George F. Kennan: An American Life (121 page)

Its most distinctive feature was Kennan’s detestation of the culture—at first American, but later European as well—that surrounded him. He claimed from time to time that he would have been happier living in the eighteenth century, an assertion to be taken with a large grain of salt; but he was always an outsider in his own time. His attempts to explain why have had less influence than his other writings, chiefly because he never found the right balance between careful criticism, of which there was some, and repetitive rants, of which there were many.

Something serious lay behind both, though: it was a profound uneasiness with complacency, or, to put it another way, a strong conviction that
we—
whoever “we” were at the time—ought to be able to do better than
this—
whatever “this” might turn out to be. That’s why Kennan was never satisfied with the way “containment” was implemented during the Cold War. It’s why the end of that struggle, the most thorough vindication imaginable of his strategy, gave him so little satisfaction. It’s why he was so at odds with post–Cold War policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations. And it’s why, had he been able to respond to the tributes that poured in on his one hundredth birthday, he would have taken himself to task for his failures.

All of which is why his self-composed obituary from nine years earlier makes a great deal of sense. When asked unexpectedly to sum up and connect the various careers of George Kennan, he placed them all under the heading of
teacher
: on understanding Russia; on shaping a strategy for dealing with that country; on the danger that in pursuing that strategy too aggressively, the United States could endanger itself; on what the past suggested about societies that had done just this; on how to study history; on how to write; on how to live.

It’s a paradox, given all this teaching, that so little of it took place in conventional classrooms. I asked him about this once. Kennan’s answer was that when he had tried it, he worried so much over assigning grades that he had given it up, because there wouldn’t have been time for anything else. George Kennan was granted far more time to teach in unconventional classrooms than he could ever have imagined. He never wasted a moment; nor did he shrink from assessment, not least of himself. That’s why he had no retirement. And it’s where his posthumous greatness primarily resides: in timeless, transcendent
teaching
.

This book has taken so long to finish that the debts I’ve incurred remind me of the national deficit. I’m sure that I’ve missed some of these in what follows, so let me begin with apologies to all not mentioned to whom I owe thanks.

My greatest debt, of course, is to George and Annelise Kennan, for the help they gave, the trust they showed, and the patience they maintained over so many years. I also owe much to my other interviewees—almost fifty of them—whose memories took me beyond what the documents showed. The younger Kennans, Grace, Joan, Christopher, and Wendy, have also in recent years assisted me with this project: I am particularly grateful to Joan for the family correspondence, photographs, and reminiscences she has provided, and to Christopher for his visits with my Yale undergraduate seminar on “The Art of Biography” when it focused on his father. Other members of the extended Kennan family shared stories, sources, and time, especially Eugene and James Hotchkiss, Douglas James, Ted Vogel, and—certainly not least—George’s secretaries over more than half a century, Dorothy Hessman, Constance Goodman, Janet Smith, Elizabeth Stenard, Terrie Bramley, and Betsy Barrett.

Archivists and staff at Princeton’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library have facilitated my work on Kennan since the mid-1970s. Hence my gratitude to that admirable institution and its directors, Nancy Bressler, Ben Primer, and most recently Daniel Linke, who organized the recataloging of George’s papers after his death. Adriane Hanson, who prepared an excellent new finding aid, helped me reconcile old with new box and folder numbers, and locate photographs. Jean Holliday, the Mudd Library’s receptionist and reading room supervisor for many years, made sure that we researchers got to know one another: I owe to her several friendships that I still cherish. For their responses to particular queries, I also should like to thank Tad Bennicoff, of the Mudd Library staff; Christine Di Bella and Erica Mosner, of the Institute for Advanced Study Archives; Michael Devine and Samuel Rushay, of the Harry S. Truman Library; Susan K. Lemke, of the National War College Archives; Gary Richert, director of alumni relations at St. John’s Northwestern Military Academy; Tim Ericson, of the Wisconsin State Historical Society; Craig Wright, of the Herbert Hoover Library; and of course Judith Schiff, Diane Kaplan, William Massa, and their colleagues at Sterling Library Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.

