leading representative and exponent of the world with which the Christian faith is today most prominently identified . . . is surely a heavy and unusual task for any Christian: . . . perhaps this one may be forgiven if he concentrates his attention at this time on the problem of how he can best cleanse himself and brace himself spiritually for the ordeal.

  One model, he thought, might be the Prince in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot: “To make one’s self as pure of heart as one is capable of becoming, to put fear and cynicism and craftiness behind one, and to abandon one’s self to the reflection that if the simple truth will not do, then nothing will.” He would have to remind himself, however, that what he would be managing was “not the encounter of George Kennan with the phenomenon of Soviet power but the encounter of the political entity kno
wn as the Government of the United States of America.”

  Had he not already spent enough time in that awful place? Kennan stared into the fire for a long time before answering: “[F]ate pushed me into the diplomatic service. A man has to do what fate calls him to do, as best he can.”1

  I.

  His task, Kennan told guests at a dinner given by Paul Hoffman early in February, would be exploit possibilities for “continuing to exist in the same world with Soviet power and yet avoid the calamities of a third world conflict.” Americans must not conclude that war was inevitable “just because we find the absence of it to be unpleasant and difficult.” Diplomacy was not disloyalty: “It is tragic that in the course of recent events we have permitted not only valuable people, but also valuable words to be deprived of their usefulness.” Harriman, Smith, and most recently Kirk had all served with self-effacement in Moscow under difficult circumstances. “[I]f I can meet the requirements of the job with as much competence and dignity as they did, and make no more mistakes, I will be pleased enough.”2

  Meanwhile, Kennan was winding up his affairs at the Institute. The study group he had hoped to make a Policy Planning Staff in exile became the first casualty: after “considerable anguish,” he told the assistants whom he had recruited to work on the project that he would have to drop it. He could not resist, however, sending a long letter to Acheson—at some three thousand words, it could have been a paper from the original planning staff—complaining about the indulgence of emerging nationalism in Asia and the Middle East. There was little to be gained, Kennan insisted, from trying to win the goodwill of its leaders, “on whose bizarre frames the trappings of statesmanship rest like an old dress suit on a wooden scarecrow.” But Washington policy making, he cautioned himself in his diary, was now beyond the control of any individual: people were spending most of their time in “a dream-like futile battle against the folds of [their] own bureaucratic clothing.” He “shuddered inwardly at the prospect of going into the lion’s den” as the representative of such a place.3

  Few forebodings were apparent, however, when Kennan appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his confirmation hearing on March 12. Moscow was “a hard city to live in,” he acknowledged. “You are surrounded with hostility and hatred and meanness on every side.” But war was unlikely, and relations with the Soviet Union deserved “to be handled with the greatest of circumspection and care and self-control.” The senators treated Kennan respectfully, if ramblingly. The only reference to ongoing loyalty investigations came when Theodore Francis Green, Democrat of Rhode Island, asked facetiously whether previous associations with Kremlin leaders might be taken as evidence that Kennan was a communist. “I assume, Senator,” the ambassador-designate responded, “that I must have been investigated quite a number of times.” The Senate confirmed the nomination unanimously on the next day.4

  Would attacks by Soviet propagandists affect his ability to do his job? He didn’t think so, he told reporters in an off-the-record press conference at the State Department on April 1. Totalitarian regimes “always enlist hatred against individuals.” After the “X” article came out, he and Forrestal had been called “cannibalistic hyenas.” But being insulted “does not necessarily mean that you’re not respected. It may mean almost the contrary.” He would be happy simply “to see the diplomatic amenities observed and not too closely connected with emotions.”5

  The new ambassador met that same day with the president of the United States, who had just announced that he would not be running for reelection. Truman agreed that Stalin did not want war, and asked Kennan to write from time to time, saying that he liked getting personal reports from overseas representatives. “Beyond this, he gave me no instructions of any kind.” The same thing happened when Kennan lunched with Acheson the next day: “He, too, was cordial but very reserved; and he said nothing that could give me any clue to the basic line of policy I was to follow in my new capacity.”

  Courtesy calls on Soviet officials in Washington and New York were no more instructive. Ambassador Aleksandr Panyushkin and his staff seemed worn down by the hostility they had encountered in the United States. Jacob Malik, with whom Kennan had had useful conversations about a Korean War cease-fire a year earlier, was now “much more bitter and sour.” The Soviet Union was being threatened, he complained, at the end of their talk. “Are you sure,” Kennan asked, “that your Government does not prefer to be threatened?” “Positively,” Malik answered.

