George F. Kennan: An American Life (86 page)

Foreign policy was not, therefore, a contest of good versus evil. To condemn negotiations as appeasement, Kennan told a Princeton University audience early in October, was to end a Hollywood movie with the villain shot. To entrust diplomacy to lawyers was to relegate power, “like sex, to a realm in which we see it only occasionally, and then in a highly sublimated and presentable form.” Both approaches ignored the fact that most international conflicts were “jams that people have gotten themselves into.” Trying to resolve them through rigid standards risked making things worse. Evil existed, to be sure: the Soviet regime reflected it, as had Nazi Germany. Sometimes you had to fight it, sometimes you had to deal with it. The important question was “what sort of compromises we make,” not how to “escape altogether from the necessity of making such compromises.”
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Dictatorships promised escapes from such dilemmas, he reminded the First Presbyterians when he delivered his sermon a few days later. Why not say “Why not?” when some Grand Inquisitor dangled relief from the discomforts of conscience and self-discipline? But that worked only until the approach of death, for which “there is no answer in the totalitarian book.” In theory, there could be no grief because there was no soul, “just an accumulation of chemicals.” In practice, “there is nothing more empty, nothing more mocking, than the trappings of a totalitarian funeral; for here we see the meaninglessness of life expounded and argued from the meaninglessness of death.” It was easier, then, to be a Christian than not to be one; but that meant confronting “the full rigor and severity of the great ethical problems” of which the founders of that faith “were so acutely aware.”
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Kennan spared the Presbyterians any detailed discussion of these, but when two Princeton seniors invited him to address a conference they were organizing on “Christianity Re-Examined,” he could no longer evade the issue. “[W]hat they really want to know is: what I believe.” He used his diary to make a list:

But was sex really sin? Had not biblical injunctions against adultery assumed polygamy, even the enslavement of women? It was hard to believe that human beings “are destined to rot in hell because their efforts to combine an animalistic nature with the discipline of civilization are not always successful.” After all, it was God “who placed these dilemmas upon us.”
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“I hope that nobody will think,” Kennan cautioned the conference when it convened in December, that “I am exhorting the student body to immorality.” But could it be that “the American male knows only one sexual object in life, namely the female with whom, at an appropriate age, he falls romantically and delightfully in love, whom he then marries and with whom he lives happily ever after?”

Christianity’s value lay in its balancing of appetites against obligations, for Christ had shown that man could live tolerably with himself by taking responsibility for others. Only this could keep the conflict between nature and spirit from bringing disaster. The students should not brood, therefore, about whether life was worthwhile: “You might forget to live it.”
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Kennan returned to diplomacy in four lectures—the Stafford Little series—delivered on the Princeton campus in late March 1954, with President Dodds himself in attendance. The site was Alexander Hall, “that curious relic of [the] 1890s,” and “to my combined delight and consternation, the place was packed on each of these occasions to the last of its one thousand sixty uncomfortable seats.” Once again, Kennan revised right up to the last moment. “Forgetting my age (like anyone just turning fifty),” he felt like “the daring young man on the flying trapeze.”
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Despite their precarious composition, the lectures were less provocative than the ones at Chicago three years earlier, and the book they became—published by the Princeton University Press as
Realities of American Foreign Policy
—was less widely read. Kennan regarded it, nonetheless, as “the most comprehensive statement I ever made of my outlook on the basic problems of American foreign policy.” Several of his themes were familiar: his respect for the Founding Fathers, his skepticism about international law and collective security, his criticism of World War II strategy, his analysis of the Soviet Union and international communism, his concern with concentrations of industrial-military power, his defense of “containment” over “liberation.” There was, however, a new emphasis on material and moral ecology.

Americans could no longer afford economic advances that depleted natural resources and devastated natural beauty, Kennan insisted. Nor could they tolerate dependency, for critical raw materials, on unreliable foreign governments. Nor could they tear their democracy apart internally because threats to democracy existed externally. Nor could they entrust defenses against such dangers to the first use of nuclear weapons, for what would be left after a nuclear war had taken place? These were all single policies, pursued without regard to how each related to the others, or to the larger ends the state was supposed to serve. They neglected “the essential unity” of national problems, thus demonstrating the “danger implicit in any attempt to compartmentalize our thinking about foreign policy.”

That lack of coordination ill-suited the separate “planes of international reality” upon which the United States had to compete. The first was “a sane and rational one, in which we felt comfortable, in which we were surrounded by people to whom we were accustomed and on whose reactions we could at least depend.” The second was “a nightmarish one, where we were like a hunted beast, oblivious of everything but survival; straining every nerve and muscle in the effort to remain alive.” Within the first arena, traditional conceptions of morality applied: “We could still be guided . . . by the American dream.” Within the second, “there was only the law of the jungle; and we had to do violence to our own traditional principles—or many of us felt we did—to fit ourselves for the relentless struggle.” The great question, then, was whether the two could ever be brought into a coherent relationship with one another.

