The Kremlinologist: Llewellyn E. Thompson, America’s Man in Cold War Moscow. Jenny Thompson and Sherry Thompson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.

Born in 1904 and raised in the obscure desert plain corner of Las Animas, Colorado, Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson defied the expectations of a rancher’s son—he never looked back after pursuing higher education with the “$1000 ($10,000 today) grubstake” he was offered after graduating from high school.[1] At some point after obtaining a degree at the University of Colorado, he sat for a State Department exam, scored well, and ended up in the diplomatic corps. His first station, in sleepy Sri Lanka, was followed by a more prestigious assignment to Geneva, where he reported on the League of Nations and learned how to write clear dispatches. In early 1940 he attended the Army War College’s strategic studies program, which provided insights on how to better bridge the divide between the U.S. military and the State Department. This education proved serendipitous, because in June of the following year he found himself watching Operation Barbarossa—Hitler’s blitzkrieg attack on the Soviet Union—unfold.

Being in Moscow during World War II was terrible as well as opportune for Thompson. Though the main American Embassy staff, along with its ambassador, relocated to the rear in Kubyshev, Thompson stayed in Moscow as part of a skeleton crew. For this act of bravery as the Nazis advanced to the gates of the red capital, Thompson received the U.S. Medal of Freedom. More significantly, in terms of career advancement and subsequent Cold War history, the war years allowed Thompson, a junior member of the American foreign mission, to forge a personal relationship with Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, as they dealt directly with him. Thompson earned the respect of the Soviets for facing hardship and risk during the Great Patriotic War, and the experience also broadened his cultural insights about the Soviet Union. Having arrived with no knowledge of Russian, he not only mastered the language but also obtained some credentials for becoming a Kremlinologist.

Though he was a known quantity to all Kremlinologists and highly respected, however, Thompson has largely remained an obscure figure. The online U.S. State Department history of the career foreign service officer Llewellyn Thompson is terse, indicating his service in Austria (1952-1957), the Soviet Union (1957-1962, 1966-1969), and “at large” (1962-1966).[2] Omitted from this thumbnail sketch is Thompson’s service prior to and during World War II. Moreover, the official outline mentions nothing of the Cold War narrative involving the postwar negotiations pertaining to Trieste, the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, or the negotiations paving the way for the first Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT I). Seldom has a person been so in the thick of important events only to be so largely forgotten, especially in comparison to George Kennan, W. Averill Harriman, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, and Paul Nitze.[3] Yet Anatoly Dobyrin, the long-time Soviet ambassador, regarded Thompson as “probably the best American ambassador in the USSR during the Cold War.”[4]

Now, thanks to Thompson’s daughters, who as children spent eight years living in the Soviet Union, a fuller picture emerges of this public figure who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Austria and twice to the Soviet Union (during the Eisenhower and Johnson administrations). He also sat on President Kennedy’s executive committee of the National Security Council during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Kremlinologist is an absorbing but lengthy biography. It contains nearly five hundred pages, excluding endnotes and index, and the work is divided into four parts consisting of thirty-eight total chapters. The first section covers Thompson’s early years to the start of the Cold War. The second section, consisting of just four chapters, covers the diplomat’s work in Austria. The third and fourth sections—titled “Diplomacy” and “Policy”—cover Thompson’s years as U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (under Eisenhower and Kennedy, and later under Johnson), and as Ambassador at Large for Soviet Affairs (under Kennedy). These later sections put Thompson in the thick of Cold War history.

