George F. Kennan: An American Life (93 page)

Kennan wrote back immediately, claiming to harbor no bitterness but seizing the moment to indulge in a bit of it nonetheless: “I could have wished that your statement had not been so promptly and eagerly exploited by people for whose integrity of motive I have not the same respect I have for your own.” He had also been “saddened” by Truman’s outburst. “I did not thrust myself on General Marshall or yourself as head of a planning staff, nor on Mr. Truman as Ambassador to Russia, and the efforts I put forward, in all three instances, were the best of which I was capable.” As for Acheson’s
Foreign Affairs
article, he would answer it in the same forum. He could only say that “rarely, if ever, have I seen error so gracefully and respectfully clothed. One hates to start plucking at such finery; but I suppose that in one way or another I shall have to do so.”
⁵³

“I think this leaves the honors to George,” Acheson acknowledged to C. C. Burlingham, a distinguished New York lawyer, then ninety-nine, whom both men knew and revered. He had written to Kennan, Acheson assured the old man—the tone was more that of an apologetic schoolboy than of an aggrieved elder statesman—to say that “although we were engaged in committing mutual mayhem, I was still fond of whatever might be left of him.”
⁵⁴

Not much was. The Reith lectures controversy was really about Germany’s place in postwar Europe, and Acheson easily prevailed. He did so because he knew when
not
to plan policy. He had supported Program A until leaks to the press ruled out its pursuit in the spring of 1949; then, to Kennan’s bewilderment, he simply dropped it. “If you couldn’t get it done you’d proceed another way, but you didn’t agonize over things,” Acheson’s daughter Mary Bundy recalled. “[H]e was a lot tougher than George, and he was a lot more practical a person.”

Kennan, in contrast, was constantly recycling, rearranging, and repackaging his ideas. The BBC broadcasts contained no proposals that Acheson hadn’t heard before. He had never heard them all at once, though, or in so public a forum, or at such a critical moment. They made it seem as though Kennan, having lost the policy battle in Washington, was now appealing over the heads of elected NATO leaders to their domestic opponents, and even to the Soviet Union itself, the country he had once sought to contain. Acheson was “absolutely furious,” Kennan admitted. Bundy remembered this as the moment her father lost confidence “in the stability of the man’s thinking, really.”

Stability was indeed the issue, but it applied to the entire postwar European settlement. For Kennan, who believed himself more an expert on Germany than Acheson and his supporters, it was absurd to seek safety in that country’s indefinite division. “I had, after all, spent five years of my life in Berlin. I was bilingual in the language. What the hell [did] these people know?” No one in his right mind could have planned such an arrangement, which could fall apart at any moment under the combined pressures of German irredentism, Anglo-French anxiety, Eastern European irresponsibility, Soviet neocolonialism, and American militarism. Over it all loomed the unprecedented danger of nuclear war: any other course, Kennan was sure, would be better than that.
⁵⁵

Acheson, despite his fury, was more hopeful. He saw more clearly than Kennan that however illogical the division of Germany was, few people anywhere—not even most Germans—were seeking to overturn it. The very danger of war that Kennan regarded as destabilizing had, in Acheson’s view, the opposite effect: it was “deterrence.” A post–World War II order was
evolving
in Europe, much as legal precedents evolve, without anyone having
designed
it, as had happened with so little success after World War I. Trained as a lawyer, Acheson understood and respected this process, so much so that it became almost theology. Anything that might deflect NATO from its present path bordered on heresy—even the grand design of a former policy planner, the logic of which Acheson had once embraced.

Both men were right, but in different eras. Acheson’s settlement kept the peace in Europe for the next three decades, and by the 1970s even Kennan could see its robustness. “[W]e might all have been spared a lot of trouble if someone in authority had come to me before these lectures were given and had said: ‘Look here, George, the decision to leave Europe divided . . . has already been taken, even if it hasn’t been announced; the talk about German unification is all eyewash; and there isn’t the faintest thing to be gained by your attempting to change this situation.’” Or as he put it in 1984, “the right thing said at the wrong time is almost worse than saying the wrong thing at the right time.”
⁵⁶

But by the end of the 1980s, the division of Germany was breaking down, as Kennan had predicted it would while on the Policy Planning Staff in 1948–49 and over the BBC in 1957. This was occurring, though, not through the negotiations he had envisaged with Moscow but because the Soviet system itself was breaking apart, something an earlier Kennan had foreseen from his vantage point in Riga in 1932 and in the “X” article of 1947. He had, his friend Oliver Franks pointed out, put the cart before the horse in making German reunification the prerequisite for ending the Cold War: the sequence, in fact, was the other way around. “It’s very difficult,” Franks added, “to distinguish between those insights of Kennan which are almost prophetic in their accuracy, and those which just aren’t.”
⁵⁷

Kennan resumed his Oxford lectures late, on February 18, 1958, delivering only five before Hilary term ended the following month. This disappointed his audience, because he had promised a history of Soviet foreign policy and got only as far as the Rapallo Conference of 1922. Health was cited as one of the reasons, but the Reith controversy was still a major distraction for Kennan, leaving little time for anything else. Late-winter Oxford was as depressing as ever, so much so that he now missed—however implausibly—the United States. Hearing an American accent made him realize “how much this period abroad has caused me to love my own people.” To be sure, they faced great problems: they were destined “within my children’s time to know unprecedented horrors and miseries and probably to pass entirely from the scene of world history.” If he could do anything to keep them from that fate, “this would be the most useful purpose to which I could put the remainder of my life.”

