by David Milne
Kennan often took his disaffection with American society to remarkable extremes. On March 21, 1940, for example, as Nazi Germany subjugated and terrorized the European continent, Kennan composed a diary entry comparing European civilization favorably to American primitivism:
When they [America’s forefathers] turned their backs on Europe, they closed their eyes to the lessons of that continent’s past; and their backwoodsmen wisdom was not adequate to the building of anything but the most primitive social scene. It is now too late to remedy the situation. The United States is, for better or for worse, a Latin American rather than a European state. Those of us who were given an old-fashioned bringing-up will scarcely ever adapt ourselves to the situation. The best we can do is to try and adapt our children to it.24
That these remarks coincided with Europe’s historical nadir testifies to Kennan’s powerful alienation from American societal and cultural mores.
Yet while Kennan was disappointed by American societal development, he found Nazism repugnant. He blamed the rise of Hitler on Germany’s ignorant and clawing middle classes, newly empowered by the post-Versailles dissolution of the Junker elite. Even after Hitler’s death, Kennan believed that the restoration of monarchy, “limited by an efficient bureaucracy and a powerful upper class,” represented Germany’s best hope for postbellum stability.25 While Kennan’s pseudo-aristocratic prejudices were unappealing, he was also sharp in identifying Nazism’s weaknesses. After being transferred from Prague to Berlin in 1939, Kennan visited the nations that had recently fallen under the Nazi yoke. In Poland, Denmark, Holland, Norway, Belgium, and France, he found Nazi rule to be brutal and self-defeating in its disrespect of each nation’s proud history and identity. Here was an empire of shallow foundation that surely was not built to last. For Kennan it was obvious that “the Nazi ideology, based on nothing other than a glorification of the supposed virtues of the German people themselves, had no conceivable appeal to people, and especially young people, outside Germany itself.”26 In Finland on March 13, 1940, Kennan recorded that it was “a black day … it was hard to think that another place where life was decent and healthy and cheerful had succumbed to the darkness and misery brought over the world by small-souled and ruthless men who control the engines of destruction.”27 In similarly evocative prose, Kennan described Paris after Hitler’s triumphant, goading arrival:
Could one not say to the Germans that the spirit of Paris had been too delicate and shy a thing to stand their determination and had melted away before them just as they thought to have it in their grasp? Was there not some Greek myth about the man who tried to ravish the goddess, only to have her turn to stone when he touched her? That is literally what has happened to Paris. When the Germans came, the soul simply went out of it; and what is left is only stone … The Germans had in their embrace the pallid corpse of Paris.28
In Kennan’s estimation, Stalinism was as baleful a force as Nazism. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he argued strongly against embracing Stalin as a future wartime ally. On June 24, 1940, Kennan wrote to Loy Henderson, head of the State Department’s Bureau of Eastern European Affairs:
It seems to me that to welcome Russia as an associate in the defense of democracy would invite misunderstanding of our position and would lend to the German war effort a gratuitous and sorely needed aura of morality. In following such a course I do not see how we could help but identify ourselves with the Russian destruction of the Baltic states, with the attack against Finnish independence, with the partitioning of Poland and Rumania, with the crushing of religion throughout Eastern Europe, and with the domestic policy of a regime which is widely feared and detested throughout this part of the world and the methods of which are far from democratic.
Reflecting on this letter in his memoirs, Kennan recalled that his reaction “embodied the essence of the disagreement that was to hold me in opposition to our governmental policy for some five years to come…”29 He believed quite simply that the Soviet Union was unworthy of American support at any cost. Although primarily a realist in his diplomatic thought, Kennan was intermittently driven by strong considerations of morality, which often trumped notions of narrow self-interest. The logic of the adage “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” did not hold true when applied to a leader as heinous as Stalin.
