George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  The next day was “hell day.” Kennan spent it “tramping from the office of one Texas or Arkansas congressman to another,” but it all seemed futile: not one would be ashamed to vote for the Proxmire amendment. “I am now desperately tired, and must be off to bed.” A second day of lobbying went better: the vote would probably be closer than it might otherwise have been. George took a bus from Washington that evening to the closest drop-off point for East Berlin, “where, in the late evening and in pitch-blackness, Joany and Larry miraculously found me by the roadside.” His Washington Post piece appeared on July 8, and two days later George wrote Annelise to say that he had finished—he hoped—his Capitol Hill diplomacy: “I have done about all that I can do.”67

  Kennan’s brief career as a lobbyist convinced him that the legislators were using Yugoslavia to demonstrate their anticommunism. It was harder to do this with the Soviet Union, because people were afraid of war. Everybody knew, though, that “Yugoslavia was not going to make war on us.” This left him, as an ambassador, with little to say. The Yugoslavs would ask: “Why is this being done to us?” He could only reply: “I have no knowledge of why it’s being done to you.” They would then inquire: “What would we have to do to avoid this?” He could only say: “I don’t know what you could do.”68

  The Proxmire amendment, in the end, fizzled: after Kennedy assured House and Senate conferees that the authority to aid Yugoslavia and Poland was one of his strongest Cold War weapons, they restored it on July 18. Kennan returned to Belgrade at the end of that month, assuming that the “most-favored nation” issue was also being resolved. But on September 27 the phone rang in the Belgrade embassy residence. The caller was Frederick G. Dutton, assistant secretary of state for congressional relations, with the news that the House-Senate conferees on the trade bill, to the surprise of the State Department, had voted to retain the denial of “most-favored nation” status to Yugoslavia and Poland. Wilbur Mills had reneged on his promise, or at least what Kennan understood it to have been. “There’s only one thing that could stop it at this point,” Kennan remembered Dutton as having said. “That would be if you would appeal personally by telephone directly to the President.”

  Because the phone line was not secure, Kennan assumed that the Yugoslavs were listening: “I had no choice, then, but to call the President.” Rising to the occasion, the ambassador summoned his ancient Russian butler, Alexander, “the usual intermediary with telephone central,” and instructed him, to his amazement, to place a person-to-person call to the president of the United States. This he did, and to Kennan’s amazement, Kennedy immediately came on the line. Kennan stated as forcefully as he could what he saw as the implications of Mills’s action, whereupon the president suggested that he talk directly to the congressman and had the call transferred. Kennan was amazed again when Mills picked up the phone, but he had his speech ready, delivered “in my official capacity as ambassador in Belgrade and against the background of thirty-five years of experience with the affairs of Eastern Europe.” Denying “most-favored nation” treatment, he insisted,

  would be unnecessary, uncalled for, and injurious to United States interests. It would be taken, not only in Yugoslavia but throughout this part of the world, as evidence of a petty and vindictive spirit, unworthy of a country of our stature and responsibility. This judgment has the concurrence of every officer in the mission. If the amendment is adopted, it will be in disregard of the most earnest and serious advice we are capable of giving.

  Mills’s response was “cursory, negative, and offered no hope for a reversal of the action.” But at least the point had been made, and Yugoslav intelligence had had an amazingly interesting evening.69

  By a vote of 256 to 91, the House passed the trade expansion bill, with Mills’s language unchanged, on October 4. The Senate approved it by acclamation on the same day. On the fifth Kennan cabled Kennedy and Rusk to say that his usefulness as an ambassador had come to an end, and that he would soon be stepping down: the Yugoslavs did not wish for him to leave, but they understood his embarrassment “after adoption by Congress of measures I have publicly opposed.” This caused a flurry at the White House, where Bundy promised that Kennedy, in signing the bill, would make “emphatically plain” his objections to the language on Yugoslavia: “I feel sure that you would not want to do anything which might be construed, even by a few, as reflecting differences with the President.” Kennedy himself weighed in on the ninth: “Bundy is right. You must stay in Yugoslavia since you understand better than anyone else what our policy aims to accomplish.” Most convincingly, Annelise also opposed resignation: “You don’t want to do that.”70

