George F. Kennan: An American Life (39 page)

Harriman, by then, had left Moscow for the last time as ambassador. “Now George,” he claimed to have said, “you’re on your own. I want you to express your opinions and send them in.” He could say anything he wanted “without my dampening hand.” So with the State Department also having encouraged him, Kennan could hardly remain silent. Sick or not, “[h]ere was a case where nothing but the whole truth would do.”

It was Kennan’s habit to write out rough drafts, then call in Hessman to type as he dictated from a horizontal position: “He always said he could think better [that way].” Still nursing his ailments, this was his posture when he summoned her on February 22, which “was officially a holiday, so I wasn’t all that thrilled.” After she finished the final version, Kennan dragged himself out of bed to take it personally to the Mokhovaya code room, where Mautner was on duty: “This has to go out tonight.” “Why tonight? I’ve got a date.” “They asked for it—now they’re going to get it!” So she found a Navy communications officer to help, and they sent it off.
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The mode of transmission was critical. A pouched dispatch would not have been read “until it got to the desk officer or some of the guys up the line,” Durbrow pointed out. But a telegram—the longest ever sent in the State Department’s long history—was sure to attract attention. Moreover, “we were wondering why George didn’t send us something. Everybody was waiting for it. They’d say: ‘Gee, has anything come in?’ ‘No, it hasn’t come in yet.’ So by the time it got there it was something.” And “it was such a beautiful job to begin with.” The department, Kennan was relieved to learn, had not been at all disturbed by his “reckless use” of its telegraphic channel. Kennan’s number 511, Matthews cabled him on the twenty-fifth, was “magnificent. I cannot overestimate its importance to those of us here struggling with the problem. Heartiest congratulations and best wishes.” Two days later Byrnes himself added that he had read 511 “with the greatest interest. It is a splendid analysis.”
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Now back in Washington, Harriman found the telegram “fairly long, and a little bit slow reading in spots.” But it did contain what Kennan “hadn’t been allowed to say before.” Harriman shared it with Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, who had long been looking for an analysis of this kind. Forrestal, in turn, had the telegram reproduced and circulated all over Washington, including to Truman himself. As Kennan recalled:

It all showed, Kennan concluded, that the real world was less important than the government’s “subjective state of readiness ... to recognize this or that feature of it.” Harriman did not find this surprising. “That was one of the things,” he later recalled, “that I couldn’t get George to understand—that our timing had to be right.” It was “why I didn’t want a lot of [his] stuff to go in, because I knew it would have gone in the files and died. But this was just the critical time. It hit Washington at just the right moment. It was very fortunate.”
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Like Stalin’s speech, Kennan’s “long telegram” reiterated much that he had said at other times and in other ways. But by breaking the rules once again—this time the State Department’s restrictions on the length of telegrams—he got the attention of his superiors, just as he had twice during the war by going to Roosevelt himself. “I apologize in advance for this burdening of telegraphic channel,” he had written at the beginning of 511, dropping an occasional article in at least a gesture toward communications economy, “but questions involved are of such urgent importance, particularly in view of recent events, that our answers to them, if they deserve attention at all, seem to me to deserve it all at once.”

There were from the Soviet perspective, he explained, two antagonistic “centers of world significance,” one socialist, the other capitalist, with the latter beset by insoluble conflicts. The greatest of these divided the United States from Great Britain, and it would in time lead to war. This might take the form of an Anglo-American clash, but it could also involve an attack on the Soviet Union by “smart capitalists” seeking to ward off their own war by fabricating a common foe. If that happened, the U.S.S.R. would prevail, but only at great cost: hence the importance of building its strength while seeking simultaneously to deepen and exploit conflicts among capitalists, even to the point if necessary of promoting “revolutionary upheavals” among them.

That position did not, Kennan emphasized, reflect the views of the Russian people, who were for the most part friendly to the outside world, eager to experience it, and hopeful now “to live in peace and enjoy fruits of their own labor.” Nor did it make sense: capitalists had not always fought one another; capitalism was not now in crisis; the idea that capitalists would provoke a war with the Soviet Union was the “sheerest nonsense.” Soviet leaders, however, respected neither public sentiment nor logic. Instead, history and ideology shaped their actions in a particularly insidious way.

The history was that of Russian rulers, whose authority had always been “archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of western countries.” The ideology was Marxism, made “truculent and intolerant” by Lenin, which provided the Stalinists with the perfect justification

Uneasy Russian nationalism, a centuries-old movement that had always blurred distinctions between defensive and offensive actions, was now operating under the cover of international Marxism, “with its honeyed promises to a desperate and war torn outside world.”