Kennan remained at the heart of Hitler’s empire through 1941, writing to his Norwegian wife, Annelise, that “life in Berlin has been much as you knew it. The major change has been the wearing of the star by the Jews. That is a fantastically barbaric thing. I shall never forget the faces of people in the subway with the great yellow star sewed onto their overcoats, standing, not daring to sit down or to brush against anybody, staring straight ahead of them with eyes like terrified beasts—nor the sight of little children running around with those badges sewn on them.”30 Berlin was becoming almost unbearable for Kennan, particularly as it was the capital of a nation whose history and achievements he greatly admired. After Germany declared war on the United States in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Kennan and his embassy staff were arrested and sent to an internment camp in Bad Nauheim, a fashionable spa town near Frankfurt. The retiring Kennan now found himself in charge of some 130 men, women, and children of the U.S. embassy, a fatherly role in which he did not thrive. To make things worse, the government stopped paying Kennan and his staff during the six months of their confinement. “We had not, you see, been working,” recalled Kennan drolly.31
Kennan returned to the United States in a diplomatic swap in the early summer of 1942. One of the first things he read upon returning home was an article by Walter Lippmann, published on June 6, 1942, which opined that “if there is to be peace in the world, that peace has to be made in full partnership between the English-speaking sea and air powers and the massive land power of Russia.” It struck Kennan that America’s intelligentsia remained as delusional about Stalin as it had been ten years previously, when Walter Duranty of The New York Times reported gushingly on Stalin’s grand success in lifting a nation out of agricultural poverty and propelling it toward the panacea of large-scale industrialization.32 A few (hundred thousand? million?) missing kulaks, Duranty rationalized, constituted a bearable cost when placed against some remarkable strides in pig iron production. Such was the warped logic of the Grand Alliance, in Kennan’s view. Defeating Germany at the cost of the independence of Eastern and Central Europe—and America’s reputation as a decent nation—was not a price worth paying. Not for the first or last time, despondency descended.
Kennan’s next move was to Lisbon, where he served as ambassador. Throughout the course of 1943, he began to consider the most appropriate way to defeat and rehabilitate Germany. Kennan disliked the “unconditional surrender” formula that President Roosevelt had crafted during the Casablanca conference in January 1943, testily observing that this was “only another way of saying that the war had to be fought until the Allied and Russian armies met somewhere.”33 American and Soviet troops might meet in bonhomie, but it was unlikely to end well, for advancing armies, flushed with victory, tend to abandon their reverse gear. Land captured at a steep blood cost is a painful thing to relinquish. On Germany itself, Kennan was mindful of the lessons of Versailles. Before the aggressor had even been defeated, he was sensitive to the need for its swift rehabilitation:
Let the impact of defeat, therefore, be as tremendous as possible. Let the immediate impressions of failure be so vivid and unforgettable that they become a part of the national consciousness of the German people for all time. But having done this, let us then abandon the concept of punishment in the treatment of Germany—for prolonged punishment can never be effective against an entire people.34
Strongly opposed to a rigorous policy of denazification, Kennan viewed a robust and viable West Germany as an essential bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Like it or not, members of the Nazi party were so large in number that their removal from public life would hamper the nation’s prospects for recovery.
Devoid of wartime camaraderie—Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt went to great pains to bond with each other, bringing their publics with them—Kennan was thinking coldly in the longer term, prioritizing stability ahead of justice.
From Lisbon, Kennan was posted to London for a brief stint in January 1944 and then on to Moscow in the spring, where he was appointed minister-counselor, second in rank to Ambassador W. Averell Harriman. Placed close to the heart of a regime he reviled, Kennan would never have a better opportunity to persuade his superiors to abandon the pipe dream of collaboration with a man such as Stalin and accommodation with an ideology as insidious as Marxism-Leninism. It was from the embassy in Moscow that Kennan drafted the telegram that would transform his career and, with it, world affairs.
