George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  So what had he proposed? the puzzled moderator asked. “You’re not all that much of an outsider.” He was, Kennan responded, in the sense that there were “military considerations” he didn’t know about. And he did know, from his State Department service, the limitations of uninformed advice: “I was trying to tell governments what they ought to think about, not what they ought to do.” But he proceeded to do that anyway: “I can see no solution to this present jam we’re getting ourselves [into] . . . except by some sort of a disengagement of the forces of the great powers in Europe and perhaps later in the Far East.”

  All of this exasperated Sir John Slessor, of the Royal Air Force, who wondered how the Europeans would defend themselves in the absence of American and British forces “when we’ve got Sputnik whirling overhead.” Was Kennan really proposing that the Europeans rely, as their only deterrent, on the prospect of local resistance after their countries had been overrun? Resistance groups had given the Germans trouble in World War II, Kennan replied, much too lamely, and NATO “obligations” would remain in place after American and British troops had been withdrawn. But a neutralized Germany would not be in NATO, the moderator pointed out. No, but it would have its own conventional forces, Kennan retorted. Wouldn’t that frighten everybody else, all of the panelists wanted to know, including the Russians?

  Kennan fell back, in the end, on something he had once condemned: reliance on “trust” in the conduct of international relations. The figurehead Soviet premier, Nikolay Bulganin, had formally offered to withdraw the Red Army from East Germany and the other Warsaw Pact countries in return for the removal of American and British troops from the European continent: he should be taken seriously. And Kennan himself was certain, on the basis of his residence in Germany as a little boy and as a young diplomat during the 1930s, that the Germans had changed, that they were now “on our side.” How the two claims meshed—how the Russians could confidently leave a unified Germany to itself if the Germans were pro-American—he did not explain.

  “My feeling now,” Kennan wrote in his diary after this embarrassing exchange, “is that I have thoroughly exhausted the working capital of knowledge about international affairs with which I left government, five years ago.” He wished “never to open my mouth about them again until I have some opportunity to learn all over again.”40

  VI.

  The Kennans left Oxford on December 28 to drive, via an English Channel ferry, to the Swiss resort town of Crans for what they hoped would be a rest. But the weather-plagued hair-raising trip took five days, and when they arrived, George found the proofs of his Reith lectures waiting. “I haven’t the faintest enthusiasm for this publication,” he lamented, sensing the furor following him around like a baleful ghost. The respected Neue Zürcher Zeitung, unaware of his presence in the country, began a series of attacks on him two days after he arrived. At tea that afternoon, one of his hosts jovially credited Kennan with killing the NATO alliance. Just then a message came from an old friend, Gladwyn Jebb, who wanted Kennan to know that his lectures had greatly complicated Jebb’s task as British ambassador in Paris. All of this worried Kennan, “because unless I can find some means of withdrawing from the discussion of contemporary affairs, I shall never be able to go successfully through the next term at Oxford.”41

  Much worse came, a week later, in an eruption of monumental proportions from an enraged Dean Acheson. “I am told,” the former secretary of state announced in a widely publicized statement on January 11, 1958, “that the impression exists in Europe that the views expressed by Mr. George Kennan . . . represent the views of the Democratic Party in the United States. Most categorically they do not, as I’m sure Mr. Kennan would agree.” Kennan could speak authoritatively “in the field he knows,” which was Russian history and culture and Marxist-Leninist ideology. However, he “has never, in my judgment, grasped the realities of power relationships, but takes a rather mystical attitude toward them.” Had he not provided his “personal assurance” that there was “no Soviet military threat” in Europe? “On what does this guarantee rest, unless Divine revelation?”42

  The sarcasm was withering, as only Acheson’s pen could have made it. As he got older, “he got more drastic,” Arthur Schlesinger recalled. “He enjoyed being extravagantly dismissive.” But he was doing so, in this instance, on behalf of the American Council on Germany, an influential pro-NATO organization headed by James B. Conant, the ex-president of Harvard who had also served as U.S. high commissioner and later ambassador in West Germany. With Conant’s approval—and Nitze’s encouragement—the group’s vice-chairman, Christopher Emmet, had asked Acheson to reply to Kennan, lest the Europeans mistake him as a “semiofficial spokesman and super brain-truster for the Democratic Party.” Acheson did not simply jump at this opportunity: he pounced on it. He had written “more for European than American readers,” he explained to Emmet, but “it won’t hurt some of our Democrats to learn that they don’t agree with George.”43

