George F. Kennan : an American life

Stevenson soon disappointed him. During an address to the Pittsburgh Foreign Policy Association on May 3, Kennan had described the situation in Eastern Europe as “a finality, for better or for worse.” The United States should not be encouraging “liberation.” This was no new position, but when James Reston quoted Kennan a few days later alongside a New York Times news story listing him as a key Stevenson adviser, an angry Democratic congressman, Thaddeus Machrowicz of Michigan, warned the candidate that he could lose the Polish-American vote unless he publicly repudiated Kennan. Stevenson wasted no time in doing so: he issued a press release “completely” disagreeing with Kennan, who “is in no way connected with my staff and never has been.”²⁰

Kennan was not consulted, nor was he even given a copy of the Stevenson letter. The brush-off cured him, or so he claimed, “of the illusion that I have any place whatsoever in American public life—even as an independent supporter of Mr. Stevenson. Serves me right for even messing in it.” Kennan wrote that on August 20, during his visit with Jeanette in Highland Park. Three days later her phone rang with a message from the Democratic nominee himself: he had just learned that Kennan was nearby—could he come to dinner that evening at the Stevenson farm in Libertyville? George asked if he could bring Grace, who had just arrived. Of course, Stevenson replied. “So we drove over almost at once.”

The meal took place to the sound of Republican rhetoric, for Eisenhower and Nixon were accepting their nominations that night, and the television was on in the next room. Stevenson assessed the speeches professionally, talked foreign policy briefly, and then George and Grace made their farewells.

Mr. Stevenson accompanied us out to the parking lot in back of the house. There was a bright moon, and the fields were in mist, and looked like a sea. We both felt intensely sorry for him: he seemed so tired and harassed and worn, he had so few people to help him; and his whole equipment for going into this battle was so shabby compared with the vast, slick, well-heeled Eisenhower organization. And not the least of his problems is to carry on his shoulders the whole miserable Democratic party; disunited, indisciplined, unenlightened, itself already having unconsciously imbibed and assimilated about half of the McCarthyism of the past few years.

Stevenson had rejected Kennan more abruptly and more visibly even than Dulles, but unlike Dulles, he found a gracious way to make amends. That, for Kennan, was style—a later generation would call it “class.” It was a quality he struggled to find within himself, even as he drove, hounded, and haunted himself.

“I am living in the world my father despaired of, and rightly so,” Kennan wrote on August 26, 1956, after returning to the archives in St. Louis. Why take it too seriously? It was, after all, late afternoon: “The main happenings of the day are over; not much more is going to happen.” He, like his father, had been “passed by, and do not really mind too much—because the present is too uninteresting.”²¹

III.

But the present, in fact, was very interesting. Six months earlier the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had secretly denounced Stalin before the Twentieth Soviet Communist Party Congress in Moscow. Two months earlier Polish workers had rioted in Poznan. One month earlier the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had nationalized the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company after Secretary of State Dulles, retaliating for an arms deal Nasser had made with Czechoslovakia, cut off American funding for the Aswan Dam. Kennan had no involvement in any of these crises, but he could hardly avoid taking an interest in them. And as far as Soviet and Eastern European affairs were concerned, the CIA expected him to do so: despite Kennan’s having declined the offer of a job there in 1953, Allen Dulles had been using him ever since as a confidential adviser.

Initially this meant membership on an advisory committee reviewing national intelligence estimates. Conveniently for Kennan, it met in Princeton with the CIA director frequently in attendance. After J. Edgar Hoover approved Kennan’s Pravda subscription, he was also able to monitor post-Stalin political maneuvering in the Kremlin, passing periodic analyses to his chief CIA contact, John Maury. The arrangement made sense on all sides. It gave the Eisenhower administration access to Kennan despite its having, in effect, fired him. It allowed Kennan the freedom to criticize policy openly while still seeking quietly to shape it. Because Kennan wished to avoid any impression “that he is seeking to intrude or in any way impose his views,” Frank Wisner explained in 1956, agency documents referred to him only as “the expert.”²²

One of the first things Allen Dulles did after the CIA obtained a transcript of Khrushchev’s speech was to send Maury to Princeton to show it to Kennan. His first reaction was that one or more of the new Soviet leaders must have arranged Stalin’s death and were now trying to cover their tracks. He advised caution in releasing the text, but Dulles overruled him and, with the other Dulles’s cooperation, the State Department published it on June 4. The Polish upheaval followed three weeks later, leading Kennan to admit that they had been right. Khrushchev had attacked the system that produced him far more effectively than the Americans could ever have done. They had only amplified what he said.²³

By August, Kennan was worrying more about the Suez crisis. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations had made a great mistake playing up to “Middle Eastern tin-pot dictators,” he told New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger in an off-the-record interview. “These men are not our friends,” but the British and the French were. The United States had traditionally favored self-determination, Kennan added in a speech at Johns Hopkins two months later, but was everyone equally ready to exercise it? Especially when doing so involved expropriating foreign property, along with the right to control an international waterway vital to the global economy? How strongly would Americans support Nasser if he cut off oil shipments from the Middle East at a time when they and their allies were increasing their dependence on that commodity?²⁴

Meanwhile, Kennan was modifying his views on the “finality” of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. Moscow’s authority there was eroding “more rapidly than I had ever anticipated,” he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on October 11. The process had begun with Tito in 1948, and now, in the aftermath of the Poznan riots, Poland was showing signs of independence that Stalin would never have permitted. Khrushchev flew to Warsaw a week later to demand the resignation of Wladyslaw Gomulka, the recently installed reformist leader of the Polish Communist Party, but surprisingly, he failed to get it. Washington wanted him to come for “consultation,” Kennan wrote in his diary on the twenty-second. Should he go? His relations with his government and even his country were approaching a crisis

that will almost unquestionably end in my being driven further away rather than brought closer. Deep in my heart I have a feeling that I shall end either in exile or—well, better not to speculate on it. Too bad: I am just now beginning to like this country a little, as a place to live—better, at least, than I did. But I shall never be able to take its public life. And the coming election will seal my estrangement.

Kennan could claim, in a way, vindication, having insisted for over a decade that the Soviet Union could not indefinitely, as Gibbon would have put it, “hold in obedience” its satellites “in opposition to their inclination and interest.” But Kennan’s problem, his old Moscow boss Bill Bullitt had suggested in a public attack on him a few months earlier, was that his devotion to Gibbon had left him with “a pessimistic bent of mind for one so young.” Kennan was “more captivated by declines and falls than by rises and achievements.”²⁵

Kennan did acknowledge, on October 29, that the situation in Eastern Europe was developing more favorably than if “we ourselves [had] tried deliberately to achieve this effect.” Perhaps Titoism had been a precursor to “liberation.” But the Hungarians were “running tremendous risks in trying to force so many issues at once.” Encouraged by the Polish example, the new government of Imre Nagy had followed an anti-Soviet uprising in Budapest with the demand that the Red Army withdraw altogether from Hungary. It appeared to have done so by