George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Did Kennan protect himself by reporting on others? He had done so on one or two occasions, he told the Oppenheimer investigators, but only in the case of “minor employees.” Kennan had long been sure that Soviet espionage was taking place within the United States, but he was equally convinced that spies had never significantly influenced policy. It was on that last point that he differed with McCarthy and his supporters. Staying on the right side of Hoover may have made that possible: confronting evil did require compromises.39

  Survivor’s guilt, under these circumstances, was inescapable. It was one of the impulses that led Kennan early in 1954 to surprise himself, his family, his friends, and his funders by deciding—on the spur of an emotional moment—to enter politics. The story began when the East Berlin Veterans of Foreign Wars honored him on February 11 for distinguished national service. It was important, Kennan said in thanking them, that the country “show itself united and confident—not afraid of anyone else, and above all, not afraid of itself.” What was happening, though, was just the opposite:

  The tone of political life has become sharper; the words have become meaner; the attempt is often made today to bring people to distrust other Americans—not on the grounds that they are dumb or selfish or short-sighted (that sort of thing has always gone on in our political life) but on the grounds that they are disloyal, that they are connected with hostile outside forces, that they are enemies to their own people.

  Veterans had a special responsibility to avoid such hysteria: “Fellows, don’t fall for this.” It gratified him deeply that instead of suspecting someone, they had found an occasion “for announcing your trust.”40

  A few weeks later a young farmer and his wife rang the doorbell in Princeton, having driven there from Pennsylvania without knowing whether they would find the Kennans at home. Some of “us fellows” had gotten together, he announced, decided they didn’t like the candidates being put up for the House of Representatives, and wondered if Kennan would agree to run. “Well, I was very much moved by this. I think it’s a duty of citizenship, if your fellow citizens want you to represent them, that you don’t turn it down.” So he drove to Gettysburg to meet local Democratic leaders, who with the “marvelous brutality” of grassroots politics “picked me to pieces right in my presence.” Kennan loved it. “These were such absolutely genuine people.” Decades later he could still quote them: “He ain’t even registered as a Democrat!” “Yeah, but his wife is.” “Well, what would you say if you had to run here?” He said a few things. “Why, we could run him for the Senate!” Kennan announced his candidacy on March 13. The next morning’s New York Times quoted the Adams County Democratic Party chairman, Fred Klunk, who with his neighbors welcomed the idea “of George Kennan being our nominee.”41

  Had that happened and had he been elected, Kennan would have been the president’s congressman, because Eisenhower’s farm was just outside Gettysburg. But he wanted to run only if unopposed in the primary, on the grounds that his other responsibilities—which included finishing the Little lectures—left him no time to campaign. The other two candidates, unimpressed by an “outsider” who had only just declared himself a Democrat, refused to withdraw. Pennsylvania law limited the money Kennan could legally raise: he was not prepared, less than legally, to approach dairy owners, the usual way of getting around this problem. Finally Rusk and Oppenheimer let Kennan know that the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study, ample though it was in other respects, did not extend to supporting candidates for public office.

  The problem, Rusk later explained, was that as a tax-exempt foundation, Rockefeller—which provided most of Kennan’s Institute funding—could not appear to be involving itself in politics. The only option would be a terminal grant, but when Oppenheimer suggested this, Kennan was not prepared to sever the Institute connection. “I could not afford to remain without regular income.... I do take seriously the commitments I have made in the academic world.” And so, four days after he entered the race, he abruptly abandoned it. He was “full of agony over this. I felt I’d let down the people in the country. On the other hand, I couldn’t see going deeply in[to] personal debt. I think I was quite right.”42

  So did almost everyone else, apart from the disappointed Pennsylvanians. Men qualified to serve in Congress were “not altogether rare,” John V. A. MacMurray, the retired diplomat whose views Kennan had long respected, wrote him with stately delicacy, “but one who combines your integrity and intellectual grasp with actual experience . . . is of irreplaceable value [in] refining of its grossness the thinking of the American people.” Others were franker. “I was horrified,” Jeanette recalled. “Oh, goodness! That’s the last thing in the world he could have done.” But Kennan always regretted this path not taken. “All my friends laugh and say: ‘You were never cut out for politics.’ I think I could have done it if I’d wanted to throw myself into it. I might have gone on to a senatorial position.”

