George F. Kennan

Lilienthal wrote this a day after Harry S. Truman sat next to Winston Churchill on a stage at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, nodding approvingly as the former prime minister warned of an “iron curtain” that had descended across the center of postwar Europe. No speech of that era—not even Stalin’s a month earlier—more clearly proclaimed the demise of the wartime grand alliance. Churchill’s address in that sense paralleled Kennan’s telegram, a more closely held obituary that was still top secret when Lilienthal read it.² Both texts became iconic in Cold War history. Neither, however, brought about the shift in U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union that took place during the first three months of 1946.

That was happening, J. C. Donnelly of the British Foreign Office noted on March 5, because circumstances had forced the Truman administration at last to give the world “some measure of the leadership which the United States ought to be providing.”³ The events in question were those Kennan had been reporting since arriving in Moscow in 1944. They showed the Soviet Union defining its postwar security requirements unilaterally, without taking into account those of the United States, Great Britain, and their democratic allies. That finding would have shocked most Americans while the war was going on, as Harriman and Bohlen were well aware: Kennan had been almost alone in insisting on it. The coming of peace, however, accomplished the only objective—military victory—that the U.S.S.R. shared with anyone else. The disillusionments that followed made balancing hopes against fears increasingly difficult, and Stalin’s “election” speech on February 9, 1946, ended the effort altogether for all but his most abject apologists.

It was within this context that Truman took control of foreign policy, having for the most part delegated it, during his first months in office, to his secretary of state. There would be, the president insisted, no further concessions like the ones made at Moscow. Byrnes swung into line with an address of his own in New York on February 28: “We will not and we cannot stand aloof,” he warned, “if force or the threat of force is used contrary to the purposes of the [U.N.] Charter. . . . If we are to be a great power we must act as a great power, not only in order to ensure our own security but in order to preserve the peace of the world.”⁴

The secretary of state had seen Kennan’s “long telegram” before delivering this speech, but most of it had already been drafted by then. What 511 did do, Doc Matthews explained to his friend Robert Murphy, was to provide the rationale for the course upon which the administration had already embarked. With pardonable pride—he and Durbrow having elicited it—Matthews confirmed that Kennan’s analysis, “to my mind the finest piece of analytical writing that I have ever seen come out of the [Foreign] Service . . . , has been received in the highest quarters here as a basic outline of future Soviet policy. That goes for the Secretary [of State], the Secretaries of War and Navy, our highest Army and Navy authorities and also across the street.” Across the street for the Department of State in 1946—as when Kennan trained there in 1926 and in moments of boredom could look out the window to monitor the comings and goings of Calvin Coolidge—was the White House. “I am very much impressed,” Murphy replied. “I think that you deserve a large bouquet of orchids for having engineered this process.”⁵

Donnelly had expressed doubt, in his March 5 assessment from London, that the new policy would stick: “It is unlikely that even the most ideal American administration imaginable would achieve what we should regard as a high standard in clarity of thought and consistency.”⁶ Kennan would not have disputed that view. Nothing had prepared him for the possibility that his country might devise and carry out a coherent grand strategy, much less one based on his own thinking. Yet this is what happened: the “long telegram” became the conceptual foundation for the strategy the United States—and Great Britain—would follow for over four decades. How then did a single dispatch sent from a distant post by a relatively unknown diplomat produce such a result?

One way to answer this question is to compare Kennan’s telegram with a review of policy toward the Soviet Union that had been under way in the State Department since the fall of 1945. Authorized by the new under secretary of state, Dean Acheson, its principal authors were Bohlen and Geroid T. Robinson, a Columbia University historian of Russia who had worked in the Office of Strategic Services during the war. The Bohlen-Robinson report was meant to reflect both Foreign Service and academic expertise on the U.S.S.R., but it differed from Kennan’s analysis in several ways.

It began by questioning its own authority: theirs was “a doubtful and uncertain enterprise,” Bohlen and Robinson lamented, because “it is impossible to grasp the total situation fully and to describe it in a set of coherent and well-established conclusions.” Mindful of this, they presented a matrix of options while avoiding specific claims. The report identified three probable “periods” in the future Soviet-American relationship in which it might be possible to apply a “Policy A,” a “Policy B,” or a “Third Alternative Procedure.” They composed the paper over several months, while handling other responsibilities. The final draft, dated February 14, 1946, reflected these limitations, concluding inelegantly that

the best and indeed the only general policy which would offer any chance of success in the achievement of our objective is to induce the Soviet Union in its own interest and in the interest of the world in general to join the family of nations and abide by the essential rules of international conduct embodied in the United Nations Charter, without abandoning the principle for which this country stands or surrendering any physical positions essential to United States security in the event that the Soviet Union refuses to cooperate.

