This bleak assessment reflected the fact that Eisenhower, as expected, had nominated John Foster Dulles to be his secretary of state. Kennan’s relationship with Dulles had been strained since shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, when they differed over the desirability of admitting Mao’s China to the United Nations and of sending MacArthur’s forces across the 38th parallel: Dulles had described Kennan at the time as a “dangerous man.” With Dulles’s encouragement, Republican demands to replace “containment” with “liberation” had dominated the 1952 presidential campaign, and on September 26—the day
Nevertheless, he was careful to send Kennan, who was still in Bad Godesberg, a copy of what he had said: “As you will see, I took issue with . . . your recent book. I hope you will not feel that I did so in any improper way.” Kennan responded by forwarding his unpublished reply to Father Walsh’s harsher denunciations, as a way of conveying “a somewhat clearer idea of how I feel about morality in foreign policy.” Dulles acknowledged this as “clarifying” but insisted that “there are certain basic moral concepts which all peoples and nations can and do comprehend, and to which it is legitimate to appeal as providing some common standard of international conduct.”3
The correspondence veiled changes of mind by both men. Dulles was distancing himself from “containment” despite the fact that he and his fellow Republicans had supported that concept when Kennan first articulated it: they raised no significant objections during the 1948 campaign. But in the aftermath of the Democrats’ victory that year, the Soviet atomic bomb, the communist takeover in China, espionage revelations, the Korean War, and China’s intervention in that conflict, Dulles had come to regard “containment” as fair game; hence his call for “liberation” as an alternative. Meanwhile Kennan was distancing himself from his own support, while running the Policy Planning Staff, for efforts to detach the Soviet Union from its satellites. Given the sensitivities he had witnessed in Moscow, Republican promises of “liberation” could, he worried, provoke a major war.4
Even if Kennan had not expected to become Dulles’s chief foreign policy adviser, as Charles Burton Marshall would subsequently claim, he did assume that the new administration “would still attach value to my opinions and to the preservation of a mutual relationship of cordiality and understanding.” Weeks passed without any word, however, “and I, over-proud and over-shy as usual, was reluctant to make the first move.” That was the situation when George wrote Kent on Christmas Day. Friends and colleagues were beginning to treat him, he later recalled, “with the elaborate politeness and forbearance one reserves for someone who has committed a social gaffe too appalling for discussion.... It was as though my objective judgment had been somehow discredited with my discretion.”5
There were, nonetheless, invitations to speak, most of which he declined. Kennan made an exception, however, for the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania State Bar Association in Scranton on January 16, 1953. “I am now a resident of Pennsylvania,” he explained to the State Department, “but have had very little opportunity to take part in civic affairs here, and feel that this is one way I can show an . . . appreciation for the many kindnesses people have shown me.” He had said nothing publicly about Soviet-American relations while serving as ambassador, and silence might also be necessary in any new appointment: “It seemed to me, therefore, that any statement I might make on this subject should be made during the incumbency of the old administration, in order that the new one might remain wholly uncommitted by what I had said.” Kennan submitted his text for review, and Bohlen, in his capacity as counselor, cleared it.6
He was hardly the first American who had gone to Moscow with high hopes and disappointing results, Kennan reminded his audience: “My own recent experience was unusual in form, but not in content.” Soviet hostility arose from “
At this point, though, Kennan’s rhetoric ensnared him yet again. He chose this moment—four days before Eisenhower’s inauguration, one day after Dulles had reiterated his commitment to “liberation” before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—to denounce that concept:
It is not consistent with our international obligations. It is not consistent with a common membership with other countries in the United Nations. It is not consistent with the maintenance of formal diplomatic relations with another country. It is replete with possibilities for misunderstanding and bitterness. To the extent that it might be successful, it would involve us in heavy responsibilities. Finally the prospects for success would be very small indeed; since the problem of civil obedience is not a great problem to the modern police dictatorship.
There was no place in foreign policy for “emotionalism, the striking of heroic attitudes, and demagoguery of all sorts, . . . no place for impulsiveness, no place for self-seeking, no place for irresponsible experiments, and no place for the spotlight of sensationalism.” It was as if he invited the front-page headline that ran the next morning in
The story, by Ferdinand Kuhn, reported that “the foremost government expert on Russia” had “sounded a warning last night against the John Foster Dulles policy of encouraging the liberation of captive peoples in Europe and Asia.” It didn’t matter that Kennan had neither named Dulles nor used the word “dangerous.” It appeared “that I had attacked a Secretary [of State] before he had even taken office. I hadn’t meant to do that.” Professing shock at what had happened, claiming that he had not had Dulles in mind and had no significant differences with him, Kennan asked Doc Matthews to let the new secretary know that all he wanted was “to make myself useful in some capacity until I become eligible for retirement.” Any job appropriate to his rank and experience would do.7
Dulles asked to see Kennan on January 23, listened to his explanation but promised no new appointment. That afternoon his press spokesman, Michael McDermott, announced that the secretary regarded the matter as “closed.” Did that mean, a reporter asked, that Kennan “is in good standing and that everything is fine and dandy?” Dulles had been “too busy on other things” to think about Kennan’s future, McDermott replied, but the Scranton speech would not jeopardize it. “Still not a single word or hint,” Kennan fretted on the twenty-fifth; “nor has any one in the new administration [sought] my opinion about anything to do with the Soviet Union.” Several weeks later he was still in a state of suspension, “the only advantages of which are that I continue to receive salary checks (as Ambassador) and am under no obligation to be in Washington.”8
“[W]e still don’t know any more about what we are going to do,” Annelise complained to Jeanette, except that “with each appointment it seems to become clear that they are not going to use their top Foreign Service people for much.” “To say that we are on tenterhooks,” Jeanette commiserated, seemed slight “compared to what
After learning that Eisenhower had asked Bohlen to replace him in Moscow, Kennan twice sought clarification
