George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Only historians could confirm links between efforts and outcomes, providing the necessary corrective if, as Shakespeare had said—it was a favorite Kennan quotation—“we are to ‘dress ourselves fairly to our end.’ ”12

  Two months later, just after finishing his second volume of almost five hundred pages—The Decision to Intervene, which carried his account only through July 1918—Kennan learned that Russia Leaves the War had won the Pulitzer Prize. By then it had also received the Bancroft and the Francis Parkman prizes. “I cannot believe that the book was that good,” he protested in his diary, “it must have been a dull year in the non-fiction field.” Still, the honors rewarded “a love of language and writing which never found any appreciable recognition in government . . . I now have the ability to be widely heard, on my own merits.” Deservedly or not, there was now “a rare possibility of usefulness,” to be “cherished and protected, wholly aside from its chance relation to my own person.”

  And when, Link asked, would he finish his third volume? The first two had appeared, after all, under the series title “Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920.” “Oh, I’m never going to complete them,” Kennan replied, a bit too casually for Link, who devoted his entire career to Wilson’s life and papers. “Well, why did you write them?” “I wrote them to establish my credentials as a historian.”13

  II.

  Kennan did this in a way that vindicated, more thoroughly than either of them could have imagined, the risk Oppenheimer had taken in proposing him for tenure at the Institute for Advanced Study: Kennan now had “security for life.” But the implications unsettled him as much as they reassured him. “Is it right,” he wondered, “that one should become, when this side of fifty, suddenly without anguish?”

  The “torture of the constant presence of the opposite sex” was abating, but what about other forms of anguish? Chekhov had been lucky to die so young having achieved so much. “I still have work to do, and am doing it; but it seems too easy.... Men—or at least such men as I—are no good unless they are driven, hounded, haunted, forced to spend every day as though it were the last they were to spend on earth.” Old age must therefore become “a sort of self-torture—not driving one’s self, as some do, to pretend to be younger than one really is, but forcing the muscles of body, intellect, and capacity for sympathy to work full time, even at the cost of shortening life.”14

  Physical self-torture came easily enough, as Kennan’s Hodge Road neighbor Bunny Dilworth discovered one weekend at the farm. “George had no sooner got there,” her husband Dick recalled, “than he rushed out and started the tractor to mow the lawn. Then he’d rush inside and go upstairs and type. He was typing on and off most of the night. But in the morning he was out again mowing the lawn.” On another occasion, visiting the Kennans in Kristiansand, both Dilworths were awakened by the sound of a wheelbarrow. “Here was George, with really immense stones, bigger than a normal person could pick up, building a set of steps down to the water. He was incapable of just stopping and taking a few hours off.” Kennan did much of his own yard work around the Princeton house, devoting several days in September 1956 to digging up a dead maple. On the morning of the twenty-third, the university awarded him an honorary degree, which Kennan accepted alongside Dag Hammarskjöld, the secretary general of the United Nations. That afternoon “I returned to my tree and exhausted myself in two or three further hours of hacking.”15

  Intellectual exertion—particularly when it involved empathy—was more difficult. Kennan achieved it in his histories: one of the most striking features of Russia Leaves the War and The Decision to Intervene was his ability to put himself in the position of the people he wrote about. He took pains to see things from their point of view, without imposing his own or those of a different age. He listened, but rarely judged. He showed respect for the dead.

  But rarely for the living, or for the culture they had created. He loathed “this thin, tight, lonely American life.” He acknowledged “a growing gap between my own outlook and that of my countrymen,” but blamed their habits, not his, for it. He had a vision of what the country once was, Dick Dilworth sensed, “and what under better circumstances it could be.” But it hadn’t turned out that way. He was “like a rejected lover.” If not for the family, Kennan told himself, he would have become “a recluse and an esthete,” living somewhere on the west coast of Scotland, reading, traveling, studying “the beauty man has created,” to the end that “I might someday create some of my own.” What beauty was there, though, in the United States? “Before us stretches the whole great Pacific Coast,” he wrote while on a flight to California,

  and my only thought, as we approach it, is: throughout the length and breadth of it not one single thing of any importance is being said or done; not one thing that gives hope for the discovery of the paths to a better and firmer and more promising human life, not one thing that would have validity beyond the immediate context of time and place in which all of it occurs.