  The episode seems, at first glance, inexplicable. How could Kennan, supposedly a realist, expect to succeed in politics without competing in primaries or soliciting contributions? What of his insight, recorded in his diary only a few months earlier, that the moral man drafted into government would have to surround himself with immoral advisers? What of his elitism, which included a long-standing contempt for Congress itself? Shrewd observers of Kennan, without too much trouble, found explanations. One was Jeanette, herself a keen critic of McCarthyism: “He was so complimented by being asked.” A second was a Princeton friend, the historian Cyril Black, who saw Kennan confusing the rough-and-tumble of American politics with the British tradition of invited “safe” seats. A third was his Hodge Road neighbor J. Richardson Dilworth: “George is ultra-conservative. He’s almost a monarchist.” And finally there was Isaiah Berlin, who detected more than a whiff of Tolstoy in Kennan’s desire to be among but above his country neighbors: “Close to the soil, and simple views. Simple truths, shining out. The prophets of the world—you know, he wasn’t too modest, Tolstoy.” Would the two have gotten along? “Tolstoy would have approved of him. He’d have had a good time with Tolstoy.”43

  People who have “what you might call genius of some sort, intellectual or artistic,” find it hard to arrange their relationships “in a manner which is wholly conventional.” That was Kennan, speaking not of himself but of Oppenheimer in testimony before the Atomic Energy Commission’s personnel security board on April 20, 1954. Such a person could be “profoundly honest and yet . . . have associates and friends who may be misguided and misled.” Did this mean, one of the commissioners wanted to know, “that all gifted individuals [are] more or less screwballs?” Kennan would not go that far, “but I would say that when gifted individuals come to a maturity of judgment which makes them valuable public servants, you are apt to find that the road by which they have [traveled] may have had zigzags in it of various sorts.”

  Wasn’t Kennan himself gifted? one of Oppenheimer’s lawyers asked. How had he remained in government for so many years with so little suspicion? The answer, Kennan suggested, was that he had encountered evil at an impressionable age. As a young Foreign Service officer, he had visited the square in Riga where the Bolsheviks had executed their hostages only a few years earlier, for no better reason than that they were members of the bourgeoisie.

  I was so affected by what I saw of the cruelty of Soviet power that I could never receive any of its boasts about social improvement with anything other than skepticism. I think that experience helped me a great deal at an early date, and helped me to avoid mistakes that I otherwise might have made.

  Kennan’s career, he acknowledged, had been no freer from blunders than anyone else’s: his four-day congressional campaign, he did not have to say, had been a big one. But he had learned the value of discretion: he had managed “to conceal the difficulties on the intellectual road that I have gone through more than other people have been able to.” His habit was “to keep them within myself and
fight them out myself.” And so, better than many, he had survived.44

  VI.

  Oppenheimer survived as the Institute’s director, which allowed him to renew Kennan’s appointment for another year with the understanding that he would stay out of politics. But in a devastatingly public humiliation, the Atomic Energy Commission withdrew Oppenheimer’s security clearance, ending his ability to do further government work in nuclear physics. For Kennan, this meant that McCarthyism had claimed another close friend. Why, he wondered, did Oppenheimer not leave the United States, since universities throughout the world would have clamored to recruit him? “He stood there for a moment, tears streaming down his face.” Then he stammered: “Dammit, I happen to love this country.”45

