George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Kennan said nothing in On Dealing with the Communist World about what U.S. policy toward China ought to be. His Asia trip gave him a chance to think about this, though, and by November 1964—a few weeks after the first Chinese atomic bomb test and Khrushchev’s almost simultaneous deposition by his Kremlin colleagues—Kennan had answers ready. He began, in The New York Times Magazine, with one of his portentous single sentences:

  The great country of China, forming the heart of Asia, a country which for many years we befriended above all others and in defense of whose interests, in part, we fought the Pacific war, has fallen into the hands of a group of embittered fanatics: wedded to a dated and specious ideology but one which holds great attraction for masses of people throughout Asia; finding in this ideology a rationale for the most ruthless exertion of power over other people; associating this ideological prejudice with the most violent currents of traditional nationalism and xenophobia; linking their power to the arrogance and pretension traditional to governing groups in a country which long regarded itself as the center of the world; consumed with ambition to extend to further areas of Asia the dictatorial authority they now wield over the Chinese people themselves; sponsoring for this reason every territorial claim of earlier Chinese Governments for which history could show even the flimsiest evidence; and now absolutely permeated with hatred toward ourselves, not only because the ideology pictures us all as villains, but also because we, more than any other people, have had the strength and the temerity to stand in their path and to obstruct the expansion of their power.

  But—the United States was not “the avenging angel of all humanity.” It lacked the power or the will to rescue Mao’s victims. It could not even defend allies along China’s periphery “if we fail to find support in the temper of the inhabitants.” The best Americans could do would be to assist other Asians in preserving their independence as long as the help they needed fell within the scope of what “we might reasonably be expected to give.”

  Meanwhile the Chinese leaders, for all of their brutality, were only human. They once had “mothers and children and affections.” They were what circumstances had made them, and circumstances would determine what they, or their successors, would become. It was up to the West, therefore, to shape those “in such a way that the fruitlessness of some of their undertakings will become apparent to them,” even as it held open “the possibility of negotiation and accommodation if their ambitions are moderated and their methods change.” Not least among those circumstances was rivalry with the Soviet Union, an antagonism too deep to be resolved by Khrushchev’s removal. The United States would be foolish not to take advantage of this. “We should be prepared to talk to the devil himself,” Kennan had said in his Look interview the year before, “if he controls enough of the world to make it worth our while.”11

  III.

  As had happened in Oxford six years earlier, illness complicated Kennan’s teaching in the spring of 1964. He came down with infectious hepatitis, which kept him hospitalized for several weeks and left him debilitated for several more—although he did manage to write all of his lectures and deliver some, while continuing to dictate long letters. The sixteen points made in one of these, he assured its recipient, “are all views I held before the color of the world turned a jaundiced yellow.” He was well enough by June, however, to risk the Asian journey as a guest of the International House of Japan. It was his first trip back since 1948, and Annelise’s first ever. It gave him a chance to reassess a country he had long regarded, like Germany, as a Cold War anomaly.12

  After formally making peace in 1951, the United States had taken on the responsibility of defending Japan and still had military bases there. Sooner or later, Kennan was sure, the Americans would make themselves so unpopular that they would have to leave. The constitution MacArthur had imposed prohibited rearmament, so Japan’s only alternative would be an agreement with the Soviet Union to “neutralize” the country—Kennan’s East Asian equivalent of European disengagement. Protests over renewing the bilateral security treaty had forced Eisenhower to cancel a visit in the summer of 1960, leading Kennan to revive his proposal to withdraw American forces when he briefed the Policy Planning Staff in February 1961. He gave little further thought to Japan’s affairs, though, until he arrived there in June 1964.13

  Kennan’s lectures, chiefly historical, aroused no particular controversy, but shortly after returning to the United States, he published a Foreign Affairs article that did. Entitled “Japanese Security and American Policy,” it stressed the “great schizophrenia of thought and feeling” he had encountered, induced by the shock of defeat, the humiliation of occupation, and the fear of nuclear war.

