George F. Kennan: An American Life (119 page)

Gellman showed him that it could be done, while convincing Kennan that he could do it better. “I don’t in the least mind the critical reflections,” he wrote the astonished young man. “I am grateful to you for having put forward such a brilliant effort to make sense out of my scattered and so often cryptic utterances, and congratulate you most heartily on the success of that formidable effort.” But Gellman had “cheerfully mingled” things said decades apart, Kennan admonished me, as though circumstances had not changed. He would not respond directly, but he would try “to set forth, more systematically than I have done in the past, my views, as of this stage of my life, on some of the questions he raised.”
²⁶

Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy
appeared in 1993, a rare example of a book inspired by a critic a fourth its author’s age. The title came from a passage in John Donne’s third
Satyre
, a Kennan favorite:

As political philosophy, the book contained little Kennan had not said elsewhere. There were predictable condemnations of advertising, automobiles, Congress, consumerism, domestic politics, environmental degradation, juvenile delinquency, nuclear weapons, pornography, television, and even demands for unconditional surrender in World War II. Kennan proposed yet another revival of the Policy Planning Staff, this time as a “Council of State,” a presidentially appointed body of senior notables like himself who, freed from the lures of personal gain or political ambition, would determine long-term national interests. If philosophy at all, these portions of
Cragged Hill
were a Platonic contemplation of ideal forms, not an Aristotelian adaptation to practicality.
²⁷

But as personal philosophy, the book was something new: it was Kennan’s first full public profession of private faith. It began, unexpectedly, with sex, a characteristic shared with the “lowest and least attractive” of mammals and reptiles. In addition to progeny, sex produced great happiness, great art, and great trouble, for “people’s physical needs change even when their deeper affections do not.” The results included “jealousies, suspicions, conflicting loyalties, wounded pride, and tragic unhappiness.” That these
were
trouble, however, reflected a higher aspect of human nature, which was the soul, the capacity “to perceive and to hold in mind the distinctions between right and wrong.” How had only one species developed this?

Not by way of Original Sin, Kennan was sure: sex had preceded people, and some Primary Cause—neither benevolent nor malevolent but indifferent—had preceded both. Where, then, did the soul come from? Of that, Kennan was unsure, but of the soul’s existence, indeed its immortality, he had no doubt. For bodily needs alone could not explain love or self-sacrifice. Those qualities constituted, then, another Deity, neither omnipotent nor omniscient but sympathetic, from whence came the strength, in the face of adversity, to endure, if not to prevail.

Each person’s Deity was his own, but there were compelling examples to emulate. By far the greatest, for Kennan, was Christ, but not as the Son of a benevolent God: there was too much evil in the world for such a Father to exist. Kennan even suspected—he refrained from saying so in the book—that it was Christ who conceived God, rather than the other way around. If so, it didn’t matter: Kennan’s faith in Christ was unshaken.

Organized religion reinforced it but was not its source. Faith lay in an inner voice that promised help, but only to the extent that one helped one’s self. For Kennan, that was Christ, but it was also the voices of the great poets, playwrights, and novelists, who mingled their brilliance with responsibility for others. It was the voices of dead parents and departed friends, which Kennan still sometimes heard in his dreams. But it was also the voice of his own conscience, as he walked the tightrope between selfishness and selflessness, beset by “little demons” at every step of the way. One could not simply brush them away. One could, however, deny them the satisfaction of having their existence acknowledged.

Salvation lay in forgiveness, a theme Kennan developed more clearly in his diary than in his book. Why, other Christians might ask, could he not more easily accept his inadequacies? “Your God is supposed, by virtue of Christ’s intercession, to be a forgiving God. Confess your sins and rely on His forgiveness.”

And so, with John Donne, Kennan went about, and around, and up and down his hill, in an uneasy soul’s acknowledgment that it soon must rest, “for none can work in that night.”
²⁸

He dreamed again about death one night in 1995, this time horribly. His dread, though, came not from what afflicted or awaited him but from a vision of Annelise bidding him farewell outside a large dark Victorian house, entering it, putting on a black gown, and disappearing behind a closing door. She was a widow, she would be alone, and “I could not stand it.” Should he not rush up, ring the doorbell, and ask for reconsideration: “Why don’t we disregard all the circumstances of our lives that have led to this
dénouement
and start all over again?” But this, he knew, was not possible, and even if it had been, it might have frightened her more than the loneliness she now faced. So he had no choice but to wake up, “still shattered by what had happened, and desperate.”
²⁹

To be sure, not all deaths were devastating. What everyone understood to be the last reunion of George and his siblings—Frances, Constance, Jeanette, and Kent—had taken place at the farm on a brilliant fall day in 1982. Frances, the oldest, thought it extraordinary that all were alive, even ambulatory: “Nobody had to be wheeled in!” But this final reunion was their first in six decades. They had long since ceased relying on each other to fend off loneliness, and so when they did occur—in 1984, 1991, 1994, and 2003, respectively—these deaths did not drive George, the last to survive, into the despair he feared Annelise would face when he was gone.
³⁰

She did all she could to keep him going. After a protracted visit from a tedious friend, George made a point of acknowledging, in his diary, “the sweetness of my wife and of the loyalty with which she, still enjoying a relative robustness, looked after both of us tottering, shambling and tiresome old men.” She, in turn, made her own point by acknowledging his infirmities as little as possible, a habit that at times exasperated him but that balanced the fretting with which he filled his diary:

