George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Salvation lay in forgiveness, a theme Kennan developed more clearly in his diary than in his book. Why, other Christians might ask, could he not more easily accept his inadequacies? “Your God is supposed, by virtue of Christ’s intercession, to be a forgiving God. Confess your sins and rely on His forgiveness.”

  My answer to that would be: “Yes, I can, no doubt, rely on his forgiveness. But that does not mean that I should light-heartedly forgive myself. Is it not possible that He will forgive me only precisely in the measure that I decline to forgive myself in those things I find unworthy of my own forgiveness?”

  And so, with John Donne, Kennan went about, and around, and up and down his hill, in an uneasy soul’s acknowledgment that it soon must rest, “for none can work in that night.”28

  V.

  He dreamed again about death one night in 1995, this time horribly. His dread, though, came not from what afflicted or awaited him but from a vision of Annelise bidding him farewell outside a large dark Victorian house, entering it, putting on a black gown, and disappearing behind a closing door. She was a widow, she would be alone, and “I could not stand it.” Should he not rush up, ring the doorbell, and ask for reconsideration: “Why don’t we disregard all the circumstances of our lives that have led to this dénouement and start all over again?” But this, he knew, was not possible, and even if it had been, it might have frightened her more than the loneliness she now faced. So he had no choice but to wake up, “still shattered by what had happened, and desperate.”29

  To be sure, not all deaths were devastating. What everyone understood to be the last reunion of George and his siblings—Frances, Constance, Jeanette, and Kent—had taken place at the farm on a brilliant fall day in 1982. Frances, the oldest, thought it extraordinary that all were alive, even ambulatory: “Nobody had to be wheeled in!” But this final reunion was their first in six decades. They had long since ceased relying on each other to fend off loneliness, and so when they did occur—in 1984, 1991, 1994, and 2003, respectively—these deaths did not drive George, the last to survive, into the despair he feared Annelise would face when he was gone.30

  She did all she could to keep him going. After a protracted visit from a tedious friend, George made a point of acknowledging, in his diary, “the sweetness of my wife and of the loyalty with which she, still enjoying a relative robustness, looked after both of us tottering, shambling and tiresome old men.” She, in turn, made her own point by acknowledging his infirmities as little as possible, a habit that at times exasperated him but that balanced the fretting with which he filled his diary:

  July 1983: I stand now, presumably, within a year or two of my death.

  May 1985: Would that . . . the young could cast us out and be done with us, as the animals do.

  January 1988: I had [hoped] that the end of my life would precede the final filling up of the [tax] ledger, so that I would not have to buy another.

  April 1994: I feel myself moving closer to the abyss; but everyone says: “Oh, you look so well.”

  April 1996: If I die in Norway? . . . What to do with the damned body?

  He practiced death there once, when Annelise wasn’t looking: “I simply collapsed on the stony path near the boathouse, lay on my back staring at the oak leaves silhouetted against a cloudy Norwegian sky, and thought to myself: this would not be a bad time and place to die. But Fate (which, as Donne wrote, God fashioned ‘but doth not controul’) decided otherwise.”31

  So did George’s hyperactivity, which countered his hypochondria. His mostly handwritten diaries—carefully recording each ailment and its attendant indignities—were as voluminous and legible as ever. He published a new book of “reflections” in 1996, chiefly his lectures and articles since 1982. He was driving himself and Annelise over much of New England researching a long-planned history of the Kennan family: even she thought this to be too much. He was compulsively reading, or rereading, and taking notes: on Shakespeare, whose plays suggested experiences with women—some presumably painful—that had left him “with high respect” for them; on Saint Augustine, whose Confessions had taken up far too much of God’s time; on Macaulay, who had made English “the most felicitous” of all languages for expressing “the higher ranges of thought and feeling”; on Saint Paul, whom Kennan found to be, disconcertingly, a Dostoyevskian “extremist.” And he had wisely come to relish the great naval history novels of Patrick O’Brian.32

  Major birthdays, now major events, also encouraged survival: it would have been irresponsible to die before the festivities had taken place. The Council on Foreign Relations celebration of his ninetieth in New York in February 1994 left Kennan, he claimed, “not only overwhelmed but unable to think of any even appropriately adequate response.” In fact he spoke vigorously, regretting how much had been made of a certain talk on “containment” given there in 1947, cautioning against any comparable oversimplification of post–Cold War foreign policy. Shortly after returning to Princeton, he had a minor stroke and spent a few days in the hospital, but within a week of his release was rigging a sump pump in the basement and driving himself, alone, to the office.33

  The Kennans were still traveling frequently, if to familiar destinations: Kristiansand for part of the summer, but also now regularly the island community of North Haven, Maine; Hermann Hatzfeldt’s castle at Crottorf for Pour le Mérite meetings in the fall; Captiva Island in Florida for winter visits with the naturalists Bill and Laura Riley—George left behind, on one such occasion, a set of poems, addressed in stately formality to the resident birds. His research trips were over by the late 1990s, but their results appeared in his last book, An American Family: The Kennans; The First Three Generations, published when he was ninety-six. He had made his ancestors, one reviewer observed, into what he wanted them to be; but at that age, perhaps he had earned that right.34

