George F. Kennan: An American Life (83 page)

George, Annelise, Christopher, and Wendy waited out the 1952 presidential election in the comfortable guest quarters of the U.S. high commissioner in Bad Godesberg. “Just what dangers my presence in the country would have added to the fortunes of the Democratic party I was unable to imagine,” George recalled, “but I was thoroughly humbled by what had just befallen me, and was in no mood to argue.” Following Eisenhower’s landslide victory on November 4, the family sailed for home on the SS
America
, arriving in New York on the eleventh. All four Kennans rated photographs in the
New York Herald Tribune
and
The New York Times
, but George was wary about answering questions. “I would like to say something,” he assured the reporters, but he refrained apart from observing, when asked whether the Moscow post was the most difficult an American diplomat could take, “I think your imagination will tell you as much as I could say.”
⁷⁵

With the Princeton house rented in the expectation of a longer Moscow stay, the only place the Kennans could go was the Pennsylvania farm: not unusually, it was in need of repairs. As far as the U.S. government was concerned, George F. Kennan was still its ambassador to the Soviet Union: he would remain so until his replacement was named. But he spent these weeks negotiating only with plumbers, carpenters, and painters, while doing a fair amount of the work himself. The family were well and happy to be back, Jeanette wrote Kent after spending Thanksgiving with them, although “disappointed not to have been able to continue their good work in Moscow.” It was just for that reason, she added, that the Soviets wanted “to get rid of them.” The method chosen “was very harmless compared to what it might have been.”
⁷⁶

Kennan saw Acheson shortly after his arrival and paid his respects to Truman early in December. Neither mentioned a future appointment: both had “the faraway look of men who know that they are about to be relieved of heavy responsibilities.” Back in town on the eighteenth to deliver his customary end-of-term lecture at the National War College, Kennan avoided any discussion of recent events other than to acknowledge, regarding the challenge of communism, that “we have held our own.” Mistakes had been made, but with proper attention to lessons learned, there was no reason why, fifteen or twenty years hence, “our children will still not be listening to the World Series and running around in Chevro-lets and doing all the things we associate with the American way of life.”
⁷⁷

By Christmas, the work at the farm was mostly done. Joan was home from Geneva, Grace had arrived from Radcliffe, and the Burlinghams—Annelise’s sister Mossik’s American relatives—were also there. “[Y]ou can imagine how very lively it was,” Annelise wrote Frieda Por. “It is nice to be a large noisy family.” Meanwhile George had thanked Kent for the grapefruit, “the like of which we never see locally.” With fifteen people in the house, it had come in handy. The house was Chekhovian in a happier sense, then, than when they had left it in April: the Cherry Orchard outside East Berlin remained reassuringly distant from Moscow.

“I thought it was unfortunate what he said,” Annelise replied many years later, when asked about George’s Tempelhof embarrassment. “He should certainly never have said it, and I think he feels that way himself.” She was sure, though, that if he had said nothing at all, “they would have tried to do something else. They had decided that they were going to get him out. I think they would have done something much worse.”
⁷⁸

“I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ME AFTER THE 20th of January,” George wrote Kent on Christmas Day 1952, “but think it doubtful that I shall be given any post of major political responsibility.” One reason was that he had worked with Democrats, and that “my name has been prominently connected with the word ‘containment,’ which has gone out of style.” Another was that “I have had the temerity to say things about the role of morality in foreign policy which sound disrespectful of some of the favorite poses of American statesmen.” He had only a year and a quarter to go before becoming eligible for retirement, however. At that point, “I hope to leave government service altogether and contribute what I can, thenceforth, as a scholar, commentator, and critic.”
¹

