Worldmaking (42 page)

Has not the Russian experiment proven—if it has proven anything—that the proletariat, once given power, does not necessarily exercise it with any particular altruism or intelligence by virtue of its own economic chastity, but readily hands it over to the most ruthless and determined political element, which in turn, as a consequence of its ruling position, only inherits the fears and interests of former regimes and exploits the people, under appeals to their patriotism, for the maintenance of its own foreign and domestic position.
21

This is a marvelous description of Marxism-Leninism in practice. Kennan had the skills to offer the most penetrating and elegant insights on the phenomena he observed. In Germany and Russia, his fluency in those languages allowed him to assimilate and read these societies from a perspective that most foreigners were incapable of assuming. His close and vast reading of history enabled him to draw linkages across eras and empires that a novelist might miss. Yet his written English was also magnificent. This combination of attributes ensured that Kennan was promoted faster than any of his colleagues in the Foreign Service.

In September 1938, on the same day as Chamberlain and Daladier served up the Sudetenland to Hitler, Kennan arrived in Prague. He was sanguine about the appeasement that took place in Munich, reasoning that the nations of Central and Eastern Europe—the feeble progeny of Versailles—were easy prey for predators. He blamed their plight on Wilson, who facilitated the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire in the spurious name of “self-determination,” raising hopes of a meaningful future for its constituent members. Doubtful of the viability of small states like Czechoslovakia, Kennan nonetheless sympathized with its people and viewed Nazism as an abomination. Ultimately, however, he believed that Czechoslovakia's incorporation into a larger German or Russian-ruled empire was in the natural order of things. His conservative views were challenged five days into his job when a striking midwestern woman entered his office and berated him for doing nothing to protect a helpless nation. Her name was Martha Gellhorn, and it was fortunate for Kennan that she was not accompanied by her combustible lover, Ernest Hemingway. Gellhorn subsequently became one of the world's most celebrated war correspondents: brave, dedicated, and insightful. Kennan found her passion admirable in a way, but he ultimately dismissed her as an idealist with a shallow understanding of history.
22
He was similarly unimpressed by a young man named John F. Kennedy, whose father—the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom—had sent him on a “fact-finding” mission to Czechoslovakia. According to Kennan, Kennedy was “obviously an upstart and an ignoramus,” and he resented having to waste time attending to his needs. But with the “polite but weary punctiliousness that characterizes diplomatic officials required to busy themselves with pesky compatriots,” Kennan secured Kennedy safe passage through German lines to Prague and then back to London.
23

It was around this time that Kennan entertained a flirtation with authoritarianism. Through his reading of history, and firsthand experience, the nations and eras for which Kennan had developed firmest appreciation included Victorian Britain and Bismarckian Germany. The innocent virtues of the New World did not stand comparison to the best of the Old; Kennan found little in the American tradition of diplomacy that was worth retaining. Alexander Hamilton was a rare voice of geopolitical reason in the early republic, but few American diplomatists since then struck Kennan as particularly convincing. A painful return visit to the United States in 1936 had convinced him that his home had become a materialistic, self-satisfied, and philistine nation. A refrain throughout Kennan's written work is a lament that America should abstain from instructing others on the paths to progress and liberty until it creates a society of substantive, enduring value.

After departing the United States in a sorrowful state, Kennan had taken a diplomatic posting in Austria, where he had been impressed by the reactionary regime led by Kurt von Schuschnigg. In a manuscript titled “The Prerequisites: Notes on Problems of the United States in 1938,” Kennan lauded Schuschnigg's success in implementing a comprehensive law unifying medical and financial procedures drafted entirely by “experts,” a process from which the Austrian parliament had been excluded. Kennan thought that America would do well to learn from this success, its fidelity to democracy and transparency was hurting the consistency of its foreign policy and its ability to deal with acute social problems. Kennan's belief in the efficacy of government by experts, his abhorrence of the messy business of democracy and interest-group activity—particularly those ethnic lobbies that can so distort foreign-policy priorities—is presented with particular force in “The Prerequisites” and in his diary, echoing Lippmann's
The Phantom Public
. It was fortunate for Kennan that he failed to find a publisher for his manuscript. It was a fair indication of the reactionary turn of his thinking in the late 1930s and would almost certainly have ended a promising diplomatic career.

Kennan often took his disaffection with American society to remarkable extremes. On March 21, 1940, for example, as Nazi Germany subjugated and terrorized the European continent, Kennan composed a diary entry comparing European civilization favorably to American primitivism:

When they [America's forefathers] turned their backs on Europe, they closed their eyes to the lessons of that continent's past; and their backwoodsmen wisdom was not adequate to the building of anything but the most primitive social scene. It is now too late to remedy the situation. The United States is, for better or for worse, a Latin American rather than a European state. Those of us who were given an old-fashioned bringing-up will scarcely ever adapt ourselves to the situation. The best we can do is to try and adapt our children to it.
24

That these remarks coincided with Europe's historical nadir testifies to Kennan's powerful alienation from American societal and cultural mores.

