George F. Kennan: An American Life (111 page)

Now they had something else to worry about: the unexpected election of a Polish pope. To claim, in the light of all this, that the old men in the Kremlin could want anything more than to hang on to what they had was “to distort out of all verisimilitude their nature, their situation, and their interests.”

But, Nitze and his friends would protest, weren’t the Soviets busily exploiting “third world” opportunities? Had they not moved into Angola in the wake of the Portuguese empire’s collapse? What about the “horn of Africa,” where the superpowers were competing for influence in Somalia and Ethiopia? Or Afghanistan, where a Marxist revolution had taken place earlier that year? In fact, Kennan insisted, in each of these situations local Marxists had exploited the Soviet Union, whose leaders knew that if they failed to aid these causes, the Cubans or the Chinese would, and their own credibility would suffer. Far from opportunities, these were liabilities, depleting strengths needed to maintain the status quo.

Kennan was now, he reminded Reston, “the patriarch.” No one else living, not even the Kremlin’s long-serving foreign minister Andrey Gromyko, could draw on his half-century of diplomatic experience. He would not claim, in all respects, to speak for the dead—Bohlen, in particular, had “never encountered a statement of mine to which he could not take
some
exception”—but his late Foreign Service colleagues would share, he believed, his astonishment at how little respect their kind of professionalism commanded in the face of current frivolities, abuses, and misrepresentations: “There, Scottie, I have chosen you as the object for what I hope will be my last statement on Soviet-American relations. Make what you will of it.”
⁴⁶

No one, not even Reston, made much of it at the time. But when Soviet archives opened after the Cold War ended, they showed Kennan’s impression of a frightened, overstretched gerontocracy, desperately trying to regain the initiative lost by its own ineptitude dating back at least as far as the invasion of Czechoslovakia, to be much closer to reality than Nitze’s calculation of a purposefully rising hege-mon. The difference, to oversimplify, was between
what
and
why.
Nitze could see what the Brezhnev regime was doing and from this he concluded, inaccurately, that he knew why. Kennan sensed why, and so worried much less about what. Nitze seemed right in the short run, because only the long run could confirm Kennan’s claim. But, with the passage of time, it did.
⁴⁷

“[I]t isn’t easy being George Kennan,” his friend Dick Ullman once observed. “I’ve always thought that that was a heavy weight to bear.” Kennan seemed genuinely reluctant to get into policy debates, but he rarely resisted the opportunity. He appeared to regard himself as “an asset to be treasured,” a historical figure whose life needed to be documented as thoroughly as possible. He was keeping more complete diaries now than ever before, and he had his research assistants—one was Ullman’s wife, Yoma—filling scrapbooks with Kennan-related newspaper clippings in multiple languages from all over the world. “I’ll bet you,” Ullman commented, “that there is no Nitze scrapbook.”
⁴⁸

Yoma Ullman was one of several assistants who worked with Kennan on his Franco-Russian alliance book. Connie Goodman, who still handled his correspondence, was another: she helped Kennan devise an elaborate system of color-coded note cards—pink for the French, blue for the Russians—which his color-blindness at times caused him to confuse. Mimi Bull, who had been Goodman’s college roommate, also worked for Kennan in Princeton and later in Austria. “I was in awe and frankly terrified to begin with,” she recalled, but soon “[t]he austere scholar diplomat relaxed and became a gifted raconteur with a delight in the absurd.” She found him, on one occasion in Vienna, sporting an old beret, a new pencil moustache, and a radiant smile, “pleased with the wealth of material he realizes is here.”
⁴⁹

In addition to the European and American archives he visited, Kennan returned to the Soviet Union several times during the 1970s to research the foreign policies of the last tsars, a privilege granted to few Western scholars. He learned to request specific documents, identified from previously published histories, whereupon the archivists would please him by producing entire files, with the explanation that they hadn’t had time to find the individual items he had requested: “They can loosen up when they want to.” They mostly did, for with Kennan’s criticisms of dissidents, he was back in favor in the Kremlin.
Pravda
reviewed
The Cloud of Danger
even if
The New York Times
didn’t, pointing out that his views had evolved “in the direction of good sense.”
⁵⁰

