George F. Kennan: An American Life

KENNAN’S EMPYREAN WAS THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY, one of the first American think tanks. Founded in 1930, located on a large tract of meadows and woods outside of Princeton, the Institute—never a part of Princeton University—made itself famous by creating a position for Albert Einstein when he left Germany after the Nazis came to power. He remained there for the rest of his life. During its early years, the Institute recruited mostly mathematicians: like its model, All Souls College, Oxford, it had no students and hence no teaching responsibilities. Its fellows’ only obligations were to ponder, research, occasionally publish—and to stay out of each other’s way. How did Kennan get along with Einstein? “I never went to see him,” he admitted ruefully, half a century after the great physicist’s death. “This was partly a reflection of my youthful arrogance. I felt I knew nothing about his subject and knew it. Einstein knew nothing about my subject, and didn’t know it.”¹

Oppenheimer became the Institute’s third director in 1947, determined to broaden the diversity of its fellows without changing what was expected of them. This led him to offer Kennan a visiting appointment, over objections from several mathematicians who wondered what contribution a Foreign Service officer with no advanced degree and no scholarly publications would be able to make. Kennan accepted it despite the continuing efforts of Princeton’s president, Harold Dodds, to give him a university professorship. “I want to make sure,” Kennan wrote, “that I do not move from a sphere in which I have occasionally… accomplish[ed] things despite a great number of diversions to one where I keep the diversions and dispense with the accomplishment.”²

Kennan and Oppenheimer had first met at the National War College in the fall of 1946. “He shuffled diffidently and almost apologetically out to the podium,” Kennan remembered,

They then become consultants to one another. Oppenheimer advised Kennan on European federation—not very successfully—when the Policy Planning Staff considered that issue in the summer of 1949. Kennan advised Oppenheimer, in turn, on what the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission should recommend with respect to the “super” bomb: Oppenheimer chaired its General Advisory Committee. Despite his reservations about Acheson’s suggested moratorium, Oppenheimer found the new weapon as abhorrent as Kennan did, and strongly opposed building it. Kennan’s long January 1950 report, Oppenheimer’s biographers have observed, might as well have been coauthored with him.³

“Could there be,” Kennan wrote of Oppenheimer after his death, “anyone harder to describe than he?… [P]art scientist, part poet; sometimes proud, sometimes humble; in some ways formidably competent in practical matters, in other ways woefully helpless: he was a bundle of marvelous contradictions.” To many, he seemed abrasive.

Thanks to Oppenheimer, the Institute for Advanced Study became Kennan’s professional and intellectual home for the next half century: he would spend twice as many years there as he did in the Foreign Service. Oppenheimer saw in Kennan—as Kennan saw in Oppenheimer—something of himself.

I.

The Kennans arrived in Princeton on Sunday, September 10, 1950, unpacked their belongings in the house they had rented, and stashed young Christopher in a playpen. There he stood, George recalled, “leaning his head idyllically on his arm (belying, in this peaceful pose, …the more frantic tendencies of later years).” Outside, mists rose on the meadows, while crickets soothed with their dreamlike drone. On Monday Kennan spent his first day at the Institute. A gentle rain was falling, “an English sort of rain,” as though deferring “to the quiet green of the place.”

Oppenheimer welcomed him with two pieces of advice. One was not to try to write anything immediately, but rather to use his first months at the Institute for unsystematic reading, to broaden what Kennan knew to be “an intense but narrow educational experience.” The other was to learn “that there is nothing harder in life than to have nothing before you but the blank page and nothing to do but your best.” Savoring the suggestion, impressed by the admonition, “I installed myself in my new office, with windows looking out over the fields to the woods, and had a sense of peace and happiness such as I have not had for a long time.”⁴

Kennan promised Acheson that he would rule out distractions: he could hardly seek refuge from Washington without accomplishing things he could never have done while there. But he was already swamped with invitations to speak, write, and consult. Most he could decline and did: his diary records seventy-seven between July and October; six more arrived on a single day, November 1. Others were more difficult to reject, whether because they came from people too prominent to put off, or from friends, family, even the children’s schools. Miss Fine’s in Princeton, where Joan was enrolled, got a carefully prepared lecture the following spring on the past and future of Soviet-American relations. Finally, there were the flattering ones that promised to amplify “one’s own voice and with it one’s possibilities for usefulness.”⁵

