George F. Kennan: An American Life (38 page)

Kennan might well have agreed, had he been able to read Wilgress’s dispatch. On January 21, 1946, he wrote to remind his old friend Elbridge Durbrow, now in the State Department, that he wanted to come home. “I have been abroad 18 of the last 19 years. I owe it to myself and particularly to my family not to delay longer in establishing roots in the United States.” He did not wish to leave the Soviet field, since “our country is decidedly short of people who can speak of Russian affairs with any authority, objectivity and courage.” But the Foreign Service was not the place to do this: “There is little that a person like myself can accomplish within the walls of a diplomatic chancery or in subordinate positions in the Department of State.”
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George F. Kennan would be forty-two on February 16, 1946. Tall, thin, half bald now, with strikingly expressive blue eyes, he had spent all of his professional life in the Foreign Service. He had become, within the Moscow embassy, almost as compelling a figure as Harriman himself. “I was, in a way, astonished,” Berlin recalled of his first meeting with Kennan. “He was not at all like the people in the State Department I knew in Washington during my service there. He was more thoughtful, more austere, and more melancholy than they were. He was terribly absorbed—personally involved, somehow—in the terrible nature of the [Stalin] regime, and in the convolutions of its policy.” John Paton Davies was struck by Kennan’s intuitive but creative mind, “richly stored with knowledge, eloquent in expression, and disciplined by a scholarly respect for precision.”

Patricia Davies regarded Kennan quite simply as “a giant among the dwarves.” But he remained a puzzle, even to his closest friends.
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Durbrow, for example, thought him cool, calculating, and ambitious: “George, in his not too pushy a way, was going to get ahead, by golly, if it was the last thing he did.” He was “very sure of himself. I never saw him fly off the handle. I fly off the handle all the time, myself, so I would have noticed that.” Loy Henderson agreed about the ambition but not the self-control. Kennan was emotionally fragile: “It was difficult for him to take unpleasant things.” Perhaps as a result, ulcers still plagued him, although drinking milk helped. So did physical activity, for which the dacha outside Moscow substituted at least in part for the farm outside East Berlin. Henderson also remembered Kennan tending “to look down in a patronizing way on people whom he didn’t consider as intellectuals. He would make little remarks now and then indicating that the person was not in his class.”

Martha Mautner, however, had a different impression. Kennan “liked to have disciples—people who would sit at his feet, [but he] tended to treat everyone on an equal basis, even the most junior people. He used to talk with us a good deal, I guess as a way of blowing off steam. I thought at the time that it was unusual for someone in his position to be unloading this kind of thing on people like me.” William A. Crawford, a young Foreign Service officer who arrived just as the war was ending, found Kennan very accessible. He ran “informal little confabs” on whatever he thought worth discussing. His personal interest extended beyond professional work: “You felt a very close relationship to him.”
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Dorothy Hessman, who knew Kennan as well as anyone outside his family, saw that his apparent aloofness concealed shyness. He was “very approachable, if you made the first move. He didn’t want to give the impression that you had to respond to any gesture of friendliness that he would make.” There were no Valentine’s Day cards in Moscow, so on one such occasion she and another secretary sent him a little verse. Fond of rhyming, he sent one back. The Kennans regularly hosted sing-alongs in the Finnsky Dom, with George playing the guitar: that was the rehearsal site, also, for Christmas carols. Patricia Davies thought him “very gentle, really, even with rather tiresome people.” Mautner remembered him serving as a crown-bearer, with Frank Roberts, at an Orthodox wedding for two friends: “I can still see them to this day, holding these crowns during this long service, Kennan very tall and Roberts quite short, their arms getting tireder and tireder.”
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Roberts thought Kennan an idealist and a realist at the same time. He was always “trying to find the morally best solution, while at the same time not ignoring the realities of the situation.” Berlin sensed piety: he could not help feeling himself “in the presence of a dedicated preacher, in front of whom one can’t tell off-color jokes. You can’t enjoy yourself too openly. No boisterous laughter permitted. To some extent, he casts a lampshade over the room. Bright lights have to be dimmed a little.”
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Kennan’s Russian, Crawford remembered, evoked respect even among native speakers for its fluency and elegance. Bohlen’s was that of the street, “colloquial, expressive, pungent,” while Kennan’s was “the Russian of Pushkin.” He “loved the Russians,” Berlin insisted. “He responded to Russian books, and the Russian character. I had long conversations with him about Moscow versus Petersburg, the Slavophiles, the Westerners, the development of Russian art.” But Kennan had no illusions about the Soviet Union. “I think that maybe Harriman did, or chose not to look.” Berlin saw Kennan as much more appalled by evil than Bohlen, who liked to regale listeners with accounts of the Big Three meetings, all of which he had attended. “The cynicism of Roosevelt, the bellicosity, the insensitivity, of Churchill, and the cunning of Stalin” shocked Kennan, “whereas for Chip, it was a play with various characters.” It was not his habit to think “about the spiritual awfulness of it.”
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With Bohlen in Moscow for the foreign ministers’ conference, the Davieses got to watch him argue with Kennan. American policy was still off limits—at least before witnesses—but as Patricia recalled: “Oh, boy, on the Soviet Union!” No one struck physical blows, but “the verbal blows were very very heavy.” Given their ferocity, John found it remarkable that the conversations remained friendly: “There were no nasty personal attacks.” But as Patricia pointed out, “They had a very different outlook, my goodness.” Berlin specified, in his characteristic rapid-fire diction, what set Kennan apart from Bohlen:

