Worldmaking (43 page)

From Lisbon, Kennan was posted to London for a brief stint in January 1944 and then on to Moscow in the spring, where he was appointed minister-counselor, second in rank to Ambassador W. Averell Harriman. Placed close to the heart of a regime he reviled, Kennan would never have a better opportunity to persuade his superiors to abandon the pipe dream of collaboration with a man such as Stalin and accommodation with an ideology as insidious as Marxism-Leninism. It was from the embassy in Moscow that Kennan drafted the telegram that would transform his career and, with it, world affairs.

*   *   *

When Kennan arrived in Moscow in May 1944, the essentials of his foreign-policy philosophy had mostly been established. The process of their cohering was fascinating and iconoclastic. A compulsive writer, Kennan kept a conventional diary, composed poetry, started an ambitious biography of Anton Chekhov in the 1930s that he never completed, and at one stage recorded a remarkable “dream diary” in which he detailed and unpicked the scenarios that had intruded on the preceding night's sleep. Kennan had read Sigmund Freud attentively while recuperating from illness in Vienna in 1938. But he also followed the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in lavishing attention on his “inner life.”
35

Regarding external stimuli, Kennan was generalist in the mode of the Founders, reading widely in history, literature, philosophy, and certain of the natural sciences that pertained to land economy. Like Woodrow Wilson, he abhorred the narrow specialization of scholarship that had become de rigueur in the modern American research university. An elegant accessibility was his hallmark as a writer, and he wrote for the general reader throughout his career inside and outside government. In that respect he followed Lippmann in vesting little faith in the discipline of political science—and its subfield international relations—which encouraged in its faithful pupils a futile and damaging tendency to view the causes of war and peace as a puzzle waiting to be solved with the right formula.

From such misguided premises come rigid and utopian visions. Wilson was right to reject narrow scholarship during his academic career, but he pursued a fatally singular vision as president, which suggested to Kennan that he had failed to read widely and attentively in a variety of sources. (This was in fact an accurate characterization, connected to Wilson's efforts to overcome dyslexia.) Makers of foreign policy should avoid offering one answer to an infinite variety of conundrums—no matter how consistent and laudable that answer appeared. The ideal diplomat should read Spengler and Gibbon, to be sure, but also Plato, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Dickens, the great Russian novelists, and the Bible. From this variegated feast should emerge skepticism and a desire for pure experience, leading ultimately to the accumulation of an old-fashioned attribute: wisdom. “For people who think as I do, the judgment and instinct of a single wise and experienced man,” Kennan wrote to a social science–inclined correspondent in 1950, “whose knowledge of the world rests on the experience of personal, emotional, and intellectual participation in a wide cross-section of human effort are something we hold to be more valuable than the most elaborate synthetic structure of demonstrable fact and logical deduction.” Putting it even more bluntly in “great man” terms, Kennan wrote, “The perception of the most competent individual intelligence is thus our absolute ceiling in the development of ideas related to foreign policy.”
36
The United States should forget about modish theories and educate the cleverest freethinkers to the best of the nation's ability. It was these men—Kennan did not entertain the possibility that women might have something meaningful to contribute to the making of diplomacy—who would rise meritoriously and infuse America's external relations with modesty, civility, and farsightedness, redounding always to the nation's advantage.

“I have always been regarded by the United States establishment as an odd-ball,” recalled Kennan in an interview with
Encounter
in 1976, “and I
am
a strange mixture of a reactionary and a liberal. In this philosophical sense, I do consider myself a lonely person.” There were many sources of his disillusionment, but the overarching cause can be condensed into one word: modernity. Rather than viewing the Industrial Revolution as an unalloyed blessing for nations seeking to outrun the Malthusian trap of population outstripping food supplies—leading to famine and brutal demographic realignment—Kennan was impressed by Charles Beard's damning portrayal of the endemic dehumanization of the modern age. “I am persuaded that the Industrial Revolution itself was the source of most of the bewilderments and failures of the modern age,” Kennan observed.
37
Industrialization facilitated the growth and sustenance of a larger population. This larger population necessarily congregated in cities where jobs were plentiful; these jobs in turn were largely demeaning and purposeless, producing fripperies that previous generations had largely lived without, fomenting the alienation of labor that Marx and Engels identified and their political champions exploited.

