In August, 1944, with Soviet troops less than sixty miles from Warsaw, partisans in the Polish Home Army staged an uprising against the city’s German occupiers. Stalin failed to intervene militarily; he refused to airlift armaments to the Polish fighters; and he turned down Harriman’s personal appeal to allow Allied planes to refuel at Ukrainian bases so they could get supplies into Warsaw. Stalin’s motives were not hard to guess. He was waiting for the S.S., which had taken over the battle in Warsaw, to annihilate the Home Army for him, thereby removing a potential obstacle to the establishment of a Soviet puppet regime when the war was over.
The S.S. more than obliged. Though Stalin eventually relented, and the Soviets airlifted (actually, simply dropped from planes) matériel into Warsaw, it was to little effect. In two months, the Germans killed twenty thousand members of the Home Army and massacred two hundred and twenty-five thousand civilians. Half a million Poles were shipped to concentration camps, a hundred and fifty thousand were sent off to forced labor in Germany, and, on Hitler’s orders, Warsaw was razed. When the Red Army entered the city, in January, 1945, not a single inhabitant was left.
Kennan always believed that this was the moment when Stalin showed his hand. In the “Memoirs,” he recalls Harriman returning from his futile meeting about the Ukrainian bases “in the wee hours of the night, shattered by the experience. There was no doubt in any of our minds as to the implications of the position the Soviet leaders had taken. This was a gauntlet thrown down, in a spirit of malicious glee, before the Western powers.” Kennan thought that the Soviets should have been given the choice, right there, of relinquishing their designs on Eastern Europe or forgoing further American assistance. He didn’t think that this would have stopped Stalin; he considered the creation of a Soviet “sphere of influence” inevitable. But it would have ended the impression of American acquiescence.
In all his reports, Kennan’s repeated message to Washington was “Get real.” He didn’t just disapprove of idealistic policy talk. He deeply loathed it. Declarations about the self-determination of peoples or international economic coöperation—the kind of thing that Roosevelt and Churchill announced as Allied war aims in the Atlantic Charter—seemed to him not only utopian and unenforceable but dangerously restrictive on a government’s scope of action. If you tell the world that you are fighting to preserve the right of self-determination, then any outcome short of that makes you look hypocritical or weak. Concessions to Soviet national-security interests were going to be necessary in Eastern Europe; it was better to be frank about this, and to stop pretending that Moscow and Washington had the same goals and values. But for domestic political reasons the American government always wants to appear virtuous, Kennan thought; so it continued to call the Soviets comrades and allies even as they were clearly preparing to walk all over the Atlantic Charter.
Kennan put much of this in a long letter to Bohlen in the winter of 1945. The United States, he wrote, should abandon Eastern Europe to the Soviets, accept the division of Germany, and give up plans for the United Nations, which he considered a classic instance of political wishful thinking. When Bohlen received the letter, he was busy with the Yalta Conference, where the Big Three negotiated the future of Europe, and his reply to Kennan was brief. “Foreign policy of that kind cannot be made in a democracy,” he said.
A year later, Kennan got his chance to wake Washington up. In February, 1946, Stalin delivered a speech in which he described the Second World War as the “inevitable result . . . of modern monopoly capitalism,” and suggested that capitalism and socialism could never coexist. It was a perfectly doctrinal speech. That capitalist countries will always go to war was a basic tenet of Marxism-Leninism, and saying so was unusual only in the context of the short period of the wartime alliance. Kennan didn’t think the speech was worth more than a summary in his regular report.
But Stalin’s words were read with alarm in Washington, and the Secretary of State, James Byrnes, asked the Embassy for an analysis. Harriman had left Moscow, and he gave Kennan his blessing to reply as he saw fit. Kennan seized the day. “They had asked for it,” he wrote in the “Memoirs.” “Now, by God, they would have it.” The result was reputedly the longest telegram in State Department history—more than five thousand words, in five numbered parts. Characteristically, Kennan was ill, and he was lying in bed when he dictated it.
The Long Telegram was Kennan unbound. Yes, he said, American capitalism and Soviet Communism were incompatible systems; Washington shouldn’t have been surprised to hear Stalin say so. But this had more to do with the nature of Russia than with the nature of Communism. Russian foreign policy had always been motivated by fear of the outside world, and Marxism gave the current regime, which Kennan considered simply the latest in a line of Oriental despotisms, an ideological fig leaf for its insecurity and paranoia. Whatever it might say, the Soviet Union would always seek to undermine the West. That was just the Kremlin’s nature. It was a case of the scorpion and the frog.
