George F. Kennan

On June 27 Kennan flew to Copenhagen, where the State Department had opened a new embassy building. He found the male staffers “loose-jointed, casual, diffident, drawling, yet full of modesty and common sense”—qualities he had admired, during the war, in the young American occupiers of Italy. The women were crisp, controlled, and helpful, their voices as innocently unselfconscious as if “they had never left Kansas City.” Suddenly—melodramatically—Kennan was homesick:

Oh my countrymen, my countrymen, my hope and my despair! What virtues you conceal beneath your slouching self-deprecation: virtues inconceivable to the pompous continental. How strong you are in all that of which you are yourselves not conscious; and how childish and superficial you are in your own concept of the sources of your excellence.

His frustrations about America were really frustrations about himself: “These are my people; it is to them, with all their deficiencies, that I, with all my deficiencies, belong. It is to them that I must return, after every rebellion, for punishment or forgiveness.” Like distant but patient parents, their strengths were not to be underestimated:

Take heed, you scoffers, you patronizers, you envious and malicious detractors, you conceited and superior Europeans, you Nassers and Khrushchevs: if you continue with your efforts to tear us down, you will rouse us yet to maturity, to introspection, to disillusionment, to cunning in our own defense; and when you do, you will discover in us reserves of strength such as you never dreamed of; and then you, even more than we, will come to regret the passing of the days of our own innocence.

Kennan shared the next leg of his flight, to Warsaw, with an Air Force attaché, his wife, and their family. Despite heavy turbulence, he chewed his gum, read his magazines, and exuded complete confidence. Would he do so in the face of “atomic death”? Probably, Kennan concluded. “Great institutions create, for those who are within them, their own illusions of security; and the United States Air Force is now a great institution.”

The Polish trip, arranged through Oxford friends, was Kennan’s first to a communist country since the Soviet Union expelled him in 1952. Most of Warsaw had been rebuilt from its near-obliteration, on Hitler’s orders, during the war. Much seemed slavishly Russian: the tawdry apartment blocks rising from seas of mud; the Stalinist skyscraper on which Poles carefully did not comment; the Hotel Bristol, which with its “shoddy air of mystery,” its “dreary, furtive corridors,” its “intensive eyeing of people,” even its delegations of visiting Chinese, Mongolians, and North Koreans, evoked the Metropole in Moscow.

But in the city center, a declaration of architectural independence had taken place: the Polish government was meticulously reconstructing the palaces and churches of the feudal and bourgeois eras. Had it tried to design anything more modern, Kennan was sure, the plans would have been ideologically incorrect and hence rejected. The Poles sensed, though, a respect on the Russians’ part for prerevolutionary culture, the natural evolution of which their revolution had so brutally broken off. So the new buildings were safe because they looked old. They stood “a trifle sheepishly, as [though] surprised, and almost discomfited, to be thus resurrected from a past [to] which, after all, they can never return.”

Kennan’s hosts at the Institute of International Affairs were charming, urbane, and politically sophisticated. Not really communists, they treated recent history like Soviet architecture: one did not speak of the Katyn massacre, or of the Red Army’s failure to prevent the crushing of the Warsaw Uprising, and “in this studied silence, there is a condemnation more devastating than in any words.” The only committed communist Kennan met was trying to build something hopeful on a “dismal foundation of error and grim despotism.” He felt sorry for her: she was “destined, unquestionably, for disillusionment and tragedy.”

Knowing that he would be among scholars, Kennan had planned to lecture on American intervention in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. Upon his arrival, however, the head of the institute informed him, with some embarrassment, that the Soviet authorities had objected to this topic, but that he was to go ahead with it anyway. The lecture was readvertised as one on contemporary problems of U.S. foreign policy. Puzzled, Kennan asked if he should now switch to that subject. No, he was told, he was to give the original talk, under the newly announced title. This had been “the bargain” with Moscow.

So Kennan spoke, on July 1, to a hand-picked audience, received polite applause when he finished, and then waited, in awkward silence, for questions. Only one came: how he could have called World War I a “tragedy,” since it had led to the formation of the modern Polish state? Kennan stumbled through an answer, and the session ended. The audience’s reticence, he later realized, reflected the fact that it was being watched. But it had been happy for him to say whatever he wished.²

Kennan subsequently reported to the CIA on how much the Poles were departing from Soviet “socialism.” If left unchallenged, the liberties they were taking would become rights, so deeply rooted that “any withdrawal of them would appear as a preposterous injury.” A kind of “liberation” was occurring from within. Further rhetoric about “liberation” from without could only delay its development. “While I do not share the views of the writer on many subjects,” Allen Dulles commented, in forwarding Kennan’s analysis to the White House, “his report on Poland is the best summary I have seen on the evolving situation there. It is possible that the President would be interested in glancing it over.” The initials “DE” on the document, together with underlinings and a distinctive doodle, show that he did.³

George could have felt some satisfaction, therefore, as he, Annelise, Christopher, and Wendy sailed for home in late July on a slow freighter, the MS Texas, whose principal cargo was cement, granite blocks, and a hundred Volvos. The European balance of power looked very different from what it had been a decade earlier. With American help, the Western Europeans had regained prosperity and self-confidence. It was now the Russians who were walking a tightrope in Eastern Europe, knowing how gleefully their “allies” would welcome a tumble into the abyss. Kennan had anticipated both possibilities, devised a strategy to bring them about, and for all of its parochialism, immaturity, and opportunistic politics, his country had broadly followed it.

In fact, though, Kennan made no further effort, on the long voyage home, to reflect on the relaxed Americans and resolute Poles he had met—or to wonder why the Russians, in Warsaw, had been so nervous about his presence. Instead, as the ship approached the New England coast, he was brooding about what lay ahead.

[W]hat does one do with this contemporary America: with this great hive of bewildered people, now in such deep trouble, so anxious in some ways for the sort of help I can give, so resentful of it in others, so exhausting and competitive in its demands, so quick to pluck to pieces and destroy anything and anyone that engages its attention?