A small population scraping a living through tilling the land was preferable to a large urban population engaged in labor that created substantially more wealth but robbed people of the essentials of how to live. The single-minded pursuit of “economic growth” was a risible imperative that by now afflicted all nations. Kennan was a keen farmer who followed Jefferson in believing a close connection to the soil was vital for anyone seeking purpose and emotional stability in the modern world: “I don't trust human beings to live successfully too far away from nature.” With pride and regret, he conceded to his interviewer that “I am, I suppose, an 18th-century person, and I'm persuaded that those of our forefathers who had their roots really back in the 18th century had more convincing values and better tastes than those whose roots were in the society that issued from the industrial revolution.”
38
He followed the sociologist Thorstein Veblen in deploring the “conspicuous consumption” that blighted the nation.
39
Accompanying this was profound regret at the environmental and societal degradation caused by the proliferation of the automobile and the ugly urban sprawl that was erected to facilitate the demographic shift to the suburbs.

From this variety of fascinating sources came a manner of diplomatic thinking that combined important elements of Mahan, Beard, and Lippmann; Wilsonianism would always remain an ideational adversary of regrettable resilience. Kennan shared with Mahan a sense of proportion and balance, agreement on the vital importance of the Atlantic Alliance, a deep ethnocentrism, and opposition to arbitration and multilateral institutions. Kennan was at one with Beard in believing that the United States should attend to its own problems before attempting to export its values. He also shared with the revisionist historian a strong belief that there were actually few foreign-policy crises that required a direct military response. The historian Bruce Kuklick puts it well when he detects in Kennan a “quietist if not pacifist dimension.”
40
Later in his life, Kennan would go so far as to describe himself “with some qualifications” as an “isolationist.”
41

Finally, Kennan followed Lippmann in bemoaning the dangers that participatory democracy posed to the making of a wise foreign policy. He viewed public opinion as a grave impediment to elected politicians and professional diplomats doing their jobs effectively. Like Lippmann, Kennan also viewed himself as operating in the realist tradition and shared a common contempt for the fledgling United Nations. On August 4, 1944, Kennan had written, “International political life is something organic, not something mechanical. Its essence is change … An international organization for preservation of the peace and security cannot take the place of a well-conceived and realistic foreign policy.”
42
These words could have been Lippmann's. Yet there was, at the time, a major difference of opinion between the two men on what constituted a “realistic foreign policy.” Put simply, Lippmann favored an accommodation with Moscow whereas Kennan preferred nonmilitary confrontation. The latter strongly believed that the success of the D-day landings had created a propitious moment for the United States to issue a stern warning to Stalin to respect majority opinion in Eastern and Central Europe:

We no longer owed them anything, after all (if indeed we ever had). The second front had been established. The Western Allies were now on the European continent in force. Soviet territory had been entirely liberated. What was now at stake in Soviet military operations was exclusively the future of non-Soviet territory previously overrun by the Germans. We in the West had a perfect right to divest ourselves of responsibility for further Soviet military operations conducted in the spirit of, and with the implications of, the Soviet denial of support for the Warsaw uprising.
43

This was no simplistic anticommunism. Kennan believed the Kremlin's expansionist designs were driven not by Marxian ideology but by traditional concerns about security and vulnerability. But this did not make Moscow's goals any more palatable or acceptable to the West. He had met with the exiled Polish prime minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk at the British embassy in Moscow in July 1944. Detecting hopeful naïveté on the part of Mikołajczyk, and cynical bonhomie on the part of his British hosts and American guests, for Kennan the dinner and reception were excruciating. “I found the evening a hard one,” he recorded in his diary. “I wished that instead of mumbling words of official optimism we had the judgment and the good taste to 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.”
44
Kennan could not abide lies among friends. If America and Britain were to force the issue over Polish independence, so be it, although it needed to happen quickly to make any difference. Encouraging false hope was dishonorable.