The clarity came from Kennan’s demonstration—it was more than just a claim—that victory in war and security in peace required different strategies. The United States and Great Britain could have defeated Nazi Germany only by allying with the Soviet Union; their postwar safety, however, would depend on resisting the Soviet Union. Kennan drove the point home by placing wartime cooperation within the stream of time and the realm of ideas. The roots of Soviet policy lay not in that brief experience but much further back in Russian history and much more deeply in Bolshevik ideology. It was to these centers of gravity that Stalin was now returning. The Grand Alliance could not be a blueprint for the postwar world because the U.S.S.R. had never been, and as currently constituted would never be, a normal state, willing to work with others to establish a mutually satisfactory international order.

Comprehension followed, for if—as Kennan insisted—the Soviet regime needed external enemies to justify its internal rule, then this would account for the wariness with which it had regarded its wartime allies, as well as for the ease with which it turned them into enemies once victory had been achieved. Diplomacy would be of little use in this situation. The United States faced new and profound dangers, against which a mobilization of political, economic, ideological, intellectual, and moral resources would be as necessary as in the war just ended.

That grim prognosis, paradoxically, relieved most of those who saw it, because Kennan left open the possibility that military mobilization might not be required. Stalin’s offensives would rely on agents and ideologies but not armies; he had no deadlines; there was time to construct fortifications. The most important of these would be a revival of European self-reliance, something the United States should want even in the absence of a Soviet threat. Hence, Kennan was saying, Americans could secure their interests by meeting their responsibilities. The tautology was oddly comforting.

After reading the “long telegram,” Bohlen philosophically abandoned his own review. “There is no need,” he wrote his State Department colleagues on March 13, “to go into any long analysis of the motives or the reasons for present Soviet policy.” Kennan’s telegram had provided that. It was clear now that the Kremlin saw a world “divided into two irreconcilably hostile camps.” Provided neither contested the other’s sphere, they might coexist: the problem was “(a) to convince the Soviet Union of this possibility and (b) to make clear well in advance the inevitable consequence of the present line of Soviet policy based on the opposite thesis.”⁸

Kennan’s dispatch, by then, had gained an unusually large audience for a classified document. The State Department sent summaries to major foreign posts, and the Army and Navy forwarded it to overseas commanders, one of whom—significantly for Kennan’s future—was General George C. Marshall, then on a presidential mission to try to end the civil war in China. Accolades soon reached the author. A typical one came from Henry Norweb, now ambassador to Cuba, who had known Kennan in Lisbon during the war: “I am sure every chief of mission who read it has been made wistful—wishing such a report could emanate from his office.” It was “a masterpiece of ‘thinking things out,’ [of] realism devoid of hysteria, of courageous approach to a problem.” Norweb’s staff had returned it with comments like “Astonishing!” “[A]n answer to prayer.” “Suggest you tell the Department how good this is.” Kennan’s presence in Moscow had been “one tremendous, undeserved piece of good luck for the United States of America.”⁹

Frank Roberts saw Kennan’s telegram soon after he sent it and, with his permission, forwarded a summary to London. The Foreign Office response was “Please will you send us yours?” Roberts obliged with three dispatches—not cables—that went by pouch in mid-March. Much longer than Kennan’s, Roberts’s messages placed less emphasis on persuasion—his foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, needed none when it came to suspecting Stalin’s intentions—and more on how Soviet ambitions might affect the British Empire. Nonetheless, Roberts faithfully echoed Kennan’s main points. “George was the great expert,” he later acknowledged, “and I benefited enormously from this.”¹⁰

The “long telegram” also had unauthorized readers. Kennan assumed, correctly as it turned out, that reports of the document, if not the full text, would quickly reach Moscow. It took a few months for its significance to sink in, but at some point in the summer of 1946, Foreign Minister Molotov ordered Nikolay Novikov, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, to follow suit. Kennan enjoyed imagining how Molotov might have put it: “Why haven’t you produced anything like this?”

Sent by pouch on September 27, the Novikov dispatch began with, and at no point departed from, the proposition that the foreign policy of the United States, reflecting “the imperialist tendencies of American monopolistic capital,” was one of “striving for world supremacy.” It would seek this objective in collaboration with Great Britain; but Novikov also claimed—contradicting his own logic but aligning himself with Lenin’s—that as capitalist rivals the British and the Americans regarded each other as their greatest enemy. “These poor people, put on the spot, produced the thing,” Kennan concluded, but “it was only a way of saying to their masters in Moscow: ‘How true, sir!’ ”¹¹

Kennan’s “long telegram” set an international standard for analytical reporting, and it was not just contemporaries who envied it. Future diplomats would dream of accomplishing what he did with a single document, but no one ever managed it: the dispatch remains unique. It set out no fully conceived grand strategy, but it was a start, and in that sense it met a need. “I now feel better about things than I have for some time,” Kennan admitted to a friend two months after sending his famous message. “[S]ome of the most dangerous tendencies in American thought about Russia have been checked, if not overcome. If we can now only restrain the hot-heads and the panic-mongers and keep policy on a firm and even keel, I am not pessimistic.”¹²