Yet while Kennan was disappointed by American societal development, he found Nazism repugnant. He blamed the rise of Hitler on Germany's ignorant and clawing middle classes, newly empowered by the post-Versailles dissolution of the Junker elite. Even after Hitler's death, Kennan believed that the restoration of monarchy, “limited by an efficient bureaucracy and a powerful upper class,” represented Germany's best hope for postbellum stability.
25
While Kennan's pseudo-aristocratic prejudices were unappealing, he was also sharp in identifying Nazism's weaknesses. After being transferred from Prague to Berlin in 1939, Kennan visited the nations that had recently fallen under the Nazi yoke. In Poland, Denmark, Holland, Norway, Belgium, and France, he found Nazi rule to be brutal and self-defeating in its disrespect of each nation's proud history and identity. Here was an empire of shallow foundation that surely was not built to last. For Kennan it was obvious that “the Nazi ideology, based on nothing other than a glorification of the supposed virtues of the German people themselves, had no conceivable appeal to people, and especially young people, outside Germany itself.”
26
In Finland on March 13, 1940, Kennan recorded that it was “a black day … it was hard to think that another place where life was decent and healthy and cheerful had succumbed to the darkness and misery brought over the world by small-souled and ruthless men who control the engines of destruction.”
27
In similarly evocative prose, Kennan described Paris after Hitler's triumphant, goading arrival:

Could one not say to the Germans that the spirit of Paris had been too delicate and shy a thing to stand their determination and had melted away before them just as they thought to have it in their grasp? Was there not some Greek myth about the man who tried to ravish the goddess, only to have her turn to stone when he touched her? That is literally what has happened to Paris. When the Germans came, the soul simply went out of it; and what is left is only stone … The Germans had in their embrace the pallid corpse of Paris.
28

In Kennan's estimation, Stalinism was as baleful a force as Nazism. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he argued strongly against embracing Stalin as a future wartime ally. On June 24, 1940, Kennan wrote to Loy Henderson, head of the State Department's Bureau of Eastern European Affairs:

It seems to me that to welcome Russia as an associate in the defense of democracy would invite misunderstanding of our position and would lend to the German war effort a gratuitous and sorely needed aura of morality. In following such a course I do not see how we could help but identify ourselves with the Russian destruction of the Baltic states, with the attack against Finnish independence, with the partitioning of Poland and Rumania, with the crushing of religion throughout Eastern Europe, and with the domestic policy of a regime which is widely feared and detested throughout this part of the world and the methods of which are far from democratic.

Reflecting on this letter in his memoirs, Kennan recalled that his reaction “embodied the essence of the disagreement that was to hold me in opposition to our governmental policy for some five years to come…”
29
He believed quite simply that the Soviet Union was unworthy of American support at any cost. Although primarily a realist in his diplomatic thought, Kennan was intermittently driven by strong considerations of morality, which often trumped notions of narrow self-interest. The logic of the adage “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” did not hold true when applied to a leader as heinous as Stalin.

Kennan remained at the heart of Hitler's empire through 1941, writing to his Norwegian wife, Annelise, that “life in Berlin has been much as you knew it. The major change has been the wearing of the star by the Jews. That is a fantastically barbaric thing. I shall never forget the faces of people in the subway with the great yellow star sewed onto their overcoats, standing, not daring to sit down or to brush against anybody, staring straight ahead of them with eyes like terrified beasts—nor the sight of little children running around with those badges sewn on them.”
30
Berlin was becoming almost unbearable for Kennan, particularly as it was the capital of a nation whose history and achievements he greatly admired. After Germany declared war on the United States in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Kennan and his embassy staff were arrested and sent to an internment camp in Bad Nauheim, a fashionable spa town near Frankfurt. The retiring Kennan now found himself in charge of some 130 men, women, and children of the U.S. embassy, a fatherly role in which he did not thrive. To make things worse, the government stopped paying Kennan and his staff during the six months of their confinement. “We had not, you see, been working,” recalled Kennan drolly.
31

Kennan returned to the United States in a diplomatic swap in the early summer of 1942. One of the first things he read upon returning home was an article by Walter Lippmann, published on June 6, 1942, which opined that “if there is to be peace in the world, that peace has to be made in full partnership between the English-speaking sea and air powers and the massive land power of Russia.” It struck Kennan that America's intelligentsia remained as delusional about Stalin as it had been ten years previously, when Walter Duranty of
The New York Times
reported gushingly on Stalin's grand success in lifting a nation out of agricultural poverty and propelling it toward the panacea of large-scale industrialization.
32
A few (hundred thousand? million?) missing kulaks, Duranty rationalized, constituted a bearable cost when placed against some remarkable strides in pig iron production. Such was the warped logic of the Grand Alliance, in Kennan's view. Defeating Germany at the cost of the independence of Eastern and Central Europe—and America's reputation as a decent nation—was not a price worth paying. Not for the first or last time, despondency descended.

Kennan's next move was to Lisbon, where he served as ambassador. Throughout the course of 1943, he began to consider the most appropriate way to defeat and rehabilitate Germany. Kennan disliked the “unconditional surrender” formula that President Roosevelt had crafted during the Casablanca conference in January 1943, testily observing that this was “only another way of saying that the war had to be fought until the Allied and Russian armies met
somewhere
.”
33
American and Soviet troops might meet in bonhomie, but it was unlikely to end well, for advancing armies, flushed with victory, tend to abandon their reverse gear. Land captured at a steep blood cost is a painful thing to relinquish. On Germany itself, Kennan was mindful of the lessons of Versailles. Before the aggressor had even been defeated, he was sensitive to the need for its swift rehabilitation:

Let the impact of defeat, therefore, be as tremendous as possible. Let the immediate impressions of failure be so vivid and unforgettable that they become a part of the national consciousness of the German people for all time. But having done this, let us then abandon the concept of punishment in the treatment of Germany—for prolonged punishment can never be effective against an entire people.
34

Strongly opposed to a rigorous policy of denazification, Kennan viewed a robust and viable West Germany as an essential bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Like it or not, members of the Nazi party were so large in number that their removal from public life would hamper the nation's prospects for recovery. Devoid of wartime camaraderie—Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt went to great pains to bond with each other, bringing their publics with them—Kennan was thinking coldly in the longer term, prioritizing stability ahead of justice.