Should he try to help? Or should he admit the futility of doing so and retire to cultivate his garden, writing books that only a handful of people might read and that would “probably burn up, anyway, in the imminent atomic holocaust?” The Texas rounded Nantucket on August 2, “and just as we did so the moon rose, ominous and blood-red, in the east. A strange evening, intensely beautiful, and slightly sinister.”⁴

George liked to joke that separating his older and younger children by thirteen years had been a triumph of policy planning: “We raised our baby sitters first.” Now, though, they were leaving. Grace had married in March, while her parents and younger siblings were still in Oxford: the bridegroom was Charles K. McClatchy, a reporter and former Adlai Stevenson aide whose family owned a major newspaper chain in California. George and Annelise covered the costs of the event, which took place in Washington, but then could not afford to fly back for it. They met their new son-in-law when he and Grace came through London in May, and by the end of the year, there was a first grandchild.⁶

Joan, in the meantime, had announced her engagement to Larry Griggs, a rising senior at Brown University. Shortly after returning for her own final year at Connecticut College, she received a letter, in familiar handwriting and on Institute for Advanced Study stationery, purporting to be from the family dog Krisha. Life in Princeton was lonely, the poodle complained. Rations were meager. It was a relief to get Christopher and Wendy off for school each morning, because their idea of petting resembled Greek-Roman wrestling. And the neighborhood canines were either ancient or lascivious:

[D]ear Joany, what does one do with the male sex? Why are they so single-minded? It’s all very flattering; and I suppose one wouldn’t be without it; but why can’t they show a little imagination? . . . I heard Wendy tell your Dad, yesterday, that there was a wedding going on in the backyard, and I suppose that’s one way of putting it.

The old man, that fall and winter, was grimly regarding his country, the world, the afterlife, and of course himself. He found Eisenhower’s determination to defend Chiang Kai-shek’s offshore outposts on Quemoy and Matsu to be tautological, since their importance lay only in the administration’s assurances that they were important. He worried about Khrushchev’s increasing unpredictability: a mature and “statesmanlike” enemy—Stalin?—was manageable, “but God save us from the erratic and distraught one.” He was reading Henry Kissinger and Reinhold Niebuhr on nuclear weapons, finding the former unconvincing and the latter prophetic. Seeking safety in such devices, Kennan concluded, was like a child wandering through his father’s house “with a faggot of burning papers in his hand.” He wondered, on Christmas Day 1958, how there could be hope for earthly progress if Christ had been born “to save us in the next world, not in this.” And on the following Easter Sunday, having exhausted himself with farm work, he lay down in the fading Pennsylvania light to ponder “the genuine dead-end” at which his life had arrived: “I haven’t the faintest idea what now to do with myself.”⁸

“Here I am: 55 years of age,” Kennan wrote a few weeks later. “I have some talents and some strength. I have nothing to lose by dedicating myself to something,” for without that, life would be “a gradual rotting and disintegrating in the warm, debilitating narcotic bath of upper-class American civilization.” Anything would be better than that. “I am, after all, expendable,” but for what? “Where is a vehicle, a framework, in which energy can usefully be expended?”⁹

Thanks largely to Acheson, Kennan had become persona non grata with much of the American—and Western European—foreign policy establishment. White House press secretary James Hagerty felt it necessary to assure reporters, when Kennan attended a conference there in January, that he would not be meeting alone with the president. “Why, hello Kennan,” a startled Eisenhower said as they shook hands in the receiving line. “It’s some time since I’ve seen you.” Kennan showed up at a Council on Foreign Relations discussion in April but was made to feel “as if the Devil had been occupying a pew in church.” It was clear, he acknowledged in July, that “[t]here is to be no disengagement.... The line of division in Europe is to be made steadily sharper, more meaningful, more ineradicable.”¹⁰

Kennan continued to get compliments, however, from Senator John F. Kennedy, who, having read his reply to Acheson in Foreign Affairs, praised the way it avoided “the kind of ad hominem irrelevancies in which Mr. Acheson unfortunately indulged last year.” Kennedy was always looking for negotiating possibilities with the Russians, Arthur Schlesinger remembered: also, he “admired Kennan as a historian.” Another admirer, unexpectedly, was Richard M. Nixon, in whose company Kennan found himself at a Washington reception in July. The vice president greeted him warmly, insisted on being photographed with him, and went out of his way to explain, to a very surprised Loy Henderson, that “Kennan here has performed a great service in his lectures and writings. We need someone like this to stir things up.” “Poor Loy, who probably thinks I ought to be shot at sunrise, had no choice but to agree,” George wrote Annelise afterward.¹¹

John Foster Dulles had resigned as secretary of state shortly before his death, from cancer, in May 1959. His successor, Under Secretary Christian A. Herter, harbored no particular animus toward Kennan but gave him no reason to anticipate an appointment during the remainder of Eisenhower’s term. The Institute would expect Kennan to continue as a historian: having established his credentials in that field, however, he felt the need now only to deliver lectures, write periodic reviews, and encourage younger scholars. The promised third volume on early Soviet-American relations was less important than commentary on public affairs: “I owe it to people here who have confidence in me to write, in book form, the rationale of my despair with the country.” At least in England there had been a community “to which I was civilly and fully admitted, during the period of my residence there.”¹²

Kennan had not forgotten how much, only a year earlier, he had despised the place: the “community” he really missed was a great friend. “I sometimes think I would accept again all the asperities of English life,” he wrote Isaiah Berlin, “for the delights of sheer conversation.” He had even dreamed recently of trying to talk with Berlin, over “the roar and surge of some enormous cocktail party.” Perhaps this reflected “the desperate intensity with which England seems to be trying to become like ourselves.... How the good old subconscious does go to the heart of things!”¹³

Never had he lived in any place “where the present did not seem to represent a deterioration as compared with the past,” George realized in a flash of self-recognition that spring. This had been true of Riga, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Moscow—the only exception, perhaps, had been Lisbon under Salazar. It was as if he blighted his own surroundings. If Christopher were to ask where, “in this world to which you have introduced me,” he could have a rewarding life, “what could I say? Only at the ends of the earth: in the Arctic, perhaps; where almost no other men live; where Nature, not man, is your companion. For my own country, I have not a shred of hope, not one.”¹⁴

And what of his own weaknesses? In Chicago, in April, “I took X to tea.” Wandering around the lobby of the Palmer House, they found a quiet place to talk. She was “her old self: impulsive, warm, and very foolish.” When they parted, her final word, “flung over the heads of the startled passers-by,” was: “Sorry to have been so miserable.” She thereby negatively illustrated a positive principle: “If you have tendencies which you know yourself are wrong, which you cannot control yet cannot leave, don’t apologize for them—brave them out; they are, after all, a part of you.”¹⁵

Joan’s wedding took place in Princeton that June, just after her graduation, under unexpectedly dramatic circumstances. As the guests gathered, there was a screeching of brakes and Christopher came running to say that Krisha had been run over. George and Jeanette’s son Gene rushed her to the veterinarian, who determined that she had been frightened but not hurt, while the rest of the family conspired to keep the news from Joan. Despite the near-tragedy, the wedding went off smoothly: “The present, at least, had been well lived through,” George wrote with relief in his diary. “[T]he future would have to take care of itself.”¹⁶

