George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  After all, people do live in the Soviet Union. For the mass of people there, life is not intolerable. The same is true in East Germany; the same is true in Hungary. It is not what these people would like; but, still, it is a way of living, and it does not mean the end of the experiment of human civilisation; it leaves the way open for further developments.

  Because there could be no recovery from a war fought with nuclear weapons, the United States should be “much bolder” in seeking their elimination, if necessary unilaterally. Was Kennan advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament? “Not all at once,” he replied, “or not without reciprocation, but if no one takes the lead in imposing self-restraint in the development of these weapons, we are never going to get any reduction of them by negotiation.”

  Did this mean that Western civilization was no longer worth defending? “Of course not,” Kennan retorted, but defense had to begin at home:

  Show me first an America which has successfully coped with the problems of crime, drugs, deteriorating educational standards, urban decay, pornography, and decadence of one sort or another—show me an America that has pulled itself together and is what it ought to be, then I will tell you how we are going to defend ourselves from the Russians. But as things are, I can see very little merit in organising ourselves to defend from the Russians the porno-shops in central Washington.

  This and much else in the interview was self-indulgent nonsense. It was Kennan’s confirmation of Parkinson’s Law: given space, he would fill it, wisely or not. Kennan the enthusiast, Kennan the entertainer, Kennan the old fool, had taken over yet again.

  But so had Kennan the prophet. We do not demand, of such seers, that they be logical, proportional, or brief. It’s their function to detect big dangers in little ones, to sense doom around each corner, to inflate admonitions, like balloons, to the bursting point. It’s also their lot to be derided, and in that respect Kennan’s bicentennial jeremiad could not have been better timed.36

  VI.

  “He’s on their side,” Paul Nitze wrote angrily on his copy of the Encounter interview, where Kennan had imagined the Red Army dispersing the Danish hippies. Meanwhile Kennan had taken on Nitze—without naming him—in his Foreign Affairs article: people like him required the image of an implacable adversary, to be displayed repeatedly like a ventriloquist’s dummy, until to question its reality seemed frivolous or treasonous. Nitze was “a very good friend,” Kennan later acknowledged, but he believed in “a fictitious and inhuman Soviet elite, whereas I am dealing with what I suspect to be, and think is likely to be, the real one.” “George and I have always been good friends,” Nitze confirmed. They had known each other since serving together on the Policy Planning Staff in the late 1940s and had never differed “except on matters of substance.” Each was convinced, their joint biographer has written, “that the other’s desired policies could lead the United States to the ultimate catastrophe.”37

  A week after Jimmy Carter’s election in November 1976, Nitze and a bipartisan group of fellow détente critics announced the formation of a new Committee on the Present Danger—an earlier one, in 1950, had rallied support for increases in defense spending after the Korean War broke out. Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger, they insisted, had underestimated the threat posed by the Soviet military buildup over the past decade. Carter had made it clear that he would not seek to reverse the trend. The committee would therefore, as loudly as possible, sound the alarm.38

  Kennan decided, that same week, to sound one of his own. He put aside his research on the Franco-Russian alliance and began writing a new book, to be called The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy. The title left no doubt about its purpose: it would be a critique of Nitze and the movement he had started. With Connie Goodman’s help—she had come back to work for Kennan in 1975—he finished it in three months. He dedicated it “[t]o my wife Annelise, whose lack of enthusiasm for this and my other excursions into public affairs has never detracted from the loyalty with which she supported these endeavors.”39

  The book was “a big disappointment,” Goodman acknowledged. The New York Times thought it insufficiently newsworthy even to review. Philip Geyelin, who did review it for The Washington Post, found Kennan to have a “lamentably loose grip” on policy practicalities. Could the United States really restrain its military-industrial complex and achieve energy independence and correct the corruptions that afflicted its culture? Reduce its global commitments to the defense of Western Europe, Japan, and—in a rare Kennan bow to domestic politics—Israel? Abandon “obsolescent and nonessential” positions in Panama, the Philippines, and South Korea? Refrain from involving itself elsewhere in the “third world,” especially southern Africa? Sympathize with Soviet dissidents while trusting the Soviet government? Acknowledge, with respect to nuclear weapons, that there was “simply no need for all this overkill,” that both sides could “give up four fifths of it tomorrow,” and that a unilateral reduction of 10 percent, “immediately and as an act of good faith,” would hurt neither of them?

