George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Apartheid, Kennan wrote the president of the African-American Institute shortly after returning to Princeton, was “not only offensive to our sensibilities, but clearly inadequate to South Africa’s own needs and doomed to eventual failure.” Any quick shift to majority rule there or elsewhere, though, would be “a disaster for all concerned.” Blacks were not ready for it, and whites were determined to fight rather than yield. So did it make sense for the United States to be supporting “national liberation” movements? Was it prepared to liquidate the war in Vietnam to fight an even bigger one on their behalf? It was “not our business, nor does it lie within our capabilities,” to compel changes in institutions and practices of other countries “when they do not meet with our approval.” With the passage of time, South Africa’s leaders would see that they could not continue to keep most of their population in “ignorance and civil helplessness.” The greatest service Americans could provide to apartheid’s victims would be to permit “the logic of that situation to work itself out.”54

  X.

  The proofs pursuing Kennan around Africa were for his first volume of memoirs. Edward A. (Ted) Weeks, the Atlantic–Little, Brown editor who published Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin in 1961, had long encouraged this project, but Kennan didn’t begin working on it until the fall of 1966. With Goodman’s help, he had finished a five-hundred-page book by mid-March 1967, at which point he checked to see who rejected the earlier autobiography he had prepared in the late 1930s, when “we were incredibly broke, and I [hoped to] make a couple of hundred dollars.” It turned out to have been Atlantic–Little, Brown: both author and publisher had forgotten this previous disappointment with one another.

  George wrote the memoir, he explained to Joan that summer, “primarily for you children, so that you would have some idea of what I did and tried to do.” A few scholars might also find it useful. With the declassification of American documents on the early Cold War, and in response to the escalating Vietnam War, a new generation of scholars was questioning the premises of “containment”: had the Soviet Union really been as dangerous as Kennan claimed? Some of their criticisms, he thought, reflected “lack of knowledge as to how I came by [my] views.... I ought to try to explain.” Others he agreed with: the United States had made itself dangerous in attempting to “contain” the Soviet Union, and he wanted to account for that as well.

  It was not enough simply to restate positions, as he had done in Realities of American Foreign Policy, and in the published version of the Reith lectures, Russia, the Atom, and the West. Few people had read those books, and they offered no biographical context. Kennan’s histories, in contrast, described other lives vividly. Could he depict his own? “I rather hate it,” George complained to Kent, as he began the task. “The best that can be said . . . is that it would be more unfortunate if I failed to write [it] than if I did.” So he was grinding out pages, wincing at each use of the first person singular, constantly falling into “traps of vanity, distortion of memory, hindsight and pompousness.” He had done the book “much too hastily,” he admitted, and “of the excitement of authorship there is none.”55

  But by the time it appeared in October 1967, under the title Memoirs: 1925–1950, Kennan was ready for a little publicity. So he granted an interview, in his Institute office, to the New York Times Book Review editor Lewis Nichols. The younger Kennan might have had to settle for the last room in Princeton when he arrived as a student in 1921, Nichols wrote, having read George’s account of his undergraduate years. But now, on the second floor of Fuld Hall, he had one of the best rooms in town. Its wide windows looked out on a forest in fall foliage. His desk was two tables, with a sturdy typewriter alongside. His sofa was “so comfortable that it is left with regret.” Bookcases lined the walls, the volumes on Russia filling one side and those on diplomacy the other. The books Kennan had written—nine by Nichols’s count—were stashed in a corner, battered from frequent use. One was American Diplomacy, which its author dismissed as “that old pot-boiler.” When Nichols reminded him that Russia Leaves the War had won four major prizes, thereby bettering the Triple Crown in horse racing, Kennan smiled like a small boy who “not only had found the cookie jar but found it full.”56

  That was not the tone, however, of his memoir. In the alienation it expressed from his era, his country, and himself, it most closely resembled The Education of Henry Adams—with whose author the two George Kennans, eerily, shared a birthday. The second Kennan had read Adams and, like him, used autobiography for self-reproach. Both rejected the self-congratulation typical of the modern genre; both reflected an ancient prototype, Saint Augustine’s Confessions. It was not an example Acheson would follow when he chose, as the title for his 1969 memoir, Present at the Creation.

  Where Kennan differed from Adams was in the quality of his writing: he left indelible impressions in print. Thanks to him, there will always be fairies in Milwaukee’s Juneau Park. Midwesterners will always find Princeton inhospitable. The Foreign Service will always have its roots in the cool, sleepy corridors of the venerable State-War-Navy building. Stalin will always be “an old battle-scarred tiger,” with “pocked face and yellow eyes.” Marshall will always peer, “penetratingly,” over the rims of his glasses. Acheson will always treat Kennan as “a court jester, expected to enliven discussion, privileged to say shocking things.”57

  Unlike Acheson, but in the manner of Adams, Kennan underestimated his own influence. He credited himself with having sorted out wartime confusion over Azores bases, accurately sensing Stalin’s intentions, organizing the Policy Planning Staff, designing the Marshall Plan, and realigning occupation policy in Japan. He made no claim, though, to having designed any long-term strategy of “containment.” He said nothing about anticipating the Sino-Soviet split. And he devoted at least as much space to what he regarded as his failures: the Truman Doctrine; the “X” article; the Smith-Molotov exchange; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Program A; the idea of an integrated Europe apart from the United States and Great Britain; and the decision to build the hydrogen bomb.

