George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  But by the end of the 1980s, the division of Germany was breaking down, as Kennan had predicted it would while on the Policy Planning Staff in 1948–49 and over the BBC in 1957. This was occurring, though, not through the negotiations he had envisaged with Moscow but because the Soviet system itself was breaking apart, something an earlier Kennan had foreseen from his vantage point in Riga in 1932 and in the “X” article of 1947. He had, his friend Oliver Franks pointed out, put the cart before the horse in making German reunification the prerequisite for ending the Cold War: the sequence, in fact, was the other way around. “It’s very difficult,” Franks added, “to distinguish between those insights of Kennan which are almost prophetic in their accuracy, and those which just aren’t.”57

  IX.

  Kennan resumed his Oxford lectures late, on February 18, 1958, delivering only five before Hilary term ended the following month. This disappointed his audience, because he had promised a history of Soviet foreign policy and got only as far as the Rapallo Conference of 1922. Health was cited as one of the reasons, but the Reith controversy was still a major distraction for Kennan, leaving little time for anything else. Late-winter Oxford was as depressing as ever, so much so that he now missed—however implausibly—the United States. Hearing an American accent made him realize “how much this period abroad has caused me to love my own people.” To be sure, they faced great problems: they were destined “within my children’s time to know unprecedented horrors and miseries and probably to pass entirely from the scene of world history.” If he could do anything to keep them from that fate, “this would be the most useful purpose to which I could put the remainder of my life.”

  But what? The crisis he had been through had shown that scholarship and current events were “like oil and water; they have nothing to do with one another; attention given to one is given at the cost of the other.” Nobody thought his historical writing relevant to the present, but giving it up for journalism or politics would require sacrificing the independence that the Institute for Advanced Study had provided him. “I am in some travail,” he admitted to “Eka” Kantorowicz, over “how to reconcile the obligations of a historian with the maddening and unaccountable preference of the public . . . to hear what I have to say about contemporary events, concerning which I know almost nothing. If you have any suggestions, I should be grateful.”58

  The Kennans spent the Oxford spring break at Cascais, in their much-loved Portugal, where George finished his response to Acheson for Foreign Affairs and began pondering his future. The leisure, the sun, and the sea caused him to tell himself—most uncharacteristically—that he should lighten up:

  I see myself laughing at myself—even at my weaknesses—recognizing the latter for the anachronisms that they are—sketching and writing fiction when the alternative would be restlessness—trying harder than I have ever tried to taste and preserve in this way the texture of life, the flavour of each day, as though it were the last I had to live—inflicting a certain asceticism on the body (for what is worse than an aging body indulged), but doing so, by all means, gaily, ironically, without grimness, taking with a laugh and without fear the body’s aches and pains, its desires, and its need for discipline.

  The next evening he started Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, couldn’t stop until he finished it, and then was so excited that he got no sleep. The following morning found him “dead tired and full of remorse. Time to begin laughing at myself.”

  An excellent opportunity arose the following day when Kennan paid his respects to Dr. António Salazar, still Portugal’s prime minister, whom he had first met during the Azores bases crisis of 1943. Then almost seventy, the durable autocrat was happy to see Kennan, but totally unsympathetic to his recent proposals. “Disengagement” made no sense because no one trusted the Germans or the Russians. Nuclear weapons were too terrible ever to be used and hence nothing to worry about. Intercontinental ballistic missiles had hardly even registered with Salazar. Kennan had the good sense not to argue with the old man, or even to fall into a diary funk afterward—this was progress.59

  The last months in England were far more relaxed than the fall and winter had been. Kennan lectured in London, Swansea, Aberystwyth, and Cambridge, the latter on a spring day, with punters on the Cam, tennis players in the Backs, under “such a wonderful mellow, shimmering light as one sees only in the French impressionist paintings.” John Holmes, a Canadian diplomat who attended an off-the-record Chatham House discussion with Kennan, found him reluctant to disagree with any of his critics. “[W]ell beyond most mortals” in his sense of history but “incredibly naïve” about current policy, Kennan left Holmes wondering “if perhaps it was I rather than he who was blind.... I could see, however, why so many people have a great affection for him and why, at the same time, they all grow so exasperated with him.”60

  Kennan’s last Oxford talk, on May 13, was to American students at Rhodes House. He told them, as he later summarized it,

  that neither our political system, nor the popular attitudes underlying it, were adequate to the solution of our national problems, but that one should nevertheless not hesitate to do whatever one could in public life, because (1) you could never tell; history performed strange tricks on us, and I might be wrong; and (2) even if we were going down, that was no reason for deserting the ship: I had sometimes thought, in my blacker moments, that even if the things I cared about were disappearing, I could find satisfaction in the feeling that they would disappear more slowly, more stubbornly, more majestically, for what I had done to invigorate them.

  The young men, Kennan could see, were “interested but disturbed” by what he had said: coming from him, however, it was a rare expression of optimism.61

  Three days later he traveled by rail to Cornwall to pick up a collection of Russian revolutionary newspapers, with the last leg of the trip on a branch line little changed since the nineteenth century: “The little locomotive puffed furiously as it pulled us up and up through the forests to Bodmin. . . . It reminded me of my youth; and I was aware of experiencing, this one last time, a form of transportation which the younger generation will probably never know.” Feeling this loss yet mindful of the future, he rode back to Oxford with an imaginary companion.

