George F. Kennan: An American Life (40 page)

The secretary of state had seen Kennan’s “long telegram” before delivering this speech, but most of it had already been drafted by then. What 511 did do, Doc Matthews explained to his friend Robert Murphy, was to provide the rationale for the course upon which the administration had already embarked. With pardonable pride—he and Durbrow having elicited it—Matthews confirmed that Kennan’s analysis, “to my mind the finest piece of analytical writing that I have ever seen come out of the [Foreign] Service . . . , has been received in the highest quarters here as a basic outline of future Soviet policy. That goes for the Secretary [of State], the Secretaries of War and Navy, our highest Army and Navy authorities and also across the street.” Across the street for the Department of State in 1946—as when Kennan trained there in 1926 and in moments of boredom could look out the window to monitor the comings and goings of Calvin Coolidge—was the White House. “I am very much impressed,” Murphy replied. “I think that you deserve a large bouquet of orchids for having engineered this process.”
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Donnelly had expressed doubt, in his March 5 assessment from London, that the new policy would stick: “It is unlikely that even the most ideal American administration imaginable would achieve what we should regard as a high standard in clarity of thought and consistency.”
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Kennan would not have disputed that view. Nothing had prepared him for the possibility that his country might devise and carry out a coherent grand strategy, much less one based on his own thinking. Yet this is what happened: the “long telegram” became the conceptual foundation for the strategy the United States—and Great Britain—would follow for over four decades. How then did a single dispatch sent from a distant post by a relatively unknown diplomat produce such a result?

One way to answer this question is to compare Kennan’s telegram with a review of policy toward the Soviet Union that had been under way in the State Department since the fall of 1945. Authorized by the new under secretary of state, Dean Acheson, its principal authors were Bohlen and Geroid T. Robinson, a Columbia University historian of Russia who had worked in the Office of Strategic Services during the war. The Bohlen-Robinson report was meant to reflect both Foreign Service and academic expertise on the U.S.S.R., but it differed from Kennan’s analysis in several ways.

It began by questioning its own authority: theirs was “a doubtful and uncertain enterprise,” Bohlen and Robinson lamented, because “it is impossible to grasp the total situation fully and to describe it in a set of coherent and well-established conclusions.” Mindful of this, they presented a matrix of options while avoiding specific claims. The report identified three probable “periods” in the future Soviet-American relationship in which it might be possible to apply a “Policy A,” a “Policy B,” or a “Third Alternative Procedure.” They composed the paper over several months, while handling other responsibilities. The final draft, dated February 14, 1946, reflected these limitations, concluding inelegantly that

Coming five days after Stalin’s speech, which
Time
magazine described as “the most warlike pronouncement uttered by any top-rank statesman since V-J Day,” this was not quite rising to the occasion. Despite its authors’ credentials, the Bohlen-Robinson report was a bureaucratic soporific, hedged with qualifications, unin-spiringly written, overtaken by events.
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Kennan’s telegram, in contrast, projected fierce self-confidence in clear prose with relentless logic. It qualified nothing, advanced no alternatives, and made no apologies for seeing everything in a single snapshot. It was the geopolitical equivalent of a medical X-ray, penetrating beneath alarming symptoms to yield at first clarity, then comprehension, and finally by implication a course of treatment.

The clarity came from Kennan’s demonstration—it was more than just a claim—that victory in war and security in peace required different strategies. The United States and Great Britain could have defeated Nazi Germany only by allying with the Soviet Union; their postwar safety, however, would depend on resisting the Soviet Union. Kennan drove the point home by placing wartime cooperation within the stream of time and the realm of ideas. The roots of Soviet policy lay not in that brief experience but much further back in Russian history and much more deeply in Bolshevik ideology. It was to these centers of gravity that Stalin was now returning. The Grand Alliance could not be a blueprint for the postwar world because the U.S.S.R. had never been, and as currently constituted would never be, a normal state, willing to work with others to establish a mutually satisfactory international order.

