George F. Kennan: An American Life (32 page)

Despite the vicissitudes, Kennan was happy to be back. “Russia seems something poignantly familiar and significant to me,” he explained to Jeanette, “as though I had lived here in childhood.” Wandering the streets of Moscow and rambling through the nearby countryside left him with “an indescribable sort of satisfaction to feel myself back again in the midst of these people—with their tremendous, pulsating warmth and vitality.” He sometimes felt that he would rather be sent to Siberia with them, “which is certainly what would happen to me without delay if I were a Soviet citizen,” than to live among the “stuffy folk” on Park Avenue.

Having forced himself to acknowledge that he could never become a Russian—“for at the age of forty one cannot afford to be unrealistic”—George had the sense of having passed the point “before which one still hopes for some unfolding of the mystery and after which one settles down to derive such modest comforts as one can from the remaining years of life.”

By the time he wrote this, in early October, Annelise and the children had arrived, by much the same route that George had taken. “I have really enjoyed having the family here,” he wrote Jeanette. “They couldn’t be sweeter, and we have a lovely home life in the little apartment which we inhabited seven years ago.” Grace and Joan were adapting to the life of diplomatic children in Moscow, playing regularly in the Spaso House garden, the closest equivalent to an American backyard. Both girls were learning Russian, and Grace was attending a Soviet school, where she was treated well by her teachers despite the ideological requirements they had to follow. The Kennans visited one day when gifts from America were being handed out. The teachers gave party-line speeches, but George noticed that while these were going on, “little hands were reaching out” attempting to open the packages. These were locked up after the ceremony, and the children never saw them again.

Grace pleased George, one day that fall, by praising him as a father: “I replied that I wasn’t gay enough to make a really good Daddy.” Joan at that point chimed in: “Oh Daddy, that’s all right. With a little forcing, it would do. And if you wouldn’t work in that office all the time.” There were evenings, Joan recalled, when “my father told me wonderful stories that he made up himself, each installment being invented on the spot—they were so good that I wish he had written them down.” He also read from
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
: “It was one of my father’s lesser known gifts, reading aloud.” Diplomacy made its demands, though: her parents went out a lot, and “my mother would come in and say good night to me before they left.”
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“George has put on weight since we came,” Annelise reported to Jeanette, “so it looks as if it agrees with him!” But he was working hard, there were plenty of things to “upset a nervous tummy,” and they all missed the farm, as well as the warmth and fresh food of Portugal. Annelise had no formal job in Moscow but spent much of her time introducing Foreign Service wives at other embassies: a whiz at languages, she also acted as their interpreter. That role could be tedious, but there were compensations. “Churchill is here,” she wrote Jeanette in October, “and the big shots are busy and the smaller ones wish they were in on it.” The Kennans fell somewhere in between. British ambassador Archibald Clark Kerr did not invite them to the dinner he gave for the prime minister, which Stalin attended, but they were allowed in afterward to gawk at the great men. “We waited for hours.... [A]t least I can tell my grandchildren that I have seen some of the people who [have] made history.”
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The American diplomatic community was still small and closely knit. Dorothy Hessman, who became Kennan’s secretary in Moscow and remained with him for almost two decades, recalled little consciousness of rank: “Everybody came to all the parties, and we had a good time together.” There was even an embassy orchestra in which George played the guitar and the double bass: it called itself “The Kremlin Krows” until Soviet officials grumbled about the name, after which it became “The Purged Pigeons.” The American dacha was still in use, there was swimming in the river that ran nearby, and in the winter even a tame form of skiing in the low hills outside of Moscow. “[W]e all saw each other too much,” Patricia Davies remembered. “We didn’t have any choice.” There were feuds and rivalries, “but by and large, people seemed to get along pretty well.” “It was something like a cruise ship,” her husband, John Paton Davies, added, “a rather macabre cruise ship.”