  At fifty-four, he told himself and his fellow traveler, he could assume perhaps another ten or fifteen years of active life. Both his government experience and his scholarly pursuits were wearing thin. So what would he lose, his companion asked, “by setting out, like the [M]arxists, to act upon life rather than to understand it?” Why not seek “real power,” in the hope of accomplishing “at least one or two concrete things before turning [it] over entirely to the new generation?”

  I saw myself shedding the naïve sincerity I have worn on my sleeve throughout . . . my life; ceasing to be the wide-eyed child I have always been; becoming as wise as the serpent, and as lonely; taking no one fully into confidence; playing the game as others play it, but not for myself . . . , rather for the sake of what I represent and belong to, which is now in such urgent and mortal peril.

  There could be, his friend whispered, great strength in choosing this path, for everything would fall into place: there would be “a rationale for all personal choices, as well as for professional decisions.” It could “take up the strains created, and fill the gaps opened up, by increasing age.” It could relieve personal frustrations—“the passage of sexual love, the growing up and weaning of one’s children, ... the decline of one’s powers of imagination and perception”—allowing their acceptance “with a scornful smile.” For as Goethe had written:

  Bedenkt, der Teufel, der ist alt;

  Man muss alt sein, ihn zu verstehen.

  [Ponder this, the devil is old;

  one must be old too, to understand him.]

  Perhaps, Kennan concluded, Mephistopheles had something to offer.62

  TWENTY-ONE

  Kennedy and Yugoslavia: 1958–1963

  “NEVER, I BELIEVE, HAVE I PARTED WIT
H GREATER INDIFFERENCE from any place where I have lived,” George wrote of Oxford after he and his family finally left it in June 1958 for a summer in Kristiansand, before returning to the United States. Norway was brighter, cleaner, and more congenial than Great Britain, yet even there youths had few interests beyond motorbikes, sailing was a dying sport, walking was a forgotten pastime, and adults were succumbing to “an anti-intellectualism, a cultural flaccidity, a complacent materialism worse than ours—plus a devastating secularism.” If this was happening in Scandinavia, then did the West deserve to survive? Hadn’t the time really come for the Russians to take over?

  It was another descent into diary despair, although this time with a twist: “I cannot believe it.” Once subject “to the wind of material plenty,” Kennan predicted, the Russians would be “as helpless as the rest of us—even more so—under its debilitating and insidious breath.” He had been forecasting the corruption of communism by capitalism since 1932, but his lack of faith in his own country had made it hard to see when or how that might occur. Now, though, having spent a year abroad, the United States was looking better to him.1

  On June 27 Kennan flew to Copenhagen, where the State Department had opened a new embassy building. He found the male staffers “loose-jointed, casual, diffident, drawling, yet full of modesty and common sense”—qualities he had admired, during the war, in the young American occupiers of Italy. The women were crisp, controlled, and helpful, their voices as innocently unselfconscious as if “they had never left Kansas City.” Suddenly—melodramatically—Kennan was homesick:

  Oh my countrymen, my countrymen, my hope and my despair! What virtues you conceal beneath your slouching self-deprecation: virtues inconceivable to the pompous continental. How strong you are in all that of which you are yourselves not conscious; and how childish and superficial you are in your own concept of the sources of your excellence.

  His frustrations about America were really frustrations about himself: “These are my people; it is to them, with all their deficiencies, that I, with all my deficiencies, belong. It is to them that I must return, after every rebellion, for punishment or forgiveness.” Like distant but patient parents, their strengths were not to be underestimated:

  Take heed, you scoffers, you patronizers, you envious and malicious detractors, you conceited and superior Europeans, you Nassers and Khrushchevs: if you continue with your efforts to tear us down, you will rouse us yet to maturity, to introspection, to disillusionment, to cunning in our own defense; and when you do, you will discover in us reserves of strength such as you never dreamed of; and then you, even more than we, will come to regret the passing of the days of our own innocence.

  Kennan shared the next leg of his flight, to Warsaw, with an Air Force attaché, his wife, and their family. Despite heavy turbulence, he chewed his gum, read his magazines, and exuded complete confidence. Would he do so in the face of “atomic death”? Probably, Kennan concluded. “Great institutions create, for those who are within them, their own illusions of security; and the United States Air Force is now a great institution.”

  The Polish trip, arranged through Oxford friends, was Kennan’s first to a communist country since the Soviet Union expelled him in 1952. Most of Warsaw had been rebuilt from its near-obliteration, on Hitler’s orders, during the war. Much seemed slavishly Russian: the tawdry apartment blocks rising from seas of mud; the Stalinist skyscraper on which Poles carefully did not comment; the Hotel Bristol, which with its “shoddy air of mystery,” its “dreary, furtive corridors,” its “intensive eyeing of people,” even its delegations of visiting Chinese, Mongolians, and North Koreans, evoked the Metropole in Moscow.

