The Cold War Read Free Page B

he put it, a “friendly” regime in Turkey.
    Kennan, who had been trained in Russian from the 1920s, was serving in the Soviet capital as deputy to Ambassador W. Averell Harriman. He had long chafed at being on the sidelines as Washington made decisions affecting Amer-ica's relations with the Soviet Union. At one point he was so despondent about being marginalized that he seriously considered resigning from the foreign service altogether.
    But in February 1946, Washington asked for his views of Soviet behavior, and he seized the occasion to send an eight-thousand-word message to the State Department—the so-called Long Telegram—describing the “Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs” that would make it impossible for the Soviet Union to coexist with the West. “Here was a case where nothing but the whole truth would do,” he wrote later. “They had asked for it. Now, by God, they would have it.”
    The Soviet leaders, he believed, could compensate for the “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” only by going permanently on the attack “in [a] patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of [a] rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.”
    As he had hoped, his warnings were heeded back home, and now American policy makers closely scrutinized his analyses of Soviet intentions.
    By late March 1946, Kennan was convinced that Stalin was insatiable: “Nothing short of complete disarmament, delivery of our air and naval forces to Russia and resigning of powers of government to American communists” would alleviate Stalin's distrust, and even then he would probably “smell a trap and would continue to harbor the most baleful misgivings.”
    As the crisis deepened, former Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, who had been associated with a more friendly policy toward the United States in the 1930s, gave a revealing interview on June 18, 1946, to the CBS correspondent in Moscow, Richard C. Hottelet. The old Bolshevik explained that there “has now been [a] return in [the] U.S.S.R. to [the] outmoded concept of geographical security.” When Hottelet asked if Soviet policy would be mitigated if the West were to give in to Soviet territorial demands, Litvinov said that “it would lead to [the] West being faced after [a] period of time with new series of demands.”
    On August 7, 1946, Moscow sent a detailed memo to the Turkish government and copied Washington. Moscow now demanded a joint Turkish-Soviet defense system in the Straits, which would necessarily require Soviet bases.
    In the absence of Secretary Byrnes, who was in Paris, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson took charge. For Acheson, the Soviet message marked a turning point. It meant that Moscow was bent on expansion whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself. Acheson's policy up till now had been to press the administration to seek common ground with the Soviets. This approach was no longer acceptable. While the Soviets may not have been planning a direct military assault on Turkey, their demand for bases in the Dardanelles implied eventual projection of Soviet power into the eastern Mediterranean. Even if it meant war, Acheson was prepared to recommend a hard line to Truman, and the president was ready to follow it.
    At fifty-three, Acheson was nearing the peak of his power and performance. Before the war he was an acerbic and brilliant young lawyer, once described by a partner as “the shiniest fish in the sea,” and service in Franklin Roosevelt's State Department had smoothed some of his sharper edges. Now with Truman as president, he was second in command under Secretary of State Byrnes. But for much of Byrnes's tenure, Acheson was acting secretary of state in Washington, as Byrnes was out of the country 350 of the 562 days he was in office, negotiating with the British, the French, and the Russians.
    Tall and imposing, with his guardsman's mustache and his seemingly imperious manner, Acheson was