  Yes, but the people were happy, someone would say. Why not join them? “Forget that you have ever been a mature person. Learn to play and be amused, again, like a child.” “Perhaps, perhaps,” was the reply. But elsewhere “man has from time to time risen to great dignity and to immense creative stature. I have lived too long in the neighborhood of those evidences to forget them so easily.”

  Kennan tried to be polite to the people he met. He imagined how his mother would have wanted him to live: “unhurriedly, with grace and dignity, secure and relaxed in the consciousness of her love and her forgiveness, not pecking at myself for past faults nor worrying about present limitations.” This required constant effort, though, for it meant acknowledging kindness and accepting hospitality while concealing from those providing these gifts all the things that “divide us so deeply.” He was learning to live “in an inner world. I am utterly without relationship to this country and this age.”16

  Paradoxically, though, with every public statement, he had found wider and more appreciative audiences. Kennan’s platform skills partly accounted for this: Princeton students not only applauded a lecture he gave there but surprised him by roaring with laughter, “which I trust was with me and not at me.” With American Diplomacy required reading in university classrooms across the country, he was getting similar responses wherever he spoke. A Stanford instructor suggested that his students were finding, in Kennan’s views, a way to rebel against those of their parents. That led him to worry that he had courted popularity, that he had “watered down my own thoughts, sweetened them with a lot of optimistic baloney.” If his youthful admirers ever caught on to what he really believed, “they would probably hate me for it. If they approve of me, it is because I have been a hypocrite and have successfully disguised myself and my thoughts.”17

  And what of his own children? If American culture encouraged healthy physical, intellectual, and spiritual development, he could leave them to thrive within it, he wrote in the summer of 1956. It did, however, just the opposite.

  How can one sit by and see them become older without really maturing: socially uncertain, imitative, conformist, nervously over-wrought by too much television, exposed first to the false excitement of teen-age hot-rod adventure, then moving into some premature liaison with the opposite sex[?] . . . In this false life innocence is lost before maturity is achieved. To say nothing of the poverty of education, the incoherence of speech, the never-ending mumbling of stereotypes—the cult, in fact, of un-eloquence, of verbal awkwardness—the pretense of tough, disillusioned taciturnity.

  Social adaptability required consigning children to mediocrity, “in order that they may feel comfortable in their time.” He should therefore advise Christopher, now six, that “whatever I like, you learn to dislike; whatever I believe in, you distrust; whatever I am, you try to be the opposite.” Only then could he have “the faintest chance of fitting into the new age.”18

  For all of his pessimism about culture in the United States, Kennan had not yet given up
on its politics. He respected Eisenhower but thought him too inclined to defer to Dulles and to McCarthyite pressures in foreign policy. He had registered as a Democrat during his brief Pennsylvania congressional candidacy, but in terms of domestic affairs, “I am much closer to the Republicans.” He opposed farm subsidies and distrusted labor unions while worrying increasingly about race relations, “still the most terrible . . . of our national problems.” In the privacy of his diary, however, he regretted Lincoln’s having kept the nation together during the Civil War: it would have been better off without the “Latin-American fringe” of California, Texas, and Florida. “I ought, in truth,” he concluded, “to have nothing to do with either political party.”

