George F. Kennan: An American Life (94 page)

On June 27 Kennan flew to Copenhagen, where the State Department had opened a new embassy building. He found the male staffers “loose-jointed, casual, diffident, drawling, yet full of modesty and common sense”—qualities he had admired, during the war, in the young American occupiers of Italy. The women were crisp, controlled, and helpful, their voices as innocently unselfconscious as if “they had never left Kansas City.” Suddenly—melodramatically—Kennan was homesick:

His frustrations about America were really frustrations about himself: “These are my people; it is to them, with all their deficiencies, that I, with all my deficiencies, belong. It is to them that I must return, after every rebellion, for punishment or forgiveness.” Like distant but patient parents, their strengths were not to be underestimated:

Kennan shared the next leg of his flight, to Warsaw, with an Air Force attaché, his wife, and their family. Despite heavy turbulence, he chewed his gum, read his magazines, and exuded complete confidence. Would he do so in the face of “atomic death”? Probably, Kennan concluded. “Great institutions create, for those who are within them, their own illusions of security; and the United States Air Force is now a great institution.”

The Polish trip, arranged through Oxford friends, was Kennan’s first to a communist country since the Soviet Union expelled him in 1952. Most of Warsaw had been rebuilt from its near-obliteration, on Hitler’s orders, during the war. Much seemed slavishly Russian: the tawdry apartment blocks rising from seas of mud; the Stalinist skyscraper on which Poles carefully did not comment; the Hotel Bristol, which with its “shoddy air of mystery,” its “dreary, furtive corridors,” its “intensive eyeing of people,” even its delegations of visiting Chinese, Mongolians, and North Koreans, evoked the Metropole in Moscow.

But in the city center, a declaration of architectural independence had taken place: the Polish government was meticulously reconstructing the palaces and churches of the feudal and bourgeois eras. Had it tried to design anything more modern, Kennan was sure, the plans would have been ideologically incorrect and hence rejected. The Poles sensed, though, a respect on the Russians’ part for prerevolutionary culture, the natural evolution of which their revolution had so brutally broken off. So the new buildings were safe because they
looked
old. They stood “a trifle sheepishly, as [though] surprised, and almost discomfited, to be thus resurrected from a past [to] which, after all, they can never return.”

Kennan’s hosts at the Institute of International Affairs were charming, urbane, and politically sophisticated. Not really communists, they treated recent history like Soviet architecture: one did not speak of the Katyn massacre, or of the Red Army’s failure to prevent the crushing of the Warsaw Uprising, and “in this studied silence, there is a condemnation more devastating than in any words.” The only committed communist Kennan met was trying to build something hopeful on a “dismal foundation of error and grim despotism.” He felt sorry for her: she was “destined, unquestionably, for disillusionment and tragedy.”

Knowing that he would be among scholars, Kennan had planned to lecture on American intervention in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. Upon his arrival, however, the head of the institute informed him, with some embarrassment, that the Soviet authorities had objected to this topic, but that he was to go ahead with it anyway. The lecture was readvertised as one on contemporary problems of U.S. foreign policy. Puzzled, Kennan asked if he should now switch to that subject. No, he was told, he was to give the original talk,
under
the newly announced title. This had been “the bargain” with Moscow.

So Kennan spoke, on July 1, to a hand-picked audience, received polite applause when he finished, and then waited, in awkward silence, for questions. Only one came: how he could have called World War I a “tragedy,” since it had led to the formation of the modern Polish state? Kennan stumbled through an answer, and the session ended. The audience’s reticence, he later realized, reflected the fact that
it
was being watched. But it had been happy for
him
to say whatever he wished.
²

Kennan subsequently reported to the CIA on how much the Poles were departing from Soviet “socialism.” If left unchallenged, the liberties they were taking would become rights, so deeply rooted that “any withdrawal of them would appear as a preposterous injury.” A kind of “liberation” was occurring from within. Further rhetoric about “liberation” from without could only delay its development. “While I do not share the views of the writer on many subjects,” Allen Dulles commented, in forwarding Kennan’s analysis to the White House, “his report on Poland is the best summary I have seen on the evolving situation there. It is possible that the President would be interested in glancing it over.” The initials “DE” on the document, together with underlinings and a distinctive doodle, show that he did.
³

George could have felt some satisfaction, therefore, as he, Annelise, Christopher, and Wendy sailed for home in late July on a slow freighter, the MS
Texas
, whose principal cargo was cement, granite blocks, and a hundred Volvos. The European balance of power looked very different from what it had been a decade earlier. With American help, the Western Europeans had regained prosperity and self-confidence. It was now the Russians who were walking a tightrope in Eastern Europe, knowing how gleefully their “allies” would welcome a tumble into the abyss. Kennan had anticipated both possibilities, devised a strategy to bring them about, and for all of its parochialism, immaturity, and opportunistic politics, his country had broadly followed it.

In fact, though, Kennan made no further effort, on the long voyage home, to reflect on the relaxed Americans and resolute Poles he had met—or to wonder why the Russians, in Warsaw, had been so nervous about his presence. Instead, as the ship approached the New England coast, he was brooding about what lay ahead.