This bleak assessment reflected the fact that Eisenhower, as expected, had nominated John Foster Dulles to be his secretary of state. Kennan’s relationship with Dulles had been strained since shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, when they differed over the desirability of admitting Mao’s China to the United Nations and of sending MacArthur’s forces across the 38th parallel: Dulles had described Kennan at the time as a “dangerous man.” With Dulles’s encouragement, Republican demands to replace “containment” with “liberation” had dominated the 1952 presidential campaign, and on September 26—the day
Pravda
attacked Kennan for his Tempelhof statement—Dulles also attacked him in a St. Louis speech for having repudiated, in
American Diplomacy
, legal and moral principles. “I disagree and have long disagreed with his basic philosophy,” Dulles explained to a friend who thought the criticism unfair, “and have repeatedly made this clear on many occasions.”
²

Nevertheless, he was careful to send Kennan, who was still in Bad Godesberg, a copy of what he had said: “As you will see, I took issue with . . . your recent book. I hope you will not feel that I did so in any improper way.” Kennan responded by forwarding his unpublished reply to Father Walsh’s harsher denunciations, as a way of conveying “a somewhat clearer idea of how I feel about morality in foreign policy.” Dulles acknowledged this as “clarifying” but insisted that “there are certain basic moral concepts which all peoples and nations can and do comprehend, and to which it is legitimate to appeal as providing some common standard of international conduct.”
³

The correspondence veiled changes of mind by both men. Dulles was distancing himself from “containment” despite the fact that he and his fellow Republicans had supported that concept when Kennan first articulated it: they raised no significant objections during the 1948 campaign. But in the aftermath of the Democrats’ victory that year, the Soviet atomic bomb, the communist takeover in China, espionage revelations, the Korean War, and China’s intervention in that conflict, Dulles had come to regard “containment” as fair game; hence his call for “liberation” as an alternative. Meanwhile Kennan was distancing himself from his own support, while running the Policy Planning Staff, for efforts to detach the Soviet Union from its satellites. Given the sensitivities he had witnessed in Moscow, Republican promises of “liberation” could, he worried, provoke a major war.
⁴

Even if Kennan had not expected to become Dulles’s chief foreign policy adviser, as Charles Burton Marshall would subsequently claim, he did assume that the new administration “would still attach value to my opinions and to the preservation of a mutual relationship of cordiality and understanding.” Weeks passed without any word, however, “and I, over-proud and over-shy as usual, was reluctant to make the first move.” That was the situation when George wrote Kent on Christmas Day. Friends and colleagues were beginning to treat him, he later recalled, “with the elaborate politeness and forbearance one reserves for someone who has committed a social gaffe too appalling for discussion.... It was as though my objective judgment had been somehow discredited with my discretion.”
⁵

There were, nonetheless, invitations to speak, most of which he declined. Kennan made an exception, however, for the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania State Bar Association in Scranton on January 16, 1953. “I am now a resident of Pennsylvania,” he explained to the State Department, “but have had very little opportunity to take part in civic affairs here, and feel that this is one way I can show an . . . appreciation for the many kindnesses people have shown me.” He had said nothing publicly about Soviet-American relations while serving as ambassador, and silence might also be necessary in any new appointment: “It seemed to me, therefore, that any statement I might make on this subject should be made during the incumbency of the old administration, in order that the new one might remain wholly uncommitted by what I had said.” Kennan submitted his text for review, and Bohlen, in his capacity as counselor, cleared it.
⁶

He was hardly the first American who had gone to Moscow with high hopes and disappointing results, Kennan reminded his audience: “My own recent experience was unusual in form, but not in content.” Soviet hostility arose from “
their
necessities, not ours.” It would give way eventually “to something more healthy, because Providence has a way of punishing those who persist long and willfully in ignoring great realities.” The most prudent American response would be to stay strong and remain calm, while waiting for this to happen.

At this point, though, Kennan’s rhetoric ensnared him yet again. He chose this moment—four days before Eisenhower’s inauguration, one day after Dulles had reiterated his commitment to “liberation” before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—to denounce that concept:

There was no place in foreign policy for “emotionalism, the striking of heroic attitudes, and demagoguery of all sorts, . . . no place for impulsiveness, no place for self-seeking, no place for irresponsible experiments, and no place for the spotlight of sensationalism.” It was as if he invited the front-page headline that ran the next morning in
The Washington Post
: “Dulles Policy ‘Dangerous,’ Kennan Says.”

