CHAPTER 5

Bohlen, left, with Johnny Herwarth at the dacha

A PRETTY GOOD CLUB

Kennan and Bohlen in the Foreign Service

Having decided that law school was too expensive, George Kennan headed for Washington in the autumn of 1925 to apply for a job with the Foreign Service. There he enrolled in a cram course run by a hard-drinking Scotsman from Virginia named Angus Crawford which prepared students for the entrance tests that the State Department had recently instituted. Still moody, still insecure, he was hardly ready to commit himself to the new career. “I haven’t much hope of passing these exams,” he wrote his father, “and when I’ve found out for sure that I have failed, I won’t stay here any longer.”

Although the vigor and solitude of a summer job on a cargo ship had temporarily restored Kennan’s erratic health, he literally worried himself sick as he studied. “I hope you will not be alarmed at the heading of this letter,” he scrawled on the stationery of a Washington hospital. “I am generally run-down.” He continued to live frugally, work intensely, and spurn those who (either out of pity or because he could sometimes be charming despite himself) sought to engage him socially. “By refusing four invitations for Christmas dinner,” he wrote in another letter, “I did manage to get a little studying done.”

Despite his worries, Kennan was among the 16 students out of 110 to pass the written exam, though he barely made the 80 percent cutoff. His best subjects were international law and German; his worst, arithmetic (which he failed to finish) and modern history. At the oral exam, his voice broke into a squeaky falsetto when Under Secretary Joseph Grew asked the first question, yet he managed to pass that too. “I should be fairly satisfied had I not been forced to reveal an inexcusable ignorance about west central Africa, getting Nigeria and the Gold Coast all tangled up,” he reported home. His only failure came on the physical. (In addition to his stomach woes, he had his tonsils removed that winter.) After a few days’ scurrying around, he managed to persuade government doctors that he was fit.

With his breezy immunity to the anxieties that afflicted Kennan, Chip Bohlen thoroughly enjoyed his time spent preparing for the Foreign Service exams. Crawford—fond of Bourbon, shapely women, and the Democratic Party—was a character after Bohlen’s heart. The day after Herbert Hoover carried Virginia in his 1928 election triumph, Bohlen recalled, “Crawford came to class drunk, delivered an impassioned lecture on the ‘black shame of the Dominion of Virginia,’ then disappeared for a week.” As for the Washington social life, a relative of Bohlen’s notes that perhaps the single greatest understatement in his autobiography is the comment that “as a bachelor in a city with many single girls, I enjoyed those charming days.”

Although he never had Kennan’s analytic depth, Bohlen had a more nimble mind. He found the written tests to be simple, a mere recollection of facts, and scored well above 90 percent. Nor did he get overwrought about the orals; with the help of some bootleg gin, he arrived at the inquisition noticeably relaxed. He muffed a question on the percentage of the U.S. population then living on farms (the correct answer, 25 percent; his answer, 40 percent), but otherwise performed with flawless grace.

One panelist, however, smelled the gin on Bohlen’s breath and argued that he should be disqualified for his breach of decorum and of the nation’s Prohibition laws. To his rescue came William Castle, the Assistant Secretary who had convinced Bohlen to join the Foreign Service. A member of the examining board, Castle persuaded the others to overlook the indiscretion.

The Foreign Service that Kennan and Bohlen joined was slowly being transformed into a professional outfit. During the nineteenth century, while America indulged in a self-satisfied isolation from the intrigues of Europe, the diplomatic corps was dominated by upper-class easterners who thought it might be nice, after a career in industry and finance, to dally in the royal courts of the Old World. Ministerial appointments were political plums, and junior secretaries tended to be young dilettantes chosen for their family connections and prowess on the polo field. Most red-blooded Americans disparaged them as effete “cookie pushers” and “boys in striped pants.”

The pressures for reform came mainly from the same enlightened elite of upper-class progressives who were attempting to root out patronage from the rest of government. At the forefront were men like Joseph Grew (Boston’s Back Bay, Groton, Harvard). They advocated a professional and dedicated Foreign Service, one that would represent to the world the best of their nation’s heritage, culture, and breeding.

The reforms, however, were not exactly an attempt to democratize the diplomatic corps; Grew, after all, took price in wearing his full regalia, including gold sword and fore-and-aft hat, when he presented himself to his Russian counterparts while serving in St. Petersburg in 1908. Of the new embassy secretaries recruited between 1914, and 1922, no less than 75 percent were from eastern prep schools, mainly Groton or St. Paul’s. “They possessed a common background, common experience, and a common liking for old wines, proper English and Savile Row clothing,” wrote Grew’s biographer. The Foreign Service became, in the proud words of diplomat Hugh Wilson (of The Hill School and Yale), “a pretty good club.”

The Rogers Act of 1924 carried the crusade for a professional Foreign Service one step further, a bit too far in fact for the likes of Grew and his coterie. The law merged the diplomatic and consular corps, provided for moderate salaries, and instituted standard tests for those seeking membership. After the law passed despite his qualms, Grew made sure that selection would depend heavily on an oral examination by elders in the State Department. It was important, he felt, that the new recruits, whatever their background, be the type who would adopt the values of the old club.

They generally did. Loy Henderson, one of the service’s most successful products, recalls: “We accepted the baggage that distinguished the most elite of our members, and in fact did so eagerly. We liked the cloth they were cut from, and did not hesitate to tailor ourselves in their image.” Many tried to be, in Felix Frankfurter’s words, “more Grotty than the men who actually went to Groton in the State Department.” Along with careers in international law and finance, service in the diplomatic corps offered young men a chance to become part of the country’s foreign policy elite.

Bohlen instinctively knew the value of having the right connections, and he carefully cultivated the patronage of men like William Castle. For Kennan the discovery came slowly, and it intrigued him. Indeed, the social outcast from Princeton found the idea of being part of an exclusive society quite enticing. As his fellow students discussed whom they knew in the State Department, it belatedly dawned on him that college provided not just an education, but a network of professional and social contacts. When the president of his Princeton class, a celebrated athlete who had never spoken to Kennan as an undergraduate, ran into him on the street and invited him to dinner, Kennan wrote home excitedly: “I’m beginning to appreciate more than ever the value of a Princeton diploma; it’s helped me out about ten times just since I’ve been in Washington.”

The candidate in Kennan’s class with perhaps the most pull was John M. Cabot, a member of the prominent Boston family and a relative of Grew’s. That spring Cabot’s mother came down to Washington, rented a big house, and set about putting those connections to work. Just before the oral exams, which Grew was conducting, Mrs. Cabot hosted a dinner in honor of the Under Secretary. To his astonishment, Kennan was one of five students she invited. “I was amazed to be asked, because I had never met her, hadn’t called on her or anything,” Kennan recalled. He spent sixty-four dollars on a new suit (blue pinstripes, as per a friend’s advice) and made an impression as the serious scholar among that year’s crop of hopefuls. “I always thought I got in the service because of being invited to the party,” he later said.

 

Upon completing his training, Bohlen was posted to Prague, where he found that the Foreign Service reforms still had a way to go. One member of the mission had suffered a nervous breakdown, locked himself in his hotel room, and lived on raw beef and beer. “When he got word that the consul was coming to take him into custody,” Bohlen recalled, “he jumped into a taxicab and headed for Carlsbad, scattering hunks of beef on the way, presumably to divert his pursuers.” Bohlen’s tasks were often less than lofty. Once, in an attempt to protect the dignity of the American flag, Bohlen sought to persuade a clothing manufacturer to quit displaying it on his products. “But I only use the Stars and Stripes,” the businessman replied, “on our top-grade brassieres.”

Bohlen lived well in Prague, fully indulging his taste for brandy and the theater. But he also impressed his superiors with his diligent interest in Russia and its language. “He appears to have a well-ordered intellect, which, if properly controlled and developed, seems to promise a career of exceptional usefulness,” wrote A. C. Frost, the consul general, in an evaluation sent to Washington. Bohlen was a serious student, Frost said, but not pedantic. His greatest weakness: English composition. Bohlen hated to write. His penmanship was so poor he had trouble reading it himself, and he never learned how to type. Nor was he good at organizing his thoughts on paper.

Kennan, on the other hand, took a tremendous pride in his own prose style. Twice a week he wrote long letters home, carefully crafting them in a flowing hand or on his typewriter. When his father casually noted that the family found his discursive missives “interesting,” Kennan wrote back that he was considering becoming a writer.

Most of his letters were florid travelogues that displayed his habit of typecasting people. From Germany, where he traveled after his Foreign Service exams, Kennan reported: “The German goes to a resort with the intention of lying around on the sand, of promenading on the boardwalk, of dressing up in white flannels and taking motor boat excursions (which I detest) in company with all the relatives and friends from Grosspapa down to the Dachshund, of sitting on terrace restaurants and drinking coffee while the municipal band plays, and finally spending five or six hours a night in the stuffy dining room of a hotel, drinking and making occasional solemn maneuvers which he thinks are dancing.” There were, however, also frequent insights: “The students here have no faith whatsoever in representative government as an enduring institution for Germany. They expect that in time Germany will be forced again to submit to a dictator.”

As part of his training, Kennan was briefly assigned to the Division of Eastern European Affairs. Loy Henderson, who was also there, recalls that even then he showed signs of intellectual arrogance. His opinions, says Henderson, were highly subjective, and when asked to back them with facts he would argue that they were intuitively obvious. This did not impress the division’s legendary chief and stern taskmaster, Robert Francis Kelley, who insisted on academic rigor and adherence to concrete facts. “He evidently credits me with abysmal ignorance, since all that he has thus far given me to do has been to study various text-books on Soviet Russia,” Kennan complained.

Nevertheless, the experience confirmed his interest in the country his distant cousin and namesake had once explored. “I have strong hopes of learning enough Russian during the first part of my service to present the Department with a fait accompli when Russia is finally recognized,” he told his father. “That would be more or less in the family tradition—to go to Russia.”