“It is a source of great satisfaction to me that I have been able, with the loyal and effective support of the other officers here, to assist you in your heavy responsibility at this difficult period,” Kennan replied to Byrnes. “I have been associated with this Mission on and off since its inception, and no one—I think—has its interests more keenly at heart.” If the department really wanted him to stay through June, he would do so to the extent that his health permitted. But he warned Durbrow that it might not. He had been sick for weeks, and in “this sunless and vitaminless environment,” recovery had been slow. With other departures and persisting staff shortages, “we are operating here under tremendous pressure and on absolutely no margin.”¹⁴

That left Durbrow looking for a solution. “George wanted to get out of the Service [to go] into the academic world. I didn’t want George to get out of the Service. Chip [Bohlen] didn’t, and Loy Henderson didn’t. We had a guy that had a wonderful analytical mind, and we needed him.” Fortunately for all concerned, Durbrow enjoyed Washington cocktail parties. At one he ran into General Alfred M. Gruenther, a distinguished Army officer who had just been appointed deputy commandant of the new National War College. “You know George Kennan, don’t you?” “Very well, yes.” “We need somebody with background on the Soviet Union, who’s brilliant.” Behind the inquiry, Durbrow suspected, was “the telegram,” which Gruenther had probably read. “He’s in Moscow, isn’t he? Any chance of getting him back?” After hearing what the job would entail, Durbrow thought it perfect: “George will love that. It’ll get him in the academic world to a certain extent. It’ll get him out of the rut of routine business.” Kennan too, when Durbrow wrote him, jumped at the opportunity. “Am interested in National War College job mentioned in your letter,” he cabled back. “What would be “[n]ature of duties, salary, title, etcetera?”¹⁵

The title, it turned out, would be Deputy Commandant for Foreign Affairs; Kennan would retain his Class I rank in the Foreign Service; and his assignment would be to help design and teach the curriculum at the first school for grand strategy that had ever existed in the United States. Located in the former premises of the Army War College at Fort McNair in Washington, the National War College was an early response to the widespread conviction, emerging from World War II, that the nation could no longer afford to separate military operations from political objectives. Although he played no role in establishing it, the school was another vindication of Kennan’s thinking. He was, Ambassador Smith had to acknowledge, “unquestionably the best possible choice that could be made from the State Dept.” The students would be mid-career Army, Navy, and Foreign Service officers destined for higher responsibilities; classes would start early in September. The job suited Kennan for many reasons, not the least of which was that the task of preparing for it would get him and his family home sooner. They needed to leave right away, he wrote Bohlen on April 19. “[O]nly ex-Muscovite could understand.”¹⁶

The Kennans departed on the twenty-ninth, traveling with Smith by plane to Paris, where George spent a week with the U.S. delegation to the Council of Foreign Ministers, which was meeting there. They sailed for New York on May 10, and by the twenty-first were back at the farm in East Berlin. “We are as usual frightfully busy getting settled,” Annelise wrote to Frieda Por. “I wonder if we are ever going to get out of that state.” The State Department, in the meantime, had authorized George’s transfer, even if it was not quite sure where: “You are hereby assigned to duty at the Naval War College.”¹⁷

Feeling guilty that he had abandoned Smith as the new ambassador was taking up his duties in Moscow, Kennan wrote him a long letter on June 27, explaining how he had used the past five weeks. Most of his time had been spent working with Gruenther and his colleagues on the war college curriculum. But there had also been “many demands” to talk about the Soviet Union:

I gave a full-fledged lecture to the representatives of over forty national organizations. . . . I gave a similar lecture to a packed house of officials from all parts of the State Department. I went over to the Navy Department, lunched with Admiral [Chester] Nimitz and the highest officers on duty there, and then talked for an hour and a half with a larger group of naval officers. I had similar sessions at the War Department, both with the operations and the intelligence people. I had an evening with Secretary [of the Navy James] Forrestal out on his yacht. I had a luncheon with General [Carl] Spaatz and sat in on the sessions of the Russian committee of SWIN [probably SWNCC, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee]. I talked to the assembled economic experts of the [State] Department (I think this was the least satisfactory of all the conferences I have had). I spent one lunch hour trying to warn Mr. [Harold] Ickes about the Communist front organizations which he is frequently associated with. I had appointments with Mr. [Donald] Russell [Assistant Secretary of State for Administration] and General [John] Hilldring [Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Areas], with the heads of personnel and the director of [the] Foreign Service and the acting head of the Foreign Buildings Office. I talked at length with the officers of the USSR section of the Research and Analysis Branch of the [State] Department. I spent an evening with [Assistant Secretary of State] Spruille Braden and the Department’s leading Latin American experts. There was the usual number of unavoidable luncheons and dinners with press people. Finally, I had made arrangements (this should not go beyond you and the top officers in the Embassy) to give certain help to the new National Intelligence Agency now headed by General [Hoyt] Vandenberg.