This dual character caused the Soviet regime to function on two levels: a visible one consisting of its official actions, and an invisible one for which it disclaimed responsibility. Both were coordinated in “purpose, timing and effect.” On the visible plane, the U.S.S.R. would observe diplomatic formalities and participate in international organizations to the extent that those facilitated its interests. On the invisible plane, it would make full use of communist parties throughout the world, as well as such other groups as it could penetrate and control, to undermine the influence of the major Western powers. This would involve efforts to “disrupt national self confidence, to hamstring measures of national defense, to increase social and industrial unrest, to stimulate all forms of disunity.”

The problem, therefore, was a daunting one: “We have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.” Controlling great resources and a great nation, it could draw upon “an elaborate and far flung apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history.” Nor was its leadership subject to reason: “The vast fund of objective fact about human society is not, as with us, the measure against which outlook is constantly being tested and re-formed, but a grab bag from which individual items are selected arbitrarily and tenaciously to bolster an outlook already preconceived.”

Coping with this adversary was “undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face.” It would require “the same thoroughness and care as solution of major strategic problem in war, and if necessary, with no smaller outlay in planning effort.” But it was within the power of the United States to solve it, and it could be done peacefully. The Soviet Union, unlike Hitler’s Germany, had no fixed timetable, was not inclined to take unnecessary risks, and would, when resisted, retreat. It was still much weaker than the West. It had no orderly mechanisms for replacing its leaders. It had swallowed territories that had severely weakened its tsarist predecessor. Its ruling party dominated but did not inspire the Soviet people. Its propaganda was negative and destructive: it should be “easy to combat it by any intelligent and constructive program.” For these reasons, “I think we may approach calmly and with good heart problem of how to deal with Russia.”

That would mean, however, educating the American public to the seriousness of the problem, for “[t]here is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown.” It would involve maintaining the “health and vigor of our own society,” because international communism was “like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue.” It would demand putting forward “a much more positive and constructive picture of the sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in the past.” Europeans, exhausted and frightened in the wake of the war, were “less interested in abstract freedom than in security.... We should be better able than Russians to give them this.” Finally, “we must have courage and self confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet Communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”
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Kennan regarded the “long telegram,” years later, as resembling “one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or by the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy.” But if the task at hand was to shift Washington’s policy from afar—and Kennan had been trying to do that since the summer of 1944—then his “outrageous encumberment of the telegraphic process” was just the right instrument. The “long telegram” expressed what Kennan knew, in a form suited for policy makers who needed to know, better than anything else he ever wrote. No other document, whether written by him or anyone else, had the instantaneous influence that this one did. “My reputation was made. My voice now carried.”
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“I WAS PERMITTED TO READ A VERY LONG AND WELL-WRITTEN DISPATCH from Moscow from Kennan of our Embassy staff there,” David E. Lilienthal, soon to become the first chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, recorded in his diary on March 6, 1946. “When he says that the position of the U.S.S.R. . . . presents the greatest test of diplomacy and statecraft in our history, he certainly does not overstate the matter.” With his own responsibility for managing the American atomic arsenal in mind, Lilienthal added: “I didn’t sleep well last night, and little wonder. I find myself in the midst of wholly strange and fearsome things.”
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Lilienthal wrote this a day after Harry S. Truman sat next to Winston Churchill on a stage at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, nodding approvingly as the former prime minister warned of an “iron curtain” that had descended across the center of postwar Europe. No speech of that era—not even Stalin’s a month earlier—more clearly proclaimed the demise of the wartime grand alliance. Churchill’s address in that sense paralleled Kennan’s telegram, a more closely held obituary that was still top secret when Lilienthal read it.
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Both texts became iconic in Cold War history. Neither, however, brought about the shift in U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union that took place during the first three months of 1946.

That was happening, J. C. Donnelly of the British Foreign Office noted on March 5, because circumstances had forced the Truman administration at last to give the world “some measure of the leadership which the United States ought to be providing.”
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The events in question were those Kennan had been reporting since arriving in Moscow in 1944. They showed the Soviet Union defining its postwar security requirements unilaterally, without taking into account those of the United States, Great Britain, and their democratic allies. That finding would have shocked most Americans while the war was going on, as Harriman and Bohlen were well aware: Kennan had been almost alone in insisting on it. The coming of peace, however, accomplished the only objective—military victory—that the U.S.S.R. shared with anyone else. The disillusionments that followed made balancing hopes against fears increasingly difficult, and Stalin’s “election” speech on February 9, 1946, ended the effort altogether for all but his most abject apologists.

It was within this context that Truman took control of foreign policy, having for the most part delegated it, during his first months in office, to his secretary of state. There would be, the president insisted, no further concessions like the ones made at Moscow. Byrnes swung into line with an address of his own in New York on February 28: “We will not and we cannot stand aloof,” he warned, “if force or the threat of force is used contrary to the purposes of the [U.N.] Charter. . . . If we are to be a great power we must act as a great power, not only in order to ensure our own security but in order to preserve the peace of the world.”
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