But first Kennan had to work his way through the consular ranks, starting with an assignment in Hamburg. Unlike Bohlen, he did not find the manic gaiety of Europe in the twenties all that appealing, but he did enjoy the security provided by the well-defined structures of diplomatic life. “In this new role as a representative (however lowly) of a government rather than of just myself, the more painful personal idiosyncrasies and neuroses tended to leave me,” he wrote. “I welcomed with surprised relief the opportunity to assume a new personality behind which the old introverted one could retire.” As he stood in his new formal tails playing host at a July 4 reception, Kennan came to a comforting realization: “I no longer had to relate myself to others as a species of naked intruder on the human scene. I had a role to play, a useful, necessary, legitimate role, helpful to others, requiring no justification or apology.”

For twenty-five years, until his involuntary retirement in 1953, Kennan found security in the role of diplomat and observer. On at least eight occasions, three of them in his first seven years of service, Kennan would tell colleagues that he had decided to resign; each time he would be comforted, consoled—and dissuaded.

His first decision to resign came while in Hamburg. Although in his memoirs he ascribed it to a desire to continue his education, Kennan’s motives were actually financial and romantic. He was engaged at the time to a Washington girl named Eleanor Hard. Her father, the prominent and hard-drinking journalist William Hard, was dead set against her marrying a poorly paid government underling. The only solution, Kennan wrote his family after brooding over the matter, was “to come home and attempt to get a real start on a road that leads somewhere financially . . . I imagine I will start at rock-bottom in some large business concern.”

As he sailed home on his twenty-fourth birthday, Kennan reconsidered his choice. “The things I most love involve a freedom from haste which will give a man time for his own thoughts and his own development,” he wrote his father. “These are all things which are clearly incompatible with the present requirements of business life. My only way out of this impasse will be, much to everyone’s disgust, to enter such a field as journalism or teaching.”

Fortunately for the Foreign Service, and perhaps too for journalism, Kennan was brutally rebuffed by the Hard family upon his arrival in Washington. Eleanor broke off the engagement; when Kennan asked her to return the ring, which had been his mother’s, she said she had lost it. “Go back to your teacups and fancy pants and safe obscurity,” said Mr. Hard, “and let’s hear no more of this.” Kennan’s superiors at the State Department, on the other hand, could not have been more supportive. They offered to help him become part of a new program to train Soviet specialists, which included study at a European university at government expense.

The driving force behind the program was Kennan’s old boss in the Eastern European Division, Robert Kelley. A tall, taciturn bachelor who had been educated at Harvard and the Sorbonne, Kelley spoke Russian fluently and cherished a love for the czarist-era culture of that country. But he was deeply distrustful of the Bolsheviks, or “Boles” as he called them, and adamantly opposed American recognition of the new Moscow regime.

Kelley’s Russian training program virtually guaranteed a certain product. It included up to three years of study at a European university followed by a posting in Riga, Latvia, or in one of the other Baltic country capitals that served as U.S. listening posts on the Soviet Union. His purpose, explained Kennan, was to replicate the training “of a well-educated Russian of the old, pre-revolutionary school.”

Kelley’s anti-Bolshevik outlook and rigorous academic approach were to have an enormous influence on those who became part of his Soviet specialist program. To one degree or another, most came to subscribe to what Daniel Yergin has labeled “the Riga Axioms.” These included Kelley’s fervent love of czarist culture and his disdain for the ideology and tactics of the new Kremlin regime. Among the first eight officers chosen for his program were Bohlen and Kennan.

 

Bohlen, not surprisingly, chose to pursue his Soviet studies in Paris, at the École Nationale. The emphasis there was on language, history, and culture. Facts about the Soviet government or its Communist ideology, Bohlen recalled, “came from books, almost all anti-communist, that we were supposed to read on our own time.’ With little apparent effort, he consistently ranked at the top of his class.

With the depressed French currency, life in Paris was easy at first. Bohlen and his Harvard friend Edward Page (later a member of the Moscow embassy staff) lived in a luxurious apartment on the Rue de Lille, ate in the finest restaurants, and “enjoyed all that Paris offers young bachelors.” Just before Christmas in 1932, Bohlen made enough money beating his friends at poker to afford an impromptu ski vacation in St. Anton.

In 1933, however, State Department salaries were cut and the dollar was sharply devalued, forcing Bohlen to give up his apartment and scale down his choice of restaurants. “Naturally, the drop in the dollar coming right after the 15 percent cut in salary socked us right in the chin,” he wrote his parents. They too were facing financial problems. Bohlen had offered to send part of his salary home when he heard that they were finding it difficult to keep the Ipswich home. “I know it is hard,” he consoled when it finally proved necessary to sell the house, “but what is over can’t be changed, so try to let it go.”

Bohlen developed a fervent interest, indeed an infatuation, with all things Russian, absorbing minute facts with a passion and retaining them in his cluttered memory. In Left Bank cafés, he and his friends spent long evenings arguing their theories about Russia and its rulers and discussing each piece of trivia that could be gleaned about the enigmatic nation none of them had seen.

For all his fascination with Russia, however, Bohlen was strikingly nonjudgmental and unreflective about Bolshevism and its aims. Standing in the Place de la Concorde one night and the Rue de Rivoli the next, he watched as first the right and then the left led protests that turned into riots. He was curious, even bemused, by such displays of commitment. But he shared none of the dark forebodings that Kennan felt upon seeing his first Communist demonstration in Hamburg. After watching the “ranks of shabby people with tense, troubled faces,” Kennan wrote that he was “suddenly moved to tears by the realization of their great earnestness.”

Kennan chose to enroll at the Oriental Seminary of the University of Berlin, founded by Bismarck and infused with the realpolitik vision that later became part of Kennan’s own outlook. Suffering again from fever, the grippe, and general exhaustion, he checked into a sanitarium upon his arrival, where he leisurely read Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Kennan’s professors were mainly specialists in the czarist era, and his private tutors, with whom he spent hours reading aloud from the Russian classics, were highly cultured émigrés. He considered these Russians of the old school to be blessed with an exuberant romanticism. His closest Russian friends were an aspiring writer, his piano-playing sister, and their mother, a penniless refugee. “All were wildly impractical and helpless,” Kennan recalled. “I was embarrassed by the reckless spontaneity of their devotion: enthusiastic visits at unexpected hours, elaborate gifts they couldn’t possibly afford . . . Sharing their woes and crises, I felt like a Russian myself.”

It was not until a year after his arrival in Berlin that Kennan first met a real Soviet official, a member of a visiting trade delegation. His skepticism about the Soviets was already so deeply ingrained that he discounted much of what the official said. “I expect to read any day of his being brought back to Moscow and shot at sunrise for being seen riding up to the headquarters of the Trade Delegation in a very bourgeois and capitalistic automobile,” Kennan said in a letter home. He also described a female Soviet government minister he met later that week: “Very brilliant but very hard-boiled; looked very old and tired, the way a lot of the Soviet people look: as though they had been under a tremendous strain for years—which they have.”

Despite his meager contacts with Soviets, Kennan’s hard-line attitude was pretty well set by the end of 1930. When the stately editor of The Nation magazine, Oswald Garrison Villard, visited Berlin in December, the budding Soviet specialist went to his hotel to argue about recognition. American liberals should be the last to want relations with the Kremlin, Kennan insisted, because it had made a mockery of progressive social doctrines. Although he had not actually read Villard’s book about his travels through Russia, Kennan contemptuously called it “a view from a car window.” With considerable intellectual arrogance, he told a friend: “When I heard him talk about Russia, I began to suspect that I knew more about it, or understood more about it, than he did.”

It would be pointless to argue with Villard, Kennan decided. “I couldn’t put across to him in so many words that which I felt about communism and which he had not felt,” wrote the twenty-six-year-old Foreign Service officer who had never been to the U.S.S.R. “If I could put it across, it would only disturb him, puzzle him. Better let him go back home as he is, in the comforting belief which I cannot share.”

Although historians would ascribe the early Cold War anti-Sovietism of Kennan and other Foreign Service officers to their disillusionment while serving in Moscow, it is clear that for most of them (especially Kennan and to a lesser extent Bohlen) this attitude took root while studying Russia from afar. Kennan would later argue that Marxism was mainly a “fig leaf” designed to justify the repressive tactics of Soviet leaders and Russia’s historic expansionism. Eventually he would become an advocate of realism and detente. But in the early 1930s—and as an undercurrent thereafter—he placed great emphasis on the irreconcilable differences between the Soviet and American systems. He had “one firm and complete conviction,” he wrote a friend in January of 1931:

 

The present system of Soviet Russia is unalterably opposed to our traditional system, that there can be no possible middle ground or compromise between the two, that any attempts to find such a middle ground, by the resumption of diplomatic relations or otherwise, are bound to be unsuccessful, that the two systems cannot even exist together in the same world unless an economic cordon is put around one or the other of them, and that within twenty or thirty years either Russia will be capitalist or we shall be communist.

Kennan was particularly offended by an English-language newspaper edited in Moscow by an American Soviet sympathizer, Anna Louise Strong. “It seems incredible,” he wrote home, “that people who identify themselves with the Soviet Government to such an extent as this editress are allowed to keep passports, since they are far more de-Americanized than the most Anglophile and bespatted diplomat.” In his first official report, prepared in 1931, Kennan advocated withdrawing the benefits of U.S. citizenship from expatriates who spread anti-American propaganda. He attached a list of three dozen Americans in the U.S.S.R. he considered “communist sympathizers.”

In another paper, which analyzed trade between Germany and the Soviet Union, Kennan took issue with businessmen who advocated American recognition of Russia for economic reasons. Communist principles were, he said, “so completely antagonistic to those prevailing in the rest of the world that it is still widely questioned whether mutually profitable commercial relations can exist over a long period of time between Soviet Russia and a country which recognizes the rights of private economic initiative.”

After two years in Berlin, Kennan was anxious to return to the field. A letter from the minister in Riga hinted that he might want Kennan to take charge of the Russian division there. “I think that’s a fantastic idea,” Kennan told his father, adding his anxiety that the “Kennan bubble” would inevitably burst. Indeed it soon did: Kelley decided to send him to Riga, but much to Kennan’s annoyance his job there was to be merely a “third secretary” in the consulate.