  The instincts, outlooks and needs of the Japanese people simply will not tolerate for long anything that appears to be an effort to enlist Japan as a passive instrument in an all-out cold war to which no one in Japan can see a favorable issue generally and which seems to imply the indefinite renunciation by Japan of all hopes for a better relationship with the mainland.

  So had the time not come to seek Moscow’s cooperation in guaranteeing Japan’s security, under United Nations auspices, while leaving its government free to make its own arrangements with Beijing? Had not MacArthur himself once insisted, “if the writer of these lines understood him correctly,” that Japan’s most suitable long-term status would be “permanent demilitarization and neutralization”?14

  Worried that the Japanese would regard a Kennan appearance in Foreign Affairs as an official trial balloon, the American ambassador in Tokyo, Edwin P. Reis-chauer, urgently arranged a rebuttal. The task fell to Bill Bundy, now assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, who while literally in flight across the Pacific had to turn a previously written speech into a repudiation of Kennan’s article. Knowing little about Japan, Kennan had fallen victim, Bundy believed, “to a rather common syndrome of the liberally inclined American who finds liberally inclined conversational partners in a foreign country and concludes that’s where opinion is headed.”

  “I feel guilty [for] having kicked up so much dust,” Kennan contritely wrote one of his Japanese hosts. He saw now how few people, either in Washington or in Tokyo, hoped to improve Soviet-Japanese relations. That was unfortunate, because Japan’s ability to manage the Chinese, “with whom an accommodation must sooner or later be negotiated,” would be enhanced if it first settled its differences with the U.S.S.R. Unlike the Reith lectures, this particular Kennan heresy did little to shake prevailing orthodoxies. It did, however, Bundy recalled, reinforce the views of those in Washington, especially Secretary of State Rusk, who “didn’t feel [that] George really knew a hell of a lot about Asia.”15

  IV.

  Kennan had not returned to the Soviet Union since Stalin declared him persona non grata in 1952, but its diplomats had for some time been regularly approaching him, obviously with the permission of the Foreign Office, usually with a bottle of Caucasian brandy in hand, to ask: “Why don’t you ever come to Russia?” The queries reminded Kennan of a line to a former lover in an Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet: “I find this frenzy insufficient reason for conversation when we meet again.” The frenzy of his expulsion need not now be discussed. He would be welcomed back.16

  Knowing that he was to be in Japan, Kennan decided to test Soviet hospitality. He had taken the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Novosibirsk and Kuznetsk in 1945, he wrote Anatoly Dobrynin, the new ambassador in Washington, but he had never ventured beyond those points, despite the fact that the elder George Kennan, the author of “a well-known work” praised by the early Bolsheviks, had traveled extensively in eastern Siberia. So might it be possible, after his Japanese visit, to travel to Norway by rail, seeing the rest of the Trans-Siberian and revisiting Moscow, “which has changed so much since I was last in the Soviet Union”?

  The embassy’s consular division replied curtly that Kennan should consult Intourist, the notoriously unfriendly Soviet travel agency. Dobrynin apologized a fe
w weeks later, claiming a misunderstanding and offering to help with the arrangements, but by then Kennan had contracted hepatitis. The illness required a recovery not likely to be facilitated by a long Russian train ride, so he let the matter drop. Sadly, he never made the trip.17

  Instead the Kennans flew from Tokyo to Oslo, by way of Bangkok, New Delhi, Tehran, Beirut, and Geneva. While Annelise waited for Christopher and Wendy to arrive from the United States, George traveled alone to Kristiansand to open the Sørensen house, empty in the wake of her parents’ recent deaths. “The old, so-little-used Buick, . . . which no one else was allowed to touch, was now standing there,” George wrote in his diary, “our property, officially.”

  With the feeling of one who commits sacrilege, I drove it out to . . . the empty cottage; wept a tear and said a prayer for the peace of the souls of its erstwhile proprietors, whose absence seems so preposterous; went to bed in their bedroom, unoccupied since they died; and lay long awake, listening to the many night noises: the banging of the shutters and scraping of the [e]spalier tree against the wall in the night breeze, the chattering of the hot water heater and, with the advent of the early northern dawn, the cries of the gulls.

