Two days after that, Kennan spoke to a predominantly Catholic audience in Davenport, Iowa, just ninety miles northwest of Eureka. He celebrated “[t]his habitat, the natural world around us, . . . the house the Lord gave us to live in.” No one had a right to deny it, “with all its beauty and fertility and marvelousness,” to future generations. The very existence of nuclear weapons endangered it. The situation would not change until Americans came to see themselves and their supposed Soviet adversaries together as “God’s creatures,” embodying “the struggle between good and evil, which is the fundamental mark of all humankind.”26
“I fire my arrows into the air,” Kennan had written in a philosophical moment before Reagan took office. “Sometimes, they strike nothing; sometimes, they strike the wrong things; sometimes one or another of them strikes a bell and rings it, loud and clear.” Despite wishful thinking in The New York Times, none of these categories fits the Kennan-Reagan relationship: there was never a direct dialogue between them. But arrows fired from different points, at different times, by very different archers, can nonetheless converge.27
IV.
“Louis and I have been talking, pleasantly, widely, and since we always ended up with the dilemmas, uselessly,” Kennan noted on October 1, 1982, while visiting friends in Switzerland. Louis J. Halle served under Kennan and Nitze on the Policy Planning Staff, had written the best early history of the Cold War, and had taught for years at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. A close observer of Kennan, he recorded the conversation more carefully, for it helped to explain “a public advocacy that does not, to my mind, stand up to reality.”
Could two men pointing pistols at one another trust a “no first use” declaration? Kennan had no answer. Wasn’t nuclear deterrence keeping the peace, so wouldn’t abolishing nuclear weapons imperil it? Kennan conceded the point. Hadn’t world government advocates foreseen a third world war if their advice wasn’t followed? Kennan acknowledged that they had been wrong. He nonetheless showed Halle a page from his diary—claiming that it had slipped out of its ringbinder—in which he foresaw his own children’s deaths within five years because no one heeded his warnings about a nuclear holocaust. He was a Christian, Kennan insisted, but in this situation God was helpless.28
Unwilling to let his friend off the hook, Halle wrote a few months later to express dismay when people whose minds he respected “take positions for which I see no adequate basis.” It was wholly implausible to claim that the U.S.S.R. had recovered from Stalinism, a phenomenon whose roots, Kennan had once argued, went back through a thousand years of Russian paranoia. “I think you were right when you said the Soviet Union had to be contained, even if you had in mind something other than military containment.” Kennan’s reply rejected his younger self: Brezhnev’s successors—the ailing autocrat had finally succumbed in November 1982—were men who calculated their interests rationally and would do all they could to avoid a war. The same could not be said of their Washington counterparts, who were deliberately destabilizing the nuclear balance: “That is, presumably, what Mr. Reagan and his associates really want.”29
But if Kennan could have read NSDD-75, the administration’s first top-secret review of policy toward the Soviet Union, approved by Reagan on January 17, 1983, he would have found still more echoes of “Mr. X.” American goals, the document specified, should be:
1. To contain and over time reverse Soviet expansionism by competing effectively on a sustained basis with the Soviet Union in all international arenas—particularly in the overall military balance and in geographical regions of priority concern to the United States.
2. To promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the ruling elite is gradually reduced.
3. To engage the Soviet Union in negotiations to attempt to reach agreements which protect and enhance U.S. interests and which are consistent with the principle of strict reciprocity and mutual interest.
It’s not clear whether Reagan had read Kennan’s famous Foreign Affairs article, but he did devote two 1977 radio broadcasts to an analysis of the recently declassified NSC 68, which incorporated its fundamental points. Whatever Kennan’s subsequent views on “X,” Reagan’s priorities were hardly those of a president bent on destroying the U.S.S.R. at the risk of ending life on the planet.30
He had fired the incendiary Haig the previous summer, replacing him with the less combustible George Shultz. With the president’s approval, the new secretary of state quietly brought Soviet ambassador Dobrynin to the White House on February 15, 1983, for his first private meeting with Reagan. Neither the press nor the president’s staff—who doubted their boss’s ability to hold his own with the experienced diplomat—were informed. After talking for two hours “pretty nose to nose,” Reagan wrote in his diary, he asked Dobrynin and Shultz to help him communicate regularly with the new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov: “Geo. tells me that after they left, the ambas. said ‘this could be a historic moment.’ ”31
Knowing nothing of it, Kennan arranged his own meeting with Dobrynin while visiting Washington on March 2. He wanted to show Dobrynin that “our country could do a bit better in this respect than the Soviet Union had done by me”—he meant his own isolation in Moscow in 1952, when an invitation from Stalin never came.
So I marched bravely into the old embassy building on 16th Street, under the amazed eyes and furiously clicking cameras of God knows how many agents of the F.B.I. and others of the intelligence fraternity, was kindly and jovially received by my ambassadorial host, lunched and talked pleasantly with him for an hour or so, well aware that the recording devices of both governments were probably noting, for the benefit of posterity, every word of our rather innocuous conversation.
