Massachusetts. “You and I are historians,” Schlesinger recorded Kennan as having said, “or rather you are a real historian and I am a pseudo-historian.”
We both know how tenuous a relation there is between a man’s intentions and the consequences of his acts.... I have children, and I do not propose to let the future of mankind be settled or ended by a group of men operating on the basis of limited perspectives and short-run calculations. I figure that the only thing I have left in life is to do everything I can to stop the war.
Kennan was in East Berlin when the Wall went up on the thirteenth, but this being the Pennsylvania village of that name, he was not inconvenienced. Nor was he upset, Bundy reported to Kennedy on the fourteenth: to the contrary, Kennan was relieved. His conclusions—which, for once, paralleled Joe Alsop’s—were that
(1) this is something they [the Soviets and the East Germans] have always had the power to do; (2) it is something they were bound to do sooner or later, unless they could control the exits from West Berlin to the West; (3) since it was bound to happen, it is as well to have it happen early, as
The Berlin Wall, then, might ease the crisis, by means that did Khrushchev little credit. Kennan presumably conveyed this thought to Kennedy when he saw the president in an off-the-record meeting, upstairs at the White House, on the fifteenth, but Kennedy was already thinking similarly. Khrushchev ’s decision showed “how despised is the East German government, which the Soviet Union seeks to make respectable,” he had written Rusk the day before. So the question was “how far we should push this.”44
Acheson had strongly opposed negotiations over Berlin. “I never found in him at any time any enthusiasm for agreements that would meet the requirements of both sides,” Bundy recalled. “I’m not sure he ever saw that animal.” This had been the basis for Acheson’s attack on Kennan in 1958: NATO’s solidarity was more important than resolving the issues that had led to its formation in the first place. Any compromise now, the former secretary of state was sure, would shake the alliance. But Kennedy, who had admired the Reith lectures, was tilting Kennan’s way.45
He flew back to Belgrade, therefore, reassured about his influence in Washington and at least cautiously optimistic about Soviet-American relations. There was “no compelling reason,” Kennan wrote Oppenheimer in mid- September, why the world should now “tear itself to pieces” over Berlin. And his own morale was improving: his ambassadorship had “wrenched me out of established habits,” refreshing “an expertise which was rapidly disappearing through neglect but which so many outsiders still expected me to be cultivating.” Whatever contribution he could still make as a scholar would “be strengthened, even if it is delayed, by this feeding of the other side of my nature.”46
VI.
Kennedy probably wanted to see Kennan secretly on August 15 to discuss the unsigned “personal and eyes only” instructions prepared the previous day in the Department of State: that upon his return to Belgrade, Kennan was to contact the Soviet ambassador, Aleksey Alekseyevich Yepishev, to suggest setting up a confidential channel about which no other governments, particularly Germans on either side of the wall, would know. “I had the opportunity,” Kennan later explained, of talking “without an interpreter or anybody else present.” All he would have to do would be to walk “from my home to the Soviet ambassador’s home, and sit down with him in his own living room.”47
Whether by coincidence or on orders from Moscow, it was Yepishev who asked to see Kennan on August 21. They met, not in Yepishev’s living room, but in the garden of the Soviet embassy—to avoid detection devices, the ambassador whispered. Confining their first conversation to the relatively safe issue of how Laos might be neutralized, the two envoys agreed to meet again on the thirty-first, but on the previous day two Soviet correspondents tipped off the United Press representative in Belgrade to the fact that the meeting would be taking place. Fearing a repeat of the Smith-Molotov embarrassment of 1948, Kennan was initially inclined to cancel the talks altogether, but then decided to go ahead on the grounds that they might at least reveal something of Khrushchev’s intentions. If exposed, Kennan could say that they were social visits. He would “take great care not to betray more than a general knowledge of our policies.”48
They met, a day later than planned, on September 1. Khrushchev had jumped at the opportunity to use the Belgrade channel, Yepishev reported: any message that Kennan might want to send would go straight to the Soviet leader without passing through intermediaries. Meanwhile an agreement on Laos seemed possible. Kennan took this communication seriously, “since things more important than Laos were potentially involved.” Chief among these was Khrushchev’s surprise announcement, on the preceding day, that the Soviet Union would be resuming the testing of nuclear weapons, ending an informal moratorium that had been in effect since 1958. Why, Kennan demanded, had Khrushchev chosen this particular moment, “a most delicate one from [the] standpoint of progress toward negotiations over Berlin”?
Yepishev had no answer, but he went on to state Soviet preconditions for a Berlin settlement with such specificity that Kennan was sure he was acting under instructions. They amounted to formal recognition, on the part of the United States and its allies, of the fact that two German states existed and that their boundaries could not now be changed. The West Germans would not have to “take tea” with the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, but they would have to end efforts to subvert his government. In return, the Soviet Union would “disinterest” itself in West Berlin: its citizens could have whatever government they wanted, secure communications with the outside world, and the continued presence of American, British, and French troops in the city to guarantee these rights. Kennan responded, cautiously, that none of this seemed “beyond the borders of what could conceivably be discussed if the right time and atmosphere and setting” could be arranged. But if Moscow “continued the sort of behavior we had recently witnessed that time might never come.”
His assessment, for Washington, was that Khrushchev was balancing competing factions within his government. New initiatives on Berlin and Germany should be pursued, therefore, “only with utmost prudence on our part.” Nevertheless, it would be unwise to shut down the Belgrade channel, for “I am quite satisfied that it does indeed represent a means of private and earliest communication with Khrushchev.” As if to confirm this, Yepishev followed up with a ten-page unsigned memorandum reiterating the points he had made orally. Kennan himself translated it for the State Department and sent it off by pouch: having cabled its substance, he had no need this time for a long telegram. He had no doubt, though, that Khrushchev would regard any Kennan reply as coming from Kennedy.49
That message, Kennan advised, should stress the inconsistency of “provocations” like the resumption of nuclear testing with the peaceful protestations Yepishev had conveyed. It was important to remember, however, that Khrushchev, for all his blustering, did not want a war. Washington’s position, then, should also reflect a readiness to negotiate, if necessary alone: “[W]e cannot let petty inhibitions of our allies, or even desire for moral support in unaligned camp, paralyze our action in any of the great decisions.” Rusk’s response was curt. “Approve your proposed reply on Berlin,” he cabled, but then added that Ambassador Thompson would soon be seeing Soviet foreign minister Andrey Gromyko in Moscow to make “tentative soundings on attitudes toward negotiations on Germany and Berlin. Believe your channel should be kept open but not developed on Berlin at this point.”50
There were two more meetings with Yepishev, at which he seemed to be pleading for flexibility, but Kennan had no further instructions on how to respond. By mid-September, the NATO ambassadors had met in Paris and complained about lack of consultation; meanwhile the State Department was reverting, as Kennan saw it, to “a
