George F. Kennan : an American life

From there George flew with his son to London, where Christopher would be attending the nearby Sunningdale School: “This was really the end of the pleasant and affectionate association I had had, these past years, with the little boy, who would never be a little boy again.” George rejoined the rest of his family in Milan, and after a weekend in Venice they arrived by train in Belgrade on May 8. Krisha had repressed all natural functions while on the last part of the journey, so “we feared complications for the red carpet.” None occurred, but George was worrying about something else. Always slightly superstitious, he had noticed how closely these travel dates corresponded to those of 1952, when he had taken up the Moscow ambassadorship: “I hoped history was not preparing to repeat itself.”³⁶

Kennan presented his credentials to Tito on May 16, at the Yugoslav president’s summer residence off the coast of the Istrian peninsula. Doing so required flying, with Annelise, to a military airfield, being ferried across to the Brioni islands, and staying overnight in the once-elegant Grand Hotel, now an almost-empty official guesthouse, surrounded by deer, pheasants, peacocks, and Roman ruins. Wandering around, George found himself picking up a mosaic stone laid down in the time of Christ. It was, he wrote Grace and Joan, “as though only twenty days, not twenty centuries, had intervened.” Transportation was by horse-drawn carriages, and that was how Kennan, in great solemnity, went to meet his host.

Despite his standing as a communist leader, Tito seemed comfortable in these imperial surroundings, and after the ceremony the two talked informally for an hour. Recent debacles like the U-2 affair and the Bay of Pigs landings had caused Tito to doubt American competence, but “we were beginning to learn from our past mistakes,” Kennan assured him, and would not indefinitely accept passively “the undermining of our world position at the hands of the Russians and Chinese.” It was a tough line with which to begin his ambassadorship, and Kennan was not at all certain that he had gotten through.

George and Annelise found the embassy’s massive Cadillac—known to envious fellow diplomats as “the flagship”—waiting for them when they returned to the mainland. It drove them to Pula, a former Austro-Hungarian naval base, which evoked in George a sense of the past and, as it happened, a distant future:

Strong touches of the Hapsburg atmosphere still hung over the place: over its wide, shady boulevards and its ponderous Viennese buildings; and one could easily picture in imagination the scenes of the first years of this century: the brilliant uniforms of the officers, the trailing skirts and high-necked blouses of their ladies, the elegant sidewalk cafes, the summer band concerts, the lassitude, the pretensions, the warning flashes of distant lightning, the uneasy premonitions of tragedy, and—all around—the disconcerting dissimulation or open bitterness of the Slavs who inhabited the surrounding countryside, seething with the suppressed resentments of centuries, biding their time for a day of bloody and terrible revenge.

The “flagship” then dropped the Kennans off at the port of Rijeka, where they picked up their own less imposing vehicle, a battered British Sunbeam left over from Oxford and shipped from New York. Leaking oil and missing parts, it nonetheless got them back to Belgrade across 350 miles of bad roads, the ambassador driving it all the way.³⁷

Kennan’s embassy subordinates were unsure what to make of the legendary figure under whom they were serving: “They viewed me, I suspect, with a certain amused astonishment, enjoyed the rhetorical melodrama of my numerous telegraphic conflicts with the Department of State, were intrigued by my unorthodox reactions to the work they performed and the experiences they reported to me, and were aware—as I like to think—of the genuine respect and affection in which I came to hold them.” But he could not know for sure, given “that treacherous curtain of deference” that surrounds any ambassador. It parted only occasionally, as when, on “international night” at the American club, Kennan got out his guitar, propped a foot on a chair, and sang, to great acclaim, “Have Some Madeira, My Dear.” A British embassy secretary whispered to Dorothy Hessman: “I can’t imagine H[is] E[xcellency] doing anything like that!”³⁸

V.

Having never seen Stalin during his months in Moscow, Kennan found Tito’s accessibility striking: the Yugoslav leader received him three times within the next two and a half months, once in Belgrade and twice again at Brioni. Kennan briefed him on the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit, held in Vienna on June 2–4; they discussed escalating tensions over Berlin as well as decolonization crises in Africa; and Tito promised his guest that he would host an upcoming conference of “nonaligned” states without favoring either of the Cold War superpowers. The Americans, Kennan replied, would take “a very calm view.” Their common language was Russian—Kennan was still learning Serbo-Croatian—and they found, if not in all respects common ground, then at least mutual respect. Tito had none of Stalin’s “refined hypocrisy and cruelty,” Kennan reported. Marxist prejudices still confused him, and his people’s experiences had made him abnormally sensitive to the oppression of others. But he had “an excellent, pragmatic political mind” and had “gained both stature and mellowness with the years.”³⁹

Anticipating Yugoslav sensitivities, Kennan had urged before leaving for Belgrade that Kennedy not proclaim “Captive Nations Week” in response to the annual congressional resolution, which was sure to call for it. Among the “nations” regularly mentioned, Kennan pointed out, were “Ude-Ural” and “Cos-sackia,” which had never existed except in the minds of Nazi propagandists during the war. And did the United States really want real nations like the Ukraine to seek their independence from the Soviet Union? The time had come to end the charade “as soon as this can be tactfully and quietly arranged.”⁴⁰

The resolution passed, as usual, in July, but the State Department promised that Kennedy would not endorse it. Kennan passed the assurance on to the Yugoslavs. Then, on the fourteenth, Kennedy did just that. It was “the most discouraging thing that has happened to me since my arrival at this post,” Kennan complained to Bundy, for it conveyed the impression that the United States was seeking to break up the Soviet Union and perhaps Yugoslavia as well. Bundy, embarrassed, acknowledged the resolution’s “foolishness” but explained that Kennedy could not ignore it “for political reasons [such] as the strength of support for foreign aid.” So the president had issued his proclamation on a Saturday evening, “the quietest possible moment of the news week,” in the hope that it would attract little notice. “It was a tactical judgment,” Bundy admitted, but Kennan took it as a warning that the new administration would be no less inclined than its predecessor to resist the primacy of domestic politics over foreign policy.⁴¹

Khrushchev’s threats against West Berlin, by then, were approaching a climax. Kennan had refrained from offering advice, he wrote Bundy, since he knew that Kennedy was consulting Acheson, which must mean “a considered rejection of my own views.” Now even more embarrassed, Bundy replied, on the twenty-seventh, that Kennan had not been asked to rejoin the government “for the purpose of shutting you up.” The president would think it “absurd that the cardinal should be quiet while the bishops are squawking.” So Kennan should speak his mind, even if this meant bypassing the State Department. After all, “there are not many people in the current management who can hold their own, in purely stylistic terms, with Dean, and you are surely one of them.”⁴²

On the next day the other Dean—Secretary of State Rusk—asked Kennan to fly back to Washington with him from a meeting of American chiefs of mission in Paris that both would be attending early in August. The purpose would be consultations on Berlin, the general situation in Europe, and Tito’s upcoming conference. Another of Rusk’s passengers on that flight was the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, with whom Kennan had a long talk. It had been “the easiest trip I have ever made across the ocean,” George wrote Annelise from the farm on the evening of August 12. “Even I was not tired.”⁴³

But he was frightened. On the way from the airport, Kennan had stopped at the White House to see Arthur Schlesinger, now serving as a presidential aide—Kennedy was spending the weekend at Hyannis Port,