VI.
Kennan had long liked the idea of becoming a teacher. He had regularly raised it with Jeanette as an alternative to the Foreign Service, and his Bad Nauheim lectures had revealed unexpected pedagogical skills. That was hardly the ideal environment, though: the war college came closer. “I am enjoying the work very much,” George wrote Kent early in October. “It is the first time in years that I have been relatively free from administrative duties and able to give a good portion of my time to purely intellectual pursuits.” He was supervising four civilian professors—one was Brodie, on leave from Yale—while giving occasional lectures and listening to many more. He was consulting on foreign policy in Washington and speaking to audiences elsewhere, as Acheson had encouraged him to do. He was getting, from all of this, a stimulus, as well as a degree of appreciation, “which I haven’t experienced anywhere else. In consequence, I feel quite bucked up.” Dorothy Hessman, who had followed Kennan from Moscow, thought the situation ideal for him: “There was no ambassador or Secretary to say ‘he can’t say that.’”34
By his count, Kennan composed seventeen lectures or articles, each about the length of the “long telegram,” between September 1946 and May 1947: the list did not include occasions on which he spoke extemporaneously or from rough notes. He gave most of the lectures at the National War College but also spoke at the Naval and Air War Colleges, at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania (where the Army War College would soon relocate), at Yale, Princeton, Virginia, Williams, at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association, and—as it turned out, famously—at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The indefatigable Hessman kept up, typing as many as three drafts for some of the lectures while managing a proliferating correspondence. This “veritable outpouring of literary and forensic effort” was meant to educate audiences on the nature of the postwar world and what the American response to it should be; but like all good teachers, Kennan was also educating himself along the way.35
His chief concern, in the fall of 1946, was still that too few Americans saw anything between diplomacy and war: if the first failed, the second must follow. Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt’s former vice president, now Truman’s secretary of commerce and a leading Democratic Party liberal, dramatized the polarity in a New York speech on September 12, warning that “‘[g]etting tough’ never bought anything—whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers. The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.” The president, he insisted, had read his speech and agreed with it. A confused week followed, at the end of which Truman made it clear that he did not agree and demanded Wallace’s resignation. Everywhere he went, Kennan complained while the controversy was still raging, “I find people with their faces buried in their hands and an air of tragedy about them saying collaboration with Russia has proved to be impossible and, therefore, all is lost.” When would the war start?36
Kennan used his first appearance before a university audience—an off-the-record lecture at Yale’s Institute of International Studies on October 1—to take on Wallace. The result was an evisceration, arguably unnecessary since the target by then had largely eviscerated himself. The talk was a response, though, not just to Wallace but to a succession of Kennan’s superiors—Bullitt, Davies, Harriman, Byrnes, and Roosevelt himself—all of whom had assumed, at one time or another, that if offered friendship the Soviet Union would reciprocate. If Wallace believed, like “many vain people” before him, “that the golden touch of his particular personality and the warmth of his sympathy for the cause of Russian Communism would modify in some important degree the actions of the Soviet Government,” then he was not only ignoring the way states worked, but he was also “flying in the face of some of the most basic and unshakeable of Russian realities.”
Stalin and his associates would not thank Wallace for implying that “they, the guardians of the Revolution, are a group of neurotic, wistful intellectuals, to be swept off their feet and won over from their holiest articles of faith by an engaging smile, [and] a few kind words.” They had committed acts that, in the absence of an ideology to justify them, would have to be considered among “the most stupendous crimes in the history of mankind.” They had built a regime in the image of that ideology. They had corrupted a generation:
The official who wields the disciplinary power of the Communist Party; the worker of the secret police who has sacrificed his family relationships to the grim dictates of his profession; the army officer whose wife has become accustomed to the new fur coat, the larger apartment and the war-booty Mercedes; the economic administrator whose one talent is to force the pace of armaments developments; all these, and many others besides, have sold their souls to the theory that the outside world is threatening and hostile.
They resembled the village misfits Dostoyevsky had described in The Demons, “already caught up in the toils of the revolution,” unable “to escape from its relentless demands.” But now they controlled a nation.
It was clear, then, that the fears and suspicions so prevalent in Moscow related not to the Truman administration’s policies but “to the character of the Soviet regime itself.” They would not be dispelled by “fatuous gestures of appeasement,” which could only lead “to the capitulation of the United States as a great power in the world and as the guardian of its own security.” There was, however, no reason to despair: Americans should see the situation instead “as a narrow and stony defile through which we must pass before we can emerge into more promising vistas.”
That promise resided in the Russian national character, more deeply rooted even than the Stalinist state or the ideology that animated it, yet visible in Russian literature. Kennan cited, as an example, the provincial governor in Gogol’s Dead Souls who one day acknowledged, in “a typically Russian burst of honesty,” that “perhaps I have, by my excessive suspiciousness, repelled those who sincerely wished to be useful to me.” He also recalled the Chekhov heroine who had tried to befriend peasants, got nowhere with them, walked away sadly, but was followed by a sympathetic blacksmith:
“Don’t be offended, Mistress,” said Rodion…. “Wait a couple of years and you can have the school, and you can have the roads, but not all at once…. [I]f you want to sow grain on that hill, first you have to clear it and then you have to take all the stones off and then you have to plow it up and then you have to keep after it and keep after it… and it is just the same with the people. You have to keep after them and keep after them until you win them over.”
People, Kennan was suggesting, could indeed shape governments, but this would take time. And circumstances, not sentimentality, would shape people. Therein lay the key to what American strategy should be.
The United States could alter the circumstances in which the Soviet government operated “only by a long term policy of firmness, patience, and understanding, designed to keep the Russians confronted with superior strength at every juncture where they might otherwise be inclined to encroach upon the vital interests of a stable and peaceful world, but to do this in so friendly and unprovocative a manner that its basic purposes will not be subject to misrepresentation.” The objective would be Clausewitzian: to shift the psychology of an adversary. The manner, however, would be Chekhovian.37