George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  While all of this was happening, the British, French, and Israelis—with exquisitely bad timing and without having consulted the United States—had launched an ill-planned invasion of Egypt with a view to retaking the Suez Canal. That left Eisenhower wondering how to condemn one such action and not the other: he solved the problem by condemning both, while asking the United Nations to do the same. Under brutal pressure from Washington, the Anglo-French-Israeli forces had no choice but to accept a cease-fire and withdraw. Khrushchev and Nasser achieved their objectives, leaving NATO to face the worst crisis in its history. Nevertheless, on November 6, Eisenhower won reelection by a landslide.26

  “The events of these recent days have been so shattering,” Kennan wrote on the seventh, “that I am at a loss to know how to react to them.” They had confirmed, “beyond my wildest dreams,” his doubts about “liberation” and the appeasement of “third world” dictators. But the United States and its allies were now in a dangerous situation over which they appeared to have little control. Despite this, Americans had voted Eisenhower a second term with a huge majority. So of what use was Kennan’s advice, even if anyone were willing to listen to it?

  He was sure that in most instances he had been right. Almost alone, in 1945, he had foreseen “the horror of Russia’s rule in the satellites, and the necessity of its eventual disintegration.” He had accurately diagnosed the weaknesses of Stalin’s rule. The Marshall Plan had been his idea, and he had correctly calculated what was needed for its success. Had he been listened to on Germany, that country would now have been reunited, free of communist control. He had urged, before the Korean War broke out, that Taiwan be placed under MacArthur’s control: “no nonsense about returning it to China.” He had warned against invading North Korea. He had opposed deferring to the United Nations rather than to allies with “a traditional stake in our future.” So what should he do with insights like these? “Bury them? Hide them? Die with them? They are not wanted.”27

  IV.

  The George Eastman Professorship in Balliol College, established in 1929 by the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, was meant to bring to Oxford each year a senior American scholar “of the highest distinction,” regardless of field. Kennan’s 1955 appointment came at a good time, strengthening his case for tenure at the Institute for Advanced Study. Before accepting it, though, he checked with Loy Henderson to make sure that the secretary of state had no plans to recall him to duty, as Foreign Service rules would allow him to do until Kennan was sixty-five. Dulles assured Henderson that he had no such intention, so Kennan was free to go. The appointment required giving a set of lectures, an obligation he took seriously enough to propose writing between twenty-five and thirty on the history of Soviet foreign policy. “I think you rather overestimate the amount of care you ought to give to these,” a former Rhodes scholar cautioned. Few people in Oxford spoke from full texts. As at Princeton, “notes would be all you need.”28

  Relieved by this advice, determined to finish The Decision to Intervene before departing for Europe in the summer of 1957, Kennan gave little further thought to his Eastman lectures, or to another series he had committed himself to in which speaking from notes would be impossible: these were the annual Reith lectures, to be delivered live over the national and international radio networks of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Perhaps, he suggested to his increasingly anxious producer Anna Kallin at the end of June, he might update the “X” article from a decade ago. “I have taken on far more than I can possibly do,” he admitted to Kent. “I have no one to blame but myself. It . . . will be a miracle if I contrive to acquit myself creditably.”29

  Four of the six Kennans—Grace, now graduated from Radcliffe, had a job in Washington, and Joan was about to begin her third year at Connecticut College—sailed for Norway in late July on the SS Stavangerfjord. While at sea one day Christopher asked his moody and irritable father what he was interested in. “I couldn’t answer him. What indeed? Boats, I said, vaguely.” Maybe also growing things, but certainly not international affairs. That field had produced so many frustrations “that I have only pessimism left; and I am too healthy to be interested in what I am pessimistic about.”