  Each of these might be goals worth considering, but to propose them all without explaining how to achieve them—in what order, on what time scale, with what trade-offs—was to compile a catalog, not to suggest a strategy. The Cloud of Danger in this respect paralleled its author’s complaints, to the New York Times columnist James Reston, about Carter’s initial approaches to Moscow: that by pushing for deep cuts in strategic weaponry while simultaneously pressing the issue of human rights, his administration had already made “just about every mistake it could make.” Kennan’s mistake, in this hurriedly composed book, was to expand into 234 pages of large type what he had taken too many pages of small type to say in Encounter, without adding anything new. Meanwhile he was living with the frustration “of having no influence on the conduct of foreign policy and, at the same time, being invited and expected to talk about it on every conceivable occasion.”40

  One he could hardly avoid was the “X” article’s thirtieth anniversary. Not wanting to be caught off guard, as the Foreign Affairs editors had been five years earlier, the Council on Foreign Relations invited Kennan to reflect on the event—he appeared somewhat belatedly in November 1977—at the organization’s recently established Washington headquarters. Little was now left of Stalinism, he insisted: Brezhnev was a moderate, even conservative figure, “confidently regarded by all who know him as a man of peace.” That made it hard to see why détente had become so controversial in the United States. Without specifying Nitze and the Committee on the Present Danger, Kennan blamed those who “lose themselves in the fantastic reaches of what I might call military mathematics—the mathematics of possible mutual destruction in an age of explosively burgeoning weapons technology.”41

  Nitze had been a banker, Kennan later explained. He liked statistics: “He was happier when he could take a blank sheet and do calculations than he was [with] the imponderables.” Because an adversary’s intentions could never be quantified, Nitze dismissed them as irrelevant. Capabilities did count, because they could be counted. Kennan had characterized him correctly, Nitze acknowledged. “When people say ‘more,’ I want to know how much ‘more’? I can understand it a hell of a lot better if you can put it into numbers or calculus or something like that. Then you can be precise as to what you’re talking about.”42

  Kennan was being imprecise, in Nitze’s view, when he called Brezhnev a “man of peace.” How did Kennan know this? What if he turned out to be wrong? Even if he was right, what did Brezhnev mean by “peace” in the first place? Why, if his intentions were peaceful, was his military so compulsively acquiring weaponry? Kennan had always found it difficult to answer questions like these, because he relied so heavily on his intuitive sense that the Russians were not going to start a war. When an interviewer for The New York Times Magazine asked him in May 1978 whether he accepted the principle “better red than dead,” Kennan unwisely admitted that he did, although “I don’t think there’s any need for us to
be red, because I don’t think that war is the way the Russians would like to expand their power.”

  That was just the point, Nitze retorted, in an article the Times ran alongside Kennan’s interview. Soviet leaders did not want a war, but they did want the “strategic nuclear preponderance,” upon which “all other levers of pressure and influence depend.” If allowed to achieve it, they would indeed expand their power, while containing that of the United States and its allies. Their goal was a world in which they would be “the unchallenged hegemonic leaders.” It had been “little short of bizarre,” Kennan complained, that the Times had felt obliged to balance him with “a good dose of hard-line conventional wisdom from Nitze.” He could not understand why so many friends were now criticizing him “in this way.”43

