followed about industrialization and urbanization, compounded now by the question of where ten million veterans would find jobs after the war. Hundreds of intellectuals were planning the future of postwar Europe. “Is there no one with sufficient leisure to contemplate a postwar America?”
Here, though, there was a shift in Kennan’s thinking. In 1938 he had seen authoritarianism as a solution for the nation’s problems. Since that time he had witnessed European authoritarianism and worse: the greatest danger to the United States, he now believed, could come from a homegrown dictatorship. The cause would be the “petty- bourgeois jealousy which resents and ridicules any style of life more dignified than its own—a phenomenon of which we saw much in Nazi Germany.”
The entire experience of mankind indicates that it is always the few, never the many, who are the real obstacles in the path of the dictator. Equalitarian principles are the inevitable concomitants of dictatorship. They produced Napoleon as inevitably as they produced Hitler and Stalin. The powers of sovereignty, as Gibbon observed, will inevitably “be first abused and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude.”
It followed, therefore, that some “enlightened and responsible” minority—not necessarily one of wealth—must gain power “if anything is to impede in our country the organic progress of political form from demagoguery to dictatorship.”
Only in this way could two more vulnerable minorities be protected. One was blacks, “a gentle and lovable people” who had never adjusted to urban life, followed “every sort of quack or extremist,” and thus were fanning “a racial antagonism from which no one except the outright enemies of our people could possibly profit, and which may have the gravest of consequences to the negroes themselves.” Jews were the other endangered group. Twenty centuries of experience had shown that they would never assimilate, but Hitler had made it impossible even to mention this problem: instead “our leftist press [howls] down as a fascist and anti-semite anyone who suggests that it might be officially recognized and given governmental consideration.” Both issues needed to be resolved if “[b]eat the negroes” and “beat the Jews” were not to become the slogans “for the solution of difficulties utterly unconnected with those unfortunate groups.”
With respect to foreign policy, the aftermaths of wars were decisive moments when lines were drawn that could last for generations. The United States had had the opportunity to do that after World War I but “muffed” it. “If we muff this, too, can we be sure that we will be given a third?”
Heretofore, in our history, we have had to take the world pretty much as we found it. From now on we will have to take it pretty much as we leave it, when this crisis is over.
Without an American effort to set postwar standards of international conduct, they would find their own level —probably that of the “rising masses” of Asia—at which “no humane, well-meaning people like our own could exist. Our position—and with it all that we prize in internal liberty—is one that can be maintained only by the firm, consistent and unceasing application of sheer power, in accordance with a long-term policy.”
That would require professionalism: a state, like a business, must, if it wished to survive, find the courage to select “a few people in whose intelligence and integrity it has confidence” and to delegate to them over long periods of time not only responsibility for the execution of policy but also its formulation. In fact, though, the United States was approaching the postwar era with no such vision. Diplomacy was not “improvisation” or “exhibitionism” or “missions-to-Moscow”—here Kennan was slamming Joe Davies’s recently released movie by the same name, which dramatized his Moscow experiences in a way that even sympathizers with the Soviet Union thought whitewashed the Stalin regime.
“Against the pageant of history we cut a small and distinctly episodic figure,” George concluded. “Ignorant and conceited, we now enter blindly on a future with which we are quite unqualified to cope.” He assured Jeanette, at the end of these “lugubrious” observations, that he had not lost hope. There were in the American character great reserves of decency and humor and good nature. But if these assets were to yield a return, “then new forms must be found, new ideas must gain currency, new associations of collective effort must come into being.”30
“Don’t take it too seriously,” he added in a postscript from Lisbon, written before sending off this long screed.31 Jeanette knew him well enough not to. She understood her value to George as a confidante, as a therapist, and even—as in this letter—as a soapbox. He had long relied on, and benefited from, her patience: she provided a mirror in which he could, from time to time, examine himself.
This particular reassessment showed Kennan beginning to connect his obtuseness regarding America and his astuteness with respect to the world. His experiences in Czechoslovakia and Germany had purged him of the simpleminded view, expressed in the “Prerequisites” essay of 1938, that a dictatorship might be good for the United States. He was not so sanguine as to assume, however, that one could never arise there: he understood how it had happened in Germany and refused to rule out the possibility that American reserves of decency and good nature might be exhaustible. However exceptional his own views of it were, he never believed that his country could exist as an exception to what was happening elsewhere.
Kennan’s most significant argument, however, was that the United States, for better or for worse, had gone beyond discovering the world: whatever it did now would shape the world. That was a task, he believed, for which the nation was unprepared, and his Portuguese experiences had done nothing to reassure him. He began to develop, as a result, a new sense of responsibility within the duties assigned to him: at several points over the next few years Kennan took risks that jeopardized his own Foreign Service career because he thought that the
V.
“It was a good thing that I returned when I did,” George wrote in his postscript to Jeanette, “for the Minister here died . . . when I was on the boat, and it was high time I was getting back to my little parish.” Fish’s death left Kennan in charge of the legation at a critical moment. The British, he learned, had concluded a secret agreement with the Portuguese on August 17, 1943, allowing them to use the Azores bases. They had informed the State Department, but it had given the Lisbon legation no guidance as to what the American response should be. “We have no idea of the views of our Government,” Kennan complained on September 9, despite the fact that this development “is of the greatest importance for the future correlation of military and political power in the whole Atlantic area.” James C. Dunn, the department’s adviser on political relations, replied lamely that the Anglo- Portuguese negotiations had been handled “in the highest quarters” and that “we have no clearer picture than you of the general plan.”32
Finally on October 8, the day the British landed on the islands, the department instructed Kennan to assure Salazar that the United States respected Portuguese sovereignty “in all Portuguese colonies.” No further explanation was provided. Minutes before he was to meet Salazar on the tenth, however—the prime minister having returned to Lisbon to receive Kennan’s message—the department rescinded the instruction. At this point, exasperated but thinking quickly, Kennan decided to exceed his instructions. He reminded the puzzled Salazar that there had been no general discussion of the Portuguese-American wartime relationship and proceeded to conduct one. He then told the State Department what he had done, only to receive an equally puzzled reminder that it had always been American policy to “promote our trade and have pleasant relations with the Portuguese people.”33
