George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  the absolute power of a single man; his power over thoughts as well as actions; the impermanence and unsubstantiality of all subordinate distinctions of rank and dignity—the instantaneous transition from lofty station to disgrace and oblivion; the indecent association of sycophancy upwards with brutality downwards; the utter disenfranchisement and helplessness of the popular masses; the nervous punishment of innocent people for the offenses they might be considered capable of committing rather than the ones they had committed; the neurotic relationship to the West; the frantic fear of foreign observation; the obsession with espionage; the secrecy; the systematic mystification; the general silence of intimidation; the preoccupation with appearances at the expense of reality; the systematic cultivation of falsehood as a weapon of policy; the tendency to rewrite the past. These were traits, some active, some latent, the recognition and correction of which would be vital to the Soviet Union’s future: “to its security, above all, not just against those external forces by whose fancied heretical will Russians of all ages have so easily seen themselves threatened, but [also] its security against itself.”12

  That sounded a lot like the “X” article: how could there be a normal relationship with such a country until its internal configuration—indeed its culture—had changed? But Kennan was writing about Custine in the nuclear era: didn’t that require overlooking such issues? Wasn’t the important thing now to balance power among states, rather than to await—or even to encourage—changes from within? The questions came from the editors of a new journal, Foreign Policy, who had noticed (as those of Foreign Affairs had not) that 1972 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mr. X’s memorable appearance.

  Eager “to welcome Professor Kennan to the pages of this magazine,” they published an interview with him in late May, a week before the first American presidential visit to the Soviet Union since Roosevelt had gone to Yalta in 1945. The Nixon-Brezhnev summit promised the greatest progress yet toward strategic arms control: an “interim agreement” limiting land- and sea-based missiles armed with nuclear warheads, and a treaty banning defenses against those that remained. It followed the even more surprising trips that Kissinger and Nixon had already made to the People’s Republic of China. What did Kennan think?

  Brezhnev’s state, he acknowledged, was not Stalin’s. It had long since lost ideological authority beyond its borders: “The façade of solidarity can be maintained, today, only by extensive concessions to the real independence of the respective Communist parties.” It had stabilized, but not expanded, its control over half of Europe—perhaps NATO had been of some use, after all. And the Soviet Union now had its own “containment” problem in East Asia, where China posed at least as great a challenge as did the United States. All of this had left Kremlin leaders “no alternatives except isolation or alliance with the capitalist countries, which could undermine the legitimacy of their power at home.” The geopolitical balance was obviously preferable to that of 1947.

  The military balance, however, was another matter. Always ahead in manpower and conventional armaments, the U.S.S.R. now had such formidable nuclear strength that American concerns no longer focused on who was to dominate Eurasia but rather on a “fantasy world” of weaponry.

  It has no foundation in real interests—no foundation, in fact, but in fear, and in an essentially irrational fear at that. It is carried not by any reason to believe that the other side would, but only by a hypnotic fascination with the fact that it could. It is simply an institutionalized force of habit. If someone could suddenly make the two sides realize that it has no purpose and if they were then to desist, the world would presumably go on, in all important respects, just as it is going on today.

  How might that happen? Not through the intricate agreements to be signed in Moscow, for these would only clarify the rules in a continuing contest. What was needed instead were “reciprocal unilateral steps of restraint.” If one could, by such means, shrink armed establishments to more reasonable dimensions, then the Soviet Union would pose no greater threat than had prerevolutionary Russia—even if it retained vestiges of the society Custine had described.

