George F. Kennan: An American Life (113 page)

Despite his gloomy postelection letter to Durbrow, Kennan had reconciled himself quickly to Reagan’s victory, if only because the alternative would have been Carter. “I am hopeful that things will now be somewhat better,” he wrote in a 1980 Thanksgiving note. When the new president shocked even his own advisers by claiming, at his first press conference, that the Soviet Union would “commit any crime” in the pursuit of “world revolution,” Kennan warned publicly against “oversimplifications” without saying who had indulged in them. “It was an effort on my part to stake out a middle ground for myself between that sort of thing and its opposite: the sort of naïve pro-Sovietism of which I am so often accused by the hard-liners.”
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In his diary, though, Kennan was already fretting about the “childishness and primitivism” of Reagan’s advisers. Alexander Haig, now secretary of state, was so alarmed about Central America that one would think the Red Army was invading the region. Richard Pipes, the Harvard historian and Committee on the Present Danger member who handled Soviet and Eastern European affairs for the National Security Council, was insisting that war was inevitable unless the U.S.S.R. changed its system. Its leaders had behaved badly, Kennan acknowledged: their polemics were “as Russian as boiled cabbage and buckwheat kasha. But what about my own government and its state of blind militaristic hysteria?”
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Reagan evoked Kennan, also not by name, in his first significant speech after being released from the hospital, on May 17, 1981. Delivered at the University of Notre Dame, it came five days after an assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, and two days before Kennan’s Einstein Prize address. In words well suited to the drama of the occasion, Reagan predicted that “[t]he West won’t contain communism, it will transcend communism. It won’t bother to . . . denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.” Strangely, Kennan took no notice of what the president had said, despite its resonance with his own—if more moderately phrased—prophecy in the “X” article thirty-four years earlier.
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Another Reagan speech given at West Point on May 27, however, did provoke a response. “It is a simple world picture that he paints,” Kennan wrote in his diary. “I ought to love it, as he sees it, and be thrilled by it. I cannot. I love certain old-fashioned values and concepts, but not
his.
” Kennan then
imagined
a conversation with Reagan if they should ever meet, “which is most unlikely.” Remembering “my evil reputation,” the president would “look me sternly in the eye and ask: ‘Kennan, are you patriotic?’” If that meant loving the land, he would reply, he
had
loved it the way it was when he was a boy, before its inhabitants had made “a wasteland, a garbage dump, a sewer out of it.” There would be little left once Reagan’s supporters had completed that process. If the president meant loving the people, Kennan would have to reject any claim that their superior virtue and strength entitled them to lead the world.
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Like many Kennan diary entries, this one demands discount. Reagan, always a gentleman, would never have asked so pointed a question, and Kennan, equally polite, would never have given such a harsh answer. The passage shows, though, that despite his resolve to keep an open mind, Kennan was beginning to project his anger about his country onto its new leader. Despite the credit he had given Reagan, in the Einstein address, for wanting reductions in nuclear weaponry, Kennan wasn’t listening carefully to what he said. Throughout Reagan’s presidency, Kennan would remain surprisingly inattentive to what he did.

“I have a foreign policy,” Reagan wrote a friend in July 1981. “I just don’t happen to think that it’s wise to [tell] the world what your foreign policy is.” Had Reagan had a chance to explain it to him, Kennan might have picked up additional echoes of his own earlier thinking. The president was seeking to restore Western self-confidence, not for the purpose of economic recovery, as in the Marshall Plan, but by redressing the military imbalance created by actual increases in Soviet strategic and conventional capabilities, as well as by psychological impressions of American weakness in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. He hoped thereby to prepare the way, not just for new negotiations aimed at reducing nuclear weapons, but also for sharpening the stresses under which the Soviet system operated. Although Reagan had joined the Committee on the Present Danger, he had never accepted its insistence that the U.S.S.R. was getting stronger. Instead, he would have agreed with what Kennan had written in his 1978 letter to James Reston: that Brezhnev’s aging, frightened, and overstretched regime had no choice, if it was to survive, but to alter its course.
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Reagan’s
reasons
for thinking this, however, puzzled his own advisers and would have appalled Kennan, had he known of them. Kennan had reached his conclusions after a systematic effort, over several years, to compile and compare statistical information on Soviet capabilities, gleaned from as many sources as he could find. The president, in contrast, based his view on the simple conviction that capitalism fit human nature better than communism—and on jokes about the Soviet economy. Both were right: Kennan’s statistics were revealing, as were Reagan’s anecdotes. But Kennan would have found them more frightening than funny.
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Meanwhile Reagan’s determination to exploit Soviet weaknesses struck Kennan as dangerous. He had indeed recommended efforts to undermine Stalin’s empire in 1947–48, but as the dictator’s successors softened their rule while expanding their military capabilities, Kennan became almost protective of them, fearing that challenges might provoke war. He dismissed the dissidents as troublemakers. He portrayed the invasion of Afghanistan as a defensive maneuver, posing no threat to American interests. And when, in December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland and arrested the leaders of Solidarity, Kennan saw the action as a realistic response to Moscow’s concerns. Reagan’s retaliatory sanctions, he insisted, were “driving the Soviet leadership to desperation by pressing it mercilessly against a closed door.” Even the normally sympathetic
New York Times
found this to be too much: the “Kennan Doctrine,” it editorialized, seemed to be “that might should at least define right in world affairs.”
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“I think there is a good deal of latent discontent with the Brezhnev regime among younger members of the hierarchy,” Kennan wrote Durbrow early in January 1982, “and that we could, and should, give greater encouragement to these people.” But Reagan would get nowhere with human rights “agitation,” because “Russia is not going to be ‘democratic’ in our time.” Nor did it make sense to seek to destroy the Soviet system: “Our task is to accept it, for the moment, as it is; to try to avoid . . . an unnecessary and mutually disastrous war; and to see that the influence we exert on that country by our words and policies is one conducive to gradual change in what we would regard as the right direction.”
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How, though, to exert that influence? He was beginning to feel “like a one-man His Majesty’s royal opposition,” Kennan wrote Charlie James. He could have avoided this isolation, he added in his diary, by becoming a politician. He would then have