Kennan’s “retirement” from the Institute for Advanced Study would normally have left him on half salary without the use of an office, but the trustees were well aware, Dick Dilworth recalled, that he had been “infinitely more productive and certainly more prominent” than anyone else there. So they allowed Professor-Emeritus Kennan to continue as a fully active professor in all but name, exempting him only from faculty meetings. To Kennan’s embarrassment, the arrangement required raising the funds needed to support him, but the Institute found them easily enough from sources including Dilworth himself, the Rockefeller family, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and because of his interest in nuclear issues, the legendary Omaha investor Warren Buffett.
⁵¹

Continuing to write history, therefore, met his continuing obligation to the Institute, but Kennan still hoped to connect his research, in some way, to contemporary affairs. It was also, his friend Cy Black observed, a kind of hobby: “It is fun for him. It keeps him busy.” Goodman agreed: “He enjoyed this so much more than any other work.” Being Kennan, of course, he could hardly have fun without feeling guilty: his book had become “a pretence,” he told himself as he neared completion of his first volume, “an excuse for existence.” He should have recognized it years ago as “a quixotic undertaking.”
⁵²

The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890
, came out from the Princeton University Press in the fall of 1979. It was not as meticulously documented as Kennan’s volumes on early Soviet-American relations, but at over four hundred pages it was an impressive performance for a man of seventy-five. Paul Kennedy, a cheeky young historian less than half Kennan’s age, congratulated him in
The Washington Post
for his “mature, warm, beautifully written book,” although it was “not a little questionable” that Kennan had neglected the French military archives, the Bismarck family papers, and the monographs of Professors Hillgruber and Mueller-Link. Kennedy acknowledged, however, that these were points “about which the general reader will care little.” One with a particular interest in Bismarck confirmed this. “I have enjoyed reading your book,” Kissinger wrote Kennan. “Not that it fails to be depressing. If even Bismarck could not prevent what he clearly foresaw, what chance does the modern period have? That is the real nightmare.”
⁵³

“Bismarck did all that he could, in his outwardly rough but essentially not inhumane way,” Kennan replied. “What surprises me more is the failure of our own generation, with the warning image of the atom bomb before it, to learn from his example.” This, of course, had been Kennan’s point all along. Had he been born only a few years earlier, he noted in his introduction, he might have been among the millions of young men who fought in World War I. He would have done so, he imagined, with the same “delirious euphoria” most of them had felt: that an era of “self-sacrifice, adventure, valor, and glory” lay ahead. Having had the luck to avoid their experiences, he wanted now to focus in detail on the statesmen of that age, for in them “we can see, not entirely but in larger degree than is generally supposed, ourselves.”
⁵⁴

“I don’t think it explains anything,” Black grumbled about
The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order
, and he had a point. Kennan had enjoyed writing the book too much to make its message clear. He spent months, for example, tracking down information on a relatively minor figure, the French-Russian double agent Elie de Cyon, not because his role was in any way critical to the coming of the war, but because Kennan relished this kind of detective work. It was an all-weather form of recreation: the scholarly equivalent of summer sailing. But it left Kennan with another volume to write if he was even going to get to the alliance of 1894—and that event would still precede, by two decades, the outbreak of the conflict whose origins he had meant to explain, and whose consequences he had hoped to assess.
⁵⁵

Kennan had again rambled, as in his
Encounter
interview and in
The Cloud of Danger
. He produced, this time, a wonderfully readable history—it could almost be a novel, he thought
⁵⁶
—but its literary and scholarly strengths made it ineffective as prophecy. Despite the pleasures it held for Kennan, using the past to instruct the future was a Sisyphean task: as his sources proliferated, his energy faded, and the distractions of the present, as always, demanded comment.

