George F. Kennan : an American life

his guest in the White House living quarters on May 29 and from his rocking chair began gently questioning him on what ideology really meant in the modern world. Weren’t other issues shaping relations between Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Albania? If that was the case, why should ideology affect Yugoslavia’s relations with the United States? There were, to be sure, still American isolationists who were “not sophisticated” about communism. But if the Yugoslavs could avoid episodes like the Belgrade conference, then there could surely be friendly relations, since the purpose of American policy was to preserve Yugoslavia’s independence.⁶²

“I was full of admiration for the way the President handled him,” Kennan recalled. Kennedy’s boyish courtesy, bordering on naivete, reminded him of the young Charles Lindbergh, perhaps even Lincoln: “There was something very appealing about it.” Kennan took the opportunity, nonetheless, to leave a letter with the president and the secretary of state confirming his intention to spend another year in Belgrade, and then to return to his academic responsibilities at the Institute for Advanced Study. Were it not for these, “nothing would give me greater satisfaction than to continue to serve . . . in any manner that was useful to your purposes.”⁶³

VIII.

Nonsophisticates were much on the minds of Kennedy and Kennan during their meeting with Popovic, because two weeks earlier the House Ways and Means Committee had quietly approved an amendment to the trade expansion bill denying “most-favored nation” status—meaning generally applied tariffs and quotas—to all communist countries. “This news fills me with consternation,” Kennan had cabled from Belgrade. The Yugoslavs would interpret it as “a gratuitously offensive act.” Bundy replied, soothingly, that the bill made no explicit mention of Yugoslavia, that the administration expected to obtain an “escape clause” in the Senate, and that the Ways and Means chairman, Representative Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, had promised not to oppose this maneuver in the conference committee that would reconcile the bills prior to final passage. “I have some official worries—not with the Executive Branch but with Congress—and I won’t breathe easily until they are resolved,” George wrote Annelise on the thirty-first. But when Kennan paid a call on Mills the next morning, he disclaimed responsibility for the offending language and seemed willing to have it removed.⁶⁴

Then on June 6 Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, citing Tito’s handling of the “nonaligned” conference, proposed an amendment to the foreign aid bill denying assistance in any form to Yugoslavia. This pleased his colleagues, who extended the ban to include Poland, and it passed by a vote of 57 to 24. Reminded that they had precluded agricultural exports, the senators then amended the amendment to allow these. The world’s “greatest deliberative body,” columnist James Reston fumed, had thereby insulted both countries, first by cutting off all aid, and then, as an afterthought, by making them “a dumping ground for farm surpluses.” Kennan learned of this after returning to Belgrade. Nothing further was needed, he cabled despairingly, “to confirm Tito on his recent course and to discourage those who have argued in favor of [a] Western orientation.”⁶⁵

Caught off guard, Kennedy took the unusual step of releasing a paraphrased version of Kennan’s telegram, as well as one from John Moors Cabot, the American ambassador in Warsaw. These congressional actions, Kennan was quoted as saying, reflected “appalling ignorance” about Yugoslavia and amounted to “the greatest windfall Soviet diplomacy could encounter in this area.” His message read, reporter Max Frankel observed, as if Kennan were pleading to come back to try to save the situation. And so he was. The least he could do in Washington, Kennan wrote in his original cable, “would be more important than the most I could do, in present circumstances, at this end.” Kennedy agreed, and after only two weeks in Belgrade, Kennan was on an airplane once again.⁶⁶

“I am now launched, for the first time in my life, into the thick of a major Congressional struggle,” George wrote Annelise from Washington on July 3. “Chances of success are poor; but one doesn’t think of that in the heat of battle.” Rusk seemed unsure of why he had come, and the State Department offered little help. The president and his staff, however, arranged meetings with congressional leaders, lined up television interviews, and encouraged Kennan to state his position in The Washington Post. When he asked about trying to see Eisenhower, Kennedy instantly agreed: Kennan visited and secured the support of the former president at his Gettysburg farm, after which he stayed overnight at his own in nearby East Berlin. “I slept like a top, [and] woke up”—it was the Fourth of July—“feeling greatly refreshed.”

The next day was “hell day.” Kennan spent it “tramping from the office of one Texas or Arkansas congressman to another,” but it all seemed futile: not one would be ashamed to vote for the Proxmire amendment. “I am now desperately tired, and must be off to bed.” A second day of lobbying went better: the vote would probably be closer than it might otherwise have been. George took a bus from Washington that evening to the closest drop-off point for East Berlin, “where, in the late evening and in pitch-blackness, Joany and Larry miraculously found me by the roadside.” His Washington Post piece appeared on July 8, and two days later George wrote Annelise to say that he had finished—he hoped—his Capitol Hill diplomacy: “I have done about all that I can do.”⁶⁷

Kennan’s brief career as a lobbyist convinced him that the legislators were using Yugoslavia to demonstrate their anticommunism. It was harder to do this with the Soviet Union, because people were afraid of war. Everybody knew, though, that “Yugoslavia was not going to make war on us.” This left him, as an ambassador, with little to say. The Yugoslavs would ask: “Why is this being done to us?” He could only reply: “I have no knowledge of why it’s being done to you.” They would then inquire: “What would we have to do to avoid this?” He could only say: “I don’t know what you could do.”⁶⁸

The Proxmire amendment, in the end, fizzled: after Kennedy assured House and Senate conferees that the authority to aid Yugoslavia and Poland was one of his strongest Cold War weapons, they restored it on July 18. Kennan returned to Belgrade at the end of that month, assuming that the “most-favored nation” issue was also being resolved. But on September 27 the phone rang in the Belgrade embassy residence. The caller was Frederick G. Dutton, assistant secretary of state for congressional relations, with the news that the House-Senate conferees on the trade bill, to the surprise of the State Department, had voted to retain the denial of “most-favored nation” status to Yugoslavia and Poland. Wilbur Mills had reneged on his promise, or at least what Kennan understood it to have been. “There’s only one thing that could stop it at this point,” Kennan remembered Dutton as having said. “That would be if you would appeal personally by telephone directly to the President.”

Because the phone line was not secure, Kennan assumed that the Yugoslavs were listening: “I had no choice, then, but to call the President.” Rising to the occasion, the ambassador summoned his ancient Russian butler, Alexander, “the usual intermediary with telephone central,” and instructed him, to his amazement, to place a person-to-person call to the president of the United States. This he did, and to Kennan’s amazement, Kennedy immediately came on the line. Kennan stated as forcefully as he could what he saw as the implications of Mills’s action, whereupon the president suggested that he talk directly to the congressman and had the call transferred. Kennan was amazed again when Mills picked up the phone, but he had his speech ready, delivered “in my official capacity as ambassador in Belgrade and against the background of thirty-five years of experience with the affairs of Eastern Europe.” Denying “most-favored nation” treatment, he insisted,

would be unnecessary, uncalled for, and injurious to United States interests. It would be taken, not only in Yugoslavia but throughout this part of the world, as evidence of a petty and vindictive spirit, unworthy of a country of our stature and responsibility. This judgment has the concurrence of every officer in the mission. If the amendment is adopted, it will be in disregard of the most earnest and serious advice we are capable of giving.

Mills’s response was “cursory, negative, and offered no hope for a reversal of the action.” But at least the point