George F. Kennan: An American Life (96 page)

There was no delay this time about the
agrément
: the Yugoslavs were delighted with Kennan’s appointment. They had liked his Reith lectures and were sure, despite his denials, that he had visited the country the previous summer “to case the joint.” So Kennan spent the first week of February receiving briefings in Washington while delivering one of his own to the Policy Planning Staff and its new director, George McGhee. The topic was not Yugoslavia, about which Kennan as yet knew little, but the future of Soviet-American relations. It was the first time since the Solarium exercise of 1953 that anyone within the government—apart from the CIA—had sought his views.

Kennan saw no possibility now of ending the division of Europe. But the United States should seek points of agreement with the U.S.S.R.—particularly on commercial ties, to which the Kremlin leadership attached symbolic significance—while avoiding unnecessary irritants like the annual congressional resolution that called for liberating the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe: “Khrushchev with all his bluster is a sensitive man. We need patience and humor in dealing with him. We should not be worried by his statement that the Soviet Union intends to bury us—this was metaphorical, and the Soviet leaders know where their real interests lie.” Kennan did not repeat his suggestion, made to Kennedy, that improving Soviet-American relations could sharpen Sino-Soviet differences. He did, however, revive his proposal—first made over a decade earlier—that the United States withdraw its military bases from Japan. And it would be helpful if the State Department could return “to the old practice of giving instructions to a newly-appointed Ambassador explaining the purposes and objectives of his mission.”
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On February 11 Kennan, along with Rusk, Harriman, Bohlen, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, attended a briefing for President Kennedy at the White House from Ambassador Thompson, just back from Moscow. Kennan could not help noticing that Johnson sat “in what seemed to me to be a sulky silence.” There was general agreement with Thompson’s claim that Soviet military and economic strength was increasing but also with Kennan’s reminder that Khrushchev and his colleagues expected to win “by the play of other forces.” Among these were “third world” opportunities, as in Laos, the Congo, and Cuba. The Soviet leader was eager to resume talks with the United States, broken off after the U-2 incident, and would probably not react violently “to a possible swift action against the Castro government.” Bundy’s minutes failed to specify who made this last suggestion; nor did they record what Kennan recalled Bohlen and himself saying next to the president: “Whatever you feel you have to do here, be sure that it is successful.”
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At his confirmation hearing on March 6, Kennan reminded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that neither the Soviet Union nor Communist China controlled Yugoslavia: “We should be happy to see that country maintain maximum independence.” The committee confirmed Kennan’s appointment unanimously, the Senate quickly agreed, and he was sworn in on March 22. That afternoon Kennan again saw the president, who wanted to know what his new ambassador to Belgrade thought about the government to which he was now accredited.

The Yugoslavs, Kennan replied, accepted American economic and financial assistance, yet supported the Soviet position “on almost every important issue.” Tito and his associates were “too deeply affected by their early Communist training to be able to get away from it entirely.” The best hope lay in the next generation of Yugoslav leaders, who might welcome “normal and intimate relations with us.” Would it help, Kennedy asked, to invite Tito to the United States? Perhaps, Kennan replied, but only if the visit was likely to produce “
some
favorable effect of a tangible nature” on the mutual relationship.
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The important thing for Kennan at the moment, though, was rehabilitation: having despaired of any such possibility at the beginning of January, he now, at the end of March, had regained his influence in Washington, had been given an ambassadorship in a country he had long considered significant, and was serving a president who sought and respected his counsel. “Kennedy was a fan,” Bundy recalled. He responded to “exactly the kind of unusual, sensitive, independent intelligence” that Kennan possessed. The president had been “very kind,” George wrote in his diary on the evening of the twenty-second, and “my admiration continues undiminished.”
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Back at the farm that weekend, he found “the house dank, the pump broken, the furnace losing water—A. was very dispirited. However, by evening, I had the house warm. And when Dorothy [Hessman], Wendy, and Krisha arrived from Princeton, it seemed more like old times.” The Kennans’ final briefing on Yugoslavia came a few days later from a friend, Robert Strunsky:

Kennan’s first significant act as ambassador took place before he left the United States. On April 19, 1961, he stopped by the Yugoslav embassy in Washington to warn his counterpart, Ambassador Marko Nikezic, of the “mischief” that could ensue if Belgrade “joined in anti-U.S. hysteria over the Cuban fiasco”—this was the CIA’s failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro by landing Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs two days earlier, about which Kennan had expressed forebodings when he first learned of it at the White House in February. It was under that cloud—“not helpful” at the beginning of his assignment—that George, Annelise, Christopher, Wendy, and Krisha sailed for Cannes on the twenty-fourth.
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From there George flew with his son to London, where Christopher would be attending the nearby Sunningdale School: “This was really the end of the pleasant and affectionate association I had had, these past years, with the little boy, who would never be a little boy again.” George rejoined the rest of his family in Milan, and after a weekend in Venice they arrived by train in Belgrade on May 8. Krisha had repressed all natural functions while on the last part of the journey, so “we feared complications for the red carpet.” None occurred, but George was worrying about something else. Always slightly superstitious, he had noticed how closely these travel dates corresponded to those of 1952, when he had taken up the Moscow ambassadorship: “I hoped history was not preparing to repeat itself.”
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Kennan presented his credentials to Tito on May 16, at the Yugoslav president’s summer residence off the coast of the Istrian peninsula. Doing so required flying, with Annelise, to a military airfield, being ferried across to the Brioni islands, and staying overnight in the once-elegant Grand Hotel, now an almost-empty official guesthouse, surrounded by deer, pheasants, peacocks, and Roman ruins. Wandering around, George found himself picking up a mosaic stone laid down in the time of Christ. It was, he wrote Grace and Joan, “as though only twenty days, not twenty centuries, had intervened.” Transportation was by horse-drawn carriages, and that was how Kennan, in great solemnity, went to meet his host.