  The pace could not continue. “What a doctor!” George wrote with relief, when his primary physician, Dr. Fong Wei, ordered him in the spring of 1998 to stay at home for a week, not answer the phone, and watch whatever animals visited the backyard. George “wasted the time most grandly” and was grateful for having been told to do so. But he was having trouble walking by the time his book came out in 2000, and Annelise, now ninety herself, was becoming frailer. Worst of all, his ancient Royal typewriter broke down one day that fall, “initiating a very similar breakdown in him who does the writing.” He continued the diary entry in a quavering hand, inscribing “the end is nearing.” It almost came out “the near is ending.” It made little difference: “the one, come to think of it, was no less true than the other.”35

  The summer of 2001 was the last George was able to spend in Norway. Reduced almost to immobility, he found a typewriter there that worked and so resumed his diary as his extended family came and went. “[C]rippledom,” however, did not lead “to productive brilliance of the mind,” for his thoughts would evaporate while waiting for his limbs to catch up. One of his final afternoons in Kristiansand was spent watching anxiously from the lawn as his young namesake, now seventeen, expertly windsurfed himself across the great sound and safely back. In Princeton that fall, George at last closed the Institute for Advanced Study office that Oppenheimer had given him half a century earlier. The Kennans’ seventieth wedding anniversary fell, unhappily, on September 11, 2001—happily, though, Christopher, Joan, and her husband Kevin Delany had arranged a congratulatory dinner with a few Princeton friends the previous weekend. George and Annelise spent the terrible day quietly at home.36

  I found him, a few months later, stretched out on a couch in his living room, his legs covered in a blanket, his hearing aids malfunctioning, his profile still strong from the side, but emaciated head-on. His mind, though, was undiminished: the conversation was a healthy mix of convictions firmly held and curiosity keenly expressed. Why did no one read Toynbee anymore? Because his books dealt with forces, not people: “You could spend your life reading Toynbee, but what would you have at the end of it?” Kennan did not find
it necessary to say, as on several previous occasions, that his own life soon would be ending. He was beyond the need for denial, or reassurance.37

  VI.

  The Kennans had live-in help now in the Hodge Road house. A Portuguese couple, Tony and Ana Mano, cooked and gradually took over other duties as well: Tony even began bringing ocean water from the New Jersey shore to bathe George’s arthritic knees. Betsy Barrett, who lived in the garage apartment, started as a housekeeper, became George’s secretary, and wound up as his nurse. Days became indistinguishable, apart from a brief stay in a Washington “assisted living” facility in the fall of 2002, while the Manos were away. The word got out, reporters got in touch, and Kennan granted his last interviews, condemning President George W. Bush’s plans to invade Iraq as well as the Democrats’ timidity in not opposing him more vigorously.38

  By the summer of 2003 Kennan could still read his correspondence but no longer reply: friends received messages, through Barrett, assuring them that silence did not mean negligence, or lack of regard. Meanwhile, preparations were under way for the grandest birthday of them all, George’s hundredth. Princeton University’s Firestone Library opened an exhibit on his life that fall, the centerpiece of which was every page of the “long telegram” displayed in a correspondingly long case. It was diplomacy’s Bayeux Tapestry.

  There were three celebrations of the real birthday, in February 2004. One was for family on February 16, when George eased his way downstairs for dinner, blew out an unrecorded number of candles on his cake, and wound up making three speeches. A second, on the eighteenth, was at the Institute for Advanced Study, which George’s family, helpers, and Dr. Wei conspired to have him attend: it had been “a plot,” he muttered. The third was a full-scale “George F. Kennan Centennial Conference” at the university, with the major address given by the secretary of state, Colin Powell. He did so with such respect, George’s grandson Brandon Griggs commented on the way out, that one would never have guessed his grandfather’s detestation of the administration in which Powell served. This enormous event was too much for Kennan to attend, so the secretary of state came to see him afterward, in his own bedroom. Tony Mano had ordered him to stay alive for the great day, George commented, and that had gotten him through it.39

  He lived for another thirteen months, but with little life left. He could read newspapers and receive visitors, but his mind was fading. So was Annelise, whose decline seemed synchronous with his own. One of the last outsiders to see them together was George’s old friend the historian John Lukacs: “His head, resting on a pillow, now had a kind of skeletal beauty; he could speak only a little, forcing out a few words with increasing difficulty; near the foot of the bed she sat huddled in a wheelchair at a table, uttering a few sensible words, not many.” They still shared that bed, and one day in March 2005 Betsy Barrett heard George turn to Annelise and ask: “Are you content?” She didn’t hear or perhaps didn’t understand, but he said clearly: “I am content.”40

  VII.

