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.”72
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.”73
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,
I was probably too highly strung emotionally, too imaginative, too sensitive, and too impressed with the importance of my own opinions, to sit quietly on that particular seat. For this, one needed a certain phlegm, a certain contentment with the trivia of diplomatic life, a readiness to go along uncomplainingly with the conventional thinking of Washington, and a willingness to refrain from asking unnecessary questions—none of which I possessed in adequate degree.
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?”74
VIII.
George, Annelise, Christopher, and Wendy waited out the 1952 presidential election in the comfortable guest quarters of the U.S. high commissioner in Bad Godesberg. “Just what dangers my presence in the country would have added to the fortunes of the Democratic party I was unable to imagine,” George recalled, “but I was thoroughly humbled by what had just befallen me, and was in no mood to argue.” Following Eisenhower’s landslide victory on November 4, the family sailed for home on the SS
With the Princeton house rented in the expectation of a longer Moscow stay, the only place the Kennans could go was the Pennsylvania farm: not unusually, it was in need of repairs. As far as the U.S. government was concerned, George F. Kennan was still its ambassador to the Soviet Union: he would remain so until his replacement was named. But he spent these weeks negotiating only with plumbers, carpenters, and painters, while doing a fair amount of the work himself. The family were well and happy to be back, Jeanette wrote Kent after spending Thanksgiving with them, although “disappointed not to have been able to continue their good work in Moscow.” It was just for that reason, she added, that the Soviets wanted “to get rid of them.” The method chosen “was very harmless compared to what it might have been.”76
Kennan saw Acheson shortly after his arrival and paid his respects to Truman early in December. Neither mentioned a future appointment: both had “the faraway look of men who know that they are about to be relieved of heavy responsibilities.” Back in town on the eighteenth to deliver his customary end-of-term lecture at the National War College, Kennan avoided any discussion of recent events other than to acknowledge, regarding the challenge of communism, that “we have held our own.” Mistakes had been made, but with proper attention to lessons learned, there was no reason why, fifteen or twenty years hence, “our children will still not be listening to the World Series and running around in Chevro-lets and doing all the things we associate with the American way of life.”77
By Christmas, the work at the farm was mostly done. Joan was home from Geneva, Grace had arrived from Radcliffe, and the Burlinghams—Annelise’s sister Mossik’s American relatives—were also there. “[Y]ou can imagine how very lively it was,” Annelise wrote Frieda Por. “It is nice to be a large noisy family.” Meanwhile George had thanked Kent for the grapefruit, “the like of which we never see locally.” With fifteen people in the house, it had come in handy. The house was Chekhovian in a happier sense, then, than when they had left it in April: the Cherry Orchard outside East Berlin remained reassuringly distant from Moscow.
“I thought it was unfortunate what he said,” Annelise replied many years later, when asked about George’s Tempelhof embarrassment. “He should certainly never have said it, and I think he feels that way himself.” She was sure, though, that if he had said nothing at all, “they would have tried to do something else. They had decided that they were going to get him out. I think they would have done something much worse.”78
NINETEEN
Finding a Niche: 1953–1955
“I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ME AFTER THE 20th of January,” George wrote Kent on Christmas Day 1952, “but think it doubtful that I shall be given any post of major political responsibility.” One reason was that he had worked with Democrats, and that “my name has been prominently connected with the word ‘containment,’ which has gone out of style.” Another was that “I have had the temerity to say things about the role of morality in foreign policy which sound disrespectful of some of the favorite poses of American statesmen.” He had only a year and a quarter to go before becoming eligible for retirement, however. At that point, “I hope to leave government service altogether and contribute what I can, thenceforth, as a scholar, commentator, and critic.”1