Before his transfer, however, Kennan had one piece of personal business. In his letters home, he had made only passing reference to “a Norwegian girl” who was working in Berlin. “Having once kept you all in expectancy for the better part of a year with false alarms about getting married,” he explained, “I decided that the next time anything of that sort was impending I would hold my peace until a date were actually set.” Annelise Sorensen, twenty-one, was the daughter of a prominent merchant from Kristiansand, on Norway’s southern tip. As Kennan described her to his father: “She has the true Scandinavian simplicity and doesn’t waste many words. She has the rare capacity for keeping silent gracefully. I have never seen her disposition ruffled by anything resembling a mood, and even I don’t make her nervous.”

Telling his family not to bother to come to the ceremony, Kennan set sail for Norway with a friend from the Berlin consulate to serve as best man. The wedding was a simple ceremony at the town’s sixteenth-century stone church. Annelise, her new husband reported, was “nearly on the verge of tears, as I understand brides generally are at this stage of the procedure.” At a formal dinner that followed, dozens of telegrams were read and even more toasts were drunk. “How the bridegroom remained sober will never be known, but he did, thereby upholding the honor of the American nation,” Kennan boasted to his father. Well after midnight the somewhat dazed couple left by ferry for Denmark, casting the wedding corsage into the Kiel Canal.

 

The greatest handicap faced by the Russian specialists was that they could not go to Russia. Instead, their windows on that country were the medieval port cities of Riga and Tallinn, the capitals of Latvia and Estonia. Both had been settled in about 1200, conquered by Peter the Great five centuries later, and ruled by the Russians until after World War I, when the Baltic states temporarily won their independence.

For Bohlen and Kennan, the two cities offered a glimpse of life in imperial Russia, replete with the gay night life and cultural trappings of the czarist era. More importantly, the émigrés who befriended them were White Russians who had fled after the Bolshevik Revolution. Their attitudes toward the new rulers in the Kremlin rubbed off on the impressionable young Americans who studied with them and stayed in their homes.

In Tallinn, which he persisted in calling by its old name of Revel, Bohlen lived at the home of a man who had been a wealthy timber merchant in Russia before the revolution. “The family was,” he recalled, “full of the curiosity which characterized the pre-Revolution Russian intelligentsia, and obsessed with deep and unworkable philosophical concepts.” Bohlen’s greatest complaint: Tallinn’s only available liquor was vodka, beer, and local brandy. “It means that I do much less drinking than if I could get the good stuff,” he told his mother. Soon, however, he honed his taste for vodka. “Russians are terribly kind-hearted and hospitable, maybe in the long run a little overwhelming but so far fine,” he wrote in another letter. “Whoopee can be made, as there are plenty of cabarets and vodka.”

Bohlen passed most of his summers in Narva Joesuu, an Estonian beach town that had once been the chief summer resort for St. Petersburg’s elite. Its citizens took great pride in their history of battles with Russian occupiers stretching from Ivan the Terrible in 1558 to the Red Army in 1919. The pension where Bohlen lived was run by a pair of émigré sisters, who were “strongly anti-Bolshevik and lived in the hope that someday the nightmare would pass away and they would return to old Russia, complete with Czar and aristocracy.”

In his letters home, Bohlen painted an idyllic picture of life in Narva Joesuu, where days were spent foraging in the forest for mushrooms and evenings were filled with brandy and animated conversation. “All talk at the top of their lungs,” he reported, “with exclamations of My God, Jesus, and Have Mercy, without which Russians cannot say five words.” One night spent around a samovar of tea discussing philosophy and reciting poetry, he said, “was so like one of Chekhov’s plays you would have died.”

Bohlen got his first glimpse of Russia when a friend from Harvard came for a visit. The two of them took an expedition to the border, walking along a dusty road until they could see the Soviet sentries in their guard tower. After taking some photographs, Bohlen peered silently into the vast expanse until his friend finally dragged him away.

As might be expected, Bohlen’s intellectual curiosity about Russia in no way overwhelmed his desire to have a good time. The young bachelor’s favorite spot was the nude beach. “I could never get over the novelty of being greeted by a bevy of naked Estonian beauties,” he said. “The Estonian people are a singularly handsome race of Scandinavian origin—tall, blond, and well built in comparison with Russians.”

Even though Bohlen shared the same contempt for the revolution that imbued the other young Soviet specialists, he developed an easy knack for getting along with the Russian people. Unlike most of the other students, he learned to talk like a native Russian, drink like one, and at times even think like one. Part of his allure was his ability to express blunt opinions with a disarming smile. His capacity to charm the Russians he met was matched only by his capacity to be charmed by them.

Kennan, who was assigned to Tallinn and Riga both before and after his study in Berlin, did not share Bohlen’s easy grace. In his own ingenuous way, he could be wistfully charming, but more often he was merely melancholy. When he first sailed into Riga in the summer of 1928, the sight of the squat steeples gleaming in the sun immediately struck him as a reflection of the lost glories of czarist Russia. “This is a place which, although it is not Russia now, was at least Russia ten years ago,” he wrote his father. What struck Bohlen as gaiety was seen by Kennan as “a nostalgic, despairing, shoot-the-works sentimentality.”

Like a character out of Dostoevsky, Kennan enjoyed the alienation that came from being a detached observer. “My usual companions were landscapes rather than people,” he wrote later. His best friend was his cocker spaniel. On the one occasion when the local U.S. consul invited him to visit his weekend cottage, Kennan recalled, “I reverted to the worst reactions of my neurotic student youth, behaved with an atrocious lack of sociability, and merited the general ostracism I received thenceforth in the little diplomatic-consular community.” He spent that Christmas as a “seeker of retreat” at a monastery near the Soviet border. Alone, he hiked through the snow to the barbed-wire fence at the border and took a snapshot of the distant guard tower with its hammer-and-sickle emblem. “This is the first quarter-mile of the 5,000-mile expanse,” he wrote his father.

While in Riga, Kennan and two other American bachelors shared an apartment of eight large rooms, which came with two servants, shelves of American canned goods, and a wine cellar with two hundred bottles ranging from champagne to rum that helped fuel late-night arguments about Communism. Kennan’s view of the world reflected a burgeoning realpolitik outlook: He argued that for all of the phlegmatic independence of the Baltic states, they were as much a part of Russia’s sphere as New Jersey was part of America’s, and they would inevitably once again provide Russia’s warm-water ports on the Baltic.

But Kennan was hardly a regular at the political bull sessions. Suffering from a recurring case of shingles, he preferred spending most evenings alone, occasionally venturing out by himself to the Russian-language theaters. In the summer he rented a tiny dacha on the coast, but instead of seeking out naked sunbathers as Bohlen did, Kennan derived sensual pleasure from “bathing in the sea by day, bathing then later, in the nocturnal hours, in the magic and, to me, commandingly erotic twilight.”

Kennan utterly lacked Bohlen’s easy grace as a diplomat. One week, when he had been left in charge of the office in Riga, Kennan discovered that the diplomatic mail pouch had been slit open and ransacked. He became quite agitated and spent the entire day cataloging the bag’s contents, launching an investigation, and sending coded messages to Washington. In his excitement, he forgot that he was supposed to represent the U.S. at the annual dinner given by the French minister, a haughty man who did not treat such lapses lightly.

When Kennan called to apologize the next morning, the Frenchman refused to receive him. “By that time,” Kennan wrote home, “my Scotch blood was beginning to boil with fury at the Latin races in general.” The incident became the talk of the diplomatic community. “I scarcely dare to venture forth any more in society,” Kennan said. Once again he considered quitting. “As a diplomat, I can neither be honest with myself nor with other people, and I’ll be better off out of it,” he wrote his cousin.

Kennan’s gloomy view of Riga became even darker when he returned there after completing his studies in Berlin. Homesick and forlorn, he attributed his failure to be named head of the Russian section to “petty jealousies.” The presence of Annelise only made matters worse. “The illusion of glamor that had hung over the life of the place when seen through the eyes of an unattached bachelor . . . fell suddenly away as one set about to introduce a young wife into its midst,” he later wrote. “One realized at a stroke how pathetically thin and barren of meaning were those habits of casual good fellowship that normally lubricated the official and social encounters of the day.”

At first the Kennans were able to afford a cook and butler for their rambling house. But the cut in Foreign Service pay soon made money a worry, and they moved to a smaller apartment. On their first Christmas together, Kennan justified a trip to Norway only because he calculated that it would be cheaper than buying food and a Christmas tree in Riga. When their first child, Grace, was born, Kennan celebrated by polishing off a bottle of whiskey. But he soon decided it was best to send her to live with her grandparents in Norway because the apartment in Riga was too cramped. “As far as my personal life is concerned,” he wrote his father, “I might as well be in Siberia.”

As Kennan’s academic expertise grew, so did his intellectual arrogance, particularly about his intuitive judgments. When the legation’s counselor asked him about the sources for one of his reports, Kennan replied: “But I’m the source.” It was an attitude that would later cause Eugene Rostow to disparage Kennan as “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”

Chekhov remained his primary passion. Hoping to write a biography of the great nineteenth-century writer, Kennan read all thirty volumes of his works and six volumes of his “inimitable” letters. “There could, as it happened, have been no finer grounding in the atmosphere of prerevolutionary Russia,” he later noted. He sent unsolicited to the Yale Review an article titled “Anton Chekhov and the Bolsheviks.” Said the State Department officer charged with clearing the essay: “If Yale can stand it, I can.” Yale apparently could not.

Citing his desire to study the Chekhov archives, Kennan applied for permission to visit Moscow in the summer of 1932. The State Department denied the request, declaring that the young Russian specialists should visit that country only when they could do so in an official capacity. “I am homesick and disgusted with Uncle Sam’s foreign service,” Kennan wrote home on hearing the news. “So if you hear of a good job as prosperity returns let me know.”

