John Lukacs

George Kennan, Hungary and Changes in Eastern Europe

 

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George Kennan (1904- 2005) is best known as a diplomatist and as the man who drafted the so-called Long Telegram in 1946 and who wrote the famous "X" article defining "Containment". For these, he has been described, with exaggeration and imprecisely, as the architect of American foreign policy during the Cold War. Two problems confront anybody who wishes to study George Kennan. The first involves something which is the very opposite to what historians normally have to face. Here the problem is not that the material available to the historian is insufficient: it is that the material is enormous. George Kennan was a man of the written word. He began to keep a diary at the age of 23; this, with occasional interruptions, he continued to do until the age of 96. These diaries are much more than schedules of his day. They are full of most brilliant and intelligent insights. So is his correspondence, which again is enormous. Much of it is still inaccessible in Princeton. Like other people in the past, George Kennan expressed his opinions, his insights, his worries, his forebodings in private letters- expressing them in the strongest way. For his future biographers, let me repeat, the problem will be that the material is both enormous and unusually rich.
The second problem is that Kennan, like many great minds, is difficult to categorise. Many have written about him so far; there are about ten biographies or biographical studies. Some of them describe two Kennans. The first of these was the Kennan who was worried about communism and the Soviets, who drafted the Long Telegram and wrote the "X" article; the second Kennan we find later in the 1950s, the Kennan who was much opposed to the ideological crusade against the Soviet Union and highly critical of several American administrations. By that time he had retired from the Foreign Service or, rather, was asked to retire because of the independence of his mind- which is why many who didn't know him well enough spoke of two Kennans. It is my conviction that there is no contradiction there. His integrity was such that his principles were always more important for him than his political ideas. Somebody once wrote that a political idea is like a fixed gun, a cannon that can fire in only one direction. A principle is a cannon mounted on a swivelling platform that can fire at mistakes, errors and dangers in all directions.

Kennan came from a very old American family. The first Kennans arrived in America in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His grandfather and father were the first in the line to have a middle-class professional career. His father, who was born in Milwaukee in 1853, was christened Kossuth Kent Kennan; for this was the year when Lajos Kossuth made his highly publicised journey to the United States where he was received with great acclaim. It must be said that George Kennan was not very pleased with his grandfather's choice of name, considering it as a chronological or political oddity, which it was. One of the reasons for his displeasure was that George Kennan believed, unlike Kossuth, that Austria-Hungary was absolutely essential to the European balance of power. Very early in his life, in his twenties, he regretted and criticised the Paris peace treaties, as well as the propaganda that led to the break-up of Austria- Hungary. This he thought was a crime, not only against that part of Europe, but against the very order of Europe. In this, as in other matters, he was similar to Churchill, who in an article in 1927 also wrote that one of the two main problems of Europe requiring revision was the award of Transylvania to Romania.

But what Kennan wrote about Austria-Hungary before he was thirty, except for one diplomatic paper, was for himself. When he was thirty, he was appointed, since he had studied and spoke Russian, as First Secretary of the first American Embassy to the Soviet Union. What he saw in the Soviet Union, what he wrote and what he observed there is extremely interesting and important.

After his stint in the Soviet Union, he was posted as First Secretary at the American Legation to Czechoslovakia. He arrived in Prague on the day after the Munich agreement. He criticised that, as many in the West did. But he also wrote in his Prague dispatches that the creation of Czechoslovakia was in many ways artificial. This was an opinion that few people in the West shared, Czechoslovakia having been not only supported but partly created by Woodrow Wilson. And Kennan, throughout his life, was critical of Woodrow Wilson.
Now Kennan was always interested, far beyond his duties as a professional diplomat, in travelling through and getting to know the country he was posted to. In February 1939, he travelled across what remained of Czechoslovakia. His Prague dispatches reported that this country would not survive, that it was an artificial creation and that Ruthenia should belong to Hungary. He wrote this in February 1939, which I think is interesting. Just as he was critical of Woodrow Wilson, he was also critical of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom he respected. Another Hungarian connection was due to his posting to Lisbon in 1943. There (this is not in his papers, but a personal communication) he had some contacts with one or two Hungarian diplomats who were trying to approach the British and Americans in 1943. In 1944, he was sent to Moscow again as First Secretary. He was very respectful to the Ambassador, Averill Harriman. He wrote many long and in retrospect hugely interesting and hugely prophetic reports and analyses of the Soviet Union. He gave them to his ambassador. Kennan did not think Harriman read them at the time; he only found out years later that he had read them, but that they didn't go far in Washington. In these memoranda he said that the situation was now hopeless for Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union was going to rule a large portion of Eastern Europe and the United States could not do much about that; it should not have any illusions, it should not make declarations about Liberated Europe; they may go down well with the American public, but they actually made the job of the Russians easier. His view of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was similar to Churchill's. In 1944, Churchill said that the Soviet Union was now a hungry wolf in the midst of a flock of sheep. Still, after the meal comes the problem of digestion. Kennan thought that for the time being nothing could be done for Hungary and for Eastern Europe, but he also thought that in the long run the Russians would not be able to digest them.

