Martha Mautner was working the last shift in the American embassy code room in Moscow on Friday, February 22, 1946. It was a bare and austere place, filled only with machinery. Polyfilm covered the windows, creating a low-tech defense against Soviet espionage attempts.
Mautner was alone in this bleak space as afternoon turned toward evening. It was George Washington’s birthday, no one was around, and her eyes were on the clock. A vivacious twenty-two-year-old graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Mautner had joined the Foreign Service out of a determination to go abroad, see the world, and be a diplomat. And the best way for a woman to enter diplomacy, in those days, was to apply as a clerk. Mautner, whose academic specialties were political science and history, could barely type. So she found a copy of the typing-test paragraph for clerical applicants and went over it about 150 times, until she had reached the acceptable speed of thirty-five words a minute. Diligence paid off. Once hired, she was put on a track that eventually led her to diplomatic postings in Germany and Russia, and then an intelligence analyst slot back in Washington.
The clock struck five, and then six. Mautner’s shift was almost over. She was thinking about her date that evening with a young, handsome Swedish diplomat. The two planned to meet up and then head to a dance party at his embassy. Uncertain he was the right man for her, she knew she could find another if things did not work out. Beautiful, young, smart—and working in a diplomatic corps where men vastly outnumbered women—Mautner could pretty much take her pick.
It was nearly seven, and Mautner was ready to bolt, when the tall figure of George Kennan appeared at the code room door. A cold, sinus problems, fever, and a toothache had laid him up for the past several days. He had last been seen upstairs, dictating to his secretary from a couch. But now he was standing before Mautner, holding a thick stack of white papers. He had an important and urgent telegram. It had to go to America, and it had to go now. He handed the stack to Mautner and told her to type it in and send it.
She looked with frustration at the first page and its ominous opening sentence: “Answer to Dept’s 284, Feb 3 [13] involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of over-simplification.”
The State Department had asked Kennan to sum up the current situation with Moscow, to analyze Stalin’s speech at the Bolshoi, and to explain why the Soviets were not going to join the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. For three years, Kennan had sent telegrams warning of Moscow’s hostility. He had been lambasting, haranguing, cajoling, arguing, and pontificating. But each quick memo describing Stalinist malfeasance had slipped into the quiet river of unread documents flowing through Washington. Now Kennan’s masters had asked him to let loose, and he had obliged. His work combined the weight and breadth of any essay with the clipped urgency of a telegram—and he wanted it sent.
Mautner respected and liked Kennan. But she was also a little bored by him. Besides, she had a date to get to, and sending this document would take hours. She gave it a quick scan, quickly got the gist of it, and handed it back. “Does it really have to go out tonight?” she asked. “You’ve said all this before.”
But Kennan insisted. Maybe the message was not new, but this version was important. Most likely, no one would read it. And most likely, anyone who did would not care. But Kennan had poured into it his anger, his wisdom, and his knowledge of history. He would be damned if this chipper young woman with her Swedish paramour would come between his 5,300 words and Washington. “They’ve asked for it,” he said to her. “And now they are going to get it.”
Mautner looked at the clock again, reluctantly took the telegram from Kennan, and headed toward the machine.
THE TELEGRAM WENT out at nine P.M., marked secret. Kennan went to bed, Mautner went late to her dance, and what became known as the Long Telegram began its journey into Cold War mythology.
Soon after the document’s arrival, a colleague of Kennan’s distributed it throughout the State Department and then rerouted it to every American embassy in the world, declaring it a brilliant work with which he was “absolutely enthralled.” Averell Harriman passed a copy to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who passed copies to hundreds of colleagues. The secretary of state read it. The president read it. Soviet spies in Washington read it.
The telegram sought to answer a question flummoxing Washington: why was the United States unable to find a policy toward the Soviets that worked? Washington was used to the traditional pattern of diplomacy and physics: action, reaction; action, reaction. But with Moscow the pattern broke. The Soviets seemed intent on quietly, but aggressively, trying to expand their territory and their influence, no matter whether the United States played nice or acted stern. The department was “floundering about, looking for new intellectual moorings,” a State Department official, Louis Halle, wrote later. By February 1946, frustration had yielded to alarm: the latest crises were the Soviet refusals to join the Bretton Woods Agreements, to leave Iran, or to respect the independence of Turkey.
To Kennan, every action by the Soviet Union made a perverse sense. Soviet hostility was not a function of U.S. policy; Russian history and psychology predetermined it. “Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic people,” Kennan wrote in the abbreviated style of a telegram. “To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies.”
Now, in 1946, this traditional anxiety had another burden: justifying Marxist dogma. The men in the Kremlin did not really believe in Marxism. But it was the “fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability.” In Kennan’s view, Stalin and his lieutenants operated a thuggish police state. Denial of that fact required that the Soviet leadership pretend to be something else, and Marxist revolutionary doctrine was a plausible cover. So the regime had to keep preaching the inevitability of conflict with the imperialists. Otherwise, “they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes.”
