George F. Kennan: An American Life (30 page)

Kennan’s next assignment—there having been no enthusiasm on his part or the department’s for his staying in Lisbon—did little to reassure him about Washington’s coordination of military operations with political objectives. The new job was that of political adviser to the American ambassador in Great Britain, John G. Winant, who would be representing the United States on the recently established European Advisory Commission. Created by the British, Americans, and Soviets late in 1943, this organization’s chief responsibility was to settle the terms of Germany’s surrender and to agree on plans for the postwar occupation of that country. But Washington had reached no consensus on how to handle these matters: as a consequence, the EAC could accomplish little. “So far as I could learn from my superiors in the department,” Kennan remembered, “their attitude toward the commission was dominated by a lively concern lest the new body should at some point and by some mischance actually do something.”
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The inactivity might have been harmless had the British and Russians remained similarly inactive, but they did not. By February 1944 both had submitted draft surrender documents, and they had even agreed on occupation zone boundaries. Under their plan, the British would control the northwestern third of Germany, the Americans the southwestern third, and the Russians the eastern third. Berlin, deep within the Soviet zone, would be jointly occupied. Winant pressed Washington for a reaction, but for several weeks received no response. The State Department then forwarded, on March 8, a completely different plan, approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that awarded the United States 46 percent of Germany’s territory and 51 percent of its population, while pushing the Soviet zone far to the east. The proposed boundaries broke up existing German administrative districts but did not extend all the way to the Czech border, leaving control of that region undetermined. No explanation accompanied this plan: Winant was told simply to put it before the EAC as the American position.
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Kennan’s Azores bases experience left him in little doubt about what had happened. Once again the Joint Chiefs had elevated military convenience above all else, and the State Department had unquestioningly passed along their plan. This time Kennan did not have to offer to return to Washington to explain the plan’s deficiencies: his chief, Winant, sent him. The flight, by way of Iceland and Newfoundland, was the worst yet. The plane’s heating system failed halfway across the Atlantic, and while landing at Gander its brakes froze, causing it almost to slide off the runway into the sea. Kennan arrived in Washington again “dazed and unnerved by the vicissitudes of wartime intercontinental travel.” His reception, however, was considerably warmer than it had been the previous fall.
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“The President was kindly, charming, and talked to me at some length,” Kennan reported to Bullitt, with whom he stayed. When shown the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposal, FDR “laughed gaily and said, just as I had expected him to say: ‘Why that’s just something I once drew on the back of an envelope.’” The president agreed that the proposal made no sense and authorized Winant to accept the British-Russian alternative. He spent most of the interview fretting about the British occupation of northwestern Germany—FDR wanted the Americans there—but he showed no concern about Berlin lying within the region the Russians would control. Kennan was relieved to have the confusion cleared up but irate that it had again fallen to him to do it. “Why it should have been left to a junior officer such as myself to jeopardize his own career by going directly to the president on these two separate occasions—why the Department of State could not have taken upon itself this minimal responsibility—was a mystery to me at that time.” It remained so when Kennan wrote that passage in his memoirs more than two decades later.
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Apart from their speed, one of the few benefits of long, uncomfortable transatlantic flights—Kennan took seven between September 1942 and March 1944—was that they allowed time to read: the noise level made conversation impossible. So his traveling companion was Edward Gibbon. It’s not clear how much of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
he got through, but it was enough to influence his thinking on the problems of occupying the territories of defeated adversaries. One passage particularly stuck in his mind. “It is incumbent on the authors of persecution,” Gibbon had written, “to reflect whether they are determined to support it in the last extreme.” If they did so, they risked “excit[ing] the flame which they strive to extinguish; and it soon becomes necessary to chastise the contumacy, as well as the crime, of the offender.”
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That, Kennan believed, was what the policy of unconditional surrender, agreed upon by Roosevelt and Churchill at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, was likely to do. It suggested no concern over “the amount of responsibility we are assuming in Germany.” It reflected “no desire, and no real plan, for acquiring allies and helpers among the German people.” It implied taking the harshest measures possible “short of actual physical extermination.” It would demand “a ruthlessness now foreign to our troops,” giving them “the worst possible lessons in the practices of government.” And, he added, “[i]t will certainly require, to be successful, a far greater degree of unity of purpose and method than can conceivably be achieved at this time between the Russians and ourselves.”
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So what to do? “We must keep quite separate in our minds our program for the treatment of Germany, and the type of surrender document we want. The latter should serve the former.” That meant focusing on the military defeat of Germany, the removal and punishment of “the most conspicuous and notorious Nazi leaders,” and the elimination “of all possibility for further oppression and aggression.” It did not mean thorough denazification:

Such an approach would leave no Germans running the country, for “[w]hether we like it or not, nine-tenths of what is strong, able, and respected in Germany has been poured into those very categories which we have in mind.”

Leaving some Nazis in power would not be popular. But the German resistance to Hitler had shown itself to be weak and disorganized, and even if it were stronger, “the worst service we could render to the liberal and democratic elements in Germany would be to saddle them with public responsibility at the moment of catastrophe and humiliation.” Far better, then, to let lesser Nazis bear that burden under restrictions the Allies imposed and leave the German people eventually to kick them out. That would be “a profoundly democratic approach.”

