It began by questioning its own authority: theirs was “a doubtful and uncertain enterprise,” Bohlen and Robinson lamented, because “it is impossible to grasp the total situation fully and to describe it in a set of coherent and well-established conclusions.” Mindful of this, they presented a matrix of options while avoiding specific claims. The report identified three probable “periods” in the future Soviet-American relationship in which it might be possible to apply a “Policy A,” a “Policy B,” or a “Third Alternative Procedure.” They composed the paper over several months, while handling other responsibilities. The final draft, dated February 14, 1946, reflected these limitations, concluding inelegantly that
the best and indeed the only general policy which would offer any chance of success in the achievement of our objective is to induce the Soviet Union in its own interest and in the interest of the world in general to join the family of nations and abide by the essential rules of international conduct embodied in the United Nations Charter, without abandoning the principle for which this country stands or surrendering any physical positions essential to United States security in the event that the Soviet Union refuses to cooperate.
Coming five days after Stalin’s speech, which Time magazine described as “the most warlike pronouncement uttered by any top-rank statesman since V-J Day,” this was not quite rising to the occasion. Despite its authors’ credentials, the Bohlen-Robinson report was a bureaucratic soporific, hedged with qualifications, unin-spiringly written, overtaken by events.7
Kennan’s telegram, in contrast, projected fierce self-confidence in clear prose with relentless logic. It qualified nothing, advanced no alternatives, and made no apologies for seeing everything in a single snapshot. It was the geopolitical equivalent of a medical X-ray, penetrating beneath alarming symptoms to yield at first clarity, then comprehension, and finally by implication a course of treatment.
The clarity came from Kennan’s demonstration—it was more than just a claim—that victory in war and security in peace required different strategies. The United States and Great Britain could have defeated Nazi Germany only by allying with the Soviet Union; their postwar safety, however, would depend on resisting the Soviet Union. Kennan drove the point home by placing wartime cooperation within the stream of time and the realm of ideas. The roots of Soviet policy lay not in that brief experience but much further back in Russian history and much more deeply in Bolshevik ideology. It was to these centers of gravity that Stalin was now returning. The Grand Alliance could not be a blueprint for the postwar world because the U.S.S.R. had never been, and as currently constituted would never be, a normal state, willing to work with others to establish a mutually satisfactory international order.
Comprehension followed, for if—as Kennan insisted—the Soviet regime needed external enemies to justify its internal rule, then this would account for the wariness with which it had regarded its wartime allies, as well as for the ease with which it turned them into enemies once victory had been achieved. Diplomacy would be of little use in this situation. The United States faced new and profound dangers, against which a mobilization of political, economic, ideological, intellectual, and moral resources would be as necessary as in the war just ended.
That grim prognosis, paradoxically, relieved most of those who saw it, because Kennan left open the possibility that military mobilization might not be required. Stalin’s offensives would rely on agents and ideologies but not armies; he had no deadlines; there was time to construct fortifications. The most important of these would be a revival of European self-reliance, something the United States should want even in the absence of a Soviet threat. Hence, Kennan was saying, Americans could secure their interests by meeting their responsibilities. The tautology was oddly comforting.
After reading the “long telegram,” Bohlen philosophically abandoned his own review. “There is no need,” he wrote his State Department colleagues on March 13, “to go into any long analysis of the motives or the reasons for present Soviet policy.” Kennan’s telegram had provided that. It was clear now that the Kremlin saw a world “divided into two irreconcilably hostile camps.” Provided neither contested the other’s sphere, they might coexist: the problem was “(a) to convince the Soviet Union of this possibility and (b) to make clear well in advance the inevitable consequence of the present line of Soviet policy based on the opposite thesis.”8
Kennan’s dispatch, by then, had gained an unusually large audience for a classified document. The State Department sent summaries to major foreign posts, and the Army and Navy forwarded it to overseas commanders, one of whom—significantly for Kennan’s future—was General George C. Marshall, then on a presidential mission to try to end the civil war in China. Accolades soon reached the author. A typical one came from Henry Norweb, now ambassador to Cuba, who had known Kennan in Lisbon during the war: “I am sure every chief of mission who read it has been made wistful—wishing such a report could emanate from his office.” It was “a masterpiece of ‘thinking things out,’ [of] realism devoid of hysteria, of courageous approach to a problem.” Norweb’s staff had returned it with comments like “Astonishing!” “[A]n answer to prayer.” “Suggest you tell the Department how good this is.” Kennan’s presence in Moscow had been “one tremendous, undeserved piece of good luck for the United States of America.”9
Frank Roberts saw Kennan’s telegram soon after he sent it and, with his permission, forwarded a summary to London. The Foreign Office response was “Please will you send us yours?” Roberts obliged with three dispatches—not cables—that went by pouch in mid-March. Much longer than Kennan’s, Roberts’s messages placed less emphasis on persuasion—his foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, needed none when it came to suspecting Stalin’s intentions—and more on how Soviet ambitions might affect the British Empire. Nonetheless, Roberts faithfully echoed Kennan’s main points. “George was the great expert,” he later acknowledged, “and I benefited enormously from this.”10
The “long telegram” also had unauthorized readers. Kennan assumed, correctly as it turned out, that reports of the document, if not the full text, would quickly reach Moscow. It took a few months for its significance to sink in, but at some point in the summer of 1946, Foreign Minister Molotov ordered Nikolay Novikov, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, to follow suit. Kennan enjoyed imagining how Molotov might have put it: “Why haven’t you produced anything like this?”
Sent by pouch on September 27, the Novikov dispatch began with, and at no point departed from, the proposition that the foreign policy of the United States, reflecting “the imperialist tendencies of American monopolistic capital,” was one of “striving for world supremacy.” It would seek this objective in collaboration with Great Britain; but Novikov also claimed—contradicting his own logic but aligning himself with Lenin’s—that as capitalist rivals the British and the Americans regarded each other as their greatest enemy. “These poor people, put on the spot, produced the thing,” Kennan concluded, but “it was only a way of saying to their masters in Moscow: ‘How true, sir!’”11
Kennan’s “long telegram” set an international standard for analytical reporting, and it was not just contemporaries who envied it. Future diplomats would dream of accomplishing what he did with a single document, but no one ever managed it: the dispatch remains unique. It set out no fully conceived grand strategy, but it was a start, and in that sense it met a need. “I now feel better about things than I have for some time,” Kennan admitted to a friend two months after sending his famous message. “[S]ome of the most dangerous tendencies in American thought about Russia have been checked, if not overcome. If we can now only restrain the hot-heads and the panic-mongers and keep policy on a firm and even keel, I am not pessimistic.”12