  No one should expect such a state not to behave as its predecessor had done. It would want to preserve, and where possible expand, its spheres of influence. It might well build a blue-water navy. It would not, in its culture or politics, become a democracy. Why, then, should “the peace of the world [depend] on the ability of the rest of us to prevent the Soviet Union indefinitely from acting like a great power?” The priority now should be to reduce or even eliminate nuclear weapons, not simply to tinker, as Kennan had put it earlier in his diary, with “the wretched ABMs and MRVs and MIRVs and SALTs and what not.”13

  Kennan’s reasoning reflected his thinking on the origins of World War I. For then, as now, great-power rivalries had existed. So too had diplomacy as a means of managing them. Nixon and Kissinger were following Bismarck’s example by balancing power, a considerable improvement over Johnson’s practice of expending it where no vital interests were at stake. But like the Europeans who came after Bismarck, the United States and the Soviet Union were simultaneously accumulating arms of such strength that any use of them would destroy what they were meant to defend. It had taken the belligerents of 1914–18 four years to accomplish this. In the nuclear age, it would take about forty minutes.

  III.

  “I could not be more pleased than I am by this appointment,” Kennan wrote Kissinger on September 19, 1973, shortly after the beleaguered Nixon, now deeply enmeshed in the Watergate scandal, had nominated his national security adviser also to become secretary of state. Kennan’s congratulations came, however, only in the last two lines of a long letter criticizing the novelist-historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union’s closest contemporary equivalent to Tolstoy himself, and the nuclear physicist Andrey Sakharov, whose anguish over the bombs he had built paralleled Oppenheimer’s. Both were “behaving very unwisely” by provoking a showdown over their alleged official mistreatment. Even worse, they were trying to enlist Americans in support of their cause. The United States could not sacrifice its entire relationship with the U.S.S.R. to satisfy “the grievances of these people.”14

  It was a surprisingly harsh tone for the self-regarded heir of the other Kennan, the most prominent nineteenth-century defender of Russian dissidents, and for George F. Kennan as well. He had made his reputation in 1946–47, after all, by blurring the distinction between domestic and foreign policy in the Soviet Union. He had worked for years afterward to help settle refugees from Stalin’s regime in the United States, right down through the arrival, in 1967, of the most famous of them all, the dead dictator’s daughter. He had gone out of his way to honor Pasternak in his May 1968 American Academy presidential address. “I wouldn’t trust any so-called détente,” he had told The New York Times after the invasion of Czechoslovakia three months later, “if it is not supported by free contacts between governments and peoples.” And six months after his letter to Kissinger, Kennan publicly praised Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.” Why, then, was Kennan becoming less sympathetic to the Kremlin’s domestic critics as the attention they attracted, during the early 1970s, began to grow?15

  One reason was that he was becoming more sympathetic to the conduct of American foreign policy. By the time Nixon relinquished the presidency to Gerald Ford in August 1974, his administration had reached agreements with the Soviet Union to limit strategic arms, brought China out of its long diplomatic isolation, negotiated an end to the war in Vietnam, contained an unexpected Arab-Israeli war, and endorsed the concept of a multipolar world that resembled in principle, if not in all its details, Kennan’s thinking while on the Policy Planning Staff a quarter-century earlier. Kissinger “understands my views better than anyone at State ever has,” Kennan acknowledged. It was a relief to know that he would stay on: “Henry’s a fine person, and I think
very highly of him,” but at the same time “he scares me.” For “with opportunists like Scoop Jackson around, he could go at any moment.”16

  “Scoop” was Senator Henry M. Jackson, a long-serving Washington State Democrat who, in the aftermath of the 1972 Nixon-Brezhnev summit, had taken it upon himself to dismantle détente. He wanted to return the Democratic Party—whose presidential nominee that year was the haplessly dovish George McGovern—to the tough foreign policy traditions of Truman and Acheson. Nixon and Kissinger, Jackson claimed, had ceded superiority in strategic weaponry to the Soviet Union through ill-conceived arms control agreements, while failing to condemn that country’s growing harassment of dissidents and potential emigrants, chiefly Jews. Jackson would use his considerable influence in the Senate to demand numerical parity in any new strategic arms treaties. He would also withhold “most-favored nation” status and Export-Import Bank credits—both promised by Nixon in Moscow—until the U.S.S.R. relaxed its restrictions on emigration. Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, as Kennan saw it, were cheering him on.

