George F. Kennan: An American Life (117 page)

That was because none of these developments, in his view, diminished the nuclear danger—instability in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union might even be increasing it. There was nothing more Kennan could do about this: “My own efforts to save civilization should be considered as substantially completed.” He had another less cosmic grievance against all of this current history, which was that it kept him from doing earlier history. His second volume on the Franco-Russian alliance had appeared in 1984, but had only reached 1894. He would need to finish a third if he was going to connect his years of research to the outbreak of World War I, and at his age there could not be much more time left. It was a “publish before perishing” obligation, compounded by the fact that despite being “retired” from the Institute for Advanced Study for the past fifteen years, he still had an office there and was expected to make good use of it. But he should try to follow the news, “if only in order not to become entirely a bore to one’s children.”
⁶⁸

Kennan was in Princeton on November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall came down. He had cleared his calendar that week for the writing of history, and “[p]recariously, almost desperately, I continued the struggle.” Elizabeth Stenard, his current secretary, heroically fended off phone calls, but it was clear from their number and from the distinction of some of the callers that the battle was lost: there would be no third volume. “Put the books away,” Kennan told himself. “Reconcile yourself to the inevitable.... [Y]ou are never again, in the short remainder of your life, to be permitted to do anything significant.” So he dashed off a warning for
The Washington Post
that it was far too soon to be considering German reunification, and a few evenings later went for a long lonely walk.

He saw it as a metaphor for his future: he would become a mobile movie camera, recording impressions on this or that, for whoever wanted them. There would still be choices to make, but only among insignificances. He hoped biographers would see him “as one who, having indeed had the aptitude for it, had tried valiantly to live as a scholar, only to be prevented in the end from doing so.” Now, though, he should get home to watch
MacNeil/Lehrer
, “for one has to keep up, you know.”
⁶⁹

It was good that he did, because Kennan joined several other former ambassadors in the Oval Office two days later to brief the president, Vice President Dan Quayle, and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft on the implications of what had happened. Kennan had come to like Bush but regarded him as “not independently thoughtful.” He did better adjusting to the views of others “in whom he sensed political influence and authority.” Kennan had no sense that he fell into that category: nothing he had said or written, he believed, had made any impression on the president’s mind. On his own mind, Kennan acknowledged sheepishly early in December, was—tennis. He had “grandly wasted” a weekend watching Becker, Edberg, and McEnroe play, “while the Communist domination of Eastern and parts of Central Europe was going up in flames.”

He could fairly say that he had seen it coming: “I was trying to tell the government, as early as the late 1940s and early 1950s, that Russian Communism as an ideology had entirely lost its hold on the Soviet people.” Years before Gorbachev, he had been arguing “that the structure of Soviet authority in Eastern Europe was seriously undermined, and would, if challenged, prove unable to stand up against any pressure.” But he could not have foreseen when the collapse would come, and now it was happening too quickly. None of the “excited peoples” being liberated had yet learned, as the Finns had long ago, that “the only safe way to establish their true independence is to show a decent respect for Soviet security interests.” If they failed to do that, they would destroy Gorbachev, who had given them their freedom.
⁷⁰

Kennan saw him briefly in another receiving line, this time at a White House state dinner, on May 31, 1990. Standing next to the president, the Soviet leader was again gracious, praising a recent Kennan statement with such warmth that he, overwhelmed, “failed to notice Mesdames Bush and Gorbachev, . . . and had to be yanked back by Annelise to greet them.” Apart from his own faux pas, Kennan thought the event well managed, but he could not help worrying about the issues Bush and Gorbachev would have to discuss the next day.
⁷¹

