George F. Kennan: An American Life (108 page)

“I could not be more pleased than I am by this appointment,” Kennan wrote Kissinger on September 19, 1973, shortly after the beleaguered Nixon, now deeply enmeshed in the Watergate scandal, had nominated his national security adviser also to become secretary of state. Kennan’s congratulations came, however, only in the last two lines of a long letter criticizing the novelist-historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union’s closest contemporary equivalent to Tolstoy himself, and the nuclear physicist Andrey Sakharov, whose anguish over the bombs he had built paralleled Oppenheimer’s. Both were “behaving very unwisely” by provoking a showdown over their alleged official mistreatment. Even worse, they were trying to enlist Americans in support of their cause. The United States could not sacrifice its entire relationship with the U.S.S.R. to satisfy “the grievances of these people.”
¹⁴

It was a surprisingly harsh tone for the self-regarded heir of the other Kennan, the most prominent nineteenth-century defender of Russian dissidents, and for George F. Kennan as well. He had made his reputation in 1946–47, after all, by
blurring
the distinction between domestic and foreign policy in the Soviet Union. He had worked for years afterward to help settle refugees from Stalin’s regime in the United States, right down through the arrival, in 1967, of the most famous of them all, the dead dictator’s daughter. He had gone out of his way to honor Pasternak in his May 1968 American Academy presidential address. “I wouldn’t trust any so-called détente,” he had told
The New York Times
after the invasion of Czechoslovakia three months later, “if it is not supported by free contacts between governments and peoples.” And six months after his letter to Kissinger, Kennan publicly praised Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag Archipelago
as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.” Why, then, was Kennan becoming less sympathetic to the Kremlin’s domestic critics as the attention they attracted, during the early 1970s, began to grow?
¹⁵

One reason was that he was becoming more sympathetic to the conduct of American foreign policy. By the time Nixon relinquished the presidency to Gerald Ford in August 1974, his administration had reached agreements with the Soviet Union to limit strategic arms, brought China out of its long diplomatic isolation, negotiated an end to the war in Vietnam, contained an unexpected Arab-Israeli war, and endorsed the concept of a multipolar world that resembled in principle, if not in all its details, Kennan’s thinking while on the Policy Planning Staff a quarter-century earlier. Kissinger “understands my views better than anyone at State ever has,” Kennan acknowledged. It was a relief to know that he would stay on: “Henry’s a fine person, and I think very highly of him,” but at the same time “he scares me.” For “with opportunists like Scoop Jackson around, he could go at any moment.”
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“Scoop” was Senator Henry M. Jackson, a long-serving Washington State Democrat who, in the aftermath of the 1972 Nixon-Brezhnev summit, had taken it upon himself to dismantle détente. He wanted to return the Democratic Party—whose presidential nominee that year was the haplessly dovish George McGovern—to the tough foreign policy traditions of Truman and Acheson. Nixon and Kissinger, Jackson claimed, had ceded superiority in strategic weaponry to the Soviet Union through ill-conceived arms control agreements, while failing to condemn that country’s growing harassment of dissidents and potential emigrants, chiefly Jews. Jackson would use his considerable influence in the Senate to demand numerical parity in any new strategic arms treaties. He would also withhold “most-favored nation” status and Export-Import Bank credits—both promised by Nixon in Moscow—until the U.S.S.R. relaxed its restrictions on emigration. Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, as Kennan saw it, were cheering him on.

The intricacies of arms control mattered little to Kennan. With both sides possessing the capacity for “fantastic overkills,” he had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee several years earlier, all calculations of advantage and disadvantage were meaningless. Human rights, though, were a trickier issue. Like John Quincy Adams, Kennan doubted the feasibility of trying to right wrongs committed by foreign governments against their own citizens. He still hoped for change within the Soviet Union but had lost faith in the ability of American leaders to bring this about. He had long deplored the ease with which domestic politics could derail foreign policy—Scoop Jackson was hardly the first example—but now the stakes were higher: with weapons of mass destruction available in such numbers, even a slight miscalculation could produce universal destruction. What gave Soviet dissidents the right, then, even if they were the figurative descendants of the Russians the elder Kennan had tried to help, to place détente at risk?
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They would have replied, with good reason, that the Soviet leaders were using détente to suppress dissent. Following the crushing of the “Prague spring” in 1968, Brezhnev had proposed an international conference to confirm post–World War II boundaries throughout Europe, with a view to regaining, through diplomacy, the legitimacy his own and other Eastern European regimes had lost. For if the United States and its allies formally recognized the status quo, what basis would domestic dissidents have for challenging communist party rule? The persistence with which Moscow pressed this plan gave the Western Europeans and the Canadians—Washington, in this instance, paid little attention—the opportunity to attach a Jackson-like condition of their own: that all parties to any such agreement acknowledge “the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Brezhnev, equally inattentively, accepted the compromise. So on July 31, 1975, thirty-five heads of government from the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, and all European states except Albania gathered in Helsinki to sign, on the next day, the “Final Act” of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
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It was “a lot of nonsense,” Kennan wrote privately, “two years of wrangling over language, most of it of a general nature, none of it committing anyone specifically to anything.” The Americans and their allies had lost nothing, since none intended to reunify Europe—particularly Germany—in the first place. The Soviets had made some significant verbal concessions, subscribing to language that appeared to proscribe, in the future, what they had done to Czechoslovakia, but hardly anyone in the United States understood this. Nixon, Ford, and even Kissinger had promised too much, and now—with allegations from hard-line Democrats and right-wing Republicans that the United States had again, as at Yalta, sold out Eastern Europe—the reaction was setting in. As far as Kennan could see, Americans were “right back where we were in Mr. Dulles’s time.” If anyone should devise “really sound and brilliant diplomacy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the country at large would not recognize it and would call with great acclaim for its abandonment.”
¹⁹

Despite the Helsinki agreements, Kennan wrote in a bicentennial history of Soviet-American relations published in the July 1976 issue of
Foreign Affairs
, the Nixon-Kissinger approach to détente had, on the whole, improved them. President Ford, however, was finding it impossible to say so, having barely survived a challenge for the Republican nomination from a Kissinger critic, Ronald Reagan, and now facing another, the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter. “[N]ot unnaturally,” Kennan noted, after lunching with Kissinger in late August, he was “somewhat dispirited, believing that he had failed in his effort to instill into American diplomacy some depth of concept and some subtlety of technique.... He is a wise, learned and agreeable man.” His memoirs would be “worth the enormous price the publishers will offer for them.”

