Human nature had hardly changed since humans first evolved. What had changed was the environment surrounding them, not because of any alteration in biological cycles of growth and decay, or rhythms of climate, or even global warming—Kennan was looking into that problem then—but because of the population explosion that had taken place over the past two centuries. Martians with good telescopes and long life spans might note this: “These little microbes have suddenly begun to multiply at the most tremendous rate.” The planet earthlings occupied was exhausting its empty space.
Some had sought to solve that problem by turning their homelands into workshops, buying what they needed by selling what they produced. Mercantile in their habits, mostly maritime in their capabilities, these people had accumulated enough wealth to dominate much of the rest of the world—for the moment. But the vast majority of its inhabitants were reproducing themselves without getting richer: this was tragedy for which the mercantile states had no answer. That being the case, it behooved the United States to refrain from offering one: “It is never easy for a rich man to talk with conviction to a poor man.”
Meanwhile, the great wars of the twentieth century had disrupted the balance of power among the workshops. Few Americans realized it, but Germany and Japan had once contributed to their safety. With their defeat, the Soviet Union—a state neither mercantile nor maritime—had won most of Eurasia. Once this would not have mattered, because large territories were difficult to control. Now, though, technology had given totalitarians the capacity to monitor and hence to manage everything that was happening within their boundaries. That endangered civilization, for wars among land powers tended to leave behind “devastation, atrocity, and bitterness.” Sea power had always been “more humane, more tempered, less drastic and less final in its objectives.”
The danger for Americans lay less in another Pearl Harbor than in what they might do to themselves because they feared one. For confronting totalitarians required, in many respects, emulating them. The leader who would attempt this “must learn to regiment his people, to husband his resources, to guard against hostile agents in his midst, to maintain formidable armed forces in peacetime, to preserve secrecy about governmental decisions, to wield the weapons of bluff and surprise, to wage war in peacetime—and peace in wartime. Can these things be done without the selling of the national soul?”
That raised a larger problem, which was that Americans no longer saw, as clearly as they once had, their own self-interest.
Whereas at one time the individual citizen swam in a relatively narrow stream, the banks of which were clearly visible to him, and could therefore measure easily his progress and position, today he is borne on vast expanses where too often the limits are not visible to him at all, and where he is incapable, with such subjective criteria of judgment as he possesses, to measure the rate and direction of the currents by which he is being borne.
The nation was thus vulnerable to “powerful trends of thought that promised clarity.” Marxism, of course, was one. Another was “modern psychology,” which saw behavior as dominated by influences of which people were unaware. A third, Kennan added—not with tongue in cheek—was advertising, which found thousands of ways daily to convince consumers that their material existence depended on “almost every sort of reaction except the direct and rational one.”
Isaiah Berlin had recently suggested that there were two kinds of freedom. One was that of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: “We shall persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom and submit to us.” The other appeared in the Declaration of Independence, which sought to secure freedom without prescribing its nature. This, Kennan believed, was the great contest of the age. The great enemy was abstraction, which promised perfection while denying the imperfections of human nature. Left to itself, it would construct “an international Antarctica, in which there would be no germs because there would be no growth, in which there would be no sickness because there would be no people, in which all would be silence and peace because there was no life.”
What, then, was a policy maker to do? Here Kennan returned to what he had learned as a policy planner: that how one did things was as important as what one did.
Our life is so strangely composed that the best way to make ourselves better seems sometimes [to be] to act as though we were better. The man who makes it a point to behave with consideration and dignity in his relations with others, regardless of his inner doubts and conflicts, will suddenly find that he has achieved a great deal in his relations with himself.
The same was true of nations. “Where purpose is dim and questionable, form comes into its own.” Good manners, which might seem “an inferior means of salvation, may be the only means of salvation we have at all.”16
Kennan managed, in these Northwestern lectures, to make sense out of much that had puzzled colleagues—sometimes even himself—over many years: his pessimism about human nature; his growing concerns about ecology and demography; his despair about what was coming to be called the “third world”; his nostalgia for the international system that had preceded the two world wars; his distrust of land power and respect for sea power; his suspicions of Marx, Freud, McCarthy, and advertising; his admiration for Isaiah Berlin, the great classics of Russian literature, and the American Founding Fathers; his enlistment of elitism in defense of democracy. It was as if Oppenheimer’s institute had given him the opportunity, at last, to resolve his contradictions.
IV.