Throw all these factors together—traditional insecurity, tyranny, and the rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism—and Soviet policy made sense. No matter what America did or said, the Kremlin would respond by trying to undermine the United States. “We have here,” proclaimed the Long Telegram’s most quoted sentence, “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”
Kennan structured his telegram in five parts. The first two described Moscow’s hostile rhetoric and its deep chauvinist roots; the next two described how the Kremlin would try to undermine America, openly and then subtly; the last, in a manner befitting a preacher, offered a solution for combating the Soviet threat, concluding with a vague call for national unity and moral uplift. “Problem is within our power to solve—and that without recourse to any general military conflict.”
The memo’s strengths were its timing and its style. Beautifully written, Kennan’s analysis was built on a deep understanding of Russia. It showed courage and provided clarity. It put the blame on Moscow, not Washington. “Kennan tied everything together, wrapped it together in a neat package, and put a red bow around it,” said George Elsey, an aide to Harry Truman.
Unsurprisingly, given that it was a cri de coeur, the Long Telegram did have logical shortcomings, in particular its depiction of the Kremlin as both supremely canny and hopelessly deluded. According to Kennan, the same government that had the power to undermine the West in dozens of tricky ways was incapable of receiving or processing objective information about the world. The Russians had the intent and the capability to penetrate everything from the “liberal magazines” to “women’s organizations” to unsupportive governments like “Switzerland, Portugal” to “police apparatus of foreign countries.” Yet Soviet leaders had no idea how any of these organizations functioned. “I for one am reluctant to believe that Stalin himself receives anything like an objective picture of outside world.”
But these criticisms were raised only in later years. At the time, what mattered was that a brilliant writer with deep knowledge of Russia was declaring that the Soviet Union was a steadfast enemy of the United States.
IN SCIENCE, a single paper can transform someone’s reputation. That almost never happens in diplomacy, but it happened with the Long Telegram. When George Kennan ambled into the embassy code room to torment Mautner with his clutch of papers, perhaps a couple hundred people knew his name. Almost immediately, he was transformed into the diplomatic legend he would remain for the rest of his life.
“If none of my previous literary efforts had seemed to evoke even the faintest tinkle from the bell at which they were aimed, this one, to my astonishment, struck it squarely and sent it vibrating with a resonance that was not to die down for many months,” he wrote in his memoirs. “My reputation was made. My voice now carried.”
The secret was timing. America had given Stalin a long leash for six months after the war ended. But he had stretched that leash to snap up swaths of territory in central Europe, and now he was gnawing at Turkey and Iran. Just two weeks after the Long Telegram, Winston Churchill spoke in the gymnasium at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and employed a metaphor based on the device used to prevent fires from spreading from stage to audience in old European theaters: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
A few Americans still argued that their nation’s harsh rhetoric had created Soviet intransigence. Henry Wallace, who had served as Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president before Truman, urged that the United States give assurances that it was not trying to form an anti-Soviet bloc—a steel curtain blocking light from the other side of the European window. Using a back channel through the Soviet secret service, Wallace had also offered to help Stalin as an “agent of influence” in the United States and had declared that he was “fighting for Truman’s soul.”
Kennan considered Wallace’s ideas preposterous. After hearing the former vice president quoted on the BBC, he sent out a memo even harsher than the Long Telegram.
Some of us [at the embassy] have tried to conceive the measures our country would have to take if it really wished to pursue, at all costs, goal of disarming Soviet suspicions. We have come to conclusion that nothing short of complete disarmament, delivery of our air and naval forces to Russia and resigning of powers of government to American Communists would even dent this problem; and even then we believe—this is not facetious—that Moscow would smell a trap.
Two weeks after sending the Long Telegram, Kennan used his new-found influence to press for promotion and reassignment; otherwise, he threatened, he would resign. A new job quickly opened: deputy commandant for foreign affairs at the National War College, a new institution set up for the education of mid-level military men and Foreign Service officers. Founded partly on Forrestal’s initiative, the War College would give Kennan a base from which to educate the military, the State Department, and the public about the impending threat. In April, Kennan, aged forty-two, began the long journey home.
He moved into a large house overlooking the Washington channel of the Potomac. From his office, he could gaze out and see both the Pentagon and the Capitol. The job would provide an excellent opportunity for a man who had lived abroad for nineteen of the past twenty years to renew his knowledge of his own country. In the summer of 1946, he embarked on a national speaking tour. He then gave a series of thirteen lectures at the War College upon his return.
