George F. Kennan: An American Life (102 page)

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

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 Smirnovsky insisted that the expulsion was “no longer valid,” that Kennan would be received cordially.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.

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

“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.

“I had a horror of Mr. Johnson,” Kennan recalled years later. “I think he did worthy things internally, but, my God!—he did them with such methods that I couldn’t have lasted in his entourage.”
²³

Johnson did, in the spring of 1965, attempt a connection to Kennan, or at least his aide, the historian Eric Goldman, did. In an effort to evoke Kennedy’s style, Goldman had proposed a White House Festival of the Arts, but by the time Johnson got around to approving the idea, he had begun escalating the war in Vietnam and had ordered military intervention to prevent an alleged pro-Castro coup in the Dominican Republic. Goldman asked Kennan to speak, in his capacity as the newly elected president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The invitation came at an awkward moment, because Kennan’s predecessor, Lewis Mumford, had used his departing speech to the organization in May to launch a vitriolic attack on Johnson. He had then “fled, leaving the meeting to me.” Kennan’s conscience would not have allowed such a thing, he wrote Mumford afterward, “but this implies no lack of respect on my part for the faithfulness with which you followed the dictates of your own.”
²⁴

Convinced that he had to represent the National Institute at the White House event, Kennan flew back at his own expense from Europe, where he was preparing for his trip to the Soviet Union with Christopher. The festival took place on June 14 with extensive media coverage, much of it generated by the poet Robert Lowell’s highly public rejection of the invitation he had received. Kennan addressed the luncheon, with Lady Bird Johnson in attendance. He defended the “eccentricities” of artists but cut from his prepared remarks a passage endorsing their right to address controversial issues: it would, Goldman had warned him, offend the president. “Are we his guests?” Kennan asked. Goldman said yes, and that settled it as far as Kennan was concerned. Mrs. Johnson thanked him for avoiding controversy, but reporters noticed the omission, obliging a presidential press spokesman to claim, lamely, that Kennan had run over his allotted time. Johnson, who had been in his office most of the day, appeared only for the concluding evening address and never bothered to greet Kennan: “That was my only contact with the White House in his time.”
²⁵

Kennan’s own doubts about Vietnam developed gradually. He had gone out of his way, while in Belgrade, to defend Kennedy’s support for Ngo Dinh Diem against Yugoslav press criticism. But by the time of the
Look
interview in November 1963—which appeared just after Diem’s overthrow and assassination—Kennan was advising caution: “When you have regimes of this sort, . . . [y]ou always have to be ready to get out.” In Japan, several months later, he acknowledged uncertainty about Johnson’s intentions but suggested that the domino theory did make sense. By March 1965, though, with American military involvement growing, Kennan was privately expressing deep concern “about what our people are doing in Southeast Asia. It seems to me that they have taken leave of their senses.” And in May, writing to Annelise: “I am absolutely appalled at what is going on. It looks to me as if Mr. J[ohnson] had lost his head completely.”
²⁶

Nevertheless, he kept these views to himself. When he saw Gromyko in Moscow on June 25, Kennan used the occasion, Ambassador Kohler reported, to mount an “able and effective” defense of American policy. That was a diplomatic facade: Kennan was in fact wondering how the United States could hope to exploit Sino-Soviet differences while fighting a major war in Vietnam. Washington had lost “almost all flexibility of choice not only in that particular area but in our approach to the communist world generally,” he wrote Yale’s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin. He saw no point, however, in speaking out. “I have had my day in court. My views are known.... I can do no more, it seems to me, than to fall silent.”
²⁷

But he didn’t. Kennan’s first published criticism of Johnson’s strategy appeared in
The Washington Post
on December 12, 1965. If victorious, he argued, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong would surely impose a ruthless dictatorship: young Americans marching on their behalf were choosing “a very strange way” to support freedom. But the world contained much more oppression than the United States could ever hope to remedy, some of it “closer to home than what transpires in Vietnam.” A communist triumph there would not shift the global balance of power. Meanwhile the war was overshadowing everything else. “[E]nslaved to the dynamics of a single unmanageable situation,” the United States was losing the initiative, “not just locally but on a world scale.”
²⁸

Kennan was recovering, when the piece appeared, from yet another health crisis, this time a prostate operation, which laid him low through the Christmas holidays. “[T]he incomparable grapefruit,” he assured Kent, “are already contributing to my recovery in a most welcome way.” He was well enough by February 1966 to draft a statement on Vietnam for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose chairman, J. William Fulbright, had invited him to testify. Kennan then traveled to Ohio for lectures at the College of Wooster and at Denison University. He took a late flight to Washington on the ninth, arriving sleep-deprived and exhausted—only to find himself, for five hours the next day, on national television.
²⁹

Angered by Johnson’s decision to resume the bombing of North Vietnam after a five-week halt failed to produce negotiations, Fulbright and his staff director, Carl Marcy, had arranged live coverage of the hearings they had convened. Worried by this, Johnson tried to seize the spotlight by scheduling, on the spur of the moment, a “summit” conference in Honolulu with South Vietnamese president Nguyen Cao Ky. He also pressed the television networks to resume their normal programming. CBS executives obliged with
I Love Lucy
reruns on the day Kennan appeared, provoking the resignation of their respected news division director, Fred W. Friendly. NBC, however, carried Kennan’s testimony in full.

“An unusual hush fell over the prelunch drinkers at the Metropolitan Club,”
The New York Times
reported, “as members and guests, including Government officials, bankers, lawyers and journalists, grouped, glasses in hand, around a television set.” What they and the nation saw,
Washington Post
columnist Murrey Marder added, was not the explosive drama of past congressional hearings, “only a bald, soft-spoken, well-tailored man just five days short of 62, . . . calmly and decorously surgically dissecting a whole concept of foreign policy [of] which he profoundly disapproved.”

Ho Chi Minh was not Hitler, Kennan explained; nor would he be, if he won, a puppet of Moscow or Beijing. Defeating him, however, would cost civilian lives and suffering on a scale “for which I would not like to see this country responsible.” The United States could not continue to “jump around” like “an elephant frightened by a mouse.” Instead its standard must be that of John Quincy Adams: to sympathize with freedom everywhere; to fight for it only where feasible; and to “go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Kennan added, to this famous aphorism, one of his own: “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”
³⁰

“Your testimony,” Kennan’s friend Louis Fischer wrote, “resembled a supersonic plane breaking the sound barrier; it ripped through the nation, and perhaps the world, breaking windowpanes of the mind.” That was extravagant, but Johnson did find it necessary, in a press conference the next day, to deny significant disagreement with Kennan, or with retired Army general James M. Gavin, who had earlier made a similar argument. Privately, Johnson was fuming. “They both would just rather not be troubled with Asia,” he complained to his aides. Why would Kennan even talk about Vietnam when he had never been there and knew nothing about the situation? But George Reedy, Johnson’s former press secretary, pointed out that Kennan and Gavin were reasonable men, who had expressed their uneasiness from a moderate perspective and in a sensible tone. Perhaps they had a point in wondering whether the war was being conducted “as an integral part of an overall United States world strategy.” Could Johnson meet with them and see that they got regular briefings? The president, now very much on the defensive, chose not to do so.
³¹