  Politicians, however, could still attract him. Kennan admired Adlai Stevenson “as a sensitive, intelligent and valiant person” who ought to be running the country and “probably never will.” Nevertheless, he agreed early in 1956 to co-chair the New Jersey “Stevenson-for-President” committee. He suggested saying little about foreign policy but sent Stevenson four single-spaced typed pages on what he should say. He even made a campaign speech in Princeton, “a task for which I am very poorly fitted,” assuring his neighbors that Stevenson would bring an “intellectual and moral conscience” to government, would conduct “an exercise of national self-scrutiny,” and would have the courage to tell Americans what they would not necessarily like to hear.19

  Stevenson soon disappointed him. During an address to the Pittsburgh Foreign Policy Association on May 3, Kennan had described the situation in Eastern Europe as “a finality, for better or for worse.” The United States should not be encouraging “liberation.” This was no new position, but when James Reston quoted Kennan a few days later alongside a New York Times news story listing him as a key Stevenson adviser, an angry Democratic congressman, Thaddeus Machrowicz of Michigan, warned the candidate that he could lose the Polish-American vote unless he publicly repudiated Kennan. Stevenson wasted no time in doing so: he issued a press release “completely” disagreeing with Kennan, who “is in no way connected with my staff and never has been.”20

  Kennan was not consulted, nor was he even given a copy of the Stevenson letter. The brush-off cured him, or so he claimed, “of the illusion that I have any place whatsoever in American public life—even as an independent supporter of Mr. Stevenson. Serves me right for even messing in it.” Kennan wrote that on August 20, during his visit with Jeanette in Highland Park. Three days later her phone rang with a message from the Democratic nominee himself: he had just learned that Kennan was nearby—could he come to dinner that evening at the Stevenson farm in Libertyville? George asked if he could bring Grace, who had just arrived. Of course, Stevenson replied. “So we drove over almost at once.”

  The meal took place to the sound of Republican rhetoric, for Eisenhower and Nixon were accepting their nominations that night, and the television was on in the next room. Stevenson assessed the speeches professionally, talked foreign policy briefly, and then George and Grace made their farewells.

  Mr. Stevenson accompanied us out to the parking lot in back of the house. There was a bright moon, and the fields were in mist, and looked like a sea. We both felt intensely sorry for him: he seemed so tired and harassed and worn, he had so few people to help him; and his whole equipment for going into this battle was so shabby compared with the vast, slick, well-heeled Eisenhower organization. And not the least of his problems is to carry on his shoulders the whole miserable Democratic party; disunited, indisciplined, unenlightened, itself already having unconsciously imbibed and assimilated about half of the McCarthyism of the past few years.

  Stevenson had rejected Kennan more abruptly and more visibly even than Dulles, but unlike Dulles, he found a gracious way to make amends. That, for Kennan, was style—a later generation would call it “class.” It was a quality he struggled to find within himself, even as he drove, hounded, and haunted himself.

  “I am living in the world my father despaired of, and rightly so,” Kennan wrote on August 26, 1956, after returning to the archives in St. Louis. Why take it too seriously? It was, after all, late afternoon: “The main happenings of the day are over; not much more is going to happen.” He, like his father, had been “passed by, and do not really mind too much—because the present is too uninteresting.”21

  III.

  But the present, in fact, was very interesting. Six months earlier the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had secretly denounced Stalin before the Twentieth Soviet Communist Party Congress in Moscow. Two months earlier Polish workers had rioted in Poznań. One month earlier the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had nationalized the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company after Secretary of State Dulles, retaliating for an arms deal Nasser had made with Czechoslovakia, cut off American funding for the Aswan Dam. Kennan had no involvement in any of these crises, but he could hardly avoid taking an interest in them. And as far as Soviet and Eastern European affairs were concerned, the CIA expected him to do so: despite Kennan’s having declined the offer of a job there in 1953, Allen Dulles had been using him ever since as a confidential adviser.

