George F. Kennan: An American Life (43 page)

His chief concern, in the fall of 1946, was still that too few Americans saw anything between diplomacy and war: if the first failed, the second must follow. Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt’s former vice president, now Truman’s secretary of commerce and a leading Democratic Party liberal, dramatized the polarity in a New York speech on September 12, warning that “ ‘[g]etting tough’ never bought anything—whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers. The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.” The president, he insisted, had read his speech and agreed with it. A confused week followed, at the end of which Truman made it clear that he did not agree and demanded Wallace’s resignation. Everywhere he went, Kennan complained while the controversy was still raging, “I find people with their faces buried in their hands and an air of tragedy about them saying collaboration with Russia has proved to be impossible and, therefore, all is lost.” When would the war start?
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Kennan used his first appearance before a university audience—an off-the-record lecture at Yale’s Institute of International Studies on October 1—to take on Wallace. The result was an evisceration, arguably unnecessary since the target by then had largely eviscerated himself. The talk was a response, though, not just to Wallace but to a succession of Kennan’s superiors—Bullitt, Davies, Harriman, Byrnes, and Roosevelt himself—all of whom had assumed, at one time or another, that if offered friendship the Soviet Union would reciprocate. If Wallace believed, like “many vain people” before him, “that the golden touch of his particular personality and the warmth of his sympathy for the cause of Russian Communism would modify in some important degree the actions of the Soviet Government,” then he was not only ignoring the way states worked, but he was also “flying in the face of some of the most basic and unshakeable of Russian realities.”

Stalin and his associates would not thank Wallace for implying that “they, the guardians of the Revolution, are a group of neurotic, wistful intellectuals, to be swept off their feet and won over from their holiest articles of faith by an engaging smile, [and] a few kind words.” They had committed acts that, in the absence of an ideology to justify them, would have to be considered among “the most stupendous crimes in the history of mankind.” They had built a regime in the image of that ideology. They had corrupted a generation:

They resembled the village misfits Dostoyevsky had described in
The Demons
, “already caught up in the toils of the revolution,” unable “to escape from its relentless demands.” But now they controlled a nation.

It was clear, then, that the fears and suspicions so prevalent in Moscow related not to the Truman administration’s policies but “to the character of the Soviet regime itself.” They would not be dispelled by “fatuous gestures of appeasement,” which could only lead “to the capitulation of the United States as a great power in the world and as the guardian of its own security.” There was, however, no reason to despair: Americans should see the situation instead “as a narrow and stony defile through which we must pass before we can emerge into more promising vistas.”

That promise resided in the Russian national character, more deeply rooted even than the Stalinist state or the ideology that animated it, yet visible in Russian literature. Kennan cited, as an example, the provincial governor in Gogol’s
Dead Souls
who one day acknowledged, in “a typically Russian burst of honesty,” that “perhaps I have, by my excessive suspiciousness, repelled those who sincerely wished to be useful to me.” He also recalled the Chekhov heroine who had tried to befriend peasants, got nowhere with them, walked away sadly, but was followed by a sympathetic blacksmith:

People, Kennan was suggesting, could indeed shape governments, but this would take time. And circumstances, not sentimentality, would shape people. Therein lay the key to what American strategy should be.

The United States could alter the circumstances in which the Soviet government operated “only by a long term policy of firmness, patience, and understanding, designed to keep the Russians confronted with superior strength at every juncture where they might otherwise be inclined to encroach upon the vital interests of a stable and peaceful world, but to do this in so friendly and unprovocative a manner that its basic purposes will not be subject to misrepresentation.” The objective would be Clausewitzian: to shift the psychology of an adversary. The manner, however, would be Chekhovian.
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Was there reason to think that this might work? Kennan’s Naval War College lecture, delivered on the same day he spoke at Yale, addressed this issue. The Russians, he pointed out, were “the most un-naval of peoples,” but they understood naval strategy. Lacking easily defended borders, unable to count on domestic loyalty, Kremlin leaders would not willingly engage an adversary stronger than themselves. “They cannot afford to get into trouble.” They respected, therefore, one of “the great truths of naval warfare,” which was “that a force sufficiently superior to that of the enemy will probably never have to be used. Its mere existence does the trick.”

That was where the United States, with superior force, had the advantage. It ought to be possible “for us to contain the Russians indefinitely” and perhaps eventually “to maneuver them back into the limits within which we would like them to stay.” This would not “solve” the Soviet problem. “You never really solve problems like that; you only learn to live with them after a fashion and to avoid major catastrophe.” But if the United States followed such a strategy consistently enough over a long enough period of time, then “I believe that the logic of it would enter into the Soviet system as a whole and bring about changes there which would be beneficial to everyone.”