  George F. Kennan died peacefully of old age—he was 101—in his own bed, surrounded by his family, on the evening of March 17, 2005. Annelise followed, under similar circumstances, on August 7, 2008. His memorial service was held, a few weeks after his death, in the National Cathedral in Washington. Hers took place two days after she died, in Princeton’s Trinity Episcopal Church. Both were appropriate, but funerals only faintly suggest lives. His inspired countless obituaries; hers—as she would have thought fitting—very few. One of his best he composed himself when I asked him to do so, with no warning, one day in 1995:

  Giving full recognition to the fact that no one fully understands himself, that no one can conceivably be fully objective about himself, I would like to tell you—I’m now quite old, most of my life lies behind me—how I view myself, and my usefulness, or lack of it, in this world. I realize the delicacy of my nervous structure. I don’t think I would have been well qualified for a very high office, especially not a political one. I see, in other words, certain of my weaknesses.

  Somebody once said to me: “George, you are by nature really a teacher.” I think that there’s a lot to that. I have certain [other] things going for me. First of all, that I am independent, and have always kept my independence. I’ve always revolted against trying to say things as a member of a collective group, simply because it’s what the others said. I don’t belong to any organization where I feel that I have to say things they decide they want said. That is a relatively rare quality for anybody who writes a lot and speaks a lot.

  I think I have certain insights, from time to time. They are not organized. I’ve never tried to put them in the strait-jacket of an intellectual discipline of any sort. But they could have been more useful to people than they have been. How much that’s my fault and how much theirs I don’t know. I leave that alone.

  And finally, I credit myself with having been honest all my life. This is a very simple virtue, but outside of that I see all my faults. How much it’s going to mean, when looked back on, I have no idea. I hope that I’m right about these qualities. They exist on the surface of a great many which are no better than anybody else’s, and sometimes worse.41

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  EPILOGUE 1

  Greatness

  LORD MOUNTBATTEN’S BIOGRAPHER, PHILIP ZIEGLER, BECAME SO enraged with his subject while writing his life that he found it necessary to place a sign on his desk: “Remember, in spite of everything, he was a great man.”2 I never felt the need to do that while preparing Kennan’s biography, but the experience did convince me that “greatness” takes multiple forms. There may be as many definitions as there are subjects for biography: my own would be that greatness is one of the things that distinguishes immortality from mortality. It was not, for Kennan, the only thing, or even the most important thing. He was a man of deep faith, and when he spoke of immortality, he generally had in mind the kind God provides. Biographers must aim lower but can perhaps suggest qualities that might make a life, for mortals, memorable.

  Begin with grand strategy, by which I mean the discipline of achieving desired ends through the most efficient use of available means. Its most memorable practitioners have attained that status by leaving behind examples—whether through their actions or their writing—of how to do this. These transcend time, space, and circumstance. Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli, the American Founding Fathers, Metternich, Clausewitz, Lincoln, Bismarck, and Isaiah Berlin remain as relevant to the twenty-first century as to their own time. Students of grand strategy will study them well into the future. Will they study Kennan?

  Henry Kissinger, himself a plausible subject of such study, made the case that they should when he credited Kennan with having come “as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.”3 Historians, to be sure, debated what that doctrine was, and Kennan more than once disavowed it. With the demise of the Cold War, however, these controversies faded in the light of a more important question: what did “containment” accomplish? More than any other idea, this one appears now to have illuminated the path by which the international system found its way from the trajectory of self-destruction it was on during the first half of the twentieth century to one that had, by the end of the second half, removed the danger of great-power war, revived democracy and capitalism, and thereby enhanced the prospects for liberty beyond what they ever before had been.

  This outcome was by no means predetermined. To see why, go back to the moment in February 1946 when Kennan, sick in bed from the rigors of a Moscow winter and irritated as usual at the Department of State, summoned Dorothy Hessman and from his preferred horizontal position dictated a lengthy telegram. The world was not safe then from the scourge of great-power war: how could it have been, when in contrast to the previous world war, it had not even been possible to convene a peace conference? Nor was the world safe from authoritarianism, given the democracies’ recent reliance on one such regime to defeat anot
her. Nor was it safe from economic collapse, in the absence of any assurance that a global depression would not return. The world was certainly not safe from abuses of human rights, with one of the most advanced nations in Europe having just resorted to genocide on an unprecedented scale. Nor was it safe from the fear that in a future war no one would be safe. How could it have been, with atomic weapons now available, and with no guarantee that they would remain under one state’s exclusive control?

  What Kennan opened up, on that bleak day in Moscow, was a way out: a path between the appeasement that had failed to prevent World War II and the alternative of a third world war, the devastation from which would have been unimaginable. Might someone else have proposed the path, had Kennan not done so? Probably, in due course, but it’s hard to think of anyone else at the time who could have charted it with greater authority, with such eloquence, or within so grand strategic a framework.

  Only Kennan had the credibility to show, at a time when too many Americans still viewed the Soviet Union as a wartime ally, that for reasons rooted in Russian history and Marxist-Leninist ideology, there could never be a normal peacetime relationship with it: Stalin’s regime required external enemies. Only Kennan could have said this so compellingly as to command immediate attention in Washington. And only Kennan foresaw the possibility—Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz would have approved—that the United States and its allies might in time get the Soviet Union to defeat itself.