That kind of leadership, however, was not his:

The choice, then, was Reagan versus Kennan: the politician versus the prophet. Neither could become the other. Meanwhile “there is a bit of life still to be lived—a bit to be seen of the tragic beauty and poetry of this world—a bit, in short, to be witnessed, perceived, and recorded.”
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“I am only a small part of the resistance in the U.S. to the madness of the present Am[erican] administration,” Kennan wrote on March 11, 1982. What he meant was the campaign then under way to achieve a “mutual, verifiable freeze” in Soviet and American nuclear capabilities. Originating within the peace movement, galvanized by the journalist Jonathan Schell’s frightening
New Yorker
articles on the effects of a nuclear war, the freeze had won sufficiently widespread support by then for 139 members of Congress to have endorsed it. Kennan had too, but only because the freeze was the least controversial objective around which the largest “opposition” could rally. It would not be nearly enough, “and I would not like to appear to be suggesting, by associating myself with it, that it
was
enough.” He had already gone beyond the freeze by calling for sharp reductions in nuclear capabilities, and he was now reviving a proposal he had first made in his 1950 “super” bomb paper: that the United States should promise never to initiate the use of nuclear weapons in fighting a war.
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“No first use” attracted no support at that point and for decades afterward because NATO depended on nuclear deterrence. The alliance had never matched the Warsaw Pact’s conventional forces, so American nuclear superiority—in principle—was supposed to balance them. In fact, the Soviet Union had long since caught up with the United States in both categories of weaponry, which meant that NATO had a credibility problem: would Americans risk their own safety to defend Western Europeans, especially West Germans?

To show that they would, all administrations since Eisenhower’s had deployed troops equipped with tactical nuclear weapons along the East German–West German border, where they would bear the brunt of any Warsaw Pact attack. Like “mutual assured destruction,” however, this “rational” strategy assumed irrationalities: that armies could fight on battlefields their own armaments had made uninhabitable; that the enemy would not respond in kind; that there would be much left of West Germany if it had to be “defended” in this way. It was a strange sort of deterrence, Kennan pointed out: “If you dare to attack West Germany, we will destroy that country; and then where will
you
be?”
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NATO’s nuclear doctrines “were marvelous instances of intellectual incoherence and practical success,” former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy observed, for despite their illogic, there had been no European war. But could they survive the collapse of détente, a new race to deploy intermediate-range missiles, the Soviet crackdown in Poland, the Reagan administration’s retaliations, and a harshness in official rhetoric on both sides not seen since the early Cold War? The president’s “zero option” proposal of November 1981 had done little to allay these concerns: even his supporters believed it to be a negotiating gambit—a crafty bit of public grandstanding—not a serious proposal.
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Shortly after the president’s speech, Kennan attended a Washington dinner hosted by R. Sargent Shriver, President Kennedy’s brother-in-law, the founder of the Peace Corps, a former ambassador to France, George McGovern’s running mate in 1972, and a devout Catholic. His other guests included former secretary of defense and World Bank president Robert S. McNamara; Gerard C. Smith, the chief American delegate at the SALT I negotiations; Paul Warnke, Smith’s SALT II counterpart; and Father J. Bryan Hehir, who was drafting a statement for the National Catholic Bishops on the danger of nuclear war. A lively discussion ensued, during which someone—probably Kennan—brought up “no first use.” To the surprise of all present, all now favored it.

Kennan agreed, therefore, to cooperate with McNamara and Smith in resurrecting the concept: they, in turn, decided that Bundy—who had not been present—should draft a proposal. Such collaboration was unusual for Kennan, but in this instance, he saw its value: “If I were to write [alone] about ‘first use’ people would say: ‘What the hell does Kennan know about military matters? He doesn’t know a damn thing about them.’ ” Bundy was initially skeptical but decided to go ahead because McNamara, who had originated the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction,” and Kennan, who had always despised it, had found common ground.
Foreign Affairs
was alerted, and the article appeared as “Nuclear Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance” early in April 1982. Its authors quickly came to be known—in a quirky homage to the victims of Mao Zedong’s last purge—as the “Gang of Four.”
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The proposal, Kennan hoped, would “force” the Reagan administration to abandon “first use,” but Secretary of State Haig ruled that out immediately. Such a shift, he claimed in a speech on April 6, would make Europe “safe for conventional aggression” while endangering “the essential values of Western civilization.” No West German outdid Haig in hyperbole, but a spokesman for the ruling Social Democratic Party did point out that a long conventional war would be just as damaging as a limited nuclear war. A leading Christian Democrat called the idea “unusually dangerous, both politically and psychologically.”
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So as a policy initiative, “no first use” died at birth. The episode was significant, though, because Kennan had allies, this time, in criticizing NATO strategy. With Bundy, McNamara, and Smith on his side, no one could claim, as had Acheson after the Reith lectures, that Kennan had a “mystical attitude” toward power relationships. Old orthodoxies, in the face of new tensions, were breaking up, winning Kennan at least a respectful hearing within the foreign policy establishment. Not, however, within the Reagan administration, which he now regarded as “ignorant, unintelligent, complacent and arrogant; worse still is the fact that it is frivolous and reckless.” The president seemed blithely above it all. “A few public statements professing his love for peace, in principle, and one or two propagandistic proposals put forward publicly and so designed as to assure Soviet rejection, and the problem, so far as he is concerned, will be resolved.”
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