It certainly allowed him to rebuild his finances. Oppenheimer had used his discretionary funds, together with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, to match Kennan’s $15,000 State Department salary when he first arrived at the Institute, but those were temporary arrangements. On February 19, 1951, the new president of the Ford Foundation, Paul G. Hoffman—formerly director of the Economic Cooperation Administration, which had run the Marshall Plan—announced that the former director of the Policy Planning Staff was to become a “consultant” while remaining at the Institute for Advanced Study on leave from the State Department. Ford offered $25,000 plus expenses: Kennan in turn would advise the foundation on how to spend some of the $25 million its endowment generated each year. “[Y]ou are [the] master,” Hoffman assured him, “of all arrangements affecting you or your activities for the Ford Foundation.”17
This was a sufficiently good deal for Kennan to resign from the Foreign Service again, thereby greatly upsetting Bohlen. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., witnessed the argument they got into, after dinner one evening in New York. “Chip, growing increasingly heated, began to denounce George for having left.” The Foreign Service had made him: he could not desert the country in an hour of crisis. “George, much more composed and clearly aware that Chip was hurt and a bit drunk, tried to mollify [him], but did not retract his position.” Big businessmen, Bohlen retorted, could not be trusted. “I hope you have an ironclad contract, boy. . . . One day Paul Hoffman will decide that it is all over—and you’ ll be swept out with the leavings.”
George said that he couldn’t get anyone to listen to him in Washington. Chip said that he gave up too easily; that you just have to keep plugging away.... George said that he felt that his intellectual integrity was being compromised.... Chip said to hell with his intellectual integrity; that if George had been on the spot in Washington [last] fall, US policy might not have got into its present mess.
They struck Schlesinger as “a marvelous pair.... They loved each other and were enthralling company together.” In the end, Kennan withdrew yet another resignation, explaining to Hoffman that State Department colleagues had “called me in the middle of the night” pleading “that I not take this step at this time—that it would be taken as another blow to Dean Acheson.”
So Hoffman agreed to pay his salary for as long as the department would permit Kennan to be away, with the understanding that the job would become permanent as soon as he qualified for his Foreign Service pension and could gracefully retire. Ford
also promised the Institute $225,000 over the next five years to fund whatever projects Kennan wished to undertake there. It was all “somewhat complicated,” George wrote Kent, “but by and large it is as favorable a setup as I could wish for. I enjoy the life of a scholar and have little wish to return to government.”18
Kennan had two major projects in mind beyond his own writing and public speaking. One was to set up a study group, at the Institute, that would “suggest a rationale for foreign policy and a set of premises and principles by which we could all be guided in our thinking on this subject.” It would be a Policy Planning Staff operating independently of the State Department. The second project, to be run from Ford, would—in Kennan’s mind at least—follow the example of the first George Kennan by helping exiles and refugees from the Soviet Union establish themselves in the United States. The foundation announced the formation of the Free Russia Fund, with a $200,000 annual budget and with Kennan as its president, on May 17, 1951.19
There was more to this initiative than met the eye. Hoffman had maintained close connections with Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination while administering the Marshall Plan, and he wanted the Ford Foundation, under his direction, to do the same. That made Kennan particularly useful to him. Kennan, in turn, kept Acheson, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and the new director of central intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, informed about the Free Russia Fund—which, to avoid confusion with other CIA projects, changed its name a few months later to the East European Fund. The new organization operated openly, relying on Ford Foundation support, but it coordinated its activities with other refugee support groups that received, or were hoping to receive, secret CIA funding. Their purpose was to collect recent intelligence on the U.S.S.R., to ensure that defectors did not re-defect, and to build a community of exiles who might one day return to Russia to form the nucleus of a post-Soviet government.20
One beneficiary was the Tolstoy Foundation, established in 1939 by Leo Tolstoy’s youngest daughter, which ran a farm in upstate New York where it welcomed, trained, and helped resettle Russian refugees. The organization was running out of money by 1951, so Kennan arranged an initial grant through the East European Fund, and after the Ford trustees had second thoughts—perhaps because of the group’s monarchist tendencies—he persuaded the CIA to subsidize it. “[W]hat the hell was wrong with this?” Kennan demanded years later, after this information became public. “There were Russian professors working as janitors in seamy New York buildings, because nobody had made any effort to tap their knowledge, to help them learn the language, to put them to some use, something useful for them and for us. It was things like this that I had supposed we could do with an outfit for secret operations.”
Kennan was even prouder of his role in helping to publish cheap editions of Russian literary classics—in the original Russian—that could never have appeared in the Soviet Union. This project originated as an initiative of the banker R. Gordon Wasson, the man who persuaded Kennan, in 1947, to contribute what became the “X” article to Foreign Affairs. Kennan asked Ford to take over the responsibility four years later by setting up the Chekhov Publishing House. They agreed to do so “as sort of a sop to me, but they didn’t understand it.” Ford supported Chekhov until 1956, at which point Kennan was unable to convince the CIA to continue its funding, and the company folded. It did manage to publish over a hundred books, relying almost entirely on the support Kennan had arranged. “We really, for the first time, broke the monopoly of the Soviet government on current literary publication in the Russian language.”
The Ford Foundation appointment, however, left Kennan with less time for his own work than he had expected. It required several trips each year to California, never a preferred destination, where Hoffman ran the organization from Pasadena. The émigrés Kennan tried to help often disagreed about what was needed. The foundation’s trustees continued to fret about Hoffman’s—and Kennan’s—ties to the intelligence community. The whole effort required so much attention, Kennan complained in the fall of 1951, that it was “mak[ing] ridiculous my continued presence here at the Institute under the pretense of being a scholar.”21 Meanwhile Kennan was undergoing one of the gravest personal crises that ever afflicted him.
