V.
“It was a good thing that I returned when I did,” George wrote in his postscript to Jeanette, “for the Minister here died… when I was on the boat, and it was high time I was getting back to my little parish.” Fish’s death left Kennan in charge of the legation at a critical moment. The British, he learned, had concluded a secret agreement with the Portuguese on August 17, 1943, allowing them to use the Azores bases. They had informed the State Department, but it had given the Lisbon legation no guidance as to what the American response should be. “We have no idea of the views of our Government,” Kennan complained on September 9, despite the fact that this development “is of the greatest importance for the future correlation of military and political power in the whole Atlantic area.” James C. Dunn, the department’s adviser on political relations, replied lamely that the Anglo-Portuguese negotiations had been handled “in the highest quarters” and that “we have no clearer picture than you of the general plan.”32
Finally on October 8, the day the British landed on the islands, the department instructed Kennan to assure Salazar that the United States respected Portuguese sovereignty “in all Portuguese colonies.” No further explanation was provided. Minutes before he was to meet Salazar on the tenth, however—the prime minister having returned to Lisbon to receive Kennan’s message—the department rescinded the instruction. At this point, exasperated but thinking quickly, Kennan decided to exceed his instructions. He reminded the puzzled Salazar that there had been no general discussion of the Portuguese-American wartime relationship and proceeded to conduct one. He then told the State Department what he had done, only to receive an equally puzzled reminder that it had always been American policy to “promote our trade and have pleasant relations with the Portuguese people.”33
Then, on the sixteenth, another department cable arrived instructing Kennan, “by direction of the President,” to “request” the American use of Azores facilities on a scale far larger than anything the British had asked for or obtained. Convinced that such an unexpected communication would provoke Salazar’s wrath—if not his resignation—Kennan took a second unusual step: he refused to carry out a White House order and asked permission to return to Washington to explain why, if necessary to the president himself: “I am willing to take full personal responsibility for this position.”34
That message made its way back to FDR, who asked for Kennan’s reasons in writing and, when given them, replied that he would “leave to your judgment and discretion the manner of approach to these negotiations.” Vastly relieved, Kennan went to the Foreign Office in Lisbon and told “a whopping lie”: that the State Department had now authorized him to extend a previously contemplated but delayed acknowledgment of Portuguese sovereignty over all Portuguese possessions, including the Azores. This elicited an appreciative message of gratitude from the Portuguese minister in Washington “for the guaranty thus given.” But it in turn puzzled the State Department, causing the under secretary of state, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., to tell a colleague that the Portuguese diplomat had thanked him “for some damn guarantee, and said that he always knew we would want facilities in the Azores. Now what in the name of hell did he mean by that?”35
Kennan himself—revealing nothing—witnessed that exchange, having been abruptly and without explanation ordered back to Washington. The trip took five days, flying by way of South America and Bermuda, so there was plenty of time to worry: he arrived “unnerved, overtired, jittery, not myself.” Stettinius hustled him off to the Pentagon, where he found himself facing General George C. Marshall, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who was in a particularly bad humor that day. All were angry about the delay in securing Azores base rights. A confused discussion ensued, which Stimson ended by telling Stettinius that the State Department needed “a full-fledged ambassador” in Lisbon who could “give proper attention to our affairs at this important post. Will you see to that, Mr. Secretary?” Kennan was then told to leave.36
Angry with himself for having failed to explain the situation adequately, convinced that he knew more about Portugal than anyone else in Washington, Kennan took yet another unorthodox step: he got in touch with the president’s chief of staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, who had been a fellow passenger the year before on the Drottningholm. Leahy arranged a meeting with Roosevelt’s top aide Harry Hopkins, who then took the surprised Kennan to see the president himself. FDR listened cheerfully to the whole story, told Kennan not to worry “about all those people in the Pentagon,” and drafted a personal letter to Salazar recalling that as under secretary of the Navy after World War I, he had been responsible for dismantling Azores bases used by the Americans and returning them to Portuguese control. “I do not need to tell you the United States has no designs on the territory of Portugal and its possessions…. I do not think our peoples have been in close enough touch in the past.”37
That, Kennan recalled, produced the desired results: “I went back with that letter and opened negotiations with Salazar…. [W]e spent many hours in conversation, [and he] agreed to our use of the British facilities.” Afterward Kennan was able to reconstruct what had happened. The Pentagon had seen only his refusal to execute Roosevelt’s order, but not his explanation or FDR’s approval of it. The State Department, “accustomed to sneezing whenever the Pentagon caught cold,” had simply transmitted its demand for Kennan’s recall, without attempting to clarify the matter. The episode illustrated how poor communication had been within the American government, so much so that four years later Kennan turned it into a case study, at the newly established National War College, on the need for closer political-military coordination. It was, one of his students commented, “a hell of a way to run a railroad.”38 But the episode also showed—for all his nervousness—a growing self-confidence on Kennan’s part.
During the Azores base negotiations, Kennan violated at least four rules, any one of which could have got him sacked from the Foreign Service. He exceeded his instructions in a conversation with a foreign head of government. He refused to carry out a presidential order. He lied, to another government, about the position of his own. And he went over the heads of his superiors in the State Department—as well as the secretary of war and the Joint Chiefs of Staff—to make a direct appeal to the White House. He turned out to be right in the end and so enhanced rather than ruined his reputation: he even received, from the secretary of state, personal congratulations for “the rapid and substantial progress made.” In this sense, Kennan passed his own test of hoping “to do better than other, less experienced men.” There were, however, many more experienced men in the department who viewed Kennan’s Azores “adventures,” despite their favorable outcome, “with a disapproval bordering on sheer horror.” They considered him, Kennan’s British friend Frank Roberts guessed, “very foolish, and rather lucky to get away with it.”39