  Kennan did too, but as he admitted during the Oppenheimer hearings, he was more critical of his country than most people: this was yet another thing “I have had to fight within myself.” He wasn’t fighting very hard, his diary suggests, in the spring of 1954. Princeton was “lush and beautiful,” but the university ’s reunion consisted of “gents” in ridiculous costumes looking “vaguely unhappy.” The resident farmer at the Cherry Orchard was paying no attention to his instructions—Kennan would have seen the resemblance to Tolstoy’s cheerfully dysfunctional peasants in Anna Karenina. Grace’s graduation from Radcliffe required a drive through Connecticut, which had been taken over by scrub forest, Italians, Portuguese, and the Catholic Church. Cambridge was “sooty, over-shaded, [and] dampish.” Giving the commencement address was an obligatory drudgery, redeemed only by the unexpected presence of Joe Alsop, whose views Kennan attacked: Alsop protested, but was “actually very pleased by the personal attention.” A visit to Washington found it overrun by the “great burly Babbitts” of the Eisenhower administration. A haircut for Christopher had his father marveling “at the combination of affection and irritation one can feel toward such a small person.”

  The Kennans sailed for Europe in June on a slow and seedy freighter like the ones George had traveled on in his youth. That continent did not seem much better, though. His lectures on Soviet-American relations, given in German at the University of Frankfurt, were, he was told, a great success, “but if I were to be asked . . . what had been accomplished, or whether it would have made any difference if I had never appeared, I would not know what to say.” For most of those who heard him, “the highest spiritual aim seems to be a motorcycle.... One sees, today, how much the Jews added to Germany.” Of the Americans in that country, “I will not speak,” but he did anyway: “Their presence here infuriates me.”

  Moscow continued to haunt him: a dream had him returning as counselor in the Ethiopian embassy, a job he had taken because it seemed “a loyal and self-effacing and almost heroic thing to do.” The ambassador, though, was an unhappy little man who left town on the day Kennan arrived, without having provided him a place to stay. Standing forlornly next to his suitcase, “I wondered whether I should call on _____ [probably Bohlen] and my other erstwhile colleagues at the American Embassy. Would they understand? Not likely.”46

  Whether because of his political misadventure, or Oppenheimer’s ordeal, or the more general sense that he had not yet found his footing, whatever equanimity Kennan had gained by moving back to Princeton now seemed to have deserted him. A long diary entry, composed while still at sea, became almost a biblical lamentation:

  1. So far as my own feelings and interests are concerned, I have nothing to live for, yet fear death.

  2. I abhor the thought of any occupation that implies any sort of association with, and adjustment to, other people. This is particularly true in the U.S. Nowhere there can I share any of the group or institutional enthusiasms.

  3. So far as I myself am concerned, I may as well live in Europe.... I am an exile wherever I go, by virtue of my experience.

  4. I do not see any way in which I can use any of my own past in approaching the problems of the future. That has all got to die on the vine: the languages, the intellectual interests, the acquaintances. It makes no whole. It is a museum of odds and ends and left-overs—and whatever value it had is declining day by day in geometric progression.

  5. Intellectual life is barred for me, partly by the way of life forced upon me by the family whenever we are with other people, partly by the fact that intellectual exertion comes, with me, only from outside stimulus and constitutes a nervous and psychic strain; yet I have no means of relaxing from it and preserving the balance of life.

  And so on, through seven other complaints, one of which involved teaching: “I should never be able to conceal my own intellectual despair, above all—the despair with U.S. society. But to reveal it would be inconsistent with the mythology of any American educational institution.”

  “It is not I who have left my country,” he concluded early in 1955, not for the first time. “It is my country that has left me—the country I thought I knew and understood.”

  I could leave it without a pang: the endless streams of cars, the bored, set faces behind the windshields, the chrome, the asphalt, the advertising, the television sets, the filling-stations, the hot-dog stands, the barren business centers, the suburban brick boxes, the country-clubs, the bars-and-grills, the empty activity, the competitiveness, the lack of spontaneity, the sameness, the drug-stores, the over-heated apartment houses, the bus terminals, the crowded campuses, the unyouthful youth and the immature middle-aged—all of this I could see recede behind the smoke of the Jersey flats without turning a hair.

