He arrived on September 29, 1938, just as the Munich Pact handed over to Hitler the part of Czechoslovakia the Germans called the Sudetenland. Kennan was in Wenceslas Square when the pact was announced. “One of my first impressions of the post-Munich Prague,” he writes in the “Memoirs,” “was thus the sight of crowds of people weeping, unabashedly, in the streets at this death knell of the independence their country had enjoyed for a brief twenty years.” Within six months, the German Army had occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. When Germany invaded Poland, in September, 1939, and the war began, Kennan was transferred to Berlin.

On December 11, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the United States. The American legation was taken from Berlin by special train to the town of Bad Nauheim, where it was interned, incommunicado, under the supervision of the Gestapo. Kennan was in charge of the hundred and thirty Americans, an experience he recalled with a degree of disgust extreme even for him. “The details of this ordeal would alone make a book,” he says in the “Memoirs.” He was not referring to the Gestapo; he was referring to the Americans, who he thought behaved like spoiled children. When everyone was released, after five months, he wrote a satirical poem about his fellow-inmates.

Kennan’s next posting was to Lisbon. The Ambassador, a man named Bert Fish, was a patronage appointee and rarely visited the Embassy. His sudden death, in 1943, left Kennan free to negotiate, face to face with Salazar, for the use of bases in the Azores by U.S. aircraft. In January, 1944, when the end of the war was in sight, Kennan served in the American delegation to the European Advisory Commission, in London. Bohlen (who had been in Tokyo when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and was interned for six months) remembered Kennan returning to Washington “appalled by the behavior of American soldiers—their reading of comic books, their foul language, and their obsession with sex, among other things. He wondered whether the United States was capable of being a world power.”

Then Kennan got a major break. Bohlen, now chief of the State Department’s Soviet section, introduced him to Harriman, Roosevelt’s new Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Harriman offered Kennan the position of minister-counsellor—essentially, second-in-command. Kennan arrived in Moscow on July 1, 1944. He flew in by way of Stalingrad, where the Red Army had turned back the Germans that winter. From the air, he wrote, the entire city looked as though it had been destroyed.

Like the man who appointed him, Harriman believed in personal diplomacy. He had, after all, done business with the Soviets back in the nineteen-twenties; in fact, he still had a financial interest left from the manganese enterprise when he became Ambassador. He thought he could talk turkey with Stalin. Kennan emphatically did not believe in personal diplomacy. He thought the idea that Stalin was someone the United States could cut reasonable deals with was delusional.

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As Gaddis points out, this made Harriman Kennan’s ideal superior. Kennan was already notorious in State Department circles for filing lengthy and opinionated reports, and Harriman was happy to let him continue, since if the reports didn’t interest him he just ignored them. He didn’t care if Kennan’s views diverged from official policy, either, because he didn’t negotiate from policy. He flew by the seat of his pants. And although he affected brusqueness—he was known as the Crocodile: somnolent until provoked—he admired Kennan and respected his intellect. “I’ve never been able to work with anyone as closely as I did with him,” he told Gaddis in 1982.

The war in Europe was won on the Eastern Front. Between June 22, 1941, the day Germany invaded Russia, and June 6, 1944, D Day, ninety-three per cent of German military casualties—4.2 million missing, wounded, or killed—were inflicted by Soviet forces. Stalin was not an ally of choice; Roosevelt and Churchill understood the ethical niceties of the situation they found themselves in. In an earlier book, Gaddis quotes a saying of Roosevelt’s (apparently a Balkan proverb): “It is permitted you in time of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge.” The Allied coalition was held together by one common goal: the total defeat of Nazi Germany.

There is no doubt that Stalin saw things the same way. In the most uncharacteristic blunder of his career, he had imagined that he could talk turkey with Hitler, and, in 1939, had signed a non-aggression treaty with Nazi Germany. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, twenty-two months later, Stalin was completely unprepared—one reason that the death toll in the East was so enormous. The Wehrmacht had come within sight of Moscow; it cost the Soviets almost a million lives to beat the Germans off, and millions more to drive them all the way back to Berlin. In the end, Soviet dead exceeded twenty-six million, roughly fourteen per cent of the population. (Fewer than half a million Americans died in the war.) Stalin needed a second front in the West, just as Roosevelt and Churchill needed the Red Army in the East.

