had been made, and Yugoslav intelligence had had an amazingly interesting evening.69
By a vote of 256 to 91, the House passed the trade expansion bill, with Mills’s language unchanged, on October 4. The Senate approved it by acclamation on the same day. On the fifth Kennan cabled Kennedy and Rusk to say that his usefulness as an ambassador had come to an end, and that he would soon be stepping down: the Yugoslavs did not wish for him to leave, but they understood his embarrassment “after adoption by Congress of measures I have publicly opposed.” This caused a flurry at the White House, where Bundy promised that Kennedy, in signing the bill, would make “emphatically plain” his objections to the language on Yugoslavia: “I feel sure that you would not want to do anything which might be construed, even by a few, as reflecting differences with the President.” Kennedy himself weighed in on the ninth: “Bundy is right. You must stay in Yugoslavia since you understand better than anyone else what our policy aims to accomplish.” Most convincingly, Annelise also opposed resignation: “You don’t want to do that.”70
Sadly, Kennedy himself, when he did sign the trade bill on the eleventh, reneged on Bundy’s promise: he praised the legislation as the most important since the Marshall Plan, leaving it to an unnamed White House “source” to voice his dissatisfaction with the denial of “most-favored nation” status. “I want you to know that the matter is very much on his mind,” Bundy apologetically cabled Kennan. “Fearful agonies of decision whether to resign or not,” George recorded in his diary on the fourteenth. “Allowed myself finally to be persuaded (not just by A’s remonstrations alone, but by these as [the] last straw of many) not to do so; but went off for a long walk, totally discouraged, feeling defeated as I have not felt since 1953.”71
IX.
Kennedy learned, on the next morning, that there were Soviet missiles in Cuba: these gave him much more to worry about than Yugoslavia, Kennan, and Wilbur Mills. Kennan had cautioned the State Department by cable, on September 13, that it should not dismiss as “propaganda” Khrushchev’s warnings about the island: “When Soviet Union threatens to intervene militarily and to unleash world war if we move to defend our security and peace of Western Hemisphere, this is profoundly serious matter.” But he played no role in the crisis that followed, hearing of it only when the rest of the world did. “I recall vividly the strains of the last world war and the months that I was [separated] from any communication with the family,” he wrote Joan on October 23 from Milan, where he and Annelise were on a brief holiday. Could she take responsibility for Christopher if they, with Wendy, should be interned somewhere? “I feel it is very serious,” Annelise added, “but cannot work myself up to the same pitch as Daddy. . . . However, it is better to be prepared!”72
The chauffeur of the embassy “flagship” rushed the Kennans back to Belgrade—over five hundred miles—in eleven hours, from where they watched the Soviet-American confrontation unfold. Appalled by the risks Khrushchev had run and not particularly sympathetic to Castro, the Yugoslavs kept their heads down, protesting the blockade of the island only after the larger crisis had been resolved. Kennedy’s handling of the situation had been “masterful,” Kennan thought. Tito’s colleagues quietly agreed, pointing out that if war had come, they would have had to come down on the Cuban side.73
With the assurance, then, that there would be a future, Kennan turned to an analysis of where American policy toward Yugoslavia had gone wrong. The problem, he concluded in an eight-thousand-word dispatch pouched to Washington at the end of November, had been “heroic struggles with ourselves.” If the United States could not do better, then it might as well “fold up our tents, before the Yugoslavs fold them up for us.” Bundy passed Kennan’s analysis to the president, who ordered yet another review and again asked Kennan to fly back for it—his fifth such trip since becoming ambassador.74
Meanwhile Tito was in Moscow, having been driven there, Kennan was sure, by American obtuseness. He had to acknowledge, though, that the Yugoslav leader was enjoying the “personal triumph of his life.” Khrushchev received him as an honored guest, with a deference that did not seem to expect subservience. Strangely, Kennan thought this a sham and even proposed, early in January 1963, that he begin cultivating Tito’s domestic opponents. Washington should provide no further food aid, and although Kennedy should seek the reinstatement of “most- favored nation” treatment, he should do this as a point of principle and not as way of luring Tito back to the side of the West.75
These suggestions bewildered the NSC staff. “The Ambassador is clearly on the zag course now, having completed the zig with his [November] airgram,” David Klein complained to Bundy. No one in Washington or in the Moscow embassy shared Kennan’s suspicions of a Tito-Khrushchev plot. Clearly “matters of personality and intuition” were shaping Kennan’s judgment, making it “difficult to come to grips with the substance of the problem.” As for standing on principle, “[t]he President can do many things, but I doubt that even he could pull off this kind of a gambit with the U.S. Congress in the year of our Lord 1963.”76
“It is by no means certain that the President will do, at this time, what I should like him to do,” George wrote Annelise from Washington, “and if it is not done now, I fear it will never be done.” That proved to be prescient. Kennedy received him on January 16 but ruled out any challenge to Congress for the foreseeable future. All that he agreed to do was to answer a planted press conference question a few days later, noting the importance of exploiting differences “behind the Iron Curtain” and hoping “that the Congress would reconsider the action it took last year.”77
Bearing that crumb, Kennan saw Tito soon after returning to Belgrade. Tito seemed uneasy but made it clear that Yugoslavia was not about to abandon its independence. The Warsaw Pact no longer fitted “modern conditions.” The word “bloc” was losing its relevance. The other Eastern Europeans would soon follow Yugoslavia’s example. Tito hoped no longer to have to rely upon the United States, because “he never knew at what point they would get hit by some whim of the Congress.” But the Americans had nothing to fear from his policy. The State Department and its Belgrade embassy should simply give them “a true picture of [the] situation as of today.”78
The meeting left Kennan deflated, dispirited, and on the way to the hospital. The trouble this time, the American military doctors in Frankfurt determined, was not ulcers but a kidney stone that would plague him for years to come. From his bed, Kennan reverted to another habit: he completed an eight-page letter to Walter Lippmann, not unlike the one he had dictated from another hospital in Washington a decade and a half earlier. “Being myself inhibited from writing for publication,” he wanted the Yugoslav situation to be known “to
The ultimate goal of the United States, Kennan argued, should have been to loosen the cohesion of the Marxist-Leninist world, which might be “the only means short of war by which we can ever make headway against the communist colossus.”
That this possibility, with all of its implications, should continue to be sacrificed to the passions of a few Ukrainian and Croatian exiles and the brutal demagoguery of a few violent temperaments here and there in our political life—and that this should occur without any appreciable protest on the part of American public opinion—is a situation so painful and lamentable, particularly to one who has tried to represent us in Yugoslavia, that it is my excuse for invading your privacy in this way, and for doing so at this outrageous length.
To John Paton Davies, Kennan added, a few days later, that his had been “a disastrously unsuccessful tour of duty.” He would have accepted the blame had it not been for the fact that no one on either side had listened to him: “I am as remote from the counsels of the congressional and labor leaders who have made U.S. policy . . . as I am
