The Free World

Art and Thought in the Cold War

Louis Menand

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780008489311
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

1

AN EMPTY SKY

Passport photograph of George Kennan, May 1924, when he was a student at Princeton. (Courtesy of Joan Kennan)

1.

When George Kennan composed the documents that would be received as the rationale for American Cold War foreign policy—the Long Telegram, written in Moscow in February 1946, and “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the so-called X Article, published in Foreign Affairs in July 1947—he did not imagine he was prescribing a new attitude for a new time. He was stating what he thought the American attitude toward the Soviet Union should always have been. He was saying something that he had been trying to say for years but that he felt few people wanted to hear. He produced those documents out of exasperation, not inspiration.

Kennan never understood why people talked about the Cold War as something that began at the end of the Second World War.¹ He thought that Stalin was a particularly brutal and cunning dictator, but that Soviet paranoia and insecurity were not products of the Russian Revolution and had, at bottom, nothing to do with Communism. They had to do with Russia’s peculiar relation to the West, which had its roots in the eighteenth century. That Russian power would someday present a problem to the rest of Europe and the United States was always, as he put it, “in the cards.”² He therefore devoted enormous diligence and eloquence to the business of persuading the American government to de-ideologize its differences with the Soviet Union. He did not have much success. This did not surprise him. He was always dubious about the ability of democratically elected politicians to run a sensible foreign policy.

Kennan is sometimes taken to be a member of what was eventually known as the Establishment, or (a term that similarly mixed respect with mild sarcasm) the Wise Men. These were the pragmatic and largely nonpartisan internationalists who played a major role in the running of American foreign policy in the first two thirds of the twentieth century. It was a clan-like group. Most were graduates of Yale, and most had successful careers as Wall Street bankers and lawyers. They believed in something that a later generation would regard as a hypocritical oxymoron: the altruistic use of American power. They wanted the United States to promote its interests abroad; but they also believed that this was for the world’s good. They did not conspire to open foreign markets to American business and “the American way of life,” because there was nothing conspiratorial about them. They were just what they seemed to be: representatives of an American conception of prosperity and an American sense of global responsibility.

The line can be traced back to the time the United States became an imperial power, during the presidencies of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.^* A founding figure was Elihu Root, secretary of war under McKinley and Roosevelt and secretary of state under Roosevelt, a creator of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the winner, in 1912, of the Nobel Peace Prize. Root’s protégé Henry Stimson (Andover, Yale, and a partner in the Wall Street firm Root and Clark, founded by Elihu Root’s son) was secretary of war under William Howard Taft, secretary of state under Herbert Hoover, and secretary of war again under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Stimson’s protégé Robert Lovett (Hill School, Yale, Brown Brothers Harriman) was Truman’s secretary of defense; another protégé, John J. McCloy (Peddie, Amherst, Cravath and Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft), was assistant secretary of war under Roosevelt and Truman, president of the World Bank, and high commissioner for Germany. Others in the mold include two men Kennan worked closely with: Averell Harriman (Groton, Yale, Brown Brothers Harriman), who was made ambassador to the Soviet Union by Roosevelt, and Dean Acheson (Groton, Yale, Covington & Burling), who became Truman’s secretary of state.³

Kennan had affinities with these men and he was comfortable around them. He had a patrician temperament. But he was not a lawyer or a banker, and he did not get called to public service through connections formed in school. He was a professional diplomat, a lifetime civil servant with practical experience in the field of foreign affairs. He was unlike the others in another, more significant, way, too. He did not believe in the virtues of Americanization.

For one of the peculiar things about Kennan, a man not short on peculiarities, is that he had little love for the country whose fortunes he devoted his life to safeguarding. He realized very early in his career that his loyalty to the United States “would be a loyalty despite, not a loyalty because, a loyalty of principle, not of identification.”⁴ What Kennan admired about the United States was the value it placed on the freedom of thought—the supreme good for Cold War intellectuals. Toward American life generally, though, he had the attitude of the typical midcentury European: he thought that Americans were shallow, materialistic, and self-centered. He was firmly anti-majoritarian, not only in foreign affairs, where he considered public opinion a menace, but also in governmental decision-making generally.