  So Kennan amused himself by outlining a set of Reith lectures that would begin with the sterility of American society, point out the overpopulated nastiness of the rest of the world, and conclude by proposing a new country composed of Great Britain, Canada, and the healthy parts of the United States (the South, Texas, and California would go elsewhere), with its capital to be near Ottawa. Democracy would then save itself from itself by half a century of benevolent dictatorship. “How would all this sound over the BBC?” Miss Kallin, fortunately, was not on board to say, and after arriving in Kristiansand Kennan settled—or so he thought—for something less controversial. The series would be “Russia, the Atom, and the West,” and he had rough drafts ready by the time he left for Oxford at end of August. But “damn poor lectures they are, by and large. This is no longer my forte. . . . What miseries I let myself in for when I accepted this invitation.”30

  “Oxford!” Kennan exclaimed in his diary. “Serene courtyards. Magnificent old towers, graceful but strong, seeming to swim against the background of the blowing clouds.” But that was as far as romanticism went. Industrial plants bracketed the university, with grimly goggled motorcyclists shuttling noisily between them. Tourists dutifully dragged themselves among colleges and churches. Restaurant patrons whispered over menus that never changed. Sundays, with everything closed and children to be amused, seemed meant to “try men’s souls.” The parks were damp, the suburbs prim, and lovers huddled for warmth along riverbanks: “Ah, love in England, so frail, so handicapped, so overwhelmingly without a chance, and so terribly poignant by consequence!” Michaelmas term would not begin until October, so there was hardly anyone to talk with beyond the family. And when dons and students did return, they brought viruses with them. All the Kennans came down with influenza.

  Balliol housed them in a Merton Street flat that presumed servants no longer present. There was no central heating, so it fell to George to carry coal up two flights of stairs and ashes back down. “Your brother thinks he is quite a martyr,” Annelise wrote Jeanette. The dining room doubled as his office, and he had to hire his own secretaries. The library system bewildered him. He was “vastly over-committed.” Real work could only be done at night, in weariness, without inspiration, “getting something written, even if inferior.” There was no point in trying to rest: strength would only be drained “by trivia or one sort or another, the following morning.”31

  Trivia infused the university itself. Kennan had imagined its colleges, Berlin was sure, “as grand, old, almost feudal institutions,” in which distinguished men dined at high table, then lingered in common rooms over port, claret, nuts, and snuff, their conversation “polished by deep traditions, refinement, moral quality.” What he found instead was “a lot of idle gossip about local affairs, academic tittle-tattle. He was horrified by that. Profound disappointment. England was not as he thought. An idealized image had been shattered.” Attendance at a single Balliol fellows’ meeting convinced Kennan never to return: “I’ve never seen such backbiting, such fury, such factions in my life.” Oxford was “a tight, tough community,” he wrote Oppenheimer at the end of October, and “few of its mysteries are to be penetrated in the course of a few months by the casual visiting professor.” He had not had a serious discussion with a colleague since arriving, “except with Is[a]iah Berlin—where you can’t help having it.”32

  The Kennans did, however, befriend two American graduate students, Anthony Quainton, later a career Foreign Service officer, and Richard H. Ullman, a historian of early Anglo-Soviet relations who would become a professor of international affairs at Princeton. The informality of Sunday lunches surprised Ullman: Wendy and Christopher roamed freely and even romped boisterously under the dining room table. “I was quite impressed by that. I thought [George’s] relationship with t
he kids was terrific.”

  His lectures, delivered twice a week in the Examination Schools building on High Street, were also impressive. Kennan wrote out every word and read them beautifully, Ullman recalled. As had happened at Chicago, they quickly outgrew the assigned space and were filling the largest hall available. “The terrible thing,” Kennan complained, was that they were “tremendously successful.” Berlin’s followed immediately, so hundreds of people came, staying for both. Dons were sitting on radiators and hanging from chandeliers, one attendee remembered. But Kennan was again drafting his lectures just prior to delivering them—about ten thousand words a week—while also carrying coal, getting sick, recoiling from common room banalities, helping to manage small children, and preparing for the Reith broadcasts that would begin on November 10, when he would have not hundreds but hundreds of thousands of listeners.33

  With television in its infancy, radio still dominated the British airwaves, so the lectures were a major event. Delivered on six successive Sunday evenings, each required rehearsal as well as careful editing to fit within the time allotted. Kennan would drive himself to the BBC’s London studios, make last-minute corrections while waiting for the nine o’clock news to end, and at nine-fifteen take his cue from the announcer’s remorseless “Mr. Kennan.”