The most important was German reunification. Kennan had opposed it in 1945, but by 1949 had come to favor it, on the grounds that the Germans would not indefinitely accept the division of their country. Because the Soviet Union would never agree to the inclusion of a single Germany within NATO, however, the price of reunification would have to be neutralization. Those had been the premises of Program A, which Kennan had proposed while running the Policy Planning Staff, and he had controversially made them public in the Reith lectures. Now, though, President Bush and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl were insisting that the unified German state—unavoidable now without the Berlin Wall—remain within NATO. With the Warsaw Pact crumbling and his own government facing secession threats from its non-Russian nationalities, Gorbachev no choice but to agree.
⁷²

The two Germanies became one on October 3, 1990, and the Kennans were in Berlin to witness the event: “We joined the tens of thousands of people shuffling along in two great streams, in opposite directions, on Unter den Linden.” George took no pleasure in what he saw, not just because his aging legs made it difficult to keep up. For German reunification had come about, not from anyone’s planning, but as a consequence of the spontaneous actions of thousands of young East Germans, motivated “by the hope of getting better jobs, making more money, and bathing in the fleshpots of the West.” Of course everyone cheered, but “was this, over the long term, what we really wanted?”
⁷³

HAVING ENCOUNTERED IT AT BIRTH, GEORGE KENNAN HAD MORE time than most people do to think about death. As he got older, the occasions—often dreams—became more frequent. One of these, in 1979, had him laid out in a hilltop temple, surrounded by mourners who believed him to be dying. Feeling fine, he was tempted to get up and walk away, but that would have disappointed his admirers. So he reconciled himself to his fate, except for one complication: “I needed to piddle.” A pause in the proceedings allowed him to perform this act without anyone noticing, after which he returned to his bier, surrounded now by scrolls containing hundreds of written tributes. How would he ever respond to them all? Why, with Connie Goodman’s help, of course, and so he cheerfully entered the afterlife, assured that the present would continue to provide secretarial assistance.
¹

He had long known, or thought he knew, the day on which he would die. It would be May 9, 1983, at which point he would have lived precisely seventy-nine years, two months, and twenty-three days. That was how old the first George Kennan had been when he died in 1924. Had both not been born on February 16, in 1845 and 1904? Had their lives not corresponded in too many ways for coincidence to explain? The fateful day, however, passed uneventfully: Kennan spent it in his Institute office preparing a speech, receiving visitors, and reading a set of conference papers by historians Michael Howard (“excellent”), Adam Ulam (“good in many ways”), and John Gaddis (no comment). That evening, at home with his family, there was “much animation”—although not, presumably, because he had alerted them to the significance of the day.
²

Having survived it, he could see that what lay ahead was a kind of petrification: Kennan the public intellectual would become Kennan the public monument. The process would resemble death, because while people on pedestals tend to be respected, even venerated, they’re also beyond being listened to, or argued with—or invited to share lunch. He was eating alone regularly now, he noticed, in the Institute for Advanced Study cafeteria. Younger colleagues vigorously debated this or that at surrounding tables, but the great man was left to himself. None was any more inclined to intrude upon his privacy than Kennan had been upon Einstein’s, decades earlier: “I am caught, like a fly in the spider web, in the golden filigrees of my wretched image; and there is no use flapping the wings too violently—it will not help.”
³

In Washington one evening a few months after the day his death did not occur, Kennan again dined alone and walked back to DACOR House, the F Street lodging for retired diplomats, accompanied only by a breeze, which swept indifferently over the White House and “its insignificant occupant.” He had spent the day “weak, shaky, unstrung, devoid of composure, the voice high, hoarse, and cracking.” Never had he played his part less well. “I despise the George Kennan that appears before other people—despise him not for being what he is, but for not appearing to be what he ought to appear to be. They should hire an actor in my place.”
⁴

They could not for his eightieth birthday party, held in Princeton a day late, on February 17, 1984. Nitze’s was the most memorable toast: Kennan had long been for him “a teacher and an example,” although “George has, no doubt, often doubted the aptness of his pupil.” Kennan graciously declined the opportunity to agree. Dick Ullman was not alone, among those present, in wondering how two men who had disagreed about so much over so many years could retain such respect for one another: “This was really the Establishment rallying around, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”
⁵