  Some issues were too delicate for Kennan to discuss. One was his ties to the CIA: Ramparts magazine had exposed the agency’s secret funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom—of which Kennan had long been aware—only months before his memoir appeared, but the full extent of his role in originating covert operations would not become apparent for years to come. He said little, beyond childhood, about his family, and certainly nothing about his affairs. He did, through the diary entries he quoted, suggest the complexities of his inner life, but some of his selections raised questions about his values. He gave four lines, for example, to an account of turning away a Jewish acquaintance from the Prague legation on the day the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, then four pages to a sexless encounter with a Berlin prostitute a few months later, in an effort to show that not all Germans were Nazis. No reader would have known, from his memoir, of the efforts Kennan made to get Jews out, in both Prague and Berlin.58

  The omission reflected Kennan’s chronic insensitivity to impressions created by what he said and wrote: even his most charitable biographer found his portrayal of the Prague events, if not callous, then “self-consciously, cold.”59 But Kennan was using his memoir to establish a literary, not a moral, reputation. He had experimented with his writing since first beginning to keep a diary in the late 1920s. Now he was publishing excerpts for the first time, and at considerable length. He meant them to display descriptive skills, and this they did. The greatest surprise of the memoir was its novelist’s eye—which is probably what earned it Kennan’s second National Book Award and his second Pulitzer Prize, this time for biography.

  These explorations in style, however, caused controversies over substance that would plague Kennan for years to come. Did his memoir reveal him to be pro-German? Anti-Semitic? Amoral? Contrite? A Cold War apologist? A Cold War revisionist? An evader of tough issues? A visionary who saw beyond them? Or simply someon
e who tried to write, for his children, a book that they might read, much as Henry Adams claimed to be writing one simply for his friends?60 It’s in the nature of classics that they defy categories. Among these is the distinction, so indistinct in Kennan’s life, between what one sets out to do, and what one does.

  XI.

  It might come as a surprise, Kennan warned an audience at Swarthmore College on December 9, 1967, that having been invited to help dedicate its new library, he should choose to speak on a subject so remote from the spirit of silence with which libraries were associated: “the present state of mind of the radical Left on the American campus.” But could the first be realized “without a drastic change” in the second? Did not education imply a voluntary withdrawal from contemporary life in order to achieve a better perspective on it? Was there not a “dreadful incongruity” between that vision and “the condition of mind and behavior in which a portion of our student youth finds itself today”?

  Instead of withdrawal, there was intense involvement. Instead of calm, “transports of passion.” Instead of self-possession, “screaming tantrums and brawling in the streets.” Instead of rational discourse, “banners and epithets and obscenities and virtually meaningless slogans.” And instead of hope, “eyes glazed with anger,” as well as by “artificial abuse of the psychic structure that lies behind them.” In saying all of this, Kennan knew he sounded parental, a prisoner of all the “seamy adjustments” to practicality that came with that status. He made no apologies, for without such compromises, children would not enjoy the privilege of “despising us for the materialistic faint-heartedness that made their maturity possible.”

  Behind the protests was legitimate outrage over racial injustice at home and an apparently endless war in Vietnam. If the young had a plan for resolving these issues, “then many of us, I am sure,” could join them. But

  when we are offered, as the only argument for change, the fact that a number of people are themselves very angry and excited; and when we are presented with a violent objection to what exists, unaccompanied by any constructive concept of what, ideally ought to exist in its place—then we of my generation can only recognize that such behavior bears a disconcerting resemblance to phenomena we have witnessed within our own time in the origins of totalitarianism.

  As a consequence, “many of us who are no happier” would have “no choice but to place ourselves on the other side of the barricades.”61

  The speech, to put it much too mildly, was not well received. On being escorted to a reception at the president’s house, Kennan found himself surrounded “by a number of bearded creatures who were absolutely hissing at me, like a crowd of geese!” His host, Courtney C. Smith, was also not pleased: “He was trying to appease these people.” (Smith would later die of a heart attack during a student occupation of the college admissions office.) Having heard of the controversy, The New York Times Magazine published a revised version of Kennan’s speech in January 1968. It brought in hundreds of letters, all of which he read, many of which he found impressive: “These people challenged me on things that were perfectly fair. I had to face up to this.” So he did so in a short book, Democracy and the Student Left, which included the Swarthmore lecture, twenty-eight letters from students, and another eleven from members of “the older generation,” together with a response six times the length of his original address. “A lot of people didn’t like [it]. I didn’t care.”62

  Several of the faculty letters were silly. One professor suggested that Kennan stage an emotional breakdown, in front of his own children, as an act of contrition. He could not believe, however, that they “would be greatly enlightened by such a spectacle, however much they might enjoy it for its unexpected dramatic aspects.” How, another wanted to know, could a student pursue scholarship with Marines recruiting on campus? By “taking a book, going into the library, and reading,” Kennan answered. “I doubt that the recruiter would follow him there.” Still another, defending the students’ objections to university parietal rules, wondered how Kennan would feel if he were in a room with someone about whom he cared deeply and was forced to leave the door open: “To this reproach, I freely confess myself devoid of any adequate answer.”

