George F. Kennan: An American Life (116 page)

The New York Times
ran Gorbachev’s statement on the morning of October 15. Kennan read it, set aside another attack on Reagan—“a deeply prejudiced, ill-informed, and stubborn man, not above the most shameless demagoguery”—and after talking with McGeorge Bundy agreed that “we should try to be helpful and not just critical.” He could not resist inflicting on Annelise, however, what he would like to have said to Gorbachev:

The problem was not just Reagan. Other powerful “elements” in American society felt the need for an inhuman enemy “as a foil for what they like to persuade themselves is their own exceptional virtue.” Through no fault of his own, Gorbachev had been cast in that role.
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Fortunately, this communication went no further than Kennan’s diary and his wife’s seasoned discretion. For it sounded embarrassingly close to a dispatch, now published, that Kennan had sent from Moscow forty years earlier. “Some of us here,” he had written the State Department then, had been trying to guess what the United States would have to do if it wished to win Stalin’s trust. The list included unconditional surrender, complete disarmament, a transfer of power to the Communist Party, and even then “Moscow would smell a trap.” Now, Kennan seemed to be saying, Gorbachev in his dealings with Reagan was facing an American Stalin.
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“Mr. Kennan,” Gorbachev said to him, in an actual conversation that took place in Washington on December 8, 1987: “We in our country believe that a man may be a friend of another country and remain, at the same time, a loyal and devoted citizen of his own; and that is the way we view you.” The tribute came at a Soviet embassy reception on the occasion of Gorbachev’s first trip to the United States. “I was just standing on the fringes,” George recalled, until Annelise took charge: “For goodness sake, go up and greet people.” So he pushed his way past Kissinger, McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and John Kenneth Galbraith, as well as less familiar luminaries—Billy Graham, Paul Newman, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Robert De Niro, and John Denver. Maybe, as Kennan approached Gorbachev, somebody whispered his name. Maybe they didn’t need to. However it happened, he “recognized me, opened his arms, and embraced me.” It was not what Kennan expected from the first successor to Stalin he had ever met.

Kennan had not expected either, though, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which Reagan and Gorbachev had just signed at the White House. It was the “zero option” brought to fruition: the first abolition, by mutual consent, of an entire category of the “apocalyptic devices” Kennan so greatly feared. The day was full of surprises. Seated at Kennan’s table while Gorbachev spoke was “a lady of most striking appearance, who chain-smoked Danish cigars and appeared to be rather bored with the whole performance.... I was later told that I should have recognized her—as the widow of a famous rock star.” His name, strangely, was something like “Lenin.” Gorbachev’s “extraordinarily gracious and tactful statement,” Kennan concluded, had brought a fitting end to his long involvement in Soviet affairs: “If you cannot have this sort of recognition from your own government . . . , it is nice to have it at least from the one-time adversary.”

