George F. Kennan: An American Life (95 page)

John Foster Dulles had resigned as secretary of state shortly before his death, from cancer, in May 1959. His successor, Under Secretary Christian A. Herter, harbored no particular animus toward Kennan but gave him no reason to anticipate an appointment during the remainder of Eisenhower’s term. The Institute would expect Kennan to continue as a historian: having established his credentials in that field, however, he felt the need now only to deliver lectures, write periodic reviews, and encourage younger scholars. The promised third volume on early Soviet-American relations was less important than commentary on public affairs: “I owe it to people here who have confidence in me to write, in book form, the rationale of my despair with the country.” At least in England there had been a community “to which I was civilly and fully admitted, during the period of my residence there.”
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Kennan had not forgotten how much, only a year earlier, he had despised the place: the “community” he really missed was a great friend. “I sometimes think I would accept again all the asperities of English life,” he wrote Isaiah Berlin, “for the delights of sheer conversation.” He had even dreamed recently of trying to talk with Berlin, over “the roar and surge of some enormous cocktail party.” Perhaps this reflected “the desperate intensity with which England seems to be trying to become like ourselves.... How the good old subconscious does go to the heart of things!”
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Never had he lived in any place “where the present did not seem to represent a deterioration as compared with the past,” George realized in a flash of self-recognition that spring. This had been true of Riga, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Moscow—the only exception, perhaps, had been Lisbon under Salazar. It was as if he blighted his own surroundings. If Christopher were to ask where, “in this world to which you have introduced me,” he could have a rewarding life, “what could I say? Only at the ends of the earth: in the Arctic, perhaps; where almost no other men live; where Nature, not man, is your companion. For my own country, I have not a shred of hope, not one.”
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And what of his own weaknesses? In Chicago, in April, “I took X to tea.” Wandering around the lobby of the Palmer House, they found a quiet place to talk. She was “her old self: impulsive, warm, and very foolish.” When they parted, her final word, “flung over the heads of the startled passers-by,” was: “Sorry to have been so miserable.” She thereby negatively illustrated a positive principle: “If you have tendencies which you know yourself are wrong, which you cannot control yet cannot leave, don’t apologize for them—brave them out; they are, after all, a part of you.”
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Joan’s wedding took place in Princeton that June, just after her graduation, under unexpectedly dramatic circumstances. As the guests gathered, there was a screeching of brakes and Christopher came running to say that Krisha had been run over. George and Jeanette’s son Gene rushed her to the veterinarian, who determined that she had been frightened but not hurt, while the rest of the family conspired to keep the news from Joan. Despite the near-tragedy, the wedding went off smoothly: “The present, at least, had been well lived through,” George wrote with relief in his diary. “[T]he future would have to take care of itself.”
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He sailed for Europe, where he would be attending a series of conferences, in early September. His family, this time, did not accompany him, so he spent most of the voyage in the company only of his diary. “I have been very heroic.... I have lived for a week in studied solitude among this crowd of people; I have had a drink with no one at the bar; aware of my age and dignity, I have let the ladies all pass me by; I have resisted the temptation to hear myself talk.” Why make “such a fetish of my loneliness”? Why take such satisfaction “in a total abstention from contact with any one else?” Why, for that matter, at Oxford, had he never watched a crew race or dined at high table in Balliol, his host college? It was of course a neurosis, perhaps inherited: “I have an idea that my father was much the same way.” But it was also “for myself that I do this.... I am determined that if I cannot have all, or the greater part, of what I want, no one is going to deprive me of the glorious martyrdom of having none of it.”
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“I still think constantly about what we should do,” George wrote Annelise from Rheinfelden, in Switzerland, where he was trying in vain to extract coherence from a meandering meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. “I suppose we shall end up by continuing to do exactly what we have been doing.” But “I have washed my clothes so regularly, and have acquired such expertise, that I could set up in the laundry business when I get back.”