  Harry S. Truman accepted instruction quickly. “I do not agree with Kennan,” he assured the press on the day Acheson’s statement appeared. “He is not a policy maker.” He had been a good ambassador, but only when he had Acheson “to tell him what to do.” Conant went further, condemning Kennan’s proposals as “a blueprint for the appeasement of the Soviet Union.” The Washington Post, however, found Acheson’s assault “savage” and “inexplicable,” coming from someone who had himself been the target of unfair attacks: “He seems to regard Mr. Kennan as an adversary scarcely less dangerous than Mr. Khrushchev, and one to be demolished in entirety.” That didn’t faze Acheson, but congratulations from Dulles did. “I am getting too respectable to be safe,” he wrote a friend. “Alice [Acheson] is already suspicious of me. When I got a letter from Foster thanking me for my attack on George Kennan she was about ready to leave me.”44

  Compliments arrived also from a couple who, had things worked out differently, would have had Kennan as a son-in-law. “Will you send me George Kennan’s skin to hang up as a trophy on my office wall?” Eleanor Hard’s father Bill wrote Acheson after reading his press release. “You took it off him completely.” Anne Hard, who had vetoed the marriage, then added her own reflections:

  George, I thought when he was engaged to Eleanor, [had] integrity, and sweetness and kindness and a pedantic mind and I have seen no reason to alter that judgment in following his later career.... I think he is one of those personally lovable people who just can’t bear to recognize that anything is ugly and when he gets a hint of it turns and flees or reaches for his kid gloves. I never thought he had great scope or imagination and he looks to me like a fish in water too deep for him.

  “Your analysis of George’s character seems to me wholly right,” Acheson responded. “I had quite forgotten that he was engaged to Eleanor. What an interesting subject for speculation that is.”45

  Kennan was still in Crans when he saw newspaper stories reporting Acheson’s assault and Truman’s comment: there had been no warning. He was at a loss to account for “this sudden vehement outburst of malevolence” by people he had never publicly criticized “who had hitherto treated me only with cordiality.” His difficulty in Moscow, after all, had been “that I had no instructions from Mr. Acheson.” Quite apart from the personal implications, Kennan took the criticism as ruling out any discussion of a European political settlement within the Democratic as well as the Republican Party. That left only the option of plunging “blindly, recklessly ahead” with an arms race, “wherever it leads us.” He was unsure whether even to reply: “The distortions of my thinking are so bad [that] I do not wish to let them ride; on the other hand, is there any use? . . . The die is now cast.... These people will have their war, on which they all seem so intent.”46

  Not surprisingly, Kennan’s ulcer flared up again under the stress. The demands of the autumn had left him physically debilitated, and he had picked up a sinus infection on the arduous drive to Switzerland. Feeling miserable, he checked himsel
f into a Zürich hospital in mid-January, while Annelise kept Christopher and Wendy busy with skiing lessons in Crans. That at least got George out of a further discussion of the Reith lectures, which the Congress for Cultural Freedom—the secretly CIA-funded organization for European intellectuals—had arranged in Paris. While Joe Alsop, Raymond Aron, Denis Healey, and Sidney Hook were dismantling Kennan’s arguments, his doctors were probing his “ghastly digestive system.” Sitting for hours one morning with a tube in his stomach, he reached the unsettling conclusion that Dulles might understand him better than Acheson did. “One would think,” Kennan wrote of the chorus of critics singing to the tune of his former boss, that “I had caught them all doing something they were ashamed of.”47

  Discharged from the hospital with orders to avoid further tension, George packed the family into the car and drove it back across the Alps into France through a raging blizzard. Fighting snow and ice all the way, they crossed the Channel, this time in an automobile air ferry, and by the end of January were back in Oxford, where George was swamped with unanswered correspondence, demands for interviews, and the need to prepare a new set of lectures. The children, who had thrived in Switzerland, soon had severe coughs, and even Annelise, unusually, was depressed. “Between you and me we just loathe [Oxford],” she wrote Jeanette, and could easily “start chalking up the days until we can leave.”48

  VII.