If Dobrynin mentioned his visit to the White House—this seems unlikely given its secrecy—Kennan made no note of it. He did meet Shultz at a dinner that evening and liked his imperturbability but thought that “it jolted him a bit when I gave him the name.” Shultz was an improvement over Haig; nevertheless “I foresee something of [a] crisis between him and the fanatics . . . around the President, particularly if he tries to do anything sensible about relations with the Soviet Union.”32
Shultz had some rough weeks ahead of him. Reagan gave him no warning before denouncing the Soviet Union, in an address to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, as “the focus of evil in the modern world,” and only minimal notice prior to his announcement, on March 23, of the Strategic Defense Initiative, his plan to protect the United States by building an antiballistic missile system. But the secretary of state soon saw Reagan’s logic in wanting to put both the U.S.S.R. and his own critics on the defensive. How could one reconcile religious faith with the political practice of “moral equivalency”? What was wrong with making nuclear weapons, as the president put it, “impotent and obsolete”?33
Kennan was vulnerable on both counts. He trusted Andropov—until recently the head of the KGB—more than he did Reagan. He opposed MAD and the first serious effort to move beyond it. He took these positions not just because he feared war but also because he allowed sensitivity to style and susceptibility to emotion to cloud his judgment. How could an apparent lightweight like Reagan have any strategy at all, much less one that echoed what Kennan’s once had been? How could Kennan share aspirations with someone so unlike himself? The administration’s attitude toward the Soviet Union, he claimed in a Washington speech that spring, was “simply childish, inexcusably childish, unworthy of people charged with the responsibility for conducting the affairs of a great power in an endangered world.”
Delivered on May 17 under the sponsorship of the Committee on East-West Accord, Kennan’s address was in other ways worthy of its author. It was his first in the city since his Einstein Prize speech two years earlier. He delivered it before an audience including diplomats from NATO and Warsaw Pact countries, as well as
an eagle-eyed Harriman, now ninety-two. Soviet negotiating techniques, Kennan admitted, could be “stiff, jerky, secretive, unpredictable,” lacking in “useful lubrication.” But it was wrong to apply, to their practitioners, “an image of unmitigated darkness,” as if they were the product of some “negative genetic miracle.” Nor was there any point in threatening the use, against their country, of useless weaponry: the goal should be to reduce nuclear arsenals, “with a view to their total elimination.” His fifty-five years of involvement in Soviet-American affairs—longer than that of anyone living—had never made him lose faith in constructive possibilities: “I wish I could convey some of that confidence to those around me here in Washington.”
The seventy-nine-year-old Kennan, Stephen Rosenfeld wrote in The New York Times, was “a driven, concentrated man of an increasingly spectral appearance” whose warnings, however imbalanced, reflected the widespread anxieties felt about Reagan. One turned to Kennan now not for policy analysis but “for glimpses of an uncommon, even mystical prophetic power.” There was “an old man’s economy of truth in him.” Kennan was, for once, pleased with his performance: “I came away with the impression that I had put one small barb into the complacent behind of the Administration.”34
When Kennan published his speech in The New Yorker the following October, he had to make a few revisions. One was to acknowledge that Harriman’s Soviet experience went back further than his own: the older man had put the younger in his place yet again. The other was to mention, if only briefly, the shooting down of a South Korean airliner that had strayed over Sakhalin on the night of August 31–September 1, 1983. Andropov and his subordinates should learn from this “what harm they do to themselves when they let military considerations ride roughshod over wider interests.” Kennan should have stopped there.
Feeling the need for further explanation, though, he decided to provide one in The Washington Post. The incident should have surprised no one familiar with the “exaggerated sensitivity” of the Kremlin leaders, their inflexible ideology, and their inability to control their military. This was not as reassuring as Kennan had meant it to be. He went on to insist that the event would never have happened had it not been for the dangerous games intelligence agencies on both sides were playing, and for the Korean pilot’s “inexplicable obstinacy” in flying at night through forbidden airspace. It was understandable, then, that Andropov had given up hope for anything other than “implacable hostility” from Reagan’s administration.
Now even Annelise, to whom George had not shown the piece before submitting it, “rose in revolt.” She was “a woman of good judgment,” he told himself, obviously shaken. “And if it makes her intensely unhappy that I should, once or twice a year, speak my mind publicly, that in itself is a reason for not doing so.” There was, however, such a thing as paralysis from frustration. “The people who experiment on rats know that. I, poor rat, am close to experiencing it.”35
On November 15, 1983, the Woodrow Wilson Center—still the Washington home of the Kennan Institute—held a dinner to “celebrate” fifty years of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Kennan was the main speaker, but the mood was noticeably subdued. A few other American ex-ambassadors attended, as did Dobrynin; the only Reagan administration official present, however, was Jack Matlock, who had recently replaced Pipes as the president’s Soviet and East European adviser on the National Security Council. Kennan praised Franklin D. Roosevelt, a very rare thing for him. If that president still occupied the White House, he would not have fallen into cynicism and despair over the state of Soviet-American relations. He would be setting about, “with boldness and good cheer, to make things better.” Why should anyone now accept anything less?36
Stalin’s daughter was asking the same question. Desperately worried that war was about to break out, she demanded that Harriman and Kennan undertake a mission to Moscow to save the situation. “What are you going to do about it?” Harriman asked. Alliluyeva was emotional, Kennan answered, “with certain oddities and disabilities of character that have been a great trial to all her friends.” Like her father, though, she was at times capable of “penetrating insights.” This was one, and Kennan would not reject the role if offered it. But that Reagan and Shultz might welcome such an initiative seemed doubtful, “and without their recognition and acceptance of it, I am not sure whether it could be of any value.”37
V.