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When Kennan arrived in Moscow in May 1944, the essentials of his foreign-policy philosophy had mostly been established. The process of their cohering was fascinating and iconoclastic. A compulsive writer, Kennan kept a conventional diary, composed poetry, started an ambitious biography of Anton Chekhov in the 1930s that he never completed, and at one stage recorded a remarkable “dream diary” in which he detailed and unpicked the scenarios that had intruded on the preceding night’s sleep. Kennan had read Sigmund Freud attentively while recuperating from illness in Vienna in 1938. But he also followed the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in lavishing attention on his “inner life.”35
Regarding external stimuli, Kennan was generalist in the mode of the Founders, reading widely in history, literature, philosophy, and certain of the natural sciences that pertained to land economy. Like Woodrow Wilson, he abhorred the narrow specialization of scholarship that had become de rigueur in the modern American research university. An elegant accessibility was his hallmark as a writer, and he wrote for the general reader throughout his career inside and outside government. In that respect he followed Lippmann in vesting little faith in the discipline of political science—and its subfield international relations—which encouraged in its faithful pupils a futile and damaging tendency to view the causes of war and peace as a puzzle waiting to be solved with the right formula.
From such misguided premises come rigid and utopian visions. Wilson was right to reject narrow scholarship during his academic career, but he pursued a fatally singular vision as president, which suggested to Kennan that he had failed to read widely and attentively in a variety of sources. (This was in fact an accurate characterization, connected to Wilson’s efforts to overcome dyslexia.) Makers of foreign policy should avoid offering one answer to an infinite variety of conundrums—no matter how consistent and laudable that answer appeared. The ideal diplomat should read Spengler and Gibbon, to be sure, but also Plato, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Dickens, the great Russian novelists, and the Bible. From this variegated feast should emerge skepticism and a desire for pure experience, leading ultimately to the accumulation of an old-fashioned attribute: wisdom. “For people who think as I do, the judgment and instinct of a single wise and experienced man,” Kennan wrote to a social science–inclined correspondent in 1950, “whose knowledge of the world rests on the experience of personal, emotional, and intellectual participation in a wide cross-section of human effort are something we hold to be more valuable than the most elaborate synthetic structure of demonstrable fact and logical deduction.” Putting it even more bluntly in “great man” terms, Kennan wrote, “The perception of the most competent individual intelligence is thus our absolute ceiling in the development of ideas related to foreign policy.”36 The United States should forget about modish theories and educate the cleverest freethinkers to the best of the nation’s ability. It was these men—Kennan did not entertain the possibility that women might have something meaningful to contribute to the making of diplomacy—who would rise meritoriously and infuse America’s external relations with modesty, civility, and farsightedness, redounding always to the nation’s advantage.
“I have always been regarded by the United States establishment as an odd-ball,” recalled Kennan in an interview with Encounter in 1976, “and I am a strange mixture of a reactionary and a liberal. In this philosophical sense, I do consider myself a lonely person.” There were many sources of his disillusionment, but the overarching cause can be condensed into one word: modernity. Rather than viewing the Industrial Revolution as an unalloyed blessing for nations seeking to outrun the Malthusian trap of population outstripping food supplies—leading to famine and brutal demographic realignment—Kennan was impressed by Charles Beard’s damning portrayal of the endemic dehumanization of the modern age. “I am persuaded that the Industrial Revolution itself was the source of most of the bewilderments and failures of the modern age,” Kennan observed.37 Industrialization facilitated the growth and sustenance of a larger population. This larger population necessarily congregated in cities where jobs were plentiful; these jobs in turn were largely demeaning and purposeless, producing fripperies that previous generations had largely lived without, fomenting the alienation of labor that Marx and Engels identified and their political champions exploited.
A small population scraping a living through tilling the land was preferable to a large urban population engaged in labor that created substantially more wealth but robbed people of the essentials of how to live. The single-minded pursuit of “economic growth” was a risible imperative that by now afflicted all nations. Kennan was a keen farmer who followed Jefferson in believing a close connection to the soil was vital for anyone seeking purpose and emotional stability in the modern world: “I don’t trust human beings to live successfully too far away from nature.” With pride and regret, he conceded to his interviewer that “I am, I suppose, an 18th-century person, and I’m persuaded that those of our forefathers who had their roots really back in the 18th century had more convincing values and better tastes than those whose roots were in the society that issued from the industrial revolution.”38 He followed the sociologist Thorstein Veblen in deploring the “conspicuous consumption” that blighted the nation.39 Accompanying this was profound regret at the environmental and societal degradation caused by the proliferation of the automobile and the ugly urban sprawl that was erected to facilitate the demographic shift to the suburbs.
