George F. Kennan: An American Life (90 page)

For all of his pessimism about culture in the United States, Kennan had not yet given up on its politics. He respected Eisenhower but thought him too inclined to defer to Dulles and to McCarthyite pressures in foreign policy. He had registered as a Democrat during his brief Pennsylvania congressional candidacy, but in terms of domestic affairs, “I am much closer to the Republicans.” He opposed farm subsidies and distrusted labor unions while worrying increasingly about race relations, “still the most terrible . . . of our national problems.” In the privacy of his diary, however, he regretted Lincoln’s having kept the nation together during the Civil War: it would have been better off without the “Latin-American fringe” of California, Texas, and Florida. “I ought, in truth,” he concluded, “to have nothing to do with either political party.”

Politicians, however, could still attract him. Kennan admired Adlai Stevenson “as a sensitive, intelligent and valiant person” who ought to be running the country and “probably never will.” Nevertheless, he agreed early in 1956 to co-chair the New Jersey “Stevenson-for-President” committee. He suggested saying little about foreign policy but sent Stevenson four single-spaced typed pages on what he should say. He even made a campaign speech in Princeton, “a task for which I am very poorly fitted,” assuring his neighbors that Stevenson would bring an “intellectual and moral conscience” to government, would conduct “an exercise of national self-scrutiny,” and would have the courage to tell Americans what they would not necessarily like to hear.
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Stevenson soon disappointed him. During an address to the Pittsburgh Foreign Policy Association on May 3, Kennan had described the situation in Eastern Europe as “a finality, for better or for worse.” The United States should not be encouraging “liberation.” This was no new position, but when James Reston quoted Kennan a few days later alongside a
New York Times
news story listing him as a key Stevenson adviser, an angry Democratic congressman, Thaddeus Machrowicz of Michigan, warned the candidate that he could lose the Polish-American vote unless he publicly repudiated Kennan. Stevenson wasted no time in doing so: he issued a press release “completely” disagreeing with Kennan, who “is in no way connected with my staff and never has been.”
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Kennan was not consulted, nor was he even given a copy of the Stevenson letter. The brush-off cured him, or so he claimed, “of the illusion that I have any place whatsoever in American public life—even as an independent supporter of Mr. Stevenson. Serves me right for even messing in it.” Kennan wrote that on August 20, during his visit with Jeanette in Highland Park. Three days later her phone rang with a message from the Democratic nominee himself: he had just learned that Kennan was nearby—could he come to dinner that evening at the Stevenson farm in Libertyville? George asked if he could bring Grace, who had just arrived. Of course, Stevenson replied. “So we drove over almost at once.”

The meal took place to the sound of Republican rhetoric, for Eisenhower and Nixon were accepting their nominations that night, and the television was on in the next room. Stevenson assessed the speeches professionally, talked foreign policy briefly, and then George and Grace made their farewells.

Stevenson had rejected Kennan more abruptly and more visibly even than Dulles, but unlike Dulles, he found a gracious way to make amends. That, for Kennan, was style—a later generation would call it “class.” It was a quality he struggled to find within himself, even as he drove, hounded, and haunted himself.

“I am living in the world my father despaired of, and rightly so,” Kennan wrote on August 26, 1956, after returning to the archives in St. Louis. Why take it too seriously? It was, after all, late afternoon: “The main happenings of the day are over; not much more is going to happen.” He, like his father, had been “passed by, and do not really mind too much—because the present is too uninteresting.”
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But the present, in fact, was very interesting. Six months earlier the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had secretly denounced Stalin before the Twentieth Soviet Communist Party Congress in Moscow. Two months earlier Polish workers had rioted in Poznań. One month earlier the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had nationalized the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company after Secretary of State Dulles, retaliating for an arms deal Nasser had made with Czechoslovakia, cut off American funding for the Aswan Dam. Kennan had no involvement in any of these crises, but he could hardly avoid taking an interest in them. And as far as Soviet and Eastern European affairs were concerned, the CIA expected him to do so: despite Kennan’s having declined the offer of a job there in 1953, Allen Dulles had been using him ever since as a confidential adviser.

Initially this meant membership on an advisory committee reviewing national intelligence estimates. Conveniently for Kennan, it met in Princeton with the CIA director frequently in attendance. After J. Edgar Hoover approved Kennan’s
Pravda
subscription, he was also able to monitor post-Stalin political maneuvering in the Kremlin, passing periodic analyses to his chief CIA contact, John Maury. The arrangement made sense on all sides. It gave the Eisenhower administration access to Kennan despite its having, in effect, fired him. It allowed Kennan the freedom to criticize policy openly while still seeking quietly to shape it. Because Kennan wished to avoid any impression “that he is seeking to intrude or in any way impose his views,” Frank Wisner explained in 1956, agency documents referred to him only as “the expert.”
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One of the first things Allen Dulles did after the CIA obtained a transcript of Khrushchev’s speech was to send Maury to Princeton to show it to Kennan. His first reaction was that one or more of the new Soviet leaders must have arranged Stalin’s death and were now trying to cover their tracks. He advised caution in releasing the text, but Dulles overruled him and, with the other Dulles’s cooperation, the State Department published it on June 4. The Polish upheaval followed three weeks later, leading Kennan to admit that they had been right. Khrushchev had attacked the system that produced him far more effectively than the Americans could ever have done. They had only amplified what he said.
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By August, Kennan was worrying more about the Suez crisis. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations had made a great mistake playing up to “Middle Eastern tin-pot dictators,” he told
New York Times
correspondent C. L. Sulzberger in an off-the-record interview. “These men are not our friends,” but the British and the French were. The United States had traditionally favored self-determination, Kennan added in a speech at Johns Hopkins two months later, but was everyone equally ready to exercise it? Especially when doing so involved expropriating foreign property, along with the right to control an international waterway vital to the global economy? How strongly would Americans support Nasser if he cut off oil shipments from the Middle East at a time when they and their allies were increasing their dependence on that commodity?
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Meanwhile, Kennan was modifying his views on the “finality” of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. Moscow’s authority there was eroding “more rapidly than I had ever anticipated,” he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on October 11. The process had begun with Tito in 1948, and now, in the aftermath of the Poznań riots, Poland was showing signs of independence that Stalin would never have permitted. Khrushchev flew to Warsaw a week later to demand the resignation of Wladyslaw Gomulka, the recently installed reformist leader of the Polish Communist Party, but surprisingly, he failed to get it. Washington wanted him to come for “consultation,” Kennan wrote in his diary on the twenty-second. Should he go? His relations with his government and even his country were approaching a crisis