 

The foremost question confronting the Soviet experts was whether the U.S. should re-establish relations with Russia. Woodrow Wilson had not only withheld recognition of the new Bolshevik regime in 1917, he had ordered a limited U.S. military intervention the following year to protect American interests. Economic relations, including major investments by Harriman and others, had nevertheless flourished. By 1930, the Soviet Union was importing more from the U.S. than from any other country. Although trade tapered off in the early 1930s, the prospect of expanded markets remained one of the primary pressures in favor of recognition. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer editorialized: “America greatly needs the vast Russian market and Russia needs manufactured goods America has for sale. It is a natural process for the two to get together.”

In two studies for the State Department in 1932 and 1933, Kennan predicted that recognition would not increase prospects for trade, thus beginning what would become a long career of tugging anxiously at the sleeves of his political overlords. In 1933 he also wrote a long report warning that the Soviets felt free to break treaties whenever it suited their purposes. Yet ignoring the logical inconsistency, he went on to argue that existing treaties between Western nations and Moscow were not worded carefully enough. Because Marxism divided the world into classes rather than nations, for example, pacts guaranteeing the rights of foreigners in Russia had to be phrased carefully.

When the American minister at Riga gathered his Russian experts in August of 1933 to solicit their formal opinions on recognition, Kennan spoke first. “We should have no relationship at all with them,” he said, citing Soviet pledges to spread Communist revolution. “There is no sound basis for believing they have changed their minds in any way.” He was even more blunt in his letters. “Recognition continues to hang over our head like a sword of Damocles,” he wrote home that month.

Kennan’s views were shared by most of the State Department Soviet specialists, from Kelley and Henderson on down. “The communist leaders in Russia are unwilling to abandon their revolutionary aims with respect to the U.S.,” Kelley warned the new Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. In his voluminous unpublished memoirs, Henderson wrote: “The members of the Eastern European Division believed that regardless of such commitments as the emissaries of the Soviet government might make, the rulers of the Soviet Union would continue their efforts to bring about the overthrow—if necessary, by force—of the government of the U.S.”

Nevertheless, Franklin Roosevelt began to pursue diplomatic relations soon after taking office. By then, the idea had wide public support. FDR sent a secret message to the Kremlin saying that he would welcome an envoy with whom he could begin talks, and in November of 1933, Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, arrived.

Not by chance, both Kennan and Bohlen happened to be in Washington when the talks got under way. Bohlen had wangled a leave from his studies in Paris and headed straight home to be where the action was. Kennan had a bit more trouble; the State Department kept postponing his scheduled vacation. Finally he had his chief in Riga send a telegram explaining that his father was in precarious health and anxious to see his new grandchild. But when his boat arrived in New York in October, Kennan promptly headed straight for Washington rather than Milwaukee. From there he sent his apologies home: “With Comrade Litvinov on the way over here, there is surely going to be a lot of work for the drones of the Eastern European Division.”

There was, but the late nights that Bohlen and Kennan spent preparing reports were peripheral to the political considerations that drove the talks. Roosevelt wanted to recognize Russia, and within eight days he and Litvinov had reached an agreement.

Bohlen was overjoyed. It seemed clear to him that the time had passed when the two emerging world powers could maintain an official silence. A particularly important consideration, he felt, was the need to counter the rise of fascism in Europe and Japanese militarism in the Far East.

Kennan, on the other hand, was torn. Though he could not help feeling some excitement, he was upset that his warnings about the need to secure precise guarantees protecting the rights of Americans in the Soviet Union were ignored. In his memoirs, he wondered whether Roosevelt was even aware of the report he had done on this issue. (In fact, a memo quoting Kennan’s study was given to the President, but when Litvinov balked at including the suggested guarantees, FDR backed down.) Kennan regarded Roosevelt’s action as purely political. This was “the first of many lessons,” he said, on the influence of “those echelons of American opinion, Congressional opinion first and foremost, to which the respective statesmen are anxious to appeal.”

More importantly, Kennan did not share Bohlen’s belief that recognition made sense in strategic terms. “Never—neither then nor at any later date—did I consider the Soviet Union a fit ally or associate, actual or potential, for this country,” he declared in his memoirs.

Roosevelt appointed as his new ambassador William Bullitt, who had helped negotiate with Litvinov. As a member of the U.S. delegation in Versailles at the end of World War I, Bullitt had journeyed to see Lenin in Moscow and worked out a truce between the U.S. and the Bolsheviks—only to have his work publicly disavowed by Wilson. Regarding his appointment in 1933 as a chance to vindicate his earlier dreams, Bullitt set out to recruit the brightest Soviet scholars for his mission to Moscow.

Among the first he chose was Bohlen. “You are not a typical Foreign Service officer,” Bullitt said. “That’s why I want you.” The new ambassador went on to complain that most veteran diplomats seemed to be in a “straightjacket.” They had lost their dash and imagination. Bohlen laughed and promised that he would never let that happen to him.

Later that day, Bohlen’s exuberance was tempered by an encounter with Kennan in the State Department corridors. Although they were no more than casual acquaintances at the time, Kennan proceeded to unload all of his dark forebodings about recognition and confide that he had once again decided to resign from the Foreign Service. Bohlen tried to cheer up his highly strung colleague. New vistas were opening, he said, and they were among the lucky handful of young men destined to be at the fore. They spent the evening together, talking and drinking. Once again, Kennan decided not to resign. And so began a lifelong odd-couple comradery. As Kennan would later declare of his relationship with Bohlen: “No friendship has meant more to me.”

Bohlen and Henderson, who wanted to make sure that Kennan was chosen for the new Moscow embassy staff, took him to meet Bullitt the next afternoon. The new ambassador peppered him with questions about Russia and its economy. Kennan was impressed by Bullitt’s engaging curiosity, and he by Kennan’s thoughtful answers.

“Do you know Russian?” Bullitt asked. “Yes,” replied Kennan. “I’m leaving on Monday for Moscow,” said Bullitt. “Could you be ready in time to come along?”

The room, Kennan recalled, seemed to rock around him. For five years he had been preparing to go to Russia, and the offer, he noted in his journal, “came as a thunderstroke of good luck.” His qualms about recognition dissipated in a rush of excitement. Less than a week later, without ever having a chance to get to Milwaukee, he and his family were sailing back across the Atlantic. On the way, he received a telegram from William Phillips informing him that his father had died.

 

Aboard the S. S. President Harding, the U.S. delegation was infected with the exhilaration that was to mark their early years in Moscow. The irrepressible Bullitt—“young, handsome, urbane, full of charm and enthusiasm,” according to Kennan—enlivened the evenings by teaching the ship’s orchestra new songs. New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, his cynicism tempered by the excitement, held conversational court fueled by the boat’s best brandy. Hovering at the edges, scribbling in his journal, was Kennan.

When their train stopped at a tiny station in Poland, Litvinov, who was traveling with the Americans, reminisced about his childhood in a village nearby and confided that he had once only wished to become a librarian. “We suddenly realized, or at least I did, that these people we were dealing with were human beings like ourselves,” Kennan noted, “that they had been born somewhere, that they had their childhood ambitions as we had. It seemed for a brief moment we could break through and embrace these people.”

On December 10, 1933, the Americans reached the Soviet border near Minsk. Kennan translated the speech given by the representative of the Soviet Foreign Office, a nervous man whose eyes sparkled with the importance of the occasion. Then there was a banquet in the station restaurant, the first of countless occasions when Soviet cooks would produce lavish meals brimming with caviar and vodka only to watch sadly as American appetites proved unequal to the challenge.

The old Russian sleeping cars that carried the Americans from the border to Moscow had icicles hanging from their eaves. Kennan, too excited to sleep, watched as Russian workers pumped hot water into the compartments at each switching station. “Russia, Russia—unwashed, backward appealing Russia, so ashamed of your own backwardness, so orientally determined to conceal it from us by clever deceit,” he wrote in his journal. “I shall always remember you—slyly, touchingly, but with great shouting and confusion—pumping hot water into our sleeping car in the frosty darkness of a December morning in order that we might not know, in order that we might never realize, to how primitive a land we had come.”

When Bullitt and Kennan arrived at the National Hotel in Moscow, they had the special privilege of being met in the lobby by Marx—Harpo Marx. The comedian, who was visiting Russia at the time, enlivened one of the welcoming banquets by magically producing forks from Litvinov’s pockets. President Kalinin—“old Daddy” as the Americans came to call him—pulled Kennan aside. As young radical students, Kalinin confided, he and his comrades used to read the elder George Kennan’s reports on Siberia. The books, he said to Kennan’s astonishment, were the bible of the early Bolsheviks.

Harpo and Kennan shared an interest in Chekhov, and they took a group to see a performance of The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Art Theater. Harpo erupted in “solitary, unrestrained gales of laughter” throughout the play; Kennan got to meet with Chekhov’s widow, Knipper-Chekova, and discussed his plans for a biography.

In a grand ceremony in the Kremlin, Bullitt presented his credentials to the Soviet government, becoming the first official U.S. envoy in Moscow since DeWitt Clinton Poole departed in 1919. He also selected the sites for the American mission: Spaso House, a cavernous stucco mansion built by a sugar tycoon in 1914, was chosen to be the ambassador’s residence; a seven-story office building under construction on Mokhovaya Street, across from the Kremlin, was to become the new chancery. After eleven days in Moscow, Bullitt headed home to recruit the rest of his delegation, leaving Kennan behind to organize the new mission.

Kennan set up shop in a room of the National Hotel, next to the proposed chancery. While Annelise prepared meals on a whiskey crate and hot plate in the corner, her husband met with his skeletal staff and fenced with Moscow’s bureaucracy. The Soviets did try to be helpful. When no mantelpiece could be found to fit a fireplace in Spaso House, the government ripped one out of the Foreign Office. But the problems were legion. Various Russians who had mysteriously established residence in Spaso House, ranging from a Vice-Commissar of Foreign Affairs to squatters of obscure origin, had to be evicted. Writing leases, exchanging currency, and finding furniture all presented tangled challenges; the more minor they seemed, the harder they were to resolve.

Fortunately for Kennan, soon after his arrival he met at the hotel bar “a young American with ruffled hair, a strong Philadelphia-society drawl, and, as conversation soon revealed, a highly developed sense of humor.” This was Charles Thayer, a man who would become both a respected diplomat as well as the court jester of the Foreign Service.

