“Before I went to Moscow,” he remembered, “I investigated who were the two best Russian experts. They were George Kennan and Chip Bohlen.” But Kennan was handling the Azores bases negotiations, and Bohlen—then head of the State Department’s Soviet desk—was becoming indispensable to Roosevelt as a policy coordinator and Russian-language interpreter. The president therefore promised Harriman, at the Tehran conference in November, that Moscow would be Kennan’s next post. Characteristically, though, he failed to tell the State Department, which instead sent Kennan to London to work on the European Advisory Commission. It took until mid-January 1944 to sort out the confusion, by which time Kennan’s ulcers had made it too risky to send him back to the city that had first provoked them.3
Kennan’s “rest” at the farm brought a rapid recovery, however, and in May Bohlen arranged for him to meet Harriman—a fellow ulcer sufferer—in Washington. The two hit it off immediately, agreeing that Kennan would run the civilian side of the Moscow embassy. Harriman knew of Kennan’s objections to Roosevelt’s policies, but these did not bother him. Secure in his access to the president, self-confident enough to respect expertise he did not have, Harriman appreciated Kennan’s candor: “I never considered a difference of opinion as something objectionable. It was something that I expected, and hoped for, to bring out the facts and establish a sound judgment.”
“Averell Harriman was an operator,” Kennan recalled. “He had a direct line to Stalin, which he thought was the only important thing. I don’t think he attached great importance to our analyses of Russian society.” But by encouraging his counselor to provide real counsel, Harriman gave Kennan the freedom to speak his mind without risking his career, as he had had to do in Portugal and on the EAC. Kennan used the opportunity to mount a sustained assault on Roosevelt’s approach to the Soviet Union.
Most of Kennan’s criticisms remained within the precincts of Spaso House and the Mokhovaya, although Harriman occasionally passed sanitized versions to Washington: “I would change the telegrams he’d drafted, and that sometimes upset him.” Kennan had little sense at the time of whether his “anxious Need-lings” were getting through to his boss. Harriman’s own views on the U.S.S.R. were changing, though, and Kennan helped him find his way. He became, in turn, Kennan’s channel to the highest levels of the American government. Through his official actions Harriman showed, Kennan later acknowledged, that he had not been oblivious to what “caused me such concern.” This was, he was sure, a better way for Harriman to indicate agreement “than by verbally holding, so to speak, my intellectual hand.”
Kennan regarded Harriman as “a towering figure on our Moscow scene, outwardly unassuming but nevertheless commanding in appearance, without petty vanity, intensely serious but never histrionic…, imperious only when things or people impeded the performance of his duties. The United States has never had a more faithful public servant.” Of Kennan, Harriman said simply: “I’ve never been able to work with anyone as closely as I did with him.”4
I.
The journey from East Berlin (Pennsylvania) to Moscow required the entire month of June 1944, partly because wartime travel was complicated, but also because the State Department allowed George to stop off in Lisbon to see his family. While he was there, the D-Day landings took place, a long-awaited military breakthrough that made it possible to begin implementing the postwar planning he had witnessed—and worried about—in London and Washington. In response to a request from Henry Norweb, the new minister to Portugal, Kennan laid out the implications for the Lisbon legation staff, making no effort to conceal his qualms.
There was no doubting the heroism or the fighting ability of the men sacrificing their lives for faith “in the ultimate righteousness of our society and in the wisdom of those who lead it.” Americans at home had organized “an amazingly successful war effort, which puts to shame all the predictions about the softness and lack of fibre of our people.” But the Roosevelt administration’s strategy for postwar Europe was ill-conceived, and there was cause for concern that war veterans, when they returned, would find their country a changed and perhaps unsettling place.
Without specifying the details, Kennan portrayed the American approach to the European Advisory Commission as “shallow and often unrealistic.” Washington was proceeding “not from what Europe is, but from what we would wish it to be.” It assumed extreme territorial changes without anticipating the tensions these would create. It was proposing a new international organization, along the lines of the old League of Nations, which would freeze that settlement in place. The resulting repression would “force the vanquished peoples to new feats of inventiveness and organization,” until finally they reached the point at which they could sell their collaboration “to the highest bidder among the erstwhile victors.” It would be, in short, the post–World War I settlement all over again.
Meanwhile the men fighting the war would have to compete for jobs after it, with workers “spoiled by high wages” secured through collective bargaining. Veterans who had faced death on meager pay would have little sympathy for labor unions. When combined with growing racial tensions and increasing juvenile delinquency, it would be “a miracle if we could survive this crisis without violence and disorder.” Americans should not think “that we can avoid at home the appearance of those same forces of ugliness and cruelty and timidity and intolerance which we are now fighting abroad.” This was the clearest expression yet of an idea Kennan had been wrestling with—at times with erratic results—since the late 1930s: that there were no distinct boundaries between domestic and foreign affairs. Americans could not insulate themselves from forces that had disrupted other societies. How they handled these would largely determine what the United States could do in the postwar world.5
On June 15 George deposited his baggage at the airlines office in Lisbon, sat with Annelise for an hour at an outdoor café watching Portuguese passersby, and then drove with her to the airport, where “we said another of those tearing watime goodbyes” that had become so familiar. “Don’t worry about me,” she wrote of this latest separation while he was still en route, “because I am feeling quite different about it.” (George had arranged, this time, for Annelise and the children to follow him to his new post.) “But even so, I don’t like it and never will.” Getting to Moscow was more difficult than it had been in peacetime: George’s trip required a circuitous routing across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the southern U.S.S.R. by whatever air transport was available. It took two weeks, giving him time to read more Gibbon, to keep a detailed diary, and to reflect on the Americans—and Russians—he met along the way.6
The journey provided Kennan’s first close look at the U.S. military, and he liked what he saw. On the flight from Gibraltar to Algiers, “I sat proudly side by side with the pilot.” He had never before been on an operational mission, “and I could not have been more pleased.” The next day he found Naples full of “slouching, impassive young American kids” who were running it “pretty damned well.” An Army Air Force general four years younger than he seemed “as efficient as any officer I ever saw.” Kennan spent the night in an Army tent, then used the next morning to reread Gibbon’s account of the Byzantine general Belisarius’s conquest of Naples in A.D. 536. It was a rare opportunity for historical comparison “which only the fortunes of war and the settings of antiquity can provide.”