George F. Kennan: An American Life (115 page)

Matlock, whom Kennan greatly respected, would not have called without authorization: that this had been granted was “extraordinary.” But by whom? Shultz, rumored to have read the
New Yorker
article? The new national security adviser, Robert McFarlane? The president himself? “[I]t is assuredly a straw in the wind, and certainly a part of the significant change of policy toward the Soviet Union which Matlock assures me is taking place.”
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The speech, one of Reagan’s most memorable, deplored the possibility that “dangerous misunderstanding[s] and miscalculations” might wreck the hopes of parents everywhere “to raise their children in a world without fear and without war.” In a peroration only he or FDR could have composed, the president envisaged a Soviet couple, Ivan and Anya, meeting an American couple, Jim and Sally. Finding how much they had in common, they would not have debated differences between their governments. Instead they might have gone out for dinner somewhere, thereby demonstrating that “people don’t make wars.”
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Kennan was momentarily reassured. “I have a sense that respect for me has recently risen in White House circles,” he wrote on January 29. The president’s advisers were not consulting him directly, “but I suspect they listen, if apprehensively, to what I say.” He had found three references, in Reagan’s address, to the
New Yorker
article, although he didn’t specify what they were. Given the president’s strong position, given the mess Andropov and his associates had made of their relations with the Western Europeans—the West German Bundestag had voted to deploy NATO intermediate-range missiles in November—maybe Kennan should try to help Reagan.

So he was “effectively stymied.” He should simply accept old age, and “let the tragedy take its course.”
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Unbeknownst to Kennan, it almost had. Andropov turned out to have been
less
capable than his predecessors of calculating interests rationally, and in his fear of nuclear war—which was real enough—had almost set one off. Convinced while still at the KGB that the Reagan administration was planning a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, he had ordered an intelligence alert that went on for two years, with agents throughout the world looking for evidence to confirm his suspicions. The Korean airliner incident occurred within that context, as did Andropov’s subsequent denials that any error had taken place. Already on kidney dialysis at the time, he was in no condition to be running a superpower, much less exchanging ideas with Reagan on how to reduce tensions.
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Kennan had been right, then, to stress the hypersensitivity of Soviet leaders, but because he had been doing this for years while also emphasizing their common sense, his warnings lacked the weight they might otherwise have had. What made the situation doubly dangerous was that Reagan too assumed rationality. He expected Andropov to take him at his word when he said, publicly and in private, that the last thing he wanted was a war. But Andropov, like Kennan, doubted Reagan’s sincerity.

Both were wrong to do so. On October 10, 1983, the president previewed
The Day After,
an ABC television movie about the effects of a Soviet missile strike on an American city, Lawrence, Kansas. “It’s very effective & left me profoundly depressed,” Reagan acknowledged, hence the need to do “all we can to have a deterrent & see that there is never a nuclear war.” On November 18—two days after Kennan demanded Rooseveltian reassurance—Reagan got his first full briefing on American war planning. Unlike previous presidents, he had postponed this as long as possible, apparently because he knew he would hate what he heard. “A most sobering experience,” he now recorded. “I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked[,] that without being in any way soft on them, we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that.” A subsequent briefing on December 9, covering Soviet war plans, left him wishing that “some of our pacifist loud talkers could have access to this information.”
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The allusion was to probably the second most dangerous crisis—after Cuba in 1962—of the entire Cold War. NATO ran military maneuvers in the North Atlantic each fall, but it upgraded the 1983 exercise, code-named “Able Archer,” to include top-level decision makers. Alarmed by this, Soviet intelligence analysts concluded that the surprise attack they had been told to expect was about to happen. Oleg Gordievsky, a British spy in Moscow, alerted his London handlers, who in turn warned Washington. Reagan found the reports hard to believe but immediately began efforts to defuse the crisis. The purpose of his upcoming speech, he wrote on January 6, 1984, would be to “reassure the eggheads & our European friends”—and presumably also the Kremlin—“that I don’t plan to blow up the world.”
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The idea for Reagan’s globally televised “fireside chat” didn’t come directly from Kennan. The president was no regular reader of
The New Yorker
, and
The Washington Post
buried its account of Kennan’s Wilson Center speech at the end of an inconspicuous story on page B13. But Matlock read what Kennan had written, heard what he had said about Roosevelt, and happened to be drafting Reagan’s speech—until the president himself took it over to introduce Jim and Sally to Ivan and Anya. There were again convergences, if not causes. “Reagan’s Soviet policy had more in common with Kennan’s thinking than the policy of any of Reagan’s predecessors,” Matlock later recalled, even if “the rhetoric that offended Kennan’s sensibilities temporarily blinded him to the real substance of American policy.”
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Andropov died on February 9. Kennan thought his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, the worst possible choice, exemplifying “all that the regime ought to be turning its back on.” Subordinates who would have to work with him deserved sympathy, not reproach: “Whatever their inner doubts, they could not admit to recognizing the justice of anything you might be saying without entering, if only so slightly, into the realm of the wholly treasonable.” Kennan might have been writing about Mikhail Gorbachev, but he hardly knew the name.
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And what of Reagan, now running for reelection? The president had become a peace candidate, Kennan explained to Dobrynin, because the antinuclear campaign and the public reaction to
The Day After
, which eighty million people saw, had left him no choice. Fearing that Reagan would revert to his hard line after his probable reelection, Kennan had his own choice to make. He could oppose the president openly, remaining true to his convictions but forfeiting any possibility of influence in a second term. Or he could “lie low,” in the faint hope that the administration might seek his help in repairing the damage it had done: “I have, God knows, no admiration for Mr. Reagan, but if a certain amount of restraint, dissimulation, and self-abasement could be useful in sparing my children—and our civilization—the final catastrophe, there could be no question of what I should do.”
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Reagan’s November victory was no surprise, therefore, but Kennan had trouble accounting for its landslide proportions. If public opinion had forced the president, against his will, to resume arms reduction talks, then why had he gotten so many votes for so little progress? Kennan shifted to the argument that the antinuclear movement had failed miserably and would have to pull itself together in some more effective form of resistance. Bill Bundy saw a draft “statement” to this effect but thought it too pessimistic for publication, and so Kennan adjusted his position yet again: after all, “new faces might appear [in Moscow] with whom, for one reason or another, people in our government might find it easier to talk.”
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As if to confirm that possibility, Chernenko died on March 10, and Gorbachev immediately succeeded him. After making his third trip up 16th Street in as many years to sign the Soviet embassy’s “grief book,” Reagan offered to meet with the new leader, as he had unsuccessfully with Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Gorbachev, at fifty-four, was of a new generation, Kennan told
The New York Times
, despite having risen through the old system. With economic problems at home, unrest in Eastern Europe, war in Afghanistan, and rivalries with both China and the United States, he had every reason to reconsider existing policies.
⁴⁸

