It soon became clear, though, that Byrnes—more slippery than stolid—was no longer prepared to do so. He relished the plaudits his hard line had won him but hoped to earn more now by breaking the diplomatic stalemate. Making the most of the free hand Truman had given him, fancying himself a wily negotiator, convinced that Molotov lacked the authority to make decisions on his own, the secretary of state decided to deal with Stalin himself. In early December, shortly after Kennan’s return to Moscow, Byrnes announced an agreement with Molotov to hold another foreign ministers’ conference in that city just one week hence. Bevin, not consulted, was furious: he had no choice, though, but to attend.23
He could hardly have been more upset than Kennan, for whom Byrnes’s self-appointed mission to Moscow—reminiscent of Joe Davies—exemplified all that was wrong with American foreign policy. “Those of us who have spent years in diplomacy appreciate better than anyone else the necessity for compromise and for flexibility,” Kennan commented in his diary after commiserating with Roberts. “But when anyone is not able to exude more cheer and confidence than I can put forward at this time about the diplomatic undertakings of our Government…, I am sure that it is best that he should not be concerned with them.”24
For the moment, though, concern was unavoidable. Accompanied by Bohlen—who had also not been consulted—Byrnes and his entourage landed in the middle of a Moscow blizzard on the afternoon of December 14. Confusion prevailed from the start, with Harriman having been told to meet the plane at the wrong airport. Kennan rushed to the right one just in time to greet the secretary of state, who spoke standing in snow with no overshoes, while the wind howled through the little group that had welcomed him. Byrnes was then driven to Spaso House to thaw out, but Kennan was given no significant role in the proceedings that followed: whatever respect Byrnes had accorded Kennan’s views in Washington, he chose not to draw upon them in Moscow.25
Kennan was allowed to observe a single short session on the nineteenth. He found Bevin looking disgusted while Molotov presided with “a Russian cigarette dangling from his mouth, his eyes flashing with satisfaction and confidence as he glanced from one to the other Foreign Minister, obviously keenly aware of their differences.” Byrnes was negotiating “with no clear or fixed plan, with no definite set of objectives or limitations.” Relying entirely on his own agility, “his main purpose is to achieve an agreement.”
The realities behind this agreement, since they concern only such people as Koreans, Rumanians, and Iranians, about whom he knows nothing, do not concern him. He wants an agreement for its political effect at home. The Russians know this. They will see that for this superficial success he pays a heavy price in the things that are real.
Afterward Kennan and Roberts dined with Doc Matthews, who had also flown in with Byrnes. “By the end of the evening, [Matthews] looked so crestfallen at the things that he had heard from Roberts and myself [that] I felt sorry for him and had to try to cheer him up.”26
One compensation was the lively presence, in Moscow, of Isaiah Berlin, whom Kennan quickly found to be the best informed and most intelligent foreigner in the city. A dinner conversation, joined by Bohlen, stretched on until two in the morning, with Berlin convinced that the Soviet leadership saw conflict with the West as unavoidable. Did they not realize, Kennan wondered, that if a conflict came about, it would be because of their own belief in its inevitability? Berlin thought not: “They would view it as inevitable through the logic of the development of social forces.” Friends would discover in time that they were enemies, “even though [they] did not know it at the moment.”27
Byrnes, to whom this would soon happen, left Moscow proud of what he had accomplished. Stalin had agreed to token concessions that in no way weakened his control over Eastern Europe, while winning symbolic involvement in an occupation of Japan that left American predominance in place. Both sides would continue to recognize Chiang Kai-shek’s government in China; both would participate in a U.N. effort to control the atomic bomb. Stalin made no promises to remove Soviet troops from northern Iran; nor did he withdraw demands on Turkey for territorial concessions and a naval base in the Dardanelles. From Kennan’s perspective, nothing had changed: all Byrnes had done had been to revive the pretense of common interests, to paper over still more cracks.
Profoundly discouraged, Kennan undertook yet another essay—never completed—to explain why this would not work. Unlike Americans, Russians throughout their history had faced hostile neighbors. As a result, they had no conception of friendly relations between states. There was no use “referring to common purposes to which we may both have done lip service at one time or another, such as strengthening world peace, or democracy, or what you will.” Such “fatuous gestures” would only lead Kremlin officials to think “that they should have been demanding more from us all along.”
It should be American policy “to accompany every expression of our wishes by some action on our part proving that Russian interests suffer if our wishes are not observed.” That would require imagination, firmness, and policy coordination, precisely the qualities lacking in Byrnes’s hastily arranged Moscow trip. There should be no top-level appeals over the heads of knowledgeable subordinates. Sledgehammers should be used, when necessary, to swat flies: “[W]e must be prepared to undertake a ‘taming of the shrew’ which is bound to involve a good deal of unpleasantness.” The Soviet system was designed “to produce the maximum concentration of national energies. We cannot face them effectively unless we do all in our power to concentrate our own effort.”28
Reflecting on the outcome of the Moscow conference, Wilgress assured his Ottawa colleagues that he had not intended “to question in any way the integrity or ability of Mr. George F. Kennan.” The fact that he was so highly regarded explained “the temporary ascendancy of the tough school shortly after the taking over of office by Mr. Byrnes.” But recent events had shown its repudiation. It was true that “American college teams usually have two or more quarterbacks,” but “the rules of the game do not permit them to use more than one at a time.”29
Kennan might well have agreed, had he been able to read Wilgress’s dispatch. On January 21, 1946, he wrote to remind his old friend Elbridge Durbrow, now in the State Department, that he wanted to come home. “I have been abroad 18 of the last 19 years. I owe it to myself and particularly to my family not to delay longer in establishing roots in the United States.” He did not wish to leave the Soviet field, since “our country is decidedly short of people who can speak of Russian affairs with any authority, objectivity and courage.” But the Foreign Service was not the place to do this: “There is little that a person like myself can accomplish within the walls of a diplomatic chancery or in subordinate positions in the Department of State.”30
IV.
George F. Kennan would be forty-two on February 16, 1946. Tall, thin, half bald now, with strikingly expressive blue eyes, he had spent all of his professional life in the Foreign Service. He had become, within the Moscow embassy, almost as compelling a figure as Harriman himself. “I was, in a way, astonished,” Berlin recalled of his first meeting with Kennan. “He was not at all like the people in the State Department I knew in Washington during my service there. He was more thoughtful, more austere, and more melancholy than they were. He was terribly absorbed—personally involved, somehow—in the terrible nature of the [Stalin] regime, and in the convolutions of its policy.” John Paton Davies was struck by Kennan’s intuitive but creative mind, “richly stored with knowledge, eloquent in expression, and disciplined by a scholarly respect for precision.”