He sailed for Europe, where he would be attending a series of conferences, in early September. His family, this time, did not accompany him, so he spent most of the voyage in the company only of his diary. “I have been very heroic.... I have lived for a week in studied solitude among this crowd of people; I have had a drink with no one at the bar; aware of my age and dignity, I have let the ladies all pass me by; I have resisted the temptation to hear myself talk.” Why make “such a fetish of my loneliness”? Why take such satisfaction “in a total abstention from contact with any one else?” Why, for that matter, at Oxford, had he never watched a crew race or dined at high table in Balliol, his host college? It was of course a neurosis, perhaps inherited: “I have an idea that my father was much the same way.” But it was also “for myself that I do this.... I am determined that if I cannot have all, or the greater part, of what I want, no one is going to deprive me of the glorious martyrdom of having none of it.”¹⁷

“I still think constantly about what we should do,” George wrote Annelise from Rheinfelden, in Switzerland, where he was trying in vain to extract coherence from a meandering meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. “I suppose we shall end up by continuing to do exactly what we have been doing.” But “I have washed my clothes so regularly, and have acquired such expertise, that I could set up in the laundry business when I get back.”¹⁸

Perhaps because of his 1956 disillusionments, Kennan took little part in the 1960 campaign. Citing Institute obligations, he rejected an effort by New Jersey Democrats to have him run for the Senate. Support was strong enough, though, for Governor Robert Meyner to insist on a face-to-face refusal. “I did my stuff,” Kennan recorded, “and everyone, I think, was happy.” Paul Nitze got a similar brush-off after asking—it seemed “with no great show of enthusiasm”—whether Kennan would join the Democratic Party Advisory Council’s foreign policy committee: “This was not my dish.”²⁰

One other reason for avoiding politics was that Kennan had become, temporarily, a teacher. He spent five weeks at Harvard that spring drafting and delivering the rest of the lectures he had meant to give at Oxford two years earlier. Dick Ullman attended this series too, and found the response much the same: Kennan filled the largest hall available. “Without any concessions to the crowd, without any attempt to make the complex more palatable by oversimplifying or sensationalizing, by the mere force of his intellect and eloquence,” the Russian historian Richard Pipes later wrote, Kennan’s was “one of the most impressive rhetorical performances I have ever witnessed.” Combined, the two sets of lectures became a survey of Soviet-American relations, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin , which appeared the following year. Meanwhile Kennan had agreed to teach a graduate seminar at Yale in the fall. “History Goes Big,” the Yale Daily News excitedly editorialized. “It is the first time I have ever done anything of this sort,” George wrote Kent, “and I am enjoying it very much.”²¹

The Kennans had spent most of the summer of 1960 in Europe: Kristiansand, Berlin, Hamburg, Venice, and—most interesting for George—Belgrade, where his notes on what he saw in three days filled six single-spaced pages. The high point was an hour with Tito, “a Balkan communist of humble origin, tough and simple, no longer young; the personality [shaped by] endless battles and dangers; a trifle smug with success, yet also somewhat out of place in the white uniform and pretentious setting of a head of state.” What interested him most about Yugoslavia, Kennan wrote Elim O’Shaughnessy, now chargé d’affaires there, was how delicately its leaders balanced the acknowledged absurdity of Marxism-Leninism against their need to preserve the ideology in whose name they had gained and retained power. China, Kennan predicted, would soon face the same dilemma.²²

Out of the country during the Democratic and Republican conventions, Kennan returned in mid-August to find Kennedy and Nixon in a tight race. He quickly sent Kennedy an eight-page letter on how to regain the initiative in world affairs by curtailing existing commitments, strengthening conventional military capabilities, and encouraging a Sino-Soviet split through improved relations with Moscow, now “royally fouled up” as a result of the U-2 incident the previous May when an American reconnaissance plane had been shot down over the U.S.S.R. He ended with a reminder of Marshall’s 1947 advice: “Avoid trivia.”²³

Disappointingly, Kennedy responded only through his aide, Theodore Sorensen, who wrote to welcome whatever other thoughts Kennan might have. Kennedy later explained to C. L. Sulzberger that Kennan’s support for “disengagement” made it awkward “to mention his name at this time.” He had been in touch with Kennan, though, and hoped “to get him back.” Kennan, in the meantime, had tried to help by criticizing Nixon’s refusal, in the second televised debate with Kennedy, to reconsider policy on Quemoy and Matsu or to express regret over the U-2. Shockingly, though, The New York Times declined to publish Kennan’s full letter. If he could not look to the Times “as a channel for my own views,” he complained angrily to James Reston, then this raised doubts “as to whether I can and should continue to try to contribute at all to the discussion of public problems in this country.”²⁴

Even if the Democrats won, Kennan warned himself, he would have little influence in the new administration, “partly because I am poor; partly because I have aroused jealousy; partly because I have said the right things too soon; partly because the appeal to the public, in our country, has to go through the mass media; and these media are incapable of appreciating or transmitting that which I have to offer.” Therefore,

having nothing of any importance to give my strength to, I shall do all possible to conserve and develop it;

having nothing for which to be prepared, I shall try to act as though the next day, in each case, was the day of supreme challenge;

having no audience, I shall try to act as though a million people were watching.

He explained why, to himself, in a long, anguished diary entry on Monday, January 2, 1961: “[I]t is now nearly two months since the election, and I have heard literally nothing from anyone in Washington.” All the senior foreign policy posts had gone to people “whom I thought of as friends: Dean Rusk, Adlai Stevenson, Chester Bowles, Paul Nitze, Mac Bundy.” The newspapers were speculating about Bohlen’s future but had said nothing about his. The silence was as profound as after Eisenhower’s election. “Mr. Acheson and the others” who had worked to keep him out of the Kennedy administration had won. “I have lost.” All that was left was to write his memoirs, after which “the shades of loneliness will really close in on me. . . . Never, I think, has there been a man so wholly alone as I have been in this time.”²⁷

But it was not 1953 all over again. On Tuesday the phone rang: Senator Kennedy’s office wished to know whether Ambassador Kennan could meet him in New York on January 10, “which I agreed to do.” Kennan found the Kennedy plane waiting at LaGuardia, and after the president-elect arrived, they flew to Washington, talking over lunch all the way. Kennedy asked brief questions, to which Kennan provided long answers. Why were the Russians so eager for a summit? How should he organize the White House staff? Could the Foreign Service be made more efficient? Should Llewellyn Thompson remain as ambassador in Moscow? Kennan thought Kennedy an excellent listener: he resisted the temptation to tell jokes or to make sententious statements, “a rare thing among men who have arisen to very exalted positions.” He said nothing about an appointment, though, and after the plane landed, Kennan caught a train back to Princeton, arriving in time for dinner.²⁸

