George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  [W]hat this man represents—this oily, folksy, tricky political play-acting, this hearty optimism, this self-congratulatory jingoism, all combined with the whiney, plaintive, provincial drawl and the childish antics of the grown male in modern Texas—this may be the America of the majority of the American people but it’s not my America.

  “I had a horror of Mr. Johnson,” Kennan recalled years later. “I think he did worthy things internally, but, my God!—he did them with such methods that I couldn’t have lasted in his entourage.”23

  Johnson did, in the spring of 1965, attempt a connection to Kennan, or at least his aide, the historian Eric Goldman, did. In an effort to evoke Kennedy’s style, Goldman had proposed a White House Festival of the Arts, but by the time Johnson got around to approving the idea, he had begun escalating the war in Vietnam and had ordered military intervention to prevent an alleged pro-Castro coup in the Dominican Republic. Goldman asked Kennan to speak, in his capacity as the newly elected president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The invitation came at an awkward moment, because Kennan’s predecessor, Lewis Mumford, had used his departing speech to the organization in May to launch a vitriolic attack on Johnson. He had then “fled, leaving the meeting to me.” Kennan’s conscience would not have allowed such a thing, he wrote Mumford afterward, “but this implies no lack of respect on my part for the faithfulness with which you followed the dictates of your own.”24

  Convinced that he had to represent the National Institute at the White House event, Kennan flew back at his own expense from Europe, where he was preparing for his trip to the Soviet Union with Christopher. The festival took place on June 14 with extensive media coverage, much of it generated by the poet Robert Lowell’s highly public rejection of the invitation he had received. Kennan addressed the luncheon, with Lady Bird Johnson in attendance. He defended the “eccentricities” of artists but cut from his prepared remarks a passage endorsing their right to address controversial issues: it would, Goldman had warned him, offend the president. “Are we his guests?” Kennan asked. Goldman said yes, and that settled it as far as Kennan was concerned. Mrs. Johnson thanked him for avoiding controversy, but reporters noticed the omission, obliging a presidential press spokesman to claim, lamely, that Kennan had run over his allotted time. Johnson, who had been in his office most of the day, appeared only for the concluding evening address and never bothered to greet Kennan: “That was my only contact with the White House in his time.”25

  Kennan’s own doubts about Vietnam developed gradually. He had gone out of his way, while in Belgrade, to defend Kennedy’s support for Ngo Dinh Diem against Yugoslav press criticism. But by the time of the Look interview in November 1963—which appeared just after Diem’s overthrow and assassination—Kennan was advising caution: “When you have regimes of this sort, . . . [y]ou always have to be ready to get out.” In Japan, several months later, he acknowledged uncertainty about Johnson’s intentions but suggested that the domino theory did make sense. By March 1965, though, with American military involvement growing, Kennan was privately expressing deep concern “about what our people are doing in Southeast Asia. It seems to me that they have taken leave of their senses.” And in May, writing to Annelise: “I am absolutely appalled at what is going on. It looks to me as if Mr. J[ohnson] had lost his head completely.”26

  Nevertheless, he kept these views to himself. When he saw Gromyko in Moscow on June 25, Kennan used the occasion, Ambassador Kohler reported, to mount an “able and effective” defense of American policy. That was a diplomatic facade: Kennan was in fact wondering how the United States could hope to exploit Sino-Soviet differences while fighting a major war in Vietnam. Washington had lost “almost all flexibility of choice not only in that particular area but in our approach to the communist world generally,” he wrote Yale’s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin. He saw no point, however, in speaking out. “I have had my day in court. My views are known.... I can do no more, it seems to me, than to fall silent.”27

  But he didn’t. Kennan’s first published criticism of Johnson’s strategy appeared in The Washington Post on December 12, 1965. If victorious, he argued, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong would surely impose a ruthless dictatorship: young Americans marching on their behalf were choosing “a very strange way” to support freedom. But the world contained much more oppression than the United States could ever hope to remedy, some of it “closer to home than what transpires in Vietnam.” A communist triumph there would not shift the global balance of power. Meanwhile the war was overshadowing everything else. “[E]nslaved to the dynamics of a single unmanageable situation,” the United States was losing the initiative, “not just locally but on a world scale.”28

  Kennan was recovering, when the piece appeared, from yet another health crisis, this time a prostate operation, which laid him low through the Christmas holidays. “[T]he incomparable grapefruit,” he assured Kent, “are already contributing to my recovery in a most welcome way.” He was well enough by February 1966 to draft a statement on Vietnam for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose chairman, J. William Fulbright, had invited him to testify. Kennan then traveled to Ohio for lectures at the College of Wooster and at Denison University. He took a late flight to Washington on the ninth, arriving sleep-deprived and exhausted—only to find himself, for five hours the next day, on national television.29

  Angered by Johnson’s decision to resume the bombing of North Vietnam after a five-week halt failed to produce negotiations, Fulbright and his staff director, Carl Marcy, had arranged live coverage of the hearings they had convened. Worried by this, Johnson tried to seize the spotlight by scheduling, on the spur of the moment, a “summit” conference in Honolulu with South Vietnamese president Nguyen Cao Ky. He also pressed the television networks to resume their normal programming. CBS executives obliged with I Love Lucy reruns on the day Kennan appeared, provoking the resignation of their respected news division director, Fred W. Friendly. NBC, however, carried Kennan’s testimony in full.

