sullen and passive refusal to discuss Berlin.” That amounted to demanding “a unilateral Soviet military and political withdrawal from central Europe,” he complained to Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles on the twenty-second. “[I]f this is the only alternative presented to the Russians, it is clear that they would prefer to make war.” Acheson, it seemed, had prevailed after all.51
Khrushchev, with characteristic earthiness, had the last word. He had agreed, he wrote Kennedy on September 29, that Kennan and Yepishev should exchange views informally. “I never met Mr. Kennan,” but he seemed to be a man “with whom preparatory work could be done.” The two ambassadors were spending too much time, however, “sniffing each other.” For the Belgrade channel to work, they would need instructions “to start talks on concrete questions without needless procrastination and not merely indulge in tea-drinking, . . . walk[ing] round and about mooing at each other.” The instructions, from Washington at least, never came.52
Kennan acknowledged, in 1965, that his conversations with Yepishev on Laos had been useful: “I attribute the subsequent quietness of the Laotian situation, in part, to these discussions.” But Rusk and his soon-to-be-appointed under secretary of state, George Ball, shut down the Berlin discussions, fearing that if news of them ever leaked, the West Germans would be horrified: “I always felt that it was a great shame that this channel was allowed to die, because they [would] not have found a better one.” That might well have been the case, for Khrushchev had been following Kennan’s thinking since the Reith lectures. “Many of Mr. Kennan’s ideas would be acceptable to us and should be to the advantage of the US as well,” the Soviet leader had told Harriman in 1959. Kennedy took a similar view, and in the wake of Kennan’s visit to Washington in August 1961, there was serious talk within the National Security Council about what form a deal on Berlin might take. “I suspect that Kennan provided expert reinforcement for views Kennedy already had,” Schlesinger later recalled.53
In the end, though, Kennedy was no more prepared to take on his own State Department, Adenauer, and of course Acheson, than he had been Congress on “captive nations.” And so it would be left to a new generation of Germans a decade later, with the wary acquiescence of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, to work out much the same Berlin settlement that Khrushchev, through Yepishev, had recommended in 1961 and that Kennan could have negotiated.
VII.
The White House gave Kennan one other assignment during his August visit, which was to cultivate Tito’s guests at the September conference of “nonaligned” states. “[P]robably no American is more admired among the neutrals than George Kennan,” Schlesinger reminded Kennedy. “Many of those coming to Belgrade would wish to see him.” The American ambassador could hardly buttonhole delegates in the corridors, but he could attend receptions for them in other embassies, respond if they sought his views, and explain U.S. policy to them. “We would be depriving ourselves of one of our most powerful weapons at the conference if Kennan were told that he could have nothing to do with it.” That did not happen.54
Now, however, Tito reneged on a promise. He had assured Kennan, during the summer, that he would host the conference in an impartial manner. But when he addressed the delegates on September 3, the Yugoslav leader said that although the timing had surprised him, he “could understand” Khrushchev’s decision to resume nuclear testing, given the “incomprehensible policies pursued by some powers” who believed that rearming West Germany would enhance European security. “George absolutely hit the ceiling,” Bill Bundy recalled. Khrushchev himself could have written the speech, Kennan reported with disgust. It looked, he later observed, “as though the Russians were in a position to make [Tito] say anything they wanted to.”55
So instead of Kennan listening to the delegates, they—and the press—had to listen to him as he voiced his indignation: “The Yugoslavs didn’t like this at all,” but they had “chosen their road,” he wrote the State Department. They could no longer be considered “a friendly or neutral nation.” Tito had become a sycophant, it seemed, in a single speech. Ball detected in Kennan’s telegrams a sense of personal affront: “I never saw that attitude on the part of any other ambassador.” Most Foreign Service officers dealt with governments that behaved “like sons-of- bitches,” Bill Bundy added. “George found [that] very hard to accept.” Shocked, the Yugoslavs took to asking: “Is the Ambassador still angry with us?” But Kennedy backed Kennan: “I want you to know that I particularly like your insistence upon representing the interests and purposes of the United States Government, even when this involves abrasions with those to whom you are accredited.”56
Since 1948 the United States had supported Tito’s regime with economic and even military assistance, despite its communist character: Kennan, more than anyone else, had originated that policy. Sustaining it had been difficult, given the objections of anti-Tito exiles, skepticism about foreign aid of any kind, and the widespread belief that all communists were enemies, whether they had split with Moscow or not. Yugoslavia was thus a tempting target for congressional critics, and now Tito was behaving, Kennan believed, as though he could not care less about “the preservation of American, or indeed western, influence anywhere in the world.” It was important that the Yugoslavs learn the “limits to American patience.” They had cheered Kennan’s appointment, the
Despite these strains in the official relationship, Kennan liked the Yugoslav people. He appreciated “their sweetness to children, their feeling for beauty, their intense suspicions and loyalties, their individuality and charm and sense of humor,” he wrote Oppenheimer. His task was to reconcile three things: the lifelong ideological commitment of Tito’s generation; American support for West German rearmament, which the Yugoslavs would “never understand or forgive”; and their continuing need for aid from the United States, which, “proud as they are, they hate to take.” But perhaps he and their leaders were beginning to work out “what is possible and what is impossible in our relations.”58
Kennedy asked Kennan to return for a review of Yugoslav policy in January 1962. After meeting with him twice, the president approved moderate amounts of food and development assistance, the sale of supplies for military equipment that the Yugoslavs had already obtained from the United States, and a continuation of trade on the same basis as with “non-Soviet bloc” nations. All of this required congressional approval, so Kennan presented the proposals to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, encountering no significant objections. He would return to Belgrade, he wrote Annelise, with understandings that “should get us over the major humps and make possible the continuation of my own work on a reasonably favorable basis.”59
At the president’s request, Kennan had prepared a summary of administration policy, but on February 5 Rusk released a revised version of it which stressed—as Kennan had been careful not to do—that Yugoslavia was strengthening its Western ties at the expense of those with the East. The Chinese published Rusk’s statement, embarrassing Kennan, who knew how much Tito resented being portrayed as a tool of the “imperialists.” No one in the State Department was listening to him, Kennan complained to Schlesinger in March, despite the fact that Rusk and the new ambassador to the Soviet Union, Foy Kohler, had once been his subordinates. Perhaps it was time to resign. He would not do this “precipitately,” but he wanted the White House to know.60
NSC staffer Robert Komer found in Kennan’s reporting few “constructive ideas” but thought the State Department reluctant to argue with an ambassador who had the ear of the White House. That he did have, McGeorge Bundy assured Kennan: the president “follows your reports with a personal interest that is matched only in one or two places which, on their surface, are more troublesome than Belgrade.” So Komer hoped that “we’re going to use Kennan’s visit here for a long cool look at what we could or should do to forestall or limit Tito’s lean leftward.”61
The occasion this time was a Washington trip by the Yugoslav foreign minister, Koca Popovic. Kennedy received