But on Monday, January 23—three days after Kennedy’s inauguration—Kennan checked his mail at Yale’s Branford College. An ashen-faced undergraduate was on the office phone: “Seeing me, he jumped up in relief and said: ‘Mr. Kennan, the President of the United States wants to talk to you.’” It was indeed Kennedy, calling to ask whether Kennan might agree to become ambassador to Poland or Yugoslavia: could he let Rusk, now secretary of state, know which it might be? Kennan was staying that evening with the George Piersons—he was the chairman of the Yale history department—and it was from their house, before dinner, that Kennan called Rusk to say that it would be Yugoslavia. “I am very enthusiastic about the way in which the new administration is taking hold,” a more cheerful George wrote his half-brother a few days later. “This is one of the reasons why I go back to government so gladly.”²⁹

There was no delay this time about the agrément: the Yugoslavs were delighted with Kennan’s appointment. They had liked his Reith lectures and were sure, despite his denials, that he had visited the country the previous summer “to case the joint.” So Kennan spent the first week of February receiving briefings in Washington while delivering one of his own to the Policy Planning Staff and its new director, George McGhee. The topic was not Yugoslavia, about which Kennan as yet knew little, but the future of Soviet-American relations. It was the first time since the Solarium exercise of 1953 that anyone within the government—apart from the CIA—had sought his views.

Kennan saw no possibility now of ending the division of Europe. But the United States should seek points of agreement with the U.S.S.R.—particularly on commercial ties, to which the Kremlin leadership attached symbolic significance—while avoiding unnecessary irritants like the annual congressional resolution that called for liberating the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe: “Khrushchev with all his bluster is a sensitive man. We need patience and humor in dealing with him. We should not be worried by his statement that the Soviet Union intends to bury us—this was metaphorical, and the Soviet leaders know where their real interests lie.” Kennan did not repeat his suggestion, made to Kennedy, that improving Soviet-American relations could sharpen Sino-Soviet differences. He did, however, revive his proposal—first made over a decade earlier—that the United States withdraw its military bases from Japan. And it would be helpful if the State Department could return “to the old practice of giving instructions to a newly-appointed Ambassador explaining the purposes and objectives of his mission.”³⁰

On February 11 Kennan, along with Rusk, Harriman, Bohlen, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, attended a briefing for President Kennedy at the White House from Ambassador Thompson, just back from Moscow. Kennan could not help noticing that Johnson sat “in what seemed to me to be a sulky silence.” There was general agreement with Thompson’s claim that Soviet military and economic strength was increasing but also with Kennan’s reminder that Khrushchev and his colleagues expected to win “by the play of other forces.” Among these were “third world” opportunities, as in Laos, the Congo, and Cuba. The Soviet leader was eager to resume talks with the United States, broken off after the U-2 incident, and would probably not react violently “to a possible swift action against the Castro government.” Bundy’s minutes failed to specify who made this last suggestion; nor did they record what Kennan recalled Bohlen and himself saying next to the president: “Whatever you feel you have to do here, be sure that it is successful.”³¹

At his confirmation hearing on March 6, Kennan reminded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that neither the Soviet Union nor Communist China controlled Yugoslavia: “We should be happy to see that country maintain maximum independence.” The committee confirmed Kennan’s appointment unanimously, the Senate quickly agreed, and he was sworn in on March 22. That afternoon Kennan again saw the president, who wanted to know what his new ambassador to Belgrade thought about the government to which he was now accredited.

The Yugoslavs, Kennan replied, accepted American economic and financial assistance, yet supported the Soviet position “on almost every important issue.” Tito and his associates were “too deeply affected by their early Communist training to be able to get away from it entirely.” The best hope lay in the next generation of Yugoslav leaders, who might welcome “normal and intimate relations with us.” Would it help, Kennedy asked, to invite Tito to the United States? Perhaps, Kennan replied, but only if the visit was likely to produce “some favorable effect of a tangible nature” on the mutual relationship.³²

The important thing for Kennan at the moment, though, was rehabilitation: having despaired of any such possibility at the beginning of January, he now, at the end of March, had regained his influence in Washington, had been given an ambassadorship in a country he had long considered significant, and was serving a president who sought and respected his counsel. “Kennedy was a fan,” Bundy recalled. He responded to “exactly the kind of unusual, sensitive, independent intelligence” that Kennan possessed. The president had been “very kind,” George wrote in his diary on the evening of the twenty-second, and “my admiration continues undiminished.”³³

Back at the farm that weekend, he found “the house dank, the pump broken, the furnace losing water—A. was very dispirited. However, by evening, I had the house warm. And when Dorothy [Hessman], Wendy, and Krisha arrived from Princeton, it seemed more like old times.” The Kennans’ final briefing on Yugoslavia came a few days later from a friend, Robert Strunsky:

The people are mainly Serbs and Croats
Who used to be at each other’s throats.
But times have changed, and they’ve called it quits,
And now toast each other in slivovitz,
(A native brandy distilled from the prune
Which, when over-indulged in, can lead to ruin).

The language is difficult to determine;
The “j” is pronounced like the “j” in German,
But the “z” is pronounced like the “j” in French
(You set your jaw; and your teeth you clench).
. . . .

So much for the language . . . The People are gay,
And given to poetry, music and play.
The names of their cities are short and sweet,
Like Bled and Brod and Ub and Split.
On the other hand, you can also go
From Virovotica to Sarajevo.

So it looks as if there is much in store
For our friends who are off to this distant shore.
As eastward you turn with new bonds to forge
We wish you Godspeed, Annelise and George.³⁴

From there George flew with his son to London, where Christopher would be attending the nearby Sunningdale School: “This was really the end of the pleasant and affectionate association I had had, these past years, with the little boy, who would never be a little boy again.” George rejoined the rest of his family in Milan, and after a weekend in Venice they arrived by train in Belgrade on May 8. Krisha had repressed all natural functions while on the last part of the journey, so “we feared complications for the red carpet.” None occurred, but George was worrying about something else. Always slightly superstitious, he had noticed how closely these travel dates corresponded to those of 1952, when he had taken up the Moscow ambassadorship: “I hoped history was not preparing to repeat itself.”³⁶

Kennan presented his credentials to Tito on May 16, at the Yugoslav president’s summer residence off the coast of the Istrian peninsula. Doing so required flying, with Annelise, to a military airfield, being ferried across to the Brioni islands, and staying overnight in the once-elegant Grand Hotel, now an almost-empty official guesthouse, surrounded by deer, pheasants, peacocks, and Roman ruins. Wandering around, George found himself picking up a mosaic stone laid down in the time of Christ. It was, he wrote Grace and Joan, “as though only twenty days, not twenty centuries, had intervened.” Transportation was by horse-drawn carriages, and that was how Kennan, in great solemnity, went to meet his host.

