George F. Kennan: An American Life (100 page)

Some spirit told him, though, not to end his ambassadorship on a sour note. So Kennan added a handwritten compliment, reminiscent of one he had sent Acheson in even more trying times thirteen years earlier:

The date was October 22, 1963. The reply went out on the twenty-eighth:

“Many thanks,” the president added, in his own handwritten postscript. Kennan later recalled what Kennedy had said at the end of their last private conversation, on the day before Tito’s visit to the White House: “George, I hope you’ ll keep on talking.”
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THAT HE DID. “OUR FOREIGN POLICY IS PARALYZED,”
LOOK
MAGAZINE had Kennan complaining, in an interview that ran under a large photograph, showing him apparently wincing in pain. The causes, he insisted, lay in Congress, where just a few powerful legislators could tie things up; in the bureaucracy, which suffered from “ponderousness”; and among allies, who found it easier to demand “everything but the kitchen sink, rather than take a real negotiating position.” There had been, thus, no “New Frontier” in diplomacy because Kennedy had no latitude to construct one. Kennan had resigned his ambassadorship, not over differences with the administration but because he lacked credibility and authority. It had not even been clear how much humanitarian assistance the United States could legally provide after the Skopje earthquake. At least he had given blood: “No Congressional committee could stop me from doing that.”
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The article appeared in the November 19, 1963, issue. Kennan was with Oppenheimer three days later when they heard the news. “He said nothing, nor did I—there was no need.... [B]ut we were both aware that it was more than just one life that had been obliterated: that the world we cared about had been grievously diminished, together with our own ability to be in any way useful in it.” In the sad days that followed, Kennan composed a eulogy for the only president under whom he had served of whom he approved.

John F. Kennedy understood, Kennan wrote, two great principles of statecraft: “First, that no political judgments must ever be final; and second, that the lack of finality must never be an excuse for inaction.” Blessed with “a clear mind, a quick intelligence, an uncommonly retentive memory,” Kennedy appraised dispassionately the people and problems he confronted.

Kennedy approached issues with an open mind, studied them carefully, and embraced answers while asking further questions. He respected the past, never assuming that those who had gone before “were idiots or men of bad will.” Despite setbacks, he never lost heart: he bore disappointments “in manly loneliness,” seldom revealing them to others. An extraordinarily gallant and gifted man,” he was only approaching his full potential when “the hand of the assassin reached him.”
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The eulogy itself was extraordinary, given Kennan’s disappointments over the past two and a half years. Kennedy had repeatedly subordinated foreign policy to the interests of Congress, the bureaucracy, and the allies, precisely the habits Kennan had so often condemned, most recently in his
Look
interview. Survivors rarely speak ill of the dead; but Kennan had spoken well of Kennedy before his death, despite compromises that differed little from those Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower had made, toward which Kennan had been far less charitable.

Kennedy, however, consulted Kennan—indeed treated him almost as a mentor—in a way no previous president had done. They met, after Kennedy ’s election, at least fourteen times, an unusually large number for a serving overseas ambassador. Their conversations softened, although they never removed, Kennan’s bitterness over his defeats: “When I came home and saw him there in his room—that bedroom of his upstairs in the White House—and realized the pressures that were brought to bear against him, realized even what it meant to him to take an hour out to sit down in his rocking chair and talk with me, I always was aware that I must not look at his position from the standpoint of my own problems.”

Kennan the historian understood that all presidents confront inadequate information and irreconcilable choices: his two volumes on Wilson and the Bolshevik Revolution had portrayed these brilliantly. But Kennan the diplomat, the policy planner, and the public intellectual rarely showed such sympathy. Kennedy, with some success, brought the two Kennans together, perhaps because Kennan—self-critical as always—saw in Kennedy what he himself should have been.
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He had known, since October 1962, that he would be resigning: what to do next, however, was as usual unclear. There were, as always, invitations to teach, this time at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Yale asked him to replace its great diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis. Harvard offered a “university professorship,” tied to no particular department. But these would involve “a disorderly, harried life,” Kennan explained to Oppenheimer. “I would probably be pressed to speak too much; the voice would soon wear thin; nothing permanent or identifiable would remain to mark the effort.”