For Kennan, communism was “an enemy to everything one believed in. He was a grave observer of spiritual phenomena, some white, some black. Nothing much in between. One was either with us or against us. At that time, it certainly felt like that.”
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Annelise monitored George’s intensity closely. “She [held] him down to earth,” Patricia Davies recalled. He could be “rather impractical in many ways, maybe even slightly grandiose,” but Annelise had ways “of pricking bubbles.” It was difficult for him to get a big head, or even “the slightest little swelling. The prick would be there.” She was “an extraordinary person, very strong,” and with a good sense of humor. And George relied on her in all kinds of ways. Embassy colleagues could tell when Annelise was away, because he would come down to the office “in the darndest getups.” Patricia wouldn’t say anything to George about the weird combinations of socks, shirts, and ties, but she did mention it to Annelise one day, after she got back: “I just thought you ought to know.” “Oh, of course,” she explained, “I always lay everything out because you know he’s color blind.”
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That was George Kennan on the eve of becoming famous: he saw what others saw, but in different colors. He had always done so, whether because of loneliness, sensitivity, ambition, intelligence, imagination, impatience, or patriotism. He had a historian’s consciousness of the past, which gave him a visionary’s perspective on the future. Within the mundane present, however, he could come across—like his selections of socks, shirts, and ties in Annelise’s absence—as a bit weird. How did it feel, Patricia Davies asked him one day toward the end of 1945, to be so much more of a hard-liner than anyone else? “I foresee that the day will come,” he replied somberly, “when I will be accused of being pro-Soviet, with exactly as much vehemence as I am now accused of being anti-Soviet.” She thought it then “one of the silliest things I’d ever heard,” but years later after this had indeed happened, “I brought it up with him. He had forgotten, although it was no surprise to him that he had said it.”
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“I am insisting on leaving here this spring,” Kennan wrote Bill Bullitt on January 22, 1946, the day after he asked Durbrow to expedite his return to the United States. “I hope to publish after I get home a book on the structure of Soviet power.... I have had exceptional opportunities to learn about things here, and I would like to feel that I had justified them.” Moreover if, “like everyone else who has been bitten by this bug, I am destined to spend the rest of my life reading, talking, and arguing about Russia,” he might as well establish his credibility.
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Precisely one month later, in a final exasperated attempt to awaken Washington, Kennan sent the State Department a very long telegram. After that, nothing in his life, or in United States policy toward the Soviet Union, would be the same.

