George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  The allusion was to probably the second most dangerous crisis—after Cuba in 1962—of the entire Cold War. NATO ran military maneuvers in the North Atlantic each fall, but it upgraded the 1983 exercise, code-named “Able Archer,” to include top-level decision makers. Alarmed by this, Soviet intelligence analysts concluded that the surprise attack they had been told to expect was about to happen. Oleg Gordievsky, a British spy in Moscow, alerted his London handlers, who in turn warned Washington. Reagan found the reports hard to believe but immediately began efforts to defuse the crisis. The purpose of his upcoming speech, he wrote on January 6, 1984, would be to “reassure the eggheads & our European friends”—and presumably also the Kremlin—“that I don’t plan to blow up the world.”43

  The idea for Reagan’s globally televised “fireside chat” didn’t come directly from Kennan. The president was no regular reader of The New Yorker, and The Washington Post buried its account of Kennan’s Wilson Center speech at the end of an inconspicuous story on page B13. But Matlock read what Kennan had written, heard what he had said about Roosevelt, and happened to be drafting Reagan’s speech—until the president himself took it over to introduce Jim and Sally to Ivan and Anya. There were again convergences, if not causes. “Reagan’s Soviet policy had more in common with Kennan’s thinking than the policy of any of Reagan’s predecessors,” Matlock later recalled, even if “the rhetoric that offended Kennan’s sensibilities temporarily blinded him to the real substance of American policy.”44

  Andropov died on February 9. Kennan thought his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, the worst possible choice, exemplifying “all that the regime ought to be turning its back on.” Subordinates who would have to work with him deserved sympathy, not reproach: “Whatever their inner doubts, they could not admit to recognizing the justice of anything you might be saying without entering, if only so slightly, into the realm of the wholly treasonable.” Kennan might have been writing about Mikhail Gorbachev, but he hardly knew the name.45

  And what of Reagan, now running for reelection? The president had become a peace candidate, Kennan explained to Dobrynin, because the antinuclear campaign and the public reaction to The Day After, which eighty million people saw, had left him no choice. Fearing that Reagan would revert to his hard line after his probable reelection, Kennan had his own choice to make. He could oppose the president openly, remaining true to his convictions but forfeiting any possibility of influence in a second term. Or he could “lie low,” in the faint hope that the administration might seek his help in repairing the damage it had done: “I have, God knows, no admiration for Mr. Reagan, but if a certain amount of restraint, dissimulation, and self-abasement could be useful in sparing my children—and our civilization—the final catastrophe, there could be no question of what I should do.”46

  VI.

  Reagan’s November victory was no surprise, therefore, but Kennan had trouble accounting for its landslide proportions. If public opinion had forced the president, against his will, to resume arms reduction talks, then why had he gotten so many votes for so little progress? Kennan shifted to the argument that the antinuclear movement had failed miserably and would have to pull itself together in some more effective form of resistance. Bill Bundy saw a draft “statement” to this effect but thought it too pessimistic for publication, and so Kennan adjusted his position yet again: after all, “new faces might appear [in Moscow] with whom, for one reason or another, people in our government might find it easier to talk.”47

  As if to confirm that possibility, Chernenko died on March 10, and Gorbachev immediately succeeded him. After making his third trip up 16th Street in as many years to sign the Soviet embassy’s “grief book,” Reagan offered to meet with the new leader, as he had unsuccessfully with Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Gorbachev, at fifty-four, was of a new generation, Kennan told The New York Times, despite having risen through the old system. With economic problems at home, unrest in Eastern Europe, war in Afghanistan, and rivalries with both China and the United States, he had every reason to reconsider existing policies.48

  Kennan had expected the Times to call, but not the State Department. He met there on April 2 with Under Secretary for Political Affairs Michael Armacost and his aides, who wanted to know what he thought of Gorbachev: “[T]his is the first time in many years that I have been consulted in this place.... I am mildly pleased to be given this attention.” But the “smooth remoteness” of the questioning left Kennan uneasy. It was too close to Dulles’s suggestion, after firing him in 1953, that he drop in from time to time when he had anything useful to say.

