George F. Kennan: An American Life (73 page)

They struck Schlesinger as “a marvelous pair.... They loved each other and were enthralling company together.” In the end, Kennan withdrew yet another resignation, explaining to Hoffman that State Department colleagues had “called me in the middle of the night” pleading “that I not take this step at this time—that it would be taken as another blow to Dean Acheson.”

So Hoffman agreed to pay his salary for as long as the department would permit Kennan to be away, with the understanding that the job would become permanent as soon as he qualified for his Foreign Service pension and could gracefully retire. Ford also promised the Institute $225,000 over the next five years to fund whatever projects Kennan wished to undertake there. It was all “somewhat complicated,” George wrote Kent, “but by and large it is as favorable a setup as I could wish for. I enjoy the life of a scholar and have little wish to return to government.”
¹⁸

Kennan had two major projects in mind beyond his own writing and public speaking. One was to set up a study group, at the Institute, that would “suggest a
rationale
for foreign policy and a set of premises and principles by which we could all be guided in our thinking on this subject.” It would be a Policy Planning Staff operating independently of the State Department. The second project, to be run from Ford, would—in Kennan’s mind at least—follow the example of the first George Kennan by helping exiles and refugees from the Soviet Union establish themselves in the United States. The foundation announced the formation of the Free Russia Fund, with a $200,000 annual budget and with Kennan as its president, on May 17, 1951.
¹⁹

There was more to this initiative than met the eye. Hoffman had maintained close connections with Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination while administering the Marshall Plan, and he wanted the Ford Foundation, under his direction, to do the same. That made Kennan particularly useful to him. Kennan, in turn, kept Acheson, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and the new director of central intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, informed about the Free Russia Fund—which, to avoid confusion with other CIA projects, changed its name a few months later to the East European Fund. The new organization operated openly, relying on Ford Foundation support, but it coordinated its activities with other refugee support groups that received, or were hoping to receive, secret CIA funding. Their purpose was to collect recent intelligence on the U.S.S.R., to ensure that defectors did not re-defect, and to build a community of exiles who might one day return to Russia to form the nucleus of a post-Soviet government.
²⁰

One beneficiary was the Tolstoy Foundation, established in 1939 by Leo Tolstoy’s youngest daughter, which ran a farm in upstate New York where it welcomed, trained, and helped resettle Russian refugees. The organization was running out of money by 1951, so Kennan arranged an initial grant through the East European Fund, and after the Ford trustees had second thoughts—perhaps because of the group’s monarchist tendencies—he persuaded the CIA to subsidize it. “[W]hat the hell was wrong with this?” Kennan demanded years later, after this information became public. “There were Russian professors working as janitors in seamy New York buildings, because nobody had made any effort to tap their knowledge, to help them learn the language, to put them to some use, something useful for them and for us. It was things like this that I had supposed we could do with an outfit for secret operations.”

Kennan was even prouder of his role in helping to publish cheap editions of Russian literary classics—in the original Russian—that could never have appeared in the Soviet Union. This project originated as an initiative of the banker R. Gordon Wasson, the man who persuaded Kennan, in 1947, to contribute what became the “X” article to
Foreign Affairs
. Kennan asked Ford to take over the responsibility four years later by setting up the Chekhov Publishing House. They agreed to do so “as sort of a sop to me, but they didn’t understand it.” Ford supported Chekhov until 1956, at which point Kennan was unable to convince the CIA to continue its funding, and the company folded. It did manage to publish over a hundred books, relying almost entirely on the support Kennan had arranged. “We really, for the first time, broke the monopoly of the Soviet government on current literary publication in the Russian language.”

The Ford Foundation appointment, however, left Kennan with less time for his own work than he had expected. It required several trips each year to California, never a preferred destination, where Hoffman ran the organization from Pasadena. The émigrés Kennan tried to help often disagreed about what was needed. The foundation’s trustees continued to fret about Hoffman’s—and Kennan’s—ties to the intelligence community. The whole effort required so much attention, Kennan complained in the fall of 1951, that it was “mak[ing] ridiculous my continued presence here at the Institute under the pretense of being a scholar.”
²¹
Meanwhile Kennan was undergoing one of the gravest personal crises that ever afflicted him.

