George F. Kennan: An American Life (97 page)

On the next day the other Dean—Secretary of State Rusk—asked Kennan to fly back to Washington with him from a meeting of American chiefs of mission in Paris that both would be attending early in August. The purpose would be consultations on Berlin, the general situation in Europe, and Tito’s upcoming conference. Another of Rusk’s passengers on that flight was the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, with whom Kennan had a long talk. It had been “the easiest trip I have ever made across the ocean,” George wrote Annelise from the farm on the evening of August 12. “Even I was not tired.”
⁴³

But he was frightened. On the way from the airport, Kennan had stopped at the White House to see Arthur Schlesinger, now serving as a presidential aide—Kennedy was spending the weekend at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. “You and I are historians,” Schlesinger recorded Kennan as having said, “or rather you are a real historian and I am a pseudo-historian.”

Kennan was in East Berlin when the Wall went up on the thirteenth, but this being the Pennsylvania village of that name, he was not inconvenienced. Nor was he upset, Bundy reported to Kennedy on the fourteenth: to the contrary, Kennan was relieved. His conclusions—which, for once, paralleled Joe Alsop’s—were that

The Berlin Wall, then, might ease the crisis, by means that did Khrushchev little credit. Kennan presumably conveyed this thought to Kennedy when he saw the president in an off-the-record meeting, upstairs at the White House, on the fifteenth, but Kennedy was already thinking similarly. Khrushchev ’s decision showed “how despised is the East German government, which the Soviet Union seeks to make respectable,” he had written Rusk the day before. So the question was “how far we should push this.”
⁴⁴

Acheson had strongly opposed negotiations over Berlin. “I never found in him at any time any enthusiasm for agreements that would meet the requirements of both sides,” Bundy recalled. “I’m not sure he ever saw that animal.” This had been the basis for Acheson’s attack on Kennan in 1958: NATO’s solidarity was more important than resolving the issues that had led to its formation in the first place. Any compromise now, the former secretary of state was sure, would shake the alliance. But Kennedy, who had admired the Reith lectures, was tilting Kennan’s way.
⁴⁵

He flew back to Belgrade, therefore, reassured about his influence in Washington and at least cautiously optimistic about Soviet-American relations. There was “no compelling reason,” Kennan wrote Oppenheimer in mid-September, why the world should now “tear itself to pieces” over Berlin. And his own morale was improving: his ambassadorship had “wrenched me out of established habits,” refreshing “an expertise which was rapidly disappearing through neglect but which so many outsiders still expected me to be cultivating.” Whatever contribution he could still make as a scholar would “be strengthened, even if it is delayed, by this feeding of the other side of my nature.”
⁴⁶

Kennedy probably wanted to see Kennan secretly on August 15 to discuss the unsigned “personal and eyes only” instructions prepared the previous day in the Department of State: that upon his return to Belgrade, Kennan was to contact the Soviet ambassador, Aleksey Alekseyevich Yepishev, to suggest setting up a confidential channel about which no other governments, particularly Germans on either side of the wall, would know. “I had the opportunity,” Kennan later explained, of talking “without an interpreter or anybody else present.” All he would have to do would be to walk “from my home to the Soviet ambassador’s home, and sit down with him in his own living room.”
⁴⁷

Whether by coincidence or on orders from Moscow, it was Yepishev who asked to see Kennan on August 21. They met, not in Yepishev’s living room, but in the garden of the Soviet embassy—to avoid detection devices, the ambassador whispered. Confining their first conversation to the relatively safe issue of how Laos might be neutralized, the two envoys agreed to meet again on the thirty-first, but on the previous day two Soviet correspondents tipped off the United Press representative in Belgrade to the fact that the meeting would be taking place. Fearing a repeat of the Smith-Molotov embarrassment of 1948, Kennan was initially inclined to cancel the talks altogether, but then decided to go ahead on the grounds that they might at least reveal something of Khrushchev’s intentions. If exposed, Kennan could say that they were social visits. He would “take great care not to betray more than a general knowledge of our policies.”
⁴⁸

They met, a day later than planned, on September 1. Khrushchev had jumped at the opportunity to use the Belgrade channel, Yepishev reported: any message that Kennan might want to send would go straight to the Soviet leader without passing through intermediaries. Meanwhile an agreement on Laos seemed possible. Kennan took this communication seriously, “since things more important than Laos were potentially involved.” Chief among these was Khrushchev’s surprise announcement, on the preceding day, that the Soviet Union would be resuming the testing of nuclear weapons, ending an informal moratorium that had been in effect since 1958. Why, Kennan demanded, had Khrushchev chosen this particular moment, “a most delicate one from [the] standpoint of progress toward negotiations over Berlin”?

Yepishev had no answer, but he went on to state Soviet preconditions for a Berlin settlement with such specificity that Kennan was sure he was acting under instructions. They amounted to formal recognition, on the part of the United States and its allies, of the fact that two German states existed and that their boundaries could not now be changed. The West Germans would not have to “take tea” with the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, but they would have to end efforts to subvert his government. In return, the Soviet Union would “disinterest” itself in West Berlin: its citizens could have whatever government they wanted, secure communications with the outside world, and the continued presence of American, British, and French troops in the city to guarantee these rights. Kennan responded, cautiously, that none of this seemed “beyond the borders of what could conceivably be discussed if the right time and atmosphere and setting” could be arranged. But if Moscow “continued the sort of behavior we had recently witnessed that time might never come.”

His assessment, for Washington, was that Khrushchev was balancing competing factions within his government. New initiatives on Berlin and Germany should be pursued, therefore, “only with utmost prudence on our part.” Nevertheless, it would be unwise to shut down the Belgrade channel, for “I am quite satisfied that it does indeed represent a means of private and earliest communication with Khrushchev.” As if to confirm this, Yepishev followed up with a ten-page unsigned memorandum reiterating the points he had made orally. Kennan himself translated it for the State Department and sent it off by pouch: having cabled its substance, he had no need this time for a long telegram. He had no doubt, though, that Khrushchev would regard any Kennan reply as coming from Kennedy.
⁴⁹

That message, Kennan advised, should stress the inconsistency of “provocations” like the resumption of nuclear testing with the peaceful protestations Yepishev had conveyed. It was important to remember, however, that Khrushchev, for all his blustering, did not want a war. Washington’s position, then, should also reflect a readiness to negotiate, if necessary alone: “[W]e cannot let petty inhibitions of our allies, or even desire for moral support in unaligned camp, paralyze our action in any of the great decisions.” Rusk’s response was curt. “Approve your proposed reply on Berlin,” he cabled, but then added that Ambassador Thompson would soon be seeing Soviet foreign minister Andrey Gromyko in Moscow to make “tentative soundings on attitudes toward negotiations on Germany and Berlin. Believe your channel should be kept open but not developed on Berlin at this point.”
⁵⁰

There were two more meetings with Yepishev, at which he seemed to be pleading for flexibility, but Kennan had no further instructions on how to respond. By mid-September, the NATO ambassadors had met in Paris and complained about lack of consultation; meanwhile the State Department was reverting, as Kennan saw it, to “a sullen and passive refusal to discuss Berlin.” That amounted to demanding “a unilateral Soviet military and political withdrawal from central Europe,” he complained to Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles on the twenty-second. “[I]f this is the only alternative presented to the Russians, it is clear that they would prefer to make war.” Acheson, it seemed, had prevailed after all.
⁵¹

Khrushchev, with characteristic earthiness, had the last word. He had agreed, he wrote Kennedy on September 29, that Kennan and Yepishev should exchange views informally. “I never met Mr. Kennan,” but he seemed to be a man “with whom preparatory work could be done.” The two ambassadors were spending too much time, however, “sniffing each other.” For the Belgrade channel to work, they would need instructions “to start talks on concrete questions without needless procrastination and not merely indulge in tea-drinking, . . . walk[ing] round and about mooing at each other.” The instructions, from Washington at least, never came.
⁵²

