by David Milne
Kennan had made repeated attempts to warn Averell Harriman, his superior at the embassy, of the nature of Moscow’s intentions and the need for a swift and forceful diplomatic response, but each had been met with indifference. A scion of the railroad dynasty, Harriman was a multimillionaire who consciously rejected ostentation and pomp. Tall and conventionally handsome, a naturally commanding presence, Harriman was worldly born, whereas Kennan had discovered the world, such as it was, with no natural advantages. These were two men of very different backgrounds and sensibilities. No reclusive poet, or Freudian dissector of dreams, Harriman’s worldview was closely aligned with that of his similarly wellborn president, Franklin Roosevelt, cognizant as he was of the larger gentlemanly stakes involved in defeating Hitler. Hence Harriman did not yet view Stalin as beyond the pale. That his perspective would change throughout the course of 1945 owed much to Kennan’s persistence in dispatching one skillfully crafted entreaty after another, until the message finally conformed to events in the eyes of the besieged recipient.
The first of Kennan’s persuasive broadsides was launched on September 1944, a long paper titled “Russia—Seven Years Later,” which offered a searing critique of both Soviet intentions and the complacency that undergirded America’s effective nonresponse. Kennan wrote that “we should realize clearly what we are faced with … the Soviet government has never ceased to think in terms of spheres of interest.” Kennan offered up a solution:
Instead of going as supplicants to the Russians, we should go to them as one bringing a friendly warning. Our position should be as follows: We would regret to have to make it plain to our public that Russia alone, of all the great powers, was unwilling to submit her future actions to the judgment of international society. We would regret this because it would only fortify and widen in our public opinion those very suspicions of Russia which we ourselves have been helping to eliminate.46
An impassive Harriman did not reply to his exercised subordinate, although he cabled sections of Kennan’s paper to Washington, where they were met with a similarly deafening silence. It was a discouraging snub that led to Kennan’s abortive attempt to leave the service in 1945. But he never held these slights personally against Harriman, whom he respected in spite of their differences. “I often think,” Kennan recalled with winning self-deprecation, “what a trial I must have been to him, running around with my head in the usual clouds of philosophic speculation, full of interests other than my work, inclined to delegate responsibility and to forget about it cheerfully so long as all went well, bombarding him with bundles of purple prose on matters which, as I am sure he thought, it was the business of the president to think about, not mine—and all this when there was detailed, immediate work to be done. Small wonder that he was often peremptory.”47
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In his memoirs, Kennan recorded a vivid account of Moscow’s celebrations following the declaration of victory in Europe. News traveled slowly to Russia, so it was not until May 10—two days after VE-day—that crowds began to congregate on the streets. Tens of thousands of Muscovites gathered in a “commodious” square outside the U.S. embassy to express appreciation for their wartime ally. “We were naturally moved and pleased by this manifestation of public feeling,” Kennan recalled, “but were at a loss to know how to respond to it. If any of us ventured out into the street, he was immediately seized, tossed enthusiastically into the air, and passed on friendly hands over the heads of the crowd, to be lost, eventually, in a confused orgy of good feeling somewhere on its outer fringes.” As Kennan was unwilling to “court this experience,” he and his staff assembled on the balcony and waved in a friendly fashion to the delirious masses below. But to get into the spirit of things, he arranged for the Hammer and Sickle to be hung alongside the Stars and Stripes. As the crowds cheered for more, Kennan delivered a short speech in Russian, which consisted in his shouting, “Congratulations on the day of victory. All honor to the Soviet allies!” He recalled that this “seemed to me to be about all I could suitably say.” The crowd grew larger with each passing hour, stirring disquiet among the Soviet authorities. The United States was a valued wartime ally, to be sure, but it also represented capitalism in its most unvarnished form: a vile, exploitative ideology anathema to all good Soviet citizens. The crowds, the cheers, the touchingly instinctive and unmediated affection—all were a slap in the face for Soviet propagandists. As Kennan recalled, “It is not hard to imagine what mortification this must have brought to both party and police. Without their solicitous prearrangement not even a sparrow had fallen in a Moscow street for twenty-seven years, and now, suddenly—this!” Efforts to break up the celebrations were to no avail. The authorities even set up a brass band on the other end of the square, hoping to create a Pied Piper effect. But the crowds stayed put, instilling in Kennan an ephemeral cheer.48
Near the end of the day, Kennan received a phone call from Ralph Parker, a former New York Times journalist who had married a Russian, settled in Moscow, and was known to him as being politically “far to the left.” The two men nonetheless enjoyed semicordial relations, and Kennan readily consented to Parker’s request that he visit the embassy to enjoy the balcony view of the square’s cheering occupants. As Parker gazed at the remarkable scene, he observed to Kennan, “Isn’t this wonderful?” Kennan agreed that in a way it was, but that the scene also made him sad. “Asked to explain,” Kennan recalled, “I observed that these people out there in the crowd had been through so much, and they naturally now hoped for so much from victory; yet the world was still full of troubles; Russia faced major problems of reconstruction; things would not be put back together again all at once; peace could scarcely be what these people dreamed of it as being.” Parker identified something more sinister. Four years later a book was published in Russia under Parker’s name titled Zagovor protiv Mira (Conspiracy Against Peace). Parker recounted his evening trip to the embassy in starkly different terms from Kennan: “I noticed on Kennan’s face, as we watched this moving scene, a strangely unhappy and irritated expression. Then, casting a last glance at the crowd, he moved away from the window and said bitterly: ‘They rejoice … They think the war has ended. But it is really only beginning.’” An angered Kennan later described the book as “the most unscrupulous, mendacious, and nauseating sort of Stalinist propaganda.”49
