interests, “the door is always wide open for full discussion and the composing of our differences.” The two men then met on the tenth, with each professing his country’s peaceful intentions. But on the eleventh, the Soviet news agency TASS released an edited version of this supposedly secret conversation: its apparent purpose was to imply that the United States had proposed a European settlement without consulting its allies. That unexpected development raised “very grave doubts in the minds of His Majesty’s Government as to what may have been intended,” Bevin cabled Marshall, in words more restrained than the anger he felt. Queries from other alarmed Europeans followed, as did a cacophony of excited press commentary.7
“I was appalled at what I had done,” Kennan later recalled. “For two evenings, I walked the streets of Foxhall Village, trying ... to discover where the error had lain.” Finally he asked to see Marshall, for what he expected to be a reprimand. “I think we were right,” he said, “and that the critics are wrong. But where there is so much criticism, there must be some fault somewhere.”
General Marshall put down his papers, turned ponderously in his chair, and fixed me penetratingly over the rims of his glasses. I trembled inwardly for what was coming.
“Kennan,” he said, “when we went into North Africa, in 1942, and the landings were initially successful, for three days we were geniuses in the eyes of the press. Then . . . for another three weeks we were nothing but the greatest dopes.
“The decision you are talking about had my approval; it was discussed in the Cabinet; it was approved by the President.
“The only trouble with you is that you don’t have the wisdom and perspicacity of a columnist. Now get out of here!”
The implications of what had happened, however, were not as reassuring. The Soviets had in the past respected confidentiality, Kennan reminded Marshall, but that could no longer be assumed: “The diplomatic channel to Moscow is really eliminated.” As long as Molotov remained foreign minister, there could be no communication “without making it to the world.”8
That was underestimating the problem, for Stalin himself had read Smith’s note, scribbling a sardonic “Ha, Ha!” next to the passage about an open door for diplomacy. He then ordered the release of the edited exchange and compounded the mischief by inserting himself into the American presidential campaign. On May 12 Wallace published an open letter to Stalin closely paralleling the TASS version of the Smith-Molotov conversation. Stalin responded on the seventeenth, welcoming Wallace’s letter as a possible basis for the peaceful resolution of differences. It was a transparent attempt, Durbrow reported disgustedly from Moscow, to “lend the appearance of substance to the vacuity of Wallace’s declarations . . . and thus to emasculate American policy.”9
The timing did seem more than coincidental. The State Department had evidence, Kennan explained to Smith, that Wallace had known what Stalin was going to do: “We unwittingly ran head on into a neat little arrangement between the Kremlin and some of the people in the Wallace headquarters.” Wallace was indeed coordinating his actions with Moscow, but Kennan chose not to pursue the possibility that a former vice president of the United States had become a Soviet agent. What chiefly concerned him was that something had been “seriously wrong with my own analysis of events.”
It was clear now that Stalin and his subordinates had no intention of dealing with Marshall and the other architects of containment. This was, in one sense, flattering: “They know very well that to us they would have to make real concessions, that we would not be put off with phony ones.” But the situation was also dangerous, for they would use every opportunity to confuse public opinion and to build up Wallace. Kennan had been “horrified,” he admitted to Smith, “by the ease with which the press and other groups interested in foreign affairs were taken in by this Russian maneuver.”10
He was still seething when he traveled to Canada late in May. The invitation had come about because the Canadians, for whom Kennan had become a kind of Delphic oracle, were still trying to figure out what he had meant weeks earlier when he had expressed optimism about relations with Moscow in his Tokyo press conference. What they got now, however, were grim warnings about the naivete of such a view. Speaking at the National Defence College in Kingston, Kennan summoned a long list of witnesses to Muscovite perfidy, extending all the way back to the emissaries of Queen Elizabeth I: “One can search in vain through the annals of Russian diplomacy for a single example of an enduring, decent and pleasant relationship between Russia and a foreign state.”
Like early Christians in the late Roman Empire (Gibbon echoed loudly here), the international communist movement was hollowing out Western civilization from within, taking advantage of its “self-flagellating conscience.” Such penitence ignored Russian history and Soviet ideology, encouraging the illusion that Stalin’s behavior depended solely upon whether he was “pleased or irritated or impressed” with Western actions. The Smith-Molotov exchange had made it “terrifyingly clear” that “the Russians are able to raise or lower at will the temperature of American political life.”
The United States and its allies could no longer expect, therefore, any reconciliation with the Soviet leaders, after which “we would all go away and play golf.” The Cold War would continue, “probably through our lifetimes.” The task now must be to manage it, and that would require an approach as “profoundly dialectic” as its Soviet counterpart. It would have to contain “conflicting elements of persuasion and compulsion.” It would be “partly one and partly the other.” It would require allowing what might appear to be “complete and arbitrary inconsistency.” This capacity to “blow hot” one day and “blow cold” the next would be vital, for if “one or the other of these possibilities is denied to us, I assure you with the deepest conviction that we are lost.”11
All of this may have clarified things for the Canadians, but Kennan’s vehemence suggested how much the Smith-Molotov episode had shaken him: for the first time since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, he had failed to anticipate what Stalin would do. With a single sleazy trick, the old dictator had undermined Kennan’s credibility as a Soviet expert. Kennan had let himself become too hopeful too soon. Even worse, he had transformed that hope into a failed policy initiative. His career did not suffer, because he still had Marshall’s support. But his faith in himself did, along with the reputation his expertise hitherto had earned him.
II.
He had already been wrong about Italy. The prospect of a communist takeover there had so haunted Kennan that in his ill-conceived “short telegram” from Manila on March 15, he raised the possibility of canceling the upcoming elections and outlawing the communist party, even at the risk of civil war and an American reoccupation of military bases on the peninsula. The situation was still worrying him as he finished his letter to Lippmann on April 6: Italy was, he wrote, the only remaining weak spot in Western Europe. On the day after Kennan got back to the office, however, it became clear that the Italian Communist Party had suffered a decisive defeat in the April 18–19 elections. Alarmed by events in Czechoslovakia, encouraged by the prospect of Marshall Plan aid, the Italians had turned back a Moscow-inspired conquest from within, on their own and by democratic means. Or so it seemed.
In fact, Italy had been the site, over the past few weeks, of the CIA’s first major covert operation. It’s difficult, even today, to assess the importance of the secret funding the agency cobbled together for the Christian Democrats as against other influences on the election outcome: the Vatican’s implacable anticommunist offensive; the massive Italian American letter-writing campaign warning that a communist victory would end economic assistance from the United States; the extent to which the Czech coup discredited the Italian communists. Those who knew about the
