George F. Kennan: An American Life (99 page)

The chauffeur of the embassy “flagship” rushed the Kennans back to Belgrade—over five hundred miles—in eleven hours, from where they watched the Soviet-American confrontation unfold. Appalled by the risks Khrushchev had run and not particularly sympathetic to Castro, the Yugoslavs kept their heads down, protesting the blockade of the island only after the larger crisis had been resolved. Kennedy’s handling of the situation had been “masterful,” Kennan thought. Tito’s colleagues quietly agreed, pointing out that if war had come, they would have had to come down on the Cuban side.
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With the assurance, then, that there would be a future, Kennan turned to an analysis of where American policy toward Yugoslavia had gone wrong. The problem, he concluded in an eight-thousand-word dispatch pouched to Washington at the end of November, had been “heroic struggles with ourselves.” If the United States could not do better, then it might as well “fold up our tents, before the Yugoslavs fold them up for us.” Bundy passed Kennan’s analysis to the president, who ordered yet another review and again asked Kennan to fly back for it—his fifth such trip since becoming ambassador.
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Meanwhile Tito was in Moscow, having been driven there, Kennan was sure, by American obtuseness. He had to acknowledge, though, that the Yugoslav leader was enjoying the “personal triumph of his life.” Khrushchev received him as an honored guest, with a deference that did not seem to expect subservience. Strangely, Kennan thought this a sham and even proposed, early in January 1963, that he begin cultivating Tito’s domestic opponents. Washington should provide no further food aid, and although Kennedy should seek the reinstatement of “most-favored nation” treatment, he should do this as a point of principle and not as way of luring Tito back to the side of the West.
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These suggestions bewildered the NSC staff. “The Ambassador is clearly on the zag course now, having completed the zig with his [November] airgram,” David Klein complained to Bundy. No one in Washington or in the Moscow embassy shared Kennan’s suspicions of a Tito-Khrushchev plot. Clearly “matters of personality and intuition” were shaping Kennan’s judgment, making it “difficult to come to grips with the substance of the problem.” As for standing on principle, “[t]he President can do many things, but I doubt that even he could pull off this kind of a gambit with the U.S. Congress in the year of our Lord 1963.”
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“It is by no means certain that the President will do, at this time, what I should like him to do,” George wrote Annelise from Washington, “and if it is not done now, I fear it will never be done.” That proved to be prescient. Kennedy received him on January 16 but ruled out any challenge to Congress for the foreseeable future. All that he agreed to do was to answer a planted press conference question a few days later, noting the importance of exploiting differences “behind the Iron Curtain” and hoping “that the Congress would reconsider the action it took last year.”
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Bearing that crumb, Kennan saw Tito soon after returning to Belgrade. Tito seemed uneasy but made it clear that Yugoslavia was not about to abandon its independence. The Warsaw Pact no longer fitted “modern conditions.” The word “bloc” was losing its relevance. The other Eastern Europeans would soon follow Yugoslavia’s example. Tito hoped no longer to have to rely upon the United States, because “he never knew at what point they would get hit by some whim of the Congress.” But the Americans had nothing to fear from his policy. The State Department and its Belgrade embassy should simply give them “a true picture of [the] situation as of today.”
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The meeting left Kennan deflated, dispirited, and on the way to the hospital. The trouble this time, the American military doctors in Frankfurt determined, was not ulcers but a kidney stone that would plague him for years to come. From his bed, Kennan reverted to another habit: he completed an eight-page letter to Walter Lippmann, not unlike the one he had dictated from another hospital in Washington a decade and a half earlier. “Being myself inhibited from writing for publication,” he wanted the Yugoslav situation to be known “to
someone
at home; and there could be no one better qualified than yourself to understand its complexities and implications.”

The ultimate goal of the United States, Kennan argued, should have been to loosen the cohesion of the Marxist-Leninist world, which might be “the only means short of war by which we can ever make headway against the communist colossus.”