Kennan was grateful for the confidence Smith had shown in him by allowing his early return: the pressure would have been much greater had he had to remain in Moscow through most of the summer. He and Annelise hoped that the Smiths were beginning to feel “some of the ineffable and implausible, but nonetheless real compensations which life [in Moscow] has to offer.” The ambassador would probably say, “with a snort,” that these were apparent “only to those who have left and are reposing comfortably in the arms of capitalism. And to that retort, I have no reply.”¹⁸

The rethinking, for Kennan, began with the bomb. His initial reactions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been a jumble—relief that the war was over, regret at the destruction employed to bring this about, alarm at the possibility that the Soviet Union might obtain its own weapon, whether through espionage or the Truman administration’s naïveté in prematurely embracing the principle of international control.²⁰ None of these thoughts cohered, however, until Kennan read another book of essays, edited by Bernard Brodie, just off the press in June 1946. Entitled The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, this volume, together with Earle’s Makers, gave Kennan a crash course in the field he was about to teach. The notes he took suggest what he learned.

Kennan began with Brodie’s book, grasping at once the paradox it posed: “Best way to avoid atomic war is to avoid war; best way to avoid war is to be prepared to resort to atomic warfare.” He recorded detailed information on the destructive capabilities of the new weapon, on the resources necessary to build it, and on the possibility that the Baruch Plan, then being proposed by the Truman administration, might provide a way for the United Nations to manage it. He was, however, skeptical: “Soviets would not hesitate to promise to forego production & proceed nevertheless to produce.” One essay claiming that only the world organization could handle the bomb caused Kennan to stop taking notes: “Remainder just rot.”²¹

The real significance of atomic weapons, he concluded, lay not in the need to bolster international institutions but in the realization that “if we are to avoid mutual destruction, we must revert to strategic political thinking of XVIII Century.” The complete annihilation of enemies no longer made sense, because:

(a) in the best of circumstances (i.e., that the Russians lack atomic weapons or facilities for employing them against us) it implies on our part a war against the Russian people and the eventual occupation of Russian territory; and

(b) in the worst of circumstances, the virtual ruin of our country as well as theirs.

The first, by the historians Crane Brinton, Gordon Craig, and Felix Gilbert, discussed the Swiss strategist Antoine-Henri Jomini, whose writings, the authors conceded, were outdated and little read. But Jomini had considered the central problem in warfare to be determining “correct lines of operation, leaving to enemy choice of withdrawing or accepting combat under unfavorable conditions.” Kennan saw a lesson for the United States:

Our task is to plan and execute our strategic dispositions in such a way as to compel Sov. Govt. either to accept combat under unfavorable conditions (which it will never do), or withdraw. In this way we can contain Soviet power until Russians tire of the game.

By far the greater impression, however, came from Hans Rothfels’s article on Carl von Clausewitz—the best study available in English at the time on the much-misunderstood Prussian strategist. Kennan was struck by Clausewitz’s emphasis on psychologically disarming an adversary: finding the point at which “the enemy realizes that victory is either too unlikely or too costly.” Hence the need to pinpoint the “center of gravity”—an army, a capital city, an alliance, even public opinion—against which minimum pressure might produce maximum results. The defense would, thus, lure the offense into overextension: “Assailant weakens himself as he advances.” (Kennan thought it significant that both Jomini and Clausewitz had fought on the Russian side when Napoleon invaded in 1812.) Once the “culminating point” of the offensive had been reached, the enemy could only shift to defense without its advantages: “The best he can do is to demonstrate that, if there is no longer any chance of his winning, his opponent cannot reach this aim either.”²⁴

Most important, for Kennan, was Clausewitz’s claim that war is a continuation of policy by other means. Kennan correctly understood this to imply not that politics are suspended during war, but just the opposite: “For[eign] pol[icy] aims are the end and war is the means.” Violence therefore could never be an objective: “Even in case of Germany it is questionable whether a war of destruction was desirable.” It would certainly not be possible against the Soviet Union: the only possibility was “a political war, a war of attrition for limited objectives.”

What Clausewitz taught him, Kennan recalled years later, was that the United States had no peacetime political-military doctrine, only a set of obsolete traditions—isolationism, neutrality, the Open Door. There was, thus, the need to clarify the uses of military power: “what we could expect to do with it, what we could not expect to do with it, and how it should fit in with diplomacy and political aims.” Kennan’s war college teaching, he hoped, would “build an intellectual structure which could act as a guide to policy makers, and which could find acceptance gradually through the academic world in the country at large.”²⁶

Surprisingly for someone who had traveled so extensively elsewhere, Kennan had never been west of the Mississippi River until the State Department sent him there late in the summer of 1946. Accompanied by Annelise, George spoke in Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Los Angeles, concluding his trip with a talk to the Adams County Bankers’ Association of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He prepared no texts, relying “on a few scribbled notes, on the resources of memory, and on the inspiration of the moment.” The tour, for Kennan, was yet another discovery of America, although this time under official auspices, and with no bicycle.²⁸

Businessmen, he reported to the department, were his best audiences. Possessing few preconceived ideas on the Soviet Union, with no personal positions at stake, they were “friendly, curious, and generally anxious to be enlightened.” They were almost all male, and Kennan found that it was easier to hold their interest than when he was speaking to mixed audiences. Women, he still believed, were ill equipped to discuss international relations, because their clubs focused too earnestly on that subject. These organizations were a way of escaping “the boredom, frustration and faintly guilty conscience which seem to afflict many well-to-do and insufficiently occupied people in this country.” Russia—“mysterious and inviting, with just enough of wickedness and brutality to complete the allure”—was easier to talk about than the problems of race, slums, and labor unions at home. Having been told so often that only cooperation with Moscow could ensure peace, it was a shock for them to hear that peace would be possible “only through a long, unpleasant process of setting will against will, force against force, idea against idea.”