  On April 11, however, Dulles’s successor dropped in on Kennan. Secretary of State Shultz, speaking at Princeton on international economic policy, went out of his way to seek Kennan’s advice, over lunch, on how to handle the new Kremlin leadership. Shultz’s cordiality so surprised Kennan that he could only dispense bromides: that these were insecure people who required reassurance and respect; that both sides should agree on what the talks were to be about; that it was unwise to raise irrelevant issues. For Shultz, this was nothing he didn’t know. For Kennan—himself an insecure person who required reassurance and respect—it was yet another reason to rethink his attitude toward the Reagan administration.49

  He found this very difficult to do. He was shocked, while in Oslo in August, to hear a recent Norwegian ambassador to Moscow defend Reagan’s firmness. “Was all diplomacy,” Kennan wondered, “some sort of dance in which we demonstrated our ‘resolve’ . . . our unbending pursuit of our chosen course?” Where was the opposition? he asked himself in October: this “greatest escape artist since Houdini” had, with the help of the Democratic Party, “defeated us all. We are left powerless and unmanned.” These were diary lamentations, not to be taken too seriously, but Kennan displayed his distrust openly in a New York Times op-ed on November 3. The upcoming Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Geneva, he insisted, should focus on slowing the arms race. It would be “tragic in the uttermost degree if Washington failed to make the effort.”50

  On November 7, 1985, the president met at the White House with a group of academic experts on the Soviet Union. Kennan was not among them. “It sounds to me like Reagan invited people who tell him things he likes to hear,” an unnamed uninvited scholar grumbled to The Washington Post. By then, though, a senior presidential aide—also unnamed—had told the same newspaper that Kennan’s 1981 proposal for a 50 percent cut in nuclear arsenals was likely to come up at Geneva: “We have for a long time proposed a reduction of about half in land- and sea-based ballistic missiles.” This was indeed the first topic Reagan raised in his first substantive private conversation with Gorbachev, on November 19. When the Soviet leader hedged, citing concerns about the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan went further: why not get rid of nuclear weapons altogether, thereby removing any need for defenses against them?51

  A few days later Kennan got an excited phone call from Congressman John F. Seiberling, an Ohio Democrat active in the peace movement. He had sent the White House, before the summit, a copy of the Einstein Prize address. Now Reagan and Gorbachev, in principle, had endorsed its chief recommendation. But Kennan was not prepared, yet, to accept the suggestion that he had, in any way, influenced the president, or even that the two had reached the same conclusions independently. “Mr. Reagan does not object to a certain amount of window-dressing in the field of academic, scientific, and personal exchanges,” he acknowledged in December. But “behind it—in the fields that really count—stands a stone wall he has no intentions of dismantling.”52

  “I have no cheerful thoughts to offer as you leave this country,” Kennan wrote Dobrynin in March 1986. His long Washington ambassadorship was coming to an end, and although “the future is full of surprises—sometimes even pleasant ones,” Reagan, Kennan was sure, would not provide them. He saw the president at times as a sinister political wizard, at others as an amiable actor speaking lines sinister writers had prepared for him. Whatever he was, Reagan would nev
er seek nuclear arms reduction. Thanks to him, “we love these apocalyptic devices; we have taken them to our hearts; and we would not give them up if the Russians had none at all.”53

  At the Reykjavik summit in October, however, Reagan and Gorbachev did agree to remove all intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. They also endorsed the concept of a 50 percent cut in intercontinental-range missiles, and they even discussed the possibility of eliminating all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. Only the president’s unwillingness to dismantle the Strategic Defense Initiative brought the negotiations to an angry halt, but as Gorbachev was quick to acknowledge, Reykjavik had “created a qualitatively new situation. And nobody is now in a position to act the way he was able to act before.”54

  The New York Times ran Gorbachev’s statement on the morning of October 15. Kennan read it, set aside another attack on Reagan—“a deeply prejudiced, ill-informed, and stubborn man, not above the most shameless demagoguery”—and after talking with McGeorge Bundy agreed that “we should try to be helpful and not just critical.” He could not resist inflicting on Annelise, however, what he would like to have said to Gorbachev:

  You could give in to us on every point in our negotiations; you would still encounter nothing but a stony hostility in official American circles; and your concessions would be exploited by the President as evidence that he had frightened you into compliance, that the only language you understood was the language of force.