  I knew, then, that for twenty-eight and a half minutes into the future I would be left alone—alone as I had never been before—alone as I had never hoped to be—alone to acquit or disgrace myself, as my capacities might determine—but alone beyond the power of any other human being to help me.

  Anything unexpected—a botched sentence, a misplaced page, even a sneeze or a blown nose—would be a national embarrassment: “I felt a tremendous sense of responsibility. Half of England was listening to these things.” Kennan sensed this shortly after the broadcasts began, when he stopped by his Oxford garage to pick up his car. “The man behind the parts desk, with his greasy hands, when he heard me speak, said: ‘Where did I hear that voice before?’ ”34

  V.

  “Kennan Says Rule in Soviet is Shaky,” The New York Times reported on the morning after his first Reith lecture. The next week’s headline was a bit more startling—“Kennan Calls Talks with Soviet Futile”—but the story revealed that he was only questioning the need for high-level summitry. On November 25, however, the lead got more attention: “Kennan Offers Plan on Neutral Germany.” Was it not “quixotic,” he was reported as having asked, to be promoting “freedom” by consigning East Germans—and hence all of Eastern Europe—to indefinite Soviet domination? Only a mutual withdrawal of all foreign forces from Germany could bring about its reunification, and that would require its detachment from all Cold War alliances. “Kennan Calls Atom Race Suicidal,” The Washington Post shrieked on December 2. NATO allies should therefore reduce their military establishments to militia levels, “somewhat on the Swiss pattern,” for the Soviet challenge lay more in the realm of politics than on battlefields. It followed, then, both the Times and the Post reported on December 16, that Kennan had warned against seeing NATO as an end in itself. To strengthen it would risk war, to perpetuate it would delay peace, and its continental European members had no reason to fear an Anglo-Canadian-American special relationship.35

  The stories oversimplified, but not by much. Kennan had made substantially these points. Curiously, neither newspaper picked up what turned out to be his most provocative suggestion: that Europe would be safe if each of its countries not now under Moscow’s control could credibly promise resistance after occupation.

  Look here, you may be able to overrun us, if you are unwise enough to attempt it, but you will have a small profit from it; we are in a position to assure that not a single Communist or other person likely to perform your political business will be available to you for this purpose; you will find here no adequate nucleus of a puppet regime; on the contrary, you will be faced with the united and organized hostility of an entire nation; your stay among us will not be a happy one; we will make you pay bitterly for every day of it; and it will be without favorable long-term political prospects.

  Kennan was again, of course, channeling Gibbon on the difficulty of holding distant provinces. And how could he be sure that the Soviet Union had learned the great historian’s lesson? “I think I can give personal assurance that any country which is in a position to say this to Moscow . . . will have little need of foreign garrisons to assure its immunity from Soviet attack.”36

  Each of these arguments had appeared over the past decade in Policy Planning Staff papers, war college lectures, correspondence, articles, and books. Never before, though, had Kennan pulled them together and broadcast them, quite literally, to the world. The hitherto “mysterious Mr. X,” all the more so now for having been kicked out of both Stalin’s Soviet Union and Dulles’s State Department, appeared at last to be emerging from the constraints imposed by official secrecy, personal discretion, and the lack of an appropriate forum. He was, before an immense audience, baring his soul. The Reith lectures were “secular sermons,” one listener recalled. “George Kennan was the best sermonizer I’ve heard, anywhere.”37

