V.
“I am insisting on leaving here this spring,” Kennan wrote Bill Bullitt on January 22, 1946, the day after he asked Durbrow to expedite his return to the United States. “I hope to publish after I get home a book on the structure of Soviet power…. I have had exceptional opportunities to learn about things here, and I would like to feel that I had justified them.” Moreover if, “like everyone else who has been bitten by this bug, I am destined to spend the rest of my life reading, talking, and arguing about Russia,” he might as well establish his credibility.39 Precisely one month later, in a final exasperated attempt to awaken Washington, Kennan sent the State Department a very long telegram. After that, nothing in his life, or in United States policy toward the Soviet Union, would be the same.
Like most legends, the Kennan “long telegram” of February 22, 1946, has become encrusted with certain inaccuracies, two of which originated with the author himself. The telegram was not, as he described it in his memoirs, “some eight thousand words” in length: the actual total was just over five thousand. Nor was it a response to “an anguished cry of bewilderment” from the Treasury Department over the U.S.S.R.’s refusal to join the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, despite having participated in the wartime Bretton Woods conference that designed them. Kennan’s explanation of that development had gone out early in January, with the pointed reminder that the Kremlin leadership considered “ultimate conflict between Soviet and Capitalist systems [to be] inevitable.”40
Rather, it was Stalin himself who provoked the “long telegram” by making a speech meant, superfluously, to win him an election. He delivered it, with great fanfare, in the Bolshoi Theater on February 9, the eve of the first postwar balloting for the entirely symbolic Supreme Soviet. Districts throughout the country had all nominated their candidates by a unanimous vote. “Since prevailing local philosophy rules out hand of Divine Providence as origin of such singular uniformity of inspiration,” Kennan cabled the State Department, “it must be attributed and is to a more earthly and familiar agency.” Stalin used his address to congratulate the army, party, government, nation, and—by implication—himself for winning the war. He mentioned American and British allies, but only perfunctorily. He said nothing about foreign policy, but he did call for a peacetime level of industrial production three times what it had been before the war. He justified the sacrifices this would require with a turgid analysis—straight out of Marx and Lenin—of capitalism’s tendency to produce conflict: it had happened in 1914 and 1939, and it was sure to happen again. The Soviet Union sought only peace, but it would have to be prepared.41
No one familiar with Stalin’s thinking would have found much new in the speech: it reflected what he had long believed and often said. Kennan thought the address so routine that he simply summarized it for the State Department. Having analyzed hundreds of Moscow events over the past year and a half, he saw little need to exert himself over this one. He would, after all, be leaving soon, and at just this moment he was getting sick: “I was taken with cold, fever, sinus, tooth trouble, and finally the aftereffects of the sulpha drugs administered for the relief of these other miseries.” Bedridden and in a bad humor, he was coping with the daily flood of dispatches and other embassy business as best he could.42
But the situation in Washington was far from routine. Truman had reprimanded Byrnes, on the secretary of state’s return from Moscow, for failing to report to him regularly: as a self-taught student of ancient history, the president was especially worried about Stalin’s ambitions in the Near East. He had also begun to share suspicions—long held by several of his other advisers and by congressional critics—that Byrnes’s pride in his negotiating skills was really an addiction to appeasement. Always a weathervane, Byrnes quickly swung back to his tougher line from the previous fall. Stalin’s repudiation of Bretton Woods had ended whatever chance there might have been for American economic assistance to the U.S.S.R., and there was now evidence—soon to become public—that Soviet intelligence had been running espionage operations in the United States and Canada aimed at stealing information on the atomic bomb. Within this context, Stalin’s February 9 speech had something of the effect of a shot on Fort Sumter. “All the things we did to work out Lend Lease and gosh knows what else during the war, the efforts made by F.D.R. at the various meetings, the San Francisco conference and all that sort of business—it was just unbelievable the way he threw it all out the window,” Durbrow remembered. Stalin’s speech had said “to hell with the rest of the world.”43
Kennan’s silence puzzled Durbrow, and he was not alone. Matthews, his immediate superior, asked: “Durby, have you had anything from George Kennan on this Stalin speech?” “No, God, I expect it any day. He must be working on a real deep one, one of his better efforts.” Still nothing. “Doc, I’ve looked at all the telegram take, and there’s not a damn line. Maybe it’s coming by pouch.” “Why don’t you send him a little friendly reminder?” As it happened, Matthews himself drafted the message, which went out over Byrnes’s signature on February 13. Stalin’s speech, it pointed out, had evoked a response with the press and the public “to a degree not hitherto felt.” With the pronouncements of Stalin’s subordinates, it had seemed “to confirm your various thoughtful telegrams. We should welcome receiving from you an interpretive analysis of what we may expect in the way of future implementation of these announced policies.”44
Harriman, by then, had left Moscow for the last time as ambassador. “Now George,” he claimed to have said, “you’re on your own. I want you to express your opinions and send them in.” He could say anything he wanted “without my dampening hand.” So with the State Department also having encouraged him, Kennan could hardly remain silent. Sick or not, “[h]ere was a case where nothing but the whole truth would do.”
I reached, figuratively, for my pen (figuratively, for the pen was in this case my long suffering and able secretary Dorothy Hessman, who was destined to endure thereafter a further fifteen years studded with just such bouts of abuse) and composed a telegram of some eight thousand words [sic]—all neatly divided, like an eighteenth-century Protestant sermon, into five separate parts. (I thought that if it went in five sections, each could pass for a separate telegram and it would not look so outrageously long.)
It was Kennan’s habit to write out rough drafts, then call in Hessman to type as he dictated from a horizontal position: “He always said he could think better [that way].” Still nursing his ailments, this was his posture when he summoned her on February 22, which “was officially a holiday, so I wasn’t all that thrilled.” After she finished the final version, Kennan dragged himself out of bed to take it personally to the Mokhovaya code room, where Mautner was on duty: “This has to go out tonight.” “Why tonight? I’ve got a date.” “They asked for it—now they’re going to get it!” So she found a Navy communications officer to help, and they sent it off.45