Kennan could claim, in a way, vindication, having insisted for over a decade that the Soviet Union could not indefinitely, as Gibbon would have put it, “hold in obedience” its satellites “in opposition to their inclination and interest.” But Kennan’s problem, his old Moscow boss Bill Bullitt had suggested in a public attack on him a few months earlier, was that his devotion to Gibbon had left him with “a pessimistic bent of mind for one so young.” Kennan was “more captivated by declines and falls than by rises and achievements.”
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Kennan did acknowledge, on October 29, that the situation in Eastern Europe was developing more favorably than if “we ourselves [had] tried deliberately to achieve this effect.” Perhaps Titoism had been a precursor to “liberation.” But the Hungarians were “running tremendous risks in trying to force so many issues at once.” Encouraged by the Polish example, the new government of Imre Nagy had followed an anti-Soviet uprising in Budapest with the demand that the Red Army withdraw altogether from Hungary. It appeared to have done so by November 1, when Kennan again saw John Maury. “I think there is a hooker in this somewhere,” he warned. “I cannot understand their accepting this kind of humiliation.” Khrushchev was indeed wavering, but he soon stopped by ordering a full-scale invasion of Hungary on November 4, which brutally crushed the rebellion. The fighting killed some 2,700 people, and another 230, including Nagy, were eventually executed.

While all of this was happening, the British, French, and Israelis—with exquisitely bad timing and without having consulted the United States—had launched an ill-planned invasion of Egypt with a view to retaking the Suez Canal. That left Eisenhower wondering how to condemn one such action and not the other: he solved the problem by condemning both, while asking the United Nations to do the same. Under brutal pressure from Washington, the Anglo-French-Israeli forces had no choice but to accept a cease-fire and withdraw. Khrushchev and Nasser achieved their objectives, leaving NATO to face the worst crisis in its history. Nevertheless, on November 6, Eisenhower won reelection by a landslide.
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“The events of these recent days have been so shattering,” Kennan wrote on the seventh, “that I am at a loss to know how to react to them.” They had confirmed, “beyond my wildest dreams,” his doubts about “liberation” and the appeasement of “third world” dictators. But the United States and its allies were now in a dangerous situation over which they appeared to have little control. Despite this, Americans had voted Eisenhower a second term with a huge majority. So of what use was Kennan’s advice, even if anyone were willing to listen to it?

He was sure that in most instances he had been right. Almost alone, in 1945, he had foreseen “the horror of Russia’s rule in the satellites, and the necessity of its eventual disintegration.” He had accurately diagnosed the weaknesses of Stalin’s rule. The Marshall Plan had been his idea, and he had correctly calculated what was needed for its success. Had he been listened to on Germany, that country would now have been reunited, free of communist control. He had urged, before the Korean War broke out, that Taiwan be placed under MacArthur’s control: “no nonsense about returning it to China.” He had warned against invading North Korea. He had opposed deferring to the United Nations rather than to allies with “a traditional stake in our future.” So what should he do with insights like these? “Bury them? Hide them? Die with them? They are not wanted.”
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The George Eastman Professorship in Balliol College, established in 1929 by the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, was meant to bring to Oxford each year a senior American scholar “of the highest distinction,” regardless of field. Kennan’s 1955 appointment came at a good time, strengthening his case for tenure at the Institute for Advanced Study. Before accepting it, though, he checked with Loy Henderson to make sure that the secretary of state had no plans to recall him to duty, as Foreign Service rules would allow him to do until Kennan was sixty-five. Dulles assured Henderson that he had no such intention, so Kennan was free to go. The appointment required giving a set of lectures, an obligation he took seriously enough to propose writing between twenty-five and thirty on the history of Soviet foreign policy. “I think you rather overestimate the amount of care you ought to give to these,” a former Rhodes scholar cautioned. Few people in Oxford spoke from full texts. As at Princeton, “notes would be all you need.”
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Relieved by this advice, determined to finish
The Decision to Intervene
before departing for Europe in the summer of 1957, Kennan gave little further thought to his Eastman lectures, or to another series he had committed himself to in which speaking from notes would be impossible: these were the annual Reith lectures, to be delivered live over the national and international radio networks of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Perhaps, he suggested to his increasingly anxious producer Anna Kallin at the end of June, he might update the “X” article from a decade ago. “I have taken on far more than I can possibly do,” he admitted to Kent. “I have no one to blame but myself. It . . . will be a miracle if I contrive to acquit myself creditably.”
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