  Kennan had accepted the BBC’s invitation because it further bolstered his scholarly reputation: Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, and Arnold Toynbee had been earlier Reith lecturers. But having done so with no particular topic in mind, and having misjudged how long it would take to prepare when he finally did choose one, he fell back on familiar concepts but was close to panic as he was conveying them. And as with the “long telegram,” the “X” article, the Chicago lectures, the Tempelhof statement, and the Scranton speech, he gave little if any thought to what the response would be to what he said. The first hint of trouble came when a reporter asked John Foster Dulles at a press conference, after the fifth lecture, whether he might now bring Kennan back into the State Department to get the benefit of his thinking. “Well,” Dulles replied, provoking laughter, “we have an opportunity to get his thinking anyway, don’t we?”38

  The timing, unplanned by Kennan, could hardly have been better: his final broadcast had long been scheduled for Sunday evening, December 15, 1957, but the NATO heads of government had only recently decided to convene a conference that would begin in Paris on the following morning. It was the first time they had all gathered since establishing the alliance in 1949. From their point of view, though, the content of Kennan’s lectures could hardly have been worse.

  NATO was reeling from the shocks of the Suez crisis, the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, and the unexpected launch, on October 4, of the first earth satellite, Sputnik, which appeared to confirm Khrushchev’s claims to have developed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Dulles sought to reassure the allies with an offer of tactical nuclear weapons and intermediate-range missiles, but since these were meant for use on their own territory, this did little to diminish their anxiety. Eisenhower added to it when he suffered a mild stroke on November 25—coming after his 1955 heart attack and an emergency operation for ileitis in 1956, it was his third health crisis in as many years. Meanwhile West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer had not yet fully convinced his countrymen—especially his critics in the Social Democratic Party—that they should forgo reunification in return for American protection. The last thing any of the leaders in Paris wanted, therefore, was for the principal American strategist of containment, in the most public manner possible, to be calling on them to reconsider it.

  That is why Adenauer complained to Eisenhower on December 17, “with some impatience” as the official record understated it, about “the recent lectures by George Kennan which unfortunately had made quite an impression.” The opposition newspapers were “quick to pick up this kind of thing.” Eisenhower agreed explosively—no small matter in a man upon whose blood pressure the fate of the West appeared to depend:

  The President said that nothing could be more wicked for Germany and the world than the neutralization of Germany. He could see only one result of such neutralization, n
amely, absorption by the communists. . . . [W]hat Kennan really proposes is the neutralization of all of Europe, which would be the actual result of his proposal for the neutralization of Germany. He described Kennan as a headline-seeker.39

  Kennan knew nothing of this conversation, but other reactions reached him soon enough. The Reith lectures had “echoed around the world,” the moderator of a special BBC broadcast noted, while introducing him for a follow-up discussion on December 20. The nineteen hundred journalists present in Paris seemed to be spending more time discussing Kennan’s arguments than those of anyone else.

  The other panelists were unimpressed. What Kennan had said, Economist editor Donald Tyerman told him bluntly, seemed dangerous. How could he be sure that the Soviet Union would not attack? The question had plagued Kennan since 1948, and he still had no answer. Soviet ideology, he pointed out, had never required the use of force to ensure communism’s triumph, but Soviet leaders were “rubbery,” and “infinitely flexible.” Might they not try to terrify the Europeans, Tyerman persisted, employing what Kennan himself had called the “psychological shadow” of military superiority? No, Kennan replied, all they wanted was to get communist regimes in power. But wouldn’t that have the same effect? Hadn’t Britain declared war in 1914 and 1939 because it feared intimidation, not because it had been attacked? “There I fully agree with you,” Kennan conceded, “and I think that the great danger today is that we will be put in a position where we would have to take the overt act.” How, then, would a neutralized Germany and a nonnuclear NATO make war less likely? He had not suggested either, Kennan claimed. “I did not feel that any outsider like myself could propose a specific plan of disengagement.”