George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  They reached Kristiansand at about midnight, with a midsummer glow on the horizon reminiscent of Riga “in other days.” At the Sørensens’, after the children had gone to sleep, “[w]e sat up with the old people and drank vermouth with brandy until near four o’clock. Then A. and I dragged ourselves back to the little cottage, in the morning light, and went to bed.”39

  George had little time to enjoy Norway, though, because he insisted on flying back to Washington, at his own expense, to testify on behalf of Davies before the State Department’s loyalty board on July 23: that was where Acheson raised the possibility of a return to Moscow. “I believe the hearing went well,” George wrote Annelise, “but have not yet heard the final result.” The case had stirred enough indignation, however, that the secretary of state had promised to rethink procedures for such investigations. “I am very pleased about this, as it makes it unnecessary for me to pursue the matter further.”40

  So he returned to Europe by way of Portugal—which Kennan found little changed since he was last there in 1944—as well as Italy, Austria, West Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. It was his first European trip in a private capacity since the one he and Nick Messolonghitis had made in the summer of 1924. The Norwegians had been unsure of his status, so Kennan asked the State Department to inform other governments along his route that he required “no official courtesies or attentions beyond those that would be extended to the ordinary traveler.” “I dream about you all, including Christopher, with the greatest regularity,” he wrote Annelise from Lisbon. And, from Rome: “If you would like to join me [in Basel], wire to Vienna.”41

  An English weekend at the beginning of September gave Kennan a chance to respond to Acheson, in longhand and at length, about Moscow as well as what might follow. Many opportunities had arisen over the past year: this came, he supposed, with “being a public figure.”

  [A]fter going over all the familiar categories of rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, etc., I concluded that the Potter, in addition to establishing the obvious predestination to poverty, had probably moulded this clay in the slightly doubtful hope that it would some day prove serviceable in the capacity of scholar and teacher—one of those teachers whose teachings rarely please people, and are no doubt often wrong, but of whom it is sometimes said, when they are gone: “It is useful that he taught as he did.”

  It made sense, then, to return to government long enough to retire with a pension, and then to resume work at the Institute with “academic life as my normal pursuit from that time on.”

  The position should be an overseas mission not associated with the formulation of policy. For it was only right to acknowledge “the full measure of divergence” between his views and those of the Truman administration.

  I say that quite without bitterness, and in full realization that in many of these differences . . . I may be the one farthest from wisdom. I also realize that there may be a feeling that it is useful from time to time to have around the place a sort of intellectual gadfly whose benevolent questionings and dissentings can sting gently and stimulate, without destroying. But it is a difficult position for the gadfly.

  Moscow might be feasible, therefore, for the work there involved the analysis of Soviet policy, not the making of policy in Washington. Commitments at the Institute and elsewhere, however, would keep him from going until well into 1952. Perhaps Admiral Alan G. Kirk, the current ambassador, could stay on; if not, the mission could probably be left under a chargé d’affaires.42

  The Kennans sailed for home on September 5, with George worried that the children had enjoyed Europe less than he had. “My friends,” he wrote them gravely one day at sea,

  with stoic mien, with patience grim,

  With martyr’s silence, with impassive stare,

  You have now coursed the chambers of the past,

  The crooked climbing street, the boulevard,

  The pavement where the scaffold stood, the scenes

  Of valor and of battle and the spots

  Where once, in verse or note or stone,

  The idle muse lent mystery and grace

  To drab old life.

  Now these and other things

  That in past ages caused the simpler human heart

  To stir have passed unanswered, unsaluted,

  Before your glazed impassive orbs; and I

  Have been allowed to sense that I should not

  Have dragged you thither.

  He also composed, for himself, a bucolic poem about flies—which could also have been State Department gadflies:

  How long before the unctuous fly

  —Its love for mammals still undaunted—

  Will learn from swats and slaps and flails,

  From sticky traps and swishing tails,

  That its attentions are unwanted?

  Kennan decided not to send Acheson a four-page summary of “points of difference” with the State Department that he had prepared. It listed disagreements over the United Nations, nuclear weapons, the future of Europe, the Near and Middle East, East Asia, Latin America, relations with Congress, and the administration of foreign policy. “This is, in my opinion, important,” he wrote across the top, presumably with historians and maybe even a biographer in mind. It was certainly comprehensive: when he finished, it was hard to find a policy with which he did agree.43

  “It is reasonable that I should look forward with a sense of relief to the prospect of being an ambassador,” Kennan commented in an undated diary fragment that summer. “It is just about the only profession one can have these days in which nothing—but really nothing—is either expected or required of you.” But there was more to it than that. He was still a Foreign Service officer: “I did not feel it proper to decline any assignment given to me.” It would be difficult to pass up an appointment to the Soviet Union, “a task for which my whole career had prepared me, if it had prepared me for anything at all.” Finally, Bohlen had urged him to take the job, on the grounds that Stalin might be more open than in the past to negotiations, particularly on Germany. So with Acheson having assured him that the president really wanted him in Moscow, Kennan agreed to go.44

  There was, however, one last effort to derail the appointment. It came from Annelise, who knew how bleak conditions there would be, and how reluctant George was to disrupt his work at the Institute. She surely had some sense, from the spring and summer, of how precarious his psychological balance had become. And she had just learned that she was again pregnant. So she took it upon herself—without asking George—to go to Washington and talk with their old Moscow friend Elbridge Durbrow, then in charge of State Department personnel assignments. “I told him that I thought this was a very bad time, that he should send somebody else, and then we could go afterwards in a couple of years.”

