IV.
In the meantime, though, the State Department had given Kennan an unusual opportunity to assess opinion in the country at large. He had called, in the “long telegram,” for educating Americans to the “realities of the Russian situation: I cannot over-emphasize [the] importance of this.” That passage particularly impressed William Benton, the new assistant secretary of state for public affairs, who pushed hard for giving Kennan part of that responsibility. The National War College appointment precluded any full-time commitment, but Kennan had been working with the department to find ways of “off-setting misleading and inaccurate propaganda.” The “experiment” of a speaking tour was one such effort.27
Surprisingly for someone who had traveled so extensively elsewhere, Kennan had never been west of the Mississippi River until the State Department sent him there late in the summer of 1946. Accompanied by Annelise, George spoke in Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Los Angeles, concluding his trip with a talk to the Adams County Bankers’ Association of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He prepared no texts, relying “on a few scribbled notes, on the resources of memory, and on the inspiration of the moment.” The tour, for Kennan, was yet another discovery of America, although this time under official auspices, and with no bicycle.28
Businessmen, he reported to the department, were his best audiences. Possessing few preconceived ideas on the Soviet Union, with no personal positions at stake, they were “friendly, curious, and generally anxious to be enlightened.” They were almost all male, and Kennan found that it was easier to hold their interest than when he was speaking to mixed audiences. Women, he still believed, were ill equipped to discuss international relations, because their clubs focused too earnestly on that subject. These organizations were a way of escaping “the boredom, frustration and faintly guilty conscience which seem to afflict many well-to-do and insufficiently occupied people in this country.” Russia—“mysterious and inviting, with just enough of wickedness and brutality to complete the allure”—was easier to talk about than the problems of race, slums, and labor unions at home. Having been told so often that only cooperation with Moscow could ensure peace, it was a shock for them to hear that peace would be possible “only through a long, unpleasant process of setting will against will, force against force, idea against idea.”
Professors were also difficult, because many of them had taken positions in public that were not in accord with what Kennan had to say. Their reputations were at stake, their pride was affected, they had made “rosy forecasts” in the hope of enhancing “their own glamour, prestige and importance.” The tendency showed up most clearly in California, where university faculties also seemed to have “a geographical inferiority complex,” resentful of the fact that foreign policy was still an East Coast product, confident that if given the chance they could handle it better, convinced that the future lay as much with countries bordering the Pacific as the Atlantic, certain that the Soviet Union, especially Siberia, fell within that realm.
Two West Coast groups particularly aroused Kennan’s concern. One was atomic scientists at Berkeley, who seemed to have “an unshakeable faith” that if they could only meet Soviet scientists and enlighten them about atomic weapons, all would be well. It had not occurred to them that, far from frightening Kremlin leaders, the bomb’s destructive potential might “whet their desire to find a way of using it.” Kennan also worried about San Francisco intellectuals, among whom he saw signs of communist activity: “I have been connected with Russian affairs for too many years not to know the real thing when I see it.” Everything he said, he was sure, was dutifully reported to the Soviet consul. (Kennan was right about this. A summary of his San Francisco remarks went off to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow on August 28.) Nothing he said was confidential, but if the State Department intended to send speakers on more sensitive topics, “it had better exercise some check on who is admitted to the meetings.”
By the time Kennan reached Los Angeles, another intelligence organization, without his knowledge, was tracking his movements. The local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that a “Mr. George Kennan,” whose name had appeared in left-wing publications in connection with activities taking place at the U.S. embassy in the Soviet Union, was soon to speak in that city. Did FBI headquarters wish “to ascertain the nature of his lecture”? J. Edgar Hoover’s office failed to respond, so an agent took it upon himself to attend Kennan’s talk on August 9, after which he sent in seven pages of notes and apologized for having earlier misspelled the speaker’s name, which should be “Kennon.” This did elicit a crisp reply: “For your information, George Frost Kennan has held many positions in the foreign service of the State Department, …is considered a foremost authority on Russian affairs, and his recent assignment to Moscow furnished considerable basis for our present foreign policy.”
Kennan ended his trip report with an affectionate tribute to his Gettysburg neighbors, who had come to his lecture “unencumbered—bless their hearts—by any pretensions to knowledge of the subject or by any inordinate sense of responsibility about it.” He had been warned that they might drift off, but this did not happen. They asked few questions, because they were shy, unaccustomed to that sort of thing, and “they don’t think that fast.” But they were “probably the most representative—and for that reason the most important—of the people I reached.”
The speaking tour, Kennan concluded, had been “generally successful,” in that he had been able to convey “a clearer, more realistic, less extreme and less alarmist view of Soviet-American relations” than his audiences had previously been exposed to, as well as “a greater confidence in the sincerity and soundness of the State Department.” Decades later he explained what he meant. He had found, on returning from Moscow, that if he warned people “that we couldn’t have the sort of collaboration we’d hoped for with the Russians,” this would cause them to conclude: “Well, then, war is inevitable.” So he had tried to say, on his trip, just the opposite: “You don’t have to have a war. Just don’t let them—if you can help it—expand their influence any further.”29
“Boy, you missed your calling,” a Milwaukee minister told Kennan after hearing him in his hometown. The tour showed that he could speak extemporaneously to diverse audiences, that he enjoyed doing so, and that he would like to keep it up. Perhaps it might be possible, he wrote Acheson, “for someone who, like myself, is not too far from the Department of State and at the same time not too near it, to accomplish something valuable.” Acheson readily agreed: “I would like to have you accept as many invitations to speak as you can…. I appreciate the extra burden your generous offer places on you; nevertheless, I hasten to take advantage of it.”30
V.
The National War College welcomed its first class, made up of forty-five Army and Army Air Force colonels, forty-five Navy captains, and ten State Department and Foreign Service officers, on September 3, 1946, a year and a day after the Japanese surrender. Vice Admiral Harry W. Hill, the commandant, warned the students that their wartime experiences would bear little relevance to what they would be studying: the atomic bomb might well require “a complete reorientation of old ideas.” It was important, therefore, “that you keep your minds flexible.” The purpose of the new institution, The New York Times reported the next day, was to integrate thinking “at the highest levels of the War, Navy, and State Departments.” The setting matched the mission, for from the old Army War College, situated at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, the students and their professors could see the Washington Monument, the Capitol, the Pentagon, and the new building just north of the Lincoln Memorial that the State Department would soon be occupying. The view was comprehensive, and the course that began that day was also meant to be.31