Comprehension followed, for if—as Kennan insisted—the Soviet regime
needed
external enemies to justify its internal rule, then this would account for the wariness with which it had regarded its wartime allies, as well as for the ease with which it turned them into enemies once victory had been achieved. Diplomacy would be of little use in this situation. The United States faced new and profound dangers, against which a mobilization of political, economic, ideological, intellectual, and moral resources would be as necessary as in the war just ended.

That grim prognosis, paradoxically, relieved most of those who saw it, because Kennan left open the possibility that military mobilization might not be required. Stalin’s offensives would rely on agents and ideologies but not armies; he had no deadlines; there was time to construct fortifications. The most important of these would be a revival of European self-reliance, something the United States should want even in the absence of a Soviet threat. Hence, Kennan was saying, Americans could secure their interests by meeting their responsibilities. The tautology was oddly comforting.

After reading the “long telegram,” Bohlen philosophically abandoned his own review. “There is no need,” he wrote his State Department colleagues on March 13, “to go into any long analysis of the motives or the reasons for present Soviet policy.” Kennan’s telegram had provided that. It was clear now that the Kremlin saw a world “divided into two irreconcilably hostile camps.” Provided neither contested the other’s sphere, they might coexist: the problem was “(a) to convince the Soviet Union of this possibility and (b) to make clear well in advance the inevitable consequence of the present line of Soviet policy based on the opposite thesis.”
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Kennan’s dispatch, by then, had gained an unusually large audience for a classified document. The State Department sent summaries to major foreign posts, and the Army and Navy forwarded it to overseas commanders, one of whom—significantly for Kennan’s future—was General George C. Marshall, then on a presidential mission to try to end the civil war in China. Accolades soon reached the author. A typical one came from Henry Norweb, now ambassador to Cuba, who had known Kennan in Lisbon during the war: “I am sure every chief of mission who read it has been made wistful—wishing such a report could emanate from his office.” It was “a masterpiece of ‘thinking things out,’ [of] realism devoid of hysteria, of courageous approach to a problem.” Norweb’s staff had returned it with comments like “Astonishing!” “[A]n answer to prayer.” “Suggest you tell the Department how good this is.” Kennan’s presence in Moscow had been “one tremendous, undeserved piece of good luck for the United States of America.”
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Frank Roberts saw Kennan’s telegram soon after he sent it and, with his permission, forwarded a summary to London. The Foreign Office response was “Please will you send us yours?” Roberts obliged with three dispatches—not cables—that went by pouch in mid-March. Much longer than Kennan’s, Roberts’s messages placed less emphasis on persuasion—his foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, needed none when it came to suspecting Stalin’s intentions—and more on how Soviet ambitions might affect the British Empire. Nonetheless, Roberts faithfully echoed Kennan’s main points. “George was the great expert,” he later acknowledged, “and I benefited enormously from this.”
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The “long telegram” also had unauthorized readers. Kennan assumed, correctly as it turned out, that reports of the document, if not the full text, would quickly reach Moscow. It took a few months for its significance to sink in, but at some point in the summer of 1946, Foreign Minister Molotov ordered Nikolay Novikov, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, to follow suit. Kennan enjoyed imagining how Molotov might have put it: “Why haven’t you produced anything like this?”