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Strangely, the American political process, in which Kennan had so little faith, produced presidential candidates in 1960 who professed to admire him. As an Eisenhower administration exile, Kennan dismissed Nixon’s praise as opportunistic flattery, probably unfairly. Kennedy, however, had impressed Kennan from the second time they met. That was in 1953, fifteen years after their unfortunate first encounter in Prague after Munich. “I was amazed,” Kennan recalled, “to see anyone looking so young and so modest in [a] Senatorial position.” Kennedy’s support in the Reith lectures controversy had been a boost at a bad time, and while vacationing in Jamaica at the end of 1959, he sent another compliment—this time in his almost illegible handwriting—applauding the “dispassionate good sense” of a talk Kennan had given on the possibility of abolishing nuclear weapons, while wondering how in their absence the United States might contain the “endless” conventional forces of the Chinese. “I was much moved that you should have taken the trouble to write,” Kennan replied, “for I know how tremendously burdened your time must be.”
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Perhaps because of his 1956 disillusionments, Kennan took little part in the 1960 campaign. Citing Institute obligations, he rejected an effort by New Jersey Democrats to have him run for the Senate. Support was strong enough, though, for Governor Robert Meyner to insist on a face-to-face refusal. “I did my stuff,” Kennan recorded, “and everyone, I think, was happy.” Paul Nitze got a similar brush-off after asking—it seemed “with no great show of enthusiasm”—whether Kennan would join the Democratic Party Advisory Council’s foreign policy committee: “This was not my dish.”
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One other reason for avoiding politics was that Kennan had become, temporarily, a teacher. He spent five weeks at Harvard that spring drafting and delivering the rest of the lectures he had meant to give at Oxford two years earlier. Dick Ullman attended this series too, and found the response much the same: Kennan filled the largest hall available. “Without any concessions to the crowd, without any attempt to make the complex more palatable by oversimplifying or sensationalizing, by the mere force of his intellect and eloquence,” the Russian historian Richard Pipes later wrote, Kennan’s was “one of the most impressive rhetorical performances I have ever witnessed.” Combined, the two sets of lectures became a survey of Soviet-American relations,
Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin
, which appeared the following year. Meanwhile Kennan had agreed to teach a graduate seminar at Yale in the fall. “History Goes Big,” the
Yale Daily News
excitedly editorialized. “It is the first time I have ever done anything of this sort,” George wrote Kent, “and I am enjoying it very much.”
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The Kennans had spent most of the summer of 1960 in Europe: Kristiansand, Berlin, Hamburg, Venice, and—most interesting for George—Belgrade, where his notes on what he saw in three days filled six single-spaced pages. The high point was an hour with Tito, “a Balkan communist of humble origin, tough and simple, no longer young; the personality [shaped by] endless battles and dangers; a trifle smug with success, yet also somewhat out of place in the white uniform and pretentious setting of a head of state.” What interested him most about Yugoslavia, Kennan wrote Elim O’Shaughnessy, now
chargé d’affaires
there, was how delicately its leaders balanced the acknowledged absurdity of Marxism-Leninism against their need to preserve the ideology in whose name they had gained and retained power. China, Kennan predicted, would soon face the same dilemma.
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Out of the country during the Democratic and Republican conventions, Kennan returned in mid-August to find Kennedy and Nixon in a tight race. He quickly sent Kennedy an eight-page letter on how to regain the initiative in world affairs by curtailing existing commitments, strengthening conventional military capabilities, and encouraging a Sino-Soviet split through improved relations with Moscow, now “royally fouled up” as a result of the U-2 incident the previous May when an American reconnaissance plane had been shot down over the U.S.S.R. He ended with a reminder of Marshall’s 1947 advice: “Avoid trivia.”