The story, by Ferdinand Kuhn, reported that “the foremost government expert on Russia” had “sounded a warning last night against the John Foster Dulles policy of encouraging the liberation of captive peoples in Europe and Asia.” It didn’t matter that Kennan had neither named Dulles nor used the word “dangerous.” It appeared “that I had attacked a Secretary [of State] before he had even taken office. I hadn’t meant to do that.” Professing shock at what had happened, claiming that he had not had Dulles in mind and had no significant differences with him, Kennan asked Doc Matthews to let the new secretary know that all he wanted was “to make myself useful in some capacity until I become eligible for retirement.” Any job appropriate to his rank and experience would do.
⁷

Dulles asked to see Kennan on January 23, listened to his explanation but promised no new appointment. That afternoon his press spokesman, Michael McDermott, announced that the secretary regarded the matter as “closed.” Did that mean, a reporter asked, that Kennan “is in good standing and that everything is fine and dandy?” Dulles had been “too busy on other things” to think about Kennan’s future, McDermott replied, but the Scranton speech would not jeopardize it. “Still not a single word or hint,” Kennan fretted on the twenty-fifth; “nor has any one in the new administration [sought] my opinion about anything to do with the Soviet Union.” Several weeks later he was still in a state of suspension, “the only advantages of which are that I continue to receive salary checks (as Ambassador) and am under no obligation to be in Washington.”
⁸

“[W]e still don’t know any more about what we are going to do,” Annelise complained to Jeanette, except that “with each appointment it seems to become clear that they are not going to use their top Foreign Service people for much.” “To say that we are on tenterhooks,” Jeanette commiserated, seemed slight “compared to what
you
must be feeling.” Things were “going very badly indeed,” George admitted to Annelise early in February. It was “not just that they have been too busy. There has been a decision that I am not to be consulted or used in any way in this country, but am to be ‘sent away’ as a sort of punishment for my association with the Truman administration.” It might be Turkey or Yugoslavia, and under normal circumstances he would be happy to have either of those posts. In the current climate, though, he was inclined to retire if, as it now appeared, he might be allowed to do so. That would require “a pretty drastic financial readjustment,” but “the more I see of the new administration, the less I wish to have anything to do with it.”
⁹

After learning that Eisenhower had asked Bohlen to replace him in Moscow, Kennan twice sought clarification of his status from Dulles: he was still the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, and the president would at some point have to accept his resignation. But the secretary of state chose not to respond to either of these communications, despite the fact that the second one was written while Kennan was in Washington consulting with Bohlen and Allen Dulles, the new director of the CIA, on the implications of Stalin’s death, which had occurred on March 5. The uncertainty finally ended on the twelfth with a call from William H. Lawrence of
The New York Times
, who let Kennan know that he would not be getting another post. Under Foreign Service rules, any ambassador not assigned to a new one within three months of leaving the previous one had to retire. Lawrence published his story the next day, revealing that Kennan’s pension would be $7,000 annually, about $500 less than it would have been with a final ambassadorship.
¹⁰

Only at that point—Friday, March 13, 1953—did the secretary of state call Kennan in to tell him “that he knew of no ‘niche’ for me in government at this time, and thought I would have difficulty getting confirmation by the Senate for any representative position, tainted as I am with ‘containment.’ ” And then, as if nothing had happened, Dulles asked Kennan to assess the implications of Stalin’s demise: “You interest me when you talk about these matters. Very few other people do.” It was, Kennan thought, as if he had told Annelise that he was divorcing her but had added that “I love the way you cook scrambled eggs, and I wonder if you’d mind fixing me up a batch of them right now, before you go.” The two men parted, Kennan reported to Oppenheimer, “in what was apparently a hearty agreement that I should now retire, although our reasons for this view were not identical.”
¹¹