George F. Kennan: An American Life (106 page)

Whatever their chances of being drafted, the students had a point, Kennan acknowledged, when they complained of having to register for military service at eighteen, while not being allowed to vote until they were twenty-one. Nor was there any excuse for sending draftees into wars “of obscure origin and rationale,” halfway around the world. If such conflicts were necessary, professionals ought to handle them. If there weren’t enough to do so, then the wars shouldn’t be fought. These were failures of
policy
, though, not of
institutions
. Democracy provided means of redress, even if not immediate. “But, the students will say, this is too slow. What you are talking about will take years. By that time, we will all be dead.” As usual, Kennan observed, “they exaggerate. I shall be dead. They probably will not.”

And what of civil rights? In their sympathy for oppressed blacks, the students reminded Kennan of that shown for peasants by the Russian populists of the late nineteenth century. In neither case had the sympathizers known much about those with whom they sympathized. In both they viewed the oppressed as “helpless” and therefore expected of them no accountability for their own behavior: “The American Negro is not going to be aided by an approach which treats him only as object and not at all as subject.” Nor would apartheid’s sufferers benefit from American universities withdrawing their South African investments, as the student left was demanding. The time had come for the academy to reclaim its authority from those who had “no experience of its past, no expertise for its present, no responsibility for its future.”

It was characteristic of radicals to abhor being outflanked. This had led, in Russia, to the nihilism that undermined the old order, thereby opening the way for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who allowed no defiance. That was not likely to happen in the United States, Kennan thought: with an end to the war, a phasing out of the draft, and the aging of students beyond thirty, things would settle down. But it was worth asking why the students had become radicalized in the first place.

The answer, Kennan insisted, went well beyond the immediate targets of protest. For the students reflected the “sickly secularism” of society as a whole: its shallow convictions; its preoccupation with gadgetry; its disconnection from nature; its lack of understanding for “the slow powerful processes of organic growth.” These had created, in college youth, “an extreme disbalance in emotional and intellectual growth.” In the end, then, the culture itself would have to change, and here Kennan fell back on familiar jeremiads: the evils of automobiles, advertising, and environmental degradation; the corruption of politics; the possibility that the country itself might be too big to solve its problems. Were the students gloomy about the American future? “[T]hey haven’t seen anything yet. Not only do my apprehensions outclass theirs but my ideas of what would have to be done to put things to rights are far more radical than theirs.”
⁶³

“George was somewhat shrill,” Dilworth recalled, “at least we thought so, and our children thought so.” It went beyond that. Kennan was getting FBI reports on student and black protests throughout this period, and at one point suggested that the government suppress them, in a manner “answerable only to the voters at the next election but not to the press or even to the courts.” There should even be special prisons for “political offenders,” to keep them apart from common criminals. “One may think what one will of the events of the last two or three years,” he wrote the master of Yale’s Branford College in 1970, asking to be removed from its roster of nonresident fellows, “but that they have impaired the ability of old and young to communicate with each other is something all of us, I think, must recognize.”
⁶⁴

Kennan’s anxieties—extreme even for him—arose from fears for his own children as much as for his country. Grace’s marriage had broken up, and Joan’s was about to. Christopher had found adjustment to Groton difficult. Wendy, her father worried, was growing up too fast. “[W]e have failed badly, somewhere, in the way we have brought these children up and the sort of life we have offered them,” George complained after spending a Thanksgiving at the farm with slouchy, sullen teenagers—his two youngest, plus some of their friends. Soon they would be off to the great universities, which would quickly expose them to “the morbidity of the present student population. We are in a hell of a shape, here at home.”
⁶⁵

Left to himself, he often claimed, he would have become an exile, even a hermit: the west coast of Scotland still beckoned. His family could hardly follow, though, so the next best choice was to avoid, as far as possible, “all confrontation with American life.... I must learn to live in it as though I did not live in it.” But could his children? That seemed implausible, given their need for education, employment, love, and families. How could he shield them, then, from “this false life,” as he had once described it, in which “innocence is lost before maturity is achieved”?
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The Kennans spent the summer of 1968, as usual, in Norway. Unusually—but as an expression of confidence—George allowed Christopher and three of his buddies to sail
Nagawicka
from Denmark to Sweden in early August, without adult supervision. On leaving them at the dock,

To George’s relief, they arrived safely and flew home, a few days later, with Wendy and Annelise. He stayed behind to secure the Kristiansand house for the winter and spent his last evening there going through family photographs. “I think of the way that Fate has tied our lives together,” he wrote Joan, “and how we struggle along, half knowing what we are doing, but with our destinies also largely formed by the accidents of birth and circumstance.”

All depended, he could see, “on God’s grace and on each other; and with this, the whole monstrous fragility and tragedy of our lives, and yet also their poetry and their occasional heroism, become visible and real to me. I wish I could capture this moment of awareness and make it a part of my view of the world, instead of being absorbed and carried away, as I shall be tomorrow morning, by a thousand trivialities and vanities.”
⁶⁷

J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER DIED IN PRINCETON, OF THROAT CANCER, on February 18, 1967, at the age of sixty-two. A week later six hundred people crowded into Alexander Hall for the memorial service, at which Kennan delivered the final eulogy. He praised his friend’s scientific mind, “rigorous but humane, fastidious but generous and powerful, uncompromisingly responsible in its relationship to ascertainable truth but never neglectful of the need for elegance and beauty in the statement of it.” He deplored the official injustice inflicted upon Oppenheimer: the government had used his talents to exploit the destructive capabilities of nuclear physics, but denied him the opportunity to explore “the great positive ones he believed that science to possess.” His life cruelly illustrated “the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength.”