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Disappointingly, Kennedy responded only through his aide, Theodore Sorensen, who wrote to welcome whatever other thoughts Kennan might have. Kennedy later explained to C. L. Sulzberger that Kennan’s support for “disengagement” made it awkward “to mention his name at this time.” He had been in touch with Kennan, though, and hoped “to get him back.” Kennan, in the meantime, had tried to help by criticizing Nixon’s refusal, in the second televised debate with Kennedy, to reconsider policy on Quemoy and Matsu or to express regret over the U-2. Shockingly, though,
The New York Times
declined to publish Kennan’s full letter. If he could not look to the
Times
“as a channel for my own views,” he complained angrily to James Reston, then this raised doubts “as to whether I can and should continue to try to contribute at all to the discussion of public problems in this country.”
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Even if the Democrats won, Kennan warned himself, he would have little influence in the new administration, “partly because I am poor; partly because I have aroused jealousy; partly because I have said the right things too soon; partly because the appeal to the public, in our country, has to go through the mass media; and these media are incapable of appreciating or transmitting that which I have to offer.” Therefore,

And how had he improved since leaving for England three years earlier? “The changes have been only chemical, and not to the good: like toenails growing on a corpse.”
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Nevertheless, Kennan got Oppenheimer’s assurances, a few days before the election, that if asked to serve in the next administration, he could do so without giving up his professorship. On October 30 Kennedy finally wrote to say that he had “profited greatly” from Kennan’s August letter, and to thank him for his support in the campaign. After Kennedy’s narrow victory on November 8, Joe Alsop, still sensing caution in the president-elect, urged him to offer Kennan at least an ambassadorship: he was, next to Bohlen, “the Foreign Service’s most distinguished member.” Frieda Por sent George a new pair of gloves for Christmas, which Annelise took to mean that she expected an overseas appointment: “So far we have not seen any sign of it.” And George, writing to thank Kent for the annual shipment of grapefruit, thought it “quite unlikely that I should be going back to government.”
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He explained why, to himself, in a long, anguished diary entry on Monday, January 2, 1961: “[I]t is now nearly two months since the election, and I have heard literally nothing from anyone in Washington.” All the senior foreign policy posts had gone to people “whom I thought of as friends: Dean Rusk, Adlai Stevenson, Chester Bowles, Paul Nitze, Mac Bundy.” The newspapers were speculating about Bohlen’s future but had said nothing about his. The silence was as profound as after Eisenhower’s election. “Mr. Acheson and the others” who had worked to keep him out of the Kennedy administration had won. “I have lost.” All that was left was to write his memoirs, after which “the shades of loneliness will really close in on me. . . . Never, I think, has there been a man so wholly alone as I have been in this time.”
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But it was not 1953 all over again. On Tuesday the phone rang: Senator Kennedy’s office wished to know whether Ambassador Kennan could meet him in New York on January 10, “which I agreed to do.” Kennan found the Kennedy plane waiting at LaGuardia, and after the president-elect arrived, they flew to Washington, talking over lunch all the way. Kennedy asked brief questions, to which Kennan provided long answers. Why were the Russians so eager for a summit? How should he organize the White House staff? Could the Foreign Service be made more efficient? Should Llewellyn Thompson remain as ambassador in Moscow? Kennan thought Kennedy an excellent listener: he resisted the temptation to tell jokes or to make sententious statements, “a rare thing among men who have arisen to very exalted positions.” He said nothing about an appointment, though, and after the plane landed, Kennan caught a train back to Princeton, arriving in time for dinner.
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But on Monday, January 23—three days after Kennedy’s inauguration—Kennan checked his mail at Yale’s Branford College. An ashen-faced undergraduate was on the office phone: “Seeing me, he jumped up in relief and said: ‘Mr. Kennan, the President of the United States wants to talk to you.’” It was indeed Kennedy, calling to ask whether Kennan might agree to become ambassador to Poland or Yugoslavia: could he let Rusk, now secretary of state, know which it might be? Kennan was staying that evening with the George Piersons—he was the chairman of the Yale history department—and it was from their house, before dinner, that Kennan called Rusk to say that it would be Yugoslavia. “I am very enthusiastic about the way in which the new administration is taking hold,” a more cheerful George wrote his half-brother a few days later. “This is one of the reasons why I go back to government so gladly.”
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