The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890, came out from the Princeton University Press in the fall of 1979. It was not as meticulously documented as Kennan’s volumes on early Soviet-American relations, but at over four hundred pages it was an impressive performance for a man of seventy-five. Paul Kennedy, a cheeky young historian less than half Kennan’s age, congratulated him in The Washington Post for his “mature, warm, beautifully written book,” although it was “not a little questionable” that Kennan had neglected the French military archives, the Bismarck family papers, and the monographs of Professors Hillgruber and Mueller-Link. Kennedy acknowledged, however, that these were points “about which the general reader will care little.” One with a particular interest in Bismarck confirmed this. “I have enjoyed reading your book,” Kissinger wrote Kennan. “Not that it fails to be depressing. If even Bismarck could not prevent what he clearly foresaw, what chance does the modern period have? That is the real nightmare.”53
“Bismarck did all that he could, in his outwardly rough but essentially not inhumane way,” Kennan replied. “What surprises me more is the failure of our own generation, with the warning image of the atom bomb before it, to learn from his example.” This, of course, had been Kennan’s point all along. Had he been born only a few years earlier, he noted in his introduction, he might have been among the millions of young men who fought in World War I. He would have done so, he imagined, with the same “delirious euphoria” most of them had felt: that an era of “self-sacrifice, adventure, valor, and glory” lay ahead. Having had the luck to avoid their experiences, he wanted now to focus in detail on the statesmen of that age, for in them “we can see, not entirely but in larger degree than is generally supposed, ourselves.”54
“I don’t think it explains anything,” Black grumbled about The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order, and he had a point. Kennan had enjoyed writing the book too much to make its message clear. He spent months, for example, tracking down information on a relatively minor figure, the French-Russian double agent Elie de Cyon, not because his role was in any way critical to the coming of the war, but because Kennan relished this kind of detective work. It was an all-weather form of recreation: the scholarly equivalent of summer sailing. But it left Kennan with another volume to write if he was even going to get to the alliance of 1894—and that event would still precede, by two decades, the outbreak of the conflict whose origins he had meant to explain, and whose consequences he had hoped to assess.55
Kennan had again rambled, as in his Encounter interview and in The Cloud of Danger. He produced, this time, a wonderfully readable history—it could almost be a novel, he thought56—but its literary and scholarly strengths made it ineffective as prophecy. Despite the pleasures it held for Kennan, using the past to instruct the future was a Sisyphean task: as his sources proliferated, his energy faded, and the distractions of the present, as always, demanded comment.
VIII.
Détente collapsed completely during the last half of 1979. After years of negotiations, Carter and a visibly enfeebled Brezhnev were able to sign the SALT II arms control treaty in Vienna in June, but a rapid succession of unexpected crises left it languishing in the U.S. Senate. The first occurred in August, when a CIA source leaked the news that the Soviet Union had placed a combat brigade in Cuba. Carter demanded its removal but had to back down after learning that the unit had been there since the missile crisis of 1962. He had never before seen “such dilettantism, amateurism and sheer bungling,” Kennan complained: it had been “an artificially-manufactured domestic-political event if there ever was one.” What he didn’t know was that he knew the manufacturer. Nitze had helped arrange the leak with a view to delaying, perhaps preventing, the treaty’s ratification.57
The second crisis broke on November 4, when Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six hostages, with the subsequent approval of the Islamist government that had recently deposed Washington’s longtime ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Furious at this violation of diplomatic immunity, recalling his own five and a half months of internment in Nazi Germany, angry that the Carter administration had let almost four months go by without securing the Americans’ release, Kennan told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 27, 1980, that the United States should simply declare war on Iran. This would allow detaining Iranians within its boundaries, while enlisting the aid of a neutral country in arranging an exchange of internees, as Switzerland had done for the Bad Nauheim “hostages” thirty-eight years earlier.