Thayer was born to a Main Line family in Villanova, Pennsylvania, attended St. Paul’s one year behind Bohlen, and went on to West Point, where his high academic record was matched by an even higher number of demerits for carefree deportment. Realizing that he was hardly destined for a military career, Thayer had sought to resign his commission and study Russian in the hope of joining the Foreign Service. The only resistance came from an eccentric cavalry officer. “The Army’s just finished educating you and now you want to quit—to become a damned cookie-pushing diplomat—and in Russia of all places,” roared Colonel George Patton. “Are you a Bolshevik?” Eventually, however, Thayer persuaded Patton and others that he would be better off out of uniform, and he embarked on his own to Moscow to await American recognition.

Before Bullitt returned to the U.S. to fill out his delegation, Thayer managed to wangle a job. Kennan immediately put him to work helping organize the embassy, a haphazard exercise at best. By the time Bullitt and his staff returned at the end of February 1934, only a shipment of wall clocks had been installed. But slowly, despite Kennan’s anxieties and Thayer’s eccentricities, the embassy and its offices began to take shape.

Bohlen joined Bullitt’s entourage when the ambassador passed through Paris on his return to Moscow. At the Russian border, while they waited to change trains, Bohlen was struck by a smell that Kennan and Thayer had already come to love and hate. “The odor of wet sheepskin coats, of sawdust spread on the floors to absorb moisture, of disinfectant, of pink soap, of human sweat, and of the cheap Russian tobacco known as Makhorka—still remains for me the smell of the Soviet Union,” he later recalled.

When Bohlen and Bullitt pulled into Moscow, Kennan and Thayer were waiting at the station to greet them. Noting a band on the platform, the American delegation prepared for a grand welcoming ceremony. The musicians, however, turned out to be for the delegates to a Women’s Day celebration. For Bullitt there was only a handshake from the Soviet chief of protocol, the first of many dashed expectations Bullitt was destined to encounter.

Bohlen plunged right in with the work of organizing the embassy. At breakfast their first morning in Spaso House, Bullitt’s French cook burst in and announced: “There is nothing in the house! Nothing! I assure you.” Thayer looked at Kennan and growled under his breath. For weeks they had been struggling to make the mansion habitable. The kitchen had no spices, the cook continued, and the bedrooms no coat hangers. So Thayer commandeered a Harley-Davidson with a sidecar from the boy friend of his landlady’s daughter and, with the earflaps of his fur cap flying, careened through the muddy streets of Moscow in search of provisions. Spices were hard to come by, but Bohlen was able to figure out the Russian word for coat hangers (veselka) and find a few wooden ones for the embassy.

“There were evenings,” noted Kennan in his journal, “when we subordinate officers—assembled in my hotel room, gloomily sipping our highballs and watching the mice play hide-and-seek along the base-boards—felt that we were defeated, that we were too weak to bridge even those preliminary contradictions between communism and capitalism, and that we would soon have to give it up and sneak shame-facedly away, the laughing-stock of Europe.” By July, however, the mission was finally able to move into the Mokhovaya offices and begin work. On the day of the move, a grizzled career officer who was serving as the embassy counselor stood amid the near-empty rooms and announced to a startled Kennan: “You know, George, I think it’s high time we got off a dispatch on the Baltic nonaggression pacts.”

Yet the demand from Washington for reporting on obscure nonaggression pacts was minimal, leaving the young officers in Moscow much time for play. Bullitt encouraged them to travel as much as possible, a mandate that Kennan pursued with an intensity his colleagues found amusing. He forayed alone by train to sketch medieval churches and search for Chekhov memorabilia. Bohlen and Thayer, much to the consternation of their secret-police escorts, took the opportunity to hunt wild boar near Baku in the Caucasus Mountains.

Bullitt also emphasized the need for close ties with the people. “As a bachelor,” Bohlen recalled, “I eagerly carried out his instructions.” After Bohlen arranged a film screening for the corps of the Moscow ballet, ballerinas became frequent guests at embassy lunches and, he noted, “many temporary liaisons were formed.” He and Kennan were asked to become consultants to a local production of Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht’s The Front Page. The young Soviet actors had their own conceptions of American society. The city editor, for example, wore a top hat and tailcoat because the director assumed this was the normal style for bosses in a capitalist society.

The Russians seemed keen on nurturing the friendship. When Bohlen, at Bullitt’s direction, offered to teach them baseball in a local park, a group dutifully turned out. Their mild interest, however, declined even further after one of them was beaned by a fastball. “Apparently,” Bohlen later wrote, “they had been ordered to play.”

Once, when Thayer was translating at a banquet for the Soviet Defense Commissar, he surreptitiously introduced the subject of polo. Said Bullitt in English: “Ask the Commissar where the best summer resorts are.” Said Thayer in Russian: “The ambassador wants to know [pause] why you don’t play polo in the Soviet Union.” Before Bullitt caught on to what was happening, Thayer had arranged for embassy staffers to teach the game to the Russians. Bullitt, more amused than angry, agreed to serve as referee for what turned out to be a set of wild exhibitions.

The distaste that Bohlen and Kennan shared for the Soviet system was temporarily thawed by the warmth they encountered that first year. Moscow’s intellectuals, in particular, seemed anxious to befriend their new American allies, and their wives were intrigued by Paris fashion and American cosmetics. There were signs of a more liberal approach to the outside world. “I bear that pleasant winter in memory,” Kennan wistfully notes, “as an example of what Soviet-American relations might, in other circumstances, have been.”

Bohlen harbored an even greater optimism; freedom and democracy, he felt, were inherent features of true Marxism, and he saw signs that they might be allowed to emerge. “The young Russians are just like novices in a new faith,” he wrote his mother. “I think the people of Moscow don’t look very beaten and crushed.” He developed a deep love for the Russians as people. “I know of no one who has been in Russia, whatever his attitude toward the regime, who has felt anything but affection for the Russian people as a whole,” he later wrote. “Henderson, Kennan and I realized that we had arrived in Moscow at an opportune time, for 1934 may be seen as the most optimistic year in Soviet history.”

The culmination of the year of good feeling came at the 1934 Christmas party at Spaso House. To enliven the affair, Thayer and his companions produced three trained seals from the Moscow Circus. At the appointed moment, they appeared through a chute into the cavernous three-story ballroom of Spaso House balancing a Christmas tree and trays of champagne on their noses. The performance climaxed with the seals playing a Christmas carol on harmonicas.

At that point, however, their trainer, who had been enjoying the festivities all too well, passed out on the ballroom floor. “There are several versions of what happened during the next fifteen minutes,” Thayer wrote. One of the seals bolted for the kitchen, where a German cook tried to subdue it with a frying pan. Another performed a series of unrehearsed acts amid the startled guests in the ballroom. Wielding brooms and dead fish, the Americans were finally able to herd all three seals back into their truck and, after one last break for freedom on the way, they were returned safely to the circus.

 

In order to escape these and less amusing trials of Moscow life, the younger members of the embassy rented a dacha about twenty miles from town. The regulars included Bohlen, Thayer, Kennan, Loy Henderson, Elbridge Durbrow, and Eddie Page. The two-story cottage had only four bedrooms, but soon it became the social center for much of the Western diplomatic corps. It offered skiing in the winter, mint for juleps in the spring, a field for baseball in the summer, and three tired brown horses for riding the year around. Thayer dubbed it a kolkhoz, or collective farm, so that Soviet authorities would sell them subsidized oats for the horses. The animals, alas, seemed not to prosper under the arrangement, perhaps because their old Russian groom, a bowlegged former czarist cavalry officer, made money on the side by reselling the feed for his own profit.

In this atmosphere even Kennan seemed to shed his somber demeanor, or at least to make a valiant stab at it. “I learned how to ride a horse,” he recalled, “and became an enthusiastic, though hardly distinguished, skater, skier, tennis player and bridge partner.” Durbrow’s home movies show him lying on the makeshift baseball diamond in his three-piece suit and playing Russian folk songs on his guitar. Annelise was even more social, abandoning her aloof demeanor at the gay parties on the weekends while her husband cornered one or another of his colleagues for intense discussions of Soviet life.

Kennan would occasionally strive to entertain his companions by reading aloud, as his father had once done, from Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Chekhov’s plays. Annelise, after a few drinks, would have to remind him somewhat forcefully that not everyone was interested in hearing these recitations. Indeed, despite Kennan’s efforts to be sociable, his manner still tended to grate on his colleagues’ nerves. When he began affecting a pipe, the others laughed at his professorial pretenses; when he churned out long memos and cables, they would roll their eyes. Later, much of his reputation would derive from precisely this penchant for writing long telegrams.

“Almost everyone got annoyed with Kennan after they first got to know him,” Henderson later said. “He was so engrossed in his own ideas that he never learned how to go along or get along. After half a year in Moscow, Bullitt had little use for George personally. He did, however, develop a great respect for George’s mind. None of us took George’s ideas as seriously as George did, but we knew that someday people would have to.”

Bohlen, understandably, was far more popular. “He had a pleasing personality, a keen sense of humor, a gift for amusing conversation, and a certain amount of spontaneous joyousness,” said Henderson. In almost every way, Bohlen was the opposite of Kennan. “Chip was friendly,” Henderson recalled. “He drank and socialized well, and he never seemed like a snob. Above all, he had a kind manner that made people open up to him. He was a very good Foreign Service officer in the sense that he always tried to please those in power. He never questioned policy, except in private where I think he tried to make everyone think he agreed with them.”

Despite their dissimilarities, or perhaps because of them, Bohlen was one of the few in Moscow who could genuinely get along with Kennan. They frequently attended lectures and concerts together, and Bohlen, after a night on the party circuit, often dropped by Kennan’s room and sat on his bed for midnight chats. He would chide his friend for being too gloomy, both personally and professionally, and for getting so wrapped up in criticizing policy that he found himself unable to execute it in a professional way. Kennan had “a good streak of American morality,” Bohlen once said, and found it hard to “divorce his visceral feelings from his knowledge and fact.”