From the start, the question was what the price would be. Stalin’s view was uncomplicated. “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system,” he explained privately to a group of Communist officials when the Red Army was bearing down on Berlin. “Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.” This is exactly the way Kennan thought that the Soviets understood the matter, and he regarded Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe as the worm in the Allied apple. Once Germany was defeated, Moscow would revert to prewar form, and the United States would have little leverage. But he could not seem to get anyone to acknowledge that the worm was there.

In August, 1944, with Soviet troops less than sixty miles from Warsaw, partisans in the Polish Home Army staged an uprising against the city’s German occupiers. Stalin failed to intervene militarily; he refused to airlift armaments to the Polish fighters; and he turned down Harriman’s personal appeal to allow Allied planes to refuel at Ukrainian bases so they could get supplies into Warsaw. Stalin’s motives were not hard to guess. He was waiting for the S.S., which had taken over the battle in Warsaw, to annihilate the Home Army for him, thereby removing a potential obstacle to the establishment of a Soviet puppet regime when the war was over.

The S.S. more than obliged. Though Stalin eventually relented, and the Soviets airlifted (actually, simply dropped from planes) matériel into Warsaw, it was to little effect. In two months, the Germans killed twenty thousand members of the Home Army and massacred two hundred and twenty-five thousand civilians. Half a million Poles were shipped to concentration camps, a hundred and fifty thousand were sent off to forced labor in Germany, and, on Hitler’s orders, Warsaw was razed. When the Red Army entered the city, in January, 1945, not a single inhabitant was left.

Kennan always believed that this was the moment when Stalin showed his hand. In the “Memoirs,” he recalls Harriman returning from his futile meeting about the Ukrainian bases “in the wee hours of the night, shattered by the experience. There was no doubt in any of our minds as to the implications of the position the Soviet leaders had taken. This was a gauntlet thrown down, in a spirit of malicious glee, before the Western powers.” Kennan thought that the Soviets should have been given the choice, right there, of relinquishing their designs on Eastern Europe or forgoing further American assistance. He didn’t think that this would have stopped Stalin; he considered the creation of a Soviet “sphere of influence” inevitable. But it would have ended the impression of American acquiescence.

In all his reports, Kennan’s repeated message to Washington was “Get real.” He didn’t just disapprove of idealistic policy talk. He deeply loathed it. Declarations about the self-determination of peoples or international economic coöperation—the kind of thing that Roosevelt and Churchill announced as Allied war aims in the Atlantic Charter—seemed to him not only utopian and unenforceable but dangerously restrictive on a government’s scope of action. If you tell the world that you are fighting to preserve the right of self-determination, then any outcome short of that makes you look hypocritical or weak. Concessions to Soviet national-security interests were going to be necessary in Eastern Europe; it was better to be frank about this, and to stop pretending that Moscow and Washington had the same goals and values. But for domestic political reasons the American government always wants to appear virtuous, Kennan thought; so it continued to call the Soviets comrades and allies even as they were clearly preparing to walk all over the Atlantic Charter.

Kennan put much of this in a long letter to Bohlen in the winter of 1945. The United States, he wrote, should abandon Eastern Europe to the Soviets, accept the division of Germany, and give up plans for the United Nations, which he considered a classic instance of political wishful thinking. When Bohlen received the letter, he was busy with the Yalta Conference, where the Big Three negotiated the future of Europe, and his reply to Kennan was brief. “Foreign policy of that kind cannot be made in a democracy,” he said.

A year later, Kennan got his chance to wake Washington up. In February, 1946, Stalin delivered a speech in which he described the Second World War as the “inevitable result . . . of modern monopoly capitalism,” and suggested that capitalism and socialism could never coexist. It was a perfectly doctrinal speech. That capitalist countries will always go to war was a basic tenet of Marxism-Leninism, and saying so was unusual only in the context of the short period of the wartime alliance. Kennan didn’t think the speech was worth more than a summary in his regular report.

But Stalin’s words were read with alarm in Washington, and the Secretary of State, James Byrnes, asked the Embassy for an analysis. Harriman had left Moscow, and he gave Kennan his blessing to reply as he saw fit. Kennan seized the day. “They had asked for it,” he wrote in the “Memoirs.” “Now, by God, they would have it.” The result was reputedly the longest telegram in State Department history—more than five thousand words, in five numbered parts. Characteristically, Kennan was ill, and he was lying in bed when he dictated it.