In the draft of a book begun in 1938, when he was thirty-four, he advocated restricting the vote to white males and other measures designed to create government by an elite.⁵ Even after the war, and in his most widely read books—American Diplomacy, published in 1951, and the first volume of his Memoirs, which came out in 1967 and won a Pulitzer Prize—he was frank about his estrangement from American life and his problem with democracy. He believed that the form of government has little to do with a nation’s quality of life, and he admired conservative autocracies, such as prewar Austria and Portugal under António Salazar.⁶ “Democracy, as Americans understand it, is not necessarily the future of all mankind,” he wrote in 1985, when he was eighty-one, “nor is it the duty of the U.S. government to assure that it becomes that.”⁷

To make the irony complete, the country he felt closest to was Russia. “Russia had been in my blood,” he says in the Memoirs. “There was some mysterious affinity which I could not explain even to myself.”⁸ He liked to imagine that he had lived in St. Petersburg in a previous life.⁹ When he visited Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, it made him feel, he said, “close to a world to which, I always thought, I could really have belonged, had circumstances permitted.”^10*

He had no sympathy for, or much interest in, Marxism, and he had no illusions about Stalin. He despised the whole Soviet apparat, in part because its minions prevented him from associating with ordinary Russians when he worked at the American embassy in Moscow. Still, he thought that even under Communism, Russians maintained a resilience of character that was disappearing in the West. When he imagined the day the Iron Curtain was lifted, a day his own policy recommendations were intended to bring about, he dreaded what would happen to the Russians once they were exposed to “the wind of material plenty” and “its debilitating and insidious breath.”¹¹ Though he had advocated the reunification of Germany, he took little satisfaction when, in 1990, it finally occurred. It was just the result, he thought, of agitation by young East Germans motivated “by the hope of getting better jobs, making more money, and bathing in the fleshpots of the West.” He wondered whether that was what the United States had really wanted when it set out, more than forty years before, to wage a cold war.¹²

2.

Kennan’s father was a Minneapolis tax attorney who was fifty-two when his son was born, in 1904. Kennan’s mother died of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix when he was two months old. (There is a story that the doctor refused to operate without permission from the husband, who was away on a fishing trip.)¹³ He went to St. John’s Military Academy, in Wisconsin, and then to Princeton, where he landed squarely in the role of outsider, a role that was partly cultivated and partly thrust upon him.

Kennan had read This Side of Paradise in high school, but preppiedom was a foreign land. “[M]y college career bore little resemblance to Fitzgerald’s,” as he put it in the Memoirs.¹⁴ He told of being left behind while his classmates all went off to the Yale game. In desperation, he hitched a ride to New Haven, but since he didn’t have a ticket, he couldn’t get into the stadium, and he returned to Princeton as solitary as when he left it.¹⁵ In his freshman year, he had an attack of scarlet fever, which set him back socially and seems to have triggered a lifelong susceptibility to illness.

He was not an outstanding student, but he had ambition. He joined the Foreign Service in 1926, a year after graduating from Princeton, with an initial posting to Hamburg by way of Geneva. Two years later, he was quick to take advantage of a State Department offer to pay the way for any member of the Foreign Service who wanted to achieve fluency in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Russian. In 1928, the United States did not recognize the government of the Soviet Union and there were no diplomatic relations between the countries. But there were Americans who did business in the Soviet Union—Averell Harriman, for example, owned a manganese concession in the Caucasus in the 1920s—and Kennan saw that the freeze could not last forever. He felt destiny operating as well in the form of a distant cousin, also named George Kennan, who had written an important book on Siberia and the exile system under the tsars.¹⁶

It was in the language-training program that Kennan discovered his special feeling for Russian life. He was one of just seven men chosen to learn Russian in the ten years the program ran, from 1926 to 1936. His studies were supervised by the head of the State Department’s Division of Eastern European Affairs, Robert Kelley. Kelley was a formidable figure, and his attitude toward the Soviet Union almost certainly influenced the views of many of the officers who passed through the program, including Kennan and the man, also a Soviet specialist, who became Kennan’s closest friend in the Foreign Service, Charles (Chip) Bohlen.

Kelley had spent a year after college at Harvard working on his Russian at the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris, then returned to Harvard to begin work on a PhD. He joined the State Department in 1922.¹⁷ Kelley understood that Communism was a subject that stirred up passions, and he was scrupulous about thoroughness and objectivity in running his division. The reports his office produced were noted for their scholarly rigor.¹⁸ But he took a legalistic view of Soviet behavior. He regarded the government as an outlaw regime whose word could not be trusted, dangerous to its neighbors and a defaulter on its debts. And he took a hard line on recognition.¹⁹ Even in 1933, when it was clear that Roosevelt, a man with little patience for legalism, intended to open diplomatic relations with Moscow, Kelley, though only a junior official in the State Department, delivered combative testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the matter and composed a vigorous opposing brief, which was duly transmitted to the president.²⁰

To begin his language training, in 1928, Kennan was sent to Tallinn, in Estonia, for a preliminary tryout in the consulate (and “to make sure that we could cope with the local liquor and the local girls,” he later said), and then, briefly, to Riga, in Latvia.²¹ Since he was already fluent in German, he chose Berlin to study in. (Five of the other trainees went to Paris; one went to Prague.)²² In 1929, his first year there, he took Russian-language classes at the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen, a school established by Bismarck for training diplomats, and with private tutors. He also took courses on Russian subjects at the Hochschule für Politik, a private academy created to support...