George F. Kennan: An American Life (34 page)

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

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.
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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 whisper, when Harriman could not hear: “That man doesn’t know how to build a fire!”
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The risk that Harriman might incinerate Spaso House was not Kennan’s only source of anxiety.
New York Times
correspondent C. L. Sulzberger found him resentful that Harriman had concealed everything from him connected with Yalta. Martha Mautner, who had just joined the embassy staff, saw that Harriman had “both ears to the ground—he was very sensitive to political considerations.” Frank Roberts, now serving in the British embassy in Moscow, recalled Kennan as insisting to Harriman: “You must get home to the president what a terrible villain Stalin is, what awful things he has done.” Harriman’s reaction was: “We’re allies, and we’re fighting the war together. There is a moral consideration which obviously you’re quite right to put to me, but I don’t think I need to put it now to the president.” John Paton Davies remembered Harriman as “a great team player.” He felt “that Kennan was too skeptical, not really at all with the Roosevelt point of view.” Kennan, in turn, “suffered agonies of frustration” over his inability to influence Washington.
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No doubt Kennan was frustrated: that was his normal state. His differences with Harriman, however, were not as great as they appeared to Roberts or Davies—or probably even to Kennan—at the time. The ambassador had been advocating a tougher line toward the Soviet Union since the Warsaw Uprising. “Unless we take issue with the present policy,” he had written Harry Hopkins in September 1944, “there is every indication the Soviet Union will become a world bully wherever their interests are involved.” Harriman did not always confide in Kennan, so he may not have realized the extent of his boss’s support for a firmer stance. And they did differ over how quickly such a shift could happen. Kennan, who resented domestic political influences on foreign policy, wanted it to take place at once. Harriman, like Bohlen, knew that this was impossible: “We couldn’t shock people in Washington because we would lose our influence.” It was, therefore, Harriman’s patience that worried Kennan, not any significant disagreement over the postwar intentions of the Soviet Union, or how the United States should handle them.
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The key to changing American policy, Harriman knew, was changing the mind of the president himself. Roosevelt’s declining health—obvious to all who saw him at Yalta—made this difficult: exhausted leaders tend not to embrace new initiatives. Even so, the gap between Stalin’s promises of “democratic” regimes in Eastern Europe and the practices of Soviet officials there was becoming too large even for Roosevelt to ignore. When, at the beginning of April, Stalin interpreted a German surrender offer in Italy as evidence of an Anglo-American plot to divert the remaining fighting to the Eastern front, the president was furious. Had he lived, Kennan later speculated, subsequent history “might have been quite different.” But he was dying, and so he never saw Harriman’s request for permission to tell the Soviet leader that if his government continued its policies, “the friendly hand that we have offered them will be withdrawn and to point out in detail what this will mean.”
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On the morning of April 13, Joan Kennan, then nine, was lying quietly in bed in the Mokhovaya apartment, playing with a kitten. “My father came into the room and said, ‘Joanie, the President is dead,’ and then sat on my bed looking so serious and so sad that I knew this was something very significant.” She could not recall her father ever speaking to her about world affairs, so “I was rather pleased that he thought me old enough to comprehend, at least partly, the significance of such a major event.”
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Harriman had been planning a trip to Washington when the news reached him earlier that morning. Knowing the importance of being in the right spot at the right time, he accelerated his departure and so was on hand to advise an inexperienced Harry S. Truman on what he should do. With Bohlen present taking notes, Harriman warned that Stalin had interpreted American restraint as weakness: the view had developed in Moscow that “the Soviet Government could do anything that it wished without having any trouble with the United States.” That left the West facing a “barbarian invasion of Europe.”
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It’s not clear what Kennan would have said if given the opportunity, but what Harriman said was close enough. He had not been oblivious to the concerns of his anxious subordinate, and now he had the ear of a president with no firm views of his own. The effect on policy, however, was for the moment minimal. Truman gave Molotov a tongue-lashing when he passed through Washington on April 23—even Harriman, who was there, thought it excessive—but the president did not immediately give up on his predecessor’s efforts to enlist Stalin’s cooperation in shaping the postwar settlement.
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There were several reasons for this. One had to do with Molotov’s destination: he was en route to San Francisco, where the conference establishing the United Nations—Roosevelt’s most cherished project—was to open on April 25. With hopes for the new organization as high as they had ever been, the United States could hardly undercut it before it had begun to function. A second reason was military: Pentagon planners, unsure whether the top-secret program to build the atomic bomb would produce a usable weapon, still counted on Soviet assistance in defeating Japan. Finally, Truman had other close advisers to whom he listened. One was Joe Davies, whose persistent desire to give the Soviet Union the benefit of every doubt countered Harriman’s determination to do the opposite.
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From Moscow, Kennan saw little that encouraged him. Taking advantage of Harriman’s absence, he peppered the State Department with an almost daily litany of complaints about Soviet behavior:

Expecting the official announcement, Kennan and Roberts accepted invitations to a gala performance at the Bolshoi Theater that evening, only to find that it celebrated Aleksandr Popov, the alleged Russian inventor of radio.
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When the authorities did finally announce the end of the war, on May 9, they and everyone else were unprepared for what happened. The first spontaneous demonstration anyone could remember in Moscow broke out in front of the Mokhovaya, where Soviet and American flags were flying, and it would not disperse. “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.” Anyone venturing into the street “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 feelings somewhere on its outer fringes. Few of us were willing to court this experience, so we lined the balconies and waved back as bravely as we could.”

Sensing that more was expected, Kennan climbed precariously onto a pedestal at the base of a column in front of the building to make his first and last public speech in Russian before the walls of the Kremlin: “Congratulations on the day of victory. All honor to the Soviet allies.” This was about all, it seemed, that “I could suitably say.”
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Kennan could, however, write—and the essay he composed that month was neither contradictory nor self-indulgent nor impractical. Entitled “Russia’s International Position at the Close of the War with Germany,” it expressed the hope that peace would not resemble the Russian summer, “faint and fleeting, tinged with reminders of rigors that recently were and rigors that are soon to come.” Reality, though, was likely to be just that. The war was ending with the defeat of two totalitarian states, but a third was poised to dominate much of the postwar world.

This was hardly an original insight. Bullitt had made the same point in a long letter to Roosevelt as early as January 1943. Harriman had been worrying about the war’s outcome since the summer of 1944 and now had influential supporters in Washington: by May 1945, for example, the new secretary of the Navy, James V. Forrestal, had concluded that Soviet ideology was “as incompatible with democracy as was Nazism or Fascism.” That same month Winston Churchill used the phrase “iron curtain” for the first time in seeking to alert Truman to the risks inherent in the way the war was ending.
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