  “An unusual hush fell over the prelunch drinkers at the Metropolitan Club,” The New York Times reported, “as members and guests, including Government officials, bankers, lawyers and journalists, grouped, glasses in hand, around a television set.” What they and the nation saw, Washington Post columnist Murrey Marder added, was not the explosive drama of past congressional hearings, “only a bald, soft-spoken, well-tailored man just five days short of 62, . . . calmly and decorously surgically dissecting a whole concept of foreign policy [of] which he profoundly disapproved.”

  Ho Chi Minh was not Hitler, Kennan explained; nor would he be, if he won, a puppet of Moscow or Beijing. Defeating him, however, would cost civilian lives and suffering on a scale “for which I would not like to see this country responsible.” The United States could not continue to “jump around” like “an elephant frightened by a mouse.” Instead its standard must be that of John Quincy Adams: to sympathize with freedom everywhere; to fight for it only where feasible; and to “go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Kennan added, to this famous aphorism, one of his own: “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”30

  “Your testimony,” Kennan’s friend Louis Fischer wrote, “resembled a supersonic plane breaking the sound barrier; it ripped through the nation, and perhaps the world, breaking windowpanes of the mind.” That was extravagant, but Johnson did find it necessary, in a press conference the next day, to deny significant disagreement with Kennan, or with retired Army general James M. Gavin, who had earlier made a similar argument. Privately, Johnson was fuming. “They both would just rather not be troubled with Asia,” he complained to his aides. Why would Kennan even talk about Vietnam when he had never been there and knew nothing about the situation? But George Reedy, Johnson’s former press secretary, pointed out that Kennan and Gavin were reasonable men
, who had expressed their uneasiness from a moderate perspective and in a sensible tone. Perhaps they had a point in wondering whether the war was being conducted “as an integral part of an overall United States world strategy.” Could Johnson meet with them and see that they got regular briefings? The president, now very much on the defensive, chose not to do so.31

  Kennan had not sought this visibility. He had participated in no public protests against the war, he assured a former State Department colleague, not even university teach-ins. But he had felt it necessary, when asked by Fulbright, to make his views known. The response astonished him: “It was perfectly tremendous. I hadn’t expected anything remotely like this.” One woman wrote to say that when his testimony began, she had been ironing: “I ironed all day.” She was not alone. CBS might have thought that the typical opinion maker didn’t watch daytime television, humorist Art Buchwald wrote, “but in my house it happens to be my wife.”

  The other day I came home from the office and said casually, “What’s new?”

  “George Kennan made a very persuasive case against our present containment policy.”

  “Oh,” I said, “that’s nice.”

  “He differed in some respects from Gen. Gavin on the enclave policies, but he has come out for courageous liquidation of unsound positions rather than stubborn pursuit of extravagant or uncompromising [sic] objectives.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “What’s for dinner?”

  One poll, shown to Johnson, revealed support for his handling of the war dropping from 63 to 49 percent in the single month that followed the Senate hearings. More than any other episode in Kennan’s career, this one confirmed his long-standing belief that style was as important as substance. After seeing them on television, nobody could dismiss Kennan or Gavin as “irresponsible students or wild-eyed radicals,” Fulbright’s biographer has written. Their testimony “made it respectable to question, if not to oppose, the war.”32

  On the Sunday after he testified, Kennan gave the chapel sermon at Princeton University. His theme was “Why Do I Hope?” There were many reasons not to: the state of the world, the fallibility of human nature, the frailties of the human frame. And yet:

  Repeatedly, in my own life, occurrences which seemed at the time to be personal misfortunes, turned out later to have been blessings in disguise. And on those occasions when I have tried to be very clever and far-sighted in my own interests, and to calculate nicely the best approach to the gratification of this or that ambition or desire, a wise and beneficent hand has seemingly intervened in the current of events to frustrate these puny, silly efforts, and to make of me the fool that deserved to be made.

  There was hope, then, in simply struggling, against whatever odds: “Churchill taught us that, in 1940.” There was hope in “this marvelous earth around us.” There was hope in professional dedication, which “like some gigantic spiritual ski-lift” overcame “the abysses of our true loneliness and helplessness.” But the strongest reason for hope was love:

  love in the family, love for friends, love—in the sense of genuine personal affection—for persons of the opposite sex, love for people with whom we are associated as neighbors or in our work; and finally, for those who are strong enough and great enough for it, love for mankind at large.

  No act of love, he was sure, “will not ultimately be given its true value in the settlement of the affairs of the human spirit—in ways, perhaps, that defy our powers of imagination, but fully and in such a way to make it a thousand times worthwhile.”33

  VII.

