George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  The Institute appointment would not begin until the fall, though, so that left Kennan free to get other things off his chest. One was his worry that American universities were trying to teach international relations as if it were an extension of law, or some newly fashionable “social science.” It was neither, he argued in the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly, whose editors put him on its cover. The world would never accept constitutional governance as it existed within the United States, while politics could never resemble physics because people were unpredictable. The only useful preparation for diplomacy came from history, as well as “from the more subtle and revealing expressions of man’s nature” found in art and literature. Students should be reading “their Bible and their Shakespeare, their Plutarch and their Gibbon, perhaps even their Latin and their Greek.” These alone would build those qualities of “honor, loyalty, generosity, [and] consideration for others” that had been the basis for effectiveness in the Foreign Service “as I have known it.”

  McCarthyism remained another concern. It fed on contempt for artists and writers, Kennan warned a University of Notre Dame audience in a well-publicized speech on May 15, “as though virility could not find expression in the creation of beauty, as though Michelangelo had never wielded his brush, as though Dante had never taken up his pen, as though the plays of Shakespeare were lacking in manliness.” This “anti-intellectualism” flaunted its own virility, fearing that in the absence of such exhibitions, “it might be found wanting.” Unchallenged, its practitioners would reduce the range of respectability to “only themselves, the excited accusers,” excluding anyone not engaged in “the profession of denunciation.” Having lived for years in totalitarian states, “I know where this sort of thing leads.”25

  The costs of confronting totalitarianism were on Kennan’s mind two weeks later as he stood in a cemetery near East Berlin, delivering a Memorial Day address meant only for his Pennsylvania neighbors. He could hardly improve on what Lincoln had said almost ninety years earlier at a similar place only a few miles away, but he would try to reflect on the meaning those words still carried:

  Under each of these stones there lies the remains of a son of this township. Each had half a life behind him, and each should have had another half a life before him. Someone had guided each of them through the trials and illnesses of early childhood. Each of these boys had passed, before he died, through the wonder of adolescence. Each had felt in his hands, at one time or another, the same shale soil we know so well. The same winds blew. The same hills were visible to them in the distance. The same sky was overhead.

  When death finally faced them, each had to reconcile himself to the thought that all this should come to be as nothing, that all the love and sacrifice and hope others had placed in them should be in vain, that all the promise of life should suddenly be rendered, to all outward appearances, meaningless. With each of these deaths, some parent died a little bit, too. And to the agony of death, there must have been added the trial of knowing that many other young men did not die but were permitted to live on and complete their lives, as though nothing had happened.

  These young men did not die voluntarily or gladly. Like most men who die in war, they probably died in pain and misery and horror and bewilderment. The only thought that could have helped them was that perhaps because of their death this country would be a tiny bit nearer to what they knew, and we know, it ought to be, than it would have been had they not died at all.

  And for this reason the act of faith that they performed was not really complete with their passing. Part of its meaning remained to be written in by other people, and notably by ourselves. Every time we reply with selfishness and cynicism and cowardice to the demands which are placed upon us, we deal another blow to the men that lie here and to those who loved them. Every time we reply to these demands with generosity and faith and courage, we bring comfort and recompense to the souls of these people.

  The point, then, was to respect “the suffering these stones tell us about,” to ensure that “the dying of these men will come to make sense, as a part of the whole great story that found its supreme expression in the death of our Lord on the Cross.”26

  Kennan remained in Washington through the middle of August to run a seminar at the School of Advanced International Studies, while his family abandoned the city for the farm. Then, on the eighteenth, he emptied the Quebec Street house and drove slowly to East Berlin, “reminding myself repeatedly that there was no hurry.” No one was at home when he arrived, so he spent much of the afternoon sitting quietly on the porch.

  Before me, literally, stretched the two fields: the first in wheat stubble, the second in corn, both parched and lifeless from the long drought. Behind me, figuratively, stretched 27 years of foreign service; and behind that an almost forgotten and seemingly irrelevant youth and boyhood. Ahead of me, figuratively, was only a great question-mark: somewhere between 1 and 30 years to live, presumably, and for what?

  Seeking physical pleasures would be “nonsense” for someone his age. Eating and drinking invited obesity; “those of the flesh become ridiculous, unimportant, and hardly dignified.” He would instead embrace “solitude, depth of thought, and writing.” The first two would amount to nothing without the third, so “the great dictate” was to sit at a desk and begin. “The thoughts will come. They always do.” The crickets were subdued that evening, there was a half-moon, and the night was “deathly quiet, as though waiting.”27

  IV.