For Kennan, the relationship he formed with Bohlen in Moscow was “the beginning of a lifelong intellectual intimacy which, for me at least, was unique in its scope and intensity.” At times it could be stormy. “In numberless verbal encounters, then and over ensuing decades, our agreements and differences would be sternly and ruthlessly talked out, sometimes with a heat so white that casual bystanders would conclude we had broken for life.” These “painful yet pleasant” arguments, however, seldom involved ideological differences. “Where we disagreed was on how ideas should be translated into policy,” Kennan recalled some fifty years later. “Chip tended to be very loyal to the U.S. policy of the moment, even when it was Roosevelt’s optimism, which he disagreed with. He did not like to fight the prevailing trends. I used to call him ‘the partisan of the moment.’”

 

The high hopes of that first year in Moscow were dashed by a murder and its grisly aftermath. In December 1934, Sergei Kirov, the party boss in Leningrad, was shot. Although it later became apparent that Stalin had ordered the assassination himself, he used the incident to embark on a series of show trials and purges that terrorized the Russian populace. From then until the outbreak of World War II, while Bohlen and Kennan alternated working in Moscow and on the Soviet desk at the State Department, the horror of the purges would dominate their dealings with the Soviet Union. As Kennan noted in his private journal: “Russia, which had begun to reach out a hand to the West, had once more failed to find the ultimate self-confidence to complete the gesture.”

A few days after Kirov’s murder, Kennan was struck by one of his periodic intestinal illnesses. As the other officials and their Soviet guests (and the seals) joined in Christmas festivities, Kennan lay suffering in bed. When colleagues came to his bedside to describe the rising fear and xenophobia pervading Moscow, Kennan’s alienation came rushing to the surface. “I felt the same sort of slightly snobbish detachment which I am sure respectable ghosts must feel toward those who are still caught in the meshes of earthly existence,” he wrote.

One friend unearthed and brought to Kennan some old volumes of correspondence from the pre-revolutionary American mission in St. Petersburg. “These people are obsessed,” one minister had written a century earlier, “with a strange superstition that they are destined to conquer the world.” For Kennan, the old dispatches reinforced his belief that Russia’s plight was indigenous to its culture and not merely a product of Communist ideology. “Most of what was written there was as true in 1934 as it has been a century before,” he noted.

Kennan gathered the old letters into a cable for the State Department, which Bullitt agreed to send after appending the explanation that they were a century old. “They were a wonderful support to our own feeling that Russia had to be looked at from a long-range point of view,” Kennan wrote in his journal, “that Bolshevism, with all its hullabaloo about revolution, was not a turning point in history, but only another name, another milepost along the road of Russia’s wasteful, painful progress from an obscure origin to an obscure destiny.”

Part of Kennan’s growing disdain for Communism grew out of his rather prissy elitism. On a solitary sojourn to Sochi, a resort on the Black Sea, he was repulsed by the “bored, homesick proletarians” at the hotel. “Had the fathers of the Revolution really imagined that, once the upper and middle classes had been kicked out of these watering-places, the members of the proletariat would move in and proceed to amuse themselves gracefully and with taste?” he mused in his journal. “Did they really fail to foresee that such simple people would make pig-sties of these hotels and villas, would have no appreciation for sky and air and mountain scenery?”

Bohlen, on the other hand, found himself more confused than outraged. “A really accurate picture is impossible as the most incredible contradictions run side by side,” he wrote in a letter home. “Whatever has been written about the methods of the state police is true. I know personally of horrible things that have happened. On the other hand, I think they are pulling it off, and hope for the future and a real glorification of work are the two factors that distinguish this country. This spirit of optimism goes hand in hand with complete repression of individual liberty as we understand it.”

What upset Bohlen most were the concrete disappointments. He ran into problems arranging with Litvinov a lease on a riverside parcel of land that Stalin had promised for a new U.S. Embassy. At first Litvinov said the site was unavailable. After Bullitt and Bohlen pressured him, Litvinov relented. But insurmountable obstacles soon arose: Permits would be necessary for each tree that would be cut down, building materials would have to be bought at unrealistic exchange rates, housing would not be available for American workmen. Soon the project had to be dropped. “The Soviets are the worst people to do business with I have ever met,” Bohlen wrote home. “They’ll try to take the gold out of your teeth.”

Bohlen attributed the Soviet disdain for compromise to the fact that they had never been a trading nation. “Russians have concentrated on the acquisition of land, seizing and holding territory,” he later wrote. “Such a relationship does not produce the spirit of compromise.” This cultural tendency, he speculated, was reinforced by “the arbitrary and intolerant nature of Bolshevist thought” and a sense that compromise was “equivalent to surrender or betrayal.” To Bohlen, the consummate diplomat, the ability to compromise was considered a paramount virtue.

Bohlen, who relished the carefree exercise of his personal freedom more than most men, was also resentful of the omnipresent Soviet state police. One evening in June, he and Bullitt decided to go rowing on the Moscow River past the embankments where young Muscovites bathed nude. They were delighted to discover that the agents trailing them did not know how to row. The gumshoes yelled anxiously into their radios. Finally, just as the two Americans were getting out of sight, a police boat arrived to continue the surveillance.

The anti-Soviet attitude of Kennan and Bohlen was partly responsible for Bullitt’s dramatic conversion in 1935. “Bohlen and I were increasingly dismayed by the Soviet system and we helped move Bullitt away from his optimistic views,” Kennan recalled later in an interview. “It did not take too much work. The Soviet government itself did the most to turn Bullitt off and dispel his ill-placed hopes.”

Bohlen was temporarily transferred back to Washington in the spring of 1935 to work in the Eastern European Division. As he crossed the border out of Russia, his elation was perhaps even greater than that he felt on arrival. “It was like coming out into the fresh spring air from a room where the oxygen content was sufficient to sustain life but insufficient to produce any mental or spiritual animation.”

Traveling with him was Charlie Thayer. The two men, unpressed and irrepressible, had been roommates in Moscow, where Thayer’s sister Avis had paid them a visit. Years before, Bohlen had spent a vacation in Villanova with George Thayer, his classmate at St. Paul’s. Avis was only nine back then, and Bohlen scarcely noticed her. But when she visited Moscow in 1934, Bohlen found himself entranced by her fresh beauty and gentle wit. On his way back to Washington, Bohlen stopped in Villanova to make Avis his wife and Charlie his brother-in-law.

Bohlen’s reports at the Eastern European Division were sharply anti-Soviet. One of them, on the Kremlin’s use of terror, noted that the Bolsheviks had forsworn the tactic when they were not in power, but once in office had come to regard it “as a perfectly legitimate instrument of class warfare.” Back in Moscow, Kennan’s outpourings were even more harsh, and certainly more prolific. It was the start of a long career producing voluminous reports that were destined to go largely unread and even longer personal memos that would languish in his own files.

The most striking of these was a 1936 paper titled “Some Fundamentals of Russian-American Relations.” In it Kennan propounded a deterministic view of history that he was to hold throughout his life. Relations between nations, he argued, “are always governed in the long run by certain relatively permanent fundamental factors arising out of geographical and historic conditions.” Because of this, he concluded, there was “little future for Russian-American relations other than a long series of misunderstandings, disappointments and recriminations on both sides.”

Kennan’s first official dispatch was a report on the Karl Radek purge trial in January 1937. It displayed the somewhat obscure analysis that would later infuriate officials seeking clear-cut answers from him. “Even if all the facts of the case were available, which they certainly are not and never will be, it is doubtful whether the western mind could ever fathom the question of guilt or innocence, of truth or fiction,” he wrote. “The Russian mind, as Dostoyevski has shown, knows no moderation; and it sometimes carries both truth and falsehood to such infinite extremes that they eventually meet in space, like parallel lines, and it is no longer possible to distinguish between them.”

 

Convinced of the bright prospects for friendly relations with Russia, Roosevelt replaced the disillusioned Bullitt with Joseph Davies, a Democratic politico and childhood friend whose support for the Soviet experiment was unwavering. Kennan was flabbergasted. In his view FDR had committed the unpardonable sin of viewing the Moscow post as “only another political plum.” At a late-night meeting in Loy Henderson’s rooms, where the disgruntled junior officers vented their dismay, Kennan once again talked of resigning.

Soon after Davies arrived, his ebullient trust in the Soviets clashed with the hard-edged suspicions of Kennan and his colleagues. There was, for example, the case of the mysterious microphone. It began when Kennan and Thayer discovered some hidden wires in the Spaso House billiard room. Because the bug had not yet been fully connected, a plan was hatched to snare the perpetrators. Along with Durbrow, they took shifts hiding in the attic with a gun (unloaded) and a flashlight. After a few cold and fruitless nights, the stakeout was abandoned in favor of a jerry-built trap of silk threads connected to an alarm bell. Unfortunately, the alarm depended on the regular house current; while the three guards slept, someone shut off the main switch to the house. In the morning it was discovered that the microphone had been removed.

Davies was annoyed by the suspicions of his subordinates. In the movie of his book Mission to Moscow, he is shown chastising a junior officer for suggesting that the Soviets might be engaged in eavesdropping. In one of his books about the period, Bears in the Caviar, Thayer pointedly notes: “A photograph of the mike is on file in the State Department in case anyone in Hollywood is interested.”

Unbeknownst to Kennan, Davies decided to recommend that he be transferred. In a letter to the State Department, the ambassador praised Kennan’s work but added that he had been in Moscow “too long for his own good” and that it would be “a very humane thing” to move him because of his poor health. In the summer of 1937, after an aborted decision to assign him to Jerusalem, Kennan was called to replace Bohlen as a Russian expert in Washington.

Kennan’s transfer came just as the department was going through a radical shake-up. Roosevelt’s determination to nurture friendly relations with Russia had resulted in the destruction of the Eastern European Division, where Bohlen was working. It was reduced to two desks in a new Division of European Affairs.

Although the reorganization was partly an attempt to streamline the bureaucracy, Bohlen and Kennan believed (with some justification) that it was designed to dissipate the hard-line clique of Soviet specialists whom Kelley had cultivated. “The Russians themselves,” Bohlen said, “took part in the campaign against Kelley.” They both darkly suspected that Eleanor Roosevelt bore some of the blame. “There was indeed the smell of Soviet influence, or strongly pro-Soviet influence, somewhere in the higher reaches of the government,” concluded Kennan.

