George F. Kennan: An American Life (81 page)

Kennan’s chief concern, however, was that the very success of Western policies—overt and covert—was making the Soviet regime desperate. It was behaving, he wrote to Doc Matthews, like a “savage beast” that “hisses and spits and snarls at us incessantly.” Only flimsy barriers deprived it of the pleasure, in the words of the Russian poet Aleksandr Blok, “of making our skeleton ‘clatter in his fond embrace.’ ” That made it all the more important to avoid provocations like the Toon-Davies article, or efforts to publicize a recent congressional report that had linked Stalin and his subordinates to the 1940 Katyn Forest massacre. It was of course accurate: no “serious student” of Soviet affairs believed otherwise. The truth would not shame the perpetrators of that atrocity, however, since their victims
prior
to Katyn ran “into the hundreds of thousands and probably millions.” Poking or prodding the beast made little sense, therefore, but perhaps someday, “if we keep cool and use our heads, we will manage to subdue him in such a way that he will cause us less trouble.”
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Would the Americans, though, stay cool and use their heads? Late in the summer of 1952 Kennan learned, through a military attaché, of a plan he considered so shocking that he was unwilling to reveal its specifics for several decades to come: it involved preparations, if war broke out, to mine the Turkish Straits. The information convinced him that “the Pentagon now had the bit in its teeth.” As had been the case during World War II, there was insufficient vigor “on the political side of the Potomac” to balance military considerations. The scheme hardly seems surprising in retrospect. Turkey had joined NATO a few months earlier, and even prior to its doing so the National Security Council had deemed it a vital American interest to deny the Soviet Union the use of the straits if hostilities occurred.
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Kennan was now hypersensitive, however, to the danger of blundering into a major war. Kremlin leaders did not
want
one, he still insisted, but NATO’s actions might provoke one. He felt caught “between immense forces over which I have little or no control.” His only hope was “to handle things in such a manner as to lessen the likelihood of the blindest and wildest sort of reactions on both sides.” With that objective in mind, he pouched a dispatch to Washington on September 8—at ten thousand words, it was one of his longest—that tried to see the situation through Soviet eyes. It made him sound, he admitted years later, like one of the early “revisionist” historians of the Cold War.
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It was more sophisticated than that. Kennan portrayed a Soviet regime shaped by history and ideology, to be sure, but also subject to “considerable vacillation, doubt and conflict,” not only between individuals and groups but also “within individual minds.” Of course the system required the appearance of external hostility to justify its own internal oppression. That did not mean, however, that it always distinguished what it needed to see from what was really happening. Stalin and his associates combined rationality with its opposite. Because they were secretive and often erratic, “it is not easy to tell when you are going to touch one of their neuralgic and irrational points.”
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Kennan wrote this document—or rather dictated it, since Hessman had now made it to Moscow—for a meeting of American chiefs of missions in Western Europe, to be held in London on September 24–26, 1952. These took place periodically, but it was unusual for the ambassador to the Soviet Union to be invited. That Kennan was asked to come suggests the seriousness with which his views were still taken, despite his having no instructions from Washington and no one to whom to talk in Moscow. The State Department would be remiss, one of Nitze’s aides wrote of Kennan’s lengthy dispatch, “if, in the light of this penetrating diagnosis of Soviet motivations and intentions, it did not review NATO objectives and activities.” But Under Secretary of State David Bruce, who organized the event, was less impressed: he had reached the point, he later recalled, where he no longer read Kennan’s reports “because they were so long-winded and so blatantly seeking to be literary rather than provide information.”
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Two Spaso House incidents deepened Kennan’s pessimism before he departed. One was the discovery that, during the mansion’s recent renovation, a sophisticated listening device had been installed inside the wooden Great Seal of the United States that hung in the ambassador’s study, a “gift” the Soviet government had presented to Harriman shortly after the end of the war. The embassy’s technicians found it by having Kennan dictate loudly to Hessman while they swept the room with their own detectors—a more sophisticated method than the ones he and Charlie Thayer had used in trying to fumigate Spaso against more primitive bugs during Joe Davies’s ambassadorship. With a grim sense of history, Kennan used as his text his own compilation of Neill Brown’s dispatches from the early 1850s, which Bullitt had sent to Washington in 1936: the State Department had just published these in 1952. The exposure of the new apparatus terrified the Burobin staff, while the guards at the gate scowled even more menacingly. “So dense was the atmosphere of anger and hostility,” Kennan remembered, “that one could have cut it with a knife.”
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The other incident was more innocent but, for him, more significant. It involved Christopher—not quite three at the time—and a late summer afternoon he spent playing in a sand pile in the front garden, while his father sat reading a book. Bored with this,