  The students he took more seriously, if no less critically. Their only apparent agenda, the 1962 Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, was social science “gobbledygook.” Even more alarming was their absence of humor, their tendency to treat people impersonally, and their belief in “the total ubiquity of responsibility.” Everyone, of a certain generation at least, was to blame for everything. Kennan’s antiwar testimony on national television had not absolved him: “There should, I gather, have been more evidences of excitement and indignation on my part—more noise and less thought.”

  Whatever their chances of being drafted, the students had a point, Kennan acknowledged, when they complained of having to register for military service at eighteen, while not being allowed to vote until they were twenty-one. Nor was there any excuse for sending draftees into wars “of obscure origin and rationale,” halfway around the world. If such conflicts were necessary, professionals ought to handle them. If there weren’t enough to do so, then the wars shouldn’t be fought. These were failures of policy, though, not of institutions. Democracy provided means of redress, even if not immediate. “But, the students will say, this is too slow. What you are talking about will take years. By that time, we will all be dead.” As usual, Kennan observed, “they exaggerate. I shall be dead. They probably will not.”

  And what of civil rights? In their sympathy for oppressed blacks, the students reminded Kennan of that shown for peasants by the Russian populists of the late nineteenth century. In neither case had the sympathizers known much about those with whom they sympathized. In both they viewed the oppressed as “helpless” and therefore expected of them no accountability for their own behavior: “The American Negro is not going to be aided by an approach which treats him only as object and not at all as subject.” Nor would apartheid’s sufferers benefit from American universities withdrawing their South African investments, as the student left was demanding. The time had come for the academy to reclaim its authority from those who had “no experience of its past, no expertise for its present, no responsibility for its future.”

  It was characteristic of radicals to abhor being outflanked. This had led, in Russia, to the nihilism that undermined the old order, thereby opening the way for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who allowed no defiance. That was not likely to happen in the United States, Kennan thought: with an end to the war, a phasing out of the draft, and the aging of students beyond thirty, things would settle down. But it was worth asking why the students had become radicalized in the first place.

  The answer, Kennan insisted, went well beyond the immediate targets of protest. For the students reflected the “sickly secularism” of society as a whole: its shallow convictions; its preoccupation with gadgetry; its disconnection from nature; its lack of understanding for “the slow powerful processes of organic growth.” These had created, in college youth, “an extreme disbalance in emotional and intellectual growth.” In the end, then, the culture itself would have to change, and here Kennan fell back on familiar jeremiads: the evils of automobiles, advertising, and environmental degradation; the corruption of politics; the possibility that the country itself might be too big to solve its problems. Were the students gloomy about the American future? “[T]hey haven’t seen anything yet. Not only do my apprehensions outclass theirs but my ideas of what would have to be done to put things to rights are far more radical than theirs.”63

  XII.

  “George was somewhat shrill,” Dilworth recalled, “at least we thought so, and our children thought so.” It went beyond that. Kennan was getting FBI reports on student and black protests throughout this period, and at one point suggested that the government suppress them, in a manner “answerable only to the voters at the next election but not to the press or even to the cour
ts.” There should even be special prisons for “political offenders,” to keep them apart from common criminals. “One may think what one will of the events of the last two or three years,” he wrote the master of Yale’s Branford College in 1970, asking to be removed from its roster of nonresident fellows, “but that they have impaired the ability of old and young to communicate with each other is something all of us, I think, must recognize.”64

  Kennan’s anxieties—extreme even for him—arose from fears for his own children as much as for his country. Grace’s marriage had broken up, and Joan’s was about to. Christopher had found adjustment to Groton difficult. Wendy, her father worried, was growing up too fast. “[W]e have failed badly, somewhere, in the way we have brought these children up and the sort of life we have offered them,” George complained after spending a Thanksgiving at the farm with slouchy, sullen teenagers—his two youngest, plus some of their friends. Soon they would be off to the great universities, which would quickly expose them to “the morbidity of the present student population. We are in a hell of a shape, here at home.”65

  Left to himself, he often claimed, he would have become an exile, even a hermit: the west coast of Scotland still beckoned. His family could hardly follow, though, so the next best choice was to avoid, as far as possible, “all confrontation with American life.... I must learn to live in it as though I did not live in it.” But could his children? That seemed implausible, given their need for education, employment, love, and families. How could he shield them, then, from “this false life,” as he had once described it, in which “innocence is lost before maturity is achieved”?66