History and a Triangle of Farms
Travel to south-central Pennsylvania and across the border into Maryland and discover a triangle of historic farms where three men who made history during the Cold War lived. One was a brilliant diplomat who understood the cold, harsh realities of international politics, and articulated a strategic doctrine that guided U.S. foreign policy throughout much of the Cold War. Another was a troubled intellectual who escaped communism, courageously exposed hidden enemies within our country, and explained more clearly than any other writer what was at stake in the struggle against communism. The third man was a soldier-statesman who led the grand military alliance that defeated Hitler, ended a divisive and unpopular war in Korea, and presided over eight years of peace and prosperity.
Kennan’s farm was his sanctuary
In rural East Berlin, Penn., in 1942, George F. Kennan, the diplomat, historian, and author of the containment doctrine that guided U.S. foreign policy throughout much of the Cold War, purchased a 238-acre farm that served as his refuge from the hustle and bustle of Washington and a place where he could combine physical labor with contemplative writing.
Kennan in his memoirs described his farm as a “cluster of buildings,” including a “standard two-story wooden farmhouse of 20th-century vintage,” to the left a “three-story edifice, studded with balconies and sleeping porches, looking . . . like nothing more than a summer hotel,” and a “great barn, built in the traditional Pennsylvania Dutch style.” The farm hosted cows, steers, a bull, and various species of wildlife. The fields around the buildings contained “crops of grain and grass, wheat, fallow.”
Kennan’s daughter noted that her father “wrote on the highest floor in a quest for peace and quiet.” That room was closed off from the rest of the house by a trap door. Kennan, she recalled, “would click and clack away for hours in the morning” on his Underwood typewriter. He had a bookshelf there “filled with old Soviet journals.” Kennan contributed to his remarkable diaries (collected and published in 2014 as The Kennan Diaries) while at the farm.
Kennan was stationed in Moscow in February 1946, when he wrote what became known as the “Long Telegram,” which warned of an impending existential struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Secretary of State George Marshall appointed Kennan to head the newly formed Policy Planning Staff in 1947, where Kennan wrote dozens of thoughtful and important policy papers that helped Marshall guide U.S. foreign policy in the early years of the Truman administration. Kennan later worked at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and wrote insightful books on the diplomatic history of the 20th century, including The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order, The Fateful Alliance, Russia Leaves the War, The Decision to Intervene, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, and his brilliant and elegantly written two-volume memoirs. He served briefly as U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia in the Kennedy administration. After that, he became an “elder statesmen,” consulted by presidents and secretaries of state, wrote articles on American foreign policy in a variety of publications, but gradually became alienated from his own country.
Chambers hid from communists on his farm
In 1937-38, Whittaker Chambers, who had served as an underground courier of secret U.S. government documents to the Soviet Union, broke with communism and became an editor at Time magazine. He and his wife purchased a farm near Westminster in Carroll County, Md., as a refuge to hide from the communist enemy. Chambers took with him a cache of secret documents that he received from Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, two highly placed American government officials who worked on behalf of the Soviet Union, as an “insurance policy” to ward off Soviet assassins.
Chambers’ farm was near Pipe Creek, situated about 25 air miles from George Kennan’s Pennsylvania farm, and 21 air miles from the town of Gettysburg. Pipe Creek was where Union General George Meade had planned to defend against a Confederate attack in late June 1863. Those plans went awry on July 1, 1863, when Union cavalry intercepted Confederate infantry on ridges west of Gettysburg.
Chambers’ 300-acre farm included cows, hogs, and sheep, and on its fields he grew wheat, corn, barley, oats, and soybeans. “Our farm,” he wrote, “is our home. It is our altar. To it each day we bring our faith, our love for one another as a family, our working hands, our prayers.” He viewed his farm as a witness against the modern world, which offers only the “vision of comfort without effort, pleasure without the pain of creation, life sterilized against even the thought of death . . . , life standardized and mechanized.”
In 1948, after the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) led by a young congressman named Richard Nixon investigated Chambers’ allegations against Hiss (who had been Assistant Secretary of State and accompanied FDR to the infamous Yalta Conference in February 1945), Chambers revealed to HUAC investigators the microfilmed documents that Hiss had provided to him, and that Chambers had secreted in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his farm. Those documents would forever after be known as the “pumpkin papers.” Hiss would later be convicted of perjury and serve nearly four years in federal prison for denying under oath his association and secret work for the Soviet Union.