Kennan’s thesis in these lectures was that the United States needed to find a midpoint between war and peace and that it should bring to bear economic, political, and psychological “measures short of war.” The Soviet Union’s goal was to increase its power, and America needed to push back wherever possible. The Soviets did not want war; they wanted a victory by steady accumulation. A partial list of the actions of which they were capable included “persuasion, intimidation, deceit, corruption, penetration, subversion, horsetrading, bluffing, psychological pressure, economic pressure, seduction, blackmail, theft, fraud.”
The United States, Kennan argued, had to fight back in similar ways, though perhaps not drawing on that entire list. If communists appeared ready to take power in Italy or France, we had to thwart them. We had to send aid to nations at risk, and we had to publicize our efforts. To counter subversion in Greece, America needed “about three ships all painted white with ‘Aid to Greece’ on the sides, and to have the first bags of wheat driven up to Athens in an American jeep with a Hollywood blonde on the radiator.”
We needed craftier intelligence agencies and better ways of countering Soviet propaganda. We had to recognize that war would lead to apocalypse, and that peace was a chimera. “Perhaps the whole idea of world peace has been a premature, unworkable grandiose form of daydreaming,” he wrote. “Perhaps we should have held up as our goal: ‘Peace if possible, and insofar as it affects our interests.’ ”
At no point, of course, should the United States actually try to overthrow or change the Soviet order. Any such attempt would only rally people around it and, besides, we had no idea what would rise in its stead. Stopping Soviet expansion would suffice. As Kennan put it in one of his speeches: “The problem of meeting the Kremlin in international affairs therefore boils down to this: Its inherent expansive tendencies must be firmly contained at all times by counter-pressure which makes it constantly evident that attempts to break through this containment would be detrimental to Soviet interests.”
Kennan gave his lectures in an academic setting and with a suitable scholarly air. He quoted Gibbon, explained the minutiae of the Soviet political system, and told funny stories about diplomats in the time of Peter the Great. But he did not try to place his ideas in the context of anyone else’s arguments. As would be the case throughout his career, Kennan cited not a single contemporary or recent political thinker. He had synthesized everything in his own mind.
Although he did not discuss nuclear weapons, they profoundly affected his thinking. He kept a diary that year of every book and paper he read, and it’s packed with works by the new breed of nuclear theorists: for example, The Absolute Weapon, a collection edited by his War College colleague Bernard Brodie, which included the essays “International Control of Atomic Weapons,” by William Fox, and “The Atomic Bomb in Soviet-American Relations,” by Arnold Wolfers. The weapon also influenced his notion that we needed to engage the Soviets in small ways so that we would not have to fight them in a big way. In his notes from an essay he read on Clausewitz, he wrote, “Does not significance of atomic weapons mean that, if we are to avoid mutual destruction, we must revert to strategic political thinking of XVIII century? Total destruction of enemy’s forces can no longer be our objective.”
Kennan did not confine himself to strategic theory. His lectures also showed a man angered at American democracy, and sometimes even at the idea of democracy itself. “I believe that there can be far greater concentration of authority within the operating branches of our government without detriment to the essentials of democracy.” Alexander Hamilton was right to argue “that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearances of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.” In one talk, Kennan declared that “there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.”
These social reflections, however, attracted little attention. People listened to his political analysis. And, once again, James Forrestal was there at the crucial moment.
The navy secretary attended many of Kennan’s lectures and grew increasingly impressed. He asked Kennan to write a paper for him about the Soviet threat, following up on the arguments made at the War College. Kennan obliged, and Forrestal sent that paper around town too.
More important, Kennan turned the paper into a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations. Afterward, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, asked Kennan whether he might be willing to publish it in the magazine. Kennan said yes. But, wary of making grand public statements as a second-tier State Department employee, he asked that the journal identify him only as “X.”
WASHINGTON IN 1946 was a time and place to make careers and reputations. Among the men elected to Congress for their first terms that autumn were John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Joseph McCarthy. National policy was like a cauldron of molten wax, waiting for people to stamp it into shape.
Paul Nitze was the right age, and in the right place, having returned to Washington to work on his USSBS report. But he was floundering, and frustrated, too, that no one wanted to read this magnum opus. The Strategic Bombing Survey’s summary report on the Pacific War was his Long Telegram, the document he had thrown himself into—the document he thought explained the future by dissecting the past. It explained the war; it explained the atomic bomb; it laid out future roles for the several armed services. But he could not get it into print. He tried desperately to get it, or a part of it, run in Reader’s Digest. He sent it to almost everyone he knew in Washington, enclosing fresh packs of salmon with some of the letters. He mailed it to every member of Congress.
But few wrote back and none appeared to have actually read the text. The newspapers gave the report only casual treatment. Nitze’s two supervisors, the men who had hired him and directed the project, did not even seem to care. The one thoughtful response in Nitze’s files likely compounded his frustrations. “I am deeply distressed at the casual treatment this report got in the press,” wrote the Harvard law professor W. Barton Leach in a long, praiseful letter. Leach added that he feared that “your work will have been wasted.”
