On August 8, 1945, with Harriman back in Moscow, Kennan accompanied him to the Kremlin for a meeting with Stalin. Despite his short stature, scrawny mustache, discolored teeth, pocked face, and yellow eyes, the “Generalissimus,” as he now styled himself, struck Kennan as having “a certain rough handsomeness,” like “an old battle-scarred tiger.”
In manner—with us, at least—he was simple, quiet, unassuming. There was no striving for effect. His words were few. They generally sounded reasonable and sensible; indeed they often were. An unforewarned visitor would never have guessed what depths of calculation, ambition, love of power, jealousy, cruelty, and sly vindictiveness lurked behind this unpretentious façade.
The subject that day was the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan, with Harriman expressing pleasure at being once again allies. There was no avoiding the implications of the American atomic bomb, however, used two days earlier at Hiroshima. It must have been “a very difficult problem to work out,” Stalin acknowledged, and “very expensive.” It would bring victory quickly, and it would mean “the end of war and of aggressors. But the secret would have to be well kept.”15
Kennan could not have agreed more, except that it was the Soviets from whom he wanted to keep the secret. “My first reaction was: ‘Oh God, if we’ve got something like this, let’s be sure that the Stalin regime doesn’t get it.’” He warned Harriman that “it would be a tragic folly for us to hand over the secrets of atomic energy production to the Russians.” More formally, he cautioned the new secretary of state, James F. Byrnes:
There is nothing—I repeat nothing—in the history of the Soviet regime which could justify us in assuming that the men who are now in power in Russia, or even those who have chances of assuming power within the foreseeable future, would hesitate for a moment to apply this power against us if by doing so they thought that they might materially improve their own power position in the world.
It was, thus, “my profound conviction that to reveal to the Soviet Government any knowledge which might be vital to the defense of the United States, without adequate guaranties for the control of its use in the Soviet Union, would constitute a frivolous neglect of the vital interests of our people.” Unusually, Kennan asked that the State Department make his view “a matter of record,” and to see that it was considered in “any discussions of this subject which may take place in responsible circles of our Government.”16
The Generalissimus, in the meantime, had paid Kennan a compliment. The occasion was the congressional visit in mid-September. To Kennan’s surprise, Stalin agreed to see the American legislators, probably with the hope of speeding action on a $6 billion postwar reconstruction loan Molotov had requested the previous January. With Harriman away again, it fell to Kennan to escort the delegation to the Kremlin, and to serve as interpreter. Several members arrived tipsy from having enjoyed “tea” somewhere in the Moscow subway, and just before entering Stalin’s office one asked: “What if I biff the old codger one in the nose?”
My heart froze. I cannot recall what I said, but I am sure that never in my life did I speak with greater earnestness. I had, as I recollect it, the help of some of the more sober members of the party, [and] our companion came meekly along. He sat… at the end of a long table, facing Stalin, and did nothing more disturbing than to leer and wink once or twice at the bewildered dictator, thus making it possible for the invisible gun muzzles, with which the room was no doubt studded, to remain sullenly silent.
Oblivious to this near-disaster, Stalin greeted his visitors politely and at the end of the meeting went out of his way to praise Kennan—with whose views espionage had already familiarized him—for the excellence of his Russian. Deputy Foreign Minister Vyshinsky added dutifully: “Yes, damn good.”17
Byrnes and Harriman were at that time attending the first postwar conference of Soviet, American, British, French, and Chinese foreign ministers, held in London in mid-September. It was not a success. Molotov was difficult, no agreements were reached on the principal agenda item, peace treaties with former German satellites, and the meeting broke up without even a public communiqué. Harriman was pleased that Byrnes had held firm: there had been, he assured the Moscow embassy staff, no more “telling the Russians how much we love them.” Kennan, for once, was also content. The Kremlin would have to face the fact, he cabled Byrnes, “that if it has not been thrown for a loss, it has at least been stopped without a gain.” This was in effect a reversaclass="underline" the first serious one, for Soviet diplomacy, since the war began. Whether there would be recriminations within the leadership remained to be seen. Byrnes took the trouble to reply personally, saying that he had found Kennan’s dispatch “highly illuminating,” with “much food for thought.”18
The football metaphor failed to impress Dana Wilgress, the Canadian ambassador in Moscow, with whom Kennan shared it. He had great respect for Kennan, Wilgress reported to Ottawa, “but he suffers from having been here in the pre-war days when foreign representatives became indoctrinated with anti-Soviet ideas as a result of the purges and subtle German propaganda.” With “only one down to go,” it was the Anglo-Saxons who were “in a huddle about what formation to try next.” That might be, Lester Pearson, Wilgress’s counterpart in Washington, commented, but Byrnes had made it a point, at a meeting with Truman, Attlee, and Canadian prime minister William L. Mackenzie King, “to express great respect for Kennan’s judgment and wisdom…. There is no doubt that whatever Kennan says carries great weight in the State Department.”19
The Truman-Attlee-King meeting, held in mid-November, focused on the international control of atomic energy and what the Soviet Union’s relationship to that process might be. Whether Kennan knew of Byrnes’s praise is not clear, although he was in Washington at the time: having received his resignation, Kennan’s superiors had called him back for consultations, just as they had done almost two decades earlier. “I took up with Mr. Kennan the question of his resignation,” a State Department official noted in a memorandum he left unsigned. “I made it clear to him that I did not think that this was the time for any of our capable senior officers to quit; their services were too badly needed.” Perhaps encouraged by the sense that the Washington mood was shifting and that his voice was beginning to be heard, Kennan agreed that “no action would be taken on his resignation…, that it would simply be held in abeyance.”20
III.
One of the curiosities of Moscow life during this period, Roberts remembered, was that he and Kennan had found themselves in charge of their respective embassies longer than the actual ambassadors were. With Harriman and Clark Kerr often away, Kennan and Roberts collaborated closely: “We were constantly having to compare notes, not merely on how the Soviets were going to carry out Potsdam, but [on] what the Soviets were up to in the Middle East, or wherever.” Both warned their governments that cooperation with Moscow “wasn’t going to be very easy.”21
Ernest Bevin, the former dockworker who had become British foreign secretary, understood this clearly, Roberts assured Kennan. He regarded the failure of the foreign ministers’ conference as a healthy development: it would be a mistake for either government to show haste in trying to resolve the difficulties that had arisen. Harriman had already detected in Bevin a considerable difference from his predecessor, Anthony Eden. Where that “suave diplomat” would dodge Molotov’s blows, the stolid Bevin, like Byrnes, had “simply faced up to them.”22