George F. Kennan: An American Life (82 page)

By that time, though, Kennan had begun to grasp the paradox that confronted him. He had given up on Washington for being too warlike, but now Moscow was giving up on him for just the same reason. “What the United States Government started on one day,” he lamented in his diary, “the Soviet Government finished on the next.” In this exposed position, with the world watching,

Then, on October 3, Moscow produced not a peep but a cannon blast: Andrey Vyshinsky, the foreign minister, summoned the American
chargé d’affaires,
John McSweeney, and handed him a note declaring Kennan persona non grata for having made “slanderous attacks hostile to the Soviet Union in a rude violation of generally recognized norms of international law.” It demanded his immediate recall. Kennan thereby became the first—and so far the only—U.S. minister or ambassador to be so ejected in over 230 years of Russian-American diplomatic relations.
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This produced, however, no major crisis. Preoccupied by the heated presidential contest between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, most Americans hardly noticed. Even Jeanette, writing from Highland Park, devoted three pages to the election but just two sentences to George’s travails. The only significant demand for severing diplomatic ties came from a right-wing Republican senator, William Knowland of California: Acheson brushed it aside, with Kennan’s approval. Despite his public support, the secretary of state blamed Kennan more than he did Moscow. Kennan’s had been, Acheson wrote in the single paragraph he devoted to the affair in his massive memoir, an “unusual statement by an experienced diplomat.” He held the barb for the end. “I sent . . . Bohlen to accompany Ambassador Kennan to Switzerland, there to await the arrival of Mrs. Kennan and their children with such patience and taciturnity as he could summon.”
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In fact, Kennan was already in Geneva visiting Joan, who had just enrolled at the International School, when the news of his expulsion reached him. He took refuge in a movie theater to “make myself comprehend the whole incredible reality of what had occurred”—only to find, with disgust, that he was becoming absorbed “in the damned film.” So he turned to copying out lines in his notebook from Shakespeare’s
Henry VIII
:

But Cardinal Wolsey offered little consolation for Kennan’s personal and professional humiliations, and was of no help at all in resolving a major logistical difficulty, which was how to get the family out of Moscow.
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That task fell chiefly to Annelise, who had already had some difficult weeks. Accompanied by Toon, she had taken Grace to Leningrad, but the police harassed them throughout the visit. They then sailed to Stockholm on a Soviet ship that had not been much better: upon docking, “we were like two colts being let out in the spring after having been in the barn!” Grace went from there back to Radcliffe, while Annelise met Joan in Denmark and dropped her off in Geneva. Then in Bonn, visiting John and Patricia Davies, Annelise came down with ptomaine poisoning. After recovering, she flew back to Moscow on September 18, using the Air Force plane that was to take George out the next day. It “wasn’t much fun,” she recalled, being buzzed by a Soviet fighter on the descent, and upon landing “the first thing I heard about was the microphone they had found.” But Wendy and Christopher could not be without at least one parent. “George flew to London this morning and I am left behind,” Annelise wrote Jeanette on the nineteenth, in an unusual acknowledgment that she was beginning to feel sorry for herself: “It seems like a mistake.”
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She learned from McSweeney, immediately after he saw Vyshinsky on October 3, that George had been declared
persona non grata.
As surprised as everyone else, Annelise now had to organize an abrupt departure. She had agreed to dine and attend a dance concert that evening with the wife of the British ambassador, who was also away. With the news still secret, “I felt like a fool—I couldn’t tell her. I thought: ‘This is the last time. I’m never going to do this again.’ ” By the time she returned to Spaso, the word was out. “They asked: ‘When can you leave?’ I said: ‘I can leave as soon as that plane can get in!’ ”

It came on October 8. Annelise gave a party that afternoon for the entire embassy staff, the American journalists, the crew of the plane, and Father Louis Robert Brassard, a Catholic priest serving the diplomatic community in Moscow. He offered her a ticket for that evening’s performance of Prokofiev’s
Romeo and Juliet
. Annelise was reluctant to go by herself, so he came up with another one using his Belgian embassy connections, and she took Mrs. McSweeney. “That was my last night in Moscow.”
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The next morning Annelise, the two children, and their three Danish servants left for Cologne, where George was to meet them, on the now ubiquitous Air Force plane. “Embassy staff and quasi totality of non satellite diplomatic corps were present at her departure,” O’Shaughnessy cabled the State Department: the military attachés showed up in full uniform. “Whether or not I had been up to my job,” George recalled, in admiration, “she had been up to hers.”
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The postmortems began at once: how could so skilled a diplomat have said such a stupid thing? Kennan at first feigned insouciance. “I have a good conscience about the matter,” he wrote his old Princeton classmate Bernard Gufler at the end of October. The Soviets would not have expelled him unless he was making them “uncomfortable” by “coming too close to the exposure of some of their frauds and outrages, which it seems to me it was my job to do.” He was happy not to have to go back, and expected to spend another year and a half in Washington before becoming eligible for retirement.
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But had it indeed been his job, a British Foreign Office professional wondered, to deliver “an unforgivable insult to Soviet ears” and to do it, of all places, in Berlin? “As ‘Mr. X’, and perhaps as a too-penetrating observer, [Kennan] has never in reality been persona grata; once he stepped outside what the Russians consider the role of an ambassador, the Soviet leaders may have taken some malicious pleasure in making him look rather foolish.” Kennan had weakened the position of all Western diplomats in Moscow, Joxe complained. He would never be allowed back in the U.S.S.R. An Irish journalist called Kennan’s Tempelhof outburst “one of the worse gaffes of postwar diplomacy.”
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Given how often Kennan had stressed the need to avoid provocations, one of the Moscow embassy’s junior provocateurs, Dick Davies, wondered if he had done it on purpose. Having built himself up as “the right man in the right spot at the right time,” Kennan found it intolerable that Stalin had not received him and that the atmosphere in Moscow had been so hostile. “[T]here is a great hand pressing down on all of us,” Davies remembered him saying one evening as they watched his angels—“goons,” the younger man called them—insulating a theater audience from them during an intermission. Kennan believed that he had somehow failed, “both in terms of his own self-image and of the image he felt he had in the eyes of others.” He could not resign: that would have been an admission of failure. “So how to get out of this? . . . [P]erhaps that was the way.”
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Charles Burton Marshall, a member of Nitze’s Policy Planning Staff who saw Kennan in Germany soon after his expulsion, was even more certain of this. If there were to be no contacts with the Soviet leadership, Marshall remembered him saying, then there was no point to remaining in Moscow, but there was a compelling reason to come home. Eisenhower would be elected president and would probably appoint John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state. Recognizing his own limitations, Dulles would make Kennan his under secretary. Kennan would agree, on the condition that Eisenhower and Dulles repudiate McCarthyism unequivocally. It was thus necessary to return to Washington, for there would be a lot to do in getting the new administration under way.
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The only source for this conversation is Marshall’s memory three decades later. It’s possible, though, that Kennan could have said something like this. He needed a better explanation for what had happened than that he had lost control of himself, as he had initially admitted to Cumming, over an interrupted children’s game. And he was capable of erratic grandiosity. He had felt neglected in Moscow while simultaneously placing himself at the center of Stalin’s concerns. Why should he not have assumed that Washington, which had also neglected him, was now eagerly awaiting his arrival?