One year after the war, few people wanted to revisit the planning for the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The only interest in Nitze’s report seemed to come from the navy and the army air forces. And they were not seeking to learn from it. They wanted to use it or to discredit it.
The services knew that a massive military reorganization would follow the war, and each was set on staking its budgetary claims. That branch to which the public gave the most credit for victory would get the largest share of congressional outlays and the most power. As a result, each tried desperately to control the Strategic Bombing Survey, and Nitze spent much of his time diving under his desk to avoid friendly fire.
The worst attacks came from the navy. Rear Admiral Ralph Ofstie described Nitze’s exposition as “a vicious and deliberate attempt to discredit the entire naval service” that he had read with “complete revulsion.” In sum, Ofstie declared the report “wholly biased, false in great part,” and “of no apparent value to other than self-seeking individuals.” Nitze recognized that this drama arose from bureaucratic politics, and it’s no surprise that the military brass would never awe him again. Throughout his career, he would respect smart generals, but he did not quiver just because someone had stars on his shoulders. And he did not trust the service secretaries to tell him exactly what weaponry they needed; he always did his own research.
Ultimately, the navy survived the reorganization and Ofstie’s blast was forgotten. But a second controversy—one that went unnoticed at the time of publication—turned out to be of more historical consequence. The debate was spurred by Nitze’s answer to one of the key questions of the report: had the atomic bomb helped to end the war?
Nitze’s answer was a firm no. “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
The conclusion was presumptuous (“based on a detailed investigation of all the facts”) and not merited by the evidence. If anything, the preponderance of Japanese leaders interviewed by the Survey believed the opposite—including Prince Konoye. Japan was politically chaotic in 1945, with groups of disillusioned civilians struggling against the military. Some diplomats had been waving the white flag for months, but, before the atomic bombs dropped, plenty of generals and admirals had declared their firm intention to fight until the last kamikaze crashed into the last destroyer.
The confidence with which Nitze expressed his view reveals a man who could let his conclusions outrun his facts. He had come to Japan certain that the war had been winnable without the atomic bomb, particularly if the United States followed his bombing plans. And his argument fit the thesis that the bomb was just another weapon—one that did not even tip the scales of the war—not an overwhelming force.
The necessity of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became one of the great debates of World War II historiography, and Nitze’s report got the readership he sought—long past the expiration date on his salmon packs. But here he did not stand with his usual allies; over the years, those citing him included left-wing historians ranging from Howard Zinn to Ward Churchill. What better support could there be for the proposition that the bombings were unnecessary than the conclusion of a government-sanctioned report written by a hawk like Paul Nitze?
ALTHOUGH HE WAS NOW IN DEMAND, Kennan still had not decided to spend his career in the Washington hurly-burly. He had always wanted to write weighty books: he had histories planned, and he still thought of finishing his biography of Chekhov. His months at the National War College had also given him his first real chance to spend time at the farm he had purchased in 1942 in East Berlin, Pennsylvania. (The location would cause trouble once, when a State Department friend terrified his secretary with a note saying Kennan was “leaving for East Berlin.”) Kennan liked dealing with rainwater tanks, fixing fences, and working on the chicken house. To the slight irritation of some of his friends, he also considered all of the above to be excellent weekend activities for guests.
Kennan imagined several possible professional futures. Should he do intelligence work? Should he become a professor, publishing scholarly tomes on the current Soviet Union, the past Russian empire, or the United States? Should he try to get a job in university or foundation administration? Or should he ditch his training and head either to Wall Street or off into the fields? In early 1946, Kennan sat down with his diary to lay out a matrix of everything he could do with his life.
|
REQUIREMENTS |
OPPORTUNITIES |
MORALS AND |
OPPORTUNITIES |
TRAVEL |
PART TIME |
INCOME |
INTELLIGENCE |
X |
|
|
|
X |
X |
|
ACADEMIC— |
X |
X |
X |
X |
|
X |
X |
ACADEMIC— |
X |
X |
X |
|
|
X |
|
ACADEMIC— |
X |
X |
X |
X |
|
X |
X |
ACADEMIC |
X |
|
|
|
|
X |
X |
FOUNDATION WORK |
X |
|
|
|
X |
X |
X |
BUSINESS |
X |
|
|
|
|
|
X |
FARMING |
|
X |
X |
X |
|
X |
|
The grid did not include a column about the possibility of meeting or working with interesting people, and nothing about opportunities for advancement or further fame. A return to diplomacy was also out. Kennan mainly wanted time alone with his thoughts and his family. The grid, in fact, made a pretty good case for becoming an academic. But then a better opportunity came knocking—one that had not been on the chart at all.