George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  IV.

  There were also, that spring, two quietly personal gratifications. After Hitler annexed Austria in March, George helped his Jewish “Frau Doktor,” Frieda Por, emigrate to the United States. “That saves my life,” she wrote in an unpublished memoir she prepared four decades later. “It is almost unbelievable that you are now in America,” Annelise wrote Frieda after George met her in New York. “I only hope that you will like it and that you will be able to work as you wish.” And then on June 13, 1938, in Milwaukee, Annelise herself became an American citizen.29

  She and the children were spending the summer at Pine Lake, leaving a self-pitying George in Washington, bereft of family, car, or money, busing home each night along an avenue of filling stations, advertising signboards, hot-dog stands, junked automobiles, and trailer camps, to dine on a bowl of cereal and then to sit for an hour or so on the front steps. So it was a relief for him to get to Wisconsin in June. While there, he rented a bicycle for a few days with a view to discovering whether there was still a house at the end of some country road where “human warmth and simplicity and graciousness defied the encroachments of a diseased world.”30

  He found the highways deserted, except for the people traveling them encased in metal machines: in a hundred miles he met no other cyclist, pedestrian, or horse-drawn vehicle. The drivers and their passengers had no more of a link with the landscape than if they had been on an airplane flying over it. They were “lost spirits,” for whom “space existed only in time.” The roads were a far cry from “the vigorous life of the English highway of Chaucer’s day.” But there were inns and taverns along his route, with helpful people willing to provide directions.

  As a consequence, George was able to find the farm, near Packwaukee, that his grandfather had once owned and where his father had grown up. The old house was gone, but there was a new farmer with a house of his own who insisted, despite George’s unexpected arrival, that he stay the night. This he did, washing up in the kitchen, eating with the family and the farmhands, occupying the guest bedroom, and rising early the next morning for a breakfast as hearty as the supper had been. The farm, unlike the highway, was a community, with the only intimation that it might not survive coming in the arrival of a college-educated daughter, “smart, well-dressed, confident, blooming with health and energy, . . . a breath of air from another world.” It seemed unlikely that she would wind up on the farm: the city, “at once so menacing and so promising,” had claimed her for its own.

  George saw the future himself when he spent the next night in a college town where the streets were empty except for automobiles, each containing a couple or two “bent on pleasure—usually vicarious pleasure—in the form of a movie or a dance or a petting party.” Anyone unlucky enough not to be among these “private, mathematically correct companies” would be alone. “There was no place where strangers would come together freely—as in a Bavarian beer hall or a Russian amusement park—for the mere purpose of being together and enjoying new acquaintances. Even the saloons were nearly empty.”

  All of this convinced George that the technology industrialization had made possible—automobiles, movies, radio, mass-circulation magazines, the advertising that paid for them—was creating an exaggerated desire for privacy. It was making an English upper-class evil a vice of American society. This was

  the sad climax of individualism, the blind-alley of a generation which had forgotten how to think or live collectively, of a people whose private lives were so brittle, so insecure that they dared not subject them to the slightest social contact with the casual stranger, of people who felt neither curiosity nor responsibility for the mass of those who shared their community life and their community problems.

  Americans had in the past, to be sure, subordinated personal interests to collective needs in the face of floods, hurricanes, or great wars. Perhaps some new cataclysm would force them to do so again. Kennan looked forward to it much as Chekhov, in the 1890s, had anticipated the “cruel and mighty storm which is advancing upon us, which . . . will soon blow all the laziness, the indifference, the prejudice against work and the rotten boredom out of our society.” Whatever might be sacrificed in years to come, Kennan concluded, “the spirit of fellowship, having reached its lowest conceivable ebb, could not fail to be the gainer.”31

  The bicycle trip and the essay it inspired amplified the anxieties about America that he had raised with Bullitt two summers before, but they added the idea that challenges—cataclysms of some kind—could be a good thing. This idea too would stick in Kennan’s mind, reappearing, nine years later, in the carefully read pages of Foreign Affairs:

  The thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin’s challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent upon their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.32

  As with Kennan’s 1932 vision of the Soviet Union’s decline and fall, concerns about himself and his country had produced a grand strategic insight—with help, this time, from Chekhov. But what if the United States, in the face of great challenges, could not pull itself together? What if its internal institutions were not up to the task?

  V.

  Kennan suggested, in his 1936 letter to Bullitt, that a new form of government might be necessary, capable of wielding “strong central power (far stronger than the present constitution would allow).” At some point in 1938—it is not clear when—he began developing his ideas on this subject, apparently with the intention of producing a short book. He never finished the project, but the surviving drafts, entitled “The Prerequisites” and “Government,” suggest the direction of his thinking.

