Richard Ullman, now a Princeton professor for whom Kennan had been a mentor, found it fascinating that he still deferred to Harriman: “I’d never seen [Kennan] with anybody else with whom he had that junior relationship.” Ullman watched it crack, briefly but revealingly, at a dinner Kaysen arranged shortly after Alliluyeva’s arrival. Harriman had been eager to meet her, but she found his questions about her father intimidating and refused to say much. Richard Holbrooke, Harriman’s feisty young aide, came gallantly to her rescue: “Governor, you are the most impossible man to work with I have ever encountered.” “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve said that,” Kennan burst out. “I’ve always felt that. Averell, you really were impossible!”24
Now, though, he needed Harriman’s help, and the old man had not mellowed. “I always distrust statements [like] ‘of the necessity . . . there can be no doubt whatsoever,’ ” he grumbled to his secretary after reading Kennan’s letter about the new institute. Why not expand existing centers at Harvard or Columbia? If a Washington site really was necessary, he advised Kennan, then “[t]he School of Advanced International Studies, started by Paul Nitze and associated with Johns Hopkins, might be a good home.” But Kennan did not like this idea. “I am naturally disappointed,” he responded to Harriman. The need for a Washington program that would not be an adjunct to something else was clear to “all the leading authorities in our country. I know that to find the money for it is not going to be an easy task.”25
That proved to be correct, but with the help of two energetic young historians, James Billington (later Librarian of Congress) and S. Frederick Starr (later president of Oberlin College), Kennan was able to get a small “Institute for Advanced Russian Studies” established at the new Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a congressionally mandated memorial to the former president, housed in the old Smithsonian building on the Washington Mall. “[A]s you will see from this stationery,” Kennan wrote Harriman again at the end of 1975, the new institute “bears, at the insistence of my younger colleagues, my own name and that of my great-uncle—the one who did all the travel in Siberia and wrote the book on your father.” The Kennan Institute still needed help: might Harriman purchase a “modest” building nearby, to be known as “Harriman House,” at which it could accommodate visiting scholars?26
Harriman did make a contribution, but the idea of a modest house named for him within the Kennan Institute carried no greater appeal than the idea of putting the latter in Nitze’s school had carried for Kennan. He approached Harriman once more in 1978, asking for help in raising a $3–5 million endowment, but this time got a flat rejection: “My prior commitments are such that I cannot give the substantial sum that you speak of in your letter to your Institute.” Kennan should approach the industrialist Armand Hammer, taking care to “give his name [sufficient] recognition to excite his interest.” Four years later Harriman announced that he and his family were giving Columbia University $11.5 million to endow its Russian Institute, which would henceforth be the “W. Averell Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.”27
Knowing Harriman’s ego, Kennan might have expected this. Having one of his own, he did not. Despite the two Kennans for whom his institute was named, the younger one had hoped through it, he later admitted, “to ‘institutionalize’ myself”—and had been bold enough to seek Harriman’s help. Harriman liked the concept, but thought that a different person deserved the distinction. It was a contest of the vanities Kennan could not win. If he had been willing to name his institute for Harriman, the Princeton historian Cy Black speculated, “he might have gotten the money. But a man like Harriman doesn’t give it to Kennan’s institute.”28
Kennan wondered, on getting the bad news, whether he should recommend liquidating his institute altogether, “the shattering of one more dream.” In the end, though, he agreed to go on the Harriman Institute’s advisory board, Harriman’s wife Pamela went on his, and the Kennan Institute became the primary Washington center for research on Russia, as well as on the non-Russian territories of the former Soviet Union. Fund-raising was always difficult, though, and so it was never able to separate itself, as Kennan had hoped it might, from the Wilson Center. His institute remained “beautiful, valuable, full of promise, but, like a young lovely Victorian governess without fortune or family, at the mercy of the one who gives her meals, a roof, and a pittance of salary.”29
V.
The Kennans celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary on September 11, 1971. Their children surprised them with a dinner followed by a ball, featuring engraved invitations, guests brought in from all over, and an orchestra playing George’s Dixieland favorites. “They organized it all by themselves, without a word to us. . . . All Princeton was impressed.” Mortality, however, was intimating itself more regularly now. Chip Bohlen died after a long illness on the first day of January 1974. He was “closest to me in professional experience and interest,” George wrote his widow, Avis. “I find it quite impossible to believe that he, who was so much a part of my world, is really gone. Perhaps, in one way, he is not.”30
Six weeks later Kennan turned seventy, thereby becoming, in line with Institute for Advanced Study procedure, a professor-emeritus. To mark the occasion, he composed a poem, which he read aloud at his birthday dinner. It sounded playful, but it was not casual: he reworked it several times before he was satisfied, and then ensured its survival by saving it in several locations. As if to humiliate future biographers, he compressed much of himself within just fifteen stanzas.
