George F. Kennan: An American Life (89 page)

Carefully researched and compulsively documented,
Russia Leaves the War
devoted over five hundred pages to just four months—the period from the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in November 1917 to their separate peace with Germany in March 1918. The book would become “the classic work in its field,” Yale’s Frederick C. Barghoorn wrote in the
Political Science Quarterly
, but it was “somewhat too detailed, considering the shortness of the period covered.” Dexter Perkins, of the Cornell History Department, suggested that Kennan had tried too hard to follow the example of “scientific” scholarship, and Kennan acknowledged as much in a letter to Herbert Butterfield: “The amateur’s lack of self-confidence—the fear of being criticized by professional historians,” had certainly been one of the reasons “why I dredged up and hurled at the reader this appalling accumulation of detail.”

The book’s readability, however, made it anything but ponderous. Kennan had spent most of his life sketching scenes in his diary and correspondence, but he had never published anything like the opening paragraph of
Russia Leaves the War
:

Personalities, too, came alive, as in Kennan’s characterization of the volcanically hyperactive Raymond Robins:

Kennan seasoned his scholarship with his own Foreign Service experience. “Like many American diplomatists who had gone before, and many who were to come after,” he wrote of Ambassador Francis and his perplexed subordinates,

The finest feature of
Russia Leaves the War
, Barghoorn concluded, was its “charitable spirit.” Kennan revealed “follies and frailties” without being “harsh, intolerant, or dogmatic.” In that respect, as in others, he had “set a splendid example.”
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Kennan embedded substantive themes within his narrative. One contrasted the purposefulness of Lenin and Trotsky with its absence among the Americans, whose determination to keep Russia in the war missed the disillusionment with the war that had made the Bolshevik takeover possible. A second was their failure to see not only a distrustful regime but also an irreconcilably hostile ideology. A third, echoing
American Diplomacy,
was the irrelevance of Wilsonian idealism—particularly the Fourteen Points speech of January 1918—to the realities at hand. A fourth was the sheer confusion of the situation, no easy thing to reconstruct in retrospect. That, in turn, suggested that contrary to what Soviet propagandists had claimed ever since, U.S. policy had been too befuddled to have had any discernible effect on what was happening inside Russia at the time.

There was only one significantly sour review. It came from William Appleman Williams, then an obscure history professor at the University of Oregon, later the founder of American revisionist historiography on the origins and evolution of the Cold War.
Russia Leaves the War
was not serious history, Williams insisted, but rather an extended brief on behalf of Kennan’s former profession, the Foreign Service. He had used no new sources, his employment of existing ones was incomplete, and he said little about the “social philosophies” of the individuals he discussed “or their systems of accounting for—and anticipating—the relationship between cause and effect.” Williams himself would soon remedy this last omission: his dismissal of confusion as an influence on American foreign policy would spark debates among diplomatic historians for decades to come.
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For the moment, though,
Russia Leaves the War
was a triumphant success—and, to Kennan’s astonishment, a prize-winner. “I can only hope that the judges were right,” he commented on accepting the National Book Award for nonfiction in March 1957. He apologized for taking a year and a half to write the book, as if this were somehow excessive. Having come to history thinking it would be easy, he now knew how difficult—but also how important—it was. For

Only historians could confirm links between efforts and outcomes, providing the necessary corrective if, as Shakespeare had said—it was a favorite Kennan quotation—“we are to ‘dress ourselves fairly to our end.’ ”
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Two months later, just after finishing his second volume of almost five hundred pages—
The Decision to Intervene
, which carried his account only through July 1918—Kennan learned that
Russia Leaves the War
had won the Pulitzer Prize. By then it had also received the Bancroft and the Francis Parkman prizes. “I cannot believe that the book was that good,” he protested in his diary, “it must have been a dull year in the non-fiction field.” Still, the honors rewarded “a love of language and writing which never found any appreciable recognition in government . . . I now have the ability to be widely heard, on my own merits.” Deservedly or not, there was now “a rare possibility of usefulness,” to be “cherished and protected, wholly aside from its chance relation to my own person.”

And when, Link asked, would he finish his third volume? The first two had appeared, after all, under the series title “Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920.” “Oh, I’m never going to complete them,” Kennan replied, a bit too casually for Link, who devoted his entire career to Wilson’s life and papers. “Well, why did you write them?” “I wrote them to establish my credentials as a historian.”
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Kennan did this in a way that vindicated, more thoroughly than either of them could have imagined, the risk Oppenheimer had taken in proposing him for tenure at the Institute for Advanced Study: Kennan now had “security for life.” But the implications unsettled him as much as they reassured him. “Is it right,” he wondered, “that one should become, when this side of fifty, suddenly without anguish?”