And what of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and the first Kennan’s legacy? The second Kennan made no mention of them in
Foreign Affairs
, noting only that “[t]he Soviet authorities will no doubt continue to adhere to internal practices of a repressive nature that will continue to offend large sections of American opinion.” But in an interview that summer, with unusual asperity, he did:

He had “the greatest misgivings about any of us, Americans or West Europeans, taking upon ourselves the responsibility for trying to overthrow this, or any other, government in Russia.” Kennan’s attitude earned him a stinging rebuke from a sensitive source. She found it pitiful, Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote him, “that
of all people
. . . it
is
George Kennan who surrendered, and forgot
his own
words, [which] he said in 1952. It is
still
true, George—even though Stalin [is] 20 years [
sic
] in grave, they are
all—
still—no better than Nazis. And you know this better than I do.”
²⁰

Containment, as Kennan had conceived it, never required action from the outside to change the internal character of the Soviet system: that was to happen from within, in response to external circumstances the West should have wished to create in any event. Reforms would require visionaries—dissidents, if you will—who would sense these new circumstances and would have the courage to respond to them. Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and their allies met that standard. But by the time they did, Kennan, fearing that disruptions of any kind could lead to nuclear war, had come to regard them as dangerous enemies.

Kennan published the second volume of his own memoirs in 1972. “I don’t think it is my best work,” he wrote after finishing it. This time he was right—his first volume had set a high standard. Covering the years 1950 through 1963, the new one focused on the Korean War, the Moscow ambassadorship and its aftermath, Kennan’s unsuccessful efforts to save the Foreign Service career of his former subordinate John Paton Davies, the Reith lectures controversy, and service under Kennedy in Yugoslavia. It was oddly uneven, treating these episodes in detail while ignoring most of what Kennan was otherwise doing, notably writing history. “I don’t see how a memoir could be better,” John Kenneth Galbraith observed in
The New York Times,
before proceeding to show how it might have been. What the book did reveal, he concluded accurately enough, was that Kennan “derives no special pleasure—as I always do—from the feeling that everyone else is wrong.”
²¹

He certainly took no pleasure in the latest crisis at the Institute for Advanced Study. After the ailing Oppenheimer resigned as director in 1966, the board of trustees appointed an economist, Carl Kaysen, to that position. A skillful fundraiser, Kaysen upgraded the Institute’s physical facilities but lacked Oppenheimer’s tact in managing its prickly personalities. After he overruled a majority of the Institute’s permanent professors to offer that status to a sociologist, Robert Bellah, in 1972, they demanded Kaysen’s resignation. Soon both sides were attacking one another in
The New York Times
, which did not normally cover academic politics in such gruesome detail. “I am very, very much distressed about the dispute,” Kennan himself told the
Times
. “A lot of it has been sheer misunderstanding of a tragic nature.”

That was part of the problem, but the larger issue was one of governance: did authority reside with the trustees, the tenured faculty, or the director, and if all three, in what proportion? Diplomacy, Kennan ruefully recalled, had been much easier than trying to answer this question. For the most part, he avoided taking sides: the trustees even approached him, at one point, about becoming interim director if Kaysen was forced to step down. To Kennan’s great relief, that didn’t happen. Bellah decided to go elsewhere, and Kaysen stayed on until 1976, when he yielded the directorship to a historian of science, Harry Woolf. But the furor robbed Kennan of the calm the Institute had once provided him. “As far as I can see,” he wrote one friend, “just about everybody here who has had any responsibility in this matter has done, with remarkable consistency, the wrong thing.” And, to another: “What fools these mortals be.”
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Kennan was hard at work, in the meantime, establishing an institute of his own, as a way of repaying “something of the debt I owe to those who once taught and inspired me.” One was his Foreign Service mentor, Robert Kelley, who had insisted that the best way to understand the Soviet Union was to study Russian history and culture. Kennan’s book on Custine reflected that principle, but there was no American center for Russian research independent of major universities. Kennan wanted one, to be located in Washington. “Of the necessity,” he wrote his former Moscow boss (and later New York governor) W. Averell Harriman, “there can, in my opinion, be no doubt whatsoever.” Only Harriman had “the position, the authority, and the institutional detachment”—Kennan was too tactful to mention the cash—“to carry things forward.”
²³

Richard Ullman, now a Princeton professor for whom Kennan had been a mentor, found it fascinating that he still deferred to Harriman: “I’d never seen [Kennan] with anybody else with whom he had that junior relationship.” Ullman watched it crack, briefly but revealingly, at a dinner Kaysen arranged shortly after Alliluyeva’s arrival. Harriman had been eager to meet her, but she found his questions about her father intimidating and refused to say much. Richard Holbrooke, Harriman’s feisty young aide, came gallantly to her rescue: “Governor, you are the most impossible man to work with I have ever encountered.” “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve said that,” Kennan burst out. “I’ve always felt that. Averell, you really were impossible!”
²⁴