George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  And so Kennan did. Because he disapproved of so much in the present, it was a party he was content to leave for “a never ending communion” with wax-museum figures “whose eyes never move and whose voices one never hears.”

  If they spoke at all, it was in words hovering above their heads “like the bubbles of utterance” that emerged from the characters in the comic strips of his boyhood. Context—those “elusive nuances of circumstances, of feeling, of environment, of intuition and telepathy”—was mostly lost. The relationship, for the historian, was not reciprocal.

  He takes an interest in them. He supports them. He becomes their posthumous conscience. He tries to see that justice is done them. He follows their trials and experiences, in many instances, with greater sympathy and detachment than any of their egocentric and jealous contemporaries ever did. But do they support him? Not in the least. They couldn’t care less.

  Historians, then, were disembodied spirits. Their task was to understand while remaining “unseen, unknown, unaided.” That, for Kennan, was “loneliness.”50

  But if loneliness lay in both the present and the past, where was consolation? George worked out an answer of sorts while staying with Jeanette and her family in Highland Park one day in August 1956. He drove himself, alone, around Milwaukee. The Cambridge Avenue house was still there, looking as it always had despite taller trees and a deteriorating neighborhood. It struck him as “strangely serene and timeless,” as though content to live by memories “and to await, without either complaint or haste, the day—which cannot be far off now—when it will disappear from the face of the earth and all that once transpired in it and around it will be swallowed up in the forgotten past.”

  A half hour later he was at the Forest Home cemetery, which he had visited for the first time only a year earlier: “I sat at the head of my parents’ graves and wept my heart out, like a child.”

  They seemed to say: we have reached a reality beyond all your strivings and sufferings; on your terms it is neither good nor bad; you cannot conceive of it; you cannot help us now, any more than we can help you; but we are serene and timeless and you are not; we have our secret, infinitely sad to your mind, no doubt, but in tune with Nature; we have known all the suffering you now know, and then some; we are beyond your sympathy, as you are beyond our pity; Look: we give you the breath of peacefulness—we are a part of the long afternoon of life; take the hint, go your way as best you can; do not ask too many questions; it will not be long before you join us.51

  Kennan had lived with loneliness—but had found it difficult to accept—all his life. Being a historian required and even rewarded it, offering something like the reassurances he thought he heard on that day. History brought wholeness closer than anything else he had ever done. It was a way of coming home.

  TWENTY

  A Rare Possibility of Usefulness: 1955–1958

  ONLY THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY COULD HAVE GRANTED Kennan the freedom to live in the past with so few obligations in the present. Any university appointment would have involved teaching, and Kennan—despite his superb skills as a lecturer—had no desire to supervise students, grade examinations, or serve on faculty committees. “He had no conception of what academic life is like,” the Princeton historian Cyril Black recalled. “It’s hard work, especially here. He wanted it to be like Oxford, I suppose: give a lecture or two a week and then stay away as much as possible.” The Institute was in fact better than Oxford—or at least all parts of it except All Souls—since it enrolled no students, required no lecturing, and specified no expectations for publication. So Kennan was delighted when Oppenheimer called him in on a cold and rainy December 29, 1954, to say that the board of trustees “would be glad to have me there as a member, and to help with the attendant financial problems, for some years to come. Nothing could have been more gratifying to me.”1

  But the proposed Kennan appointment—which amounted to lifetime tenure—became a test of Oppenheimer’s authority as director. The man who built the atomic bomb had found that task considerably easier than running the Institute. Its faculty remained bitterly divided between the mathematicians, mostly past their professional prime with plenty of time to make trouble, and their more productive colleagues in other fields. Oppenheimer favored the latter group while cultivating friendships with sympathetic trustees. This was an unhealthy situation, board member Dick Dilworth thought, but it was from such conversations that the idea of a permanent position for Kennan probably arose.2

  Until this point in the Institute’s history, the faculty had approved all such appointments unanimously. Kennan’s, it quickly became clear, would break that precedent. The School of Historical Studies, weakened by the recent death of Edward Mead Earle and the impending retirement of the diplomatic historian Sir Llewellyn Woodward, was strongly in favor. Kennan was known at the Institute, had recently been asked to spend a year at Oxford as George Eastman Professor, and was at work on a book that, as one of the historians put it, was sure to earn “the highest praise [in] that it would not have to be done again.” The School of Mathematics, however, protested vociferously. Its heavyweights, among them John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel, pointed out that Kennan had no advanced degree, no scholarly publications, and no reputation as a professional historian. He had, moreover, involved himself in “politics.” Tenuring him would “debauch the standards of the Institute and set its feet upon a downward path.” In no other instance had it taken such a risk.3

  Anticipating objections, Oppenheimer solicited external assessments, but these were not reassuring. Joseph Strayer, the chairman of the Princeton history department, foresaw “surprise and adverse comment” if the Institute were to make Kennan a professor of history. “He simply does not have the standing.” Strayer’s colleague Gordon Craig agreed: “He is not a historian, although he has taken to writing history.” Ray Billington, of Northwestern University, worried that Kennan’s “knowledge of men in the field is limited.” Philip Mosely, of the Columbia University Russian Institute, wondered whether he would apply “traditional academic standards in the selection of people and projects.” Only Theodor Mommsen of Cornell University, among the historians consulted, regarded Kennan as qualified: even he, though, suggested that an Institute appointment might more appropriately rest on Kennan’s strengths as a “humanist.”