  The problem was not just Reagan. Other powerful “elements” in American society felt the need for an inhuman enemy “as a foil for what they like to persuade themselves is their own exceptional virtue.” Through no fault of his own, Gorbachev had been cast in that role.55

  Fortunately, this communication went no further than Kennan’s diary and his wife’s seasoned discretion. For it sounded embarrassingly close to a dispatch, now published, that Kennan had sent from Moscow forty years earlier. “Some of us here,” he had written the State Department then, had been trying to guess what the United States would have to do if it wished to win Stalin’s trust. The list included unconditional surrender, complete disarmament, a transfer of power to the Communist Party, and even then “Moscow would smell a trap.” Now, Kennan seemed to be saying, Gorbachev in his dealings with Reagan was facing an American Stalin.56

  VII.

  “Mr. Kennan,” Gorbachev said to him, in an actual conversation that took place in Washington on December 8, 1987: “We in our country believe that a man may be a friend of another country and remain, at the same time, a loyal and devoted citizen of his own; and that is the way we view you.” The tribute came at a Soviet embassy reception on the occasion of Gorbachev’s first trip to the United States. “I was just standing on the fringes,” George recalled, until Annelise took charge: “For goodness sake, go up and greet people.” So he pushed his way past Kissinger, McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and John Kenneth Galbraith, as well as less familiar luminaries—Billy Graham, Paul Newman, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Robert De Niro, and John Denver. Maybe, as Kennan approached Gorbachev, somebody whispered his name. Maybe they didn’t need to. However it happened, he “recognized me, opened his arms, and embraced me.” It was not what Kennan expected from the first successor to Stalin he had ever met.

  Kennan had not expected either, though, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which Reagan and Gorbachev had just signed at the White House. It was the “zero option” brought to fruition: the first abolition, by mutual consent, of an entire category of the “apocalyptic devices” Kennan so greatly feared. The day was full of surprises. Seated at Kennan’s table while Gorbachev spoke was “a lady of most striking appearance, who chain-smoked Danish cigars and appeared to be rather bored with the whole performance.... I was later told that I should have recognized her—as the widow of a famous rock star.” His name, strangely, was something like “Lenin.” Gorbachev’s “extraordinarily gracious and tactful statement,” Kennan concluded, had brought a fitting end to his long involvement in Soviet affairs: “If you cannot have this sort of recognition from your own government . . . , it is nice to have it at least from the one-time adversary.”

  How, though, had Kennan’s idea—that nuclear weapons should not be just “controlled” but reduced or even eliminated—taken hold in Reagan’s administration? Perhaps it had to do with simplicity, Kennan suggested, when asked this question a few days after meeting Gorbachev. Stalin had known that “complicated things never wash in high politics.” Reagan knew that too. He had wanted “some simple formula,” and the Einstein Prize proposal provided it. “[T]he things that are done by great statesmen publicly have to be quite simple.”57

  As the comparison suggested, the “greatness” of which Kennan spoke was not meant as a compliment. Reagan’s policies, Kennan had predicted at the beginning of 1987, were likely “to preclude the pursuit of any sensible policy towards [the Soviet Union] for years to come.” When the president demanded, in June in Berlin, that Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” Kennan, speaking two weeks later within sight of it, deplored “confrontational tactics.” The time was “plainly not ripe,” the onetime architect of “disengagement” now maintained, for German reunification, or for any shift in existing military alliances. “The approach of Mr. Gorbachev depresses me profoundly,” Kennan had written before the December summit in Washington. “I cannot understand why he consented to come.”58

