Kennan concluded from these meetings that the Soviet leadership did indeed want a cease-fire, that it had instructed the North Koreans and the Chinese Communists to accept an American proposal for one, and that it was willing to see the talks proceed without bringing in such wider issues as the future of Japan or Taiwan. “I hope that we will not hesitate to grasp at once the nettle of action.... We may not succeed; but I have the feeling we are moving much closer to the edge of the precipice than most of us are aware, and that this is one of the times when the dangers of inaction far exceed those of action.”34
The precipice he had in mind, Kennan wrote Acheson in a personal letter on June 20, was the possibility of war with the U.S.S.R. While Stalin had no appetite for such a conflict, he would view with “mortal apprehension” any U.S. military presence along the Soviet or the Chinese border with North Korea. That was why he had encouraged Mao to cross the Yalu and hurl MacArthur’s forces back. Now that the Chinese offensive had stalled, the Russians feared another American drive north. If that happened, they would have no choice but to intervene themselves, and a catastrophe would result. The whole Korean experience had been, for the Kremlin leaders, “a nerve-wracking and excruciating experience, straining to the limit their self-control and patience.” That explained Malik’s response, which the United States should not reject. For even though it might not seem so at the moment, “our action in Korea, so often denounced as futile, may prove to have . . . laid the foundation for the renewal of some sort of stability in the Far East.”35
Three days later, as if on cue, Malik made his cease-fire suggestion public. Talks began in July between the opposing military commanders in Korea, even as the fighting continued. It would take two years to achieve an armistice, partly because of disagreements over repatriating prisoners of war, partly because Stalin, reassured now that the war would be limited, was in less of a hurry to see it end. When it did finally in July 1953, shortly after his death, the terms were close to what Kennan had suggested.
His role in the Korean War, Kennan wrote later, had been “relatively minor,” but that was an understatement. For on several issues—his recommendation to deploy the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait, his concerns about crossing the 38th parallel, his warnings about MacArthur, his advice against negotiating after the Chinese had intervened, his reversal of that advice after the Chinese had been contained, and his delicate conversations with Malik—he won a degree of respect within the government that he had not enjoyed since 1947.36 Which is probably why Acheson asked Kennan, on July 23, 1951, if he would like to become the next U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.
VII.
“I did not turn it down cold,” George wrote Annelise from Washington—she and the family were in Kristiansand. “I said I would not be available, in any case, before completion of the next Institute term.” He would write Acheson a fuller response, “but [I] want to talk to you first.” The Kennans had sailed to Norway on the SS
As the ship neared the Norwegian coast, however, George’s mood brightened. On the Fourth of July, he watched children parading around the deck waving American flags, listened as the ship’s orchestra played “The Star Spangled Banner,” and at the captain’s invitation made a speech, linking what had happened in his country 175 years earlier with what Annelise’s had experienced at the hands of the Nazis: who could really appreciate the value of freedom “who hasn’t seen it attacked by a foreign invader and occupier on his own soil”? He even praised NATO—Norway had been a founding member. The alliance’s commitment to interdependence, he reminded the ship’s passengers and crew, meant that there was “really no such thing as a purely
The ship called at Bergen early the next morning, and then navigated the rugged coastline to the south. “Norway simply took my breath away,” George recorded,
not just, or even primarily, the colors of the mountains and sea and sky, but rather the places where the hand of man had softened and ordered this hard nature: the little docks, the villages at the foot of the rocks, the white cottages, the hay drying on fences around the tiny green pastures, the old stone monastery-church on the treeless, rocky island near the sea—stubborn, hard, defiant, braving century after century, the long winter bleakness, the gales, the loneliness, the rain and the cold—living the poetry of wind-swept rock and sky and only that.
They reached Kristiansand at about midnight, with a midsummer glow on the horizon reminiscent of Riga “in other days.” At the Sorensens’, after the children had gone to sleep, “[w]e sat up with the old people and drank vermouth with brandy until near four o’clock. Then A. and I dragged ourselves back to the little cottage, in the morning light, and went to bed.”39
George had little time to enjoy Norway, though, because he insisted on flying back to Washington, at his own expense, to testify on behalf of Davies before the State Department’s loyalty board on July 23: that was where Acheson raised the possibility of a return to Moscow. “I believe the hearing went well,” George wrote Annelise, “but have not yet heard the final result.” The case had stirred enough indignation, however, that the secretary of state had promised to rethink procedures for such investigations. “I am very pleased about this, as it makes it unnecessary for me to pursue the matter further.”40
So he returned to Europe by way of Portugal—which Kennan found little changed since he was last there in 1944—as well as Italy, Austria, West Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. It was his first European trip in a private capacity since the one he and Nick Messolonghitis had made in the summer of 1924. The Norwegians had been unsure of his status, so Kennan asked the State Department to inform other governments along his route that he required “no official courtesies or attentions beyond those that would be extended to the ordinary traveler.” “I dream about you all, including Christopher, with the greatest regularity,” he wrote Annelise from Lisbon. And, from Rome: “If you would like to join me [in Basel], wire to Vienna.”41
An English weekend at the beginning of September gave Kennan a chance to respond to Acheson, in longhand and at length, about Moscow as well as what might follow. Many opportunities had arisen over the past year: this came, he supposed, with “being a public figure.”
[A]fter going over all the familiar categories of rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, etc., I concluded that the Potter, in addition to establishing the obvious predestination to poverty, had probably moulded this clay in the slightly doubtful hope that it would some day prove serviceable in the capacity of scholar and teacher—one of those teachers whose teachings rarely please people, and are no doubt often wrong, but of whom it is sometimes said, when they are gone: “It is useful that he taught as he did.”
It made sense, then, to return to government long enough to retire with a pension, and then to resume work at the Institute with “academic life as my normal pursuit from that time on.”
The position should be an overseas mission not associated with the formulation of policy. For it was only right to acknowledge “the full measure of divergence” between his views and those of the Truman administration.
I say that quite without bitterness, and in full realization that in many of these differences . . . I may be the one farthest from wisdom. I also realize that there may be a feeling that it is useful from time to time to have around the place a sort of intellectual gadfly whose benevolent questionings and dissentings can sting gently and stimulate,