What made Kennan’s testimony particularly striking, however, was his equally emphatic insistence that the Carter administration had overreacted to the third and most serious crisis that had developed in recent months: the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979. Eleven years earlier Kennan had criticized the Johnson administration’s tepid response to Czechoslovakia’s occupation. Now, though, in the face of Carter’s more vigorous retaliations—withdrawing the SALT II treaty from the Senate, embargoing grain and technology shipments to the U.S.S.R., calling for military draft registration, increasing defense spending, and demanding a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics—Kennan claimed that the president had gone too far. Brezhnev had sent troops into Afghanistan in a desperate effort to save the imperiled Marxist government there, not—as Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had argued—with a view to beginning an offensive aimed at controlling the Persian Gulf. The Soviets would soon see that they had made a mistake, would be looking for a way out, and the United States should help them find one.58
There was a compartmentalized logic in Kennan’s positions. Iran had, under a strict interpretation of international law, committed an act of war against the United States. The U.S.S.R. had indeed acted from a position of weakness, not strength, in Afghanistan. But Kennan’s grand strategic logic—the ability to see how contents mix after compartments are opened—eluded him altogether in this instance. What would the implications have been of the first formal declaration of war by anybody since 1945? What was to prevent escalation? How might Kremlin leaders respond to the prospect of American military action in a country bordering their own and Afghanistan? What conspiracies might they see in the rise of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland, the rapturous reception accorded Pope John Paul II on his first visit back after his election, and in the Polish-born Brzezinski’s recent well-publicized trip to the Khyber Pass? It was not at all clear that Kennan’s method of rescuing the hostages would reassure the aging officials in Moscow who now controlled half of the world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Kennan always had trouble keeping his emotions apart from his strategies, but as he grew older, the problem got worse. He commanded, as an elder statesman, increasing respect: there was supposed to be some kind of connection, he knew, between advanced age and wisdom. But “as one to whom these imputations would presumably be applicable, I am bound to say that this theory is at best complicated, and at worst questionable.”59 He had fewer contemporaries, now, who could insist that he reconcile his contradictions before publicly displaying them. Bohlen had most frequently played that role, but so too had Acheson, Lippmann, and Harriman—the last still living and selectively donating, but in no condition to set Kennan right, as he used to do in Moscow, on the limits of policy feasibility. Nitze, a personal friend, was a public adversary who delighted in pouncing (or having associates like Eugene Rostow pounce) on Kennan’s lapses. No one had asked, with respect to his Encounter interview, The Cloud of Danger, the Bismarck book, or his remarkable appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “George, how will all of this hang together?”
But in October 1980 one old friend tried. With events in Iran and Afghanistan having produced so much “confusion, bewilderment, and fuzzy thinking,” Elbridge Durbrow wrote, he could not help but recall “how realistic, sound and prophetic” Kennan had been in the “long telegram” and the “X”
article. “Practically everything you predicted has transpired,” but hardly anyone in government was even aware of this. So did each new administration have to learn all over again “that the Soviet leaders since Lenin have not fundamentally changed their basic aims, goals, and methods of operation”? It was a polite way of asking, Durbrow later explained, “what the devil is the difference? I see them as still the same enemies we always had. Why does George see [them] differently?”60
“Mr. Carter’s performance is only a bit of history,” Kennan replied grimly on November 10, six days after Reagan’s landslide victory. Foreign policy would now be in the hands of Nitze, Scoop Jackson, and other hard-liners. There would be no limits to the arms race, or to preparations for a military showdown. Kennan had tried, since the end of the last war, to find a way of dealing with the Soviet Union that would not require a new war: “[T]oday I have to recognize the final and irreparable failure of this effort.” How all of this could please Durbrow—himself a hard-liner—Kennan could not understand, “but if it does—my congratulations. It is a small consolation to know that even if one cannot, one’s self, see hope in a situation, one has friends who can.”61
IX.
Kennan was just back from attending the annual meeting of Pour le Mérite, an elite eighteenth-century Prussian military order revived by the West German government to celebrate civilian achievements in the arts and sciences. He had become one of its thirty foreign members in 1976, regarding the honor at least as seriously as his membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The German organization combined his love of ceremony with his affinity for that culture, and despite the fact that attendance required flying across the Atlantic instead of simply slipping into New York, he rarely missed its meetings. The 1980 convocation took place in Regensburg in late September, after which the Kennans went to Garmisch, where, on October 1, George was to give the principal address at the Second World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies.
Characteristically, he had put off finishing it until the last moment, so while waiting for it to be typed, he sat wearily on a park bench in the fading afternoon sunlight, envying other old people around him who seemed free of such weighty responsibilities. Could he ever be like them? Would anything come of it, if he tried, apart from physical and intellectual decay? Thirteen hundred people were present when he rose to address them that evening, and just as he came to the passage of which he was proudest, a woman in the audience let out a piercing shriek, as if to herald what he was about to say—which was what he wished he could say, simultaneously, to leaders in both Washington and Moscow:
For the love of God, of your children, and of the civilization to which you belong, cease this madness. You have a duty not just to the generation of the present—you have a duty to civilization’s past, which you threaten to render meaningless, and to its future, which you threaten to render nonexistent. You are mortal men. You are capable of error. You have no right to hold in your hands—there is no one wise enough and strong enough to hold in his hands—destructive powers sufficient to put an end to civilized life on a great portion of our planet. No one should wish to hold such powers. Thrust them from you. The risks you might thereby assume are not greater—could not be greater—than those which you are now incurring for us all.