Parker’s retelling was a fabrication, although it captured something of his interlocutor’s unspoken thoughts. Kennan did favor a confrontation with Moscow, just so long as it wasn’t a military one. Throughout 1945, as Truman strained to master the presidency following FDR’s sudden death, Kennan continued to craft strong critiques of the complacent tenor of U.S. policy toward Moscow, all with little appreciation, or indeed acknowledgment, of his efforts. In the early months of his presidency, Truman had not impressed Kennan. The president was a machine politician from Missouri, partial to guttural language, who poked fun at what he described as the “striped pants brigade” at the State Department. He appeared only dimly aware of the world beyond America’s shores. This was assuredly not a combination of traits to instill much confidence in an elitist professional diplomat and cosmopolitan. Clark Clifford recounted of Truman that he had a “black-and-white” view of world affairs, “and, by God, he was going to see to it that the men in the white hats prevailed.”50 This Wilsonian echo was worrying, as was the appearance of parochialism and obtuseness. But there was more to Truman than met the eye. Surveying biblical scenes of destruction in Berlin on July 16, 1945, Truman recorded in his diary that “I thought of Carthage, Baalbeck, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis, Peking, Babylon, Nineveh; Scipio, Rameses II, Titus, Hermann [Arminius], Sherman, Jenghis Khan, Alexander, Darius the Great.”51 Truman was clearly a devoted reader of history.52
Soon after assuming the presidency, Truman confided to his wife that “I like Stalin. He is straightforward. Knows what he wants and will compromise when he can’t get it.”53 At the Potsdam Conference of July 16 to August 2, however, President Truman proved
himself to be less sympathetic than his predecessor to Stalin’s “defensive” perspective on Eastern Europe’s “independence”—asking some hard questions of the Soviet Union’s ultimate designs. At the beginning of the conference, the Red Army wielded effective control over Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and the Baltic states. Soviet troops were also positioned in northern Iran, and Stalin had indicated to Churchill at Yalta that he had no intention of withdrawing them.54 Having missed the ideal opportunity to confront Stalin twelve months before, Kennan believed that President Truman should abandon hope of influencing events in Eastern Europe and engage with Stalin on the more honest level of “spheres of influence,” just as Churchill had proposed to a mindless chorus of American disapproval.
Fighting a losing battle over Eastern Europe was merely a distraction, albeit one that wasted valuable time. It was Truman’s naïve views on collaboration with Moscow over Germany’s future that Kennan believed were truly detached from reality—posing serious risks to a situation that was unfolding, not one that had unfolded. A communiqué summarizing the agreement made at Potsdam was regrettably peppered, as Kennan described it, with “such words as ‘democratic,’ ‘peaceful,’ and ‘justice’ [which] went directly counter to everything I had learned, in seventeen years of experience with Russian affairs, about the technique of dealing with the Soviet government.” The notion that Germany would be jointly run through a quadripartite control mechanism—with the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union each controlling stakes of variable size—was folly. As early as May 1945, Kennan believed that the Western powers had no choice but to combine their areas of control to form a legitimate, noncommunist “West German” state. In dispensing futile protests about the sanctity of Eastern Europe, mainly to placate a domestic audience, and entertaining the illusory possibility of collaboration with Stalin over Germany, the Truman administration was “in danger of losing, like the dog standing over the reflecting pool, the bone in our mouth without obtaining the one we saw in the water.”55
Potsdam was eventful for other reasons. On July 16, the opening day of the conference, a military test, supposedly shrouded in secrecy, took place near Alamogordo, a small town in New Mexico’s vast desert, that had vast repercussions for the conference—and indeed for the world. As J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project, looked on nervously from a bunker some seventeen miles away, an implosion-type plutonium device was detonated for the very first time. Informal bets were taken among researchers and observers on a range of possibilities: Would the device actually detonate? Would it conform to its projected maximum explosive yield of twenty kilotons? Would it destroy Alamogordo, the state of New Mexico, or indeed the face of the planet? The answer arrived when a searing flash illuminated the lunar landscape and a vast fireball was thrown high into the sky, eventually darkening to form a sullen, gray, mushroom-shaped cloud eight miles high. (Its yield was eighteen kilotons, and the earth, beyond a one-thousand-foot crater, fortunately retained its crust.) The roar of the shock wave took forty seconds to hit Oppenheimer and his fellow creators; its reverberations were felt two hundred miles away. Surveying a surreal scene, the director of the test, the Harvard-based professor of physics Kenneth Bainbridge, turned to Oppenheimer and remarked, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Oppenheimer shunned the profane, remembering a line from the Bhagavad Gita that followed Vishnu as he assumed a multiarmed form in order to impress a prince. Vishnu exclaims, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”56
At Potsdam, on July 24, 1945, President Truman informed Stalin in deliberately anodyne terms that the United States was now in possession of “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” In his memoir, Truman recalled that “the Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’”57 Observing the same scene, Soviet marshal Georgii Zhukov realized that Stalin’s apparent lack of interest belied a detailed understanding of the significance of Truman’s message. Following Truman’s announcement, Zhukov joined Stalin for a private meeting with Molotov, where Stalin briefed his foreign minister on the substance of the brief exchange. “Let them,” said Molotov impassively. “We’ll have to talk it over with Kurchatov and get him to speed things up.” Igor Kurchatov was head of the Soviet A-bomb project, so it was immediately obvious to Zhukov that his superiors were discussing the detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb, and they weren’t at all flustered.58 This was because Soviet spies, such as the German-born British citizen Klaus Fuchs, had penetrated the Manhattan Project. They had kept their paymasters fully apprised of developments, who in turn had fed blueprints and formulas to Soviet atomic scientists. Truman need not have bothered informing Stalin about the A-bomb.