*   *   *

False hope it was, as Kennan believed Yalta's obfuscations amply displayed. Where Lippmann celebrated President Roosevelt's clear-sighted delineation of the national interest in the Crimea, Kennan detected unworthy and deliberate ambiguity over the fate of Eastern Europe: “The Yalta declaration, with its references to the reorganization of the existing Polish-Communist regime ‘on a broader democratic basis' and to the holding ‘of free and unfettered elections … on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot,' struck me as the shabbiest sort of equivocation, certainly not calculated to pull the wool over the eyes of the Western public but bound to have this effect.”
45

Kennan had made repeated attempts to warn Averell Harriman, his superior at the embassy, of the nature of Moscow's intentions and the need for a swift and forceful diplomatic response, but each had been met with indifference. A scion of the railroad dynasty, Harriman was a multimillionaire who consciously rejected ostentation and pomp. Tall and conventionally handsome, a naturally commanding presence, Harriman was worldly born, whereas Kennan had discovered the world, such as it was, with no natural advantages. These were two men of very different backgrounds and sensibilities. No reclusive poet, or Freudian dissector of dreams, Harriman's worldview was closely aligned with that of his similarly wellborn president, Franklin Roosevelt, cognizant as he was of the larger gentlemanly stakes involved in defeating Hitler. Hence Harriman did not yet view Stalin as beyond the pale. That his perspective would change throughout the course of 1945 owed much to Kennan's persistence in dispatching one skillfully crafted entreaty after another, until the message finally conformed to events in the eyes of the besieged recipient.

The first of Kennan's persuasive broadsides was launched on September 1944, a long paper titled “Russia—Seven Years Later,” which offered a searing critique of both Soviet intentions and the complacency that undergirded America's effective nonresponse. Kennan wrote that “we should realize clearly what we are faced with … the Soviet government has never ceased to think in terms of spheres of interest.” Kennan offered up a solution:

Instead of going as supplicants to the Russians, we should go to them as one bringing a friendly warning. Our position should be as follows: We would regret to have to make it plain to our public that Russia alone, of all the great powers, was unwilling to submit her future actions to the judgment of international society. We would regret this because it would only fortify and widen in our public opinion those very suspicions of Russia which we ourselves have been helping to eliminate.
46

An impassive Harriman did not reply to his exercised subordinate, although he cabled sections of Kennan's paper to Washington, where they were met with a similarly deafening silence. It was a discouraging snub that led to Kennan's abortive attempt to leave the service in 1945. But he never held these slights personally against Harriman, whom he respected in spite of their differences. “I often think,” Kennan recalled with winning self-deprecation, “what a trial I must have been to him, running around with my head in the usual clouds of philosophic speculation, full of interests other than my work, inclined to delegate responsibility and to forget about it cheerfully so long as all went well, bombarding him with bundles of purple prose on matters which, as I am sure he thought, it was the business of the president to think about, not mine—and all this when there was detailed, immediate work to be done. Small wonder that he was often peremptory.”
47

*   *   *

In his memoirs, Kennan recorded a vivid account of Moscow's celebrations following the declaration of victory in Europe. News traveled slowly to Russia, so it was not until May 10—two days after VE-day—that crowds began to congregate on the streets. Tens of thousands of Muscovites gathered in a “commodious” square outside the U.S. embassy to express appreciation for their wartime ally. “We were naturally moved and pleased by this manifestation of public feeling,” Kennan recalled, “but were at a loss to know how to respond to it. If any of us ventured out into the street, he was immediately seized, tossed enthusiastically into the air, and passed on friendly hands over the heads of the crowd, to be lost, eventually, in a confused orgy of good feeling somewhere on its outer fringes.” As Kennan was unwilling to “court this experience,” he and his staff assembled on the balcony and waved in a friendly fashion to the delirious masses below. But to get into the spirit of things, he arranged for the Hammer and Sickle to be hung alongside the Stars and Stripes. As the crowds cheered for more, Kennan delivered a short speech in Russian, which consisted in his shouting, “Congratulations on the day of victory. All honor to the Soviet allies!” He recalled that this “seemed to me to be about all I could suitably say.” The crowd grew larger with each passing hour, stirring disquiet among the Soviet authorities. The United States was a valued wartime ally, to be sure, but it also represented capitalism in its most unvarnished form: a vile, exploitative ideology anathema to all good Soviet citizens. The crowds, the cheers, the touchingly instinctive and unmediated affection—all were a slap in the face for Soviet propagandists. As Kennan recalled, “It is not hard to imagine what mortification this must have brought to both party and police. Without their solicitous prearrangement not even a sparrow had fallen in a Moscow street for twenty-seven years, and now, suddenly—this!” Efforts to break up the celebrations were to no avail. The authorities even set up a brass band on the other end of the square, hoping to create a Pied Piper effect. But the crowds stayed put, instilling in Kennan an ephemeral cheer.
48