From George F. Kennan: An American Life (John Lewis Gaddis, 2011) pp437-8
The well-informed [James] Reston broke the news of Kennan’s ambassadorship on November 20, 1952, before the Soviet foreign ministry had provided the necessary agrément. A delay of several weeks followed, along with a Pravda complaint about Kennan’s association with the East European Fund – he had by now resigned as its president. This convinced Harrison Salisbury, the New York Times Moscow correspondent, that Stalin was about to veto the appointment. Kennan was well known, after all, as the author of the “long telegram” and the “X” article; moreover, Ralph Parker, a left-leaning British journalist, had been allowed to publish a book in Moscow in 1949, entitled Conspiracy Against Peace, claiming that at the victory celebration outside the Mokhovaya four years earlier, Kennan had turned away cynically from the cheering crowds to predict a new world war. By December 26, Salisbury had a story ready on the impending rejection, but the censors refused to clear it.
Andrey Gromyko, the wartime Soviet ambassador in Washington, had advised Stalin that “it is hardly conceivable that the USA government at present may appoint a more acceptable candidate.” Whether for that reason or some other, the Kremlin boss then gave his approval, allowing the White House to confirm that Kennan was indeed Truman’s choice. Salisbury, for once, was grateful to the censors: “By killing my adverse speculation [they] spared me an embarrassing error.”
A week later, in bed at the Princeton house with a sprained back from having fallen off his bicycle, the ambassador-designate wrote out in longhand, for his future embassy counselor Hugh Cumming, what he hoped to accomplish:
It seems to me that the best an ambassador can hope to do in Moscow is to reside there patiently, cheerfully, and with a reasonable modicum of dignity, burdening the rest of the Mission as little as possible with his household and his presence, holding himself available for such chores of negotiation as may come his way, gaining what understanding he can of the local scene from such fragmentary evidence as the regime finds it impossible not to divulge to him, keeping himself prepared to give advice on Soviet-American relations whenever it can be useful to the Government, and helping himself and his associates to remain of good heart and bear themselves with confidence and dignity in an atmosphere of hostility and insults, of suspicion and misinterpretation of their every action, of attempts to belittle their world and their beliefs-an atmosphere of lies and distortions, in other words, of which the very essence is the unceasing effort to induce people to abandon the evidence of their senses and of all objective criteria and to accept as valid a version of reality artificially created, unconnected with objective fact, and calculated to reduce them to a state in which no reactions are operative but those of fear and respect for the mysteries of Soviet power.
This might seem an “overly modest set of aspirations,” Kennan added, “but I think you will agree with me that it is job enough for any man; and if I am able to acquit myself of it with as few mistakes and as much distinction as have my immediate predecessors, I shall be satisfied.“
Cumming would probably also have agreed – a very long telegram once having made its way from Moscow – on the appropriateness of a very long sentence now making its way back.
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