Like most legends, the Kennan “long telegram” of February 22, 1946, has become encrusted with certain inaccuracies, two of which originated with the author himself. The telegram was not, as he described it in his memoirs, “some eight thousand words” in length: the actual total was just over five thousand. Nor was it a response to “an anguished cry of bewilderment” from the Treasury Department over the U.S.S.R.’s refusal to join the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, despite having participated in the wartime Bretton Woods conference that designed them. Kennan’s explanation of that development had gone out early in January, with the pointed reminder that the Kremlin leadership considered “ultimate conflict between Soviet and Capitalist systems [to be] inevitable.”
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Rather, it was Stalin himself who provoked the “long telegram” by making a speech meant, superfluously, to win him an election. He delivered it, with great fanfare, in the Bolshoi Theater on February 9, the eve of the first postwar balloting for the entirely symbolic Supreme Soviet. Districts throughout the country had all nominated their candidates by a unanimous vote. “Since prevailing local philosophy rules out hand of Divine Providence as origin of such singular uniformity of inspiration,” Kennan cabled the State Department, “it must be attributed and is to a more earthly and familiar agency.” Stalin used his address to congratulate the army, party, government, nation, and—by implication—himself for winning the war. He mentioned American and British allies, but only perfunctorily. He said nothing about foreign policy, but he did call for a peacetime level of industrial production three times what it had been before the war. He justified the sacrifices this would require with a turgid analysis—straight out of Marx and Lenin—of capitalism’s tendency to produce conflict: it had happened in 1914 and 1939, and it was sure to happen again. The Soviet Union sought only peace, but it would have to be prepared.
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No one familiar with Stalin’s thinking would have found much new in the speech: it reflected what he had long believed and often said. Kennan thought the address so routine that he simply summarized it for the State Department. Having analyzed hundreds of Moscow events over the past year and a half, he saw little need to exert himself over this one. He would, after all, be leaving soon, and at just this moment he was getting sick: “I was taken with cold, fever, sinus, tooth trouble, and finally the aftereffects of the sulpha drugs administered for the relief of these other miseries.” Bedridden and in a bad humor, he was coping with the daily flood of dispatches and other embassy business as best he could.
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But the situation in Washington was far from routine. Truman had reprimanded Byrnes, on the secretary of state’s return from Moscow, for failing to report to him regularly: as a self-taught student of ancient history, the president was especially worried about Stalin’s ambitions in the Near East. He had also begun to share suspicions—long held by several of his other advisers and by congressional critics—that Byrnes’s pride in his negotiating skills was really an addiction to appeasement. Always a weathervane, Byrnes quickly swung back to his tougher line from the previous fall. Stalin’s repudiation of Bretton Woods had ended whatever chance there might have been for American economic assistance to the U.S.S.R., and there was now evidence—soon to become public—that Soviet intelligence had been running espionage operations in the United States and Canada aimed at stealing information on the atomic bomb. Within this context, Stalin’s February 9 speech had something of the effect of a shot on Fort Sumter. “All the things we did to work out Lend Lease and gosh knows what else during the war, the efforts made by F.D.R. at the various meetings, the San Francisco conference and all that sort of business—it was just unbelievable the way he threw it all out the window,” Durbrow remembered. Stalin’s speech had said “to hell with the rest of the world.”
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Kennan’s silence puzzled Durbrow, and he was not alone. Matthews, his immediate superior, asked: “Durby, have you had anything from George Kennan on this Stalin speech?” “No, God, I expect it any day. He must be working on a real deep one, one of his better efforts.” Still nothing. “Doc, I’ve looked at all the telegram take, and there’s not a damn line. Maybe it’s coming by pouch.” “Why don’t you send him a little friendly reminder?” As it happened, Matthews himself drafted the message, which went out over Byrnes’s signature on February 13. Stalin’s speech, it pointed out, had evoked a response with the press and the public “to a degree not hitherto felt.” With the pronouncements of Stalin’s subordinates, it had seemed “to confirm your various thoughtful telegrams. We should welcome receiving from you an interpretive analysis of what we may expect in the way of future implementation of these announced policies.”
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