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The Long Telegram arrived in Washington at the right moment. It was immediately shown to President Truman. Overnight Kennan became famous. He regretted this. He wrote in his Memoirs that in a democracy much is due to political timing. Had he written this and dispatched the telegramme to Washington six months earlier, people would have said, "it's George Kennan being gloomy again." Had he written it six months later, they would have said, "well, we know all that" and so forth. He suddenly became important. He was recalled to Washington in January 1947. General Marshall, the new Secretary of State, thought very highly of Kennan and created a new position for him within the governmental hierarchy: Kennan was made head of policy planning staff. In all his long life (he lived to be more than a hundred) this was the period for which he is best known, indeed almost the only period for which he is known. There were two and a half or three years when he was a high-ranking officer on the bridge of the American ship of state. This was due to the Long Telegram in 1946 and to the "X" Containment article which was published in July 1947. This is why people say that he was the architect of an American foreign policy for fifty years, which is a vast exaggeration. The truth is he was never happy with the "X" article. He said that it was successful because it said what was obvious by then. He had not considered Eastern Europe. Containment meant that we have to contain the Soviet Union and prevent any expansion of Russian communism beyond the Iron Curtain. He did not say anything about Eastern Europe other than his insight that Eastern Europe is not necessarily an element of strength for Russia. In 1947 everybody else started to believe that after Eastern Europe had turned Communist, the Soviet Union was ready to spread communism to France and Italy and Western Europe; Kennan said that this was not the case. Here he was completely alone. He said that the Soviet Union had to be contained, he was in favour of things like the Marshall Plan, whose goal was to build up the economies and the social structure, the strength of Western Europe, so that there should be no danger of a Communist Party in France and Italy obtaining more than a small share of the votes. What he did not believe was that this policy of containment should lead to the militarization of the American alliance system, as a consequence of which there would be American military bases all over the world.

George Kennan's view of Stalin was also unique. In the 1930s, when he himself was only in his thirties, he knew Russia well enough. He was widely read in Russian literature. When he was young, he bought the 50-volume edition of the collected works of Chekhov and began writing a biography of Chekhov which he never finished. In 1937, in one of his dispatches, he wrote that Stalin has little or nothing to do with communism. He saw in the purges in Russia the substitution of a Communist and internationalist bureaucracy by a Russian security state bureaucracy. Stalin saw himself as a statesman, not as an ideologue. Stalin did not believe in Marxism, though he would not admit to this. Kennan saw Stalin as a combination of a peasant tsar and a Caucasian chieftain. Which he was. This is not the place to analyse Kennan's view of Stalin, but he thought that the West, especially after the Second World War, was misreading Stalin and putting an exceptional emphasis on communism as a doctrine, which even in 1940 he saw as outdated. It may assist the Soviet Union to some extent, but it was less and less popular anywhere else in Europe. Kennan believed something that I also happen to believe, that perhaps the entire Cold War largely came about because of a reciprocal misunderstanding. The United States believed that having conquered Eastern Europe and established Communism there, Stalin was now ready to expand into Western Europe, spreading Communism, or that he would militarily subdue Western Europe, which was not the case. Stalin believed that the Americans, who won the war with relatively little effort, were establishing themselves all over Western and Southern Europe and were now challenging his rule in Eastern Europe; which also was not the case. The United States, which had written Eastern Europe off in Yalta, was now making a lot of noise about imprisoned politicians, cardinals and so forth. Kennan thought that the Iron Curtain, the division of Europe, and within Europe the division of Germany, and within the division of Germany, the division of Berlin were artificial and wrong. They should not stand. And he believed that the time would come sooner or later when the United States and Russia would have to renegotiate the division of Europe. As I said, Kennan's popularity and success in government circles was due to his early (but not premature) anti-communism, his early diagnosis of the Soviet Union. But by 1950- 51, people who once kept reading Kennan's diagnoses turned against him. For a short time he was ambassador in Moscow, but he had to resign, because the Russians wanted him to go. On his return to Washington, Secretary Dulles told him there was no place for him in the State Department. "There is no niche for you," is how Dulles put it. Whereupon he resigned at the age of fortynine. There then followed fifty astonishingly productive years during which he wrote perceptive analyses and great books; he discovered his talent as a historian; at least four of his history books have become classics.