  “The way in which the Establishment set out to swat him down—the things that Dean Acheson said in print about him—wounded [Kennan] very much,” Ullman recalled. Meanwhile well-meaning friends, dismayed by the rift, were trying to heal it. “I suppose it was necessary,” Joseph C. Harsch, the National Broadcasting Company correspondent in London, wrote Acheson: “If he had to be destroyed only you could do it.” But couldn’t Acheson let Kennan know that there had been nothing personal in the “dissection”? Not yet, Acheson replied: Kennan’s lectures had been not only silly but “extremely harmful.”

  An appeal to the lotus-eating spirit in mankind, which urges him to relax just at the time when real effort might possibly cause a great improvement, could be disastrous. . . . I decided to let him have it, and the reports which have come to me from the continent indicate that it was well worthwhile.

  Someday he would write George a friendly note. “For the present, I wish to God that he would devote himself to giving us a new volume on the period 1917–1920 as delightful as the last, and would leave the next forty years alone.” Harsch tried again, pointing out that Kennan had been sick and was still convalescing. Acheson was unmoved: “One can hardly do as much damage as George has done,” he grumbled to William Tyler, of the American embassy in Bonn, “and then rush off to immunity in the hospital.”49

  “Your January broadside was perfect as a bucket-full of cold water down George’s neck and into the faces of the admiring throng,” Tyler replied. “As soon as the Germans found out that George was unlikely to be the next secretary of state in a Democratic administration, (and you removed any expectations they may have had on that score) they lost interest in his arabesques.” The “brawl” with Kennan had indeed pained their friends, but as Acheson reminded Philip Jessup, “I was not writing for our friends.... I was writing for the Germans to destroy as effectively as I could the corroding effect of what he had said and the belief that he was a seer in these matters.” Kennan had been trotting out Program A as a “panacea” for every crisis since 1948. Of course it could be looked at again, “just as a loaded gun can be.” But “I am against it.”50

  One prominent Democrat, however, chose not to let Acheson tell him what to think. Senator John F. Kennedy wrote Kennan on February 13 to say that he had read the Reith lectures, thought them excellent, and regretted the extent to which their contents had been “twisted and misrepresented”—nothing justified “the personal criticisms that have been made.” He did disagree with Kennan on several points; still it was

  most satisfying that there is at least one member of the “opposition” who is not only performing his critical duty but also providing a carefully formulated, comprehensive, and brilliantly written set of alternative proposals and perspectives. You have directed our attention to the right questions and in a manner that allows us to test rigorously our current assumptions.

  “It meant a great deal to me,” Kennan responded, “to know that you were not among those who consider the Reith lectures to have been some kind of outrage.” Composed under difficult circumstances, they certainly had their shortcomings. Surely, though, NATO policy was sufficiently robust “to stand re-examination at this moment, which seems to me a very dangerous and crucial one.”51

  Unaware of this correspondence, Acheson had sent “Jacquie” Kennedy—whose family he had long known—a copy of a speech he had made objecting to her husband’s attacks on French policy in Algeria. “Mr. Acheson” got back a handwritten note praising his “beautifully constructed prose,” while wondering how someone “capable of such an Olympian tone can become so personal when attacking policy differences.” Caught off guard, Acheson reminded her that the Olympians had been “a pretty personal lot,” but he admitted that “[p]erhaps lawyers, who are always contentious fellows, are too hardened to be sensitive to these things.... So, you see, you have me very much mixed up.” Two days later, on March 10, he asked a mutual friend to tell Kennan that although he would soon be restating his argument in Foreign Affairs, “[m]y disagreement does not involve any diminution of my affection for him.” A direct letter, enclosing the article proofs, went off three days later: “I am more accustomed to public controversy and criticism than you are. So you are entitled to a few earthy expletives.”52