  It got worse the following month when an enemy joined the chorus. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, expelled from the Soviet Union four years earlier, attacked Kennan in a widely publicized Harvard commencement address for having denied the applicability of morality in politics: “On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well-planned world strategy.” With Kennan calling for “unilateral disarmament,” even the youngest of Kremlin officials were laughing “at your political wizards.” Kennan heard of this only when his mail caught up with his sailboat, appropriately enough, in a Danish port. “Abruptly yanked back . . . from the harsh but simple realities of the sea,” he wandered disconsolately among a forest of “indifferent masts,” but as the evening wore on, “the annoyances of life ashore, about which for the moment one could do so little, faded from consciousness. This, I suppose, is the therapeutic quality of cruising in small sailing craft.”44

  Kennan had criticized the Committee on the Present Danger “at length and with care,” Eugene V. Rostow, one of the organization’s cofounders and close friend of Nitze, wrote in The Yale Law Journal that summer. But as Kennan’s Memoirs had shown, he had long suffered inner conflicts “about himself, his dream world, his work, his goals, and his relationship to the American nature and culture.” These had brought him “perilously close to preaching that we don’t really need a foreign and defense policy at all.” He had, in this way, outdone the Old Testament prophets, for however sharply they scolded the ancient Israelites, “not even Jeremiah despaired of their survival.” Kennan had no sense of what it would take to ensure that of the West, because his mind had “never moved along mathematical lines, and never will.” He was “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”45

  Having been called many things but never before an extraterrestrial, Kennan wrestled in his diary with how to respond. “Blast the stupidities? Expend, in this way, such authority as I possess?” In the end he wrote a long letter, typed it himself, and sent it off late in November 1978 to Reston. “I shall soon be 75 years of age,” he pointed out. “[M]y means and energies are obviously limited. For me to try to involve myself in public disputes with Paul Nitze and others would merely mean to get myself chewed up in controversy, and I would soon lose what little value I may have as a force in public opinion.”

  He then went on to show how the skills of an impressionist or a poet—if not an alien—could be valuable. He did so by imagining himself in the position of Brezhnev and his closest associates, most of whom were approaching Kennan’s age. They might “like to have everything under such perfect control that they could address themselves exclusively to schemes for our early undoing,” as the Committee on the Present Danger had suggested, “but the fact is: they don’t.” Whatever their self-confidence, it had to be vastly overshadowed by their fears

  of alarming declines in the rates of increase of national product and labor efficiency; of poor morale, expressing itself in cynicism, absenteeism and drunkenness in great portions of their population; of a developing labor shortage of truly spectacular dimensions; of disturbing demographic changes; of an extremely serious erosion of their moral authority and political position in Eastern Europe; of a Chinese ideological competition that threatens to deprive them of their position of leadership among the Marxist forces of the world; of a Chinese military competition that threatens them with a two-front war (the bête noire of every Russian strategist of all time) in the case of complications with the West; of their virtual isolation among the great advanced nations of the world; of the forthcoming difficulties of succession within their own party.

  Now they had something else to worry about: the unexpected election of a Polish pope. To claim, in the light of all this, that the old men in the Kremlin could want anything more than to hang on to what they had was “to distort out of all verisimilitude their nature, their situation, and their interests.”

  But, Nitze and his friends would protest, weren’t the Soviets busily exploiting “third world” opportunities? Had they not moved into Angola in the wake of the Portuguese empire’s collapse? What about the “horn of Africa,” where the superpowers were competing for influence in Somalia and Ethiopia? Or Afghanistan, where a Marxist revolution had taken place earlier that year? In fact, Kennan insisted, in each of these situations local Marxists had exploited the Soviet Union, whose leaders knew that if they failed to aid these causes, the Cubans or the Chinese would, and their own credibility would suffer. Far from opportunities, these were liabilities, depleting strengths needed to maintain the status quo.