Despite his standing as a communist leader, Tito seemed comfortable in these imperial surroundings, and after the ceremony the two talked informally for an hour. Recent debacles like the U-2 affair and the Bay of Pigs landings had caused Tito to doubt American competence, but “we were beginning to learn from our past mistakes,” Kennan assured him, and would not indefinitely accept passively “the undermining of our world position at the hands of the Russians and Chinese.” It was a tough line with which to begin his ambassadorship, and Kennan was not at all certain that he had gotten through.

George and Annelise found the embassy’s massive Cadillac—known to envious fellow diplomats as “the flagship”—waiting for them when they returned to the mainland. It drove them to Pula, a former Austro-Hungarian naval base, which evoked in George a sense of the past and, as it happened, a distant future:

Strong touches of the Hapsburg atmosphere still hung over the place: over its wide, shady boulevards and its ponderous Viennese buildings; and one could easily picture in imagination the scenes of the first years of this century: the brilliant uniforms of the officers, the trailing skirts and high-necked blouses of their ladies, the elegant sidewalk cafes, the summer band concerts, the lassitude, the pretensions, the warning flashes of distant lightning, the uneasy premonitions of tragedy, and—all around—the disconcerting dissimulation or open bitterness of the Slavs who inhabited the surrounding countryside, seething with the suppressed resentments of centuries, biding their time for a day of bloody and terrible revenge.

The “flagship” then dropped the Kennans off at the port of Rijeka, where they picked up their own less imposing vehicle, a battered British Sunbeam left over from Oxford and shipped from New York. Leaking oil and missing parts, it nonetheless got them back to Belgrade across 350 miles of bad roads, the ambassador driving it all the way.³⁷

Kennan’s embassy subordinates were unsure what to make of the legendary figure under whom they were serving: “They viewed me, I suspect, with a certain amused astonishment, enjoyed the rhetorical melodrama of my numerous telegraphic conflicts with the Department of State, were intrigued by my unorthodox reactions to the work they performed and the experiences they reported to me, and were aware—as I like to think—of the genuine respect and affection in which I came to hold them.” But he could not know for sure, given “that treacherous curtain of deference” that surrounds any ambassador. It parted only occasionally, as when, on “international night” at the American club, Kennan got out his guitar, propped a foot on a chair, and sang, to great acclaim, “Have Some Madeira, My Dear.” A British embassy secretary whispered to Dorothy Hessman: “I can’t imagine H[is] E[xcellency] doing anything like that!”³⁸

Anticipating Yugoslav sensitivities, Kennan had urged before leaving for Belgrade that Kennedy not proclaim “Captive Nations Week” in response to the annual congressional resolution, which was sure to call for it. Among the “nations” regularly mentioned, Kennan pointed out, were “Ude-Ural” and “Cos-sackia,” which had never existed except in the minds of Nazi propagandists during the war. And did the United States really want real nations like the Ukraine to seek their independence from the Soviet Union? The time had come to end the charade “as soon as this can be tactfully and quietly arranged.”⁴⁰

The resolution passed, as usual, in July, but the State Department promised that Kennedy would not endorse it. Kennan passed the assurance on to the Yugoslavs. Then, on the fourteenth, Kennedy did just that. It was “the most discouraging thing that has happened to me since my arrival at this post,” Kennan complained to Bundy, for it conveyed the impression that the United States was seeking to break up the Soviet Union and perhaps Yugoslavia as well. Bundy, embarrassed, acknowledged the resolution’s “foolishness” but explained that Kennedy could not ignore it “for political reasons [such] as the strength of support for foreign aid.” So the president had issued his proclamation on a Saturday evening, “the quietest possible moment of the news week,” in the hope that it would attract little notice. “It was a tactical judgment,” Bundy admitted, but Kennan took it as a warning that the new administration would be no less inclined than its predecessor to resist the primacy of domestic politics over foreign policy.⁴¹

Khrushchev’s threats against West Berlin, by then, were approaching a climax. Kennan had refrained from offering advice, he wrote Bundy, since he knew that Kennedy was consulting Acheson, which must mean “a considered rejection of my own views.” Now even more embarrassed, Bundy replied, on the twenty-seventh, that Kennan had not been asked to rejoin the government “for the purpose of shutting you up.” The president would think it “absurd that the cardinal should be quiet while the bishops are squawking.” So Kennan should speak his mind, even if this meant bypassing the State Department. After all, “there are not many people in the current management who can hold their own, in purely stylistic terms, with Dean, and you are surely one of them.”⁴²

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

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

We both know how tenuous a relation there is between a man’s intentions and the consequences of his acts.... I have children, and I do not propose to let the future of mankind be settled or ended by a group of men operating on the basis of limited perspectives and short-run calculations. I figure that the only thing I have left in life is to do everything I can to stop the war.

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

(1) this is something they [the Soviets and the East Germans] have always had the power to do; (2) it is something they were bound to do sooner or later, unless they could control the exits from West Berlin to the West; (3) since it was bound to happen, it is as well to have it happen early, as their doing and their responsibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite these strains in the official relationship, Kennan liked the Yugoslav people. He appreciated “their sweetness to children, their feeling for beauty, their intense suspicions and loyalties, their individuality and charm and sense of humor,” he wrote Oppenheimer. His task was to reconcile three things: the lifelong ideological commitment of Tito’s generation; American support for West German rearmament, which the Yugoslavs would “never understand or forgive”; and their continuing need for aid from the United States, which, “proud as they are, they hate to take.” But perhaps he and their leaders were beginning to work out “what is possible and what is impossible in our relations.”⁵⁸

Kennedy asked Kennan to return for a review of Yugoslav policy in January 1962. After meeting with him twice, the president approved moderate amounts of food and development assistance, the sale of supplies for military equipment that the Yugoslavs had already obtained from the United States, and a continuation of trade on the same basis as with “non-Soviet bloc” nations. All of this required congressional approval, so Kennan presented the proposals to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, encountering no significant objections. He would return to Belgrade, he wrote Annelise, with understandings that “should get us over the major humps and make possible the continuation of my own work on a reasonably favorable basis.”⁵⁹

