George F. Kennan: An American Life (110 page)

Had Kennan become, then, an isolationist? Not if that meant abruptly curtailing existing commitments. It should be possible, though, to reduce these gradually, with a view to “leaving other people alone and expect[ing] largely to be left alone by them.” Would that not consign European allies to Soviet domination? Perhaps they deserved it, Kennan replied: they had grown far too self-indulgent under American protection. While recently cruising in the Baltic, he had happened upon a Danish youth festival “swarming with hippies—motorbikes, girlfriends, drugs, pornography, drunkenness, noise—it was all there. I looked at this mob and thought how one company of robust Russian infantry would drive it out of town.”

But with an ideology “at least 70–80 years out of date,” Kremlin leaders would not know what to do with Western Europe if they were to take it over. And if the moderate socialists of the region ever summoned the resolve to end their countries’ dependence on the United States, the Soviet Union would have no plausible justification for continuing to control Eastern Europe. Disarray, therefore, “cuts both ways.”

Kennan’s most startling comments were on nuclear weapons. People would always find excuses to fight one another, so they had to be prevented “from playing with the worst kind of toys.”

Compared to the ecological and demographic consequences of a nuclear conflagration, Soviet domination of Western Europe would be only “a minor catastrophe.”

Because there could be no recovery from a war fought with nuclear weapons, the United States should be “much bolder” in seeking their elimination, if necessary unilaterally. Was Kennan advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament? “Not all at once,” he replied, “or not without reciprocation, but if no one takes the lead in imposing self-restraint in the development of these weapons, we are never going to get any reduction of them by negotiation.”

Did this mean that Western civilization was no longer worth defending? “Of course not,” Kennan retorted, but defense had to begin at home:

This and much else in the interview was self-indulgent nonsense. It was Kennan’s confirmation of Parkinson’s Law: given space, he would fill it, wisely or not. Kennan the enthusiast, Kennan the entertainer, Kennan the old fool, had taken over yet again.

But so had Kennan the prophet. We do not demand, of such seers, that they be logical, proportional, or brief. It’s their function to detect big dangers in little ones, to sense doom around each corner, to inflate admonitions, like balloons, to the bursting point. It’s also their lot to be derided, and in that respect Kennan’s bicentennial jeremiad could not have been better timed.
³⁶

“He’s on their side,” Paul Nitze wrote angrily on his copy of the
Encounter
interview, where Kennan had imagined the Red Army dispersing the Danish hippies. Meanwhile Kennan had taken on Nitze—without naming him—in his
Foreign Affairs
article: people like him required the
image
of an implacable adversary, to be displayed repeatedly like a ventriloquist’s dummy, until to question its reality seemed frivolous or treasonous. Nitze was “a very good friend,” Kennan later acknowledged, but he believed in “a fictitious and inhuman Soviet elite, whereas I am dealing with what I suspect to be, and think is likely to be, the real one.” “George and I have always been good friends,” Nitze confirmed. They had known each other since serving together on the Policy Planning Staff in the late 1940s and had never differed “except on matters of substance.” Each was convinced, their joint biographer has written, “that the other’s desired policies could lead the United States to the ultimate catastrophe.”
³⁷

A week after Jimmy Carter’s election in November 1976, Nitze and a bipartisan group of fellow détente critics announced the formation of a new Committee on the Present Danger—an earlier one, in 1950, had rallied support for increases in defense spending after the Korean War broke out. Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger, they insisted, had underestimated the threat posed by the Soviet military buildup over the past decade. Carter had made it clear that he would not seek to reverse the trend. The committee would therefore, as loudly as possible, sound the alarm.
³⁸

Kennan decided, that same week, to sound one of his own. He put aside his research on the Franco-Russian alliance and began writing a new book, to be called
The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy.
The title left no doubt about its purpose: it would be a critique of Nitze and the movement he had started. With Connie Goodman’s help—she had come back to work for Kennan in 1975—he finished it in three months. He dedicated it “[t]o my wife Annelise, whose lack of enthusiasm for this and my other excursions into public affairs has never detracted from the loyalty with which she supported these endeavors.”
³⁹

The book was “a big disappointment,” Goodman acknowledged.
The New York Times
thought it insufficiently newsworthy even to review. Philip Geyelin, who did review it for
The Washington Post
, found Kennan to have a “lamentably loose grip” on policy practicalities. Could the United States really restrain its military-industrial complex
and
achieve energy independence
and
correct the corruptions that afflicted its culture? Reduce its global commitments to the defense of Western Europe, Japan, and—in a rare Kennan bow to domestic politics—Israel? Abandon “obsolescent and nonessential” positions in Panama, the Philippines, and South Korea? Refrain from involving itself elsewhere in the “third world,” especially southern Africa? Sympathize with Soviet dissidents while trusting the Soviet government? Acknowledge, with respect to nuclear weapons, that there was “simply no need for all this overkill,” that both sides could “give up four fifths of it tomorrow,” and that a unilateral reduction of 10 percent, “immediately and as an act of good faith,” would hurt neither of them?