The “torture of the constant presence of the opposite sex” was abating, but what about other forms of anguish? Chekhov had been lucky to die so young having achieved so much. “I still have work to do, and am doing it; but it seems too easy.... Men—or at least such men as I—are no good unless they are driven, hounded, haunted, forced to spend every day as though it were the last they were to spend on earth.” Old age must therefore become “a sort of self-torture—not driving one’s self, as some do, to pretend to be younger than one really is, but forcing the muscles of body, intellect, and capacity for sympathy to work full time, even at the cost of shortening life.”
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Physical self-torture came easily enough, as Kennan’s Hodge Road neighbor Bunny Dilworth discovered one weekend at the farm. “George had no sooner got there,” her husband Dick recalled, “than he rushed out and started the tractor to mow the lawn. Then he’d rush inside and go upstairs and type. He was typing on and off most of the night. But in the morning he was out again mowing the lawn.” On another occasion, visiting the Kennans in Kristiansand, both Dilworths were awakened by the sound of a wheelbarrow. “Here was George, with really immense stones, bigger than a normal person could pick up, building a set of steps down to the water. He was incapable of just stopping and taking a few hours off.” Kennan did much of his own yard work around the Princeton house, devoting several days in September 1956 to digging up a dead maple. On the morning of the twenty-third, the university awarded him an honorary degree, which Kennan accepted alongside Dag Hammarskjöld, the secretary general of the United Nations. That afternoon “I returned to my tree and exhausted myself in two or three further hours of hacking.”
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Intellectual exertion—particularly when it involved empathy—was more difficult. Kennan achieved it in his histories: one of the most striking features of
Russia Leaves the War
and
The Decision to Intervene
was his ability to put himself in the position of the people he wrote about. He took pains to see things from
their
point of view, without imposing his own or those of a different age. He listened, but rarely judged. He showed respect for the dead.

But rarely for the living, or for the culture they had created. He loathed “this thin, tight, lonely American life.” He acknowledged “a growing gap between my own outlook and that of my countrymen,” but blamed their habits, not his, for it. He had a vision of what the country once was, Dick Dilworth sensed, “and what under better circumstances it could be.” But it hadn’t turned out that way. He was “like a rejected lover.” If not for the family, Kennan told himself, he would have become “a recluse and an esthete,” living somewhere on the west coast of Scotland, reading, traveling, studying “the beauty man has created,” to the end that “I might someday create some of my own.” What beauty was there, though, in the United States? “Before us stretches the whole great Pacific Coast,” he wrote while on a flight to California,

Yes, but the people were happy, someone would say. Why not join them? “Forget that you have ever been a mature person. Learn to play and be amused, again, like a child.” “Perhaps, perhaps,” was the reply. But elsewhere “man has from time to time risen to great dignity and to immense creative stature. I have lived too long in the neighborhood of those evidences to forget them so easily.”

Kennan tried to be polite to the people he met. He imagined how his mother would have wanted him to live: “unhurriedly, with grace and dignity, secure and relaxed in the consciousness of her love and her forgiveness, not pecking at myself for past faults nor worrying about present limitations.” This required constant effort, though, for it meant acknowledging kindness and accepting hospitality while concealing from those providing these gifts all the things that “divide us so deeply.” He was learning to live “in an inner world. I am utterly without relationship to this country and this age.”
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Paradoxically, though, with every public statement, he had found wider and more appreciative audiences. Kennan’s platform skills partly accounted for this: Princeton students not only applauded a lecture he gave there but surprised him by roaring with laughter, “which I trust was with me and not at me.” With
American Diplomacy
required reading in university classrooms across the country, he was getting similar responses wherever he spoke. A Stanford instructor suggested that his students were finding, in Kennan’s views, a way to rebel against those of their parents. That led him to worry that he had courted popularity, that he had “watered down my own thoughts, sweetened them with a lot of optimistic baloney.” If his youthful admirers ever caught on to what he really believed, “they would probably hate me for it. If they approve of me, it is because I have been a hypocrite and have successfully disguised myself and my thoughts.”
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And what of his own children? If American culture encouraged healthy physical, intellectual, and spiritual development, he could leave them to thrive within it, he wrote in the summer of 1956. It did, however, just the opposite.

Social adaptability required consigning children to mediocrity, “in order that they may feel comfortable in their time.” He should therefore advise Christopher, now six, that “whatever I like, you learn to dislike; whatever I believe in, you distrust; whatever I am, you try to be the opposite.” Only then could he have “the faintest chance of fitting into the new age.”
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