  But in the city center, a declaration of architectural independence had taken place: the Polish government was meticulously reconstructing the palaces and churches of the feudal and bourgeois eras. Had it tried to design anything more modern, Kennan was sure, the plans would have been ideologically incorrect and hence rejected. The Poles sensed, though, a respect on the Russians’ part for prerevolutionary culture, the natural evolution of which their revolution had so brutally broken off. So the new buildings were safe because they looked old. They stood “a trifle sheepishly, as [though] surprised, and almost discomfited, to be thus resurrected from a past [to] which, after all, they can never return.”

  Kennan’s hosts at the Institute of International Affairs were charming, urbane, and politically sophisticated. Not really communists, they treated recent history like Soviet architecture: one did not speak of the Katyn massacre, or of the Red Army’s failure to prevent the crushing of the Warsaw Uprising, and “in this studied silence, there is a condemnation more devastating than in any words.” The only committed communist Kennan met was trying to build something hopeful on a “dismal foundation of error and grim despotism.” He felt sorry for her: she was “destined, unquestionably, for disillusionment and tragedy.”

  Knowing that he would be among scholars, Kennan had planned to lecture on American intervention in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. Upon his arrival, however, the head of the institute informed him, with some embarrassment, that the Soviet authorities had objected to this topic, but that he was to go ahead with it anyway. The lecture was readvertised as one on contemporary problems of U.S. foreign policy. Puzzled, Kennan asked if he should now switch to that subject. No, he was told, he was to give the original talk, under the newly announced title. This had been “the bargain” with Moscow.

  So Kennan spoke, on July 1, to a hand-picked audience, received polite applause when he finished, and then waited, in awkward silence, for questions. Only one came: how he could have called World War I a “tragedy,” since it had led to the formation of the modern Polish state? Kennan stumbled through an answer, and the session ended. The audience’s reticence, he later realized, reflected the fact that it was being watched. But it had been happy for him to say whatever he wished.2

  Kennan subsequently reported to the CIA on how much the Poles were departing from Soviet “socialism.” If left unchallenged, the liberties they were taking would become rights, so deeply rooted that “any withdrawal of them would appear as a preposterous injury.” A kind of “liberation” was occurring from within. Further rhetoric about “liberation” from without could only delay its development. “While I do not share the views of the writer on many subjects,” Allen Dulles commented, in forwarding Kennan’s analysis to the White House, “his report on Poland is the best summary I have seen on the evolving situation there. It is possible that the President would be interested in glancing it over.” The initials “DE” on the document, together with underlinings and a distinctive doodle, show that he did.3

  George could have felt some satisfaction, therefore, as he, Annelise, Christopher, and Wendy sailed for home in late July on a slow freighter, the MS Texas, whose principal cargo was cement, granite blocks, and a hundred Volvos. The European balance of power looked very different from what it had been a decade earlier. With American help, the Western Europeans had regained prosperity and self-confidence. It was now the Russians who were walking a tightrope in Eastern Europe, knowing how gleefully their “allies” would welcome a tumble into the abyss. Kennan had anticipated both possibilities, devised a strategy to bring them about, and for all of its parochialism, immaturity, and opportunistic politics, his country had broadly followed it.

  In fact, though, Kennan made no further effort, on the long voyage home, to reflect on the relaxed Americans and resolute Poles he had met—or to wonder why the Russians, in Warsaw, had been so nervous about his presence. Instead, as the ship approached the New England coast, he was brooding about what lay ahead.

  [W]hat does one do with this contemporary America: with this great hive of bewildered people, now in such deep trouble, so anxious in some ways for the sort of help I can give, so resentful of it in others, so exhausting and competitive in its demands, so quick to pluck to pieces and destroy anything and anyone that engages its attention?

  Should he
try to help? Or should he admit the futility of doing so and retire to cultivate his garden, writing books that only a handful of people might read and that would “probably burn up, anyway, in the imminent atomic holocaust?” The Texas rounded Nantucket on August 2, “and just as we did so the moon rose, ominous and blood-red, in the east. A strange evening, intensely beautiful, and slightly sinister.”4

  I.

  The Kennans spent the rest of August 1958 at the farm, where George carefully chronicled his activities: ditch digging, fence building, buying a tractor, completing a survey of the property, arranging for a new tenant to manage the place. He also granted an interview—his first in over a year—to the Harrisburg Patriot-News, which celebrated its exclusive “Press Conference with Ex-Ambassador Keenan” by staging a “Mr. X Contest.” Princeton, when the family returned to it in September, was “gloriously quiet, relaxed, comfortable,” but George soon felt himself sinking back into “the false, tense, harried life of the American upper class—tightly organized, over-elaborate in all its arrangements, lacking in spontaneity, everyone living on the outward edge of their energies and resources, ... attempting to meet standards which, being themselves survivals of the age of servants, are themselves exorbitant.” So he resolved to seek refuge, for three hours each day, deep within the university’s Firestone Library, “where no one knows where to find me.” That would leave twelve hours for sleeping and meals, eight for activities apart from scholarship, and one for work around the yard and the house.5