Kennan had expected the
Times
to call, but not the State Department. He met there on April 2 with Under Secretary for Political Affairs Michael Armacost and his aides, who wanted to know what he thought of Gorbachev: “[T]his is the first time in many years that I have been consulted in this place.... I am mildly pleased to be given this attention.” But the “smooth remoteness” of the questioning left Kennan uneasy. It was too close to Dulles’s suggestion, after firing him in 1953, that he drop in from time to time when he had anything useful to say.

On April 11, however, Dulles’s successor dropped in on Kennan. Secretary of State Shultz, speaking at Princeton on international economic policy, went out of his way to seek Kennan’s advice, over lunch, on how to handle the new Kremlin leadership. Shultz’s cordiality so surprised Kennan that he could only dispense bromides: that these were insecure people who required reassurance and respect; that both sides should agree on what the talks were to be about; that it was unwise to raise irrelevant issues. For Shultz, this was nothing he didn’t know. For Kennan—himself an insecure person who required reassurance and respect—it was yet another reason to rethink his attitude toward the Reagan administration.
⁴⁹

He found this very difficult to do. He was shocked, while in Oslo in August, to hear a recent Norwegian ambassador to Moscow defend Reagan’s firmness. “Was all diplomacy,” Kennan wondered, “some sort of dance in which we demonstrated our ‘resolve’ . . . our unbending pursuit of our chosen course?” Where was the opposition? he asked himself in October: this “greatest escape artist since Houdini” had, with the help of the Democratic Party, “defeated us all. We are left powerless and unmanned.” These were diary lamentations, not to be taken too seriously, but Kennan displayed his distrust openly in a
New York Times
op-ed on November 3. The upcoming Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Geneva, he insisted, should focus on slowing the arms race. It would be “tragic in the uttermost degree if
Washington
failed to make the effort.”
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On November 7, 1985, the president met at the White House with a group of academic experts on the Soviet Union. Kennan was not among them. “It sounds to me like Reagan invited people who tell him things he likes to hear,” an unnamed uninvited scholar grumbled to
The Washington Post
. By then, though, a senior presidential aide—also unnamed—had told the same newspaper that Kennan’s 1981 proposal for a 50 percent cut in nuclear arsenals was likely to come up at Geneva: “We have for a long time proposed a reduction of about half in land- and sea-based ballistic missiles.” This was indeed the first topic Reagan raised in his first substantive private conversation with Gorbachev, on November 19. When the Soviet leader hedged, citing concerns about the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan went further: why not get rid of nuclear weapons altogether, thereby removing any need for defenses against them?
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A few days later Kennan got an excited phone call from Congressman John F. Seiberling, an Ohio Democrat active in the peace movement. He had sent the White House, before the summit, a copy of the Einstein Prize address. Now Reagan and Gorbachev, in principle, had endorsed its chief recommendation. But Kennan was not prepared, yet, to accept the suggestion that he had, in any way, influenced the president, or even that the two had reached the same conclusions independently. “Mr. Reagan does not object to a certain amount of window-dressing in the field of academic, scientific, and personal exchanges,” he acknowledged in December. But “behind it—in the fields that really count—stands a stone wall he has no intentions of dismantling.”
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“I have no cheerful thoughts to offer as you leave this country,” Kennan wrote Dobrynin in March 1986. His long Washington ambassadorship was coming to an end, and although “the future is full of surprises—sometimes even pleasant ones,” Reagan, Kennan was sure, would not provide them. He saw the president at times as a sinister political wizard, at others as an amiable actor speaking lines sinister writers had prepared for him. Whatever he was, Reagan would never seek nuclear arms reduction. Thanks to him, “we love these apocalyptic devices; we have taken them to our hearts; and we would not give them up if the Russians had none at all.”
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At the Reykjavik summit in October, however, Reagan and Gorbachev did agree to remove all intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. They also endorsed the concept of a 50 percent cut in intercontinental-range missiles, and they even discussed the possibility of eliminating
all
nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. Only the president’s unwillingness to dismantle the Strategic Defense Initiative brought the negotiations to an angry halt, but as Gorbachev was quick to acknowledge, Reykjavik had “created a qualitatively new situation. And nobody is now in a position to act the way he was able to act before.”
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