Kennan acknowledged, in 1965, that his conversations with Yepishev on Laos had been useful: “I attribute the subsequent quietness of the Laotian situation, in part, to these discussions.” But Rusk and his soon-to-be-appointed under secretary of state, George Ball, shut down the Berlin discussions, fearing that if news of them ever leaked, the West Germans would be horrified: “I always felt that it was a great shame that this channel was allowed to die, because they [would] not have found a better one.” That might well have been the case, for Khrushchev had been following Kennan’s thinking since the Reith lectures. “Many of Mr. Kennan’s ideas would be acceptable to us and should be to the advantage of the US as well,” the Soviet leader had told Harriman in 1959. Kennedy took a similar view, and in the wake of Kennan’s visit to Washington in August 1961, there was serious talk within the National Security Council about what form a deal on Berlin might take. “I suspect that Kennan provided expert reinforcement for views Kennedy already had,” Schlesinger later recalled.
⁵³

In the end, though, Kennedy was no more prepared to take on his own State Department, Adenauer, and of course Acheson, than he had been Congress on “captive nations.” And so it would be left to a new generation of Germans a decade later, with the wary acquiescence of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, to work out much the same Berlin settlement that Khrushchev, through Yepishev, had recommended in 1961 and that Kennan could have negotiated.

The White House gave Kennan one other assignment during his August visit, which was to cultivate Tito’s guests at the September conference of “nonaligned” states. “[P]robably no American is more admired among the neutrals than George Kennan,” Schlesinger reminded Kennedy. “Many of those coming to Belgrade would wish to see him.” The American ambassador could hardly buttonhole delegates in the corridors, but he could attend receptions for them in other embassies, respond if they sought his views, and explain U.S. policy to them. “We would be depriving ourselves of one of our most powerful weapons at the conference if Kennan were told that he could have nothing to do with it.” That did not happen.
⁵⁴

Now, however, Tito reneged on a promise. He had assured Kennan, during the summer, that he would host the conference in an impartial manner. But when he addressed the delegates on September 3, the Yugoslav leader said that although the timing had surprised him, he “could understand” Khrushchev’s decision to resume nuclear testing, given the “incomprehensible policies pursued by some powers” who believed that rearming West Germany would enhance European security. “George absolutely hit the ceiling,” Bill Bundy recalled. Khrushchev himself could have written the speech, Kennan reported with disgust. It looked, he later observed, “as though the Russians were in a position to make [Tito] say anything they wanted to.”
⁵⁵

So instead of Kennan listening to the delegates, they—and the press—had to listen to him as he voiced his indignation: “The Yugoslavs didn’t like this at all,” but they had “chosen their road,” he wrote the State Department. They could no longer be considered “a friendly or neutral nation.” Tito had become a sycophant, it seemed, in a single speech. Ball detected in Kennan’s telegrams a sense of personal affront: “I never saw that attitude on the part of any other ambassador.” Most Foreign Service officers dealt with governments that behaved “like sons-of-bitches,” Bill Bundy added. “George found [that] very hard to accept.” Shocked, the Yugoslavs took to asking: “Is the Ambassador still angry with us?” But Kennedy backed Kennan: “I want you to know that I particularly like your insistence upon representing the interests and purposes of the United States Government, even when this involves abrasions with those to whom you are accredited.”
⁵⁶

Since 1948 the United States had supported Tito’s regime with economic and even military assistance, despite its communist character: Kennan, more than anyone else, had originated that policy. Sustaining it had been difficult, given the objections of anti-Tito exiles, skepticism about foreign aid of any kind, and the widespread belief that all communists were enemies, whether they had split with Moscow or not. Yugoslavia was thus a tempting target for congressional critics, and now Tito was behaving, Kennan believed, as though he could not care less about “the preservation of American, or indeed western, influence anywhere in the world.” It was important that the Yugoslavs learn the “limits to American patience.” They had cheered Kennan’s appointment, the
New York Times
Belgrade correspondent reported, because they thought him a “big man.” They still did, but now there were “no happy grins.”
⁵⁷