  Soviet attitudes were no surprise, but Kennan did find the State Department’s silence unsettling. So he arranged, through Bohlen, another meeting with Acheson on April 18: “It was left entirely to me to set the trend of the discussion.” His reputation and the publicity surrounding his appointment, Kennan tried to point out, meant that

  anything I said in that city would be listened to with great eagerness and interest; and that even statements made to other diplomats, correspondents or visitors would get back to the Soviet Government in the majority of cases; that these . . . would be scrutinized with intense curiosity by the Soviet leaders and might well have the result of affecting their attitudes.

  Should he not have, then, a clear understanding of policy on such issues as Germany—did the United States really want reunification? Or Korea—what kind of a settlement should follow a cease-fire? Or disarmament—did this not require, first, a reduction of tensions? Kennan got no answers to any of these questions: “Our position seemed to me to be comparable to the policy of unconditional surrender in the recent war.”

  A private conversation with Bohlen was even more disturbing. He appeared to have embraced “the flat and inflexible thinking of the Pentagon,” which privileged “the false mathematics of relative effectiveness” regarding weapons of mass destruction over all other considerations that might attend their use.

  The philosophic difference between this view and my own was so profound, and the hour of our conversation so late, that I could not even bring myself to argue with him about it, but it shocked me deeply for he and I have been closer than any other people in Washington, I think, in our views about Russia generally, and I realized that the difference of view implicit in his remarks would go very deep and would really prevent any further intellectual intimacy on the questions of American policy between the two of us.

  Kennan returned to Princeton “feeling extremely lonely.” No one in Washington sympathized with his views, and no one in Moscow was likely to. It seemed “that I was being sent on a mission to play a game at which I could not possibly win and that part of my obligation consisted of . . . taking upon myself the onus of whatever overt failures were involved .”6

  What Kennan expected remains unclear. Exhausted from constant crises and furious criticism, Acheson knew that his term would soon end. This was no time for new initiatives, and Kennan had disagreed, over the past several years, with most of the old ones. He still harbored hopes of redesigning the Soviet-American relationship: the fact that “a friend of the Russian tradition” would be representing the United States “might not be lost” among Moscow’s artists and intellectuals, Kennan explained, a bit forlornly, to Richard Rovere of The New Yorker on the eve of his departure. Even Stalin was not “irretrievably provincial, doctrinaire, and inflexible in his outlook on the rest of the world.” But with Truman leaving office, the Korean War still raging, and the old dictator’s rule not likely to last much longer—he had just turned seventy-three when he agreed to Kennan’s appointment—breakthroughs seemed less than likely.7

  On April 24, 1952, the New York Herald Tribune ran a picture of a smiling Ambassador Kennan, departing for Europe the day before with Annelise and Christopher on the Queen Elizabeth—Grace and Joan, still in school, were to follow later. He shared the page, for they shared the ship, with the comedian Jimmy Durante and the Indian film star Sabu, known for playing characters from Rudyard Kipling novels. Kennan’s mood, however, was darker than the photograph suggested. A few nights earlier, at the farm,
he had written out on the back of an envelope this valedictory:

  Old house and pleasing slopes, who have received us all these years like a warm, relaxed, motherly host, you have given us many things: your walls have echoed the Christmas hymns sung by childish voices; young people have danced the polka through the ground floor rooms; many evenings of talk have been spent around the fire; the gurgling of the little stream has many times lulled people to sleep who were tired and troubled from the cares of the city; we have all had health and enjoyment and hope and reassurance from your wordless, patient, kindly and mysterious influence.

  Perhaps tonight I am sleeping here for the last time, and all this has gone, as in a dream. And therefore I ask you now—you who have been so mysteriously benevolent to me, let your spirit come into me on this night and enter my dreams; tell me something of your past and your meaning; tell me to what end you have been so kind to me and given me so much, that I may have strength to accept as past that which is past and go, strengthened and unregretful, into the future.8

  The words were Kennan’s, but the tone, as he knew well, was that of Chekhov’s Madame Ranyevskaya, standing surrounded by suitcases in the final act of The Cherry Orchard, listening to the sound of it being cut down.9