The Long Telegram was Kennan unbound. Yes, he said, American capitalism and Soviet Communism were incompatible systems; Washington shouldn’t have been surprised to hear Stalin say so. But this had more to do with the nature of Russia than with the nature of Communism. Russian foreign policy had always been motivated by fear of the outside world, and Marxism gave the current regime, which Kennan considered simply the latest in a line of Oriental despotisms, an ideological fig leaf for its insecurity and paranoia. Whatever it might say, the Soviet Union would always seek to undermine the West. That was just the Kremlin’s nature. It was a case of the scorpion and the frog.

Still, there was a modus vivendi available for the short term. The Soviet Union was relatively weak; it was overstretched territorially; and it did not want war. It wanted only to take advantage of opportunities. The proper policy of the United States, therefore, was vigilance against allowing opportunities to arise for the Soviet Union to take advantage of. If the United States demonstrated resolve whenever Moscow made threatening noises; if it extended aid to the European democracies, so that they would know who their friends were; and if it otherwise tended to the cultivation of its own garden there was no reason to expect World War Three.

In Washington, the telegram was a sensation. There’s no evidence that Truman read it, but, thanks largely to the Navy Secretary, James Forrestal, who had it mimeographed and circulated, it was seen by the Cabinet and by senior military officials. Kennan was summoned to Washington and installed in the newly created National War College as Deputy Commandant for Foreign Affairs. The State Department dispatched him on a lecture tour to instruct the public on the true nature of the Soviet threat; at the War College, he lectured on international relations to military, State Department, and Foreign Service officials. “I seem to have hit the jackpot as a ‘Russian expert,’ ” he wrote to Jeanette.

In 1947, George Marshall, the Secretary of State, appointed Kennan chief of a new Policy Planning Staff—an effort to think ahead in the area of international relations, not something that the United States had had much practice with. The staff, Gaddis says, became the principal source of policy ideas for Marshall and for the National Security Council, and thus for the President. Kennan dominated the staff meetings, did most of the writing, and worked in the office next to Marshall’s. For two years, he essentially formulated American foreign policy.

The greatest of his contributions was to the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Western Europe, a program that echoed policy recommendations made in the Long Telegram. It was Kennan’s idea that aid under the plan should be offered to the Soviet Union and its satellite states, with the expectation that Stalin would prohibit his satellite regimes from accepting. Stalin did exactly that, and thus put himself in the position of taking blame for the division of Europe.

Kennan’s second major Cold War treatise was the 1947 article for Foreign Affairs, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” The essay began as a paper written for Forrestal. In many respects, it was an eloquent re-statement of the Long Telegram, and it is famous for a single sentence: “It is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

This gave a name to American Cold War policy, and, with a few tweaks and many exceptions, what Kennan had called “containment” remained American policy until the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Wherever there was “Communist aggression,” the United States pushed back. As long as the Communists remained in their box, the United States did not (except rhetorically) seek to intervene. And, as Gaddis says, even Reagan, despite talk of liberation and “rollback,” stayed largely true to containment policy.

The article was signed with an “X” because Kennan did not want it to seem that, as a State Department employee, he was stating policy, but his identity was quickly revealed, and for the rest of his career he was known as the author of containment. He had reasons to resent this.

When Acheson replaced Marshall as Secretary of State, in 1949, Kennan’s influence was diminished—though Acheson was friendly and solicited his advice. Kennan gave counsel to the Administration during the Korean War, and was instrumental in setting up the covert-operations wing of the Central Intelligence Agency. His tenure as Truman’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union ended abruptly when, at a press conference at Tempelhof airport, in Berlin, he compared life in the Moscow Embassy with his internment by the Nazis at Bad Nauheim. Stalin declared Kennan persona non grata, and he was denied reëntry to the country.

He turned down offers from Harvard, M.I.T., Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale to take a position at the Institute for Advanced Study, where, whenever he was out of public life, he distracted himself by writing history. His major policy statements in the nineteen-fifties came in two lecture series. The first, at the University of Chicago in 1951, was a survey of American foreign policy since the Spanish-American War, and a running critique of the deleterious effect of domestic politics on international relations.