But the Cold War had not started yet. Granted, cracks were appearing in the Grand Alliance even before the declaration of victory in Europe. Meanwhile, Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 ushered into the White House a plain-spoken, midwestern machine politician who soon “tired of babying the Soviets” (as he told an aide after just a few months in office).32 However, Harry S. Truman was no fan of the OSS
and seems to have taken a strong personal dislike to the “Black Republican leprechaun,” William Donovan.33 More convinced than ever of the United States’s need for a permanent secret service, and personally reveling in his role of American spymaster, Wild Bill had begun arguing as early as September 1943 for the extension of the OSS’s lifetime beyond the end of the war. Again, however, he encountered resistance at every turn, some from the usual quarters, such as Hoover’s FBI; and some in less expected places: it now appears that FDR himself authorized the leaking to the press of a memorandum from Donovan outlining his vision of a peacetime intelligence agency, which resulted in a storm of negative reports in the anti-Roosevelt press in February 1945. “New Deal Plans to Spy on World and Home Folks,” read a headline in the
“and Super Gestapo Agency Is Under Consideration.”34 Wild Bill ploughed on manfully, but the game was up. Eventually granted access to the Oval Office, he presented Truman with an envelope containing his spy agency blueprint, which the new president tore in two and handed back to him. The OSS was formally dissolved in September 1945, with Research and Analysis hived off to the State Department and all the
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other branches going to the military. Demobilized by the end of 1945, Donovan, Dulles, and Wisner all returned reluctantly to their law practices in New York. It was, Dulles told John Kenneth Galbraith, “an appall-ing thing to come back, after heading a spy network, to handling corporate indentures.”35 History, it seemed, had passed him by again.
George F. Kennan was suffering from one of his chronic maladies—a de-bilitating combination of cold, fever, sinusitis, and toothache. Still, he had waited a long time for a chance like this, and he was not about to let it slip through his fingers. Princeton-educated, intensively trained at the U.S. foreign service’s elite school for Soviet specialists in the Baltic city of Riga, and steeped in Russian culture and history, Kennan had watched for years from his middle-ranking post at the American Embassy in Moscow as well-intentioned but naïve New Deal officials let Stalin and his des-potic regime get away, literally, with murder. Now, however, in February 1946, the Truman administration was uncertain as to how to handle its erstwhile ally. Some of the new president’s advisors counseled that Truman continue his predecessor’s wartime policy of cooperation, while others advised taking a hard-line stance. The State Department cabled the U.S. mission to Moscow requesting clarification of Soviet intentions.
Kennan’s superiors were at last asking for his opinion, and, as he later put it in his memoirs, “by God, they would have it.” Dictating to a secretary from his sickbed, the chargé d’affaires composed a 5,540-word telegram,
“all neatly divided, like an eighteenth-century Protestant sermon, into five separate parts,” which gave eloquent voice to his long pent-up personal frustrations, love of the Russian people, and hatred of Bolshevism.36
There was, Kennan’s “Long Telegram” explained, no possibility of continued cooperation with the Soviet leadership. A number of factors, including an instinctive sense of national insecurity and the expansionist imperatives of Marxism-Leninism, had made communist Russia into “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] U.S.
there can be no permanent
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