But as was his wont, Bohlen could also see the President’s point that “a fresh view was needed in the State Department,” and he agreed to man the new Russian desk until Kennan’s return. What bothered Bohlen most about the “hoary bureaucratic solution” was the decision to disperse the old division’s valuable research collection, which ranged from early editions of Pravda to files on revolutionaries in the U.S. So he surreptitiously wrapped the most important material in brown paper and hid it in the cavernous attic of the old State Department building. “The preservation of this invaluable collection of revolutionary documents was my first concern.”

When Kennan reached Washington in September he was horrified. “It was like one of the Russian purges,” he recalls, overstating the situation somewhat. “A beautiful library was being destroyed by people in the White House who objected to our realistic attitude toward the Soviet Union.” One evening before Bohlen left to go back to Moscow, the two friends had a few drinks together in the half-cubicle that Bohlen was vacating. Then they climbed into the attic to rescue the hidden books and documents. Kennan kept the most important ones squirreled away near his new desk. The rest Bohlen arranged to have stored in a special section of the Library of Congress. “We agreed,” Kennan recalled, “that it was our duty to keep alive the flame of those who believed in objective analysis of the Soviet system.”

During his year on the Russian desk, Kennan spent much of his time working with American businessmen, including Harriman, who were interested in increased trade with the Soviet Union. His prickly Puritan streak made him more sensitive about conflicts of interest than many of the Wall Streeters in government at the time. When a Milwaukee machine manufacturer asked him to use his influence to help win a Soviet contract, Kennan replied that it was not the role of the U.S. government “to push individual deals.”

Kennan’s only summons to see Secretary of State Cordell Hull concerned a case of some American Communists who had mysteriously disappeared in Moscow. Still distressed about the loose wording of treaties guaranteeing the rights of foreigners in the U.S.S.R., the young analyst gave a characteristically tortured analysis of the situation. “At the end of the brief interview he thought, I suspected, that I was as unbalanced as the Russians whose behavior I had tried to make intelligible,” Kennan noted.

In a paper on “The Position of the American Ambassador in Moscow,” Kennan provided a detailed indictment of the Soviet attitude to foreigners and the hassles faced by members of the Moscow embassy. To protest “the general atmosphere of suspicion and lack of cooperation,” wrote Kennan in a subsequent flurry of memos, Washington should postpone appointing a replacement for Davies when his assignment was over. Like many of his hard-line suggestions, the advice was ignored.

Although his colleagues would often smile wearily at Kennan’s unsolicited outpourings, he was slowly carving a role for himself in the foreign policy Establishment as a resident philosophizer; he began to be considered, and most certainly considered himself, an abstract and intuitive thinker able to fathom the complexities of Soviet conduct. The geographic and historic determinism that was nascent in his memos for Bullitt gradually evolved into a coherent philosophy, one that would form the basis for his momentous cables and essays defining the doctrine of containment after World War II.

Its earliest clear expression came in a lecture titled “Russia” that Kennan gave at the Foreign Service School in May of 1938. In it he downplayed the role of Marxist ideology in guiding Kremlin conduct and placed greater importance on the “permanent characteristics” of the Russian national character. Citing his discovery a few years earlier of the dispatches from American ambassadors at the time of Czar Nicholas I, Kennan argued that, both before and after its revolution, Russia had a “definite personality” that included “the constant fear of foreign invasion, the hysterical suspicion of other nations.”

This deep-dyed national personality, Kennan theorized, resulted in part from the geography of Russia, a vast and cold continental mass that encouraged “extremism” rather than a sense of limits and whose insecure borders prevented inhabitants from thinking in terms of a “limited well-defined territory.” History also played a role: Centuries of invasion by “Asiatic hordes” had produced a system of “Oriental despotism” and xenophobia. In addition, there was the influence of the Byzantine Church, characterized by “its intolerance, its intriguing and despotic political systems.”

Kennan’s conclusion was almost Freudian in its determinism: “Nations, like individuals, are largely the product of their environment; and many of their characteristics, their fears and their neuroses, as well as their abilities, are conditioned by the impressions of what we may call their early childhood.” It was a gloomy picture, one that offered little hope for future friendship between Russia and the West.

Kennan’s elitism had already made him scornful of the proletarian pretenses of Marxism. Back home in the U.S., he squirmed at the bitter midterm elections of 1938 with their ill-informed foreign policy rhetoric. His elitism flared anew, and this time its target was democracy. When Bohlen introduced him to the newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop, Kennan proclaimed: “The trouble with this country is that we are a democracy and instead should be ruled by aristocrats.” Recalled Alsop: “I was very nearly sick.”

The Founding Fathers, Kennan believed, had not meant to establish a true democracy. In a note to a friend as early as 1930, he had posed the question: “If they disapproved of democracy for a population predominantly white, Protestant and British, faced with relatively simple problems, would they not turn over in their graves at the mere thought of the democratic principle being applied to a population containing over ten million Negroes and many more millions of southern Europeans to whom the democratic principle is completely strange?”

While in Austria recuperating from an intestinal illness in 1935, Kennan had been impressed at the way the “distinctively authoritarian” regime in Vienna handled social problems. “There was no demagoguery, no public wrangling and debate by laymen, no appeal to the emotions and greed of the public,” he wrote in a private journal he completed in 1939. “Benevolent despotism,” he concluded, “had greater possibilities for good” than did democracy. “During the years to come—the uneasy years from 1936 to 1939, when our country rang with shrill debate about the issue of dictatorship vs. democracy—I was never able to forget these impressions. I could not get excited by this fancied issue. I could not follow the fanatical separating of the authoritarian goats from the democratic sheep.”

In 1938, Kennan began drafting a bizarre book that advocated an authoritarian state run by America’s elite. He completed only two chapters, did not submit them for publication, and never mentioned the proposed book in his memoirs or elsewhere—which was no doubt fortunate for his reputation. In this work, Kennan proposes that the U.S. travel “along the road which leads through constitutional change to the authoritarian state.”

The first chapter, titled “The Prerequisites,” was written in a messy scrawl that betrayed more emotion than Kennan’s usual disciplined hand. Drawing from his perceptions of Austria, he argued that there were no moral distinctions between democracy and authoritarianism. The U.S., he proposed, should be governed by an “enlightened elite.” He left “unanswered” the question of how this group would be chosen except to say that members should be “selected on the basis of individual fitness for authority.”

Even more startling were the proposals in Kennan’s second chapter for “the very extensive restriction of suffrage in national affairs.” He explained: “There are millions of people in this country who haven’t the faintest conception of the rights and wrongs of the complicated questions which the federal government faces.” Those who would be denied the vote under his scheme: women, whom Kennan called frivolous; blacks, whom he considered wards of the state; and immigrants, who were exercising more political power than “real” Americans.

The book draft was littered with intuitive slurs on various groups. Among them: “Newer” Americans (mainly Catholic immigrants) could not understand American principles and would be “happier as passive citizens”; women in the U.S. tended to be more “high-strung, unsatisfied, flat-chested and flat-voiced” than those in other countries and would lead more meaningful lives if they returned to “family picnics, children’s parties and the church social”; and blacks would be better off if they were “openly dependent” on the “kindness” of society. “The lack of the franchise could make the negro little more defenseless than he is,” Kennan argued.

Buried in the papers of even the most enlightened men are, no doubt, some rather wild notions. The question is whether such idle fancies reflect their true character or a momentary excess. Kennan’s book draft was somewhat extreme, even for him, yet it did reflect a dark side of his character. He and Bohlen shared many intellectual notions; yet Bohlen’s secure self-perception produced a more optimistic outlook, whereas Kennan’s brooding discomfort with the world bred a bleak view of mankind.

Throughout his public career, Kennan bristled at politicians catering to public pressures. He criticized the “political pressures” for helping Jewish refugees before and after World War II and invariably despaired of the ability of a democracy to conduct a coherent foreign policy. “Our actions in the field of foreign affairs are the convulsive reactions of politicians to an internal political life dominated by vocal minorities,” he wrote in his diary in 1944. Even late in his life, Kennan nurtured his notions of an elite meritocracy. “We ought to create a panel or pool of outstanding people that would comprise perhaps five hundred to one thousand souls,” he told an interviewer. “Appointment to it would be by some detached and austere authority such as the Supreme Court.” From this group, he argued, the nation’s leaders should be chosen.

 

When Bohlen, who had traded jobs with Kennan, arrived back in Moscow in January of 1938, he was again struck by the smell. “There was the same pervasive odor,” he wrote. The only difference, as his wife, Avis, pointed out, was the addition of a ghastly cheap perfume Russian women had started wearing and which foreigners dubbed “Stalin’s breath.” Nor had the oppressive grip of the Soviet police state eased: Authorities refused to allow Bohlen to bring in forty-one of the books he was carrying, some of them from the old Eastern European Division library that he and Kennan had rescued. It was the first time that the personal items of an American Foreign Service officer had been banned.

Bohlen soon found himself at odds with Davies’s rosy outlook on the Soviet system. Two weeks after his return, Bohlen visited the Supreme Soviet to watch it adopt reforms that were supposed to separate the policy-making functions of the Communist Party’s Politburo from the administrative duties of various state agencies. What Bohlen reported, correctly, was that both party and state were embodied in one man, Stalin. “Judged by the accepted connotations of the word democracy and by the usual procedure of legislative bodies,” Bohlen cabled, “the entire proceedings in the Supreme Soviet were a farce.” He did note, however, that a pudgy man with a big grin named Nikita Khrushchev was “less obviously boot-licking.”

Bohlen’s initial reaction to the wave of purges was, typically, a practical one. Like Manhattan apartment seekers who read the obituary columns, he went to the Soviet Foreign Office after the arrests of two Russians who lived in the Mokhovaya building and negotiated to take over the lease of their rooms. “I felt like a vulture,” he recalled, “but we needed the space.”