When the step becomes slow, and the wit becomes slower,
And memory fails, and the hearing declines;
When skies become clouded, and clouds become lower,
And you find yourself talking poetical lines;
When the path that you tread becomes steeper and darker;
And the question seems no longer whether, but when—
Then, my friend, you should look for the biblical marker,
The sign by the road that reads: Three Score and Ten;
At this point you’ll observe, if you care to look closely,
You’re no longer alone on the highway of life;
For there trudges behind you, and glowers morosely,
A bearded old man with a curious knife;
At first you defy this absurd apparition
(For it’s old Father Time, with his glass and his scythe);
You swear you were never in better condition—
The body more jaunty, the spirit more blythe;
And you laugh in his face, and you tell the old joker:
“You must be mistaken; I’m feeling just fine,”
But the wretched old scarecrow just picks up his poker
And gives you a jab and says: “Get back in line”;
So you swallow your pride, and you march with your brothers;
You do all the things you’re instructed to do;
But you’re sure this compulsion, just right for the others,
Could not have been really intended for you;
And you turn to the thought of your erstwhile successes—
How brilliant, how charming, how worthy of fame;
’Til a small voice protests and the conscience confesses
What an ass you once were and how empty the claim;
Then the ghosts of the past find you out in your sadness,
And gather about, and point fingers of shame—
The ghosts of stupidities spawned by your madness—
The ghosts of injustices done in your name;
And you grieve with remorse for the sins you’ve committed:
The fingers that roamed and the tongue that betrayed;
But you grieve even more for the ones you omitted:
The nectar untasted, the record unplayed.
But the cut most unkind, and the cruelest teacher,
Is the feeling you have when, as sometimes occurs,
The wandering eye of some heavenly creature
>
Encounters your own, and your own catches hers;
And you conjure up dreams too delightful to mention,
And you primp and you pose, ’til it’s suddenly seen
That the actual object of all her attention—
This burning, voluptuous female attention—
Is a fellow behind you who’s all of nineteen.
So you swallow your pride, and you scurry for cover
In the solaces characteristic of age:
You tell the same anecdotes over and over,
Forget the same names, and reread the same page;
And at length you concede, though with dim satisfaction,
That it’s not on yourself that your peace now depends—
That for this you must look to a different reaction:
To the weary indulgence of children and friends.
Yet, if given the chance to retread, as you’ve known it,
The ladder of life—to begin at the spot
Where the story picked up, and before you had blown it,
Would you take it, dear friends?
I suspect you would not;
So let us take heart; we are none of us friendless;
And fill up your glasses, and raise them again
To the chance that an interval, seemingly endless,
Will ensue
Before you
Become Three Score and Ten.
Kennan also resolved, with posterity in mind, to keep his diary more conscientiously: “An occasional hour of intimate reflection will be no less useful—and have no smaller chances of usefulness—than anything else I might be doing,” he wrote on the first day of January 1975. “And there is so little time left in which the real ‘me,’ as distinct from the mind alone or the various things I seem to mean to other people, can be expressed.”31
A week later he was sitting under the great vault in Washington’s National Cathedral—where his own memorial service would be held thirty years later—thinking “highly egoistic and improper, but very human thoughts” while the late Walter Lippmann’s friends eulogized him. Why had Lippmann had more influence than he? Kennan’s own education had been “broader, if less deep,” his mind “no less powerful,” his stylistic ability “fully as great,” his insights “bolder, more penetrating and more prophetic,” but his impact on American public life was “undetectable.” So why not give up punditry altogether and concentrate on history? “Will it make any difference, several decades later, whether what I wrote about . . . was my own dreary time or the period of the 1880s?”32
Kennan spent the spring and summer of 1975 researching the Franco-Russian alliance in European archives. “I feel detached,” he wrote late in April, just prior to the final collapse of South Vietnam. “I have done what little I could.” He seemed strangely connected, however, to the departed. Walt Butterworth, another Foreign Service colleague and, in recent years, a Princeton neighbor, had also recently died. But Kennan dreamed, one night in Vienna, of a “visitation” from Butterworth, who
embraced me affectionately, we both being fully aware of the fact of his deadness, and allowed himself to be assured by me in the absurd, stammering language of dreams (for we were both much moved) of our continued companionship of the spirit, death notwithstanding. What to make of this I know not.... But that there was something in it more than just what is of this world—was clear.