A generation of research assistants has, at one time or another, worked with me on this book. They include Anne Louise Antonoff, Ryan Floyd, Michael Gaddis, Victor Kaufman, Matthew Kennedy, Victor McFarland, Ned Mitchell, Michael Schmidt, and Andrew Scott: all have extended the biography beyond what it otherwise would have been. Igor Biryukov, Andrey Ivanov, Jeffrey Mankoff, and Adam Tooze have helped with translations, and I am also grateful to Rene Bystrom, Kimberly Chow, Jack Cunningham, Robert English, Barton Gellman, John Lamberton Harper, Mark Lawrence, Melvyn P. Leffler, Geir Lundestad, Douglas McCabe, Philip Nash, Christian Ostermann, Thomas Schöttli, Strobe Talbott, and Nicholas Thompson for passing along Kennan information obtained in their own research.

Institutional support has come, over the years, from the Guggenheim Foundation, Oxford University, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, as well as my “home” universities, Ohio and Yale. Fred Greenstein and Richard Ullman arranged a semester for me at Princeton University in 1987, where I was able to complete much of the early research for this book. Others have helped in more specific ways: Avis Bohlen spent a morning talking with me about her father; Mark Bradley showed me Milwaukee sites that I would write about; Mimi Bull sent me her correspondence with Kennan while she was working as his research assistant; Patricia Woolf shared reminiscences about the Institute for Advanced Study; and S. Frederick Starr, while president of Oberlin College, arranged for me to join the second George Kennan on a memorable visit to the house, in Norwalk, Ohio, where the first George Kennan had grown up.

Teaching, I discovered long ago, is how I learn, so the students I’ve had in my classes—especially my Yale biography seminar—have been my collaborators, whether they realize it or not. For his role in the early placement of this book, I should like to thank Gerald McCauley, then more recently Andrew Wylie, of The Wylie Agency, to whom I am grateful not just for his help with this book, but also for his willingness to support the scholarship of several of my younger colleagues and graduate students. Eamon Dolan, my editor at Penguin, gave the manuscript the bracingly critical final reading that it badly needed, while Emily Graff has carefully but tactfully overseen the production process, with the valuable assistance of Janet Biehl, Barbara Campo, Roland Ottewell, and Don Homolka. Scott Moyers, first at Penguin, then at Wylie, and now back at Penguin, has in every way made this project his own, and I am deeply grateful.

Friends and family sustain projects like this in ways less tangible but no less important. So my special gratitude, for contributions the nature of which they will understand, goes to Paul Kennedy and Cynthia Farrar, Charles Hill and Norma Thompson, Gaddis and Barclay Smith, Charles Ellis and Linda Lorimer, Sam and Sherry Wells, Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Susan Ferber, Vladimir Pechatnov, Bill Miscamble C.S.C., Nancy Stratton, Jack and Rebecca Matlock, Roger Hertog, Barbara Gaddis, Michael and Tina Gaddis, David Gaddis, Eliza Shaw Valk, and—it would take another book of this size even to begin to explain how much—Toni Dorfman.

 

—J. L. G.

ASK: Annelise Sørensen Kennan

CIA: Central Intelligence Agency

CKB: Constance Kennan Bradt

DSR-DF: Decimal File, U.S. Department of State Records, Record Group 59, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation

FKW: Frances Kennan Worobec

FRUS
: U.S. Department of State,
Foreign Relations of the United States

GFK: George F. Kennan

GFK Diary: George F. Kennan Diary, Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, filed chronologically in Boxes 230–39 and 32
5–
26

GFK,
Memoirs,
I: George F. Kennan,
Memoirs: 1925–1950
(Boston: Atlantic
–
Little, Brown, 1967)

GFK,
Memoirs,
II: George F. Kennan,
Memoirs: 1950–1963
(Boston: Atlantic
–
Little, Brown, 1972)

JKH: Jeanette Kennan Hotchkiss

JEK: Joan Elisabeth Kennan

JLG: John Lewis Gaddis

KKK: Kossuth Kent Kennan

KWK: Kent Wheeler Kennan

NSC: National Security Council

OPC: Office of Policy Coordination

OSP: Office of Special Projects

OSS: Office of Strategic Services

PPS Papers
:
The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, 1947–1949.
New York: Garland, 1983.