Despite his standing as a communist leader, Tito seemed comfortable in these imperial surroundings, and after the ceremony the two talked informally for an hour. Recent debacles like the U-2 affair and the Bay of Pigs landings had caused Tito to doubt American competence, but “we were beginning to learn from our past mistakes,” Kennan assured him, and would not indefinitely accept passively “the undermining of our world position at the hands of the Russians and Chinese.” It was a tough line with which to begin his ambassadorship, and Kennan was not at all certain that he had gotten through.

George and Annelise found the embassy’s massive Cadillac—known to envious fellow diplomats as “the flagship”—waiting for them when they returned to the mainland. It drove them to Pula, a former Austro-Hungarian naval base, which evoked in George a sense of the past and, as it happened, a distant future:

The “flagship” then dropped the Kennans off at the port of Rijeka, where they picked up their own less imposing vehicle, a battered British Sunbeam left over from Oxford and shipped from New York. Leaking oil and missing parts, it nonetheless got them back to Belgrade across 350 miles of bad roads, the ambassador driving it all the way.
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Kennan’s embassy subordinates were unsure what to make of the legendary figure under whom they were serving: “They viewed me, I suspect, with a certain amused astonishment, enjoyed the rhetorical melodrama of my numerous telegraphic conflicts with the Department of State, were intrigued by my unorthodox reactions to the work they performed and the experiences they reported to me, and were aware—as I like to think—of the genuine respect and affection in which I came to hold them.” But he could not know for sure, given “that treacherous curtain of deference” that surrounds any ambassador. It parted only occasionally, as when, on “international night” at the American club, Kennan got out his guitar, propped a foot on a chair, and sang, to great acclaim, “Have Some Madeira, My Dear.” A British embassy secretary whispered to Dorothy Hessman: “I can’t imagine H[is] E[xcellency] doing anything like that!”
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Having never seen Stalin during his months in Moscow, Kennan found Tito’s accessibility striking: the Yugoslav leader received him three times within the next two and a half months, once in Belgrade and twice again at Brioni. Kennan briefed him on the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit, held in Vienna on June 2–4; they discussed escalating tensions over Berlin as well as decolonization crises in Africa; and Tito promised his guest that he would host an upcoming conference of “nonaligned” states without favoring either of the Cold War superpowers. The Americans, Kennan replied, would take “a very calm view.” Their common language was Russian—Kennan was still learning Serbo-Croatian—and they found, if not in all respects common ground, then at least mutual respect. Tito had none of Stalin’s “refined hypocrisy and cruelty,” Kennan reported. Marxist prejudices still confused him, and his people’s experiences had made him abnormally sensitive to the oppression of others. But he had “an excellent, pragmatic political mind” and had “gained both stature and mellowness with the years.”
³⁹

Anticipating Yugoslav sensitivities, Kennan had urged before leaving for Belgrade that Kennedy
not
proclaim “Captive Nations Week” in response to the annual congressional resolution, which was sure to call for it. Among the “nations” regularly mentioned, Kennan pointed out, were “Ude-Ural” and “Cos-sackia,” which had never existed except in the minds of Nazi propagandists during the war. And did the United States really want real nations like the Ukraine to seek their independence from the Soviet Union? The time had come to end the charade “as soon as this can be tactfully and quietly arranged.”
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The resolution passed, as usual, in July, but the State Department promised that Kennedy would not endorse it. Kennan passed the assurance on to the Yugoslavs. Then, on the fourteenth, Kennedy did just that. It was “the most discouraging thing that has happened to me since my arrival at this post,” Kennan complained to Bundy, for it conveyed the impression that the United States was seeking to break up the Soviet Union and perhaps Yugoslavia as well. Bundy, embarrassed, acknowledged the resolution’s “foolishness” but explained that Kennedy could not ignore it “for political reasons [such] as the strength of support for foreign aid.” So the president had issued his proclamation on a Saturday evening, “the quietest possible moment of the news week,” in the hope that it would attract little notice. “It was a tactical judgment,” Bundy admitted, but Kennan took it as a warning that the new administration would be no less inclined than its predecessor to resist the primacy of domestic politics over foreign policy.
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Khrushchev’s threats against West Berlin, by then, were approaching a climax. Kennan had refrained from offering advice, he wrote Bundy, since he knew that Kennedy was consulting Acheson, which must mean “a considered rejection of my own views.” Now even more embarrassed, Bundy replied, on the twenty-seventh, that Kennan had not been asked to rejoin the government “for the purpose of shutting you up.” The president would think it “absurd that the cardinal should be quiet while the bishops are squawking.” So Kennan should speak his mind, even if this meant bypassing the State Department. After all, “there are not many people in the current management who can hold their own, in purely stylistic terms, with Dean, and you are surely one of them.”
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