  On the twentieth Kennan repacked the car, tied his bicycle on top of it, and drove alone to Princeton. The Hodge Road house was “empty, battered, and barn-like,” without electricity or telephone service but with poison ivy proliferating along the driveway, a broken tree branch hanging over an unkempt yard, rats in the basement, and cats in the garage. Rather than confront these crises, Kennan spent the rest of the day pondering a lay sermon he had agreed to give later that fall at the First Presbyterian Church. In search of inspiration, he went to the university bookstore, purchased John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, and sat on a bench outside reading it—although surely not all of it. “Very interesting,” he noted, but with the family arriving soon, the rest of the month had to go to making the house habitable, a process “not conducive to theoretic thought.”28

  Oppenheimer’s vagueness about Institute expectations allowed Kennan to set his own priorities. One was to answer the question he had left unanswered in American Diplomacy: could governments behave as individuals should? His preliminary conclusion, sketched out in his diary, was that politics, whether within or among nations, would always be a struggle for power. It could never in itself be a moral act. It followed that government was “a sad necessity and not a glorious one.” Politics might, from time to time, draft moral men into government, but even they would never be “wholly unsullied,” for although an individual might remain uncorrupted by power, he would have to surround himself with others who were.29

  Foreign policy was not, therefore, a contest of good versus evil. To condemn negotiations as appeasement, Kennan told a Princeton University audience early in October, was to end a Hollywood movie with the villain shot. To entrust diplomacy to lawyers was to relegate power, “like sex, to a realm in which we see it only occasionally, and then in a highly sublimated and presentable form.” Both approaches ignored the fact that most international conflicts were “jams that people have gotten themselves into.” Trying to resolve them through rigid standards risked making things worse. Evil existed, to be sure: the Soviet regime reflected it, as had Nazi Germany. Sometimes you had to fight it, sometimes you had to deal with it. The important question was “what sort of compromises we make,” not how to “escape altogether from the necessity of making such compromises.”30

  Dictatorships promised escapes from such dilemmas, he reminded the First Presbyterians when he delivered his sermon a few days later. Why not say “Why not?” when some Grand Inquisitor dangled relief from the discomforts of conscienc
e and self-discipline? But that worked only until the approach of death, for which “there is no answer in the totalitarian book.” In theory, there could be no grief because there was no soul, “just an accumulation of chemicals.” In practice, “there is nothing more empty, nothing more mocking, than the trappings of a totalitarian funeral; for here we see the meaninglessness of life expounded and argued from the meaninglessness of death.” It was easier, then, to be a Christian than not to be one; but that meant confronting “the full rigor and severity of the great ethical problems” of which the founders of that faith “were so acutely aware.”31

  Kennan spared the Presbyterians any detailed discussion of these, but when two Princeton seniors invited him to address a conference they were organizing on “Christianity Re-Examined,” he could no longer evade the issue. “[W]hat they really want to know is: what I believe.” He used his diary to make a list:

  Human nature not perfectible.

  Civilized life a compromise with nature.

  Das Unbehagen in der Kultur [which he later translated as “The Discomfort of Man in the Civilized Context”].

  No perfect human relationship.

  No perfect solutions in political matters.

  The dangers of romantic love: (love is at best a friendship and a practical partnership, complicated by an intensely intimate, impermanent and . . . unstable element that we call sex).

  But was sex really sin? Had not biblical injunctions against adultery assumed polygamy, even the enslavement of women? It was hard to believe that human beings “are destined to rot in hell because their efforts to combine an animalistic nature with the discipline of civilization are not always successful.” After all, it was God “who placed these dilemmas upon us.”32

  “I hope that nobody will think,” Kennan cautioned the conference when it convened in December, that “I am exhorting the student body to immorality.” But could it be that “the American male knows only one sexual object in life, namely the female with whom, at an appropriate age, he falls romantically and delightfully in love, whom he then marries and with whom he lives happily ever after?”

  Really, gentlemen, . . . ask yourself: “How silly can people get?” . . . [L]ook around you, among those of us who are your elders and your teachers, and I think you will find not one in a thousand of us who has met these touching and idyllic standards.

  Christianity’s value lay in its balancing of appetites against obligations, for Christ had shown that man could live tolerably with himself by taking responsibility for others. Only this could keep the conflict between nature and spirit from bringing disaster. The students should not brood, therefore, about whether life was worthwhile: “You might forget to live it.”33

  Kennan returned to diplomacy in four lectures—the Stafford Little series—delivered on the Princeton campus in late March 1954, with President Dodds himself in attendance. The site was Alexander Hall, “that curious relic of [the] 1890s,” and “to my combined delight and consternation, the place was packed on each of these occasions to the last of its one thousand sixty uncomfortable seats.” Once again, Kennan revised right up to the last moment. “Forgetting my age (like anyone just turning fifty),” he felt like “the daring young man on the flying trapeze.”34

  Despite their precarious composition, the lectures were less provocative than the ones at Chicago three years earlier, and the book they became—published by the Princeton University Press as Realities of American Foreign Policy—was less widely read. Kennan regarded it, nonetheless, as “the most comprehensive statement I ever made of my outlook on the basic problems of American foreign policy.” Several of his themes were familiar: his respect for the Founding Fathers, his skepticism about international law and collective security, his criticism of World War II strategy, his analysis of the Soviet Union and international communism, his concern with concentrations of industrial-military power, his defense of “containment” over “liberation.” There was, however, a new emphasis on material and moral ecology.