  The family got there the next day, and after dinner George, Christopher, and Wendy walked to the boathouse, dragged the rowboat down to the water, and watched as it promptly sank.18

  But there was a better boat waiting. On July 10, just outside Bergen, the Kennans took possession of Nagawicka, their new seagoing sailing vessel. “I was so excited,” George recorded, that “I could scarcely pay the taxi-driver.” After a few days of trials in a nearby fjord, they stocked up on supplies, took on a Norwegian deckhand, and set off for Kristiansand, a voyage of some 220 miles down the coast and around the southern tip of the country, partly in protected waters, partly in open ocean. They almost didn’t make it.

  On the second day out—the first beyond the shelter of islands—they ran into a strong headwind accompanied by stinging rain, an “uninterrupted shower-bath” that left Wendy, huddled against her mother, “barely recognizable under her heavy oilskins.” The next afternoon, with fog approaching, they anchored near Stavanger, from where George had intended to put Annelise and Wendy on the train to Kristiansand, to spare them the long sea-exposed stretches that lay to the south. But the weather was fine the following morning, and there was another port with a rail connection—Egersund—on the way, so George decided, “influenced, I must say, by the common desire of the male contingent to continue to have the services of a cook,” to proceed there.

  They were off Egersund at five that evening, with another five hours of daylight left, when George changed his plans again: why not do another twenty or thirty miles? He quickly regretted this. The diesel engine quit, just as visibility diminished and a sudden storm began driving them toward the coast—the one portion for which he had neglected to bring a chart. Sturdy as she was, Nagawicka could not easily tack if forced into a confined harbor or a narrow fjord. With darkness approaching, George finally saw the beam from a distant lighthouse. He knew then that he was at the mouth of the Listafjord, into which he blindly sailed boat and family, finally locating, at around midnight, a secure anchorage. Annelise, imperturbably, had kept a stew simmering throughout the excitement, and they all now devoured it, relishing the implausibility of ever having been “in danger near so snug and peaceful a spot.” Two days later, her engine repaired but unused, Nagawicka tacked “manfully” into the sound at Kristiansand. She had, on the whole, “behaved splendidly throughout—exceeded, in fact, our highest hopes.... If her master is able to develop qualities comparable to her own, she will go anywhere.”19

  It was the first of many such voyages with family and friends, some equally hair-raising. “George obviously responds to this sailing life,” his Princeton neighbor Frank Taplin recalled of a trip they made together on a successor sailboat, Northwind. Sailing also brought out, as Kennan’s guitar sometimes did, a ribaldry quite at odds with the his public image. Taplin preserved one example, recited gleefully by George while at sea:

  Oh mistress Mary, we do believe,

  That without sin thou didst conceive;

  Oh mistress Mary, still believing,

  Teach us to sin without conceiving.

  George never allowed Annelise to take the tiller when sailing out of a harbor, Dick Dilworth noticed, “although she’s fully competent to do so.” So because Northwind had no winch, on at least one occasion—it happened to be July 4, 1976—the task of hauling up her heavy slimy anchor fell to this financial adviser to the Rockefeller family, trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study, member of the Yale Corporation, and chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while Captain Kennan kept his eye firmly fixed on the nautical horizon.20

  V.