At this point the guards—presumably under orders now to be even more vigilant—shooed the children away. The revelation that the beast could not tolerate even this most minimal poking caused Kennan’s patience to snap. Had he been a better ambassador, he later admonished himself, this would not have happened: “But give way it did; and it could not soon be restored.”
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On the afternoon before his departure, Kennan asked to see Salisbury, Whitney, Eddy Gilmore, and Henry Shapiro, the principal American correspondents in Moscow. He was concerned about leaks in Washington, which seemed to suggest that his views of the Soviet Union were more critical than what he was saying publicly. Kennan assured the journalists, Salisbury recalled, that “he would say absolutely nothing while on this trip abroad; if he had something on his mind, he would call us in when he returned.” Salisbury accompanied him to the airport the next morning, September 19, 1952. “He was in a silent, withdrawn mood.”
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The ambassadorial plane flew Kennan to West Berlin, accompanied this time not by his family but by the gadget found in the Great Seal. Expecting reporters when he landed at Tempelhof, determined to have safe answers ready, Kennan conducted an interview with himself in a small notebook while still airborne:

Upon arrival, though, one of the questions caught him off guard: were there many “social contacts” with Russians in Moscow? “Why, I thought to myself, must editors send reporters of such ignorance to interview ambassadors at airports?”
The New York Times
reported what he said next:

Kennan thought he had made the comment off the record. There was airplane noise, though, and if he did restrict it, he didn’t do so loudly enough. “Correct or incorrect, accurate or inaccurate, it was an extremely foolish thing for me to have said.”
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He saw at once that he had gone too far. “Don’t be a boy, and don’t feed the little ego,” he scribbled in his notebook, just below his practice press conference, probably on the next leg of the flight to London—the shakiness of the handwriting suggests nervousness or turbulence or both. “Be deliberate. Learn not to mind pauses and silences.... Never be a raconteur unless you are desperate.” Upon his arrival he met Cumming, who was returning from Washington with the suicide pills Kennan had requested from the CIA. “George, why in the hell did you make that remark at Tempelhof?” Cumming asked, after watching him pocket the package. “Particularly since one thing you’ve always drilled in on all of us was: never, never, never, never compare the totalitarian structure of the Soviet Union with that of Nazi Germany?”

The only explanation Kennan provided was the story of Christopher and his friends playing at the Spaso House fence. “There is no Iron Curtain between children,” he claimed to have been thinking, until the guards corrected him. “I was still under that emotional strain when I made that statement.” “You’ll probably be ‘png’d’ for that [declared persona non grata],” Cumming warned. “Oh, no,” Kennan protested, “they wouldn’t dream of a ‘png.’ ”
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For a week nothing happened. Kennan met with the other chiefs of mission, cautioned them that there was no longer a “diplomatic cushion between peace and war,” and came away convinced that he had made no impression, either orally or in his long dispatch: “The NATO people, as well as our own military authorities, were completely captivated and lost in the compulsive logic of the military equation.” Nor was there flexibility on Germany. No one had wanted to talk about reunification, or even a mutual withdrawal of occupation forces. The only option was to wait for Moscow’s authority to collapse in East Germany and in turn over all of Eastern Europe—in short, the Toon-Davies plan. “[I]t was hopeless to expect the Soviet Government to agree to any such thing as this.”

What, then, was an ambassador in the U.S.S.R. to say or do? Walking the streets of London afterward with his embassy counselor Elim O’Shaughnessy, Kennan concluded “that war had to be accepted as inevitable, or very nearly so.” To think that he would have to return to confront more “foul, malicious, and insulting propaganda,” knowing that there was just enough truth behind it to make it impossible to challenge, “seemed to me as bitter [a reflection] as a representative of our country could ever have had.”
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It fell to
Pravda
to spare him that prospect, when on September 26 it furiously attacked him for his Tempelhof statement. “Kennan in ecstasy lied,” it shrieked, by claiming that Americans had no social contacts with Soviet citizens: had not the vice president of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union praised the ease with which his delegation talked with Muscovites during their visit a year earlier? Such “truthful and sincere words . . . nail to the pillar of shame the American slanderer under the mask of a diplomat.” But Kennan had committed a much greater offense by

This was, after all, the same Kennan who, as related by “the English journalist Parker,” had sneered at the crowds celebrating Hitler’s defeat outside the American embassy in May 1945: “They think that the war has ended and it is just beginning.”
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Kennan’s first instinct was to defend himself. What he had said was not new, he assured the State Department—that was true as far as it went, but he failed to mention the comparison to Nazi Germany. Instead he cited his
conciliatory
attitude toward the Soviet Union to explain
Pravda’
s anger. It had alarmed “elements” who wanted him out of Moscow, because if he ever did talk with Stalin, the old man would realize the extent to which his subordinates had “consistently misinformed him about [the] outside world.” The delay in Kennan’s
agrément,
his protests over the propaganda campaign, the provocateur in the embassy, the prestige he enjoyed among foreign diplomats in the city, the fact that his experience in Soviet affairs went back “farther than it is wise for even Soviet memories and acquaintances to go”—all of this had made his ambassadorship an issue within the Kremlin hierarchy beyond what the “dominant group” was willing to allow.
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“Cannot anticipate Department’s reaction,” George cabled Annelise from London, “but think it quite possible they may wish me to return and brave it out. Meanwhile there is no change in my plans, and see no reason for any change in yours at the moment.... Lots of love, and don’t worry.” The attack on Kennan, Acheson did indeed announce, had been “wholly unjustified,” since he had accurately described life in the Soviet Union. Nor was the State Department planning to recall him, its press spokesman commented on the twenty-ninth, noting that “we haven’t had a peep” out of Moscow regarding his status.
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