  Isaiah Berlin, writing from Oxford, came vigorously to Kennan’s defense. The Eastman electors had chosen Kennan unanimously: his had been the only name suggested by everyone consulted. He was “one of the most interesting and attractive human beings I [have] ever met.” His books and articles contained “more ideas per page, and more freshness and directness of vision,” than most academic publications.

  In short, he seems to me to be a man of unique distinction of mind and remarkable, sometimes rather mysterious, intellectual processes, leading to original conclusions of an arresting kind in any subject matter to which he applies himself. Moreover, he has that rarest of all possessions—something to say.

  The Institute would perform a great service by allowing Kennan to do history there indefinitely. “I myself would ask no greater privilege than that of being able to communicate with him about such matters for the rest of my natural life.”4

  These mixed reviews emboldened the mathematicians, who demanded the right to make their case directly to the board of trustees. Fearing that this procedure would undermine Oppenheimer, the trustees rejected it in a contentious meeting on November 15, 1955: fortunately Lewis Strauss was not present. After summarizing the arguments for and against, Oppenheimer proposed that Kennan be made a professor of international relations, not of history. The board agreed with a single dissent, from a trustee concerned that for the first time “an appointment had been recommended by less than a unanimous vote of the faculty and [that] a substantial minority of the faculty seemed quite upset about this.” Oppenheimer then amended his own compromise: Kennan’s appointment, which took effect on January 1, 1956, was simply “professor” in
the School of Historical Studies.5

  How much Kennan knew of the controversy is unclear. His diary makes no mention of it, and Oppenheimer—knowing how easily he bruised—appears to have spared him the details. He explained only that certain colleagues had doubted Kennan’s long-term commitment to scholarship, and that if he himself had doubts, he should not accept the position. “That seemed fair enough,” Kennan recalled, grateful that he now had the means of supporting his family after his temporary appointment had ended. “The Institute took me,” he wrote years later, “already a middle-aged man devoid of academic credentials, substantially on faith, gambling on the existence of scholarly capacities that remained to be demonstrated.... I can find no adequate words in which to acknowledge the debt I owe to this establishment.”6

  I.

  Kennan worked throughout 1954 on Russia Leaves the War, the first of his projected two volumes—which soon became three—on the early American response to the Bolshevik Revolution. Arthur Link, who thought American Diplomacy “extraordinarily simplistic,” became Kennan’s tutor: “I advised him to go back and read some good manuals on how one goes about doing research. What is a primary document? What is a secondary document? How much reliance can you put on memoirs?” Kennan went to the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, manuscript collections at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago, even to the state historical societies of Wisconsin and Missouri for the papers, respectively, of Raymond Robins, the American Red Cross representative in Petrograd in 1917–18, and David R. Francis, the American ambassador at the time. Hessman, still Kennan’s secretary, accompanied him on most of these trips, copying out long passages from the materials he selected. He wrote (and dictated) as he researched, mixing narrative with analysis, resisting the temptation to stockpile notes. His speed, as a consequence, exceeded that of most academic historians.7

  “It was my first major effort,” Kennan later recalled, “and I was not quite sure what it was, actually, that I had produced.” So he sought out readers as he neared completion. Despite differences over Woodrow Wilson, Link liked what he saw: “There’s no question that he [had] learned a great deal.” The most helpful comments, however, came from the Institute’s medievalist Ernst “Eka” Kantorowicz, who had fought in the German army during World War I but afterward, like Einstein, fled the Nazis.

  He took the typescript home and read, at least, great parts of it. Then he asked me to dinner, alone.... Being not only a gourmet but also an accomplished cook, he prepared with his own hands a marvelous meal for the two of us, served it with the best of wines, and then, seating me in the living room over coffee and brandy, took out the typescript and said: “Now, my friend, we will talk about what you have done.”

  Whereupon he subjected it to “unforgettable criticism,” not from the standpoint of factual accuracy or interpretive logic, but from that of style. “This, I thought, was the mark not just of a great scholar but of a great gentleman.”8

  By March 1955 Kennan was almost done. “The book is my diary,” he wrote apologetically in his neglected diary. “My own life has been of no importance.” On the tenth he delivered the manuscript, with great trepidation, to the Princeton University Press. The editors took their time, and Kennan continued to make revisions, so the book did not appear until the summer of 1956. One of the first reviews came from Harrison Salisbury, who sardonically credited Dulles with coauthorship: deprived of any current policy position, Kennan had had little choice but to turn to the past. “I thought of you many times as I wrote it,” Kennan assured Acheson, who had read the book and praised it.

  Only the stern censorship of my academic colleagues, who urged that I keep the editorializing to a minimum, restrained me from observing that in the strange conditions of 1917 people neglected to charge [then Secretary of State Robert] Lansing with treason for his “do nothing” policy, nor did they even think to blame him for the future course of the Russian Revolution—an inexplicable oversight [by] contemporary standards.