  Kennan wrote back immediately, claiming to harbor no bitterness but seizing the moment to indulge in a bit of it nonetheless: “I could have wished that your statement had not been so promptly and eagerly exploited by people for whose integrity of motive I have not the same respect I have for your own.” He had also been “saddened” by Truman’s outburst. “I did not thrust myself on General Marshall or yourself as head of a planning staff, nor on Mr. Truman as Ambassador to Russia, and the efforts I put forward, in all three instances, were the best of which I was capable.” As for Acheson’s Foreign Affairs article, he would answer it in the same forum. He could only say that “rarely, if ever, have I seen error so gracefully and respectfully clothed. One hates to start plucking at such finery; but I suppose that in one way or another I shall have to do so.”53

  “I think this leaves the honors to George,” Acheson acknowledged to C. C. Burlingham, a distinguished New York lawyer, then ninety-nine, whom both men knew and revered. He had written to Kennan, Acheson assured the old man—the tone was more that of an apologetic schoolboy than of an aggrieved elder statesman—to say that “although we were engaged in committing mutual mayhem, I was still fond of whatever might be left of him.”54

  VIII.

  Not much was. The Reith lectures controversy was really about Germany’s place in postwar Europe, and Acheson easily prevailed. He did so because he knew when not to plan policy. He had supported Program A until leaks to the press ruled out its pursuit in the spring of 1949; then, to Kennan’s bewilderment, he simply dropped it. “If you couldn’t get it done you’d proceed another way, but you didn’t agonize over things,” Acheson’s daughter Mary Bundy recalled. “[H]e was a lot tougher than George, and he was a lot more practical a person.”

  Kennan, in contrast, was constantly recycling, rearranging, and repackaging his ideas. The BBC broadcasts contained no proposals that Acheson hadn’t heard before. He had never heard them all at once, though, or in so public a forum, or at such a critical moment. They made it seem as though Kennan, having lost the policy battle in Washington, was now appealing over the heads of elected NATO leaders to their domestic opponents, and even to the Soviet Union itself, the country he had once sought to contain. Acheson was “absolutely furious,” Kennan admitted. Bundy remembered this as the moment her father lost confidence “in th
e stability of the man’s thinking, really.”

  Stability was indeed the issue, but it applied to the entire postwar European settlement. For Kennan, who believed himself more an expert on Germany than Acheson and his supporters, it was absurd to seek safety in that country’s indefinite division. “I had, after all, spent five years of my life in Berlin. I was bilingual in the language. What the hell [did] these people know?” No one in his right mind could have planned such an arrangement, which could fall apart at any moment under the combined pressures of German irredentism, Anglo-French anxiety, Eastern European irresponsibility, Soviet neocolonialism, and American militarism. Over it all loomed the unprecedented danger of nuclear war: any other course, Kennan was sure, would be better than that.55

  Acheson, despite his fury, was more hopeful. He saw more clearly than Kennan that however illogical the division of Germany was, few people anywhere—not even most Germans—were seeking to overturn it. The very danger of war that Kennan regarded as destabilizing had, in Acheson’s view, the opposite effect: it was “deterrence.” A post–World War II order was evolving in Europe, much as legal precedents evolve, without anyone having designed it, as had happened with so little success after World War I. Trained as a lawyer, Acheson understood and respected this process, so much so that it became almost theology. Anything that might deflect NATO from its present path bordered on heresy—even the grand design of a former policy planner, the logic of which Acheson had once embraced.

  Both men were right, but in different eras. Acheson’s settlement kept the peace in Europe for the next three decades, and by the 1970s even Kennan could see its robustness. “[W]e might all have been spared a lot of trouble if someone in authority had come to me before these lectures were given and had said: ‘Look here, George, the decision to leave Europe divided . . . has already been taken, even if it hasn’t been announced; the talk about German unification is all eyewash; and there isn’t the faintest thing to be gained by your attempting to change this situation.’” Or as he put it in 1984, “the right thing said at the wrong time is almost worse than saying the wrong thing at the right time.”56