Professors were also difficult, because many of them had taken positions in public that were not in accord with what Kennan had to say. Their reputations were at stake, their pride was affected, they had made “rosy forecasts” in the hope of enhancing “their own glamour, prestige and importance.” The tendency showed up most clearly in California, where university faculties also seemed to have “a geographical inferiority complex,” resentful of the fact that foreign policy was still an East Coast product, confident that if given the chance they could handle it better, convinced that the future lay as much with countries bordering the Pacific as the Atlantic, certain that the Soviet Union, especially Siberia, fell within that realm.

Two West Coast groups particularly aroused Kennan’s concern. One was atomic scientists at Berkeley, who seemed to have “an unshakeable faith” that if they could only meet Soviet scientists and enlighten them about atomic weapons, all would be well. It had not occurred to them that, far from frightening Kremlin leaders, the bomb’s destructive potential might “whet their desire to find a way of using it.” Kennan also worried about San Francisco intellectuals, among whom he saw signs of communist activity: “I have been connected with Russian affairs for too many years not to know the real thing when I see it.” Everything he said, he was sure, was dutifully reported to the Soviet consul. (Kennan was right about this. A summary of his San Francisco remarks went off to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow on August 28.) Nothing he said was confidential, but if the State Department intended to send speakers on more sensitive topics, “it had better exercise some check on who is admitted to the meetings.”

By the time Kennan reached Los Angeles, another intelligence organization, without his knowledge, was tracking his movements. The local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that a “Mr. George Kennan,” whose name had appeared in left-wing publications in connection with activities taking place at the U.S. embassy in the Soviet Union, was soon to speak in that city. Did FBI headquarters wish “to ascertain the nature of his lecture”? J. Edgar Hoover’s office failed to respond, so an agent took it upon himself to attend Kennan’s talk on August 9, after which he sent in seven pages of notes and apologized for having earlier misspelled the speaker’s name, which should be “Kennon.” This did elicit a crisp reply: “For your information, George Frost Kennan has held many positions in the foreign service of the State Department, ... is considered a foremost authority on Russian affairs, and his recent assignment to Moscow furnished considerable basis for our present foreign policy.”

Kennan ended his trip report with an affectionate tribute to his Gettysburg neighbors, who had come to his lecture “unencumbered—bless their hearts—by any pretensions to knowledge of the subject or by any inordinate sense of responsibility about it.” He had been warned that they might drift off, but this did not happen. They asked few questions, because they were shy, unaccustomed to that sort of thing, and “they don’t think that fast.” But they were “probably the most representative—and for that reason the most important—of the people I reached.”

The speaking tour, Kennan concluded, had been “generally successful,” in that he had been able to convey “a clearer, more realistic, less extreme and less alarmist view of Soviet-American relations” than his audiences had previously been exposed to, as well as “a greater confidence in the sincerity and soundness of the State Department.” Decades later he explained what he meant. He had found, on returning from Moscow, that if he warned people “that we couldn’t have the sort of collaboration we’d hoped for with the Russians,” this would cause them to conclude: “Well, then, war is inevitable.” So he had tried to say, on his trip, just the opposite: “You don’t have to have a war. Just don’t let them—if you can help it—expand their influence any further.”²⁹

“Boy, you missed your calling,” a Milwaukee minister told Kennan after hearing him in his hometown. The tour showed that he could speak extemporaneously to diverse audiences, that he enjoyed doing so, and that he would like to keep it up. Perhaps it might be possible, he wrote Acheson, “for someone who, like myself, is not too far from the Department of State and at the same time not too near it, to accomplish something valuable.” Acheson readily agreed: “I would like to have you accept as many invitations to speak as you can.... I appreciate the extra burden your generous offer places on you; nevertheless, I hasten to take advantage of it.”³⁰

The students attended the same lectures and worked on the same problems, regardless of the positions they held or the uniforms they wore. They would graduate not only with “mutual respect and understanding,” Kennan explained, “but also a common approach to the major problems of our country in the field of foreign affairs.” Future leaders rubbed elbows with current leaders, who frequently visited. Navy Secretary Forrestal, who had helped to establish the college, came most often, but “[o]ther officers of Cabinet rank, generals, and Senators sat at our feet as we lectured.” The college became an “academic seminar for the higher echelons of governmental Washington generally.”³²

“Gentlemen; Admiral Hill. The question we have to consider this morning is a question of the relations between sovereign governments, and it pertains to the measures that they employ when they deal with each other for the main purposes for which states have to deal with each other.” That is how Kennan began his first lecture on September 16, 1946, prosaically titled “Measures Short of War (Diplomatic).” On stage alongside him was a chart listing “Diplomatic Measures of Adjustment for the Redress of Grievances or for the Pacific Settlement of Disputes.” There is no way to know how many inadequately caffeinated students—or policy makers—came close to dozing off at that point, but they soon woke up. For within five minutes Kennan had tossed traditional methods of conflict resolution onto a historical ash-heap.