  Americans could no longer afford economic advances that depleted natural resources and devastated natural beauty, Kennan insisted. Nor could they tolerate dependency, for critical raw materials, on unreliable foreign governments. Nor could they tear their democracy apart internally because threats to democracy existed externally. Nor could they entrust defenses against such dangers to the first use of nuclear weapons, for what would be left after a nuclear war had taken place? These were all single policies, pursued without regard to how each related to the others, or to the larger ends the state was supposed to serve. They neglected “the essential unity” of national problems, thus demonstrating the “danger implicit in any attempt to compartmentalize our thinking about foreign policy.”

  That lack of coordination ill-suited the separate “planes of international reality” upon which the United States had to compete. The first was “a sane and rational one, in which we felt comfortable, in which we were surrounded by people to whom we were accustomed and on whose reactions we could at least depend.” The second was “a nightmarish one, where we were like a hunted beast, oblivious of everything but survival; straining every nerve and muscle in the effort to remain alive.” Within the first arena, traditional conceptions of morality applied: “We could still be guided . . . by the American dream.” Within the second, “there was only the law of the jungle; and we had to do violence to our own traditional principles—or many of us felt we did—to fit ourselves for the relentless struggle.” The great question, then, was whether the two could ever be brought into a coherent relationship with one another.

  They could, Kennan suggested, through a kind of geopolitical horticulture: “We must be gardeners and not mechanics in our approach to world affairs.” International life was an organic process, not a static system. Americans had inherited it, not designed it. Their preferred standards of behavior, therefore, could hardly govern it. But it should be possible “to take these forces for what they are and to induce them to work with us and for us by influencing the environmental stimuli to which they are subjected.” That would have to be done

  gently and patiently, with understanding and sympathy, not trying to force growth by mechanical means, not tearing the plants up by the roots when they fail to behave as we wish them to. The forces of nature will generally be on the side of him who understands them best and respects them most scrupulously.

  Democracy had the advantage over communism in this respect, because it did not rely on violence to reshape society. Its outlook was “more closely attuned to the real nature of man, . . . [so] we can afford to be patient and even occasionally to suffer reverses, placing our confidence in the longer and deeper workings of history.”

  It was here, then, that Kennan’s views on foreign policy cycled back through his previous thinking on self-containment, Russian literature (especially Chekhov), environmentalism, religion, and even sex. For if the issue, in the end, was human nature, didn’t survival require balancing appetites and obligations? “Only too often in life we find ourselves beset by demons, sometimes outside ourselves, sometimes within us,” but they “have power over us only so long as they are able to monopolize our attention.” They lose that power “when we simply go on with the real work we know we have to do.” Nothing could be more shortsighted than “to sacrifice the traditional values of our civilization to our fears rather than to defend those values with our faith.”35

  V.

  The particular demons Kennan had in mind were those of McCarthyism, which was not only deranging foreign policy but also ruining friends and former colleagues. Chief among them was John Paton Davies, who after being exonerated by the State Department’s loyalty board in 1951 had been subjected to a long series of inconclusive investigations by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Kennan worked hard to prevent these from leading to perjury charges, even to the point of threatening to withhold future consultations with the government if Davies should be prosecuted. He never was, but the ordeal ended Davie
s’s Foreign Service career. John and Patricia spent the next decade living in Peru. Kennan blamed himself, but Davies did not blame him: “The forces against which he was struggling were far stronger than he.”36

  Similar fates befell other “China hands,” among them John Stewart Service and O. Edmund Clubb, both of whom Kennan tried to help, and the fight over Bohlen’s nomination showed that even Soviet specialists could be suspect. Meanwhile the FBI was investigating Oppenheimer for alleged ties to communists and for having opposed building the hydrogen bomb. His chief accuser was Lewis Strauss, now chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and, ironically, a longtime trustee at the Institute for Advanced Study. So why not Kennan, who had spent years in the U.S.S.R., joined Oppenheimer in objecting to the new weapon, criticized the Republican strategy of “liberation,” railed against McCarthy, and was now also at the Institute? “I was sometimes attacked, sometimes even called a ‘socialist,’ or a ‘Marxist,’ ” he later recalled, “but the attacks made little impression.” That was more “by luck than by any just deserts.”37

  Perhaps, but Kennan was also careful. He had “always been friendly to the Bureau,” one of J. Edgar Hoover’s aides reminded the director in 1951, “furnishing pertinent and helpful information when in the State Department.” A former government employee, then in a mental institution, did raise questions about Kennan’s loyalty a few months later, but Hoover chose not to pursue the matter. Before departing for Moscow as ambassador in 1952, Kennan let the bureau know that he would be calling on his Soviet counterparts in Washington and at the United Nations; after returning to the Institute the following year, he informed Hoover that he would be subscribing to Pravda for research purposes, unless the director thought this “undesirable or unwise.” Hoover did not, passing the word to the Post Office Department that “the Bureau has had cordial relations with him.”38