Should he try to help? Or should he admit the futility of doing so and retire to cultivate his garden, writing books that only a handful of people might read and that would “probably burn up, anyway, in the imminent atomic holocaust?” The
Texas
rounded Nantucket on August 2, “and just as we did so the moon rose, ominous and blood-red, in the east. A strange evening, intensely beautiful, and slightly sinister.”
⁴

The Kennans spent the rest of August 1958 at the farm, where George carefully chronicled his activities: ditch digging, fence building, buying a tractor, completing a survey of the property, arranging for a new tenant to manage the place. He also granted an interview—his first in over a year—to the
Harrisburg Patriot-News
, which celebrated its exclusive “Press Conference with Ex-Ambassador Keenan” by staging a “Mr. X Contest.” Princeton, when the family returned to it in September, was “gloriously quiet, relaxed, comfortable,” but George soon felt himself sinking back into “the false, tense, harried life of the American upper class—tightly organized, over-elaborate in all its arrangements, lacking in spontaneity, everyone living on the outward edge of their energies and resources, ... attempting to meet standards which, being themselves survivals of the age of servants, are themselves exorbitant.” So he resolved to seek refuge, for three hours each day, deep within the university’s Firestone Library, “where no one knows where to find me.” That would leave twelve hours for sleeping and meals, eight for activities apart from scholarship, and one for work around the yard and the house.
⁵

George liked to joke that separating his older and younger children by thirteen years had been a triumph of policy planning: “We raised our baby sitters first.” Now, though, they were leaving. Grace had married in March, while her parents and younger siblings were still in Oxford: the bridegroom was Charles K. McClatchy, a reporter and former Adlai Stevenson aide whose family owned a major newspaper chain in California. George and Annelise covered the costs of the event, which took place in Washington, but then could not afford to fly back for it. They met their new son-in-law when he and Grace came through London in May, and by the end of the year, there was a first grandchild.
⁶

Joan, in the meantime, had announced her engagement to Larry Griggs, a rising senior at Brown University. Shortly after returning for her own final year at Connecticut College, she received a letter, in familiar handwriting and on Institute for Advanced Study stationery, purporting to be from the family dog Krisha. Life in Princeton was lonely, the poodle complained. Rations were meager. It was a relief to get Christopher and Wendy off for school each morning, because their idea of petting resembled Greek-Roman wrestling. And the neighborhood canines were either ancient or lascivious:

Dismayed, on a trip to the farm, not to find Joan there, Krisha had to spend the weekend “in the scintillating company of her old man, with his muddy boots, his bills and workmen, his ditches and gutters, and his grim physiognomy—well, at least he takes a walk occasionally.”
⁷

The old man, that fall and winter, was grimly regarding his country, the world, the afterlife, and of course himself. He found Eisenhower’s determination to defend Chiang Kai-shek’s offshore outposts on Quemoy and Matsu to be tautological, since their importance lay only in the administration’s assurances that they were important. He worried about Khrushchev’s increasing unpredictability: a mature and “statesmanlike” enemy—Stalin?—was manageable, “but God save us from the erratic and distraught one.” He was reading Henry Kissinger and Reinhold Niebuhr on nuclear weapons, finding the former unconvincing and the latter prophetic. Seeking safety in such devices, Kennan concluded, was like a child wandering through his father’s house “with a faggot of burning papers in his hand.” He wondered, on Christmas Day 1958, how there could be hope for earthly progress if Christ had been born “to save us in the next world, not in this.” And on the following Easter Sunday, having exhausted himself with farm work, he lay down in the fading Pennsylvania light to ponder “the genuine dead-end” at which his life had arrived: “I haven’t the faintest idea what now to do with myself.”
⁸

“Here I am: 55 years of age,” Kennan wrote a few weeks later. “I have some talents and some strength. I have nothing to lose by dedicating myself to something,” for without that, life would be “a gradual rotting and disintegrating in the warm, debilitating narcotic bath of upper-class American civilization.” Anything would be better than that. “I am, after all, expendable,” but for what? “Where is a vehicle, a framework, in which energy can usefully be expended?”
⁹

Thanks largely to Acheson, Kennan had become persona non grata with much of the American—and Western European—foreign policy establishment. White House press secretary James Hagerty felt it necessary to assure reporters, when Kennan attended a conference there in January, that he would not be meeting alone with the president. “Why, hello Kennan,” a startled Eisenhower said as they shook hands in the receiving line. “It’s some time since I’ve seen you.” Kennan showed up at a Council on Foreign Relations discussion in April but was made to feel “as if the Devil had been occupying a pew in church.” It was clear, he acknowledged in July, that “[t]here is to be no disengagement.... The line of division in Europe is to be made steadily sharper, more meaningful, more ineradicable.”
¹⁰

Kennan continued to get compliments, however, from Senator John F. Kennedy, who, having read his reply to Acheson in
Foreign Affairs,
praised the way it avoided “the kind of
ad hominem
irrelevancies in which Mr. Acheson unfortunately indulged last year.” Kennedy was always looking for negotiating possibilities with the Russians, Arthur Schlesinger remembered: also, he “admired Kennan as a historian.” Another admirer, unexpectedly, was Richard M. Nixon, in whose company Kennan found himself at a Washington reception in July. The vice president greeted him warmly, insisted on being photographed with him, and went out of his way to explain, to a very surprised Loy Henderson, that “Kennan here has performed a great service in his lectures and writings. We need someone like this to stir things up.” “Poor Loy, who probably thinks I ought to be shot at sunrise, had no choice but to agree,” George wrote Annelise afterward.
¹¹