  It meant a great deal, he added, to have Acheson’s approval. “There is no one for whom I could more have wished that the tale would prove interesting and worth reading.”9

  Carefully researched and compulsively documented, Russia Leaves the War devoted over five hundred pages to just four months—the period from the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in November 1917 to their separate peace with Germany in March 1918. The book would become “the classic work in its field,” Yale’s Frederick C. Barghoorn wrote in the Political Science Quarterly, but it was “somewhat too detailed, considering the shortness of the period covered.” Dexter Perkins, of the Cornell History Department, suggested that Kennan had tried too hard to follow the example of “scientific” scholarship, and Kennan acknowledged as much in a letter to Herbert Butterfield: “The amateur’s lack of self-confidence—the fear of being criticized by professional historians,” had certainly been one of the reasons “why I dredged up and hurled at the reader this appalling accumulation of detail.”

  The book’s readability, however, made it anything but ponderous. Kennan had spent most of his life sketching scenes in his diary and correspondence, but he had never published anything like the opening paragraph of Russia Leaves the War:

  The city of Sankt Petersburgh—St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, call it what you will—is one of the strangest, loveliest, most terrible, and most dramatic of the world’s great urban centers. The high northern latitude, the extreme slant of the sun’s rays, the flatness of the terrain, the frequent breaking of the landscape by wide, shimmering expanses of water: all these combine to accent the horizontal at the expense of the vertical and to create everywhere the sense of immense space, distance, and power. The heaven is vast, the skyline remote and extended. Cleaving the city down the center, the cold waters of the Neva move silently and swiftly, like a slab of smooth grey metal, past the granite embankments and the ponderous palaces, bringing with them the tang of the lonely wastes of forests and swamp from which they have emerged. At every hand one feels the proximity of the great wilderness of the Russian north—silent, sombre, infinitely patient.

  Personalities, too, came alive, as in Kennan’s characterization of the volcanically hyperactive Raymond Robins:

  His concept of diplomacy was a deeply personal one, in which understanding came to rest upon the fire of a glance or the firmness of a handclasp. He suffered, in his state of exalted and dedicated enthusiasm, from an inability to find with other men any normal middle ground of association between the extremes of passionate loyalty and dark suspicion.

  Kennan seasoned his scholarship with his own Foreign Service experience. “Like many American diplomatists who had gone before, and many who were to come after,” he wrote of Ambassador Francis and his perplexed subordinates,

  they were left to vegetate as best they could at their foreign stations, gleaning their understanding of the rationale of American policy from the press or from such cryptic hints as might from time to time be given them, sending their interpretive reports to a Department of State wrapped in a deep and enigmatic silence, endeavoring uncomfortably to conceal from the governments to which they were accredited the full measure of their helplessness and lack of influence.

  The finest feature of Russia Leaves the War, Barghoorn concluded, was its “charitable spirit.” Kennan revealed “follies and frailties” without being “harsh, intolerant, or dogmatic.” In that respect, as in others, he had “set a splendid example.”10

  Kennan embedded substantive themes within his narrative. One contrasted the purposefulness of Lenin and Trotsky with its absence among the Americans, whose determination to keep Russia in the war missed the disillusionment with the war that had made the Bolshevik takeover possible. A second was their failure to see not only a distrustful regime but also an irreconcilably hostile ideology. A third, echoing American Diplomacy, was the irrelevance of Wilsonian idealism—particularly the Fourteen Points speech of January 1918—to
the realities at hand. A fourth was the sheer confusion of the situation, no easy thing to reconstruct in retrospect. That, in turn, suggested that contrary to what Soviet propagandists had claimed ever since, U.S. policy had been too befuddled to have had any discernible effect on what was happening inside Russia at the time.

  There was only one significantly sour review. It came from William Appleman Williams, then an obscure history professor at the University of Oregon, later the founder of American revisionist historiography on the origins and evolution of the Cold War. Russia Leaves the War was not serious history, Williams insisted, but rather an extended brief on behalf of Kennan’s former profession, the Foreign Service. He had used no new sources, his employment of existing ones was incomplete, and he said little about the “social philosophies” of the individuals he discussed “or their systems of accounting for—and anticipating—the relationship between cause and effect.” Williams himself would soon remedy this last omission: his dismissal of confusion as an influence on American foreign policy would spark debates among diplomatic historians for decades to come.11

  For the moment, though, Russia Leaves the War was a triumphant success—and, to Kennan’s astonishment, a prize-winner. “I can only hope that the judges were right,” he commented on accepting the National Book Award for nonfiction in March 1957. He apologized for taking a year and a half to write the book, as if this were somehow excessive. Having come to history thinking it would be easy, he now knew how difficult—but also how important—it was. For

  [i]f we plod along with only the feeble lantern of our vision of contemporary events, unaided by history, we see—to be sure—a little of the path just under our feet; but the shadows are grotesque and misleading, the darkness closes in again behind us as we move along, and none can be sure of direction or of pace or of the trueness of action.