The fundamental American interest in Germany, Kennan concluded in a memorandum he sent Admiral Leahy at the White House, was “to see that no European power acquires the possibility of using Europe’s resources to conduct aggression outside the continent of Europe.” In a broader sense, it was also an American objective “to see that western Europe survives and prospers as a major cultural force in the world.” This would require “patient, persistent and intelligent” efforts over a considerable period of time, with the goal of achieving “the maximum degree of federation in Europe.” That, in turn, would depend upon enlisting German resources in the rehabilitation of European life. And what if the Soviet Union—also an occupier of Germany—should disagree? In that case, “we will be right and they will be wrong, and we will have to find ways of persuading them to accept our view.”
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Kennan unburdened himself, while in Washington, to his fellow Soviet expert Bohlen, an increasingly influential adviser to Roosevelt and Hopkins, now back from his own internment in Japan: “Chip was very distressed if I didn’t agree with him, and viewed it almost as a betrayal.” He always seemed to be defending “what the Department did, what the government did.” Bohlen pointed out that “we didn’t have the tradition of fighting a war with an eye on the future.” Kennan, not reassured, was sure that demanding unconditional surrender was dangerous, putting “too much weight on our future relationship with the Soviet Union. We ought to keep our hands free.” For what? Bohlen wondered: “We’ve always wanted to win like a boxing match and get the hell out.” The two friends tried to convince each other through most of the night. Kennan went home weeping with anguish. “I suppose, in a way, I loved him like a brother, . . . and this is why we argued so.”
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Service on the European Advisory Commission confirmed Kennan’s conviction that the U.S. government was woefully deficient at grand strategy, if by that term one meant the ability to coordinate
all
available means with fundamental policy ends. Military planners were not qualified to take political considerations into account; but the Department of State—which was qualified—refused to take that responsibility. Strategy was emerging, then, from a confusing mix of competing initiatives, false starts, wasted energy, and as he himself had experienced, emergency appeals to the president himself. It was indeed a hell of a way to run the state that was likely to be running the postwar world. In thinking about these problems, Kennan found himself deriving lessons from the running of other worlds; hence his airborne interest in ancient Rome. He had no position yet in which he could apply this approach, which echoed his argument in the Bad Nauheim lectures that the study of history was the most reliable guide to the making of policy. But one would soon come.

“Mostly, I was unaware of the war that raged around us,” Joan recalled of the two years she spent in Portugal. “We took in some refugee Jewish children for a while, but I didn’t know anything about Hitler’s campaign against the Jews.” Only seven at the time, though, “I must have understood something.” One day, while the family was picnicking, some airplanes flew over. George and Annelise exchanged uneasy glances, enough for Joan to ask: “Are those German bombers?”

Her parents carefully kept whatever marital problems they were having from her, “[b]ut there are always little clues that children pick up.” One day “[m]y mother threw something at my father, either a vase or a lamp. Naturally, this made an impression.” Whether for this reason or not, Annelise and the children spent the Christmas of 1943 in Lisbon without George, who had flown back to Washington for the initial consultations on his EAC assignment: “Terribly disappointing,” she cabled him, but “[w]ill carry on in the best tradition.” He then went directly to London, where Annelise joined him: Joan realized only later how “blissfully ignorant” she had been of the danger they faced from the continuing German bombing of the city.
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Soon the stress he was under caused George’s ulcer to flare up again, forcing a brief hospitalization in January. While he was back in Washington at the end of March, Navy doctors advised him “to discontinue all work for a period of time.” Having received this news with “what I suspect to have been some relief,” the State Department “urged me to make the vacation a good long one, and assured me that I had no need to worry further about the affairs of the EAC—another officer would be sent at once to take my place.”
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Kennan’s Foreign Service colleagues suspected him, one of them recalled, of using his illnesses to get out of boring jobs and back into the center of things. Certainly he did not stop working—he simply shifted the nature of it. He went to the farm, exhausted himself with physical labor, and as he explained to Bullitt, recovered remarkably quickly:

“Excuse the sloppiness,” George added in a letter to Gene Hotchkiss. “Getting callouses on your hands seems to raise hell with the more delicate capacities, such as letter-writing.” Early in April, still unsure of his next assignment but relieved that it would not be London, George cabled Annelise in Lisbon to suggest that she pack things up and await further word: “Love to yourself and children. Hope we can soon be together.” Three weeks later he was able to add: “Everything fine feeling much improved.”
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Life at the farm allowed a brief reversion to bachelor life: George invited his old friend Cyrus Follmer—himself a Bad Nauheim internee, now working at the State Department—to East Berlin for a visit. They reminisced about the other Berlin and the Kozhenikovs, while Cyrus got enlisted in planting more trees. Some of the walnuts, George wrote several weeks later, were “thrusting themselves up with the most uninhibited abandon” while others were “hiding away in the deep grass.” But “to them that last shall be given gifts that no extrovert can boast of: inner strength, and the fortitude born of suffering, and great persistence.” “That my dear Cyrus,” George concluded, “ends my little Sunday morning sermon.... I am apparently going abroad again soon: very far, and for a long time; and I am sad to think how little I am leaving behind in this country, beside these neglected acres, which could draw me back again.”
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“I AM STILL ENTIRELY IN THE DARK ABOUT WHAT THE STATE DEPARTMENT will assign me to next,” George wrote Gene Hotchkiss from the farm in mid-April 1944. But he added: “I suspect that it will be Moscow; and if it is I am inclined to accept it and go. I spent so many years on Russia that I don’t want them to be wasted. And I feel that . . . I must live there once more, before I retire from this form of life.” Kennan’s appointment as counselor, the second-ranking position in the U.S. Embassy to the Soviet Union, came through on May 22. It had been in the works long before that.
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