  Sadly, Kennedy himself, when he did sign the trade bill on the eleventh, reneged on Bundy’s promise: he praised the legislation as the most important since the Marshall Plan, leaving it to an unnamed White House “source” to voice his dissatisfaction with the denial of “most-favored nation” status. “I want you to know that the matter is very much on his mind,” Bundy apologetically cabled Kennan. “Fearful agonies of decision whether to resign or not,” George recorded in his diary on the fourteenth. “Allowed myself finally to be persuaded (not just by A’s remonstrations alone, but by these as [the] last straw of many) not to do so; but went off for a long walk, totally discouraged, feeling defeated as I have not felt since 1953.”71

  IX.

  Kennedy learned, on the next morning, that there were Soviet missiles in Cuba: these gave him much more to worry about than Yugoslavia, Kennan, and Wilbur Mills. Kennan had cautioned the State Department by cable, on September 13, that it should not dismiss as “propaganda” Khrushchev’s warnings about the island: “When Soviet Union threatens to intervene militarily and to unleash world war if we move to defend our security and peace of Western Hemisphere, this is profoundly serious matter.” But he played no role in the crisis that followed, hearing of it only when the rest of the world did. “I recall vividly the strains of the last world war and the months that I was [separated] from any communication with the family,” he wrote Joan on October 23 from Milan, where he and Annelise were on a brief holiday. Could she take responsibility for Christopher if they, with Wendy, should be interned somewhere? “I feel it is very serious,” Annelise added, “but cannot work myself up to the same pitch as Daddy. . . . However, it is better to be prepared!”72

  The chauffeur of the embassy “flagship” rushed the Kennans back to Belgrade—over five hundred miles—in eleven hours, from where they watched the Soviet-American confrontation unfold. Appalled by the risks Khrushchev had run and not particularly sympathetic to Castro, the Yugoslavs kept their heads down, protesting the blockade of the island only after the larger crisis had been resolved. Kennedy’s handling of the situation had been “masterful,” Kennan thought. Tito’s colleagues quietly agreed, pointing out that if war had come, they would have had to come down on the Cuban side.73

  With the assurance, then, that there would be a future, Kennan turned to an analysis of where American policy toward Yugoslavia had gone wrong. The problem, he concluded in an eight-thousand-word dispatch pouched to Washington at the end of November, had been “heroic struggles with ourselves.” If the United States could not do better, then it might as well “fold up our tents, before the Yugoslavs fold them up for us.” Bundy passed Kennan’s analysis to the president, who ordered yet another review and again asked Kennan to fly back for it—his fifth such trip since becoming ambassador.74

  Meanwhile Tito was in Moscow, having been driven there, Kennan was sure, by American obtuseness. He had to acknowledge, though, that the Yugoslav leader was enjoying the “personal triumph of his life.” Khrushchev received him as an honored guest, with a deference that did not seem to expect subservience. Strangely, Kennan thought this a sham and even proposed, early in January 1963, that he begin cultivating Tito’s domestic opponents. Washington should provide no further food aid, and although Kennedy should seek the reinstatement of “most-favored nation” treatment, he should do this
as a point of principle and not as way of luring Tito back to the side of the West.75

  These suggestions bewildered the NSC staff. “The Ambassador is clearly on the zag course now, having completed the zig with his [November] airgram,” David Klein complained to Bundy. No one in Washington or in the Moscow embassy shared Kennan’s suspicions of a Tito-Khrushchev plot. Clearly “matters of personality and intuition” were shaping Kennan’s judgment, making it “difficult to come to grips with the substance of the problem.” As for standing on principle, “[t]he President can do many things, but I doubt that even he could pull off this kind of a gambit with the U.S. Congress in the year of our Lord 1963.”76

