George F. Kennan : an American life

have arisen to very exalted positions.” He said nothing about an appointment, though, and after the plane landed, Kennan caught a train back to Princeton, arriving in time for dinner.²⁸

But on Monday, January 23—three days after Kennedy’s inauguration—Kennan checked his mail at Yale’s Branford College. An ashen-faced undergraduate was on the office phone: “Seeing me, he jumped up in relief and said: ‘Mr. Kennan, the President of the United States wants to talk to you.’” It was indeed Kennedy, calling to ask whether Kennan might agree to become ambassador to Poland or Yugoslavia: could he let Rusk, now secretary of state, know which it might be? Kennan was staying that evening with the George Piersons—he was the chairman of the Yale history department—and it was from their house, before dinner, that Kennan called Rusk to say that it would be Yugoslavia. “I am very enthusiastic about the way in which the new administration is taking hold,” a more cheerful George wrote his half-brother a few days later. “This is one of the reasons why I go back to government so gladly.”²⁹

There was no delay this time about the agrement: the Yugoslavs were delighted with Kennan’s appointment. They had liked his Reith lectures and were sure, despite his denials, that he had visited the country the previous summer “to case the joint.” So Kennan spent the first week of February receiving briefings in Washington while delivering one of his own to the Policy Planning Staff and its new director, George McGhee. The topic was not Yugoslavia, about which Kennan as yet knew little, but the future of Soviet-American relations. It was the first time since the Solarium exercise of 1953 that anyone within the government—apart from the CIA—had sought his views.

Kennan saw no possibility now of ending the division of Europe. But the United States should seek points of agreement with the U.S.S.R.—particularly on commercial ties, to which the Kremlin leadership attached symbolic significance—while avoiding unnecessary irritants like the annual congressional resolution that called for liberating the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe: “Khrushchev with all his bluster is a sensitive man. We need patience and humor in dealing with him. We should not be worried by his statement that the Soviet Union intends to bury us—this was metaphorical, and the Soviet leaders know where their real interests lie.” Kennan did not repeat his suggestion, made to Kennedy, that improving Soviet-American relations could sharpen Sino-Soviet differences. He did, however, revive his proposal—first made over a decade earlier—that the United States withdraw its military bases from Japan. And it would be helpful if the State Department could return “to the old practice of giving instructions to a newly-appointed Ambassador explaining the purposes and objectives of his mission.”³⁰

On February 11 Kennan, along with Rusk, Harriman, Bohlen, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, attended a briefing for President Kennedy at the White House from Ambassador Thompson, just back from Moscow. Kennan could not help noticing that Johnson sat “in what seemed to me to be a sulky silence.” There was general agreement with Thompson’s claim that Soviet military and economic strength was increasing but also with Kennan’s reminder that Khrushchev and his colleagues expected to win “by the play of other forces.” Among these were “third world” opportunities, as in Laos, the Congo, and Cuba. The Soviet leader was eager to resume talks with the United States, broken off after the U-2 incident, and would probably not react violently “to a possible swift action against the Castro government.” Bundy’s minutes failed to specify who made this last suggestion; nor did they record what Kennan recalled Bohlen and himself saying next to the president: “Whatever you feel you have to do here, be sure that it is successful.”³¹

At his confirmation hearing on March 6, Kennan reminded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that neither the Soviet Union nor Communist China controlled Yugoslavia: “We should be happy to see that country maintain maximum independence.” The committee confirmed Kennan’s appointment unanimously, the Senate quickly agreed, and he was sworn in on March 22. That afternoon Kennan again saw the president, who wanted to know what his new ambassador to Belgrade thought about the government to which he was now accredited.

The Yugoslavs, Kennan replied, accepted American economic and financial assistance, yet supported the Soviet position “on almost every important issue.” Tito and his associates were “too deeply affected by their early Communist training to be able to get away from it entirely.” The best hope lay in the next generation of Yugoslav leaders, who might welcome “normal and intimate relations with us.” Would it help, Kennedy asked, to invite Tito to the United States? Perhaps, Kennan replied, but only if the visit was likely to produce “some favorable effect of a tangible nature” on the mutual relationship.³²

The important thing for Kennan at the moment, though, was rehabilitation: having despaired of any such possibility at the beginning of January, he now, at the end of March, had regained his influence in Washington, had been given an ambassadorship in a country he had long considered significant, and was serving a president who sought and respected his counsel. “Kennedy was a fan,” Bundy recalled. He responded to “exactly the kind of unusual, sensitive, independent intelligence” that Kennan possessed. The president had been “very kind,” George wrote in his diary on the evening of the twenty-second, and “my admiration continues undiminished.”³³

Back at the farm that weekend, he found “the house dank, the pump broken, the furnace losing water—A. was very dispirited. However, by evening, I had the house warm. And when Dorothy [Hessman], Wendy, and Krisha arrived from Princeton, it seemed more like old times.” The Kennans’ final briefing on Yugoslavia came a few days later from a friend, Robert Strunsky:

The people are mainly Serbs and Croats

Who used to be at each other’s throats.

But times have changed, and they’ve called it quits,

And now toast each other in slivovitz,

(A native brandy distilled from the prune

Which, when over-indulged in, can lead to ruin).

The language is difficult to determine;

The “j” is pronounced like the “j” in German,

But the “z” is pronounced like the “j” in French

(You set your jaw; and your teeth you clench).

. . . .

So much for the language . . . The People are gay,

And given to poetry, music and play.

The names of their cities are short and sweet,

Like Bled and Brod and Ub and Split.

On the other hand, you can also go

From Virovotica to Sarajevo.

So it looks as if there is much in store

For our friends who are off to this distant shore.

As eastward you turn with new bonds to forge

We wish you Godspeed, Annelise and George.³⁴

IV.

Kennan’s first significant act as ambassador took place before he left the United States. On April 19, 1961, he stopped by the Yugoslav embassy in Washington to warn his counterpart, Ambassador Marko Nikezic, of the “mischief” that could ensue if Belgrade “joined in anti-U.S. hysteria over the Cuban fiasco”—this was the CIA’s failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro by landing Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs two days earlier, about which Kennan had expressed forebodings when he first learned of it at the White House in February. It was under that cloud—“not helpful” at the beginning of his assignment—that George, Annelise, Christopher, Wendy, and Krisha sailed for Cannes on the twenty-fourth.³⁵