  Kennan was now, he reminded Reston, “the patriarch.” No one else living, not even the Kremlin’s long-serving foreign minister Andrey Gromyko, could draw on his half-century of diplomatic experience. He would not claim, in all respects, to speak for the dead—Bohlen, in particular, had “never encountered a statement of mine to which he could not take some exception”—but his late Foreign Service colleagues would share, he believed, his astonishment at how little respect their kind of professionalism commanded in the face of current frivolities, abuses, and misrepresentations: “There, Scottie, I have chosen you as the object for what I hope will be my last statement on Soviet-American relations. Make what you will of it.”46

  No one, not even Reston, made much of it at the time. But when Soviet archives opened after the Cold War ended, they showed Kennan’s impression of a frightened, overstretched gerontocracy, desperately trying to regain the initiative lost by its own ineptitude dating back at least as far as the invasion of Czechoslovakia, to be much closer to reality than Nitze’s calculation of a purposefully rising hege-mon. The difference, to oversimplify, was between what and why. Nitze could see what the Brezhnev regime was doing and from this he concluded, inaccurately, that he knew why. Kennan sensed why, and so worried much less about what. Nitze seemed right in the short run, because only the long run could confirm Kennan’s claim. But, with the passage of time, it did.47

  VII.

  “[I]t isn’t easy being George Kennan,” his friend Dick Ullman once observed. “I’ve always thought that that was a heavy weight to bear.” Kennan seemed genuinely reluctant to get into policy debates, but he rarely resisted the opportunity. He appeared to regard himself as “an asset to be treasured,” a historical figure whose life needed to be documented as thoroughly as possible. He was keeping more complete diaries now than ever before, and he had his research assistants—one was Ullman’s wife, Yoma—filling scrapbooks with Kennan-related newspaper clippings in multiple languages from all over the world. “I’ll bet you,” Ullman commented, “that there is no Nitze scrapbook.”48

  Yoma Ullman was one of several assistants who worked with Kennan on his Franco-Russian alliance book. Connie Goodman, who still handled his correspondence, was another: she helped Kennan devise an elaborate system of color-coded note cards—pink for the French, blue for the Russians—which his color-blindness at times caused him to confuse. Mimi Bull, who had been Goodman’s college roommate, also worked for Kennan in Princeton and later in Austria. “I was in awe and frankly terrified to begin with,” she recalled, but soon “[t]he austere scholar diplomat relaxed and became a gifted raconteur with a delight in the absurd.” She found him, on one occasi
on in Vienna, sporting an old beret, a new pencil moustache, and a radiant smile, “pleased with the wealth of material he realizes is here.”49

  In addition to the European and American archives he visited, Kennan returned to the Soviet Union several times during the 1970s to research the foreign policies of the last tsars, a privilege granted to few Western scholars. He learned to request specific documents, identified from previously published histories, whereupon the archivists would please him by producing entire files, with the explanation that they hadn’t had time to find the individual items he had requested: “They can loosen up when they want to.” They mostly did, for with Kennan’s criticisms of dissidents, he was back in favor in the Kremlin. Pravda reviewed The Cloud of Danger even if The New York Times didn’t, pointing out that his views had evolved “in the direction of good sense.”50

  Kennan’s “retirement” from the Institute for Advanced Study would normally have left him on half salary without the use of an office, but the trustees were well aware, Dick Dilworth recalled, that he had been “infinitely more productive and certainly more prominent” than anyone else there. So they allowed Professor-Emeritus Kennan to continue as a fully active professor in all but name, exempting him only from faculty meetings. To Kennan’s embarrassment, the arrangement required raising the funds needed to support him, but the Institute found them easily enough from sources including Dilworth himself, the Rockefeller family, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and because of his interest in nuclear issues, the legendary Omaha investor Warren Buffett.51

  Continuing to write history, therefore, met his continuing obligation to the Institute, but Kennan still hoped to connect his research, in some way, to contemporary affairs. It was also, his friend Cy Black observed, a kind of hobby: “It is fun for him. It keeps him busy.” Goodman agreed: “He enjoyed this so much more than any other work.” Being Kennan, of course, he could hardly have fun without feeling guilty: his book had become “a pretence,” he told himself as he neared completion of his first volume, “an excuse for existence.” He should have recognized it years ago as “a quixotic undertaking.”52