  “It is by no means certain that the President will do, at this time, what I should like him to do,” George wrote Annelise from Washington, “and if it is not done now, I fear it will never be done.” That proved to be prescient. Kennedy received him on January 16 but ruled out any challenge to Congress for the foreseeable future. All that he agreed to do was to answer a planted press conference question a few days later, noting the importance of exploiting differences “behind the Iron Curtain” and hoping “that the Congress would reconsider the action it took last year.”77

  Bearing that crumb, Kennan saw Tito soon after returning to Belgrade. Tito seemed uneasy but made it clear that Yugoslavia was not about to abandon its independence. The Warsaw Pact no longer fitted “modern conditions.” The word “bloc” was losing its relevance. The other Eastern Europeans would soon follow Yugoslavia’s example. Tito hoped no longer to have to rely upon the United States, because “he never knew at what point they would get hit by some whim of the Congress.” But the Americans had nothing to fear from his policy. The State Department and its Belgrade embassy should simply give them “a true picture of [the] situation as of today.”78

  The meeting left Kennan deflated, dispirited, and on the way to the hospital. The trouble this time, the American military doctors in Frankfurt determined, was not ulcers but a kidney stone that would plague him for years to come. From his bed, Kennan reverted to another habit: he completed an eight-page letter to Walter Lippmann, not unlike the one he had dictated from another hospital in Washington a decade and a half earlier. “Being myself inhibited from writing for publication,” he wanted the Yugoslav situation to be known “to someone at home; and there could be no one better qualified than yourself to understand its complexities and implications.”

  The ultimate goal of the United States, Kennan argued, should have been to loosen the cohesion of the Marxist-Leninist world, which might be “the only means short of war by which we can ever make headway against the communist colossus.”

  That this possibility, with all of its implications, should continue to be sacrificed to the passions of a few Ukrainian and Croatian exiles and the brutal demagoguery of a few violent temperaments here and there in our political life—and that this should occur without any appreciable protest on the part of American public opinion—is a situation so painful and lamentable, particularly to one who has tried to represent us in Yugoslavia, that it is my excuse for invading your privacy in this way, and for doing so at this outrageous length.

  To John Paton Davies, Kennan added, a few days later, that his had been “a disastrously unsuccessful tour of duty.” He would have accepted the blame had it not been for the fact that no one on either side had listened to him: “I am as remote from the counsels of the congressional and labor leaders who have made U.S. policy . . . as I am from the internal deliberations of the Yugoslav League of Communists.” Their insults “go past my head like bullets past the head of one who sits between the battle-lines (and for the safety of whose head neither side could care less).” He would “leave U.S.-Yugoslav relations at an all-time low.”79

  X.

  The White House announced Kennan’s resignation on May 17, 1963. “We all knew George had been through a lot,” Schlesinger remembered, “and there was no surprise or bitterness over his leaving.” Seeking to dispel rumors to the contrary, Kennan claimed in his own statement to have had the support throughout of the president and the secretary of state, even though congressional actions regarding Yugoslavia had been “a great disappointment.” In fact, Kennan complained in 1965, neither Rusk nor his under secretary of state, George Ball, had ever concerned themselves with his problems: they had seen his appointment as having been Kennedy’s and “were not interested in what happened to me.”

  Kennedy too disappointed Kennan—by proclaiming “Captive Nations Week,” by failing to keep open the Yepishev channel, by repeatedly promising a tougher line with Congress than he was willing to pursue—but Kennan bore him no grudge: “[T]he President completely understood what he did to me, and I, on the other hand, completely understood why he had to do it.” Because he had so narrowly won the presidency, Kennedy’s political position was weak. He could not afford to appear “soft” on communism. Taking a stand against Mills might have “gummed up” his civil rights program and other domestic legislation. “This was a tragic situation, and I think both of us came out of it entirely without bitterness.... I was sorry that it was myself whom he was obliged in a way to destroy.”80

