always clear. For all the space he gave to it, he failed to explain how Russian culture affected Soviet behavior. He contradicted himself by claiming at one point that Kremlin leaders could never know what their people were thinking, while warning elsewhere of their ability totally to control that thinking. There were no clear recommendations for what the United States should do: this surely would have disappointed anyone who read the essay through to the end. They would have found there, instead, a self-indulgent self-portrait—the lonely expert atop the chilly and inhospitable mountain—which seemed to suggest that only Kennan was qualified to stand on that pinnacle, and that no one would take his conclusions seriously if he reached it. When conveyed in this form, he was correct.
V.
“This is my sixth winter in Moscow,” George wrote Jeanette on January 25, 1945, “and I’m getting pretty well used to them. We are taking things pretty easy and just praying that they will really relieve me here in time to let me get home before the whole spring season is over.” The main subject of this letter—Jeanette having sent Betty MacDonald’s best seller
She would have been right, for on the next day Kennan completed his sharpest attack yet on American policy toward the Soviet Union. It took the form of an eight-page personal letter to Chip Bohlen. Kennan wrote it knowing that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin would be meeting at Yalta on February 4, and that Bohlen—the president’s interpreter—would literally have his ear. He sent it four days after Harriman had left to supervise preparations: Hessman, who typed it, remembered that the ambassador’s absences seemed to liberate Kennan. This document too failed to achieve its purpose: given its startling contents, he could hardly have expected otherwise. But it did, with uncanny foresight, prescribe policy. By the middle of 1947 the U.S. government had agreed to almost everything Kennan had recommended. He was still lonely and unappreciated at the beginning of 1945, but that was only because he was two and a half years ahead of everyone else.34
Kennan began by reminding his old friend of a claim Bohlen had made the previous summer: that if Kennan had not been limited by “the narrow field of vision provided by Lisbon and the EAC, . . . I would have had more confidence in the pattern of things to come.” Six months in Moscow had expanded Kennan’s horizons, but without changing his conviction that Soviet political objectives in Europe were not consistent “with the happiness, prosperity or stability of international life on the rest of the continent.” Stalin and his subordinates viewed with suspicion “any source of unity or moral integrity” that they could not control. Rather than allow these to exist, there was no evil they would not be prepared to inflict, “if they could.”
A basic conflict is thus arising over Europe between the interests of Atlantic sea-power, which demand the preservation of vigorous and independent political life on the European peninsula, and the interests of the jealous Eurasian land power, which must always seek to extend itself to the west and will never find a place, short of the Atlantic Ocean, where it can from its own standpoint safely stop.
No one was to blame for this: the situation was deeply rooted in Russian history and in European geography. Nor did Kennan question the need for Moscow’s assistance in defeating Nazi Germany: “We were too weak to win [the war] without Russia’s cooperation.” Nor could anyone doubt that the Soviet war effort had been “masterful and effective and must, to a certain extent, find its reward at the expense of other peoples in eastern and central Europe.”
He did wonder, though, “why we must associate ourselves with this political program, so hostile to the interests of the Atlantic community as a whole, so dangerous to everything which we need to see preserved in Europe.” Why not instead divide Europe “into spheres of influence—keep ourselves out of the Russian sphere and keep the Russians out of ours?” That would allow honesty in dealing with Moscow, while “within whatever sphere of action was left to us we could at least [try] to restore life, in the wake of the war, on a dignified and stable foundation.”
Instead, the Roosevelt administration was refusing to specify American interests in Europe, while going ahead with plans for a new League of Nations with “no basis in reality,” a course that could only accentuate differences with the Soviet Union while giving the American public “a distorted picture of the nature of the problems the postwar era is bound to bring.” As that was happening, political and territorial settlements were being made that would leave the food-producing regions of Germany in Soviet hands, the American and British zones flooded with refugees, and no realistic prospect for cooperative tripartite administration of that country. American influence would be confined “to the purely negative act of destroying Nazi power.”
So what to do? “We should gather together at once into our hands all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full value.” Plans for the United Nations should be set aside “as quickly and quietly as possible.” The United States should abandon Eastern Europe altogether. And Washington should accept Germany’s division into a Soviet and a consolidated Anglo-American zone, with the latter integrated as much as possible into the economic life of Western Europe. Each of the victors would take reparations from its zone only, on a “catch as catch can” basis. Kennan admitted that this “bitterly modest” program would amount to a partition of Europe. “But beggars can’t be choosers.”
Bohlen received Kennan’s letter at Yalta. He wrote back hurriedly that although its recommendations might make sense in the abstract, “as practical suggestions they are utterly impossible. Foreign policy of that kind cannot be made in a democracy. Only totalitarian states can make and carry out such policies.” What Bohlen meant, he explained in his memoirs, was that democracies
must take into account the emotions, beliefs, and goals of the people. The most carefully thought-out plans of the experts, even though 100 percent correct in theory, will fail without broad public support. The good leader in foreign affairs formulates his policy on expert advice and creates a climate of public support to support it.
More privately, Bohlen remembered worrying about Kennan’s “damn-it-all-the-hell-with-it-let’s-throw-up-our- hands” attitude. “Obviously you couldn’t do that.” Roosevelt understood that Americans, who had fought a long, hard war, deserved at least an attempt to make peace. If it failed, the United States could not be blamed for not trying. Or as Bohlen put it in his reply to Kennan at the time: “Quarreling with them would be so easy, but we can always come to that.”
Kennan’s letter went nowhere because he destroyed all copies of it—or thought he had—at Bohlen’s request: “That it was written to him while he was at Yalta challenged what the President was trying to do.” But Hessman quietly kept a copy, and as it happened Bohlen did also, even publishing portions of it years later in his memoirs, to Kennan’s surprise. Despite all of Roosevelt’s efforts to get along with Moscow, Bohlen acknowledged, Stalin did “exactly as Kennan had predicted and I had feared.” Even so, Bohlen could not agree “that we should write off Eastern Europe and give up efforts to cooperate with the Soviet Union”—at least not yet.35
VI.
John Paton and Patricia Davies arrived in Moscow, after years of Foreign Service duties in China, at the end of March 1945. They found Harriman functioning at the level of Roosevelt, Stalin, and their respective advisers, mostly from his Spaso House bedroom, where the ambassador would review dispatches late into the night in a dressing gown, in front of the fireplace. “We’d sit around there and chat,” Patricia remembered, while Harriman would feed the fire. “There was something about the way he did it that drove George absolutely up a tree! You could just see him holding himself back, and his eyes, those large eyes, practically popping out of his head.” Kennan would