How, though, had Kennan’s idea—that nuclear weapons should not be just “controlled” but reduced or even eliminated—taken hold in Reagan’s administration? Perhaps it had to do with simplicity, Kennan suggested, when asked this question a few days after meeting Gorbachev. Stalin had known that “complicated things never wash in high politics.” Reagan knew that too. He had wanted “some simple formula,” and the Einstein Prize proposal provided it. “[T]he things that are done by great statesmen publicly have to be quite simple.”
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As the comparison suggested, the “greatness” of which Kennan spoke was not meant as a compliment. Reagan’s policies, Kennan had predicted at the beginning of 1987, were likely “to preclude the pursuit of any sensible policy towards [the Soviet Union] for years to come.” When the president demanded, in June in Berlin, that Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” Kennan, speaking two weeks later within sight of it, deplored “confrontational tactics.” The time was “plainly not ripe,” the onetime architect of “disengagement” now maintained, for German reunification, or for any shift in existing military alliances. “The approach of Mr. Gorbachev depresses me profoundly,” Kennan had written before the December summit in Washington. “I cannot understand why he consented to come.”
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Joe Alsop, now dying of cancer, hosted a dinner for some old friends just prior to Gorbachev’s arrival. Kennan was startled to find everyone there more optimistic than he was. Might something more come out of the summit than the “zero option” treaty, which Reagan had obviously proposed in the belief that the Soviets would never accept it? Had Gorbachev done so out of weakness? Or perhaps out of cleverness? “There is nothing that so upsets the NATO commanders, Mr. Reagan among them, than a sudden and unexpected consent to their more outrageous demands.” But
Kennan
had been demanding the removal of nuclear missiles from Europe for decades, and now
he
was upset that it was about to happen. His attitude itself bordered on the outrageous: how could he have loved John F. Kennedy, who repeatedly rejected his advice, and loathed Ronald Reagan, whose actions in this and other respects were consistent with it?
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Gorbachev’s tribute to Kennan suggests one answer, for Reagan never offered one. There are no references to Kennan in any of Reagan’s prepresidential radio broadcasts, in his speeches and press conferences as president, or in his voluminous White House diaries, which he kept more regularly, if less introspectively, than Kennan did his. Recognition was important to Kennan, whose vanity equaled his self-doubt. Kennedy’s cultivation of Kennan softened the disappointments he inflicted. Reagan’s failure to do so kept Kennan from seeing that his own vindication was taking place.

But even if the president had tried, he might not have succeeded, for he embodied what Kennan deplored about America. Reagan’s roots lay in movies, television, and advertising. His political home was the Republican Party’s right wing, where McCarthy had once resided. Reagan viewed the world through dangerous simplicities, not realist subtleties. He was not the first California president—Hoover and Nixon had preceded him—but he was the first happy one. With Kennan distrusting both happiness and California, he probably would have distrusted Reagan, even if the president had tried to win his trust. Shultz and Matlock did try but, perhaps sensing the pitfalls, did not persist. Nitze, another possible intermediary, did not even bother. Kennan’s complaints about Reagan, he wrote at one point, were “entirely a red herring,” followed by “a lot of drivel.”
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Reagan, for his part, had little need of Kennan. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was an instinctive grand strategist, fully capable of operating without policy planners. He saw more clearly than his advisers the
sequences
of actions, together with the
coalitions
of constituencies, necessary to get him where he wanted to go. He refused to let complications obscure destinations, or to make conventional wisdom a compass. And he understood that, in order to lead, he could never despair. Kennan saw destinations clearly enough, and he certainly defied orthodoxies. But he was bad at sequencing: as he himself admitted, he too often did the right things at the wrong times. He tended more often to shatter than to solidify coalitions. And he despaired constantly, whatever he was doing. So Kennan turned himself into a complication, leaving it to Reagan to bring his strategy to its successful conclusion.
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Eventually, grudgingly, and a bit wistfully, Kennan came to see this. When asked, in 1996, who had ended the Cold War, he predictably named Gorbachev. But then he added, watching carefully to see whether his interviewer, who came close, would fall off his chair: “also Ronald Reagan, who in his own inimitable way, probably not even being quite aware of what he was really doing, did what few other people would have been able to do in breaking this log jam.”
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When President George H. W. Bush took office in January 1989, it was not yet clear that the Cold War was over. Gorbachev, speaking at the United Nations the previous month, had announced a unilateral withdrawal of half a million Soviet troops from Central and Eastern Europe, but Bush nonetheless ordered a policy review, implying that Reagan had been too trustful. Kennan was glad to have “new and more intelligent people” at the White House. He worried, though, about loss of momentum in responding to Gorbachev and so resolved, by going public again, to make the case for regaining it. “If I don’t say something now, and the new people go the wrong way, I will never know whether something I could have said and didn’t would make a difference.”