Great-power clashes in the contemporary world, he insisted, did not take place within any agreed-upon framework of international law: rather, they pitted democracies against totalitarians prepared to employ “varieties of skullduggery ... as unlimited as human ingenuity itself, and just about as unpleasant.” These included “persuasion, intimidation, deceit, corruption, penetration, subversion, horse-trading, bluffing, psychological pressure, economic pressure, seduction, blackmail, theft, fraud, rape, battle, murder, and sudden death. Don’t mistake that for a complete list.” Restrained “by no moral inhibitions, by no domestic public opinion to speak of and not even by any serious considerations of consistency and intellectual dignity,” states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were limited only by “their own estimate of the consequences to themselves of the adoption of a given measure.”

That left the question, then, of whether democracies could deal with such states by any means other than all-out war. Kennan had no definitive answer: the course they were taking, he reminded the students, was meant to develop one. But he did have suggestions, the first of which echoed Clausewitz. It was that psychology could itself become a strategy. The past decade had made it clear that everything the United States did produced psychological effects internationally. There had been no sustained effort, though, to tie these together in such a way as to serve a purpose.

Another suggestion had to do with economics, because democracies for the foreseeable future—he meant chiefly the United States—would possess a disproportionate share of the world’s productive capacity. Given the Soviet Union’s reliance on autarchy, that advantage might not produce immediate benefits, but the students should consider its cumulative effect “when exercised over a long period of time and in a wise way.” It could be especially useful among satellites with little to gain from Soviet domination: economic pressure might well provoke “discontent, trouble, and dissension within the totalitarian world.”

Finally the students should not neglect an important political weapon, which was “the cultivation of solidarity with other like minded nations.” In this respect, Kennan acknowledged, the United Nations had been more helpful than he had expected, because it provided a way to connect power with morality. Without that link, competition over spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and the Near East might have come across simply as power politics. With it, the United States had been able “to build up a record for good faith which it is hard for anyone to challenge.”

Each of these “measures short of war” fell within the realm of international affairs, which must now embrace all forms of power, even military capabilities: “You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.” Power, in turn, reflected the nation wielding it: “We are no stronger than the country we represent.” Hence no one could afford indifference “to internal disharmony, dissension, intolerance and the things that break up the real moral and political structure of our society at home.” Integrating force with foreign policy did not mean “blustering, threatening, waving clubs at people and telling them if they don’t do this or that we are going to drop a bomb on them.” But it did mean maintaining “a preponderance of strength” among the democracies: this was “the most peaceful of all the measures we can take short of war because the greater your strength, the less likelihood that you are ever going to use it.”

What was required, therefore, was coordination across each of the categories of available power: “We must work out a general plan of what the United States wants in this world and we must go after that with all the measures at our disposal, depending on what is indicated by the circumstances.” The nation needed in peacetime a “grand strategy no less concrete and no less consistent than that which governs our actions in war.” If applied wisely, then “these measures short of war will be all the ones that we will ever have to use to secure the prosperous and safe future of the people in this country.”

Kennan finished with that but got a tough first question: was it possible for the United States to have a grand strategy? “[W]e don’t aspire to anything particularly except what we have; [so] what, mainly can our grand strategy consist of ?” The point was well taken, Kennan acknowledged. “What has the United States got really to offer to other people?” Thinking quickly, he improvised an answer that raised a larger question:

[W]e have freedom of elections, freedom of speech, freedom to live out your life politically; but a great many people in this world would say that is not enough; we are tired; we are hungry; we are bewildered; to hell with freedom to elect somebody; to hell with freedom of speech; what we want is to be shown the way; we want to be guided. [You] don’t believe in abstract freedom but only in freedom from something or freedom to something; and what is it you are showing us the freedom to?

It’s unlikely that anyone dozed, therefore, through Kennan’s opening National War College lecture. It redefined international relations in an ideological age, it assessed totalitarian strengths and weaknesses, it sketched out democratic responses, it stressed the multiple forms that power can assume, it called for diplomacy to become grand strategy, and it concluded with Kennan’s imaginative leap into the minds of those for whose allegiance the United States and the Soviet Union would be competing. It was a satisfactory start, not least because of the work it left for his students—and for Kennan himself—still to do.