  The intricacies of arms control mattered little to Kennan. With both sides possessing the capacity for “fantastic overkills,” he had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee several years earlier, all calculations of advantage and disadvantage were meaningless. Human rights, though, were a trickier issue. Like John Quincy Adams, Kennan doubted the feasibility of trying to right wrongs committed by foreign governments against their own citizens. He still hoped for change within the Soviet Union but had lost faith in the ability of American leaders to bring this about. He had long deplored the ease with which domestic politics could derail foreign policy—Scoop Jackson was hardly the first example—but now the stakes were higher: with weapons of mass destruction available in such numbers, even a slight miscalculation could produce universal destruction. What gave Soviet dissidents the right, then, even if they were the figurative descendants of the Russians the elder Kennan had tried to help, to place détente at risk?17

  They would have replied, with good reason, that the Soviet leaders were using détente to suppress dissent. Following the crushing of the “Prague spring” in 1968, Brezhnev had proposed an international conference to confirm post–World War II boundaries throughout Europe, with a view to regaining, through diplomacy, the legitimacy his own and other Eastern European regimes had lost. For if the United States and its allies formally recognized the status quo, what basis would domestic dissidents have for challenging communist party rule? The persistence with which Moscow pressed this plan gave the Western Europeans and the Canadians—Washington, in this instance, paid little attention—the opportunity to attach a Jackson-like condition of their own: that all parties to any such agreement acknowledge “the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Brezhnev, equally inattentively, accepted the compromise. So on July 31, 1975, thirty-five heads of government from the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, and all European states except Albania gathered in Helsinki to sign, on the next day, the “Final Act” of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.18

  It was “a lot of nonsense,” Kennan wrote privately, “two years of wrangling over language, most of it of a general nature, none of it committing anyone specifically to anything.” The Americans and their allies had lost nothing, since none intended to reunify Europe—particularly Germany—in the first place. The Soviets had made some significant verbal concessions, subscribing to language that appeared to proscribe, in the future, what they had done to Czechoslovakia, but hardly anyone in the United States understood this. Nixon, Ford, and even Kissinger had promised too much, and now—with allegations from hard-line Democrats and right-wing Republicans that the United States had again, as at Yalta, sold out Eastern Europe—the reaction was setting in. As far as Kennan could see, Americans were “right back where we were in Mr. Dulles’s time.” If anyone should devise “really sound and brilliant diplomacy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the country at large would not recognize it and would call with great acclaim for its abandonment.”19

  Despite the Helsinki agreements, Kennan wrote in a bicentennial history of Soviet-American relations published in the July 1976 issue of Foreign Affairs, the Nixon-Kissinger approach to détente had, on the whole, improved them. President Ford, however, was finding it impossible to say so, having barely survived a challenge for the Republican nomination from a Kissinger critic, Ronald Reagan, and now facing another, the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter. “[N]ot unnaturally,” Kennan noted, after lunching with Kissinger in late August, he was “somewhat dispirited, believing that he had failed in his effort to instill into American diplomacy some depth of concept and some subtlety of technique.... He is a wise, learned and agreeable man.” His memoirs would be “worth the enormous price the publishers will offer for them.”

  And what of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and the first Kennan’s legacy? The second Kennan made no mention of them in Foreign Affairs, noting only that “[t]he Soviet authorities will no doubt continue to adhere to internal practices of a repressive nature that will continue to offend large sections of American opinion.” But in an interview that summer, with unusual asperity, he did:

  [M]y namesake, George Kennan the elder, was busy for many years trying to whip up sympathy for the Russian revolutionaries, admittedly not the Bolsheviks but their moderate predecessors the Populists. The assumption behind all this was that if one could only overthrow the old Czarist autocracy, something much better would follow. Have we learned anything from this lesson?

