of his status from Dulles: he was still the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, and the president would at some point have to accept his resignation. But the secretary of state chose not to respond to either of these communications, despite the fact that the second one was written while Kennan was in Washington consulting with Bohlen and Allen Dulles, the new director of the CIA, on the implications of Stalin’s death, which had occurred on March 5. The uncertainty finally ended on the twelfth with a call from William H. Lawrence of
Only at that point—Friday, March 13, 1953—did the secretary of state call Kennan in to tell him “that he knew of no ‘niche’ for me in government at this time, and thought I would have difficulty getting confirmation by the Senate for any representative position, tainted as I am with ‘containment.’ ” And then, as if nothing had happened, Dulles asked Kennan to assess the implications of Stalin’s demise: “You interest me when you talk about these matters. Very few other people do.” It was, Kennan thought, as if he had told Annelise that he was divorcing her but had added that “I love the way you cook scrambled eggs, and I wonder if you’d mind fixing me up a batch of them right now, before you go.” The two men parted, Kennan reported to Oppenheimer, “in what was apparently a hearty agreement that I should now retire, although our reasons for this view were not identical.”11
Kennan asked Dulles to announce the arrangement as soon as possible but another long silence ensued, until on April 6 he was shown a draft statement implying that he was retiring at his own request. He refused to approve it, so Dulles—claiming confusion—called him in again the next day to ask what he really wanted. That depended, Kennan replied, on whether the secretary of state and the president really wanted him. Dulles again dithered, so Kennan wrote the press release himself:
Mr. Kennan expects to retire from the Foreign Service in the near future and to return to private activity in the academic field. He hopes to be able to . . . function, following his retirement, as a regular consultant to the Government. These plans are the result of discussions between him and the Secretary, and are agreeable to both.
It had been, Kennan admitted to Acheson, “a strange and chilling experience.” His ambassadorship ended officially on April 29, but George remained on call in Washington for another three months, so he and Annelise rented a house on Quebec Street for the summer.
When his last day at the State Department came, Kennan spent the morning working in an empty office, had lunch, and then went looking for Hessman, who would be staying on for a few weeks. Not finding her, he left a note saying “that I was leaving and would not be back—ever.” He was able to take leave of another secretary and the fifth-floor receptionist: “We all nearly wept.” Then he rode the elevator down, “as on a thousand other occasions, and suddenly there I was on the steps of the building, in the baking glaring heat: a retired officer, a private citizen, after 27 years of official life. I was not unhappy.”
Perhaps—but it was an inglorious conclusion to an illustrious career. No Foreign Service officer had advanced more rapidly within its ranks. None had more significantly shaped grand strategy at the highest levels of government. None had created, if inadvertently, a “school” of international relations theory. And yet Kennan walked out of the State Department on July 29, 1953, with hardly anyone noticing. He was not prepared to reflect, at that point, on how this had happened: “Someone else, I knew, would have to strike the balance, if one was ever to be struck, between justice and injustice, failure and accomplishment.”12
I.
“Why hell,” Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan told Kennan, after learning that Dulles had denied him a new appointment, “you wouldn’t have had any trouble getting confirmed.” Ferguson had asked to see Kennan to get his opinion of Bohlen, whose Moscow nomination had run into trouble. The problem was Yalta, the wartime conference associated now, in the minds of Republicans eager for “liberation,” with the alleged “sell-out” of Eastern Europe. Bohlen had attended as Roosevelt’s interpreter and one of his advisers. So had Alger Hiss. That was enough to upset Ferguson, despite Kennan’s reassurances. It infuriated Joseph McCarthy and his senatorial allies.
Eisenhower fought back: otherwise, he feared, he would be relinquishing his authority over the conduct of foreign policy. The battle, which consumed most of March 1953, was heated, public, and ultimately successful. It was the first time the White House had defended a Foreign Service officer accused of disloyalty—Truman had done little to assist John Paton Davies and others similarly accused. The victory was all the more important given Dulles’s demands, which had offended many of his State Department subordinates, that they “positively” demonstrate their patriotism. But even as Eisenhower struggled to save Bohlen, he did nothing to retain Kennan who, as the Alsops pointedly noted in their column on April 12, would have accepted a position if one had been offered him. His “unequalled knowledge” and “intuitive brilliance” were assets “the American Government cannot replace at any price.” The
Kennan was the same age as Bohlen, similarly trained, and—in Ferguson’s view, at least—less controversial. He had not been at Yalta and had made no secret of his objections to Roosevelt’s policies. His “X” article had been an attack on Henry Wallace. He was, to be sure, the architect of “containment” and had spoken out against “liberation,” but it would have been hard to portray the author of
The Bohlen nomination fight suggests one reason. Kennan was not as vulnerable, but Dulles had attacked him during the campaign and Kennan appeared to have struck back in his Scranton speech. Eisenhower didn’t need another controversy just at this moment. Moreover, Kennan had mentioned retirement in the apology he asked Matthews to convey to Dulles: “This was foolish. I shouldn’t have done it.” Dulles was “a cagey, tricky man,” with no appreciation of what lay behind this gesture: “He simply used this as a way of getting rid of me.” Kennan could have “raised hell” by going to Eisenhower and saying: “Look here, I’ve [had] an honorable career. How can you let me be fired in this way?” But Dulles could have simply said: “I understood you’d wanted to leave the Service.”15
There was, however, a deeper issue, which was that Kennan had made himself hard to place: it’s revealing that Acheson, exasperated by the Tempelhof gaffe, had offered no new appointment either. Unlike Bohlen, always a smooth operator, Kennan had gained a reputation for brittleness. “He doesn’t bend,” Isaiah Berlin recalled. “He breaks.” Years later Robert R. Bowie, who became Dulles’s Policy Planning Staff director, suggested some reasons why.
Kennan had the intuitions and insights—but also the volatility—of a poet, Bowie thought: these made him too “reactive.” Convinced that people in power were taking the wrong direction, he would simplify and thus dramatize