Sent by pouch on September 27, the Novikov dispatch began with, and at no point departed from, the proposition that the foreign policy of the United States, reflecting “the imperialist tendencies of American monopolistic capital,” was one of “striving for world supremacy.” It would seek this objective in collaboration with Great Britain; but Novikov also claimed—contradicting his own logic but aligning himself with Lenin’s—that as capitalist rivals the British and the Americans regarded each other as their greatest enemy. “These poor people, put on the spot, produced the thing,” Kennan concluded, but “it was only a way of saying to their masters in Moscow: ‘How true, sir!’ ”
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Kennan’s “long telegram” set an international standard for analytical reporting, and it was not just contemporaries who envied it. Future diplomats would dream of accomplishing what he did with a single document, but no one ever managed it: the dispatch remains unique. It set out no fully conceived grand strategy, but it was a start, and in that sense it met a need. “I now feel better about things than I have for some time,” Kennan admitted to a friend two months after sending his famous message. “[S]ome of the most dangerous tendencies in American thought about Russia have been checked, if not overcome. If we can now only restrain the hot-heads and the panic-mongers and keep policy on a firm and even keel, I am not pessimistic.”
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Kennan still wanted to come home. “I feel I must get away this spring,” he cabled Durbrow on March 7, and “if Dept can not take some action in near future I am afraid I will have to submit telegraphic resignation and ask to be relieved by May 1.” Byrnes himself replied, noting that Harriman’s successor as ambassador, General Walter Bedell Smith, would soon arrive in Moscow, but that Durbrow, who was to replace Kennan, would not be able to get there until July. Could not Kennan stay on until that date? “You have been doing a wonderful job, for which we are all very grateful.” Smith followed up: “The most important single thing to me in connection with this mission is that I have the benefit of your experience and advice.... I request most urgently that you remain until about July first.”
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“It is a source of great satisfaction to me that I have been able, with the loyal and effective support of the other officers here, to assist you in your heavy responsibility at this difficult period,” Kennan replied to Byrnes. “I have been associated with this Mission on and off since its inception, and no one—I think—has its interests more keenly at heart.” If the department really wanted him to stay through June, he would do so to the extent that his health permitted. But he warned Durbrow that it might not. He had been sick for weeks, and in “this sunless and vitaminless environment,” recovery had been slow. With other departures and persisting staff shortages, “we are operating here under tremendous pressure and on absolutely no margin.”
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That left Durbrow looking for a solution. “George wanted to get out of the Service [to go] into the academic world. I didn’t want George to get out of the Service. Chip [Bohlen] didn’t, and Loy Henderson didn’t. We had a guy that had a wonderful analytical mind, and we needed him.” Fortunately for all concerned, Durbrow enjoyed Washington cocktail parties. At one he ran into General Alfred M. Gruenther, a distinguished Army officer who had just been appointed deputy commandant of the new National War College. “You know George Kennan, don’t you?” “Very well, yes.” “We need somebody with background on the Soviet Union, who’s brilliant.” Behind the inquiry, Durbrow suspected, was “
the
telegram,” which Gruenther had probably read. “He’s in Moscow, isn’t he? Any chance of getting him back?” After hearing what the job would entail, Durbrow thought it perfect: “George will love that. It’ll get him in the academic world to a certain extent. It’ll get him out of the rut of routine business.” Kennan too, when Durbrow wrote him, jumped at the opportunity. “Am interested in National War College job mentioned in your letter,” he cabled back. “What would be “[n]ature of duties, salary, title, etcetera?”
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The title, it turned out, would be Deputy Commandant for Foreign Affairs; Kennan would retain his Class I rank in the Foreign Service; and his assignment would be to help design and teach the curriculum at the first school for grand strategy that had ever existed in the United States. Located in the former premises of the Army War College at Fort McNair in Washington, the National War College was an early response to the widespread conviction, emerging from World War II, that the nation could no longer afford to separate military operations from political objectives. Although he played no role in establishing it, the school was another vindication of Kennan’s thinking. He was, Ambassador Smith had to acknowledge, “unquestionably the best possible choice that could be made from the State Dept.” The students would be mid-career Army, Navy, and Foreign Service officers destined for higher responsibilities; classes would start early in September. The job suited Kennan for many reasons, not the least of which was that the task of preparing for it would get him and his family home sooner. They needed to leave right away, he wrote Bohlen on April 19. “[O]nly ex-Muscovite could understand.”
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