Shakespeare’s image of a “universal wolf” as a “universal prey” eating itself up had haunted Kennan ever since he incorporated it into his long but mostly unread January 1950 paper on the “super” bomb. The idea, however, was Oppenheimer’s: it was he who first alerted Kennan to the
ecological
consequences of the nuclear revolution. “[N]o one paid any attention to us,” Kennan recalled, “but that brought us together.” Oppenheimer gave Kennan an institutional home after he left government. Kennan, in turn, spoke for Oppenheimer after allegations about the beleaguered physicist’s loyalty effectively silenced him. A war fought with modern weapons, Kennan warned in his 1957 Reith lectures, would risk everything: “the kindliness of our natural environment to the human experience, the genetic composition of the race, the possibilities of health and life for future generations.” In bidding Oppenheimer farewell a decade later, Kennan acknowledged that without his help “some of us—most of us, I suppose—would never have been quite where we are today.... [A]ny further progress we now make is in part his achievement.”
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There were, at the time of Oppenheimer’s death, about forty thousand nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union—three-fourths of them American. Most were thermonuclear warheads, designed for near-instantaneous delivery by land-based and submarine-launched missiles. The least powerful, intended for battlefield use, each approximated the strength of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Kennan lacked access to these numbers, but he didn’t need it to conclude that seeking security by these means was an absurdity.

Since the Cuban missile crisis, there had been fewer explicit threats to use nuclear weapons. Satellite reconnaissance was reducing the risk of surprise attack. Diplomacy had produced a Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, and a Soviet-American agreement, that same year, to begin negotiations on limiting nuclear weapons delivery systems while restricting the deployment of defenses against them. The goal, it appeared, was no longer to
win
a nuclear arms race but rather to
stabilize
it by ensuring equal opportunities for destruction. Both superpowers seemed to have embraced Bernard Brodie’s 1946 argument that the best way to avoid war was to make its prospect as horrible as possible.

Kennan did not doubt the proposition but wondered—with Oppenheimer—why it required retaining the capacity to end civilization so many times over. That was why he distrusted détente, which most people understood to mean something he should have favored: the use of diplomacy to secure peace by balancing power. Kennan saw it as applying outdated techniques to a world in which the relationship between war and politics had changed. The nineteenth-century view had been that “you really could win a war and gain something from it.” Now, though, the destructiveness of weaponry had made such calculations meaningless. War and politics, in Kennan’s mind at least, were becoming equally dangerous.

Where, then, did the strategy of “containment,” which was to have bridged the gap between war and politics, fit into all of this? When Kennan described its objective, in 1947, as bringing about peacefully either the breakup or “gradual mellowing” of the Soviet Union, that country had no nuclear capability. By the beginning of the 1960s, its warhead and missile technology was qualitatively approaching that of the United States. By the end of the decade, it was doing so quantitatively. By 1986, when the number of nuclear weapons peaked at around seventy thousand, just under two-thirds belonged to the U.S.S.R.
²

So did the risks of attempting to change that state now exceed the benefits? Was the danger to be contained no longer its behavior but nuclear war itself? If so, did that suggest accepting the Soviet Union and its satellites as permanent features of the international landscape? What would that mean for the future of Germany, and of Europe itself? None of these were new questions for Kennan: he had wrestled with all of them prior to Oppenheimer’s death. In the years that followed, though, they took on a renewed urgency. It was as if Kennan felt an obligation to keep Oppenheimer’s prophetic vision alive, whatever that might imply for the original concept of “containment.”

Late in 1967 Kennan was elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Established in 1898, limited to fifty members, and modeled on the much older
Académie française
, the organization’s mission was to recognize distinction in literature, music, and the fine arts. Kennan had been invited to join five years earlier because of his accomplishments as a writer, sixty-four years after the first George Kennan was similarly honored. The academy’s parent organization, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, had made the second Kennan its president in 1965, just in time for the ill-fated White House Festival of the Arts. He took all of these institutional responsibilities seriously. Kennan’s sense of having been excluded as a young man, Arthur Schlesinger speculated, had left him with a love of ritual as an older man: “He believes strongly that the ceremonies of life are important. It’s an endearing, interesting characteristic.”
³

Kennan addressed the academy for the first time in his new capacity on May 28, 1968, three months after the Tet offensive in Vietnam, two months after Johnson’s announcement that he would seek a negotiated settlement of the war but not reelection, seven weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and one week before that of Robert F. Kennedy. “[W]e are meeting,” Kennan acknowledged, “in a very troubled time.” The artist’s duty was not to get involved in politics, which were always “polluted with the passions and the myopia of the moment.” Nor was it to attempt to correct, in any immediate sense, “the manifold follies and stupidities to which man, in his capacity as a political actor, is prone.”

Perhaps it might be, though, to “lend to the comprehension of the human predicament a deeper dimension of insight,” through which “the tragic illusions of power and anger will lose their force.” Had not Cranach and Grünewald painted during peasant rebellions and religious wars? Had not Goethe, Beethoven, and Schiller flourished alongside the upheavals of the Napoleonic era? Most moving of all was Boris Pasternak, “scratching out his poems through the night in that abandoned country house in the Urals during the Russian civil war, while each night the dark shadows of the wolves against the snow came nearer.” It took forty years for his writings to appear, but they were now “an imperishable component of Russian literature.” Much would have been lost if those artists had sacrificed their creativity “in order to throw themselves into political pursuits for which they were ill-prepared and in which, as Pasternak realized, they could do nothing comparable in importance to what they could achieve by the employment of their real talents.”
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