Though the co-authors Jenny Thompson and Sherry Thompson are the subject’s daughters, any initially skeptical reader will readily see that this work is no fluff remembrance or hagiography. Rather, it is a meticulously researched volume, using primary sources from U.S. presidential libraries, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the bound volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States, the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, and the Thompson family papers.[5] However, it is clear that the daughters are on a mission to rescue their father—a man who was described in the New York Times as “customary self-effacing part” in world affairs—from obscurity.[6] In their introduction, the co-authors admit their desire to “spark interest in serious scholars of diplomacy to give our father the attention he merits.”[7]

Thompson’s professional modesty, along with his refusal to participate in first drafts of histories, may have contributed to his overall neglect. For instance, in 1954 Joseph Jones sought Thompson’s input for a book on the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, but Thompson declined.[8] The ambassador wrote Jones, stating, “I have always felt that the responsibility in these matters is that of the top officers in the Department and that it is as wrong to ascribe credit to their subordinates as it is to attribute blame.”[9] For his role in the Trieste negotiations, the co-authors asked Thompson why he did not receive more credit, to which he replied, “Those who mattered knew what he had done.”[10] The daughters also quibble about “the pitfalls of relying too heavily on the written record.”[11] They frown on historians for placing “undue weight” on written documents, explaining how their father disdained the compilation of the Potsdam Conference’s official papers; for that task, a State Department historian collected various memoranda, but in the end the principal State Department advisor offered little or nothing while a lowly staffer submitted dozens of his documents that likely went unread by the chief participants.[12]

The Kremlinologist even hints that Thompson deserves some credit for the development of the Long Telegram, Kennan’s famous Cold War manifesto, which he later pared down in Foreign Affairs as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”[13] In 1944, Thompson had written a forty-page paper on his views of the Soviet Union and shared a copy with Kennan. The following year Kennan returned the paper to Thompson with a note stating: “valuable document and should not go unused.”[14] Kennan explained he had no time to offer feedback. Six months later, Kennan issued the Long Telegram. According to the co-authors of The Kremlinologist, the Long Telegram “discussed the issues Thompson had in his earlier paper: the main factors that motivated Soviet foreign policy, the background that led to the postwar Soviet outlook, the paranoia of that country’s leadership, and Stalin’s fear of ‘capitalist encirclement.’”[15] Kennan’s memoirs, which won the Pulitzer Prize, only mention Thompson once, and nothing in regard to the development of the Long Telegram.[16] It is not surprising, then, that John Lewis Gaddis’ Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on George Kennan also barely mentions Thompson.[17]

About Kennan, the co-authors quote their father who offered his impression of the famous colleague:

Kennan was a “charming, lovable man, sentimental yet ruthless [man].” He was also “aloof,” a “one-man show.” He had a great sense of history and a broad perspective. He was often wrong in the short term, but right in the long run. He was a poor administrator yet refused to delegate authority. Kennan was brilliant at tossing out ideas, but not capable of choosing among them. He had good intuition and was “exceedingly perceptive,” but he was not the sort of person who should have responsibility for carrying out policy.[18]

Any reader of Gaddis’ biography of Kennan likely would agree with that assessment by Thompson, but the overall statement may display a hint of professional envy. Perhaps Thompson would have preferred himself heading the State Department’s new Policy Planning Staff, a position Kennan retained for two years until replaced by the hawkish Nitze. In actuality, both Thompson and Kennan shared similar views, and both opposed an overly militarized containment strategy, even though each had a hand in setting in motion Truman’s forceful approach to the Soviet Union.[19] Once the Cold War got underway, Kennan denounced containment’s implementation, as if his advice had been totally misconstrued.

The co-authors are critical of Kennan’s revisionism, calling him out for having favored the Truman Doctrine when issued while later “attempting to redefine his role in these events and the ensuing policy.”[20] However, they are honest in conceding that their father, since he never wrote his memoirs, was “spared the temptation” to revise the past about his role in the Cold War’s early days.[21] What can be said is that both Thompson and Kennan believed militarized containment was the wrong approach following the death of Stalin. But, by that time, due to the outbreak of the Korean War two and half years earlier, the American position had hardened when Truman signed off on NSC 68.[22]