  Joe Alsop, now dying of cancer, hosted a dinner for some old friends just prior to Gorbachev’s arrival. Kennan was startled to find everyone there more optimistic than he was. Might something more come out of the summit than the “zero option” treaty, which Reagan had obviously proposed in the belief that the Soviets would never accept it? Had Gorbachev done so out of weakness? Or perhaps out of cleverness? “There is nothing that so upsets the NATO commanders, Mr. Reagan among them, than a sudden and unexpected consent to their more outrageous demands.” But Kennan had been demanding the removal of nuclear missiles from Europe for decades, and now he was upset that it was about to happen. His attitude itself bordered on the outrageous: how could he have loved John F. Kennedy, who repeatedly rejected his advice, and loathed Ronald Reagan, whose actions in this and other respects were consistent with it?59

  Gorbachev’s tribute to Kennan suggests one answer, for Reagan never offered one. There are no references to Kennan in any of Reagan’s prepresidential radio broadcasts, in his speeches and press conferences as president, or in his voluminous White House diaries, which he kept more regularly, if less introspectively, than Kennan did his. Recognition was important to Kennan, whose vanity equaled his self-doubt. Kennedy’s cultivation of Kennan softened the disappointments he inflicted. Reagan’s failure to do so kept Kennan from seeing that his own vindication was taking place.

  But even if the president had tried, he might not have succeeded, for he embodied what Kennan deplored about America. Reagan’s roots lay in movies, television, and advertising. His political home was the Republican Party’s right wing, where McCarthy had once resided. Reagan viewed the world through dangerous simplicities, not realist subtleties. He was not the first California president—Hoover and Nixon had preceded him—but he was the first happy one. With Kennan distrusting both happiness and California, he probably would have distrusted Reagan, even if the president had tried to win his trust. Shultz and Matlock did try but, perhaps sensing the pitfalls, did not persist. Nitze, another possible intermediary, did not even bother. Kennan’s complaints about Reagan, he wrote at one point, were “entirely a red herring,” followed by “a lot of drivel.”60

  Reagan, for his part, had little need of Kennan. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was an instinctive grand strategist, fully capable of operating without policy planners. He saw more clearly than his advisers the sequences of actions, together with the coalitions of constituencies, necessary to get him where he wanted to go. He refused to let complications obscure destinations, or to make conventional wisdom a compass. And he understood tha
t, in order to lead, he could never despair. Kennan saw destinations clearly enough, and he certainly defied orthodoxies. But he was bad at sequencing: as he himself admitted, he too often did the right things at the wrong times. He tended more often to shatter than to solidify coalitions. And he despaired constantly, whatever he was doing. So Kennan turned himself into a complication, leaving it to Reagan to bring his strategy to its successful conclusion.61

  Eventually, grudgingly, and a bit wistfully, Kennan came to see this. When asked, in 1996, who had ended the Cold War, he predictably named Gorbachev. But then he added, watching carefully to see whether his interviewer, who came close, would fall off his chair: “also Ronald Reagan, who in his own inimitable way, probably not even being quite aware of what he was really doing, did what few other people would have been able to do in breaking this log jam.”62

  VIII.

  When President George H. W. Bush took office in January 1989, it was not yet clear that the Cold War was over. Gorbachev, speaking at the United Nations the previous month, had announced a unilateral withdrawal of half a million Soviet troops from Central and Eastern Europe, but Bush nonetheless ordered a policy review, implying that Reagan had been too trustful. Kennan was glad to have “new and more intelligent people” at the White House. He worried, though, about loss of momentum in responding to Gorbachev and so resolved, by going public again, to make the case for regaining it. “If I don’t say something now, and the new people go the wrong way, I will never know whether something I could have said and didn’t would make a difference.”