They could, Kennan suggested, through a kind of geopolitical horticulture: “We must be gardeners and not mechanics in our approach to world affairs.” International life was an organic process, not a static system. Americans had inherited it, not designed it. Their preferred standards of behavior, therefore, could hardly govern it. But it should be possible “to take these forces for what they are and to induce them to work with us and for us by influencing the environmental stimuli to which they are subjected.” That would have to be done

Democracy had the advantage over communism in this respect, because it did not rely on violence to reshape society. Its outlook was “more closely attuned to the real nature of man, . . . [so] we can afford to be patient and even occasionally to suffer reverses, placing our confidence in the longer and deeper workings of history.”

It was here, then, that Kennan’s views on foreign policy cycled back through his previous thinking on self-containment, Russian literature (especially Chekhov), environmentalism, religion, and even sex. For if the issue, in the end, was human nature, didn’t survival require balancing appetites and obligations? “Only too often in life we find ourselves beset by demons, sometimes outside ourselves, sometimes within us,” but they “have power over us only so long as they are able to monopolize our attention.” They lose that power “when we simply go on with the real work we know we have to do.” Nothing could be more shortsighted than “to sacrifice the traditional values of our civilization to our fears rather than to defend those values with our faith.”
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The particular demons Kennan had in mind were those of McCarthyism, which was not only deranging foreign policy but also ruining friends and former colleagues. Chief among them was John Paton Davies, who after being exonerated by the State Department’s loyalty board in 1951 had been subjected to a long series of inconclusive investigations by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Kennan worked hard to prevent these from leading to perjury charges, even to the point of threatening to withhold future consultations with the government if Davies should be prosecuted. He never was, but the ordeal ended Davies’s Foreign Service career. John and Patricia spent the next decade living in Peru. Kennan blamed himself, but Davies did not blame him: “The forces against which he was struggling were far stronger than he.”
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Similar fates befell other “China hands,” among them John Stewart Service and O. Edmund Clubb, both of whom Kennan tried to help, and the fight over Bohlen’s nomination showed that even Soviet specialists could be suspect. Meanwhile the FBI was investigating Oppenheimer for alleged ties to communists and for having opposed building the hydrogen bomb. His chief accuser was Lewis Strauss, now chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and, ironically, a longtime trustee at the Institute for Advanced Study. So why not Kennan, who had spent years in the U.S.S.R., joined Oppenheimer in objecting to the new weapon, criticized the Republican strategy of “liberation,” railed against McCarthy, and was now also at the Institute? “I was sometimes attacked, sometimes even called a ‘socialist,’ or a ‘Marxist,’ ” he later recalled, “but the attacks made little impression.” That was more “by luck than by any just deserts.”
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Perhaps, but Kennan was also careful. He had “always been friendly to the Bureau,” one of J. Edgar Hoover’s aides reminded the director in 1951, “furnishing pertinent and helpful information when in the State Department.” A former government employee, then in a mental institution, did raise questions about Kennan’s loyalty a few months later, but Hoover chose not to pursue the matter. Before departing for Moscow as ambassador in 1952, Kennan let the bureau know that he would be calling on his Soviet counterparts in Washington and at the United Nations; after returning to the Institute the following year, he informed Hoover that he would be subscribing to
Pravda
for research purposes, unless the director thought this “undesirable or unwise.” Hoover did not, passing the word to the Post Office Department that “the Bureau has had cordial relations with him.”
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Did Kennan protect himself by reporting on others? He had done so on one or two occasions, he told the Oppenheimer investigators, but only in the case of “minor employees.” Kennan had long been sure that Soviet espionage was taking place within the United States, but he was equally convinced that spies had never significantly influenced policy. It was on that last point that he differed with McCarthy and his supporters. Staying on the right side of Hoover may have made that possible: confronting evil did require compromises.
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Survivor’s guilt, under these circumstances, was inescapable. It was one of the impulses that led Kennan early in 1954 to surprise himself, his family, his friends, and his funders by deciding—on the spur of an emotional moment—to enter politics. The story began when the East Berlin Veterans of Foreign Wars honored him on February 11 for distinguished national service. It was important, Kennan said in thanking them, that the country “show itself united and confident—not afraid of anyone else, and above all, not afraid of itself.” What was happening, though, was just the opposite:

Veterans had a special responsibility to avoid such hysteria: “Fellows, don’t fall for this.” It gratified him deeply that instead of suspecting someone, they had found an occasion “for announcing your trust.”
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A few weeks later a young farmer and his wife rang the doorbell in Princeton, having driven there from Pennsylvania without knowing whether they would find the Kennans at home. Some of “us fellows” had gotten together, he announced, decided they didn’t like the candidates being put up for the House of Representatives, and wondered if Kennan would agree to run. “Well, I was very much moved by this. I think it’s a duty of citizenship, if your fellow citizens want you to represent them, that you don’t turn it down.” So he drove to Gettysburg to meet local Democratic leaders, who with the “marvelous brutality” of grassroots politics “picked me to pieces right in my presence.” Kennan loved it. “These were such absolutely genuine people.” Decades later he could still quote them: “He ain’t even registered as a Democrat!” “Yeah, but his wife is.” “Well, what would you say if you had to run here?” He said a few things. “Why, we could run him for the Senate!” Kennan announced his candidacy on March 13. The next morning’s
New York Times
quoted the Adams County Democratic Party chairman, Fred Klunk, who with his neighbors welcomed the idea “of George Kennan being our nominee.”
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