By his count, Kennan composed seventeen lectures or articles, each about the length of the “long telegram,” between September 1946 and May 1947: the list did not include occasions on which he spoke extemporaneously or from rough notes. He gave most of the lectures at the National War College but also spoke at the Naval and Air War Colleges, at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania (where the Army War College would soon relocate), at Yale, Princeton, Virginia, Williams, at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association, and—as it turned out, famously—at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The indefatigable Hessman kept up, typing as many as three drafts for some of the lectures while managing a proliferating correspondence. This “veritable outpouring of literary and forensic effort” was meant to educate audiences on the nature of the postwar world and what the American response to it should be; but like all good teachers, Kennan was also educating himself along the way.³⁵

His chief concern, in the fall of 1946, was still that too few Americans saw anything between diplomacy and war: if the first failed, the second must follow. Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt’s former vice president, now Truman’s secretary of commerce and a leading Democratic Party liberal, dramatized the polarity in a New York speech on September 12, warning that “ ‘[g]etting tough’ never bought anything—whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers. The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.” The president, he insisted, had read his speech and agreed with it. A confused week followed, at the end of which Truman made it clear that he did not agree and demanded Wallace’s resignation. Everywhere he went, Kennan complained while the controversy was still raging, “I find people with their faces buried in their hands and an air of tragedy about them saying collaboration with Russia has proved to be impossible and, therefore, all is lost.” When would the war start?³⁶

Kennan used his first appearance before a university audience—an off-the-record lecture at Yale’s Institute of International Studies on October 1—to take on Wallace. The result was an evisceration, arguably unnecessary since the target by then had largely eviscerated himself. The talk was a response, though, not just to Wallace but to a succession of Kennan’s superiors—Bullitt, Davies, Harriman, Byrnes, and Roosevelt himself—all of whom had assumed, at one time or another, that if offered friendship the Soviet Union would reciprocate. If Wallace believed, like “many vain people” before him, “that the golden touch of his particular personality and the warmth of his sympathy for the cause of Russian Communism would modify in some important degree the actions of the Soviet Government,” then he was not only ignoring the way states worked, but he was also “flying in the face of some of the most basic and unshakeable of Russian realities.”

Stalin and his associates would not thank Wallace for implying that “they, the guardians of the Revolution, are a group of neurotic, wistful intellectuals, to be swept off their feet and won over from their holiest articles of faith by an engaging smile, [and] a few kind words.” They had committed acts that, in the absence of an ideology to justify them, would have to be considered among “the most stupendous crimes in the history of mankind.” They had built a regime in the image of that ideology. They had corrupted a generation:

The official who wields the disciplinary power of the Communist Party; the worker of the secret police who has sacrificed his family relationships to the grim dictates of his profession; the army officer whose wife has become accustomed to the new fur coat, the larger apartment and the war-booty Mercedes; the economic administrator whose one talent is to force the pace of armaments developments; all these, and many others besides, have sold their souls to the theory that the outside world is threatening and hostile.

It was clear, then, that the fears and suspicions so prevalent in Moscow related not to the Truman administration’s policies but “to the character of the Soviet regime itself.” They would not be dispelled by “fatuous gestures of appeasement,” which could only lead “to the capitulation of the United States as a great power in the world and as the guardian of its own security.” There was, however, no reason to despair: Americans should see the situation instead “as a narrow and stony defile through which we must pass before we can emerge into more promising vistas.”

That promise resided in the Russian national character, more deeply rooted even than the Stalinist state or the ideology that animated it, yet visible in Russian literature. Kennan cited, as an example, the provincial governor in Gogol’s Dead Souls who one day acknowledged, in “a typically Russian burst of honesty,” that “perhaps I have, by my excessive suspiciousness, repelled those who sincerely wished to be useful to me.” He also recalled the Chekhov heroine who had tried to befriend peasants, got nowhere with them, walked away sadly, but was followed by a sympathetic blacksmith:

“Don’t be offended, Mistress,” said Rodion. . . . “Wait a couple of years and you can have the school, and you can have the roads, but not all at once.... [I]f you want to sow grain on that hill, first you have to clear it and then you have to take all the stones off and then you have to plow it up and then you have to keep after it and keep after it . . . and it is just the same with the people. You have to keep after them and keep after them until you win them over.”

The United States could alter the circumstances in which the Soviet government operated “only by a long term policy of firmness, patience, and understanding, designed to keep the Russians confronted with superior strength at every juncture where they might otherwise be inclined to encroach upon the vital interests of a stable and peaceful world, but to do this in so friendly and unprovocative a manner that its basic purposes will not be subject to misrepresentation.” The objective would be Clausewitzian: to shift the psychology of an adversary. The manner, however, would be Chekhovian.³⁷

Was there reason to think that this might work? Kennan’s Naval War College lecture, delivered on the same day he spoke at Yale, addressed this issue. The Russians, he pointed out, were “the most un-naval of peoples,” but they understood naval strategy. Lacking easily defended borders, unable to count on domestic loyalty, Kremlin leaders would not willingly engage an adversary stronger than themselves. “They cannot afford to get into trouble.” They respected, therefore, one of “the great truths of naval warfare,” which was “that a force sufficiently superior to that of the enemy will probably never have to be used. Its mere existence does the trick.”

