George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Kennan and Oppenheimer had first met at the National War College in the fall of 1946. “He shuffled diffidently and almost apologetically out to the podium,” Kennan remembered,

  a frail, stooped figure in a heavy brown tweed suit with trousers that were baggy and too long, big feet that turned outward, and a small head and face that caused him, at times, to look strangely like a young student. He then proceeded to speak for nearly an hour, without the use of notes—but with such startling lucidity and precision of expression that when he had finished, no one dared ask a question—everyone was sure that somehow or other he had answered every possible point. I say “somehow or other,” because, curiously enough, no one could remember exactly what he said.

  They then become consultants to one another. Oppenheimer advised Kennan on European federation—not very successfully—when the Policy Planning Staff considered that issue in the summer of 1949. Kennan advised Oppenheimer, in turn, on what the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission should recommend with respect to the “super” bomb: Oppenheimer chaired its General Advisory Committee. Despite his reservations about Acheson’s suggested moratorium, Oppenheimer found the new weapon as abhorrent as Kennan did, and strongly opposed building it. Kennan’s long January 1950 report, Oppenheimer’s biographers have observed, might as well have been coauthored with him.3

  “Could there be,” Kennan wrote of Oppenheimer after his death, “anyone harder to describe than he? . . . [P]art scientist, part poet; sometimes proud, sometimes humble; in some ways formidably competent in practical matters, in other ways woefully helpless: he was a bundle of marvelous contradictions.” To many, he seemed abrasive.

  The shattering quickness and critical power of his own mind made him, no doubt, impatient of the ponderous, the obvious, and the platitudinous, in the discourse of others. But underneath this edgy impatience there lay one of the most sentimental of natures, an enormous thirst for friendship and affection, and a touching belief—such as I have never observed in anyone else—in what he thought should be the fraternity of advanced scholarship.

  Thanks to Oppenheimer, the Institute for Advanced Study became Kennan’s professional and intellectual home for the next half century: he would spend twice as many years there as he did in the Foreign Service. Oppenheimer saw in Kennan—as Kennan saw in Oppenheimer—something of himself.

  I.

  The Kennans arrived in Princeton on Sunday, September 10, 1950, unpacked their belongings in the house they had rented, and stashed young Christopher in a playpen. There he stood, George recalled, “leaning his head idyllically on his arm (belying, in this peaceful pose, . . . the more frantic tendencies of later years).” Outside, mists rose on the meadows, while crickets soothed with their dreamlike drone. On Monday Kennan spent his first day at the Institute. A gentle rain was falling, “an English sort of rain,” as though deferring “to the quiet green of the place.”

  Oppenheimer welcomed him with two pieces of advice. One was not to try to write anything immediately, but rather to use his first months at the Institute for unsystematic reading, to broaden what Kennan knew to be “an intense but narrow educational experience.” The other was to learn “that there is nothing harder in life than to have nothing before you but the blank page and nothing to do but your best.” Savoring the suggestion, impressed by the admonition, “I installed myself in my new office, with windows looking out over the fields to the woods, and had a sense of peace and happiness such as I have not had for a long time.”4

  Kennan promised Acheson that he would rule out distractions: he could hardly seek refuge from Washington without accomplishing things he could never have done while there. But he was already swamped with invitations to speak, write, and consult. Most he could decline and did: his diary records seventy-seven between July and October; six more arrived on a single day, November 1. Others were more difficult to reject, whether because they came from people too prominent to put off, or from friends, family, even the children’s schools. Miss Fine’s in Princeton, where Joan was enrolled, got a carefully prepared lecture the following spring on the past and future of Soviet-American relations. Finally, there were the flattering ones that promised to amplify “one’s own voice and with it one’s possibilities for usefulness.”5

  Outstanding obligations also ensnared him. Kennan had agreed to write a new article for Foreign Affairs, in yet another effort to update and clarify what he had said four years earlier as “X.” He had accepted, “with staggering frivolity,” invitations to give two series of lectures, one at Northwestern University and the other at the University of Chicago. He was participating in a Council on Foreign Relations study group on aid to Europe. He was reading book manuscripts: the historian S. Everett Gleason got five pages of single-spaced comments on a single draft chapter of The Challenge to Isolation, the semiofficial history of pre–World War II American foreign policy he was coauthoring with William L. Langer. And Kennan had assured Dodds that he would participate in university affairs, even if not as a professor. So he ran, successfully, for alumni trustee in 1951—despite having fled his own class reunion a year earlier because he couldn’t afford the fee.6

  But he turned down an invitation to join the advisory board of the Woodrow Wilson School’s new Center for Research on World Political Institutions, which was seeking to apply social and behavioral sciences to the making of public policy. “[U]seful thought in the political sciences,” Kennan explained to a Columbia professor who had tried to interest him in these techniques, “is the product not just of rational deduction about phenomena external to ourselves but also of emotional and esthetic experience and of a recognition of the relationship of ‘self ’ to environment.” He was more candid with Edward Meade Earle, the wartime editor of Makers of Modern Strategy, now a historian at the Institute. Such people seemed to think “that all you have to do is put these problems in the hopper of a group of qualified social scientists and the proper answers [will] emerge from the other end, along the lines of the Institute’s computer.”7