Farm was where Chambers wrote autobiography
It was also at Pipe Creek Farm that Chambers wrote his autobiography Witness, one of the great books of the 20th century. In Witness, Chambers wrote that the Cold War struggle between communism and the West was fundamentally a struggle between two faiths — faith in God vs. faith in man. Chambers, who by that time was a devout Quaker, believed that communism would triumph because so many in the West misunderstood the nature of the conflict. From his farm, Chambers also corresponded frequently with William F. Buckley, Jr., who founded National Review in 1955 (where Chambers briefly served as a senior editor). That correspondence was later published in book form under the title Odyssey of a Friend.
Chambers named one field on the farm “Cold Friday,” and in an unfinished manuscript, several essays, and some letters that were collected and published as a book titled Cold Friday a few years after his death (he died in 1961), Chambers predicted that nationalist uprisings in Eastern Europe would some day result in the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
In Cold Friday, Chambers noted that his farm was just a few miles from Little Round Top, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the Battle of Gettysburg. “Little Round Top,” he wrote, “ . . . lifted itself, in three days during barley harvest, 1863, permanently into the horizon of history.” In the “dusty grain fields, woods, and orchards [of Gettysburg],” Chambers continued, “a way was cleared for the United States to become something without its like in history: a technological colossus; and that fact, for good or ill, was to be decisive for all mankind.” Chambers revered his farm, explaining that “a nation is first of all the soil on which it lives, for which it is willing to die — a soil bonded to those who lived on it by that blood of which a man usually loses a few drops in working any field like Cold Friday.”
Eisenhower also relaxed at his farm
Across the valley from Little Round Top behind Seminary Ridge (from where the Confederates launched their attack on Little Round Top and other targets on the battle’s ferocious second day) is the farm where President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife Mamie lived from 1956-69.
In 1950, Eisenhower purchased the 189-acre farm in Gettysburg that included a house, a barn, and outbuildings. He used most of the land to feed livestock and raised purebred Aberdeen Angus. During his eight years as president, the farm served as a retreat from the pressures of Washington.
The Eisenhower presidency was eventful and successful. Eisenhower ended the war in Korea. He increased U.S. nuclear forces to act as a deterrent to Soviet aggression in Europe and elsewhere in the world. He used the CIA to engineer coups in Iran and Guatemala. He controversially intervened in the Suez Crisis, pressuring Britain, France, and Israel to cease their war against the Arabs. He sent troops to Lebanon to protect America’s growing interests in the Middle East. He held summit meetings with Soviet leaders.
At home, Eisenhower sent armed troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce the Supreme Court’s desegregation order. He signed a weak, but symbolically important Civil Rights Act. He established the interstate highway system. He limited the growth of domestic federal spending. And he warned against the influence of the Military-Industrial Complex in his farewell address to the nation before retreating to his Gettysburg farm.
Ike became an expert on Battle of Gettysburg
In the mid-1950s, the Eisenhowers rebuilt the decaying farmhouse. The new house had eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a dining room, butler’s pantry, a kitchen, and a glassed-in porch. The farm served as the “temporary White House” after Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955. Eisenhower used his proximity to the Gettysburg battlefield to become an expert on the battle, and toured the battlefield with such luminaries as Winston Churchill, Charles De Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, and British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev also visited the farm in 1959.
Eisenhower retired to the Gettysburg farm in 1961. There, and at an office at Gettysburg College, he wrote his memoirs, and was visited by U.S. and world leaders who sought advice from the elder statesman. On Nov. 19, 1963, the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the former president spoke at the Gettysburg National Cemetery. His words are memorable and eternal:
On this day of commemoration, Lincoln still asks of each of us, as clearly as he did of those who heard his words a century ago, to give that increased devotion to the cause for which soldiers in all our wars have given the last full measure of devotion. Our answer, the only worthy one we can render to the memory of the great emancipator, is ever to defend, protect and pass on unblemished, to coming generations the heritage — the trust —t hat Abraham Lincoln, and all the ghostly legions of patriots of the past, with unflinching faith in their God, have bequeathed to us—a nation free, with liberty, dignity, and justice for all.