To John Paton Davies, Kennan added, a few days later, that his had been “a disastrously unsuccessful tour of duty.” He would have accepted the blame had it not been for the fact that no one on either side had listened to him: “I am as remote from the counsels of the congressional and labor leaders who have made U.S. policy . . . as I am from the internal deliberations of the Yugoslav League of Communists.” Their insults “go past my head like bullets past the head of one who sits between the battle-lines (and for the safety of whose head neither side could care less).” He would “leave U.S.-Yugoslav relations at an all-time low.”
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The White House announced Kennan’s resignation on May 17, 1963. “We all knew George had been through a lot,” Schlesinger remembered, “and there was no surprise or bitterness over his leaving.” Seeking to dispel rumors to the contrary, Kennan claimed in his own statement to have had the support throughout of the president and the secretary of state, even though congressional actions regarding Yugoslavia had been “a great disappointment.” In fact, Kennan complained in 1965, neither Rusk nor his under secretary of state, George Ball, had ever concerned themselves with his problems: they had seen his appointment as having been Kennedy’s and “were not interested in what happened to me.”

Kennedy too disappointed Kennan—by proclaiming “Captive Nations Week,” by failing to keep open the Yepishev channel, by repeatedly promising a tougher line with Congress than he was willing to pursue—but Kennan bore him no grudge: “[T]he President completely understood what he did to me, and I, on the other hand, completely understood why he had to do it.” Because he had so narrowly won the presidency, Kennedy’s political position was weak. He could not afford to appear “soft” on communism. Taking a stand against Mills might have “gummed up” his civil rights program and other domestic legislation. “This was a tragic situation, and I think both of us came out of it entirely without bitterness.... I was sorry that it was myself whom he was obliged in a way to destroy.”
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Kennan came around, as well, to a more charitable view of Tito. The Sino-Soviet split was in the open now, and neighboring Albania had sided with the Chinese. Tito knew how much credit he could get with Khrushchev by sticking up for him after his decision to resume nuclear testing: that accounted for the Belgrade conference speech, which had cost Kennan his ambassadorial equilibrium. The Moscow trip was Tito’s payoff: the “prodigal son” returned, but on his own terms. He would make verbal concessions, but with “no intention of giving up his independence.” As a consequence, Eastern Europe was safer for heterodoxy than it had been in 1958, when Kennan had detected some of the first signs of it in Poland. He and Tito, it turned out, had wanted much the same thing.
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Relations with Yugoslavia were therefore never close to collapse, but Kennan more than once was. As usual, he took too much personally. In contrast to colleagues like Rusk, Ball, and Bohlen, Kennan had never achieved the diplomatic equivalent of clinical detachment. Emotional fragility led to professional volatility, a problem that had afflicted him throughout his career and was still doing so in Belgrade. “I am attached to the man as a person,” Kennan’s economic counselor, Owen T. Jones, wrote in his private diary: to his “kindness and decency, his brilliance, his reputation and stature, his access to people at all levels, the essentially long term soundness of his judgments.” But “I am repelled by his self-centered egoism, . . . his mercurial moods, his meticulous arrogance.” Kennan’s “fixations,” Jones concluded, “haunt any dealings with him.”
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Kennan had his own explanation for his difficulties in Belgrade. Progress generally resulted from accumulations of small services, he reminded himself in a note written while on a flight back to the United States—
not
for consultations this time—at the end of May 1963. Those who performed such tasks tended to have little sense of the larger picture. He had been trying, in Yugoslavia, “to do one small thing,” and he did not regret this: “It might have been worse if I had not been there.” But as he returned now to wider perspectives, “I find myself little aided by two and a half years’ immersion in the dust and heat.”
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His first stop was a conference in upstate New York where gloom about his own country quickly resurfaced. His own speech had failed, while Oppenheimer’s had been “too compact and subtle to be fully understood, and too impressive to be answered.” A gang of sullen teenagers, encountered on an early morning walk, would have killed him “for kicks” if they not been exhausted from being up all night. There was nothing to do now but “stand by and watch the internal catastrophe . . . which will surely overtake us if the external catastrophe does not anticipate it.”