  The problems confronting the United States, Kennan believed, resulted from the fact that its constitution was a century and a half old. It worked well enough for its time but had now come up against uncontrolled industrialization, a malfunctioning economy, a declining agricultural population, and ugly problems of urbanization. The American people, hence, no longer had “its old fiber or its old ideals.” Instead it was afflicted by crime and corruption, along with the antagonisms of class and race. Some saw government as having created these problems; others believed that only government could solve them. But both groups accepted democracy, abhorring “fascism” or “dictatorship.” Both were wrong, Kennan insisted: the only solution lay along a path that few Americans were willing to contemplate, extending “through constitutional change to the authoritarian state.”

  There were, after all, no absolute democracies or dictatorships. Democracies taxed their citizens, allowed the police to use force, and tolerated unemployment: surely a government in the hands of political machines and lobbyists was not really majority rule. Dictatorships could not operate without the cooperation of those who administered them and without the acquiescence of those subject to them: why did dictators go to such lengths to shape public opinion through propaganda? If truly “absolute,” they would have no need of it. And then there were regimes, like those in China, Japan, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, which were neither democracies nor dictatorships but fell somewhere in between. Both terms, then, were vague clichés: it was time to drop “the angel of democracy” as well as “the bogey-man of dictatorship.”

  The task of government was to provide its people with adequate living standards, to ensure their humane behavior toward one another, and to give them a sense of contributing toward the general improvement of their society. Beyond that, objectives need not be specified: “We leave to the communists the detailed description of distant millenniums.” But what kind of government—if neither democracy nor dictatorship as generally understood—could best achieve these objectives?

  Only one entrusted, Kennan was sure, to the right kind of people. They would h
ave to be, of course, a minority, but not the conglomerate of professional politicians and powerful special interests that currently controlled the country. Leaders instead should be selected “from all sections and classes of the population . . . on the basis of individual fitness for the exercise of authority.” Fitness would reflect “character, education and inclination,” but because not everyone could be trusted to recognize it, there would have to be “a very extensive restriction of the suffrage in national affairs.”

  Three groups in particular would lose the right to vote. The first were “aliens” and “naturalized citizens,” whose political influence, exercised through ethnic groups and the bosses that dominated them, had become disproportionate. They would be happier as the wards of a government they could respect than as “fodder for the rent-sharks, ward-heelers and confidence men of the big cities.” The second was nonprofessional women, who were turning the country into a matriarchy through their domination of families, the economy, and national culture. They had failed to live up to the responsibilities their power entailed, placing it, rather, in the hands of “lobbyists, charlatans and racketeers,” while themselves becoming “delicate, high-strung, unsatisfied, flat-chested and flat-voiced.” Finally, there were “negroes,” for whom seventy years of the “nominal” right to vote had provided no benefits: their condition was “the outstanding disgrace of American public life.” Removing the franchise from them would induce a greater responsibility for them on the part of the white population, because “we are kinder to those who, like our children, are openly dependent on our kindness than to those who are nominally able to look after themselves.”

  With these restrictions, political power would gravitate to people with the qualifications to exercise it “intelligently and usefully.” Their leaders would organize themselves independently of all political parties or vested interests. They would be “profoundly indifferent to the size of [their] popular backing and unhampered by the necessity of seeking votes.” They would thereby command the confidence of their followers. And they would train their successors, by recruiting young people willing “to abandon the attractions of private life, the prospect of making money and of keeping up with the Joneses,” in order to subject themselves to the discipline that would be required of them “if they entered a religious order.”

  Kennan’s elite would have no need to seize power, for “[i]f the present degeneration of American political life continues, it is more probable that power will eventually drop like a ripe apple into the hands of any organized minority which knows what it wants and which has the courage to accept responsibility.” He was not trying to create such a leadership vacuum, for it was already on the way. He was only trying to anticipate it, with a view to ensuring that “there should be at least one competitor with a sense of decency and responsibility.”33

  VI.

  Left incomplete, filed, and apparently forgotten, Kennan’s essay resurfaced and became famous, after he opened his papers for research in the 1970s, as an egregious example of political incorrectness. Embarrassed, he withdrew it from further scrutiny, explaining to the historian who most carefully analyzed the draft that it stood in relation to his later thinking as “an esquisse does to an artist’s final painting. It was to be modified, polished, pushed in other directions.” More privately, he complained that he had never meant what he had written for publication. “They were scraps of diary material. I could just as well—if you asked me to write in the diary the next day—have written contrary to that.” It was inappropriate to excavate this “stuff ” as evidence “of my mature thinking and compare it with things that I wrote in later years.”34

  In one way, this makes sense. The essay abounds in gaffes that, one hopes, would never have made their way into print. Aliens could not have been denied the vote, because they had never been granted it. Fears of “flat-chested” women colluding with “racketeers” were, to say the least, bizarre. Insisting that African Americans would be better off deprived of even “nominal” voting rights brought Kennan perilously close to paternalist arguments advanced, before the Civil War, to defend slavery. It was not clear how narrowing representation would produce a government selected “from all sections and classes of the population.” Nor were young people likely to prepare for leadership by becoming—even if temporarily—monks. “Buried in the papers of even the most enlightened men are, no doubt, some rather wild notions,” two other historians who saw this 1938 essay commented, with philosophical resignation.35

  But these were not, as Kennan claimed, just diary scraps. They were the beginnings of a book, and although he took it no further at this point, some of his arguments would show up again, softened, in later writings.36 They also reflect, at this relatively early stage in Kennan’s career, one of his most persistent paradoxes: that he understood the Soviet Union far better than he did the United States.

  Kennan’s analyses of the U.S.S.R. were as sophisticated as anything available at the time. By the end of his first decade in the Foreign Service, he was explaining Russian society far better than Russians were doing for themselves. He had proven himself a worthy successor to the first George Kennan, a point not lost on Soviet officialdom at the highest level. And yet the second Kennan’s writing about the United States showed no sophistication at all. He portrayed an America devoid of leadership, riddled with corruption, engulfed in pollution, beset with boredom, and pervaded by such loneliness that the entire country seemed populated by refugees from Edward Hopper paintings. It was as if the New Deal had never happened.

  In an unpublished memoir also composed in 1938, Kennan made a point of describing how a committee of experts under Austria’s chancellor Kurt Schusch-nigg had revised that country’s social insurance system three years earlier: the government had been authoritarian, yet it had shown that an “intelligent, determined ruling minority” could act more responsibly than most democracies. Had Nazi Germany not taken over Austria, the scheme would have been “a model of foresight and thoroughness.” But in 1935, the same year that Schuschnigg’s experts submitted their recommendations, the Roosevelt administration established from scratch, through constitutional processes, a social security system far more robust than its Austrian counterpart. Kennan seems not to have noticed this, or the more general fact that an American democratic revolution was taking place in the 1930s that would, for all its shortcomings, shape world history at least as decisively as what was happening in the authoritarian states of Europe.37

  To be sure, the Department of State did not expect Kennan to write professionally about the United States. His “reporting” on America was to himself and—occasionally in a sanitized form—to Jeanette and Bill Bullitt. He was free to indulge in impressions, omissions, even inconsistencies. But the same was true of his letters and diary entries about the Soviet Union, which also were not meant for publication. It’s clear from reading these that Kennan knew what he was writing about. It’s clear from reading his writings on the United States that he did not.

  One explanation is that he had not lived there for more than a few months since being sent to Geneva in 1927. He had never traveled as extensively in the United States as he had in Europe. He had read more American literature than American history, and he appears to have had no interest at all in American politics. He viewed the country through a series of snapshots that were, to him, extraordinarily vivid; but they focused on small scenes at particular moments. They offered little sense of the country as a whole, or of its evolution through time. They provided a poor basis for grandiloquent generalizations about where the United States had been and where it was going.

  Another difficulty was that Kennan romanticized what he did know. He could remember an America in which travel was by train and boat, automobiles were a novelty, not a curse, and country roads were elongated communities, like Chaucer’s highways. Something of value had indeed been lost. But that same America had lacked antibiotics: hence his mother’s death from a ruptured appendix, and his own near-dea
th from scarlet fever. It was as if Kennan filtered his past through a gauzy screen, blurring or even eliminating the bad parts, while exaggerating those he saw in the present.

  That led him, in turn, to turn personal grievances into national problems. He blamed capitalism for having left him on the verge of poverty in 1932, but he was hardly alone in this and as a result the domestic political system had brought about reforms. But it had also brought Joe Davies to Moscow in 1937, so there was little to be said for it: “Was the Foreign Service really supposed . . . to place itself at the disposal of each successive administration as a nurse-maid to its patronage creditors? If so, we were really nothing but high-paid flunkeys.”38 Kennan’s view of the United States lacked a sense of proportion: displacement failed to produce the detachment that characterized the perspectives of foreign interpreters like Alexis de Tocqueville, James Bryce, and Alistair Cooke.

  The problem, fundamentally, was patriotism. “I wonder whether anyone who has not lived abroad can understand the hypersensitiveness which expatriate Americans can develop toward their own country,” Kennan wrote in another unpublished memoir composed in the early 1940s. Their information was necessarily based more on past memories than on present knowledge, yet faith in the United States was a spiritual necessity. “Were it to be otherwise—were it not to be possible to rely on the basic worthiness, the decency, the justice and the soundness of one’s own country—then the Foreign Service officer would indeed be a lost soul.” So Kennan came back to America “glowing inwardly at everything which . . . is sound and right and refreshing, and wincing at everything which offends a taste rendered more discriminate than the average by its ability to draw comparisons.” His sensitivity was that of a musical instrument, vibrating to the “most minute phenomena,” for “[t]hat which he represented having been judged for years by him, he can now do no other than to judge himself by that which he represents.”39