  Well, they gave me this lovely run-around—how wonderful it would be to have George there, they didn’t want to change it. I still remember, I was furious! I was livid! I mean, for somebody I knew very well—Durbrow—to give me this little song and dance. It was not necessary.

  She never doubted that George should return to Moscow. “I felt very strongly that he was a specialist and he should go back, [and] at that time one still felt pretty young.” It was also “a nice honor to go as an ambassador, because we don’t have so many career ambassadors in the major countries. It was just that the timing was not so good.”45

  Annelise had still one other reason for not wanting to go to Moscow at that moment: the Kennans had just bought a house of their own in Princeton. The all-electric one they had rented, Patricia Davies recalled, had become barely inhabitable the previous winter when a blizzard knocked out the power: the family survived by huddling around the fireplace, which contained a hook from which Annelise could cook, “in her proper Norwegian fashion.” The new house—old enough to match George’s age, having been built in 1904—was located on a large lot at 146 Hodge Road, a tree-lined street half a mile from the university and a mile from the In
stitute. George was soon bicycling to both destinations and would continue to do so for decades.

  Apart from the farm, it was the first permanent residence the Kennans had occupied during their twenty years of marriage. The first floor contained large living and dining rooms, a library, a kitchen, and a breakfast nook. Upstairs there were seven bedrooms, some meant for maids, one in a third-story tower. There was even a separate apartment over the garage, useful for visiting family and, at times, for renters. “We lack beds now,” George wrote Jeanette in October 1951, “but I am sure we will have them by Thanksgiving.” The Ford Foundation salary had made the purchase possible, he explained to Kent, even though “we haven’t saved any money.” The house was “friendly and receptive in a relaxed way,” George wrote in his memoir two decades later, “but slightly detached, like a hostess to a casual guest—as though it did not expect us to stay forever.” The Kennans did stay for a long time: George and Annelise would each die in the house, fifty-four and fifty-seven years, respectively, after they moved into it.46

  VIII.

  “A book by George Kennan is an event in Washington,” James Reston wrote in The New York Times on September 30, 1951. The relentlessly efficient University of Chicago Press had rushed Kennan’s Walgreen lectures into print as American Diplomacy: 1900–1950. To flesh out the thin volume, Kennan added the 1947 “X” article, as well as the essay he intended as its successor, “America and the Russian Future,” which had appeared in the April issue of Foreign Affairs. But the first piece was familiar and the second looked too far into the future to attract much attention: it was an unclassified update of PPS/38, the 1948 study in which Kennan had tried to specify American objectives for a post-Soviet Russia. The lectures, however, enthralled their readers, just as they had packed the room—and then the auditorium—in which he delivered them. It was Kennan’s first book, but it sold better than anything else he ever wrote.

  Characteristically, he did not enjoy this triumph. He didn’t like the idea of publishing lectures, he grumbled to Alsop, who wrote to congratulate him: “Either you write or you talk, but you don’t do both together.” He had been heartened, but also shamed, by the favorable reaction. Hostile reviews would have made him miserable, Kennan admitted to Oppenheimer; nevertheless the complimentary ones “leave me with a sense of discomfort,” because the lectures were not nearly as good as he could have made them. There was, however, the satisfaction of having produced a book, “if only by inadvertence.”

  American Diplomacy succeeded for several reasons. It was, as Reston noted, the most critical account of U.S. foreign policy produced by any government official since the end of the war. Not “ghost-written,” it was “straight Kennan,” and he was “perhaps the most reflective of the young American professional diplomats.” The author himself, more modestly, would later attribute the book’s success to its shallowness, for it met the needs of teachers eager to find easy reading for their students. His foreword, however, had promised more: he would show why the United States, which in 1900 could not have imagined threats from abroad to its prosperity and way of life, had reached the point by 1950 “where it seemed to think of little else.”47

  Kennan’s explanation was short but shocking: the insecurity the United States faced resulted less from what its adversaries had done than from its own leaders’ illusions. Forgetting their forefathers’ warnings, American statesmen in the twentieth century had come to prefer the proclamation of principles to the balancing of power. The pattern began with John Hay’s Open Door notes, announced as an afterthought in the wake of the Spanish-American War and the American occupation of the Philippines, with a view to discouraging China’s division into European, Russian, and Japanese spheres of influence. Hay accomplished little for the Chinese, but he set a style for his own country’s diplomacy: it manifested itself, with more serious consequences, in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, in Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter, and in the World War II demand for the “unconditional surrender” of Germany and Japan, which had opened the way for Soviet domination of half of Europe and much of Asia. Far from securing its interests, the “legalism-moralism” with which the United States had conducted its diplomacy had left it in grave peril.