  And so, he now realized, “Mr. Dulles was quite right to fire me.” People like himself had no role in government. Why, then, was he unhappy? “Here, of course, the trouble is with me. . . . I sometimes ask myself whether there is anything I am interested in—anything I would like to do.”47

  VII.

  Dysfunctional peasants had nothing on Kennan, one might conclude from these entries, but that would be to miss the function his diary served. It allowed him despair in order to shield others from it. Family, friends, and colleagues saw some, but by no means all, of this inner turmoil. The diary, in turn, failed fully to reflect what Kennan’s contemporaries could clearly see: that with Oppenheimer’s help he was finding a niche, sufficiently satisfying that he would remain within it—or at least near it—for the last half of his long life. George’s 1953 Christmas Day letter to Kent hinted at what was happening.

  I am just beginning to get my teeth into my work for this [coming] year, which is a beginning on what I suppose will eventually be a two-volume history of Soviet-American relations. It is slow work, and laborious; but it is one way of earning a living, and it might just help to steady American thinking on the contemporary aspects of the subject—something which seems to me to be sorely needed.

  Speaking of teeth, “[y]ou can’t imagine how good the grapefruits taste to us. They are the first good fruit I have had this year.”48

  Why history? The immediate reason, of course, was that Kennan had promised Oppenheimer scholarship, and American Diplomacy—his first venture into the field—had not delivered it. Kennan was determined to do better. But history had always been a lodestone, attracting him when opportunities arose. He liked working as a research assistant for Professor Karl Stählin at the University of Berlin in 1930: his assignment had been a Kremlin librarian during Napoleon’s invasion. He gleefully excavated Neill Brown’s dispatches from the era of Nicholas I for Bullitt to resend to Washington. He exhausted the State Department with his exhaustive study of the Alaska Purchase. He lectured on Russian history while interned at Bad Nauheim. He discovered Gibbon while in flight during the war. And even if his own past might not be useful in solving the problems of the future, he had long believed that the study of the past could be: that was a recurring theme in Kennan’s National War College lectures.

  Now, thanks to the Institute, he could concentrate on history. His first impulse had been to survey all of Soviet-American relations, but “I immediately realized that the archival resources had never been properly t
ouched, that anything I might say after reading what few memoirs there were would be superficial and maybe not even accurate. So I happily went to the sources.” That meant immersion in the intricacies of the Bolshevik Revolution, a topic recent enough for there to be living—if unreliable—witnesses, close enough to Kennan’s experience for him to use his linguistic and diplomatic skills, distant enough that he had not been personally involved. Would the world be different “when I have finished”? he wondered aloud in a talk he gave at the National Archives in the fall of 1954. Not much, he conceded, but “a few people may have been helped to understand some of our failures and failings today.” At the top of his speaking notes, he wrote a single word: “Loneliness.”49

  He later explained what he meant. His work involved warming himself alongside fires kindled four decades earlier. Their heat was now as pale and faint as moonlight. If the era seemed remote, however, it was “because I was a poor historian, incapable of re-creating the flesh-and-blood images of the characters I was studying.” Only through the deepest identification with the past could there be the “intimacy of acquaintance which permits historical personages really to become alive again.” Being a good historian, then, required cutting one’s self off from the present. Contemporaries rarely forgave that, because each age believed its own to be the most important that ever had existed, or ever would. What normal person would spend time with people suffering from “the obvious inferiority of not being alive”?

  The historian too often finds himself, I fear, in the position of the man who has left the noisy and convivial party, to wander alone on cold and lonely paths. The other guests . . . murmur discontentedly among themselves: “Why should he have left? Who does he think he is? Obviously, he doesn’t like our company. He thinks us, plainly, a band of frivolous fools.... Let him sulk.” So they say. And he does.