  Kennan came around, as well, to a more charitable view of Tito. The Sino-Soviet split was in the open now, and neighboring Albania had sided with the Chinese. Tito knew how much credit he could get with Khrushchev by sticking up for him after his decision to resume nuclear testing: that accounted for the Belgrade conference speech, which had cost Kennan his ambassadorial equilibrium. The Moscow trip was Tito’s payoff: the “prodigal son” returned, but on his own terms. He would make verbal concessions, but with “no intention of giving up his independence.” As a consequence, Eastern Europe was safer for heterodoxy than it had been in 1958, when Kennan had detected some of the first signs of it in Poland. He and Tito, it turned out, had wanted much the same thing.81

  Relations with Yugoslavia were therefore never close to collapse, but Kennan more than once was. As usual, he took too much personally. In contrast to colleagues like Rusk, Ball, and Bohlen, Kennan had never achieved the diplomatic equivalent of clinical detachment. Emotional fragility led to professional volatility, a problem that had afflicted him throughout his career and was still doing so in Belgrade. “I am attached to the man as a person,” Kennan’s economic counselor, Owen T. Jones, wrote in his private diary: to his “kindness and decency, his brilliance, his reputation and stature, his access to people at all levels, the essentially long term soundness of his judgments.” But “I am repelled by his self-centered egoism, . . . his mercurial moods, his meticulous arrogance.” Kennan’s “fixations,” Jones concluded, “haunt any dealings with him.”82

  Kennan had his own explanation for his difficulties in Belgrade. Progress generally resulted from accumulations of small services, he reminded himself in a note written while on a flight back to the United States—not for consultations this time—at the end of May 1963. Those who performed such tasks tended to have little sense of the larger picture. He had been trying, in Yugoslavia, “to do one small thing,” and he did not regret this: “It might have been worse if I had not been there.” But as he returned now to wider perspectives, “I find myself little aided by two and a half years’ immersion in the dust and heat.”83

  His first stop was a conference in upstate New York where gloom about his own country quickly resurfaced. His own speech had failed, while Oppenheimer’s had been “too compact and subtle to be fully understood, and too impressive to be answered.” A gang of sullen teenagers, encountered on an early morning walk, would have killed him “for kicks” if they not been exhausted from being up all night. There was nothing to do now but “stand by and watch the internal catastrophe . . . which will surely overtake us if the external catastrophe does not anticipate it.”84

  He was also having weird dreams. One moved the East Berlin farm to Nagawicka, where the Kennan children had spent their summers, which adjoined California, where Grace and her husband were living, wh
ich was just across the lake from Delafield, where George had attended St. John’s and now was considering entering local politics. Another occurred while traveling overnight to Chicago on the 20th Century Limited. The train was somehow diverted into Canada, where George had to board a bus to another railroad station, located with the aid of Prime Minister Lester Pearson, from which he caught another train, settled himself in the club car without a ticket, but was sure “that if I, being who I was, explained my predicament, there would be no difficulty.” The sugar bags in the real dining car the next morning read: “Have sweet dreams on the Century.”85

  George visited Jeanette and her family in Highland Park, spoke at the University of Wisconsin commencement in Madison, and helped Charlie James, now president and chairman of the board of the Northwestern National Insurance Company, open its new building in Milwaukee. He then picked up an honorary degree at Harvard, flew to Paris for a NATO meeting, and rescued Christopher from Sunningdale, where he had just finished his second and final year. They spent a day nostalgically in Oxford, drove from there to Harwich, and boarded a Channel ferry for Holland. Sitting on deck in the sun and out of the wind, George spent the afternoon reading Thurber aloud to his son, who “laughed until he got the hiccoughs.”86

  The Kennans’ last full day in Belgrade, July 26, 1963, was a somber one because of the earthquake that had occurred that morning in Skopje, killing over a thousand people and devastating most of the city. The next day they flew to Brioni, where on the twenty-eighth Tito hosted a luncheon for all four Kennans, with George able to announce the arrival, near the disaster site, of an American emergency field hospital. The children comported themselves appropriately in the presence of the Yugoslav president, who toasted their father as a “nauchnik”—a scholar—just the right thing to have said. From there the family flew to Venice, Christopher having negotiated permission to keep his turtle.87