  It had encouraged toothless treaties like the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which between the two greatest wars in history had outlawed war as an instrument of national policy. It had caused hopes to be invested in, and time to be wasted on, the League of Nations and the United Nations, which could act only if the great powers had already settled their differences. It had led to long periods of inattention, punctuated by spasms of senseless violence. “I sometimes wonder,” Kennan wrote, in the book’s most memorable passage,

  whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath—in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat.

  Kennan’s imagery—the dinosaur in particular—would pursue him for decades. It dramatized, but vastly oversimplified, what he had been trying to say since studying Clausewitz at the National War College in 1946: that while war must always be subordinate to policy, alternatives to war can always fail. Hence, the need for grand strategy in peace as well as in war.48

  Hastily composed, passionately written, brilliantly if not deliberately timed, American Diplomacy became Kennan’s “long telegram” to the American academy: it insisted on the need to see the world as it was, not as professors of international relations might like it to be. For the young Kenneth Thompson, who had studied with the University of Chicago legal and institutional scholar Quincy Wright, Kennan opened “a whole new world. I’d never really heard a ‘realist’ interpretation of foreign policy.” One grateful reader wrote to Time magazine that, having read Kennan, he could now retire his well-worn copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. To be sure, Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Lippmann had all warned, in their writings, against relying on principles while neglecting power. They, however, had done so from outside the government. Kennan was still, to most of his audience, an insider, and that—together with his flair for the dramatic—was what made his argument so compelling.49

  It was also, to careful readers, unsettling. He had not meant to say that Americans should abandon “decency and dignity and generosity,” he assured the historian Arnold Toynbee. His point, rather, had been that the United States should refrain from claiming to know what was right or wrong in the behavior of other societies. Its policy should be one of avoiding “great orgies of violence that acquire their own momentum and get out of hand.” It should employ its armies, if they were to be used at all, in what Gibbon called “temperate and indecisive contests,” remembering that civilizations could not stand “too much jolting and abuse.” There was no room, in the modern world, for moral indignation, “unless it be indignation with ourselves for failing to be what we know we could and should have been.” He should have said all of this at Chicago, but “the material had to be compressed, I was dilatory, the last lecture was written in the publishers’ office on the day it was delivered, and there I was, before I knew it, making myself out an amoral cynic for all time.”50

  Father Edmund A. Walsh, the legendary founder of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, certainly saw it that way: he publicly attacked Kennan in July 1952 for having abandoned “the concept of right and wrong in judging the actions of a foreign state.” That logic led “straight back to the jungle” and had even been “used as a defense for Hitler’s extermination of 6,000,000 Jews.” Kennan was in Moscow by then, but Walsh’s excoriation worried him enough that he drafted—but wisely did not send—a letter to The New York Times restating the explanation he had given To
ynbee. It would not have been the moment, while trying to run an embassy in a forbiddingly hostile state, to get into an open argument with the most formidable American Jesuit.

  “[T]he reaction in academic circles is really intense,” Philip Jessup warned the Policy Planning Staff in September, “and I think it is doing some harm.” Morgenthau’s hefty Politics Among Nations had already become a standard university text, but Kennan’s brief book, which was about to appear in a thirty-five-cent reprint, would surely compete with it. And yet, “as I have gathered from talking with him, it is not a final and profound statement of his thinking.... It is by no means the complete negation of law and morals which many people think it is.”51

  As if to confirm the fears of Toynbee, Walsh, Jessup, and even Kennan himself, the American Political Science Association had already by then named American Diplomacy “the best book of the year in the field of international relations.” And so its author—told by diplomatic historians that he was not yet ready to join their guild—found himself enshrined instead within a “realist” theoretical tradition that dated back to Thucydides—whom Kennan had not yet even read. Meanwhile his Northwestern lectures, a far more careful exposition of his thinking, had appeared unheralded in the Illinois Law Review, where they have languished in obscurity ever since. It was yet another example of Kennan’s strange tendency to be remembered more for what he said in haste than for what he took the time to ponder.52

  IX.

  The well-informed Reston broke the news of Kennan’s ambassadorship on November 20, 1952, before the Soviet foreign ministry had provided the necessary agrément . A delay of several weeks followed, along with a Pravda complaint about Kennan’s association with the East European Fund—he had by now resigned as its president. This convinced Harrison Salisbury, the New York Times Moscow correspondent, that Stalin was about to veto the appointment. Kennan was well known, after all, as the author of the “long telegram” and the “X” article; moreover, Ralph Parker, a left-leaning British journalist, had been allowed to publish a book in Moscow in 1949, entitled Conspiracy Against Peace, claiming that at the victory celebration outside the Mokhovaya four years earlier, Kennan had turned away cynically from the cheering crowds to predict a new world war. By December 26, Salisbury had a story ready on the impending rejection, but the censors refused to clear it.