Détente collapsed completely during the last half of 1979. After years of negotiations, Carter and a visibly enfeebled Brezhnev were able to sign the SALT II arms control treaty in Vienna in June, but a rapid succession of unexpected crises left it languishing in the U.S. Senate. The first occurred in August, when a CIA source leaked the news that the Soviet Union had placed a combat brigade in Cuba. Carter demanded its removal but had to back down after learning that the unit had been there since the missile crisis of 1962. He had never before seen “such dilettantism, amateurism and sheer bungling,” Kennan complained: it had been “an artificially-manufactured domestic-political event if there ever was one.” What he didn’t know was that he knew the manufacturer. Nitze had helped arrange the leak with a view to delaying, perhaps preventing, the treaty’s ratification.
⁵⁷

The second crisis broke on November 4, when Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six hostages, with the subsequent approval of the Islamist government that had recently deposed Washington’s longtime ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Furious at this violation of diplomatic immunity, recalling his own five and a half months of internment in Nazi Germany, angry that the Carter administration had let almost four months go by without securing the Americans’ release, Kennan told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 27, 1980, that the United States should simply declare war on Iran. This would allow detaining Iranians within its boundaries, while enlisting the aid of a neutral country in arranging an exchange of internees, as Switzerland had done for the Bad Nauheim “hostages” thirty-eight years earlier.

What made Kennan’s testimony particularly striking, however, was his equally emphatic insistence that the Carter administration had
overreacted
to the third and most serious crisis that had developed in recent months: the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979. Eleven years earlier Kennan had criticized the Johnson administration’s tepid response to Czechoslovakia’s occupation. Now, though, in the face of Carter’s more vigorous retaliations—withdrawing the SALT II treaty from the Senate, embargoing grain and technology shipments to the U.S.S.R., calling for military draft registration, increasing defense spending, and demanding a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics—Kennan claimed that the president had gone too far. Brezhnev had sent troops into Afghanistan in a desperate effort to save the imperiled Marxist government there, not—as Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had argued—with a view to beginning an offensive aimed at controlling the Persian Gulf. The Soviets would soon see that they had made a mistake, would be looking for a way out, and the United States should help them find one.
⁵⁸

There was a compartmentalized logic in Kennan’s positions. Iran had, under a strict interpretation of international law, committed an act of war against the United States. The U.S.S.R. had indeed acted from a position of weakness, not strength, in Afghanistan. But Kennan’s grand strategic logic—the ability to see how contents mix after compartments are opened—eluded him altogether in this instance. What would the implications have been of the first formal declaration of war by anybody since 1945? What was to prevent escalation? How might Kremlin leaders respond to the prospect of American military action in a country bordering their own and Afghanistan? What conspiracies might they see in the rise of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland, the rapturous reception accorded Pope John Paul II on his first visit back after his election, and in the Polish-born Brzezinski’s recent well-publicized trip to the Khyber Pass? It was not at all clear that Kennan’s method of rescuing the hostages would reassure the aging officials in Moscow who now controlled half of the world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Kennan always had trouble keeping his emotions apart from his strategies, but as he grew older, the problem got worse. He commanded, as an elder statesman, increasing respect: there was supposed to be some kind of connection, he knew, between advanced age and wisdom. But “as one to whom these imputations would presumably be applicable, I am bound to say that this theory is at best complicated, and at worst questionable.”
⁵⁹
He had fewer contemporaries, now, who could insist that he reconcile his contradictions before publicly displaying them. Bohlen had most frequently played that role, but so too had Acheson, Lippmann, and Harriman—the last still living and selectively donating, but in no condition to set Kennan right, as he used to do in Moscow, on the limits of policy feasibility. Nitze, a personal friend, was a public adversary who delighted in pouncing (or having associates like Eugene Rostow pounce) on Kennan’s lapses. No one had asked, with respect to his
Encounter
interview,
The Cloud of Danger
, the Bismarck book, or his remarkable appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “George, how will all of this hang together?”