Two pieces of contemporary evidence suggest that he did. Kennan had alerted the State Department back in July that he might have to resign if John Paton Davies were convicted of perjury. Both presidential candidates were busy, he knew, but it might be worth letting them know “that this cloud hangs over my own future,” for “they will both find that the problem of replacing me [in Moscow] is not the simplest of problems.” Then on October 7, four days after it had become clear, for a different reason, that he would have to be replaced, Kennan suggested to Bohlen that he be reassigned to the National Security Council to assess Soviet developments for the president and the secretary of state. He did not specify which ones, but he knew that Truman and Acheson would not be there much longer. Bohlen responded positively, but—on Acheson’s instructions—he did not encourage Kennan to hurry home.
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If Kennan had
not
meant to provoke his own expulsion, Paul Mason, the assistant under secretary in the British Foreign Office, observed, then “his lack of self control is extraordinary.” So Adam Watson, of the Washington embassy, sought an explanation from Bohlen, now back from seeing Kennan in Geneva. Kennan had hoped to keep the Kremlin from grievous miscalculations like those of Hitler with respect to the British in 1939 or Stalin’s in setting off the Korean War, Bohlen surmised. But the “Hate America” campaign, together with his own isolation, had quickly convinced Kennan that this would not be possible. Feeling “that sense of escape from prison which people have when they emerge from behind the Iron Curtain,” he had spoken unguardedly at Tempelhof, believing his comments to be off the record. Kennan had not done so to “see whether they would throw him out,” Bohlen insisted, but Watson could not help wondering “whether subconsciously he did not feel inclined to take some risk.”
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In fact, Bohlen himself was mystified. “Why he did it, I don’t know,” he recalled when asked about the incident years later. “George is certainly an experienced enough man . . . to realize that you can’t make a statement [like that] without having it get in the papers.” It had been “one of the most extraordinary things in George’s career.” But Bohlen was able to determine, to his satisfaction, why the Soviets responded in the way that they did. Two years after Eisenhower appointed him as Kennan’s successor—Bohlen had arrived in Moscow in April 1953, five weeks after Stalin’s death—he found himself in a conversation with Politburo members Anastas Mikoyan and Lazar Kaganovich at a diplomatic reception. All Kremlin leaders including Stalin, they assured Bohlen, had held Kennan in high regard “as a serious and intelligent student of Soviet affairs.” They particularly respected ambassadors “who stood up firmly for their country’s interest,” as opposed to those “who attempt to ingratiate themselves with the Soviet Government by hypocrisy or other means.” They regretted the remarks that had led to Kennan’s expulsion and were still not able to understand how he could have “departed from the accepted tenets of diplomacy.”

Bohlen defended his friend, pointing out how “tricky” it was to deal with the press in impromptu settings, something with which Soviet officials had little experience: the expulsion had been “far and away beyond the requirements of the situation.” But the problem, Mikoyan explained, was where Kennan had made his remarks: “In Berlin it was too much. That we should be insulted precisely from Berlin was intolerable.” Both men seemed to be saying, Bohlen concluded, “that it was Stalin himself who had ordered George’s expulsion.”
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Kennan eventually acknowledged having provoked his own expulsion. All of his excuses, he admitted in his 1972 memoir, had been attempts to “salve the wounded ego. . . . At heart, I was deeply shamed and shaken by what had occurred.” Had he really been fit for the job in the first place? He was a good reporting officer, he thought, and did not normally shatter crockery. He had not understood, to be sure, that he was simply to “keep the seat warm” in Moscow until the next administration took over: “A little more clarity on this point might have . . . helped me to accept more philosophically the irritations of the situation into which I had been placed.” But even with such guidance,

The exposure of these inadequacies was painful at the time and would long remain so. “When I reflect, however, that it [caused a] change in my own life which I would never have encompassed on my own initiative, I realize that I must not protest this turn of fate too much. God’s ways are truly unfathomable. Who am I to say that I could have arranged it better?”
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