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Parties, under such circumstances, could become legendary. With Harriman out of town in November 1944, it fell to George and Annelise to organize a Thanksgiving dinner and dance at Spaso House for, as she put it, “the lonely souls in town.” One was Lillian Hellman, the stridently left-wing playwright who with Roosevelt’s support—but to the alarm of the FBI—had recently shown up in Moscow, ill after a harrowing two-week air trip across Siberia. Worried about her health, George arranged accommodations at Spaso, and she had recovered sufficiently by Thanksgiving to join the festivities. That evening Hellman fell dramatically and decisively in love with the embassy third secretary, John Melby. “Whatever might have happened that first night was postponed,” their biographer has written, because Annelise insisted that Melby come back downstairs and dance with her. “But the next morning, at breakfast, they found the magic still held.” The affair, a famous Cold War romance, would continue off and on for the next three decades.
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A few days before Christmas that year, two American journalists in Moscow, William Lawrence of
The New York Times
and John Hersey of
Time
, decided that they would like to have the holiday dinner with, as Hersey wrote his wife, the “Kennons.” But “we couldn’t think of any reason in the world why they should want us.” So why not invite them to dine at the Metropole? “But then we decided that they’d want to have Christmas with their girls and we’d better not do that. We dropped the whole Kennon idea—until about five that afternoon. Then, without any prompting except what she must have gotten by mental telepathy, Mrs. Kennon called me first, and then Bill, and invited us to Christmas dinner! Both of us practically sang into the phone when we accepted.”
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“There is no telling how long I’ll remain here,” George had written Jeanette that fall. “Presumably at least until both wars are over. But one never knows.... A single wrong word—a single mistake—can only too easily ruin a person’s usefulness in any atmosphere as delicate as this, and among people so hyper-sensitive.” Harriman, however, was “a truly exceptional man, of great courage and competence. I genuinely admire him and have learned a good deal, working for him.” George’s own job was important, “[t]o the extent that Russia’s relations with the United States are important.... That might mean anything, depending on how you look at it.”
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“Our new minister has arrived so Ave’s thrilled,” Harriman’s daughter Kathleen, who served as his official hostess in Moscow, wrote on July 3, 1944. “The new counselor speaks in Russian perfectly freely,” an aide reported to Molotov a few days later, “quite willingly entering conversation, although in his manner he seems at first reserved and dry.” By then Kennan had already spent hours talking with his new boss: as Harriman’s aide Robert Meiklejohn noted, “[t]he Ambassador put him to work at once.” The topic was probably Poland, for Kennan followed up with the first of many memoranda on that subject.
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History had shown, he wrote, that Germany and Russia tolerated a strong and independent Poland only when they themselves were weak. “Otherwise, Poland inevitably becomes a pawn in their century-old rivalry.” With the Red Army nearing Warsaw, independence looked extremely unlikely. The alternative would not necessarily be communism, but it would involve “extensive control of foreign affairs, military matters, public opinion, and economic relations with the outside world.” As a consequence, the United States should be very careful not to promise the Poles “a prosperous and happy future under Russian influence. Prosperity and happiness have always been, like warm summer days, fleeting exceptions in the cruel climate of Eastern Europe.”
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“All interesting,” Harriman commented, “especially last para[graph].” It was indeed, because Great Britain had gone to war in 1939 on Poland’s behalf, and Roosevelt and Churchill had publicly pledged, two years later in the Atlantic Charter, to restore “sovereign rights and self-government . . . to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Stalin, however, had paved the way for the German invasion of Poland with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and the Red Army had occupied the eastern third of the country shortly thereafter. Hitler’s attack in 1941 placed the Soviet Union nominally on the side of the Polish government-in-exile in London, but the relationship remained wary because Stalin was determined to keep the territorial gains the U.S.S.R. had made, as Germany’s ally, at Poland’s expense.
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Then in 1943 the Germans revealed that they had found the graves of some fifteen thousand Polish prisoners of war, allegedly shot by the Russians three years earlier, at Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. When the London Poles called for an investigation, Stalin broke diplomatic relations with them and began preparations to set up a Polish government of his own design. At Harriman’s request, Kathleen and John Melby inspected the site early in 1944, after the Russians had recaptured it. They reported that the Germans had killed the Poles, and Harriman accepted their findings. Kennan, still in London, had his doubts—correctly as it turned out—but with no evidence of his own, he fell in “with the tacit rule of silence which was being applied at that time to the unpleasant subject in question.”
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Meanwhile Roosevelt was running for reelection. With a large, politically active Polish American community in the United States, the last thing he wanted was controversy over Katyn or anything else that had to do with Poland. On his instructions, Harriman told Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, a month before Kennan’s arrival in Moscow, that “the Polish-Soviet question must not become an issue in the forthcoming presidential campaign.” The president was doing what he could to restrain the London Poles and hoped that “whatever the Soviet Government publicly stated would be on a constructive side.... It was time to keep the barking dogs quiet.”
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With that objective in mind, Roosevelt arranged for Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the prime minister of the London Polish government, to visit Moscow at the end of July. He was coming, Kennan warned Harriman, at a moment when pride and elation over Soviet victories had “almost reached the point of hysteria.” The Russians were less worried than ever before about controlling Eastern Europe and would not go out of their way to meet the wishes of émigré Poles. But Harriman refused to pass this depressing conclusion on to Washington. “The Russians have a long-term consistent policy,” Kennan complained in his diary. “We have—and they know we have—a fluctuating policy reflecting only the momentary fancies of public opinion in the United States.” Given this disparity, Americans should stop “mumbling words of official optimism” and instead “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.”
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On August 1, 1944, the day Kennan wrote those words, resistance fighters linked to the London Poles seized large portions of Warsaw, in the expectation that the Red Army, which had reached the eastern suburbs of the city, would come to their assistance. But, as he noted on the sixth, “there is some suspicion that the Russians are deliberately withholding support, finding it by no means inconvenient that the Germans and the members of Mikołajczyk’s underground should destroy each other.” These fears seemed confirmed on the fifteenth when Harriman and Clark Kerr asked that British and American planes dropping supplies to the Warsaw insurgents be allowed to refuel at Soviet bases. Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Vyshinsky turned them down flat, denouncing the uprising as “ill-advised, . . . not worthy of assistance.” Harriman returned from this conversation, Kennan recalled, “shattered by the experience.” The ambassador informed Roosevelt later that evening that “[f]or the first time since coming to Moscow, I am gravely concerned by the attitude of the Soviet government.”
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Years afterward Kennan claimed to have concluded that this was the moment for an Anglo-American showdown with the Soviet leadership. They should have been given the choice “between changing their policy completely and agreeing to collaborate in the establishment of truly independent countries in Eastern Europe or forfeiting Western-Allied support and sponsorship for the remaining phases of the war.” The second front had been established. Soviet territory had been liberated. The West had the perfect right to divest itself of responsibility for what their “ally” would now do. The time had come to “hold fast and be ready to drive a real bargain with them when the hostilities [were] over.”
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Kennan’s recommendations at the time, however, were less drastic. Stalin and his subordinates, he reminded Harriman, had “never ceased to think in terms of spheres of influence.” They expected support in such regions, “regardless of whether that action seems to us or to the rest of the world to be right or wrong.” This was not, he admitted, an unreasonable position, because they would surely have respected Washington’s predominance in the Caribbean. The problem was that the American people, “for reasons which we do not need to go into,” had not been prepared for such a postwar settlement, but instead had been led to believe that the Soviet Union was eager to join an international security organization with the power to prevent aggression: “We are now faced with the prospect of having our people disabused of this illusion.” The United States should therefore warn the Kremlin leaders that their actions were making it difficult “for this or any other American administration to do for the Russian people the things which all of us would like to be able to do.” The choice would then lie with Moscow: “If this position is adhered to and if repercussions in American public opinion are unfavorable, Russia has only herself to blame.”
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