Many readers will find the account of the Kennedy years—covering the fallout of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Berlin crisis, and the Cuban Missile Crisis—intriguing. The latter event is Thompson’s claim to fame. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s statement about Thompson being the “unsung hero” gets repeated here unsurprisingly.[23] Also, the co-authors quote Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who in a 1987 letter to Sherry Thompson, said Thompson’s role was important as a member of ExCom (the NSC’s executive committee that oversaw the crisis). Yet “the written record on the real story of the Cuban Missile Crisis is very scanty and will not reflect [Thompson’s] contribution.”[24] Thompson’s most important role during the crisis, the co-authors conclude, “was changing the thought patterns of those most closely involved,” especially Kennedy.[25] Thompson understood Khrushchev and the Soviet perspective, and he convinced Kennedy not to back him into a corner.

One of the most touching moments in the biography occurs after Thompson is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich arranged for the former ambassador to be sent a remedy based on the properties of the chaga mushroom that grows on Siberian trees. Unfortunately, the drug did not arrive in time. On February 6, 1972, when Thompson died at age sixty-seven, the Cold War was not over but it was seemingly less dangerous. He left no account of his role in making that possible. The Kremlinologist now offers his story and makes it part of the larger Cold War narrative. It is a worthwhile reflection on the life of a career diplomat who did his duty with professionalism and integrity.

Roger Chapman is Professor of History at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida.

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Header Image: Panorama of Moscow Kremlin from Bolshoi Kamenny bridge. (Wikimedia)

Notes:

[1] Jenny Thompson and Sherry Thompson, The Kremlinologist: Llewellyn E Thompson, America’s Man in Cold War Moscow (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press), 2.

[2] US Department of State, “Llewellyn E. Thompson Jr. (1904–1972),” Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute, https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/thompson-llewellyn-e.

[3] Thompson’s relatively early death and laconic personality contributed to his relative obscurity, whereas “Kennan lived to be 101, and during his long life he wrote a large number of books and articles about Russia and the Soviet Union, including two volumes of memoirs,” according to Mark Kramer in the introduction of James Goldgeier, et al., “Cold War Adviser: Llewellyn Thompson and the Making of U.S. Policy toward the Soviet Union,” Journal of Cold War Studies 21, no. 3 (2019): 222.

[4] Ibid., 235.

[5] Kramer, the editor of the Journal of Cold War Studies (MIT Press), rates this work as a “solid scholarly analysis”—see Ibid., p. 223. Robert Scheer, editor of Truthdig, describes the biography as a “first-rate work of journalism”—see Scheer, “The ‘Highest Danger’ of the Cold War Isn’t Behind Us,” Scheer Intelligence, December 28, 2018, https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/scheer-intelligence/the-highest-danger-of-the-cold-war-isnt-behind-us.

[6] Associated Press, “Llewellyn Thompson Dead at Age of 67; Ex-Envoy to Soviet,” New York Times, February 7, 1972, 1, 34.

[7] Thompson and Thompson, 2.

[8] Joseph Marion Jones, The Fifteen Weeks: An Inside Account of the Genesis of the Marshall Plan (New York: Viking Press/Harbinger Press, 1955).

[9] Thompson and Thompson, 64.

[10] Ibid., 115.

[11] Ibid., 2.

[12] Ibid., 54.

[13] George F. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25, No.4 (1947), 566-82.

[14] Ibid., 55.

[15] Ibid., 58.

[16] George K. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925-1950 (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1967), 301.

[17] John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). In this biography of Kennan, Thompson’s name is only mentioned in three places and nowhere in reference to the Long Telegram. Similarly, in Gaddis’ Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (1982; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), Thompson’s name appears only twice. And Thompson’s name appears neither in Gaddis’ seminal The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) nor in Gaddis’ retrospective The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005).

[18] Ibid., 41.

[19] Ernest R. May, ed., American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1993), 12-14.

[20] Thomson and Thompson., 64.

[21] Ibid.

[22] May, 14-15, 204-205.

[23] Thompson and Thompson, 302.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibdi., 332.