  Initially this meant membership on an advisory committee reviewing national intelligence estimates. Conveniently for Kennan, it met in Princeton with the CIA director frequently in attendance. After J. Edgar Hoover approved Kennan’s Pravda subscription, he was also able to monitor post-Stalin political maneuvering in the Kremlin, passing periodic analyses to his chief CIA contact, John Maury. The arrangement made sense on all sides. It gave the Eisenhower administration access to Kennan despite its having, in effect, fired him. It allowed Kennan the freedom to criticize policy openly while still seeking quietly to shape it. Because Kennan wished to avoid any impression “that he is seeking to intrude or in any way impose his views,” Frank Wisner explained in 1956, agency documents referred to him only as “the expert.”22

  One of the first things Allen Dulles did after the CIA obtained a transcript of Khrushchev’s speech was to send Maury to Princeton to show it to Kennan. His first reaction was that one or more of the new Soviet leaders must have arranged Stalin’s death and were now trying to cover their tracks. He advised caution in releasing the text, but Dulles overruled him and, with the other Dulles’s cooperation, the State Department published it on June 4. The Polish upheaval followed three weeks later, leading Kennan to admit that they had been right. Khrushchev had attacked the system that produced him far more effectively than the Americans could ever have done. They had only amplified what he said.23

  By August, Kennan was worrying more about the Suez crisis. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations had made a great mistake playing up to “Middle Eastern tin-pot dictators,” he told New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger in an off-the-record interview. “These men are not our friends,” but the British and the French were. The United States had traditionally favored self-determination, Kennan added in a speech at Johns Hopkins two months later, but was everyone equally ready to exercise it? Especially when doing so involved expropriating foreign property, along with the right to control an international waterway vital to the global economy? How strongly would Americans support Nasser if he cut off oil shipments from the Middle East at a time when they and their allies were increasing their dependence on that commodity?24

  Meanwhile, Kennan was modifying his views on the “finality” of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. Moscow’s authority there was eroding “more rapidly than I had ever anticipated,” he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on October 11. The process had begun with Tito in 1948, and now, in the aftermath of the Poznań riots, Poland was showing signs of independence that Stalin would never have permitted. Khrushchev flew to Warsaw a week later to demand the resignation of Wladyslaw Gomulka, the recently installed reformist leader of the Polish Communist Party, but surprisingly, he failed to get it. Washington wanted him to come for “consultation,” Kennan wrote in his diary on the twenty-second. Should he go? His relations with his government and
even his country were approaching a crisis

  that will almost unquestionably end in my being driven further away rather than brought closer. Deep in my heart I have a feeling that I shall end either in exile or—well, better not to speculate on it. Too bad: I am just now beginning to like this country a little, as a place to live—better, at least, than I did. But I shall never be able to take its public life. And the coming election will seal my estrangement.

  Kennan could claim, in a way, vindication, having insisted for over a decade that the Soviet Union could not indefinitely, as Gibbon would have put it, “hold in obedience” its satellites “in opposition to their inclination and interest.” But Kennan’s problem, his old Moscow boss Bill Bullitt had suggested in a public attack on him a few months earlier, was that his devotion to Gibbon had left him with “a pessimistic bent of mind for one so young.” Kennan was “more captivated by declines and falls than by rises and achievements.”25

  Kennan did acknowledge, on October 29, that the situation in Eastern Europe was developing more favorably than if “we ourselves [had] tried deliberately to achieve this effect.” Perhaps Titoism had been a precursor to “liberation.” But the Hungarians were “running tremendous risks in trying to force so many issues at once.” Encouraged by the Polish example, the new government of Imre Nagy had followed an anti-Soviet uprising in Budapest with the demand that the Red Army withdraw altogether from Hungary. It appeared to have done so by November 1, when Kennan again saw John Maury. “I think there is a hooker in this somewhere,” he warned. “I cannot understand their accepting this kind of humiliation.” Khrushchev was indeed wavering, but he soon stopped by ordering a full-scale invasion of Hungary on November 4, which brutally crushed the rebellion. The fighting killed some 2,700 people, and another 230, including Nagy, were eventually executed.