Hans Morgenthau had arranged for Kennan to deliver a second set of lectures, in April at the University of Chicago, under the sponsorship of the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation. The topic would be U.S. foreign relations during the first half of the twentieth century. By early 1951 he had prepared rough drafts on the Spanish-American War, the Open Door Policy, and East Asia through the outbreak of war with Japan in 1941. He also had notes for a lecture on Woodrow Wilson and World War I, and these he casually showed to Earle, who tactfully suggested bringing in a few diplomatic historians to comment on Kennan’s conclusions prior to their delivery. He agreed. It was easy to forget, he admitted to Hoffman, “how serious a matter scholarship can be, and how implacable its requirements.”
²²

The historians included Dexter Perkins, Gordon A. Craig, Richard W. Leopold, and Wilson’s biographer, Arthur S. Link. The seminar took place at the Institute on March 10. “Most of us were pretty appalled,” Link remembered. The lectures were “ahistorical, very presentist and personal, lacking even the semblance of what we would ordinarily think of as historical scholarship.” Kennan showed no resentment of the criticisms he got: “Quite the contrary, he seemed very grateful.” He kept assuring the group that “of course I’m not a professional historian.” But the experience shook his self-confidence about doing history, only a month before his public debut as a historian. “They took me to pieces, quite properly.” Dean Rusk, now a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, heard that Oppenheimer called Kennan in to give him “a shirt-tail lecture on the standards that were expected in the world of scholarship. George’s later books reflect the influence of that lecture.”
²³

Something else, simultaneously, was causing Kennan to take himself to pieces. Were it not for the diary in which he could atone for “the damage I have done,” he wrote in it on April 2, “the situation would indeed be desperate.” For he had placed the happiness of others in jeopardy. Unsure “that the blow would not still fall, I would continue to feel myself half a murderer, to have horror of myself, and to place limitations, in my own mind, on my ability to be useful to anyone else in any physical intimacy.” He was “like a person who has placed poison in one of two glasses before a person he loves—looks back upon his act with horror and incredulity—but still does not know from which glass the person will drink.” The next day he added: “It is right and necessary that I should become much older in a short space of time.”

He found some solace in the daily rhythms of work, “where people wear their professional personalities like uniforms.” During the past two days, he noted on April 5, he had rewritten one lecture, finished a new one, consulted Earle, talked with a student, lunched with Oppenheimer, “and done a dozen necessary and unavoidable little things.” But these didn’t alleviate the nightmares. Perhaps

On April 7, he would be leaving for Chicago, where “there will be all the things that are difficult for me”:

He had another nightmare before he left, which had to do with concealment: “Unquestionably, there is an abnormality here: a dread of being found out. This can probably be repaired only by making my life such that there is genuinely nothing to conceal and that means making it such that it will no longer, in a sense, be my life at all.”
²⁴

Kennan opened his lecture series on the afternoon of April 9. It would, he told his audience, examine the record of the past half century in search of lessons “for
us
, the generation of 1951, pressed and hemmed in as we are by a thousand troubles and dangers.” Before giving it, he had attempted to rest in his hotel room. But

The newspapers that day were reporting public disagreements between Truman and MacArthur over Korean War strategy, and on the eleventh—the day of Kennan’s second lecture—the president fired the general. Kennan might have been pleased had he received the news within the familiar surroundings of Princeton or Washington, but the reaction in Chicago frightened him.

He was glad he had not gone to Milwaukee: “I hope never to go there again until McCarthyism has burned itself out there and people are thoroughly ashamed of it.” Even Jeanette and her family, in Highland Park, could offer no refuge. The day would soon come when they “will be afraid and embarrassed to have me in the house, when my presence will bring unpleasantness and danger to them, when—if I came—they would want me to sneak in and out in the middle of the night.”
²⁵

That was hardly the response, however, of his University of Chicago audience: “Respectable at the start, attendance grew most alarmingly.” By the third lecture, students were sitting on the floor and in the aisles, requiring that the fourth be moved to an auditorium, where Kennan worried that he was only “a remote silhouette and a canned, electrified voice.” But they still kept coming: “I was surprised, delighted, and yet in a sense sobered, by the success of the undertaking.” One cause for concern was that he had not yet written the final lecture, scheduled for April 20. On learning of this that morning, the editors at the university press, which would be publishing the series, summoned him to “a great office clattering with a dozen typewriters, and with my letter of acceptance lying reproachfully before me, I was put to work to produce some sort of publishable document.”

The panic seared itself so deeply into his consciousness, Kennan recalled two decades later, “that I continue even now to relive it as a recurring nightmare.” But a young professor who attended the lectures detected no signs of unease. Kenneth W. Thompson remembered Kennan’s “marvelous melodic flow.” Listening to him was “like an experience on the road to Damascus.” One evening, at a fraternity house, Kennan sat talking with students until the early hours of the morning. It was “an absolutely elevating experience for everyone.”
²⁶

Except Kennan. By April 16—the day his lecture was moved to accommodate the hundreds who wanted to hear it—he had concluded that with his combination of personal and public problems, it would be a miracle if “anything remained for me personally in life.... This will be a time for leadership or for martyrdom or for both. I may as well prepare myself for it.” And on the seventeenth: