George F. Kennan: An American Life (37 page)

On August 8, 1945, with Harriman back in Moscow, Kennan accompanied him to the Kremlin for a meeting with Stalin. Despite his short stature, scrawny mustache, discolored teeth, pocked face, and yellow eyes, the “Generalissimus,” as he now styled himself, struck Kennan as having “a certain rough handsomeness,” like “an old battle-scarred tiger.”

The subject that day was the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan, with Harriman expressing pleasure at being once again allies. There was no avoiding the implications of the American atomic bomb, however, used two days earlier at Hiroshima. It must have been “a very difficult problem to work out,” Stalin acknowledged, and “very expensive.” It would bring victory quickly, and it would mean “the end of war and of aggressors. But the secret would have to be well kept.”
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Kennan could not have agreed more, except that it was the Soviets from whom he wanted to keep the secret. “My first reaction was: ‘Oh God, if we’ve got something like this, let’s be sure that the Stalin regime doesn’t get it.’ ” He warned Harriman that “it would be a tragic folly for us to hand over the secrets of atomic energy production to the Russians.” More formally, he cautioned the new secretary of state, James F. Byrnes:

It was, thus, “my profound conviction that to reveal to the Soviet Government any knowledge which might be vital to the defense of the United States, without adequate guaranties for the control of its use in the Soviet Union, would constitute a frivolous neglect of the vital interests of our people.” Unusually, Kennan asked that the State Department make his view “a matter of record,” and to see that it was considered in “any discussions of this subject which may take place in responsible circles of our Government.”
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The Generalissimus, in the meantime, had paid Kennan a compliment. The occasion was the congressional visit in mid-September. To Kennan’s surprise, Stalin agreed to see the American legislators, probably with the hope of speeding action on a $6 billion postwar reconstruction loan Molotov had requested the previous January. With Harriman away again, it fell to Kennan to escort the delegation to the Kremlin, and to serve as interpreter. Several members arrived tipsy from having enjoyed “tea” somewhere in the Moscow subway, and just before entering Stalin’s office one asked: “What if I biff the old codger one in the nose?”

Oblivious to this near-disaster, Stalin greeted his visitors politely and at the end of the meeting went out of his way to praise Kennan—with whose views espionage had already familiarized him—for the excellence of his Russian. Deputy Foreign Minister Vyshinsky added dutifully: “Yes, damn good.”
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Byrnes and Harriman were at that time attending the first postwar conference of Soviet, American, British, French, and Chinese foreign ministers, held in London in mid-September. It was not a success. Molotov was difficult, no agreements were reached on the principal agenda item, peace treaties with former German satellites, and the meeting broke up without even a public communiqué. Harriman was pleased that Byrnes had held firm: there had been, he assured the Moscow embassy staff, no more “telling the Russians how much we love them.” Kennan, for once, was also content. The Kremlin would have to face the fact, he cabled Byrnes, “that if it has not been thrown for a loss, it has at least been stopped without a gain.” This was in effect a reversal: the first serious one, for Soviet diplomacy, since the war began. Whether there would be recriminations within the leadership remained to be seen. Byrnes took the trouble to reply personally, saying that he had found Kennan’s dispatch “highly illuminating,” with “much food for thought.”
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The football metaphor failed to impress Dana Wilgress, the Canadian ambassador in Moscow, with whom Kennan shared it. He had great respect for Kennan, Wilgress reported to Ottawa, “but he suffers from having been here in the pre-war days when foreign representatives became indoctrinated with anti-Soviet ideas as a result of the purges and subtle German propaganda.” With “only one down to go,” it was the Anglo-Saxons who were “in a huddle about what formation to try next.” That might be, Lester Pearson, Wilgress’s counterpart in Washington, commented, but Byrnes had made it a point, at a meeting with Truman, Attlee, and Canadian prime minister William L. Mackenzie King, “to express great respect for Kennan’s judgment and wisdom.... There is no doubt that whatever Kennan says carries great weight in the State Department.”
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The Truman-Attlee-King meeting, held in mid-November, focused on the international control of atomic energy and what the Soviet Union’s relationship to that process might be. Whether Kennan knew of Byrnes’s praise is not clear, although he was in Washington at the time: having received his resignation, Kennan’s superiors had called him back for consultations, just as they had done almost two decades earlier. “I took up with Mr. Kennan the question of his resignation,” a State Department official noted in a memorandum he left unsigned. “I made it clear to him that I did not think that this was the time for any of our capable senior officers to quit; their services were too badly needed.” Perhaps encouraged by the sense that the Washington mood was shifting and that his voice was beginning to be heard, Kennan agreed that “no action would be taken on his resignation . . . , that it would simply be held in abeyance.”
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One of the curiosities of Moscow life during this period, Roberts remembered, was that he and Kennan had found themselves in charge of their respective embassies longer than the actual ambassadors were. With Harriman and Clark Kerr often away, Kennan and Roberts collaborated closely: “We were constantly having to compare notes, not merely on how the Soviets were going to carry out Potsdam, but [on] what the Soviets were up to in the Middle East, or wherever.” Both warned their governments that cooperation with Moscow “wasn’t going to be very easy.”
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Ernest Bevin, the former dockworker who had become British foreign secretary, understood this clearly, Roberts assured Kennan. He regarded the failure of the foreign ministers’ conference as a healthy development: it would be a mistake for either government to show haste in trying to resolve the difficulties that had arisen. Harriman had already detected in Bevin a considerable difference from his predecessor, Anthony Eden. Where that “suave diplomat” would dodge Molotov’s blows, the stolid Bevin, like Byrnes, had “simply faced up to them.”
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It soon became clear, though, that Byrnes—more slippery than stolid—was no longer prepared to do so. He relished the plaudits his hard line had won him but hoped to earn more now by breaking the diplomatic stalemate. Making the most of the free hand Truman had given him, fancying himself a wily negotiator, convinced that Molotov lacked the authority to make decisions on his own, the secretary of state decided to deal with Stalin himself. In early December, shortly after Kennan’s return to Moscow, Byrnes announced an agreement with Molotov to hold another foreign ministers’ conference in that city just one week hence. Bevin, not consulted, was furious: he had no choice, though, but to attend.
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He could hardly have been more upset than Kennan, for whom Byrnes’s self-appointed mission to Moscow—reminiscent of Joe Davies—exemplified all that was wrong with American foreign policy. “Those of us who have spent years in diplomacy appreciate better than anyone else the necessity for compromise and for flexibility,” Kennan commented in his diary after commiserating with Roberts. “But when anyone is not able to exude more cheer and confidence than I can put forward at this time about the diplomatic undertakings of our Government . . . , I am sure that it is best that he should not be concerned with them.”
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For the moment, though, concern was unavoidable. Accompanied by Bohlen—who had also not been consulted—Byrnes and his entourage landed in the middle of a Moscow blizzard on the afternoon of December 14. Confusion prevailed from the start, with Harriman having been told to meet the plane at the wrong airport. Kennan rushed to the right one just in time to greet the secretary of state, who spoke standing in snow with no overshoes, while the wind howled through the little group that had welcomed him. Byrnes was then driven to Spaso House to thaw out, but Kennan was given no significant role in the proceedings that followed: whatever respect Byrnes had accorded Kennan’s views in Washington, he chose not to draw upon them in Moscow.
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Kennan was allowed to observe a single short session on the nineteenth. He found Bevin looking disgusted while Molotov presided with “a Russian cigarette dangling from his mouth, his eyes flashing with satisfaction and confidence as he glanced from one to the other Foreign Minister, obviously keenly aware of their differences.” Byrnes was negotiating “with no clear or fixed plan, with no definite set of objectives or limitations.” Relying entirely on his own agility, “his main purpose is to achieve
an
agreement.”