The alternative was immersion in history, possibly the transition “from the clear and symmetrical concepts of 18th-century culture to the strange Victorian world of the latter half of the 19th century.” He could try to become conscious of all “the currents and impulses to which men were exposed at that time—to let this work in me, and then to determine, as spirit and occasion might dictate, what I want to express, and what form to give it.” Were he to take this course, he would return to the Institute, where “I would expect to detach myself completely from the public discussion of contemporary affairs (Dorothy [Hessman] smiles as I dictate this; but she is wrong).” Yet another possibility would be a memoir. “But what if it should be a success?” Could he really retire into the past? This was “the whirlpool of questions in which I rotate.”
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“I cherish you as a colleague and neighbor far too much to trust my own objectivity,” Oppenheimer replied, in a letter exquisitely attuned to these ambivalences. He went on to remind Kennan, though, that the Institute could allow all of these options. It would expect scholarship, but the topics pursued need not always be the same. Most of its faculty taught, from time to time, “in nearby campi.” As for public commentary, Einstein, Earle, von Neumann, “and indeed I myself have not felt silenced, or even inhibited, by our attachment to this place.” There need be no final commitment: Harvard could keep its chair warm while Kennan sampled life back in Princeton. He should say no to Yale. In the end, he ought to give “an appropriately small weight to what other people expect of you, and a very great one to what you expect of yourself.”
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As Oppenheimer had hoped, that settled it. Kennan promised that he would be on hand for the Institute’s fall term. The other offers had left him “much torn,” George admitted to Kent, but returning to Princeton would give him the greatest flexibility, while not forcing another relocation upon his family. He and Annelise had moved, he later estimated, some thirteen times while he was in government. “I recognized her need for a permanent home.” So the White House resignation announcement made it official: Ambassador Kennan would resume his duties at the Institute for Advanced Study, in accordance with “long standing plans.”
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He would do so without Hessman, who had spent almost two decades with him. Now a Foreign Service employee, she decided to stay on to work for C. Burke Elbrick, Kennan’s successor in Yugoslavia. Her own successor turned out to be Constance Moench (later Goodman), a Smith College graduate who had applied for a secretarial position in Oppenheimer’s office but was assigned instead to Kennan. It was “a blind date,” she recalled, “because the two of us agreed to this sight unseen.” However, “I did know something about Professor Kennan. I’d been a government major, and I’d read the ‘X Article’ and
American Diplomacy
.” She had also seen, in
The New York Times
, an account of the ambassador’s last days in Belgrade. “I thought, well, if his staff is weeping when he’s leaving, he can’t be all that bad.”

Moench found her new boss “slim, elegant, and rather young in the face, although balding—balding? He was bald.” Kennan was shyer than she had expected, and sensitive to everything around him: “By that I mean his [capacity] to observe and to feel beauty, to drink it all in like a sponge, his caring for other people.” His eyes, she noticed, resembled Oppenheimer’s: “extraordinary eyes, just absolutely riveting, those clear blue eyes. I sensed a very real affection between the two men.” Kennan was a man of many moods, “although I never felt terribly dragged down by them.” He always treated her “with kindness and affection and respect.”
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Princeton University made Kennan a “visiting” professor of history and international affairs in the fall of 1963. This was an unpaid position, in line with the Institute’s policy on outside academic appointments, but the courses were for credit, and he welcomed the interaction with students. It would counter, George wrote Kent, “the unbroken loneliness of pure research and writing [which] is not good for me.” His spring semester courses would include lectures on Russia in the era of Nicholas II, a seminar on recent diplomatic history, and a preceptorial, Princeton’s version of a tutorial. Moench remembered his working hard on these, compiling bibliographies, searching out maps, even locating recordings of famous speeches. “It was very lively, there was a lot of wonderful discussion that went on, and he spent almost full-time making [it] exciting and interesting and rich for the students.”

Kennan enjoyed teaching, although he soon realized that he would have to cut back his course load if he was to get anything else done. He preferred undergraduates to graduate students: the latter were too beaten down, too lacking in spontaneity, too worried about what he might think of them. Both groups wrote badly and were poorly prepared linguistically. Kennan agonized over grades but was generous when his own role in history came up. “I think he deserves an A,” he wrote a few years later of a student who had turned in a paper on Harriman without discussing him. “Better people than ____ have failed to mention me in this connection.”
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Kennan was also working that fall on the Elihu Root lectures, a series of three to be delivered at the Council on Foreign Relations in early November. He would type out first drafts—embarrassingly, Moench found him to be faster than she was—then mark them up, rearrange passages using scissors and tape, and return them for further editing. He still dictated, at times horizontally, but chiefly for correspondence, or to relieve kidney stone pain. Published in 1964 as a short book,
On Dealing with the Communist World
, the lectures were Kennan’s attempt to extract lessons from his Yugoslavia experience. He meant them “as a polemic” against the ill-informed anticommunism so evident within Congress. They were a Cold War primer: “Little steps for little feet.” They were also, as it happened, little read. In the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, Kennan’s ambassadorial travails seemed inconsequential. The implications he drew from them, however, marked an important shift in his thinking about the postwar international system.

Owing to a sequence of events that began in 1948—Tito’s defection, Mao’s triumph, Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign, unrest in Poland, rebellion in Hungary, and now the Sino-Soviet split—it hardly made sense anymore, Kennan argued, to speak of “communism” as a unitary phenomenon. That opened opportunities, because by exploiting divisions within that ideology—by selectively extending support to or withholding it from regimes that still espoused one variety or another of Marxism-Leninism—the West could determine “whether the Chinese view, or the Soviet view, or perhaps a view more liberal than either, would ultimately prevail within the Communist camp.” Capitalism, in theory at least, could shape communism’s future.

In practice, though, this was not happening. Mindful only of mindless constituencies, Congress was indiscriminately legislating trade and aid policy. Deference to the West Germans precluded any disavowal of their irredentist ambitions in East Germany and Poland. These, in turn, prevented the Soviet Union from reducing its military presence in Eastern Europe, something it would have to do before “polycentrism” could flourish there. The great colonial powers, during the nineteenth century, had alienated millions through insensitivity toward those who were within their power. Weren’t the United States and its allies offending “just as many more through lack of imagination and feeling toward those who were in the power of their ideological adversaries”?
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