  He had “the greatest misgivings about any of us, Americans or West Europeans, taking upon ourselves the responsibility for trying to overthrow this, or any other, government in Russia.” Kennan’s attitude earned him a stinging rebuke from a sensitive source. She found it pitiful, Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote him, “that of all people . . . it is George Kennan who surrendered, and forgot his own words, [which] he said in 1952. It is still true, George—even though Stalin [is] 20 years [sic] in grave, they are all—still—no better than Nazis. And you know this better than I do.”20

  Containment, as Kennan had conceived it, never required action from the outside to change the internal character of the Soviet system: that was to happen from within, in response to external circumstances the West should have wished to create in any event. Reforms would require visionaries—dissidents, if you will—who would sense these new circumstances and would have the courage to respond to them. Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and their allies met that standard. But by the time they did, Kennan, fearing that disruptions of any kind could lead to nuclear war, had come to regard them as dangerous enemies.

  IV.

  Kennan published the second volume of his own memoirs in 1972. “I don’t think it is my best work,” he wrote after finishing it. This time he was right—his first volume had set a high standard. Covering the years 1950 through 1963, the new one focused on the Korean War, the Moscow ambassadorship and its aftermath, Kennan’s unsuccessful efforts to save the Foreign Service career of his former subordinate John Paton Davies, the Reith lectures controversy, and service under Kennedy in Yugoslavia. It was oddly uneven, treating these episodes in detail while ignoring most of what Kennan was otherwise doing, notably writing history. “I don’t see how a memoir could be better,” John Kenneth Galbraith observed in The New York Times, before proceeding to show how it might have been. What the book did reveal, he concluded accurately enough, was that Kennan “derives no special pleasure—as I always do—from the feeling that everyone else is wrong.”21

  He certainly took no pleasure in the latest crisis at the Institute for Advanced Study. After the ailing Oppenheimer resigned as director in 1966, the board of trustees appointed an economist, Carl Kaysen, to that position. A skillful fundraiser, Kaysen upgraded the Institute’s physical facilities but lacked Oppenheimer’s tact in managing its prickly personalities. After he overruled a majority of the Institute’s permanent professors to offer that status to a sociologist, Robert Bellah, i
n 1972, they demanded Kaysen’s resignation. Soon both sides were attacking one another in The New York Times, which did not normally cover academic politics in such gruesome detail. “I am very, very much distressed about the dispute,” Kennan himself told the Times. “A lot of it has been sheer misunderstanding of a tragic nature.”

  That was part of the problem, but the larger issue was one of governance: did authority reside with the trustees, the tenured faculty, or the director, and if all three, in what proportion? Diplomacy, Kennan ruefully recalled, had been much easier than trying to answer this question. For the most part, he avoided taking sides: the trustees even approached him, at one point, about becoming interim director if Kaysen was forced to step down. To Kennan’s great relief, that didn’t happen. Bellah decided to go elsewhere, and Kaysen stayed on until 1976, when he yielded the directorship to a historian of science, Harry Woolf. But the furor robbed Kennan of the calm the Institute had once provided him. “As far as I can see,” he wrote one friend, “just about everybody here who has had any responsibility in this matter has done, with remarkable consistency, the wrong thing.” And, to another: “What fools these mortals be.”22

  Kennan was hard at work, in the meantime, establishing an institute of his own, as a way of repaying “something of the debt I owe to those who once taught and inspired me.” One was his Foreign Service mentor, Robert Kelley, who had insisted that the best way to understand the Soviet Union was to study Russian history and culture. Kennan’s book on Custine reflected that principle, but there was no American center for Russian research independent of major universities. Kennan wanted one, to be located in Washington. “Of the necessity,” he wrote his former Moscow boss (and later New York governor) W. Averell Harriman, “there can, in my opinion, be no doubt whatsoever.” Only Harriman had “the position, the authority, and the institutional detachment”—Kennan was too tactful to mention the cash—“to carry things forward.”23