  There really was a computer at the Institute in 1950, or at least the mathematician John von Neumann was building one. Located in the basement of Fuld Hall, beneath Kennan’s new office, it was enormous and unreliable but the first in the world. Its processing capabilities would prove good enough to speed development of the American hydrogen bomb and later to form the basis for the discipline of game theory. Kennan had already opposed the first invention; he would come to despise the second. His coexistence in space but not in sympathy with von Neumann reflected the Institute’s failure to foster the “rich and harmonious fellowship of the mind” that its director hoped for. “[M]athematicians and historians continued to seek their own tables in the cafeteria,” Kennan recalled, while Oppenheimer remained largely alone “in his ability to bridge in a single inner world these wholly disparate workings of the human intellect.” For the moment, though, this did not matter.8

  II.

  Joe Alsop went to see the Korean War for himself two weeks after his June 1950 run-in with Kennan’s balalaika. Forgivingly, he had allowed George and Annelise to camp out amid the Soong eggshell ware in his Dumbarton Oaks house—the lease had run out on the more modest quarters they had rented in Cleveland Park. “Your battle accounts were the best I have seen in our press,” Kennan wrote, thanking him. “Like Tolstoy, you are an artist and should write about what you see and perceive rather than what you think. For the latter, I have respect too, but not as much.” With that barb implanted, Kennan admitted to having been “startlingly wrong” in some of his views about Asia, “and you, it would seem, much righter.” But “not necessarily” for the right reasons. “I can’t help but feel that you overrate my descriptive powers and perhaps just slightly underrate my poor intellect,” Alsop responded, “but you and I will argue as long as we are friends.”9

  Once out of Washington, Kennan watched with admiration as MacArthur landed American and South Korean forces at Inchon on September 15, and then with foreboding as they swe
pt into North Korea at the beginning of October. No less a figure than George C. Marshall, recruited by Truman to replace the hopeless Louis Johnson as secretary of defense, had cabled MacArthur that he was “to feel unhampered strategically and tactically” in operating north of the 38th parallel. Meeting little opposition, United Nations forces advanced rapidly through the narrow neck of the Korean peninsula and toward the much longer border with China at the Yalu River. Mao Zedong ordered his armies to cross into North Korea on October 19. A week later they attacked South Korean units, but MacArthur kept going. As he neared the Yalu on November 25, the Chinese surprised him with a massive counteroffensive, which soon had his forces retreating in disarray and Washington in a state of panic.

  Kennan had indeed been wrong about some things and right about others. He had warned of intervention, but it was the Soviet Union that worried him: he hardly mentioned the possibility that the Chinese might enter the war. He opposed trying to occupy all of North Korea, but Chinese sources suggest that Mao might have attacked even if United Nations forces had remained south of the 38th parallel. There were strains in the Sino-Soviet relationship, but they originated more from Stalin’s uncertainty about how to handle MacArthur’s advance than from Mao’s determination to assert his independence from Moscow. Still eager to show his loyalty to the Soviet Union, Mao welcomed a war with the Americans, partly for ideological reasons but chiefly because the Truman administration had accepted Kennan’s recommendation to deploy the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. That, as Mao saw it, was intervention in the internal affairs of China.10

  But none of this was known then. What was clear was that official Washington—having spent the past five months experiencing despair, and then euphoria, and then despair again—was badly rattled. Asked at a press conference on November 30 whether he had considered using the atomic bomb in Korea, Truman acknowledged that he had, and then alarmed everyone by adding that “the military commander in the field” would decide when its employment would be appropriate. The White House quickly backtracked, insisting that only the president could make such a decision, but British prime minister Clement Attlee invited himself to Washington anyway to try to figure out what was going on. The next morning Bohlen called Kennan from Paris to point out that there was now no one in the State Department with “a deep understanding” of the Soviet Union. Kennan must volunteer his services once again.11

  He immediately did so, received thanks from Acheson, and caught the next train. He spent the evening of Saturday, December 2, with the Davieses and on Sunday morning reported for duty. With the secretary of state tied up at the Pentagon and the White House, it fell to Webb to brief Kennan. Military planners required a decision within thirty-six hours as to whether to withdraw completely from Korea. Attlee would be arriving the next morning. The State Department needed an urgent assessment of what the prospects might be for negotiating something—just what was left unclear—with the Soviet Union.

  Kennan, Davies, and their colleague G. Frederick Reinhardt produced, within four hours, four pages of what Kennan remembered as “the bleakest and most uncomfortable prose that the department’s files can ever have accommodated.” There had never been a worse time to approach Moscow, they concluded. There was “not the faintest reason why the Russians should wish to aid us in our predicament.” Diplomacy would work only when there were “solid cards in our hand, in the form of some means of pressure on them to arrive at an agreement [which would be] in their own interests.” Acheson, looking exhausted, was leaving his office when Kennan brought the report to him. Could he come home for dinner? Kennan did, saving the depressing news for the next morning.