An avid fan of the Public Broadcasting System’s
MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
, Kennan made himself available for interviews on it. He regretted, in
The New York Times Magazine,
the “reluctant, embarrassed, and occasionally even surly” American reactions to Gorbachev’s concessions. As it had done three and a half decades earlier,
The Atlantic
again put him on its cover, this time to publicize
Sketches from a Life,
a forthcoming book of selections Kennan had made from his diaries. And he agreed to testify, on April 4, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “I dare not be optimistic.... I don’t think I do so well anyway, under this sort of questioning. But here we go.”
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“Grandeur on Capitol Hill? Yes, it sometimes happens,” an enthralled Mary McGrory assured her readers in
The Washington Post
. “Kennan is 85. His back is as straight as a young man’s, his jaw as chiseled.” He spoke “with such lucidity, learning, and large-mindedness that the senators did not want to let him go.” Gorbachev, he told them repeatedly, had ended the Russian revolutionary experiment that had begun in 1917, with the result that the Soviet Union was now becoming a normal state. When Kennan did finish, after two and a half hours, everyone in the room—even the committee’s stenographer—rose in an unprecedented standing ovation. The sense seemed to be, journalist Peter Jenkins wrote, that “[i]f anyone is entitled to call off the Cold War, it is George Kennan, the man who invented the Western strategy for winning it.”
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On May 13 President Bush went to Texas A&M University to announce the results of his policy review. He began by praising the “wise men” who “crafted the strategy of containment,” among them Marshall, Acheson, and Kennan. Because they had shown the way, the United States could now move “beyond containment” toward the Soviet Union’s full integration into the community of nations. One source for the phrase, White House staffers revealed to columnist William Safire in “passionate anonymity,” was the National Security Council’s young Soviet specialist, Condoleezza Rice—the future secretary of state had recently met Kennan at a conference of Soviet and American Cold War historians. The slogan would serve as Mount Kilimanjaro, another Bush adviser explained, “something you can see in the distance as a goal.”
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While in Kristiansand at the end of June, Kennan got the word that the president wished to confer upon him, in Washington the following week, the Medal of Freedom. “I am somewhat bewildered by this development,” he wrote in his diary. Bush had indeed spoken favorably of him, as had others in recent months. But why this gesture on behalf of someone “whose views on a number of important subjects are known to be so little in accord with those that he represents?” Perhaps it was a consolation prize, “given in recognition not of my success but of my failure.” Without the failure, “it would never have been accorded.”
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The ceremony took place at the White House on July 6. The other honorees were retired Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, an early critic of Joe McCarthy; General James Doolittle, aviation pioneer and war hero; former Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon; and the late television comedienne Lucille Ball, for whose reruns CBS had bumped Kennan’s 1966 congressional testimony on the Vietnam War. Once again Bush spoke not of failure but of “the successful strategy of containment which George Kennan did so much to develop.” Responses were not expected, but Kennan could not help composing one silently, “[t]he usual disclaimers of merit seem[ing] no less invidious, in their obvious hypocrisy, than the more blatant evidences of self-satisfaction.” It followed the example of Adlai Stevenson, who after hearing a comparably lengthy list of his many virtues, had assumed a noble pose and announced: “Right on target.”
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By the time Kennan got his medal, the Hungarians had given Imre Nagy, the reluctant and subsequently executed leader of the 1956 rebellion, a belated state funeral; meanwhile they were tearing down the barbed wire along the Austrian border that had been their stretch of the Iron Curtain. In Poland, restrictions on Solidarity had been lifted, and its candidates had swept the first free postwar parliamentary elections. In the Soviet Union, Gorbachev had allowed contested candidacies for the Congress of People’s Deputies and then television coverage of unconstrained debates within it. Antiauthoritarian protests had even reached Beijing, where the Chinese government, at Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3–4, forcibly suppressed them. But what struck Kennan, after returning to Kristiansand, was not “how much I read of the news from the outside world but how little of it.... I see nothing hopeful in any of it.”