V.
Hans Morgenthau had arranged for Kennan to deliver a second set of lectures, in April at the University of Chicago, under the sponsorship of the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation. The topic would be U.S. foreign relations during the first half of the twentieth century. By early 1951 he had prepared rough drafts on the Spanish-American War, the Open Door Policy, and East Asia through the outbreak of war with Japan in 1941. He also had notes for a lecture on Woodrow Wilson and World War I, and these he casually showed to Earle, who tactfully suggested bringing in a few diplomatic historians to comment on Kennan’s conclusions prior to their delivery. He agreed. It was easy to forget, he admitted to Hoffman, “how serious a matter scholarship can be, and how implacable its requirements.”22
The historians included Dexter Perkins, Gordon A. Craig, Richard W. Leopold, and Wilson’s biographer, Arthur S. Link. The seminar took place at the Institute on March 10. “Most of us were pretty appalled,” Link remembered. The lectures were “ahistorical, very presentist and personal, lacking even the semblance of what we would ordinarily think of as historical scholarship.” Kennan showed no resentment of the criticisms he got: “Quite the contrary, he seemed very grateful.” He kept assuring the group that “of course I’m not a professional historian.” But the experience shook his self-confidence about doing history, only a month before his public debut as a historian. “They took me to pieces, quite properly.” Dean Rusk, now a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, heard that Oppenheimer called Kennan in to give him “a shirt-tail lecture on the standards that were expected in the world of scholarship. George’s later books reflect the influence of that lecture.”23
Something else, simultaneously, was causing Kennan to take himself to pieces. Were it not for the diary in which he could atone for “the damage I have done,” he wrote in it on April 2, “the situation would indeed be desperate.” For he had placed the happiness of others in jeopardy. Unsure “that the blow would not still fall, I would continue to feel myself half a murderer, to have horror of myself, and to place limitations, in my own mind, on my ability to be useful to anyone else in any physical intimacy.” He was “like a person who has placed poison in one of two glasses before a person he loves—looks back upon his act with horror and incredulity—but still does not know from which glass the person will drink.” The next day he added: “It is right and necessary that I should become much older in a short space of time.”
He found some solace in the daily rhythms of work, “where people wear their professional personalities like uniforms.” During the past two days, he noted on April 5, he had rewritten one lecture, finished a new one, consulted Earle, talked with a student, lunched with Oppenheimer, “and done a dozen necessary and unavoidable little things.” But these didn’t alleviate the nightmares. Perhaps
the subconscious mind, like the workings of history, is often years out of date in its causality. Even were I to bow before the suggestions that the dream contained—were I to say to the subconscious: you are right, you are unanswerable, I will cut all the fateful knots and follow you—none of it would work out. Ten years ago—it would have; not today. How dangerous a guide, in later age, is then that which is most powerful—or nearly the most powerful (for that remains to be seen)—within us.
On April 7, he would be leaving for Chicago, where “there will be all the things that are difficult for me”:
a strange city, a hotel, solitude, boredom, strange women, the sense of time fleeting, of time being wasted, of a life pulsating around me—a life unknown, untasted, full of mystery—and yet not touched by myself. . . . Let us see whether, if I can stand the first day, the next will not be easier. It will be a real test, an opportunity for a real triumph—no—that is an exaggeration—there are no tr
iumphs—an opportunity to inch a tiny bit along the road.
He had another nightmare before he left, which had to do with concealment: “Unquestionably, there is an abnormality here: a dread of being found out. This can probably be repaired only by making my life such that there is genuinely nothing to conceal and that means making it such that it will no longer, in a sense, be my life at all.”24
Kennan opened his lecture series on the afternoon of April 9. It would, he told his audience, examine the record of the past half century in search of lessons “for us, the generation of 1951, pressed and hemmed in as we are by a thousand troubles and dangers.” Before giving it, he had attempted to rest in his hotel room. But
[w]hen I try, as I did then, to bring the spirit to a state of complete repose, shutting out all effort and all seeking, I become aware of the remnants of anxieties and desires still surging and thrashing around, like waves in a swimming-pool when the last swimmer has left; and I realize in what a turmoil the pool of the soul usually is, and how long it must lie untroubled before the surface becomes clear and one can see to the bottom.
The newspapers that day were reporting public disagreements between Truman and MacArthur over Korean War strategy, and on the eleventh—the day of Kennan’s second lecture—the president fired the general. Kennan might have been pleased had he received the news within the familiar surroundings of Princeton or Washington, but the reaction in Chicago frightened him.
For the first time in my life I have become conscious of the existence of powerful forces in the country to which, if they are successful, no democratic adjustment can be made: people . . . who have to be regarded as totalitarian enemies.... [M]y homeland has turned against me. . . . I am now in the truest sense of the word an expatriate.
George F. Kennan : an American life Page 56