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He was also having weird dreams. One moved the East Berlin farm to Nagawicka, where the Kennan children had spent their summers, which adjoined California, where Grace and her husband were living, which was just across the lake from Delafield, where George had attended St. John’s and now was considering entering local politics. Another occurred while traveling overnight to Chicago on the 20th Century Limited. The train was somehow diverted into Canada, where George had to board a bus to another railroad station, located with the aid of Prime Minister Lester Pearson, from which he caught another train, settled himself in the club car without a ticket, but was sure “that if I, being who I was, explained my predicament, there would be no difficulty.” The sugar bags in the real dining car the next morning read: “Have sweet dreams on the Century.”
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George visited Jeanette and her family in Highland Park, spoke at the University of Wisconsin commencement in Madison, and helped Charlie James, now president and chairman of the board of the Northwestern National Insurance Company, open its new building in Milwaukee. He then picked up an honorary degree at Harvard, flew to Paris for a NATO meeting, and rescued Christopher from Sunningdale, where he had just finished his second and final year. They spent a day nostalgically in Oxford, drove from there to Harwich, and boarded a Channel ferry for Holland. Sitting on deck in the sun and out of the wind, George spent the afternoon reading Thurber aloud to his son, who “laughed until he got the hiccoughs.”
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The Kennans’ last full day in Belgrade, July 26, 1963, was a somber one because of the earthquake that had occurred that morning in Skopje, killing over a thousand people and devastating most of the city. The next day they flew to Brioni, where on the twenty-eighth Tito hosted a luncheon for all four Kennans, with George able to announce the arrival, near the disaster site, of an American emergency field hospital. The children comported themselves appropriately in the presence of the Yugoslav president, who toasted their father as a “nauchnik”—a scholar—just the right thing to have said. From there the family flew to Venice, Christopher having negotiated permission to keep his turtle.
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Kennan had one more ambassadorial duty to perform that fall, since Kennedy had not yet appointed his successor: this was to help host the long-planned Tito visit to the United States. Anticipating hostile demonstrations in Washington, the State Department had arranged to house the Yugoslavs within the controlled precincts of Colonial Williamsburg, and Kennan was dispatched there to welcome them. The horse-drawn carriages were a bonus, but also “a fitting answer,” George thought, to those at Brioni. The Kennans were the only Americans at dinner that evening, where the conversation veered off, improbably, onto snakes. “I ask Koča [Popović] whether they were much bothered by such things during their life in the mountains, in the Partisan war.” No, he replied, “for some reason, wild life avoided us.” “That,” Tito explained, “is because we never washed.” The Kennans spent the night in an overheated room at the Williamsburg Inn, with George “assailed by gloomy premonitions, harder to bear than the exhalations of the burning radiators.”
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They were well-founded. Demonstrators noisily picketed the White House when the Yugoslavs were received there the next day. Reporters noticed Kennedy’s reluctance to be photographed shaking hands with his guest. The president explained to Tito that he had signed the Trade Expansion Act, despite its denial of the “most-favored nation” privilege, because it was “a very important measure.” He hoped to regain presidential discretion in the matter, perhaps within the next few weeks. Tito should understand, though, that “every member of Congress wanted to avoid being called pro-communist,” and it was hard for them “to distinguish among the Soviet Union, Communist China, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Albania.” As for the pickets, he got them all the time himself.
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Worse was to come. When Tito arrived in New York to address the U.N. General Assembly, he and his entourage were literally besieged in the Waldorf-Astoria, with two young protesters almost breaking into his suite. Kennan was at least able to greet the Titos peacefully in Princeton, where, he reported with relief to Kennedy, the visit had gone well. But if New York was to continue to host the United Nations, it would have to take “greater responsibility than it now does for the protection of its foreign guests against insult and molestation.”
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