On August 6 and 9, 1945, the world’s second and third atomic bombs were dropped on two Japanese cities. In Hiroshima, an area of approximately five square miles was incinerated in a flash—80,000 people were killed instantly. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki killed approximately 40,000 people within seconds of detonation. In the months and years that followed, as Japanese citizens who were in and around the blast zone died from burns and radiation sickness, the combined death toll rose to approximately 225,000.59 Walter Lippmann was disgusted that Truman made the decision to drop the bombs, observing that “one of the things I look back on with the greatest regret, as an American, is that we were the ones that first dropped atomic bombs.”60 Kennan said little of this new weapon at the time, recording nothing in his memoir on his reaction to Truman’s decision. As the months and years passed, however, it became clear that Kennan viewed the existence of nuclear weapons as an affront to the notion of civilization. In creating the bomb, Oppenheimer and his colleagues had made “a philosophical mistake,” as Kennan described it, and interestingly this was an assessment with which Oppenheimer came to agree.61 “Even the tactical atomic weapon,” Kennan wrote in later years, as lower-yield variations on the device were tested, “is destructive to a degree that sickens the imagination.”62 A pure morality had entered Kennan’s calculus once again, conditioning his views on a weapon that made the job of the diplomatist vital in the existential sense.
While Kennan was troubled by Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb, he was gladdened by his decision to cancel Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union after Japan’s surrender on August 15—the day on which the Second World War formally ended. Typically, Kennan believed the United States had played tough with Moscow about a year too late, observing that “we should have considered at least an extensive curtailment of this program at the time of the Warsaw uprising in the summer of 1944.”63 Nonetheless, Truman had acted correctly on this matter, and a firmer sense of purpose was becoming evident in the White House.
But it was not yet pervasive, and Kennan blamed this delay in Truman grasping reality on Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, whom he suspected was still enthralled by the notion of peacetime collaboration with Stalin at the expense of America’s core relationship with Great Britain. In his diary, Kennan recalled the substance of the Moscow Conference in December 1945, attended by the emissaries of the wartime Big Three: Byrnes, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, and Molotov. Bevin had not wanted to attend, believing that Moscow, through its aggressive and contemptuous actions in Eastern Europe and Iran, did not deserve the respect a conference bestowed. Byrnes thought otherwise. The process and personalities were captured nicely by Kennan:
As for Byrnes, Bevin saw in him only another cocky and unreliable Irishman, similar to ones that he had known in his experience as a docker and labor leader. Byrnes had consistently shown himself negligent of British feelings and quite unconcerned for Anglo-American relations … When Harriman raised his glass to the future success of the conference, Bevin assented and added: “And let’s hope we don’t all get sacked when we get home.” Molotov left the minute luncheon was over.64
Later that evening, Kennan attended a special performance o
f Zolushka (Cinderella) at the Bolshoi. Perplexed as to why such a first-rate performance had fallen flat on the large audience, Kennan discovered that Stalin had been part of the audience. “For this reason,” Kennan wrote, “the audience, except for the diplomatic corps, was apparently composed almost exclusively of secret police people, who were doubtless afraid that any excessive display on their part of enthusiasm for the performance might look as though they were being diverted from their duties.”65 Kennan was appalled at the regimentation of thought and action demanded by the Soviet system; that it scarred a Russian cultural event of the highest artistic merit made it all the more insidious. But a small part of Kennan yearned for a similar measure of disciplined uniformity in the U.S. government. There was something unsettling about the haphazard nature of foreign policymaking, and Byrnes was particularly susceptible to departing from the script. Truman ultimately came to share Kennan’s belief that Byrnes had performed abysmally at the conference, failing to warn Stalin of serious repercussions if the Red Army did not retreat from Iran. “I do not think we should play compromise any longer,” wrote Truman in reference to Byrnes on January 5, 1946. “I am tired of babying the Soviets.”66 Prospects of exerting influence appeared to be improving for the embassy’s resident Cassandra.