On Saturday, January 14, 1984, to Kennan’s astonishment, he did get a call from the White House. It would have come a day earlier, but Annelise, still hoping for a less visible husband, had refused to disturb him. The caller was Matlock. He had no Moscow trip in mind, but he did want Kennan to know that on the morning of the sixteenth—timed for European television—Reagan would be making an important speech.
He then told me very interesting things: that the President felt some regret over certain of the things he had said, in the early period of his presidency, about the Soviet Union; and that the reason why he had been unwilling to deal with the Soviet government at that time was that he had felt that we were too weak militarily for our word to have any weight. Now, he felt we were stronger, and that he was in a better position to deal with them.
Matlock, whom Kennan greatly respected, would not have called without authorization: that this had been granted was “extraordinary.” But by whom? Shultz, rumored to have read the New Yorker article? The new national security adviser, Robert McFarlane? The president himself? “[I]t is assuredly a straw in the wind, and certainly a part of the significant change of policy toward the Soviet Union which Matlock assures me is taking place.”38
The speech, one of Reagan’s most memorable, deplored the possibility that “dangerous misunderstanding[s] and miscalculations” might wreck the hopes of parents everywhere “to raise their children in a world without fear and without war.” In a peroration only he or FDR could have composed, the president envisaged a Soviet couple, Ivan and Anya, meeting an American couple, Jim and Sally. Finding how much they had in common, they would not have debated differences between their governments. Instead they might have gone out for dinner somewhere, thereby demonstrating that “people don’t make wars.”39
Kennan was momentarily reassured. “I have a sense that respect for me has recently risen in White House circles,” he wrote on January 29. The president’s advisers were not consulting him directly, “but I suspect they listen, if apprehensively, to what I say.” He had found three references, in Reagan’s address, to the New Yorker article, although he didn’t specify what they were. Given the president’s strong position, given the mess Andropov and his associates had made of their relations with the Western Europeans—the West German Bundestag had voted to deploy NATO intermediate-range missiles in November—maybe Kennan should try to help Reagan.
But then I thought of all of his other follies and of his unlimited commitment to a military showdown, and I also reflected on my own age and on the limitations that imposes; and I thought: no, the faintly more positive tone of his recent speech is surely no more than a minor tactical concession, he is a stubborn man who, precisely because his political position is a strong one, is unlikely to wander very far from the primitive preconceptions he has already formed. Better, I thought, for you, Kennan, to keep out of this.
So he was “effectively stymied.” He should simply accept old age, and “let the tragedy take its course.”40
Unbeknownst to Kennan, it almost had. Andropov turned out to have been less capable than his predecessors of calculating interests rationally, and in his fear of nuclear war—which was real enough—had almost set one off. Convinced while still at the KGB that the Reagan administration was planning a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, he had ordered an intelligence alert that went on for two years, with agents throughout the world looking for evidence to confirm his suspicions. The Korean airliner incident occurred within that context, as did Andropov’s subsequent denials that any error had taken place. Already on kidney dialysis at th
e time, he was in no condition to be running a superpower, much less exchanging ideas with Reagan on how to reduce tensions.41
Kennan had been right, then, to stress the hypersensitivity of Soviet leaders, but because he had been doing this for years while also emphasizing their common sense, his warnings lacked the weight they might otherwise have had. What made the situation doubly dangerous was that Reagan too assumed rationality. He expected Andropov to take him at his word when he said, publicly and in private, that the last thing he wanted was a war. But Andropov, like Kennan, doubted Reagan’s sincerity.
Both were wrong to do so. On October 10, 1983, the president previewed The Day After, an ABC television movie about the effects of a Soviet missile strike on an American city, Lawrence, Kansas. “It’s very effective & left me profoundly depressed,” Reagan acknowledged, hence the need to do “all we can to have a deterrent & see that there is never a nuclear war.” On November 18—two days after Kennan demanded Rooseveltian reassurance—Reagan got his first full briefing on American war planning. Unlike previous presidents, he had postponed this as long as possible, apparently because he knew he would hate what he heard. “A most sobering experience,” he now recorded. “I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked[,] that without being in any way soft on them, we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that.” A subsequent briefing on December 9, covering Soviet war plans, left him wishing that “some of our pacifist loud talkers could have access to this information.”42
George F. Kennan : an American life Page 88