But what? The crisis he had been through had shown that scholarship and current events were “like oil and water; they have nothing to do with one another; attention given to one is given at the cost of the other.” Nobody thought his historical writing relevant to the present, but giving it up for journalism or politics would require sacrificing the independence that the Institute for Advanced Study had provided him. “I am in some travail,” he admitted to “Eka” Kantorowicz, over “how to reconcile the obligations of a historian with the maddening and unaccountable preference of the public . . . to hear what I have to say about contemporary events, concerning which I know almost nothing. If you have any suggestions, I should be grateful.”
⁵⁸

The Kennans spent the Oxford spring break at Cascais, in their much-loved Portugal, where George finished his response to Acheson for
Foreign Affairs
and began pondering his future. The leisure, the sun, and the sea caused him to tell himself—most uncharacteristically—that he should lighten up:

The next evening he started Joseph Conrad’s
Under Western Eyes
, couldn’t stop until he finished it, and then was so excited that he got no sleep. The following morning found him “dead tired and full of remorse. Time to begin laughing at myself.”

An excellent opportunity arose the following day when Kennan paid his respects to Dr. António Salazar, still Portugal’s prime minister, whom he had first met during the Azores bases crisis of 1943. Then almost seventy, the durable autocrat was happy to see Kennan, but totally unsympathetic to his recent proposals. “Disengagement” made no sense because no one trusted the Germans or the Russians. Nuclear weapons were too terrible ever to be used and hence nothing to worry about. Intercontinental ballistic missiles had hardly even registered with Salazar. Kennan had the good sense not to argue with the old man, or even to fall into a diary funk afterward—this was progress.
⁵⁹

The last months in England were far more relaxed than the fall and winter had been. Kennan lectured in London, Swansea, Aberystwyth, and Cambridge, the latter on a spring day, with punters on the Cam, tennis players in the Backs, under “such a wonderful mellow, shimmering light as one sees only in the French impressionist paintings.” John Holmes, a Canadian diplomat who attended an off-the-record Chatham House discussion with Kennan, found him reluctant to disagree with any of his critics. “[W]ell beyond most mortals” in his sense of history but “incredibly naïve” about current policy, Kennan left Holmes wondering “if perhaps it was I rather than he who was blind.... I could see, however, why so many people have a great affection for him and why, at the same time, they all grow so exasperated with him.”
⁶⁰

Kennan’s last Oxford talk, on May 13, was to American students at Rhodes House. He told them, as he later summarized it,

The young men, Kennan could see, were “interested but disturbed” by what he had said: coming from him, however, it was a rare expression of optimism.
⁶¹

Three days later he traveled by rail to Cornwall to pick up a collection of Russian revolutionary newspapers, with the last leg of the trip on a branch line little changed since the nineteenth century: “The little locomotive puffed furiously as it pulled us up and up through the forests to Bodmin. . . . It reminded me of my youth; and I was aware of experiencing, this one last time, a form of transportation which the younger generation will probably never know.” Feeling this loss yet mindful of the future, he rode back to Oxford with an imaginary companion.

At fifty-four, he told himself and his fellow traveler, he could assume perhaps another ten or fifteen years of active life. Both his government experience and his scholarly pursuits were wearing thin. So what would he lose, his companion asked, “by setting out, like the [M]arxists, to act upon life rather than to understand it?” Why not seek “real power,” in the hope of accomplishing “at least one or two concrete things before turning [it] over entirely to the new generation?”

There could be, his friend whispered, great strength in choosing this path, for everything would fall into place: there would be “a rationale for all personal choices, as well as for professional decisions.” It could “take up the strains created, and fill the gaps opened up, by increasing age.” It could relieve personal frustrations—“the passage of sexual love, the growing up and weaning of one’s children, ... the decline of one’s powers of imagination and perception”—allowing their acceptance “with a scornful smile.” For as Goethe had written:

Perhaps, Kennan concluded, Mephistopheles had something to offer.
⁶²

“NEVER, I BELIEVE, HAVE I PARTED WITH GREATER INDIFFERENCE from any place where I have lived,” George wrote of Oxford after he and his family finally left it in June 1958 for a summer in Kristiansand, before returning to the United States. Norway was brighter, cleaner, and more congenial than Great Britain, yet even there youths had few interests beyond motorbikes, sailing was a dying sport, walking was a forgotten pastime, and adults were succumbing to “an anti-intellectualism, a cultural flaccidity, a complacent materialism worse than ours—plus a devastating secularism.” If this was happening in Scandinavia, then did the West deserve to survive? Hadn’t the time really come for the Russians to take over?

It was another descent into diary despair, although this time with a twist: “I cannot believe it.” Once subject “to the wind of material plenty,” Kennan predicted, the Russians would be “as helpless as the rest of us—even more so—under its debilitating and insidious breath.” He had been forecasting the corruption of communism by capitalism since 1932, but his lack of faith in his own country had made it hard to see when or how that might occur. Now, though, having spent a year abroad, the United States was looking better to him.
¹