From this variety of fascinating sources came a manner of diplomatic thinking that combined important elements of Mahan, Beard, and Lippmann; Wilsonianism would always remain an ideational adversary of regrettable resilience. Kennan shared with Mahan a sense of proportion and balance, agreement on the vital importance of the Atlantic Alliance, a deep ethnocentrism, and opposition to arbitration and multilateral institutions. Kennan was at one with Beard in believing that the United States should attend to its own problems before attempting to export its values. He also shared with the revisionist historian a strong belief that there were actually few foreign-policy crises that required a direct military response. The historian Bruce Kuklick puts it well when he detects in Kennan a “quietist if not pacifist dimension.”40 Later in his life, Kennan would go so far as to describe himself “with some qualifications” as an “isolationist.”41
Finally, Kennan followed Lippmann in bemoaning the dangers that participatory democracy posed to the making of a wise foreign policy. He viewed public opinion as a grave impediment to elected politicians and professional diplomats doing their jobs effectively. Like Lippmann, Kennan also viewed himself as operating in the realist tradition and shared a common contempt for the fledgling United Nations. On August 4, 1944, Kennan had written, “International political life is something organic, not something mechanical. Its essence is change … An international organization for preservation of the peace and security cannot take the place of a well-conceived and realistic foreign policy.”42 These words could have been Lippmann’s. Yet there was, at the time, a major difference of opinion between the two men on what constituted a “realistic foreign policy.” Put simply, Lippmann favored an accommodation with Moscow whereas Kennan preferred nonmilitary confrontation. The latter strongly
believed that the success of the D-day landings had created a propitious moment for the United States to issue a stern warning to Stalin to respect majority opinion in Eastern and Central Europe:
We no longer owed them anything, after all (if indeed we ever had). The second front had been established. The Western Allies were now on the European continent in force. Soviet territory had been entirely liberated. What was now at stake in Soviet military operations was exclusively the future of non-Soviet territory previously overrun by the Germans. We in the West had a perfect right to divest ourselves of responsibility for further Soviet military operations conducted in the spirit of, and with the implications of, the Soviet denial of support for the Warsaw uprising.43
This was no simplistic anticommunism. Kennan believed the Kremlin’s expansionist designs were driven not by Marxian ideology but by traditional concerns about security and vulnerability. But this did not make Moscow’s goals any more palatable or acceptable to the West. He had met with the exiled Polish prime minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk at the British embassy in Moscow in July 1944. Detecting hopeful naïveté on the part of Mikołajczyk, and cynical bonhomie on the part of his British hosts and American guests, for Kennan the dinner and reception were excruciating. “I found the evening a hard one,” he recorded in his diary. “I wished that instead of mumbling words of official optimism we had the judgment and the good taste to bow our heads in silence before the tragedy of a people who have been our allies, whom we have saved from our enemies, and whom we cannot save from our friends.”44 Kennan could not abide lies among friends. If America and Britain were to force the issue over Polish independence, so be it, although it needed to happen quickly to make any difference. Encouraging false hope was dishonorable.
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False hope it was, as Kennan believed Yalta’s obfuscations amply displayed. Where Lippmann celebrated President Roosevelt’s clear-sighted delineation of the national interest in the Crimea, Kennan detected unworthy and deliberate ambiguity over the fate of Eastern Europe: “The Yalta declaration, with its references to the reorganization of the existing Polish-Communist regime ‘on a broader democratic basis’ and to the holding ‘of free and unfettered elections … on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot,’ struck me as the shabbiest sort of equivocation, certainly not calculated to pull the wool over the eyes of the Western public but bound to have this effect.”45