Afterward Kennan and Roberts dined with Doc Matthews, who had also flown in with Byrnes. “By the end of the evening, [Matthews] looked so crestfallen at the things that he had heard from Roberts and myself [that] I felt sorry for him and had to try to cheer him up.”
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One compensation was the lively presence, in Moscow, of Isaiah Berlin, whom Kennan quickly found to be the best informed and most intelligent foreigner in the city. A dinner conversation, joined by Bohlen, stretched on until two in the morning, with Berlin convinced that the Soviet leadership saw conflict with the West as unavoidable. Did they not realize, Kennan wondered, that if a conflict came about, it would be because of their own belief in its inevitability? Berlin thought not: “They would view it as inevitable through the logic of the development of social forces.” Friends would discover in time that they were enemies, “even though [they] did not know it at the moment.”
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Byrnes, to whom this would soon happen, left Moscow proud of what he had accomplished. Stalin had agreed to token concessions that in no way weakened his control over Eastern Europe, while winning symbolic involvement in an occupation of Japan that left American predominance in place. Both sides would continue to recognize Chiang Kai-shek’s government in China; both would participate in a U.N. effort to control the atomic bomb. Stalin made no promises to remove Soviet troops from northern Iran; nor did he withdraw demands on Turkey for territorial concessions and a naval base in the Dardanelles. From Kennan’s perspective, nothing had changed: all Byrnes had done had been to revive the pretense of common interests, to paper over still more cracks.

Profoundly discouraged, Kennan undertook yet another essay—never completed—to explain why this would not work. Unlike Americans, Russians throughout their history had faced hostile neighbors. As a result, they had no conception of friendly relations between states. There was no use “referring to common purposes to which we may both have done lip service at one time or another, such as strengthening world peace, or democracy, or what you will.” Such “fatuous gestures” would only lead Kremlin officials to think “that they should have been demanding more from us all along.”

It should be American policy “to accompany every expression of our wishes by some action on our part proving that Russian interests suffer if our wishes are not observed.” That would require imagination, firmness, and policy coordination, precisely the qualities lacking in Byrnes’s hastily arranged Moscow trip. There should be no top-level appeals over the heads of knowledgeable subordinates. Sledgehammers should be used, when necessary, to swat flies: “[W]e must be prepared to undertake a ‘taming of the shrew’ which is bound to involve a good deal of unpleasantness.” The Soviet system was designed “to produce the maximum concentration of national energies. We cannot face them effectively unless we do all in our power to concentrate our own effort.”
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Reflecting on the outcome of the Moscow conference, Wilgress assured his Ottawa colleagues that he had not intended “to question in any way the integrity or ability of Mr. George F. Kennan.” The fact that he was so highly regarded explained “the
temporary
ascendancy of the tough school shortly after the taking over of office by Mr. Byrnes.” But recent events had shown its repudiation. It was true that “American college teams usually have two or more quarterbacks,” but “the rules of the game do not permit them to use more than one at a time.”
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