Two weeks later, on a visit to Hermann Hatzfeldt’s Crottorf, Kennan was left to work alone, as was his preference, in the castle’s great library.
[I]t is of course haunted—not in a particularly sinister sense, although it does have a whiff of death about it, in all its loveliness. One is somehow aware of a recent, lingering, still significant presence. But then, I thought to myself, perhaps I, who work here and love the place and respond to its atmosphere, will join the company of spirits (or is it one, alone?) who inhabit it.
Until then, he needed “to quiet down, grow up, act my age, gather my strength,” and it struck him that if he made the effort, “God will help me.” Even God, though, would find it difficult “to teach this old dog new tricks.” For as soon as he joined the company of others, “the old fool—Kennan the enthusiast—Kennan the entertainer—takes over before I can control him, and we are off again.”33
While in Bonn early in May, Kennan walked through a hotel lounge, found the movie version of South Pacific—dubbed into German—playing on television, and was “suddenly obliged—to my own amazement and amusement—to repress tears.” It was a relic from a lost civilization: “these fresh, boyish images of American sailors, the harmless inanities of the plot, the heroine’s belief in a happy future.” He could not say, with Oppenheimer, “Dammit, I happen to love this country,” but “I can say that I loved, and love in memory, something of what the country once was.... [T]he young will never know it.”34
Kennan was in Helsinki in July 1975, on the eve of the great thirty-five-nation conference, but his mind was on the archival remains of a late-nineteenth-century world a lifetime removed from his own: “Yet all of this has now faded into the shadows.” Empires had disappeared. Names once “mountain-high in grandeur” were now known “only to a handful of historians like myself.” Stepping out onto the streets, where preparations were under way to welcome the notables of his era, Kennan could see that within another lifetime they too would be “carried off with the wind into the obscurity of time.” The present could only be captured “as in some old photograph, never to be recaptured as a living reality. Such is the dizziness, with relation to time, that can, on occasion, seize the historian.”35
God had not yet induced in Kennan the habit—also once recommended by Acheson—of “taciturnity.” That became clear in an interview Kennan granted to the writer and broadcaster George Urban, which, when published in the September 1976 issue of the journal Encounter, filled thirty-three of its pages. “[T]ried to read it,” Kennan admitted on the day his copy arrived, but “found it much too long, and so boring that I went to sleep, literally, before I could finish it.” As with other Kennan pronouncements over the years, however, his critics found this one anything but boring.
He began with a bicentennial prediction for the United States: “This country is destined to succumb to failures which cannot be other than tragic and enormous in their scope.” They would arise from the familiar evils of industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, secularization, and environmental degradation. The only remedy would be “a much simpler form of life, a much smaller population, a society in which the agrarian component is far greater in relation to the urban component.... In this sense I am, I suppose, an 18th-century person.” Short of coercion, there was no way a nation the size of the United States could manage its affairs without never-ending compromises among self-centered constituencies. But if that was the only way the country could govern itself, then “this places certain limitations on what it can hope to do in the field of foreign affairs.” Its policy should be “a very restrained one.”
Had Kennan become, then, an isolationist? Not if that meant abruptly curtailing existing commitments. It should be possible, though, to reduce these gradually, with a view to “leaving other people alone and expect[ing] largely to be left alone by them.” Would that not consign European allies to Soviet domination? Perhaps they deserved it, Kennan replied: they had grown far too self-indulgent under American protection. While recently cruising in the Baltic, he had happened upon a Danish youth festival “swarming with hippies—motorbikes, girlfriends, drugs, pornography, drunkenness, noise—it was all there. I looked at this mob and thought how one company of robust Russian infantry would drive it out of town.”
But with an ideology “at least 70–80 years out of date,” Kremlin leaders would not know what to do with Western Europe if they were to take it over. And if the moderate socialists of the region ever summoned the resolve to end their countries’ dependence on the United States, the Soviet Union would have no plausible justification for continuing
to control Eastern Europe. Disarray, therefore, “cuts both ways.”
Kennan’s most startling comments were on nuclear weapons. People would always find excuses to fight one another, so they had to be prevented “from playing with the worst kind of toys.”
This is why I feel that the great weapons of mass-destruction—and nuclear arms are not the only conceivable ones—should never be in human hands, that it would be much better to go back, symbolically speaking, to bows and arrows which at least do not destroy nature. I have no sympathy with the man who demands an eye for an eye in a nuclear conflict.
Compared to the ecological and demographic consequences of a nuclear conflagration, Soviet domination of Western Europe would be only “a minor catastrophe.”
George F. Kennan : an American life Page 84