The outburst, he later determined, had no connection to the lecture. But the Slavicists, expecting neither a shriek nor a prophet, responded with only polite applause. And so Kennan was left “as uncertain of the suitability (not the truth) of what I had had to say as I had been before saying it.”62
TWENTY-FOUR
A Precarious Vindication: 1980–1990
KENNAN HAD NEVER HEARD OF THE ALBERT EINSTEIN PEACE PRIZE when he got a phone call on March 9, 1981, informing him that he had won it. The prize was a new one, selection committee chairman Norman Cousins explained, established only a year earlier by the trustees of Einstein’s estate. Kennan would be the second recipient. “I was, of course, in one way pleased over this news—a pleasure not diminished, I must confess, although not mainly occasioned, by the fact that the award carries with it a $50,000 check.” He and Einstein had, after all, once been “colleagues of sorts” at the Institute for Advanced Study, even if they had never spoken. But in Kennan’s continuing struggle between scholarship and prophecy, the award might tip the balance irrevocably in the latter direction. Accepting it would imply a commitment “to do what I can to bring people to their senses and to halt a wholly unnecessary and infinitely dangerous drift towards war—and all of this at a time when I would like to finish my historical study, really retire, work around the house and garden, etc. Oh dear!”1
While researching his second volume on the Franco-Russian alliance in Moscow the following month, Kennan received two other unexpected accolades. Jack Matlock, the American chargé d’affaires, gave a dinner at which he praised his guest in more generous terms than Kennan could ever remember hearing from anyone in government. The toast made up “for all the slights and rebuffs I have had from . . . J[ohn] Foster Dulles on down.” Then at a luncheon the next day, Georgi Arbatov, the influential director of the USA and Canada Institute, offered an equally handsome tribute from the Soviet side, which also had not always passed out “posies and compliments.” Moved by these honors, Kennan came home resolved to make the most of the Einstein award: “May God give me the insight to retain, in the light of my weaknesses, my humility, and the strength to do something useful in the remaining time.”2
The ceremony took place in Washington on May 19 before an audience including members of the new Reagan administration as well as the longtime Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Kennan used the occasion not to thunder dire warnings, as at Garmisch, or to descend into details, as in his recent historical writing, or to redesign America, as he had tried to do in The Cloud of Danger and in the Encounter interview. Nor did he contradict himself, as in his puzzling congressional testimony the previous year. Rather, he spoke softly, reasoned strategically, and put forward a single striking proposal, the logic of which swept aside conventional wisdoms almost effectively as the “long telegram” had done three and a half decades earlier.
Kennan began with the question he and Oppenheimer had often posed to each other: why, if nuclear weapons were so destructive, did there have to be so many of them? With the megatonnage of more than a million Hiroshima bombs between them, Soviet and American arsenals were “fantastically redundant to the purpose in question,” which was supposed to be deterrence. The superpowers had no excuse for holding themselves hostage to such devastation, along with the rest of the northern hemisphere. Their leaders seemed hypnotized, “like men in a dream, like lemmings heading for the sea, like the children of Hamlin marching blindly behind their Pied Piper.”
However well intentioned, the SALT agreements of the 1970s had worsened the situation by exaggerating the importance of intricate balances, so that even slight shifts could set off clamorous alarms. What was needed, instead, was an acknowledgment, on all sides, of lethal redundancies. This should then lead to
an immediate across-the-boards reduction by 50 percent of the nuclear arsenals now being maintained by the two superpowers; a reduction affecting in equal measure all forms of the weapon, strategic, medium-range, and tactical, as well as their means of delivery: all this to be implemented at once and without further wrangling among the experts, and to be subject to such national means of verification as now lie at the disposal of the two powers.
A 50 percent cut would be more symbolic than systematic, but it would be a start. For if the superpowers could accept that arbitrary number, then why continue haggling over the complex calculations that had stalemated SALT? Why not cut the arsenals by half again, and then by half after that, until nuclear stockpiles were approaching the point at which, as President Reagan had recently and “very wisely” said, “neither side threatens the survival of the other”? Kennan concluded his address with an exhortation from Bertrand Russell, endorsed by Einstein just
before his death: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”3
I.
“It was a radical proposal from a figure not known for radicalism,” Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer aptly observed. Certainly it was no small thing for Kennan to have enlisted Einstein, Russell, and Reagan in an attack on SALT, the centerpiece of détente. His speech was not just a challenge to orthodoxy: it was a scrambling of orthodoxies, and it produced surprising responses. Nitze, when asked the next day, acknowledged that a 50 percent reduction might make sense, provided the cuts started with the heaviest multiple-warhead ICBMs. Eugene V. Rostow, who in 1978 had dismissed Kennan as “not an earthling,” now told The New York Times that “[w]e are taking a careful look at [his] proposal.” Reagan had nominated Rostow to run the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and at his confirmation hearing a month later, he suggested replacing the acronym SALT—Strategic Arms Limitation Talks—with START—Strategic Arms Reduction Talks: “Such proposals have been made from time to time—notably by Paul H. Nitze in 1971 and by George Kennan a few weeks ago.... No American administration could reject such a possibility out of hand.”4
So how did Kennan, Nitze, and Reagan (for whom Rostow was speaking) wind up suddenly on almost the same page? The answer had to do with what the SALT process had become. Nitze had indeed proposed cuts of roughly 50 percent in ICBM launchers during the initial stages of the SALT I talks—the date was 1969, not 1971—on the assumption that the word “limitation” in the acronym meant reduction. His idea went nowhere, though, and “arms control” came to be seen as a way of stabilizing existing numbers of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. By the time Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty in 1979, its provisions had become so arcane that only experts could understand them. That allowed Nitze, himself an expert but now also a vociferous critic, to claim that technocrats were squandering American assets while the Soviets were surging ahead. It ought to be possible, with a new and simpler approach, to do better.5
George F. Kennan : an American life Page 86