The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War by Nicholas Thompson

Author:Nicholas Thompson [Thompson, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Biography & Autobiography, Cold War, Diplomacy, History, International Relations, Political Science
ISBN: 9780805081428
Google: LmuomAEACAAJ
Amazon: 0805081429
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Published: 2009-09-15T03:00:00+00:00

IT WAS THE MIDDLE of the night, probably two or three A.M., when the phone rang at the home of Kennan’s secretary, Constance Goodman. On the line was Donald Jameson, a Russian expert for the CIA. “Something has come up,” he said firmly. “I have to talk with Professor Kennan.”

Soon Kennan was awakened at his Pennsylvania farm. Though sleepy and confused, he recognized the voice on the other end. But Jameson was cagey: “We have a tremendous defection here,” was all that the spy would say.

It was early March 1967. Ten time zones away, in Delhi, India, a beautiful Russian woman had walked through the glass doors of the American embassy and declared that she was Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Stalin. “The Stalin?” queried one of the diplomats on duty. “Yes.”

The story of the decision to defect to the West began in 1963, when Svetlana fell in love with an Indian living in Moscow named Brajesh Singh. The two met in a hospital. He had just had nasal polyps removed to alleviate his chronic breathing problems and had cotton tampons in his nostrils. She had just had her tonsils taken out. They began talking one day while sitting on a couch in the hallway. As they convalesced, they slowly fell for each other. To Svetlana, one of Singh’s most endearing traits was that after she revealed her parentage, he never questioned her about it again.

In 1965, she registered in Moscow for a civil marriage with a foreigner. Soon thereafter, Premier Alexei Kosygin summoned her to the Kremlin. “What have you cooked up?” he demanded coldly, sitting in her father’s office. “You, a young healthy woman, a sportswoman, couldn’t you have found someone here, I mean someone young and strong? What do you want with this old sick Hindu? No, we are positively against it.” The marriage registration was revoked; a year and a half later, Singh died—of a broken heart, in Svetlana’s opinion. Enraged, she insisted on taking his ashes to India.

It was her first trip outside the Soviet Union, and after a few months away she decided she had had enough of being told what to do. “Every week there was a call for me to come back, to go back, to go back,” she recalled. “And I got madder and madder.”

The final step was impulsive. She had two children in Moscow, from two previous marriages, aged twenty-one and sixteen, and a bag full of Indian presents to bring home to them. She had spent her whole life in the Soviet Union and it was wrenching to consider leaving her children. But she was a woman who could fall in love quickly, with men and with ideas. At three in the afternoon on March 6, fourteen years and a day after her father’s death, she lay in bed, thinking. She had dinner plans that night, and a flight home in two days. But she could not bear the thought of returning. Too many people had given her too many commands for too long.

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