Still, there was a modus vivendi available for the short term. The Soviet Union was relatively weak; it was overstretched territorially; and it did not want war. It wanted only to take advantage of opportunities. The proper policy of the United States, therefore, was vigilance against allowing opportunities to arise for the Soviet Union to take advantage of. If the United States demonstrated resolve whenever Moscow made threatening noises; if it extended aid to the European democracies, so that they would know who their friends were; and if it otherwise tended to the cultivation of its own garden there was no reason to expect World War Three.
In Washington, the telegram was a sensation. There’s no evidence that Truman read it, but, thanks largely to the Navy Secretary, James Forrestal, who had it mimeographed and circulated, it was seen by the Cabinet and by senior military officials. Kennan was summoned to Washington and installed in the newly created National War College as Deputy Commandant for Foreign Affairs. The State Department dispatched him on a lecture tour to instruct the public on the true nature of the Soviet threat; at the War College, he lectured on international relations to military, State Department, and Foreign Service officials. “I seem to have hit the jackpot as a ‘Russian expert,’ ” he wrote to Jeanette.
In 1947, George Marshall, the Secretary of State, appointed Kennan chief of a new Policy Planning Staff—an effort to think ahead in the area of international relations, not something that the United States had had much practice with. The staff, Gaddis says, became the principal source of policy ideas for Marshall and for the National Security Council, and thus for the President. Kennan dominated the staff meetings, did most of the writing, and worked in the office next to Marshall’s. For two years, he essentially formulated American foreign policy.
The greatest of his contributions was to the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Western Europe, a program that echoed policy recommendations made in the Long Telegram. It was Kennan’s idea that aid under the plan should be offered to the Soviet Union and its satellite states, with the expectation that Stalin would prohibit his satellite regimes from accepting. Stalin did exactly that, and thus put himself in the position of taking blame for the division of Europe.
Kennan’s second major Cold War treatise was the 1947 article for Foreign Affairs, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” The essay began as a paper written for Forrestal. In many respects, it was an eloquent re-statement of the Long Telegram, and it is famous for a single sentence: “It is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
This gave a name to American Cold War policy, and, with a few tweaks and many exceptions, what Kennan had called “containment” remained American policy until the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Wherever there was “Communist aggression,” the United States pushed back. As long as the Communists remained in their box, the United States did not (except rhetorically) seek to intervene. And, as Gaddis says, even Reagan, despite talk of liberation and “rollback,” stayed largely true to containment policy.
The article was signed with an “X” because Kennan did not want it to seem that, as a State Department employee, he was stating policy, but his identity was quickly revealed, and for the rest of his career he was known as the author of containment. He had reasons to resent this.
When Acheson replaced Marshall as Secretary of State, in 1949, Kennan’s influence was diminished—though Acheson was friendly and solicited his advice. Kennan gave counsel to the Administration during the Korean War, and was instrumental in setting up the covert-operations wing of the Central Intelligence Agency. His tenure as Truman’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union ended abruptly when, at a press conference at Tempelhof airport, in Berlin, he compared life in the Moscow Embassy with his internment by the Nazis at Bad Nauheim. Stalin declared Kennan persona non grata, and he was denied reëntry to the country.
He turned down offers from Harvard, M.I.T., Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale to take a position at the Institute for Advanced Study, where, whenever he was out of public life, he distracted himself by writing history. His major policy statements in the nineteen-fifties came in two lecture series. The first, at the University of Chicago in 1951, was a survey of American foreign policy since the Spanish-American War, and a running critique of the deleterious effect of domestic politics on international relations.
It was in this work, published as “American Diplomacy,” that Kennan ventured his famous analogy between democracy and “one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin”:
He lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath—in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat.
Kennan’s other notable policy statement came in the Reith lectures, broadcast on BBC Radio in 1957, in which he called for the demilitarization and neutralization of Germany. Since 1957 was the year of Sputnik, and since West Germany was a key member of the NATO alliance, this was not a good time to imply that there was no real Soviet threat to Western Europe. Kennan’s old friend Acheson was so infuriated that he said in a speech, quoted in the New York Times, that Kennan had always taken “a rather mystical attitude” to the realities of power relations. The remark stung.
“You heard me—I warned him about eye contact.” Link copied
Kennan’s lectures did have an admirer: Senator John F. Kennedy wrote him a complimentary note. When Kennedy became President, he named Kennan Ambassador to Yugoslavia. Kennan liked Yugoslavia, and he thought Tito was a valuable demonstration of a point he had often made, which was that Communism was not monolithic. But Kennan resigned out of pique when he felt Kennedy had crossed him up by signing a trade bill that stigmatized Yugoslavia.