At the president’s request, Kennan had prepared a summary of administration policy, but on February 5 Rusk released a revised version of it which stressed—as Kennan had been careful not to do—that Yugoslavia was strengthening its Western ties at the expense of those with the East. The Chinese published Rusk’s statement, embarrassing Kennan, who knew how much Tito resented being portrayed as a tool of the “imperialists.” No one in the State Department was listening to him, Kennan complained to Schlesinger in March, despite the fact that Rusk and the new ambassador to the Soviet Union, Foy Kohler, had once been his subordinates. Perhaps it was time to resign. He would not do this “precipitately,” but he wanted the White House to know.⁶⁰

NSC staffer Robert Komer found in Kennan’s reporting few “constructive ideas” but thought the State Department reluctant to argue with an ambassador who had the ear of the White House. That he did have, McGeorge Bundy assured Kennan: the president “follows your reports with a personal interest that is matched only in one or two places which, on their surface, are more troublesome than Belgrade.” So Komer hoped that “we’re going to use Kennan’s visit here for a long cool look at what we could or should do to forestall or limit Tito’s lean leftward.”⁶¹

The occasion this time was a Washington trip by the Yugoslav foreign minister, Koča Popović. Kennedy received his guest in the White House living quarters on May 29 and from his rocking chair began gently questioning him on what ideology really meant in the modern world. Weren’t other issues shaping relations between Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Albania? If that was the case, why should ideology affect Yugoslavia’s relations with the United States? There were, to be sure, still American isolationists who were “not sophisticated” about communism. But if the Yugoslavs could avoid episodes like the Belgrade conference, then there could surely be friendly relations, since the purpose of American policy was to preserve Yugoslavia’s independence.⁶²

“I was full of admiration for the way the President handled him,” Kennan recalled. Kennedy’s boyish courtesy, bordering on naïveté, reminded him of the young Charles Lindbergh, perhaps even Lincoln: “There was something very appealing about it.” Kennan took the opportunity, nonetheless, to leave a letter with the president and the secretary of state confirming his intention to spend another year in Belgrade, and then to return to his academic responsibilities at the Institute for Advanced Study. Were it not for these, “nothing would give me greater satisfaction than to continue to serve . . . in any manner that was useful to your purposes.”⁶³

Then on June 6 Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, citing Tito’s handling of the “nonaligned” conference, proposed an amendment to the foreign aid bill denying assistance in any form to Yugoslavia. This pleased his colleagues, who extended the ban to include Poland, and it passed by a vote of 57 to 24. Reminded that they had precluded agricultural exports, the senators then amended the amendment to allow these. The world’s “greatest deliberative body,” columnist James Reston fumed, had thereby insulted both countries, first by cutting off all aid, and then, as an afterthought, by making them “a dumping ground for farm surpluses.” Kennan learned of this after returning to Belgrade. Nothing further was needed, he cabled despairingly, “to confirm Tito on his recent course and to discourage those who have argued in favor of [a] Western orientation.”⁶⁵

Caught off guard, Kennedy took the unusual step of releasing a paraphrased version of Kennan’s telegram, as well as one from John Moors Cabot, the American ambassador in Warsaw. These congressional actions, Kennan was quoted as saying, reflected “appalling ignorance” about Yugoslavia and amounted to “the greatest windfall Soviet diplomacy could encounter in this area.” His message read, reporter Max Frankel observed, as if Kennan were pleading to come back to try to save the situation. And so he was. The least he could do in Washington, Kennan wrote in his original cable, “would be more important than the most I could do, in present circumstances, at this end.” Kennedy agreed, and after only two weeks in Belgrade, Kennan was on an airplane once again.⁶⁶

“I am now launched, for the first time in my life, into the thick of a major Congressional struggle,” George wrote Annelise from Washington on July 3. “Chances of success are poor; but one doesn’t think of that in the heat of battle.” Rusk seemed unsure of why he had come, and the State Department offered little help. The president and his staff, however, arranged meetings with congressional leaders, lined up television interviews, and encouraged Kennan to state his position in The Washington Post. When he asked about trying to see Eisenhower, Kennedy instantly agreed: Kennan visited and secured the support of the former president at his Gettysburg farm, after which he stayed overnight at his own in nearby East Berlin. “I slept like a top, [and] woke up”—it was the Fourth of July—“feeling greatly refreshed.”

The next day was “hell day.” Kennan spent it “tramping from the office of one Texas or Arkansas congressman to another,” but it all seemed futile: not one would be ashamed to vote for the Proxmire amendment. “I am now desperately tired, and must be off to bed.” A second day of lobbying went better: the vote would probably be closer than it might otherwise have been. George took a bus from Washington that evening to the closest drop-off point for East Berlin, “where, in the late evening and in pitch-blackness, Joany and Larry miraculously found me by the roadside.” His Washington Post piece appeared on July 8, and two days later George wrote Annelise to say that he had finished—he hoped—his Capitol Hill diplomacy: “I have done about all that I can do.”⁶⁷

Kennan’s brief career as a lobbyist convinced him that the legislators were using Yugoslavia to demonstrate their anticommunism. It was harder to do this with the Soviet Union, because people were afraid of war. Everybody knew, though, that “Yugoslavia was not going to make war on us.” This left him, as an ambassador, with little to say. The Yugoslavs would ask: “Why is this being done to us?” He could only reply: “I have no knowledge of why it’s being done to you.” They would then inquire: “What would we have to do to avoid this?” He could only say: “I don’t know what you could do.”⁶⁸

The Proxmire amendment, in the end, fizzled: after Kennedy assured House and Senate conferees that the authority to aid Yugoslavia and Poland was one of his strongest Cold War weapons, they restored it on July 18. Kennan returned to Belgrade at the end of that month, assuming that the “most-favored nation” issue was also being resolved. But on September 27 the phone rang in the Belgrade embassy residence. The caller was Frederick G. Dutton, assistant secretary of state for congressional relations, with the news that the House-Senate conferees on the trade bill, to the surprise of the State Department, had voted to retain the denial of “most-favored nation” status to Yugoslavia and Poland. Wilbur Mills had reneged on his promise, or at least what Kennan understood it to have been. “There’s only one thing that could stop it at this point,” Kennan remembered Dutton as having said. “That would be if you would appeal personally by telephone directly to the President.”

Because the phone line was not secure, Kennan assumed that the Yugoslavs were listening: “I had no choice, then, but to call the President.” Rising to the occasion, the ambassador summoned his ancient Russian butler, Alexander, “the usual intermediary with telephone central,” and instructed him, to his amazement, to place a person-to-person call to the president of the United States. This he did, and to Kennan’s amazement, Kennedy immediately came on the line. Kennan stated as forcefully as he could what he saw as the implications of Mills’s action, whereupon the president suggested that he talk directly to the congressman and had the call transferred. Kennan was amazed again when Mills picked up the phone, but he had his speech ready, delivered “in my official capacity as ambassador in Belgrade and against the background of thirty-five years of experience with the affairs of Eastern Europe.” Denying “most-favored nation” treatment, he insisted,

would be unnecessary, uncalled for, and injurious to United States interests. It would be taken, not only in Yugoslavia but throughout this part of the world, as evidence of a petty and vindictive spirit, unworthy of a country of our stature and responsibility. This judgment has the concurrence of every officer in the mission. If the amendment is adopted, it will be in disregard of the most earnest and serious advice we are capable of giving.