That was where the United States, with superior force, had the advantage. It ought to be possible “for us to contain the Russians indefinitely” and perhaps eventually “to maneuver them back into the limits within which we would like them to stay.” This would not “solve” the Soviet problem. “You never really solve problems like that; you only learn to live with them after a fashion and to avoid major catastrophe.” But if the United States followed such a strategy consistently enough over a long enough period of time, then “I believe that the logic of it would enter into the Soviet system as a whole and bring about changes there which would be beneficial to everyone.”

As currently configured, the American government was not equipped to do this. Its policies proceeded along separate tracks; there was no common concept. But it should be possible to secure such coordination. It would involve setting up “some formal organization for decision and action at the Cabinet level.” It would demand closer liaison with Congress. It would require educating the public on the “powers and prerogatives of government in the field of foreign affairs” and on the need for its own “restraint and self-discipline.” And there would have to be “more sheer courage” in defending policies from domestic critics.

The Soviet challenge, therefore, was really to “the quality of our own society, . . . [to] how good democracy is in the world of today.” If it could “force us to pull ourselves together,” then “perhaps we may call our Russian friends a blessing rather than a plague.” Shakespeare’s Henry V had anticipated that possibility long ago:

There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out;
For our bad neighbor makes us early stirrers,
Which is both healthful and good husbandry;
Besides, they are our outward consciences
And preachers to us all: admonishing
That we should dress us fairly for our end.³⁸

With these two lectures, given on the same day, Kennan found his voice as a teacher. He connected current events with his years of experience in the Soviet Union, his summer crash course on grand strategy and the atomic bomb, the impressions derived from his speaking tour, Admiral Hill’s mandate to rethink the requirements of national security, and his own sense that literature could inspire statecraft.³⁹ He did all of this with an eloquence that existed nowhere else in the government: he understood—as his friend Bohlen did not—that rhetoric persuades, and that style instructs. It’s no wonder that he attracted students, some of them highly placed.

The State Department sent Kennan to Ottawa in December to present the new American policy, on a top-secret basis, to Canadian officials worried about defense of the Arctic. It was “virtually certain,” he assured them, that Stalin planned no surprise attack, there or anywhere else. Miscalculation, however, might lead to unplanned hostilities, so the United States and its allies must leave no doubt, in his mind, of their resolve. They would have to be as firm as they were patient: the goal should be “to ‘contain’ Russian expansionism for so long a time that it would have to modify itself.” And how long might that take? Kennan guessed “10 or 15 years.”⁴⁰

The Kennans had been living, since September, in a graceful three-story brick house on “General’s Row” at Fort McNair, courtesy of the U.S. Army. Facing the parade ground with a view of the Potomac out the back, it was large, well staffed, and came with full commissary privileges, which George noted “considerably reduce the cost of living.” There were tennis courts, a golf club, a swimming pool, an officers’ club, and it was all within reach of the East Berlin farm on weekends.

Saturdays flew by in veritable orgies of labor on various “projects.” The energies of guests were employed no less enthusiastically and no less inefficiently than our own. Then, on Sunday mornings, there would be the sad cleaning up . . . , followed by the long trek back amid Sunday-afternoon traffic; and finally—the sudden confrontation with the . . . fat stacks of the waiting Sunday paper and the insistent phone calls of people who had been trying to reach us ever since Friday noon.

The disappointments, that fall and winter, were remarkably few. The children loved living in their Army house and, to their parents’ relief, liked their Washington schools, to which a bus delivered them every day. Grace, now fourteen, had been to several local dances; Joan, however, missed ballet classes in Moscow. Hearing The Nutcracker Suite, her father noticed, caused her to go “through all the dances as she remembered them.... She certainly has it in her blood.” George, for his part, was coming to see in his children something that he and his siblings had missed. “I hope you will get married,” he wrote Kent, “if only because you—like the rest of us—did not have a normal family life in childhood; and the re-living of it in one’s own family helps to overcome the effects of that.” The war college allowed as “normal” an existence as the Kennans had yet managed.⁴³

George was “terribly happy” at the National War College, Annelise remembered. “You must think me a little dotty,” he would come home and say, but “this was said, and this was discussed, and this is wonderful.” There had been eighty-five lectures that fall, he explained to Kent, probably the best series on international affairs that had ever been given. The contacts were “like manna to me after many years of the philistinism of American foreign colony life.” He was not sure now that he would want to return to diplomacy: “I have found such generous appreciation . . . among the academicians for what little I know about Russia and have had such tempting offers to continue working with them that I am sorely tried.” That knowledge now was “a chance aggregate of odds and ends, gathered without system and in large part without purpose.” If he could spend a year or two in systematic study, “I might really be able to do something more worthwhile in scholarship than in diplomacy.”

At work, it is certainly admirable. At play, it could hardly be worse. Its liberal intellectuals are in large part below criticism. Its emotional strength lies largely in the smaller and quieter communities, where intellectual life is least developed. I have no doubt that as a people we have tremendous latent power of every sort. But it is buried behind so much immaturity, such formidable artificialities in manner of living, such universal lack of humility and discipline, and such strange prejudices about the organization of human society that I am not sure whether it can be applied . . . successfully in another crisis, as it was in this last.⁴⁴

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.