United States are important.... That might mean anything, depending on how you look at it.”19
III.
“Our new minister has arrived so Ave’s thrilled,” Harriman’s daughter Kathleen, who served as his official hostess in Moscow, wrote on July 3, 1944. “The new counselor speaks in Russian perfectly freely,” an aide reported to Molotov a few days later, “quite willingly entering conversation, although in his manner he seems at first reserved and dry.” By then Kennan had already spent hours talking with his new boss: as Harriman’s aide Robert Meiklejohn noted, “[t]he Ambassador put him to work at once.” The topic was probably Poland, for Kennan followed up with the first of many memoranda on that subject.20
History had shown, he wrote, that Germany and Russia tolerated a strong and independent Poland only when they themselves were weak. “Otherwise, Poland inevitably becomes a pawn in their century-old rivalry.” With the Red Army nearing Warsaw, independence looked extremely unlikely. The alternative would not necessarily be communism, but it would involve “extensive control of foreign affairs, military matters, public opinion, and economic relations with the outside world.” As a consequence, the United States should be very careful not to promise the Poles “a prosperous and happy future under Russian influence. Prosperity and happiness have always been, like warm summer days, fleeting exceptions in the cruel climate of Eastern Europe.”21
“All interesting,” Harriman commented, “especially last para[graph].” It was indeed, because Great Britain had gone to war in 1939 on Poland’s behalf, and Roosevelt and Churchill had publicly pledged, two years later in the Atlantic Charter, to restore “sovereign rights and self-government . . . to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Stalin, however, had paved the way for the German invasion of Poland with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and the Red Army had occupied the eastern third of the country shortly thereafter. Hitler’s attack in 1941 placed the Soviet Union nominally on the side of the Polish government-in-exile in London, but the relationship remained wary because Stalin was determined to keep the territorial gains the U.S.S.R. had made, as Germany’s ally, at Poland’s expense.22
Then in 1943 the Germans revealed that they had found the graves of some fifteen thousand Polish prisoners of war, allegedly shot by the Russians three years earlier, at Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. When the London Poles called for an investigation, Stalin broke diplomatic relations with them and began preparations to set up a Polish government of his own design. At Harriman’s request, Kathleen and John Melby inspected the site early in 1944, after the Russians had recaptured it. They reported that the Germans had killed the Poles, and Harriman accepted their findings. Kennan, still in London, had his doubts—correctly as it turned out—but with no evidence of his own, he fell in “with the tacit rule of silence which was being applied at that time to the unpleasant subject in question.”23
Meanwhile Roosevelt was running for reelection. With a large, politically active Polish American community in the United States, the last thing he wanted was controversy over Katyn or anything else that had to do with Poland. On his instructions, Harriman told Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, a month before Kennan’s arrival in Moscow, that “the Polish-Soviet question must not become an issue in the forthcoming presidential campaign.” The president was doing what he could to restrain the London Poles and hoped that “whatever the Soviet Government publicly stated would be on a constructive side.... It was time to keep the barking dogs quiet.”24
With that objective in mind, Roosevelt arranged for Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, the prime minister of the London Polish government, to visit Moscow at the end of July. He was coming, Kennan warned Harriman, at a moment when pride and elation over Soviet victories had “almost reached the point of hysteria.” The Russians were less worried than ever before about controlling Eastern Europe and would not go out of their way to meet the wishes of emigre Poles. But Harriman refused to pass this depressing conclusion on to Washington. “The Russians have a long-term consistent policy,” Kennan complained in his diary. “We have—and they know we have—a fluctuating policy reflecting only the momentary fancies of public opinion in the United States.” Given this disparity, Americans should stop “mumbling words of official optimism” and instead “bow our heads in silence before the tragedy of a people who have been our allies, whom we have saved from our enemies, and whom we cannot save from our friends.”25
On August 1, 1944, the day Kennan wrote those words, resistance fighters linked to the London Poles seized large portions of Warsaw, in the expectation that the Red Army, which had reached the eastern suburbs of the city, would come to their assistance. But, as he noted on the sixth, “there is some suspicion that the Russians are deliberately withholding support, finding it by no means inconvenient that the Germans and the members of Mikolajczyk’s underground should destroy each other.” These fears seemed confirmed on the fifteenth when Harriman and Clark Kerr asked that British and American planes dropping supplies to the Warsaw insurgents be allowed to refuel at Soviet bases. Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Vyshinsky turned them down flat, denouncing the uprising as “ill-advised, . . . not worthy of assistance.” Harriman returned from this conversation, Kennan recalled, “shattered by the experience.” The ambassador informed Roosevelt later that evening that “[f]or the first time since coming to Moscow, I am gravely concerned by the attitude of the Soviet government.”26
Years afterward Kennan claimed to have concluded that this was the moment for an Anglo-American showdown with the Soviet leadership. They should have been given the choice “between changing their policy completely and agreeing to collaborate in the establishment of truly independent countries in Eastern Europe or forfeiting Western-Allied support and sponsorship for the remaining phases of the war.” The second front had been established. Soviet territory had been liberated. The West had the perfect right to divest itself of responsibility for what their “ally” would now do. The time had come to “hold fast and be ready to drive a real bargain with them when the hostilities [were] over.”27
Kennan’s recommendations at the time, however, were less drastic. Stalin and his subordinates, he reminded Harriman, had “never ceased to think in terms of spheres of influence.” They expected support in such regions, “regardless of whether that action seems to us or to the rest of the world to be right or wrong.” This was not, he admitted, an unreasonable position, because they would surely have respected Washington’s predominance in the Caribbean. The problem was that the American people, “for reasons which we do not need to go into,” had not been prepared for such a postwar settlement, but instead had been led to believe that the Soviet Union was eager to join an international security organization with the power to prevent aggression: “We are now faced with the prospect of having our people disabused of this illusion.” The United States should therefore warn the Kremlin leaders that their actions were making it difficult “for this or any other American administration to do for the Russian people the things which all of us would like to be able to do.” The choice would then lie with Moscow: “If this position is adhered to and if repercussions in American public opinion are unfavorable, Russia has only herself to blame.”28
Roosevelt quickly made it clear, though, that he did not wish to alter his Soviet policy in the light of the Warsaw Uprising, and Harriman followed his lead: “We had to fight the war. Hitler was our main enemy. We shouldn’t let divergence interfere with that.” Kennan, angrier now, suggested that an international force administer postwar Poland. If that were not possible, then the United States should abandon its interests there altogether rather than “to try to defend them in circumstances over which we will have no real influence.” Harriman wrote back bluntly: “George—These are two extremes, and much ‘too extreme.’ ”
“I didn’t blame Averell for it,” Kennan recalled. “Averell was the President’s personal representative, and he couldn’t join me in these criticisms.” Isaiah Berlin, who knew both men well, explained that Harriman believed in negotiation, “whereas George believed in principle. Those two things could never quite be reconciled. There was no open hostility or tension between them that I know of. But they were very different.” Harriman remembered respecting Kennan’s judgments: “They were accurate but sometimes too impractical to be acted upon.” When he