By a vote of 256 to 91, the House passed the trade expansion bill, with Mills’s language unchanged, on October 4. The Senate approved it by acclamation on the same day. On the fifth Kennan cabled Kennedy and Rusk to say that his usefulness as an ambassador had come to an end, and that he would soon be stepping down: the Yugoslavs did not wish for him to leave, but they understood his embarrassment “after adoption by Congress of measures I have publicly opposed.” This caused a flurry at the White House, where Bundy promised that Kennedy, in signing the bill, would make “emphatically plain” his objections to the language on Yugoslavia: “I feel sure that you would not want to do anything which might be construed, even by a few, as reflecting differences with the President.” Kennedy himself weighed in on the ninth: “Bundy is right. You must stay in Yugoslavia since you understand better than anyone else what our policy aims to accomplish.” Most convincingly, Annelise also opposed resignation: “You don’t want to do that.”⁷⁰

Sadly, Kennedy himself, when he did sign the trade bill on the eleventh, reneged on Bundy’s promise: he praised the legislation as the most important since the Marshall Plan, leaving it to an unnamed White House “source” to voice his dissatisfaction with the denial of “most-favored nation” status. “I want you to know that the matter is very much on his mind,” Bundy apologetically cabled Kennan. “Fearful agonies of decision whether to resign or not,” George recorded in his diary on the fourteenth. “Allowed myself finally to be persuaded (not just by A’s remonstrations alone, but by these as [the] last straw of many) not to do so; but went off for a long walk, totally discouraged, feeling defeated as I have not felt since 1953.”⁷¹

The chauffeur of the embassy “flagship” rushed the Kennans back to Belgrade—over five hundred miles—in eleven hours, from where they watched the Soviet-American confrontation unfold. Appalled by the risks Khrushchev had run and not particularly sympathetic to Castro, the Yugoslavs kept their heads down, protesting the blockade of the island only after the larger crisis had been resolved. Kennedy’s handling of the situation had been “masterful,” Kennan thought. Tito’s colleagues quietly agreed, pointing out that if war had come, they would have had to come down on the Cuban side.⁷³

With the assurance, then, that there would be a future, Kennan turned to an analysis of where American policy toward Yugoslavia had gone wrong. The problem, he concluded in an eight-thousand-word dispatch pouched to Washington at the end of November, had been “heroic struggles with ourselves.” If the United States could not do better, then it might as well “fold up our tents, before the Yugoslavs fold them up for us.” Bundy passed Kennan’s analysis to the president, who ordered yet another review and again asked Kennan to fly back for it—his fifth such trip since becoming ambassador.⁷⁴

Meanwhile Tito was in Moscow, having been driven there, Kennan was sure, by American obtuseness. He had to acknowledge, though, that the Yugoslav leader was enjoying the “personal triumph of his life.” Khrushchev received him as an honored guest, with a deference that did not seem to expect subservience. Strangely, Kennan thought this a sham and even proposed, early in January 1963, that he begin cultivating Tito’s domestic opponents. Washington should provide no further food aid, and although Kennedy should seek the reinstatement of “most-favored nation” treatment, he should do this as a point of principle and not as way of luring Tito back to the side of the West.⁷⁵

These suggestions bewildered the NSC staff. “The Ambassador is clearly on the zag course now, having completed the zig with his [November] airgram,” David Klein complained to Bundy. No one in Washington or in the Moscow embassy shared Kennan’s suspicions of a Tito-Khrushchev plot. Clearly “matters of personality and intuition” were shaping Kennan’s judgment, making it “difficult to come to grips with the substance of the problem.” As for standing on principle, “[t]he President can do many things, but I doubt that even he could pull off this kind of a gambit with the U.S. Congress in the year of our Lord 1963.”⁷⁶

“It is by no means certain that the President will do, at this time, what I should like him to do,” George wrote Annelise from Washington, “and if it is not done now, I fear it will never be done.” That proved to be prescient. Kennedy received him on January 16 but ruled out any challenge to Congress for the foreseeable future. All that he agreed to do was to answer a planted press conference question a few days later, noting the importance of exploiting differences “behind the Iron Curtain” and hoping “that the Congress would reconsider the action it took last year.”⁷⁷

Bearing that crumb, Kennan saw Tito soon after returning to Belgrade. Tito seemed uneasy but made it clear that Yugoslavia was not about to abandon its independence. The Warsaw Pact no longer fitted “modern conditions.” The word “bloc” was losing its relevance. The other Eastern Europeans would soon follow Yugoslavia’s example. Tito hoped no longer to have to rely upon the United States, because “he never knew at what point they would get hit by some whim of the Congress.” But the Americans had nothing to fear from his policy. The State Department and its Belgrade embassy should simply give them “a true picture of [the] situation as of today.”⁷⁸

The meeting left Kennan deflated, dispirited, and on the way to the hospital. The trouble this time, the American military doctors in Frankfurt determined, was not ulcers but a kidney stone that would plague him for years to come. From his bed, Kennan reverted to another habit: he completed an eight-page letter to Walter Lippmann, not unlike the one he had dictated from another hospital in Washington a decade and a half earlier. “Being myself inhibited from writing for publication,” he wanted the Yugoslav situation to be known “to someone at home; and there could be no one better qualified than yourself to understand its complexities and implications.”

That this possibility, with all of its implications, should continue to be sacrificed to the passions of a few Ukrainian and Croatian exiles and the brutal demagoguery of a few violent temperaments here and there in our political life—and that this should occur without any appreciable protest on the part of American public opinion—is a situation so painful and lamentable, particularly to one who has tried to represent us in Yugoslavia, that it is my excuse for invading your privacy in this way, and for doing so at this outrageous length.