  Acheson unburdened himself that evening. He joked about a new portrait that seemed to show him impervious to criticism. He spoke “of the strangeness of his position” as if he were the only person in Washington who understood the seriousness of the situation. He sounded, at that moment, like Kennan, who recalled years later that “I had often disagreed with him—our minds had never really worked in the same way; but never for a moment could I deny him my admiration for the manner in which he bore this ordeal.” So Kennan went back to the Davieses, sat up into the early morning of December 4, and wrote out in longhand this letter for his embattled superior:

  Dear Mr. Secretary:

  On the official level I have been asked to give advice only on the particular problem of Soviet reaction to various possible approaches.

  But there is one thing I should like to say in continuation of our discussion of yesterday evening.

  In international, as in private, life, what counts most is not really what happens to some one but how he bears what happens to him. For this reason almost everything depends from here on out on the manner in which we Americans bear what is unquestionably a major failure and disaster to our national fortunes. If we accept it with candor, with dignity, with a resolve to absorb its lessons and to make it good by re-doubled and determined effort—starting all over again, if necessary, along the pattern of Pearl Harbor—we need lose neither our self-confidence nor our allies nor our power for bargaining, eventually, with the Russians. But if we try to conceal from our own people or from our allies the full measure of our misfortune, or permit ourselves to seek relief in any reactions of bluster or petulance or hysteria, we can easily find this crisis resolving itself into an irreparable deterioration of our world position—and of our confidence in ourselves.

  George Kennan

  Both Acheson and Kennan included this document in their memoirs—but only Acheson, who found it “wise and inspiring,” quoted it in full.12

  It would be too much to claim that this note, together with Kennan’s advice over the next few days, reversed the mood of desperation gripping Washington. He was not alone in pointing out that, as the Chinese Communists drove south, they would outrun their supply lines: it ought to be possible to stabilize the front somewhere in the vicinity of the 38th parallel. That became the consensus on the course to be followed, and ultimately—despite MacArthur’s increasingly erratic mood swings—this is what happened. Kennan’s intervention was important enough, though, for Acheson to read his note aloud at a State Department staff meeting the next day, and to convey his argument against negotiations to Truman and Attlee.13

  What must have impressed the secretary of state was that Kennan, for once, was not advocating diplomacy. Instead he agreed with Rusk, who evoked the example of the British in the two world wars. “They held on,” Kennan added, “when there was no apparent reason for it.” If there was any validity to the idea of negotiating from a position of strength, then this was “clearly a very bad time for an approach to the Russians.” Acheson may have sounded like Kennan the previous evening, but Kennan now sounded like Acheson. He was even more vehement about the Chinese Communists, with the department’s note-taker struggling to keep up:

  He said the Chinese have now committed an affront of the greatest magnitude to the United States. He said that what they have done is something that we can not forget for years and the Chinese will have to worry about righting themselves with us not us with them.... He said we owe China nothing but a lesson.

  Kennan went back to the Institute satisfied that the week had been well spent. On December 17 he sent Alsop a Christmas card: “You must not be offended that I could not see you in Washington recently. I was there very briefly—and it was better that way. On the rare occasions when I can push the ubiquitous present out of the way, I am greatly enjoying my associations with the past—i.e., diplomatic history. But the present is a fearful nuisance.”14

  III.

  “I am enjoying Princeton and my work here immensely,” George wrote Kent on the second day of 1951, “though I am still harried by outside demands on my time.... I seem to get less done than under the pressures of the State Department.” Nevertheless, the Institute was the ideal place for him now, “and all I would ask would be that I might be left alone to work there.... [T]hanks awfully for the grapefruit. They are deliciou
s.”15

  Kennan was getting a lot done, although the results did not begin to show until January. Between then and the end of April, he completed his article for Foreign Affairs, submitted a forty-page study on American participation in international organizations to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and began studying the relationship between population growth, industrialization, and diminishing water reserves in the eastern United States, while preparing ten original lectures, each of them different, none to be delivered extemporaneously. He was trying, he said in the first of these, given in New York on January 27, “to disentangle the snarled skeins” of contemporary American foreign policy, “to bring order out of the chaos.” But he was also clarifying his own thinking, most successfully in the two lectures he gave—little noticed at the time and less remembered since—immediately afterward at Northwestern University.

  He began with a universally known piece of World War II graffiti. Anyone attempting to lead, he observed, encountered relics of those who had gone before. Wherever you looked, the scribbles would appear: “Kilroy—Kilroy the statesman, Kilroy the historian, Kilroy the policy maker—was here.” Ahead was the future, shrouded in silence, mystery, and probably danger, all the greater if one advanced without looking back. For there was in the past a fund of human wisdom to draw upon. The wording might be cumbersome, or the imagery unfamiliar, but “a lot of people have thought very hard about human affairs for a long time, and may have done a lot of work that we need not repeat.” It was vital, therefore, to use this “credit balance of experience and wisdom,” because that was the only way to locate the point beyond which “we are really on our own.”