As on his seventieth birthday, Kennan read a poem—not his own, this time, but his translation of one by Hermann Hesse. It portrayed a man who had returned from a long trip, found a stack of mail from admirers waiting, and burned the lot in the fireplace. Noting furrowed brows, Kennan explained that only a saint or a mystic could, from within, keep the flame of life fluttering. For anyone else, this required “the respect, affection, support, forbearance, and even forgiveness of those around him.” Whose letters, unanswered, had just gone up in smoke. The poem meant something to him, Kennan wrote, a bit defensively, in his diary. “Whether to anyone else, I could not tell.”
⁶

Something else had happened on his and the first George Kennan’s real birthday, though, that meant much more. For on February 16, 1984, the second Kennan’s youngest daughter, Wendy, now the wife of a Swiss businessman, Claude Pfaeffli, gave birth to a son. “There was no way,” his uncle Christopher recalled, “that that kid was not going to be named George Kennan Pfaeffli.” And so, three weeks later in Geneva, George Frost Kennan held his own and his namesake’s namesake in his arms and gave him a silent blessing, “persuaded, almost superstitiously, that his preoccupations will some day have some strange connection with my own.”
⁷

Kennan’s preoccupation now was to find a life within the limits imposed by an aging body and an enhanced reputation. It would have to be “unrelated to this epoch” and yet, “somehow or other, worthwhile.” He would become a disembodied spirit, like the one haunting the gloomy great rooms of Spaso House in 1952. But he was thinking these thoughts in 1983, in Paris, in the spring. He was entering the Métro, and a train was approaching. He quickened his steps. In this new life of being old, though, why hurry? Then, distracted by an alluring female figure,

It could at least sigh, as the aged Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had once done: “Ah, to be seventy again!”
⁸

He could offer his country little, Kennan believed, because those who ran it would not listen. He was living in a country—indeed a civilization—that was well on its way to catastrophe. His own and Annelise’s physical decline lay ahead, as did anguish for their children, all of whom had faced, or were likely to face, disappointments greater than anything their parents had experienced. At the same time, his name evoked respect among thousands of people. He must not let his pessimism drive them to despair. He disliked the term “role model,” but he had become one. So what to do?

Perhaps attempt to look “like what people believe me to be—to encourage them in the illusion that there really is such a person—and, by doing this, to try to add, just a little bit, to their hope and strength and confidence in life.” Results were irrelevant, for these might be “burned in the rubble of a nuclear war.” The important thing was to hold up his end of his reputation, whatever the consequences or the costs: “Duty, then, as a dedication—as a means of redemption in the final years—yes. But no hope; no fear; and, to the extent [that] the line is firmly and consistently pursued, no apologies.”
⁹

That was, of course, easier to write than to accomplish. Demands on his time were as great as ever: “Come here; come there; speak here; write these; attend this conference; receive this visitor.” Under no circumstances sit quietly, or read a book, or “try to learn something.” Kennan’s body, however, was approaching the point at which reading was one of the few things it would permit. “I feel like hell,” he complained, in one of hundreds of such diary entries. “How hard it is to pace one’s self at this age. One is too old to try to win, too young to give up.”
¹⁰

His illnesses had long since earned him the right to hypochondria: appendicitis and scarlet fever in his youth, amoebic dysentery followed by several hospital-strength bouts with ulcers as a young man, a kidney stone that accompanied him through much of his later life, periodic herpes zoster outbreaks, prostate difficulties, jaundice, arthritis, and beginning in his mid-eighties, debilitating heart irregularities. Treatments often provoked new problems. Drug reactions were frequent; lithotripsy broke up the kidney stone but at the cost of uremic poisoning in 1984, and by 1992 Kennan’s heart problems had become serious enough to require a pacemaker. His relationship with it was not amicable: “Mine is a body, I suspect, that
should
be dead; but the pacemaker won’t allow it to be.”
¹¹