Outstanding obligations also ensnared him. Kennan had agreed to write a new article for Foreign Affairs, in yet another effort to update and clarify what he had said four years earlier as “X.” He had accepted, “with staggering frivolity,” invitations to give two series of lectures, one at Northwestern University and the other at the University of Chicago. He was participating in a Council on Foreign Relations study group on aid to Europe. He was reading book manuscripts: the historian S. Everett Gleason got five pages of single-spaced comments on a single draft chapter of The Challenge to Isolation, the semiofficial history of pre–World War II American foreign policy he was coauthoring with William L. Langer. And Kennan had assured Dodds that he would participate in university affairs, even if not as a professor. So he ran, successfully, for alumni trustee in 1951—despite having fled his own class reunion a year earlier because he couldn’t afford the fee.⁶

But he turned down an invitation to join the advisory board of the Woodrow Wilson School’s new Center for Research on World Political Institutions, which was seeking to apply social and behavioral sciences to the making of public policy. “[U]seful thought in the political sciences,” Kennan explained to a Columbia professor who had tried to interest him in these techniques, “is the product not just of rational deduction about phenomena external to ourselves but also of emotional and esthetic experience and of a recognition of the relationship of ‘self ’ to environment.” He was more candid with Edward Meade Earle, the wartime editor of Makers of Modern Strategy, now a historian at the Institute. Such people seemed to think “that all you have to do is put these problems in the hopper of a group of qualified social scientists and the proper answers [will] emerge from the other end, along the lines of the Institute’s computer.”⁷

There really was a computer at the Institute in 1950, or at least the mathematician John von Neumann was building one. Located in the basement of Fuld Hall, beneath Kennan’s new office, it was enormous and unreliable but the first in the world. Its processing capabilities would prove good enough to speed development of the American hydrogen bomb and later to form the basis for the discipline of game theory. Kennan had already opposed the first invention; he would come to despise the second. His coexistence in space but not in sympathy with von Neumann reflected the Institute’s failure to foster the “rich and harmonious fellowship of the mind” that its director hoped for. “[M]athematicians and historians continued to seek their own tables in the cafeteria,” Kennan recalled, while Oppenheimer remained largely alone “in his ability to bridge in a single inner world these wholly disparate workings of the human intellect.” For the moment, though, this did not matter.⁸

II.

Joe Alsop went to see the Korean War for himself two weeks after his June 1950 run-in with Kennan’s balalaika. Forgivingly, he had allowed George and Annelise to camp out amid the Soong eggshell ware in his Dumbarton Oaks house—the lease had run out on the more modest quarters they had rented in Cleveland Park. “Your battle accounts were the best I have seen in our press,” Kennan wrote, thanking him. “Like Tolstoy, you are an artist and should write about what you see and perceive rather than what you think. For the latter, I have respect too, but not as much.” With that barb implanted, Kennan admitted to having been “startlingly wrong” in some of his views about Asia, “and you, it would seem, much righter.” But “not necessarily” for the right reasons. “I can’t help but feel that you overrate my descriptive powers and perhaps just slightly underrate my poor intellect,” Alsop responded, “but you and I will argue as long as we are friends.”⁹

Once out of Washington, Kennan watched with admiration as MacArthur landed American and South Korean forces at Inchon on September 15, and then with foreboding as they swept into North Korea at the beginning of October. No less a figure than George C. Marshall, recruited by Truman to replace the hopeless Louis Johnson as secretary of defense, had cabled MacArthur that he was “to feel unhampered strategically and tactically” in operating north of the 38th parallel. Meeting little opposition, United Nations forces advanced rapidly through the narrow neck of the Korean peninsula and toward the much longer border with China at the Yalu River. Mao Zedong ordered his armies to cross into North Korea on October 19. A week later they attacked South Korean units, but MacArthur kept going. As he neared the Yalu on November 25, the Chinese surprised him with a massive counteroffensive, which soon had his forces retreating in disarray and Washington in a state of panic.

