George F. Kennan : an American life

Princeton was a long way from Pskovo-Pechorsky, however, so First Presbyterian would have to do. He worried that he would be “a very imperfect Christian,” Kennan wrote its pastor on accepting membership early in 1952, but he would be bearing a burden “far away and in loneliness.” The Soviet Union was

the most impressive example of hell on earth that our time has known—and to reside there as the leading representative and exponent of the world with which the Christian faith is today most prominently identified . . . is surely a heavy and unusual task for any Christian: . . . perhaps this one may be forgiven if he concentrates his attention at this time on the problem of how he can best cleanse himself and brace himself spiritually for the ordeal.

One model, he thought, might be the Prince in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot: “To make one’s self as pure of heart as one is capable of becoming, to put fear and cynicism and craftiness behind one, and to abandon one’s self to the reflection that if the simple truth will not do, then nothing will.” He would have to remind himself, however, that what he would be managing was “not the encounter of George Kennan with the phenomenon of Soviet power but the encounter of the political entity known as the Government of the United States of America.”

Had he not already spent enough time in that awful place? Kennan stared into the fire for a long time before answering: “[F]ate pushed me into the diplomatic service. A man has to do what fate calls him to do, as best he can.”¹

I.

His task, Kennan told guests at a dinner given by Paul Hoffman early in February, would be exploit possibilities for “continuing to exist in the same world with Soviet power and yet avoid the calamities of a third world conflict.” Americans must not conclude that war was inevitable “just because we find the absence of it to be unpleasant and difficult.” Diplomacy was not disloyalty: “It is tragic that in the course of recent events we have permitted not only valuable people, but also valuable words to be deprived of their usefulness.” Harriman, Smith, and most recently Kirk had all served with self-effacement in Moscow under difficult circumstances. “[I]f I can meet the requirements of the job with as much competence and dignity as they did, and make no more mistakes, I will be pleased enough.”²

Meanwhile, Kennan was winding up his affairs at the Institute. The study group he had hoped to make a Policy Planning Staff in exile became the first casualty: after “considerable anguish,” he told the assistants whom he had recruited to work on the project that he would have to drop it. He could not resist, however, sending a long letter to Acheson—at some three thousand words, it could have been a paper from the original planning staff—complaining about the indulgence of emerging nationalism in Asia and the Middle East. There was little to be gained, Kennan insisted, from trying to win the goodwill of its leaders, “on whose bizarre frames the trappings of statesmanship rest like an old dress suit on a wooden scarecrow.” But Washington policy making, he cautioned himself in his diary, was now beyond the control of any individual: people were spending most of their time in “a dream-like futile battle against the folds of [their] own bureaucratic clothing.” He “shuddered inwardly at the prospect of going into the lion’s den” as the representative of such a place.³

Few forebodings were apparent, however, when Kennan appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his confirmation hearing on March 12. Moscow was “a hard city to live in,” he acknowledged. “You are surrounded with hostility and hatred and meanness on every side.” But war was unlikely, and relations with the Soviet Union deserved “to be handled with the greatest of circumspection and care and self-control.” The senators treated Kennan respectfully, if ramblingly. The only reference to ongoing loyalty investigations came when Theodore Francis Green, Democrat of Rhode Island, asked facetiously whether previous associations with Kremlin leaders might be taken as evidence that Kennan was a communist. “I assume, Senator,” the ambassador-designate responded, “that I must have been investigated quite a number of times.” The Senate confirmed the nomination unanimously on the next day.⁴

Would attacks by Soviet propagandists affect his ability to do his job? He didn’t think so, he told reporters in an off-the-record press conference at the State Department on April 1. Totalitarian regimes “always enlist hatred against individuals.” After the “X” article came out, he and Forrestal had been called “cannibalistic hyenas.” But being insulted “does not necessarily mean that you’re not respected. It may mean almost the contrary.” He would be happy simply “to see the diplomatic amenities observed and not too closely connected with emotions.”⁵

The new ambassador met that same day with the president of the United States, who had just announced that he would not be running for reelection. Truman agreed that Stalin did not want war, and asked Kennan to write from time to time, saying that he liked getting personal reports from overseas representatives. “Beyond this, he gave me no instructions of any kind.” The same thing happened when Kennan lunched with Acheson the next day: “He, too, was cordial but very reserved; and he said nothing that could give me any clue to the basic line of policy I was to follow in my new capacity.”

Courtesy calls on Soviet officials in Washington and New York were no more instructive. Ambassador Aleksandr Panyushkin and his staff seemed worn down by the hostility they had encountered in the United States. Jacob Malik, with whom Kennan had had useful conversations about a Korean War cease-fire a year earlier, was now “much more bitter and sour.” The Soviet Union was being threatened, he complained, at the end of their talk. “Are you sure,” Kennan asked, “that your Government does not prefer to be threatened?” “Positively,” Malik answered.

Soviet attitudes were no surprise, but Kennan did find the State Department’s silence unsettling. So he arranged, through Bohlen, another meeting with Acheson on April 18: “It was left entirely to me to set the trend of the discussion.” His reputation and the publicity surrounding his appointment, Kennan tried to point out, meant that

anything I said in that city would be listened to with great eagerness and interest; and that even statements made to other diplomats, correspondents or visitors would get back to the Soviet Government in the majority of cases; that these . . . would be scrutinized with intense curiosity by the Soviet leaders and might well have the result of affecting their attitudes.

Should he not have, then, a clear understanding of policy on such issues as Germany—did the United States really want reunification? Or Korea—what kind of a settlement should follow a cease-fire? Or disarmament—did this not require, first, a reduction of tensions? Kennan got no answers to any of these questions: “Our position seemed to me to be comparable to the policy of unconditional surrender in the recent war.”

A private conversation with Bohlen was even more disturbing. He appeared to have embraced “the flat and inflexible thinking of the Pentagon,” which privileged “the false mathematics of relative effectiveness” regarding weapons of mass destruction over all other considerations that might attend their use.

The philosophic difference between this view and my own was so profound, and the hour of our conversation so late, that I could not even bring myself to argue with him about it, but it shocked me deeply for he and I have been closer than any other people in Washington, I think, in our views about Russia generally, and I realized that the difference of view implicit in his remarks would go very deep and would really prevent any further intellectual intimacy on the questions of American policy between the two of us.

Kennan returned to Princeton “feeling extremely lonely.” No one in Washington sympathized with his views, and no one in Moscow was likely to. It seemed “that I was being sent on a mission to play a game at which I could not