George F. Kennan : an American life

Would the Americans, though, stay cool and use their heads? Late in the summer of 1952 Kennan learned, through a military attache, 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.⁴⁸

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.⁴⁹

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.”⁵⁰

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.”⁵¹

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.”⁵²

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,

the boy wandered down to the iron fence, gripped two of the spikes with his pudgy little fists, and stood staring out into the wide, semi-forbidden world beyond.... Some Soviet children came along the sidewalk on the other side of the fence, saw him, smiled at him, and gave him a friendly poke through the bars. He squealed in pleasure and poked back. Soon, to much mutual pleasure, a game was in progress.

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.”⁵³

VI.

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.”⁵⁴

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:

Where are you going? I am on my way to London to attend a meeting of some of our European chiefs of mission with the Under Secretary of State, Mr. Bruce.

Is the situation more hopeful than it was when you went in last spring? The situation is not worse.

Have you seen Stalin? There has been no occasion for me to ask to be received by Premier Stalin.

What do you think of the last Soviet note on Germany? It shows that the Soviet leaders do not wish the discussion of precisely those matters which will have to be discussed first if there is to be a really free and united Germany.

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:

George F. Kennan, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, declared today that he and other Western diplomats resided in Moscow in an “icy-cold” atmosphere of isolation so complete that he could not talk even to his guides or servants except on simple business....

His isolation in the Soviet capital today is worse than he experienced as an interned U.S. diplomat in Germany after Pearl Harbor when the Nazis declared war on the United States, Mr. Kennan said.

The only modification he offered about this statement was that in Moscow he and other Western officials were