  The Soviet Foreign Ministry was still trying to get Kennan back to Moscow, and in December 1964 Mikhail Smirnovsky, the head of its American desk, brought the matter to the attention of White House aide David Klein at a Washington dinner: why was Kennan so reluctant? “I said the reason was probably the obvious one,” Klein wrote him, “the treatment you received in 1952.” Smirnovsky insisted that the expulsion was “no longer valid,” that Kennan would be received cordially. Dobrynin then followed up with another invitation. So Kennan finally decided to go, not as an official guest but as an ordinary tourist, and to bring Christopher with him.21

  They left Budapest by rail on the evening of June 21, 1965, in a Soviet sleeping car on which George was relieved to hear Russian spoken—Hungarian being one of the few European languages to have eluded him. The rough roadbed irritated his kidney stone, but the car attendant did her best to make him comfortable. “I saw it in your eyes,” she said of his pain. There was a late-night border crossing, after which George and Christopher slept through the Carpathians and spent the next day crossing the fertile plains of the western Ukraine. An Intourist guide took them around Kiev on the twenty-third—the cathedral, the university, the catacombs, the banks of the Dnieper, the deep but excellent subway. The next day they flew to Moscow.

  Foy Kohler, the American ambassador, had invited them to stay at Spaso House, which to George’s eyes looked “absolutely splendid—immensely improved.” There was time that afternoon for a drive through the city, a walk around the Kremlin, and an evening at the Bolshoi, where the dancers conveyed simultaneous impressions of proficiency and of “something already done too often.” The Soviet foreign minister, Andrey Gromyko, came to lunch at Spaso the following day, bringing only Smirnovsky with him—it was, The New York Times noted, “a special tribute.” Positions were “stoutly maintained on both sides,” Kennan recorded, but “I gained a new respect for our visitor, in whom I was obliged to recognize an able and seasoned statesman, not unkind or unreasonable, nor devoid of a sense of humor.” Gromyko was saying, in effect: “Please understand that the Foreign Office had nothing to do with your expulsion, and was not even informed about it. Therefore, I hope that we can have as pleasant relations as we would normally have, had this never occurred.” It was Edna St. Vincent Millay, improbably channeled.

  On the next morning a chauffeur drove George and his son to the ancient city of Novgorod, where they admired the local Kremlin, enjoyed the view of the Volkhov River and Lake Ilmen, soaked in the long rays of the evening sunshine, felt the breezes blowing in from the Baltic, and savored the cheerful disorder of the Russian families picnicking, fishing, swimming, sailing, or just walking around. Following dinner in the hotel, they had an unexpected visit from two students, who wondered whether they might be willing to sell Christopher’s only pair of shoes, “i.e., his ghastly loafers.”

  There were, then, two days in Leningrad, after which George took Christopher on another train ride, this time to Helsinki, from where they would go on to Norway. At the Finnish border, they watched “with more than a detached interest” the train’s slow progress across the heavily guarded frontier zone. George had been there before, both in his diplomatic career and in his
historical imagination: The Decision to Intervene ends with this description of the site, as it would have appeared to the last official Americans to leave Russia in the fall of 1918.

  The sky was leaden; a cold wind blew from the northwest. . . . The little stream, hurrying to the Gulf of Finland, swirled past the wooden pilings and carried its eddies swiftly and silently away into the swamps below. Along the Soviet bank a tethered nanny goat, indifferent to all the ruin and all the tragedy, nibbled patiently at the sparse dying foliage.... The Finnish gate now clanked down behind them—one more link in that iron curtain that was to constitute through the coming decades the greatest and saddest of the world’s political realities.

  How had he known that there had been a goat? He couldn’t prove it, he later admitted, but “I never saw such a scene in Russia without a goat,” so it seemed safe enough to include one. Now he was there with Christopher, and perhaps even in the distance another goat. It was the end of a train trip George had hoped to begin in Vladivostok. This one didn’t, but the border crossing brought a kind of closure, nonetheless.22

  VI.

  “I spent the day laboriously endeavoring not to think about the event,” Kennan confessed on January 20, 1965, the day Lyndon B. Johnson was inaugurated for the full term he had won by defeating Barry Goldwater the previous November. “Is this just sour grapes—the fact that I am rejected by Washington? In part, perhaps.” Probably “I would like, deep down, to be called upon to serve again,” but “I know I should dread, on closer contact, having actually to do so.” With Kennedy’s death, Kennan had lost his chief listener in the White House. He expected no such relationship with Johnson.