PPS Records: U.S. Department of State, Policy Planning Staff Records, Record Group 59, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

1
GFK to JLG, April 18, 1995, JLG Papers.

2
GFK Diary, April 15, 1997; GFK to Eugene Hotchkiss, February 14, 2003, copy in JLG Papers.

3
JLG Diary, November 9, 2003,
ibid.

4
JLG notes, August 24, 1982, and September 5, 1983
, ibid.

1
Unless otherwise noted, the author conducted all interviews. Dates are repeated only for multiple interviews with the same individual. A key to abbreviations is on page 701. JKH interview, December 21, 1982, p. 3; CKB, interview by JEK, undated, p. 1. See also GFK,
Memoirs,
I, 4, and JKH, “Memoirs for Two.”

2
GFK,
Memoirs,
I, 3–4.

3
GFK Diary, March 8, 1931, quoted in GFK,
Sketches from a Life,
pp. 20–21.

4
GFK to “my dear children,” Bad Nauheim, Germany, February 1942, GFK Papers, 140:9. Here and henceforth, for the Kennan papers, the first number is the box, the second the folder. Where no folder is indicated, files are in alphabetical or chronological order. Locations of all manuscript collections are listed in the Bibliography.

5
GFK Diary, January 14, 1959. The Kennan diaries, hereafter cited by date only, are in the GFK Papers, boxes 230–39 and 325–26.

6
GFK to JKH and CKB, July 21, 1984, JKH Papers.

7
Chekhov,
Steppe and Other Stories,
pp.1, 47. My wife, Toni, and I witnessed these tears during a visit with GFK in Princeton, N.J., June 26, 1999.

8
GFK,
Memoirs,
I, 4.

9
GFK interview by JEK, undated, CKB interview, November 13, 1982, p. 2, and FKW interview, June 28, 1984, p. 3; also JKH interview, p. 4, and CKB interview by JEK, p. 14.

10
GFK interview, August 24, 1982, p. 4. See also Sanborn Map Company,
Insurance Maps of Milwaukee,
I, 61. The house was later renumbered as 309 Cambridge Avenue.

11
GFK interview by JEK, p. 8; CKB interview, p. 1; JKH interview, p. 2.

12
KKK handwritten reminiscences, no date but probably 1933, KKK Papers. I am indebted to Tim Ericson for bringing these materials to my attention.

13
JKH interview, p. 3.

14
CKB interview, p. 2.

15
JKH interview, p. 7; JKH, “Memoirs for Two,” p. 8; CKB interview, p. 2.

16
GFK interview, August 24, 1982, pp. 4, 11–12; JKH interview, p. 4.

17
JKH interview, December 29, 1982, p. 5; JKH, “Memoirs for Two,” pp. 17, 21; KWK interview, December 29, 1982, p. 1.

18
FKW interview, p. 3; KKK reminiscences, emphases in original; JKH interview, p. 3. See also GFK’s own portrait of his father in his
Memoirs,
I, 7–8.

19
KWK interview, p. 2; GFK,
Memoirs,
I, 3; JKH interview, p. 23.

20
GFK interview, August 24, 1982, p. 13; KWK interview, December 29, 1982, pp. 3, 5; JKH interview, pp. 4, 11–12, 25.

21
JKH interview, pp. 1, 9; JKH to JLG, September 24, 1983; FKW interview, p. 13; GFK,
Memoirs,
I, 1.

22
JKH interview, p. 6; GFK interview, August 24, 1982, pp. 4, 12.

23
JKH interview by JEK, p. 2.

24
CKB interview, p. 3; GFK interview, August 24, 1982, p. 14; KWK interview, p. 5.

25
JKH interview, p. 1; GFK interview, August 24, 1982, p. 3.

26
KKK reminiscences; FKW interview, p. 4; JKH, “Memoirs for Two,” p. 10.

27
GFK to JEK, November 12, 1972, JEK Papers. I have relied here also on the GFK Diary, July 9, 1927, and April 16, 1929, as well as on Seegert,
Oakwood Bay Centennial
. I am grateful to Jeanette’s son Jim Hotchkiss for giving me a tour of the area in 1996.

28
Anderson and Olson,
Milwaukee: At the Gathering of the Waters,
especially pp. 46, 57–60; Orum,
City-Building in America,
pp. 88–90.

29
JKH interview, p. 1; FKW interview, p. 4; GFK interview, August 24, 1982, pp. 8–9; CKB interview, p. 5; KKK reminiscences; Gregory,
History of Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
p. 142; GFK interview by JEK, pp. 8–9. The book was KKK,
Income Taxation—Method and Results in Various Countries
.