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In 1957, the University of Oxford invited him to take up a visiting professorship. While he was in England, the BBC asked him to give their Reith lectures for that year. (At that time Kennan's reputation in Britain and Germany was higher than in his own country.) These were six lectures that became famous later, two of which were devoted to Europe. The broadcasts drew an audience of millions. He said again that the division of Europe and Germany was unnatural and that after the death of Stalin, the Russians had enough troubles of their own, specifically citing Poland and Hungary. Looking at Europe geographically, he saw that between the American and the Russian spheres of Europe, a neutral zone had already begun to exist, including Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria and Yugoslavia. The fact, he said, that these countries belonged neither to the Warsaw Pact nor to NATO, was telling. And the time has come, he said bravely, to begin considering the withdrawal of Russian and American forces from Central Europe.
He was immediately attacked from all sides, by both Republicans and Democrats in the U.S., by Dulles as well as by Acheson, by the British and the French governments, by the West German government, who were content with the division of Europe. He saw signs from the Russians, certain indications from Khrushchev himself, that a demilitarisation of Germany might perhaps be negotiated through a partial withdrawal of Russian troops from Eastern Germany and a partial withdrawal of American troops from Western Germany. The United States Government, the British, the French and the West Germans were unwilling even to consider that. The Polish Foreign Minister Rapacki had proposed that Central Europe should be free of nuclear weapons. The only person who was listening was Kennan. These Reith lectures had tremendous repercussions, but officially they were condemned by the West.
George Kennan believed that a Russian withdrawal from Hungary and from much of Eastern Europe would not be achieved through increased American military pressure and hostility towards Russia. How it could be achieved, he believed, was through an improvement in American- Russian relations and through a mutually agreed partial withdrawal of American and Russian forces from the middle of Europe.
Today this may sound more sensible than it did at that time. Speaking personally, I saw things in much the same way, in contrast to my Hungarian friends all over the world. They believed that the hope for Hungary was more and more American pressure, more and more American hostility against the Soviet Union, that only through American pressure could Hungary ever be liberated. I thought that the hope for Hungary lay not in a deterioration, but in an improvement of American- Russian relations.
I was never involved in Hungarian émigré politics. But I thought that what Kennan had to say about Eastern Europe, particularly Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, was so important that I translated some of the Reith lectures once they were published in book form and sent the translation to a Hungarian émigré publication in Germany. They rejected it, because they thought it was too pro-Communist. Eventually, as you know, American- Russian relations improved, and the withdrawal of Russian forces from Eastern Europe did take place- not because of increasing military pressure and hostility, but as a result of other factors. After those years between 1957 and 1989, Kennan turned to the writing of history; his work was superior to many, if not all professional historians, and not only because of the brilliance of his style. The list of the articles and books he published in the last forty years of his life is formidable. With his warnings against this or that in American foreign policy, with his warnings against the undue trust placed in nuclear weapons, he gradually became recognised as a kind of national asset. In 1989, President George Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the highest American decoration.
Often (and, as I have said, incorrectly) he was categorised as the architect of containment. Some, fewer in number but wiser, called him the conscience of America. This, in many ways, he was, since his concerns with his country and people went beyond foreign policy.

Translated by

John Lukacs
is a Budapest-born historian, living and teaching in the U.S. since 1946. His books include Budapest 1900 (1988), Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990), The Duel (1990), The End of the Twentieth Century- The End of the Modern Age (1993) and A Thread of Years (1999). The above introduction to two letters from George Kennan to John Lukacs, first published here, is the edited text of a lecture delivered at the Central European University in Budapest on 6 June 2006.