He practiced death there once, when Annelise wasn’t looking: “I simply collapsed on the stony path near the boathouse, lay on my back staring at the oak leaves silhouetted against a cloudy Norwegian sky, and thought to myself: this would not be a bad time and place to die. But Fate (which, as Donne wrote, God fashioned ‘but doth not controul’) decided otherwise.”
³¹

So did George’s hyperactivity, which countered his hypochondria. His mostly handwritten diaries—carefully recording each ailment and its attendant indignities—were as voluminous and legible as ever. He published a new book of “reflections” in 1996, chiefly his lectures and articles since 1982. He was driving himself and Annelise over much of New England researching a long-planned history of the Kennan family: even she thought this to be too much. He was compulsively reading, or rereading, and taking notes: on Shakespeare, whose plays suggested experiences with women—some presumably painful—that had left him “with high respect” for them; on Saint Augustine, whose
Confessions
had taken up far too much of God’s time; on Macaulay, who had made English “the most felicitous” of all languages for expressing “the higher ranges of thought and feeling”; on Saint Paul, whom Kennan found to be, disconcertingly, a Dostoyevskian “extremist.” And he had wisely come to relish the great naval history novels of Patrick O’Brian.
³²

Major birthdays, now major events, also encouraged survival: it would have been irresponsible to die before the festivities had taken place. The Council on Foreign Relations celebration of his ninetieth in New York in February 1994 left Kennan, he claimed, “not only overwhelmed but unable to think of any even appropriately adequate response.” In fact he spoke vigorously, regretting how much had been made of a certain talk on “containment” given there in 1947, cautioning against any comparable oversimplification of post–Cold War foreign policy. Shortly after returning to Princeton, he had a minor stroke and spent a few days in the hospital, but within a week of his release was rigging a sump pump in the basement and driving himself, alone, to the office.
³³

The Kennans were still traveling frequently, if to familiar destinations: Kristiansand for part of the summer, but also now regularly the island community of North Haven, Maine; Hermann Hatzfeldt’s castle at Crottorf for Pour le Mérite meetings in the fall; Captiva Island in Florida for winter visits with the naturalists Bill and Laura Riley—George left behind, on one such occasion, a set of poems, addressed in stately formality to the resident birds. His research trips were over by the late 1990s, but their results appeared in his last book,
An American Family: The Kennans; The First Three Generations
, published when he was ninety-six. He had made his ancestors, one reviewer observed, into what he wanted them to be; but at that age, perhaps he had earned that right.
³⁴

The pace could not continue. “What a doctor!” George wrote with relief, when his primary physician, Dr. Fong Wei, ordered him in the spring of 1998 to stay at home for a week, not answer the phone, and watch whatever animals visited the backyard. George “wasted the time most grandly” and was grateful for having been told to do so. But he was having trouble walking by the time his book came out in 2000, and Annelise, now ninety herself, was becoming frailer. Worst of all, his ancient Royal typewriter broke down one day that fall, “initiating a very similar breakdown in him who does the writing.” He continued the diary entry in a quavering hand, inscribing “the end is nearing.” It almost came out “the near is ending.” It made little difference: “the one, come to think of it, was no less true than the other.”
³⁵

The summer of 2001 was the last George was able to spend in Norway. Reduced almost to immobility, he found a typewriter there that worked and so resumed his diary as his extended family came and went. “[C]rippledom,” however, did not lead “to productive brilliance of the mind,” for his thoughts would evaporate while waiting for his limbs to catch up. One of his final afternoons in Kristiansand was spent watching anxiously from the lawn as his young namesake, now seventeen, expertly windsurfed himself across the great sound and safely back. In Princeton that fall, George at last closed the Institute for Advanced Study office that Oppenheimer had given him half a century earlier. The Kennans’ seventieth wedding anniversary fell, unhappily, on September 11, 2001—happily, though, Christopher, Joan, and her husband Kevin Delany had arranged a congratulatory dinner with a few Princeton friends the previous weekend. George and Annelise spent the terrible day quietly at home.
³⁶

I found him, a few months later, stretched out on a couch in his living room, his legs covered in a blanket, his hearing aids malfunctioning, his profile still strong from the side, but emaciated head-on. His mind, though, was undiminished: the conversation was a healthy mix of convictions firmly held and curiosity keenly expressed. Why did no one read Toynbee anymore? Because his books dealt with forces, not people: “You could spend your life reading Toynbee, but what would you have at the end of it?” Kennan did not find it necessary to say, as on several previous occasions, that his own life soon would be ending. He was beyond the need for denial, or reassurance.
³⁷

The Kennans had live-in help now in the Hodge Road house. A Portuguese couple, Tony and Ana Mano, cooked and gradually took over other duties as well: Tony even began bringing ocean water from the New Jersey shore to bathe George’s arthritic knees. Betsy Barrett, who lived in the garage apartment, started as a housekeeper, became George’s secretary, and wound up as his nurse. Days became indistinguishable, apart from a brief stay in a Washington “assisted living” facility in the fall of 2002, while the Manos were away. The word got out, reporters got in touch, and Kennan granted his last interviews, condemning President George W. Bush’s plans to invade Iraq as well as the Democrats’ timidity in not opposing him more vigorously.
³⁸

By the summer of 2003 Kennan could still read his correspondence but no longer reply: friends received messages, through Barrett, assuring them that silence did not mean negligence, or lack of regard. Meanwhile, preparations were under way for the grandest birthday of them all, George’s hundredth. Princeton University’s Firestone Library opened an exhibit on his life that fall, the centerpiece of which was every page of the “long telegram” displayed in a correspondingly long case. It was diplomacy’s Bayeux Tapestry.