  “Dearest Annelise,” George wrote her from Geneva, where he had been lecturing at the Graduate Institute of International Relations, on May 5, 1965. “I have been thinking constantly about ourselves and our future.... I thought it might be easier to write some of this to you than to say it when I get home.” They were approaching

  a serious crisis, not in our relations, which are unaffected, but a crisis brewed of the point of change to which my life, and partly our life, has come: with the growing up of our children, the exhaustion of my public usefulness, the passage of the farm beyond the limits of our mutual strength, and my own need for some steady and creative purpose, if I am to move cheerfully through the strains of advancing age.

  There would be “more of Princeton, and more of the loneliness of the Institute,” but this would raise problems. “We’ll have to dream up something, I think, to prevent a complete drying-up of my personality . . . , and to make our life and home sufficiently interesting to hold some attraction for the children—as well as for ourselves.” It wouldn’t be easy, “for our taste in people and in recreations is not always the same.” Annelise’s reply, if she wrote one, is not on record, but the issue was one of which they were both aware. Marriages, like life, go through stages. Some survive the transitions; others don’t. How this happens is often a mystery, since few couples document—and fewer outsiders witness—the inner workings of an intimate relationship.34

  Of their love there can be no doubt: the marriage could not otherwise have lasted for as long as it did. How two people love, though, is—as George’s letter gently suggested—not always the same. “I think they must have had a lot of hard times with each other,” a close friend surmised. George acknowledged as much—also gently—in his Princeton chapel sermon: “The path of true love indeed never does run smooth, [given] the inevitability of jealousies, of unrequited affections, of separations and bereavements.”

  He had known, as a young man, that he must marry, but he also dreaded the prospect. “[O]nce married,” George informed Jeanette before he had even met Annelise, “very few men ever think at all any more.” Annelise wasn’t his equal as a thinker and never tried to be. “I wonder what it’s going to be like, living here with all these great brains,” she teased Oppenheimer, on the day they were introduced in the spring of 1950. She had been living with George for a long time by then, though, and his brain was still functioning. Some other wife, facing his slides into self-absorption, might have given up on him, Jeanette speculated. But “Annelise would make him go out and buy her a birthday present! She wouldn’t sit and sulk.” She was, George’s older sister Constance observed, totally unlike him, and therefore “[s]he couldn’t have been a better wife for him.”35

  Annelise’s resilience, their neighbor Dick Dilworth thought, reflected her Scandinavian origins: an American would not have had the patience. Another Princeton friend, Bill Bundy, admired her skill in getting George to relax: “One has seen matrimonial relations where you feel that it’s too jangly, because they’re both trying to show off to each other.” Annelise had been a Washington wife when Mary Bundy first encountered her: “You talk about your husband. It’s tedious beyond measure.” In Princeton, though, “I began to see the other side, and to think she was just wonderful.” But George might have found Annelise “a little boring at times,” even there.36

  “George is more apt to talk about himself with women than with men,” Annelise herself acknowledged. “Much more so.” Shrewdly, she used the plural. She could always discuss with him where to live and travel, what they could afford, and how to raise the children. But George never wrote her the kind of long, self-revelatory letters he sent to Jeanette. Annelise had seen some, and they made it appear “as if he were having absolutely the worst time. I knew it wasn’t like this. I can’t explain to you why always when he took pen in hand—” “Gloom and depression would set in?” “Yes.”37

  Dorothy Fosdick, with whom Kennan shared his troubles when they served together on the Policy Planning Staff, attributed his need to confide in women to “deep psychological considerations.” Annelise agreed, pointing out that the loss of George’s mother, and then of Cousin Grace after his father remarried, had changed “his whole feeling about women.” George went even further: his relations with women, he wrote when he was seventy-seven, had been “unfortunately affected by the bewildering succession of female figures who flitted in and out of the house, each taking care of me
in her way, through the years of my infancy and childhood.”38

  The stability of a long marriage never quite balanced this instability in his upbringing; hence his dependence on Jeanette, as well as on a succession of female friends from whom George sought solace, to one degree or another, at one time or another: Frieda Por, Dorothy Hessman, Juli Zapolskaya, Fosdick herself. Others—more secretly—became lovers in times of loneliness, lapses George explained in Freudian terms without absolving himself of Calvinist guilt.

  I’ve noticed over the years what a tremendous difference there can be between what Freud calls the “persona”—the outward personality which we all have to put forward, but particularly to people dependent on us—and the real personality underneath. We all have vestiges of our animalistic existence in us.

  The best you could do, when afflicted by such “emotional and instinctual chaos,” was “to learn to act as though you weren’t.” But concealment too had its price: “There’s no use pretending that it’s anything other than what it is.”39

  That’s why he used Russian, at times, to chronicle concealments. “I am ringing her up,” George wrote under an English-language entry in his diary on February 14, 1965. “No one is answering. I am calling again. She has picked up but I can hear in the tone of her voice that she is not alone. Embarrassed, I am ending the conversation. I am absolutely devastated and driving home.” Similar passages stretched across the bottom of pages for the next three months. They were to be understood, he explained to himself and to whoever would later read them, as “a story or novel based on fantasies flowing from my own life, representing its [switching back to English] fictional extension.” A few of these entries, however, also recounted dreams. “Enticing opportunities of getting intimate with particular women,” he wrote of one, “which don’t materialize because of the presence—the watchful presence—of my wife.”40