As currently configured, the American government was not equipped to do this. Its policies proceeded along separate tracks; there was no common concept. But it should be possible to secure such coordination. It would involve setting up “some formal organization for decision and action at the Cabinet level.” It would demand closer liaison with Congress. It would require educating the public on the “powers and prerogatives of government in the field of foreign affairs” and on the need for its own “restraint and self-discipline.” And there would have to be “more sheer courage” in defending policies from domestic critics.

The Soviet challenge, therefore, was really to “the quality of our own society, . . . [to] how good democracy is in the world of today.” If it could “force us to pull ourselves together,” then “perhaps we may call our Russian friends a blessing rather than a plague.” Shakespeare’s Henry V had anticipated that possibility long ago:

With these two lectures, given on the same day, Kennan found his voice as a teacher. He connected current events with his years of experience in the Soviet Union, his summer crash course on grand strategy and the atomic bomb, the impressions derived from his speaking tour, Admiral Hill’s mandate to rethink the requirements of national security, and his own sense that literature could inspire statecraft.
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He did all of this with an eloquence that existed nowhere else in the government: he understood—as his friend Bohlen did not—that rhetoric persuades, and that style instructs. It’s no wonder that he attracted students, some of them highly placed.

The State Department sent Kennan to Ottawa in December to present the new American policy, on a top-secret basis, to Canadian officials worried about defense of the Arctic. It was “virtually certain,” he assured them, that Stalin planned no surprise attack, there or anywhere else. Miscalculation, however, might lead to unplanned hostilities, so the United States and its allies must leave no doubt, in his mind, of their resolve. They would have to be as firm as they were patient: the goal should be “to ‘contain’ Russian expansionism for so long a time that it would have to modify itself.” And how long might that take? Kennan guessed “10 or 15 years.”
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“I seem to have hit the jackpot as a ‘Russian expert,’ ” George wrote Jeanette on Christmas Day 1946. “You’d be amazed, what seems to be coming my way.” Harvard, Princeton, and Yale had all asked him to join their faculties. “As far as I can see, I can write my own ticket.” The State Department was willing to keep him on the payroll while “loaning me out” for research: he would soon be promoted to the rank of “minister” with a salary rumored to be $15,000. It was “almost too good to be true, and I really doubt that it will materialize; but it all goes to show that nothing succeeds like success.”
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The Kennans had been living, since September, in a graceful three-story brick house on “General’s Row” at Fort McNair, courtesy of the U.S. Army. Facing the parade ground with a view of the Potomac out the back, it was large, well staffed, and came with full commissary privileges, which George noted “considerably reduce the cost of living.” There were tennis courts, a golf club, a swimming pool, an officers’ club, and it was all within reach of the East Berlin farm on weekends.

The farm, George believed, kept him healthy: “When, for one reason or another, I omitted these weekend expeditions to the country, I fell ill.” And his Pennsylvania neighbors provided not only practical advice but “a shrewd, reassuring common sense ... that gave new, and sometimes healing, perspective to the trials, excitements, and disappointments of a hectic official existence.”
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The disappointments, that fall and winter, were remarkably few. The children loved living in their Army house and, to their parents’ relief, liked their Washington schools, to which a bus delivered them every day. Grace, now fourteen, had been to several local dances; Joan, however, missed ballet classes in Moscow. Hearing
The Nutcracker Suite
, her father noticed, caused her to go “through all the dances as she remembered them.... She certainly has it in her blood.” George, for his part, was coming to see in his children something that he and his siblings had missed. “I hope you will get married,” he wrote Kent, “if only because you—like the rest of us—did not have a normal family life in childhood; and the re-living of it in one’s own family helps to overcome the effects of that.” The war college allowed as “normal” an existence as the Kennans had yet managed.
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George was “terribly happy” at the National War College, Annelise remembered. “You must think me a little dotty,” he would come home and say, but “this was said, and this was discussed, and this is wonderful.” There had been eighty-five lectures that fall, he explained to Kent, probably the best series on international affairs that had ever been given. The contacts were “like manna to me after many years of the philistinism of American foreign colony life.” He was not sure now that he would want to return to diplomacy: “I have found such generous appreciation . . . among the academicians for what little I know about Russia and have had such tempting offers to continue working with them that I am sorely tried.” That knowledge now was “a chance aggregate of odds and ends, gathered without system and in large part without purpose.” If he could spend a year or two in systematic study, “I might really be able to do something more worthwhile in scholarship than in diplomacy.”

The months since his return from Moscow had also allowed a reacquaintance with his own country, but here Kennan’s conclusions—admittedly tentative—were more measured.

Having educated himself in grand strategy, and having shown that he could educate others, he would get a chance to answer that question, sooner than he could have expected.