Bohlen was assigned to report on the last of the great show trials, that of Nikolai Bukharin, one of the original Bolsheviks. Whereas Kennan had lapsed into convoluted discourses about the contradictions inherent in the Russian mind when he was faced with disagreeing with Ambassador Davies’s hopelessly naïve view of the purge trials, Bohlen reacted in a way that was indicative of his own limitations.

The “bloodthirsty” prosecutor, Andrei Vishinsky, repulsed Bohlen, and he found the evidence and confessions to be “fantastic” and unbelievable (which indeed they were). The judge, “who looked like a sadistic pig,” read the sentences with relish: “To be shot, to be shot, to be shot.” Bohlen recalls: “I felt that the top of my head was coming off. I could not go to sleep easily for almost a month.” He privately ridiculed the naïveté of Davies. “He had an unfortunate tendency to take what was presented at the trial as the honest and gospel truth,” wrote Bohlen. “I still blush when I think of some of the telegrams he sent.”

Yet Bohlen found himself unable to write his analysis of the case, the only assignment in his forty-year career that he failed to complete. “I could not separate fact from fiction at the trial,” he recalled. “I knew the trial was a phony, but I could not prove it; I could only intimate that it had no relevance to reality. Try as I did, and I tried for over a month, I was unable to present a convincing case.”

Loy Henderson, who had assigned him the task, was harsh in his assessment of Bohlen’s motives. “He said he would rather not write it,” Henderson recalled years later. “He knew the Soviets would somehow get hold of it and that he might make them permanent enemies of his. He also knew that Roosevelt and Davies did not want to see negative reporting on the Soviets. He was so anxious to please everyone. He would never say anything that might get him in trouble.”

Bohlen’s and Kennan’s hostility toward Stalin and his system might seem quite unremarkable in retrospect, but at the time it was a stark departure from official U.S. thinking. Both Davies and his military attaché were ardent apostles of Soviet-American friendship. So too, though in a more restrained way, were President Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and Secretary of State Hull. Even the American public, despite deep currents of anti-Communist sentiment, was fascinated by press accounts portraying Russia as a potential trading partner and ally.

While Kennan was wrestling with his abstract theories, Bohlen was developing a more straightforward view of Soviet conduct. He agreed with Kennan that Russians had historically been expansionist. In addition, Bohlen felt, their new ideology of international class struggle prompted them to interfere in other countries. But the primary determinant of Soviet foreign policy, he came to believe, was the desire of Kremlin leaders to consolidate their own control at home and protect their national security. Their belief in the hostility of the capitalist world served to justify their own ironclad rule. In discussions during the 1930s, Bohlen bounced these ideas off of Kennan, who later became their most eloquent exponent.

What Bohlen concluded from his analysis was that it was foolish to base a policy toward the Soviets on anything other than an appeal to their self-interest. Any alliances the Kremlin made would be temporary and cynical, forged solely on the basis of transitory needs rather than true understandings. As he said in a 1938 cable: “The Kremlin does not envisage cordial relations with the capitalist governments on any permanent basis but rather as a temporary expedient.”

Bohlen’s insights prepared him to sense a stunning turnabout: that Stalin might abandon efforts at collective security with Britain and France and sign a nonaggression pact with Hitler’s Germany. His reporting on this critical event was aided as well by his remarkable ease in establishing diplomatic contacts and his charmed luck.

What first caught Bohlen’s eye was a speech Litvinov made in June of 1938. “If the countries with which it was heretofore contented to cooperate do not pursue policies in accordance with the desire of the Soviet government,” said the Foreign Minister, “even this slight cooperation might be withdrawn.” Bohlen’s wariness increased after Neville Chamberlain’s attempt at appeasement in Munich, for he knew such a move would raise Soviet fears of “capitalist encirclement.” Yet still he was characteristically cautious: “For the moment at least the Kremlin is inclined to await the course of further developments.”

Indeed, Bohlen remained reluctant—perhaps too reluctant—to go out on a limb even after Stalin proclaimed in March of 1939 that Russia would not go to war “to pull somebody else’s chestnuts out of the fire.” When Litvinov was replaced by Molotov, Bohlen stated (correctly) that the personnel change “might be a step away from the principle of collective security and toward the establishment of relations with Germany,” but then he added that it might be only a ploy to pressure Britain. Even Bullitt, who telephoned from Paris, where he was now stationed, to discuss how Litvinov’s removal would affect France, had trouble eliciting a bolder prediction from his former staffer. Talking in baseball slang to confuse eavesdroppers, Bullitt wondered whether his “friends” might face a “shutout.” Bohlen cautiously responded that he found it difficult to predict what a “pinch hitter” would do.

Unlike Kennan, however, Bohlen’s reporting skills were greater than his confidence in his own insights. At the American dacha near Moscow, one of the frequent guests was a personable young staffer in the German Embassy, Johnny Herwarth, who was secretly dismayed by Hitler’s tyranny. In May of 1939, the day after he returned from a trip with his ambassador, Herwarth went riding with Bohlen on the spavined nags at the dacha. He told his friend that the ambassador had been summoned back to Berlin and that “something was up.” Bohlen immediately cabled the information to Washington, saying it came “in the strictest confidence.”

To Bohlen’s surprise, Herwarth seemed willing to keep him abreast of subsequent developments. Later in the week, the two went back to the dacha, where Herwarth spilled the details of what had happened in Berlin. In a long and explicit cable, Bohlen reported that the German ambassador had been told “to convey very discreetly to the Soviet government the impression that Germany entertained no animosity toward it.”

Bohlen’s talks with Herwarth continued, sometimes at the German Embassy, more often at the dacha. Bohlen became convinced that Herwarth was acting out of friendship rather than sinister motives. With his phenomenal recall, Bohlen could remember all the details of what Herwarth said without taking notes. Then, because he could not type and feared that any dictation would be picked up by bugs, he would scrawl his reports in longhand upon returning to the embassy. After stenographers had wrestled with his illegible writing, the messages were coded and cabled.

The big break came in mid-August at a formal ball at the German Embassy. When Bohlen walked in, Herwarth told him that the ambassador was at that moment in the Kremlin talking to Molotov. He promised to fill in Bohlen as soon as he learned what had transpired. Bohlen, anxious to keep a clear head, was careful to drink only moderately. Half an hour later, the ambassador appeared at the party. Recalled Bohlen: “He was the urbane, smiling host and gave no indication that he had just pulled off one of the greatest coups in modern diplomatic history.” As they sat in the corner sipping champagne, Herwarth gave Bohlen the details.

Bohlen’s cable was greeted with skepticism at the State Department. “This doubt was a sign, I think, of too great a belief in the fidelity of the Soviet leaders to their anti-Fascist views and not enough realization that they put the preservation of the Soviet system high above every other consideration,” he later wrote. Nevertheless, Secretary Hull summoned the British and French envoys in Washington to pass along the information. Years later, Anthony Eden, who had been the British Foreign Minister, told Bohlen that because of a Communist traitor working in the Foreign Office code room, the message was not delivered to British leaders until after the announcement was public.

The final agreement was sealed and announced the following week when German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop flew to Moscow to meet with Molotov and Stalin. Herwarth called Bohlen and asked him to visit the German chancery. While Ribbentrop slept upstairs, Herwarth filled in Bohlen on the secret protocol attached to the pact, which agreed that Russia and Germany would carve up Poland for themselves. Both men realized that the upshot would be a Nazi attack on Poland and perhaps an all-out war. Herwarth, still a nationalist, returned to Germany to join his old army regiment. (After the war, he became West Germany’s first ambassador to England.) Bohlen, meanwhile, was able to develop a new contact in the German Embassy who helped him monitor the collaboration between the two dictatorships.

Early in 1940, Bohlen decided to take Avis, who was pregnant, to Paris so that she could fly home and have their baby in the U.S. While in Berlin, he got a chance to spend a long evening with Kennan, who had been reassigned there. Kennan was in a gloomier mood than usual, alarmed by the preparations the Nazis were making for their assault on France. He also told Bohlen that he doubted, incorrectly as it turned out, that the Nazis would do anything to dissolve their unholy alliance with the Soviets.

When Bohlen passed through Berlin again later that year, Kennan had just taken a long trip through the Nazi-occupied countries, resulting in yet another voluminous report for the State Department files. The tour had strengthened his conviction, Kennan said, that Russia was a greater threat to most European countries than Nazi Germany. Particularly in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, Moscow inspired more fear. The Germans, Kennan added, were enjoying high morale. To show Bohlen the pervasive spirit, he took him to a German music hall where the patrons cheered and banged their beer mugs to the strains of “Wir fahren nach England”

Kennan’s attitude did not arise out of sympathy for the Nazis or for their aggressive policies. Indeed, he wrote a report in 1940 arguing that the only way to prevent German domination of Europe was to destroy the Nazi regime. Yet he thought that Hitler was “acting in the best tradition of German nationalism” and that feckless Western liberalism had encouraged this sentiment.

What was most distinctive, and disturbing, about Kennan’s reporting from Prague and Berlin in 1939 and 1940 was his callousness to the plight of those subjected to Nazi terror. One Jewish acquaintance, who had worked for years with the Americans, appeared at Kennan’s home in Prague when the Nazis took over. Despairing over the fact that Kennan could not help him escape, the man contemplated suicide. “Annelise pleaded with him at intervals throughout the coming hours not to choose this way out,” Kennan wrote, “not because she or I had any great optimism with respect to his chances for future happiness but partly on general Anglo-Saxon principles and partly to preserve our home from this sort of unpleasantness.”

After being transferred to Berlin, Kennan complained about the work load, which was partly caused by having to deal with the desperate situation of German Jews. “The heavy attendant pressures brought to bear upon us to effect their release and removal to the United States added to the burden,” he wrote. “These pressures tended often to be generated by powerful congressional circles at home.”

As Europe edged closer to war, Soviet studies took a back seat to more pressing U.S. concerns. Bohlen was transferred to Tokyo at the request of Joseph Grew, the U.S. ambassador there. Kennan was kept in Berlin. It was not until the war was well under way, and attention slowly turned to questions about what kind of world would rise from the ashes, that the two friends would again be assigned to deal with the country that fascinated and infuriated them both.