To John Paton Davies, Kennan added, a few days later, that his had been “a disastrously unsuccessful tour of duty.” He would have accepted the blame had it not been for the fact that no one on either side had listened to him: “I am as remote from the counsels of the congressional and labor leaders who have made U.S. policy . . . as I am from the internal deliberations of the Yugoslav League of Communists.” Their insults “go past my head like bullets past the head of one who sits between the battle-lines (and for the safety of whose head neither side could care less).” He would “leave U.S.-Yugoslav relations at an all-time low.”⁷⁹

Kennan came around, as well, to a more charitable view of Tito. The Sino-Soviet split was in the open now, and neighboring Albania had sided with the Chinese. Tito knew how much credit he could get with Khrushchev by sticking up for him after his decision to resume nuclear testing: that accounted for the Belgrade conference speech, which had cost Kennan his ambassadorial equilibrium. The Moscow trip was Tito’s payoff: the “prodigal son” returned, but on his own terms. He would make verbal concessions, but with “no intention of giving up his independence.” As a consequence, Eastern Europe was safer for heterodoxy than it had been in 1958, when Kennan had detected some of the first signs of it in Poland. He and Tito, it turned out, had wanted much the same thing.⁸¹

Relations with Yugoslavia were therefore never close to collapse, but Kennan more than once was. As usual, he took too much personally. In contrast to colleagues like Rusk, Ball, and Bohlen, Kennan had never achieved the diplomatic equivalent of clinical detachment. Emotional fragility led to professional volatility, a problem that had afflicted him throughout his career and was still doing so in Belgrade. “I am attached to the man as a person,” Kennan’s economic counselor, Owen T. Jones, wrote in his private diary: to his “kindness and decency, his brilliance, his reputation and stature, his access to people at all levels, the essentially long term soundness of his judgments.” But “I am repelled by his self-centered egoism, . . . his mercurial moods, his meticulous arrogance.” Kennan’s “fixations,” Jones concluded, “haunt any dealings with him.”⁸²

Kennan had his own explanation for his difficulties in Belgrade. Progress generally resulted from accumulations of small services, he reminded himself in a note written while on a flight back to the United States—not for consultations this time—at the end of May 1963. Those who performed such tasks tended to have little sense of the larger picture. He had been trying, in Yugoslavia, “to do one small thing,” and he did not regret this: “It might have been worse if I had not been there.” But as he returned now to wider perspectives, “I find myself little aided by two and a half years’ immersion in the dust and heat.”⁸³

His first stop was a conference in upstate New York where gloom about his own country quickly resurfaced. His own speech had failed, while Oppenheimer’s had been “too compact and subtle to be fully understood, and too impressive to be answered.” A gang of sullen teenagers, encountered on an early morning walk, would have killed him “for kicks” if they not been exhausted from being up all night. There was nothing to do now but “stand by and watch the internal catastrophe . . . which will surely overtake us if the external catastrophe does not anticipate it.”⁸⁴

He was also having weird dreams. One moved the East Berlin farm to Nagawicka, where the Kennan children had spent their summers, which adjoined California, where Grace and her husband were living, which was just across the lake from Delafield, where George had attended St. John’s and now was considering entering local politics. Another occurred while traveling overnight to Chicago on the 20th Century Limited. The train was somehow diverted into Canada, where George had to board a bus to another railroad station, located with the aid of Prime Minister Lester Pearson, from which he caught another train, settled himself in the club car without a ticket, but was sure “that if I, being who I was, explained my predicament, there would be no difficulty.” The sugar bags in the real dining car the next morning read: “Have sweet dreams on the Century.”⁸⁵

George visited Jeanette and her family in Highland Park, spoke at the University of Wisconsin commencement in Madison, and helped Charlie James, now president and chairman of the board of the Northwestern National Insurance Company, open its new building in Milwaukee. He then picked up an honorary degree at Harvard, flew to Paris for a NATO meeting, and rescued Christopher from Sunningdale, where he had just finished his second and final year. They spent a day nostalgically in Oxford, drove from there to Harwich, and boarded a Channel ferry for Holland. Sitting on deck in the sun and out of the wind, George spent the afternoon reading Thurber aloud to his son, who “laughed until he got the hiccoughs.”⁸⁶

The Kennans’ last full day in Belgrade, July 26, 1963, was a somber one because of the earthquake that had occurred that morning in Skopje, killing over a thousand people and devastating most of the city. The next day they flew to Brioni, where on the twenty-eighth Tito hosted a luncheon for all four Kennans, with George able to announce the arrival, near the disaster site, of an American emergency field hospital. The children comported themselves appropriately in the presence of the Yugoslav president, who toasted their father as a “nauchnik”—a scholar—just the right thing to have said. From there the family flew to Venice, Christopher having negotiated permission to keep his turtle.⁸⁷

They were well-founded. Demonstrators noisily picketed the White House when the Yugoslavs were received there the next day. Reporters noticed Kennedy’s reluctance to be photographed shaking hands with his guest. The president explained to Tito that he had signed the Trade Expansion Act, despite its denial of the “most-favored nation” privilege, because it was “a very important measure.” He hoped to regain presidential discretion in the matter, perhaps within the next few weeks. Tito should understand, though, that “every member of Congress wanted to avoid being called pro-communist,” and it was hard for them “to distinguish among the Soviet Union, Communist China, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Albania.” As for the pickets, he got them all the time himself.⁸⁹

Worse was to come. When Tito arrived in New York to address the U.N. General Assembly, he and his entourage were literally besieged in the Waldorf-Astoria, with two young protesters almost breaking into his suite. Kennan was at least able to greet the Titos peacefully in Princeton, where, he reported with relief to Kennedy, the visit had gone well. But if New York was to continue to host the United Nations, it would have to take “greater responsibility than it now does for the protection of its foreign guests against insult and molestation.”⁹⁰

Some spirit told him, though, not to end his ambassadorship on a sour note. So Kennan added a handwritten compliment, reminiscent of one he had sent Acheson in even more trying times thirteen years earlier:

Dear Mr. President:

You get many brickbats; and of those who say approving and encouraging things, not all are pure of motive.

I am now fully retired, and a candidate for neither elective nor appointive office. I think, therefore, that my sincerity may be credited if I take this means to speak a word of encouragement. I am full of admiration, both as a historian and as a person with diplomatic experience, for the manner in which you have addressed yourself to the problems of foreign policy with which I am familiar. I don’t think we have seen a better standard of statesmanship in the White House in the present century. I hope you will continue to be of good heart and allow yourself to be discouraged neither by the appalling pressures of your office nor by the obtuseness and obstruction you encounter in another branch of the government. Please know that I and many others are deeply grateful for the courage and patience and perception with which you carry on.

Very sincerely yours,
George Kennan

The date was October 22, 1963. The reply went out on the twenty-eighth:

Dear George:

Your handwritten note . . . is a letter I will keep nearby for reference and reinforcement on hard days. It is a great encouragement to have the support of a diplomat and historian of your quality, and it was uncommonly thoughtful for you to write me in this personal way.

Sincerely,
John Kennedy

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