Each of these might be goals worth considering, but to propose them all without explaining how to achieve them—in what order, on what time scale, with what trade-offs—was to compile a catalog, not to suggest a strategy.
The Cloud of Danger
in this respect paralleled its author’s complaints, to the
New York Times
columnist James Reston, about Carter’s initial approaches to Moscow: that by pushing for deep cuts in strategic weaponry while simultaneously pressing the issue of human rights, his administration had already made “just about every mistake it could make.” Kennan’s mistake, in this hurriedly composed book, was to expand into 234 pages of large type what he had taken too many pages of small type to say in
Encounter,
without adding anything new. Meanwhile he was living with the frustration “of having no influence on the conduct of foreign policy and, at the same time, being invited and expected to talk about it on every conceivable occasion.”
⁴⁰

One he could hardly avoid was the “X” article’s thirtieth anniversary. Not wanting to be caught off guard, as the
Foreign Affairs
editors had been five years earlier, the Council on Foreign Relations invited Kennan to reflect on the event—he appeared somewhat belatedly in November 1977—at the organization’s recently established Washington headquarters. Little was now left of Stalinism, he insisted: Brezhnev was a moderate, even conservative figure, “confidently regarded by all who know him as a man of peace.” That made it hard to see why détente had become so controversial in the United States. Without specifying Nitze and the Committee on the Present Danger, Kennan blamed those who “lose themselves in the fantastic reaches of what I might call military mathematics—the mathematics of possible mutual destruction in an age of explosively burgeoning weapons technology.”
⁴¹

Nitze had been a banker, Kennan later explained. He liked statistics: “He was happier when he could take a blank sheet and do calculations than he was [with] the imponderables.” Because an adversary’s intentions could never be quantified, Nitze dismissed them as irrelevant. Capabilities did count, because they could be counted. Kennan had characterized him correctly, Nitze acknowledged. “When people say ‘more,’ I want to know how much ‘more’? I can understand it a hell of a lot better if you can put it into numbers or calculus or something like that. Then you can be precise as to what you’re talking about.”
⁴²

Kennan was being imprecise, in Nitze’s view, when he called Brezhnev a “man of peace.” How did Kennan know this? What if he turned out to be wrong? Even if he was right, what did Brezhnev mean by “peace” in the first place? Why, if his intentions were peaceful, was his military so compulsively acquiring weaponry? Kennan had always found it difficult to answer questions like these, because he relied so heavily on his
intuitive
sense that the Russians were not going to start a war. When an interviewer for
The New York Times Magazine
asked him in May 1978 whether he accepted the principle “better red than dead,” Kennan unwisely admitted that he did, although “I don’t think there’s any need for us to be red, because I don’t think that war is the way the Russians would like to expand their power.”

That was just the point, Nitze retorted, in an article the
Times
ran alongside Kennan’s interview. Soviet leaders did not want a war, but they did want the “strategic nuclear preponderance,” upon which “all other levers of pressure and influence depend.” If allowed to achieve it, they would indeed expand their power, while containing that of the United States and its allies. Their goal was a world in which they would be “the unchallenged hegemonic leaders.” It had been “little short of bizarre,” Kennan complained, that the
Times
had felt obliged to balance him with “a good dose of hard-line conventional wisdom from Nitze.” He could not understand why so many friends were now criticizing him “in this way.”
⁴³

It got worse the following month when an enemy joined the chorus. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, expelled from the Soviet Union four years earlier, attacked Kennan in a widely publicized Harvard commencement address for having denied the applicability of morality in politics: “On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well-planned world strategy.” With Kennan calling for “unilateral disarmament,” even the youngest of Kremlin officials were laughing “at your political wizards.” Kennan heard of this only when his mail caught up with his sailboat, appropriately enough, in a Danish port. “Abruptly yanked back . . . from the harsh but simple realities of the sea,” he wandered disconsolately among a forest of “indifferent masts,” but as the evening wore on, “the annoyances of life ashore, about which for the moment one could do so little, faded from consciousness. This, I suppose, is the therapeutic quality of cruising in small sailing craft.”
⁴⁴

Kennan had criticized the Committee on the Present Danger “at length and with care,” Eugene V. Rostow, one of the organization’s cofounders and close friend of Nitze, wrote in
The Yale Law Journal
that summer. But as Kennan’s
Memoirs
had shown, he had long suffered inner conflicts “about himself, his dream world, his work, his goals, and his relationship to the American nature and culture.” These had brought him “perilously close to preaching that we don’t really need a foreign and defense policy at all.” He had, in this way, outdone the Old Testament prophets, for however sharply they scolded the ancient Israelites, “not even Jeremiah despaired of their survival.” Kennan had no sense of what it would take to ensure that of the West, because his mind had “never moved along mathematical lines, and never will.” He was “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”
⁴⁵

Having been called many things but never before an extraterrestrial, Kennan wrestled in his diary with how to respond. “Blast the stupidities? Expend, in this way, such authority as I possess?” In the end he wrote a long letter, typed it himself, and sent it off late in November 1978 to Reston. “I shall soon be 75 years of age,” he pointed out. “[M]y means and energies are obviously limited. For me to try to involve myself in public disputes with Paul Nitze and others would merely mean to get myself chewed up in controversy, and I would soon lose what little value I may have as a force in public opinion.”

He then went on to show how the skills of an impressionist or a poet—if not an alien—could be valuable. He did so by imagining himself in the position of Brezhnev and his closest associates, most of whom were approaching Kennan’s age. They might “
like
to have everything under such perfect control that they could address themselves exclusively to schemes for our early undoing,” as the Committee on the Present Danger had suggested, “but the fact is: they don’t.” Whatever their self-confidence, it had to be vastly overshadowed by their fears