Kennan had indeed been wrong about some things and right about others. He had warned of intervention, but it was the Soviet Union that worried him: he hardly mentioned the possibility that the Chinese might enter the war. He opposed trying to occupy all of North Korea, but Chinese sources suggest that Mao might have attacked even if United Nations forces had remained south of the 38th parallel. There were strains in the Sino-Soviet relationship, but they originated more from Stalin’s uncertainty about how to handle MacArthur’s advance than from Mao’s determination to assert his independence from Moscow. Still eager to show his loyalty to the Soviet Union, Mao welcomed a war with the Americans, partly for ideological reasons but chiefly because the Truman administration had accepted Kennan’s recommendation to deploy the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. That, as Mao saw it, was intervention in the internal affairs of China.¹⁰

But none of this was known then. What was clear was that official Washington—having spent the past five months experiencing despair, and then euphoria, and then despair again—was badly rattled. Asked at a press conference on November 30 whether he had considered using the atomic bomb in Korea, Truman acknowledged that he had, and then alarmed everyone by adding that “the military commander in the field” would decide when its employment would be appropriate. The White House quickly backtracked, insisting that only the president could make such a decision, but British prime minister Clement Attlee invited himself to Washington anyway to try to figure out what was going on. The next morning Bohlen called Kennan from Paris to point out that there was now no one in the State Department with “a deep understanding” of the Soviet Union. Kennan must volunteer his services once again.¹¹

He immediately did so, received thanks from Acheson, and caught the next train. He spent the evening of Saturday, December 2, with the Davieses and on Sunday morning reported for duty. With the secretary of state tied up at the Pentagon and the White House, it fell to Webb to brief Kennan. Military planners required a decision within thirty-six hours as to whether to withdraw completely from Korea. Attlee would be arriving the next morning. The State Department needed an urgent assessment of what the prospects might be for negotiating something—just what was left unclear—with the Soviet Union.

Kennan, Davies, and their colleague G. Frederick Reinhardt produced, within four hours, four pages of what Kennan remembered as “the bleakest and most uncomfortable prose that the department’s files can ever have accommodated.” There had never been a worse time to approach Moscow, they concluded. There was “not the faintest reason why the Russians should wish to aid us in our predicament.” Diplomacy would work only when there were “solid cards in our hand, in the form of some means of pressure on them to arrive at an agreement [which would be] in their own interests.” Acheson, looking exhausted, was leaving his office when Kennan brought the report to him. Could he come home for dinner? Kennan did, saving the depressing news for the next morning.

Acheson unburdened himself that evening. He joked about a new portrait that seemed to show him impervious to criticism. He spoke “of the strangeness of his position” as if he were the only person in Washington who understood the seriousness of the situation. He sounded, at that moment, like Kennan, who recalled years later that “I had often disagreed with him—our minds had never really worked in the same way; but never for a moment could I deny him my admiration for the manner in which he bore this ordeal.” So Kennan went back to the Davieses, sat up into the early morning of December 4, and wrote out in longhand this letter for his embattled superior:

Both Acheson and Kennan included this document in their memoirs—but only Acheson, who found it “wise and inspiring,” quoted it in full.¹²

It would be too much to claim that this note, together with Kennan’s advice over the next few days, reversed the mood of desperation gripping Washington. He was not alone in pointing out that, as the Chinese Communists drove south, they would outrun their supply lines: it ought to be possible to stabilize the front somewhere in the vicinity of the 38th parallel. That became the consensus on the course to be followed, and ultimately—despite MacArthur’s increasingly erratic mood swings—this is what happened. Kennan’s intervention was important enough, though, for Acheson to read his note aloud at a State Department staff meeting the next day, and to convey his argument against negotiations to Truman and Attlee.¹³

What must have impressed the secretary of state was that Kennan, for once, was not advocating diplomacy. Instead he agreed with Rusk, who evoked the example of the British in the two world wars. “They held on,” Kennan added, “when there was no apparent reason for it.” If there was any validity to the idea of negotiating from a position of strength, then this was “clearly a very bad time for an approach to the Russians.” Acheson may have sounded like Kennan the previous evening, but Kennan now sounded like Acheson. He was even more vehement about the Chinese Communists, with the department’s note-taker struggling to keep up:

Kennan went back to the Institute satisfied that the week had been well spent. On December 17 he sent Alsop a Christmas card: “You must not be offended that I could not see you in Washington recently. I was there very briefly—and it was better that way. On the rare occasions when I can push the ubiquitous present out of the way, I am greatly enjoying my associations with the past—i.e., diplomatic history. But the present is a fearful nuisance.”¹⁴

III.

“I am enjoying Princeton and my work here immensely,” George wrote Kent on the second day of 1951, “though I am still harried by outside demands on my time…. I seem to get less done than under the pressures of the State Department.” Nevertheless, the Institute was the ideal place for him now, “and all I would ask would be that I might be left alone to work there…. [T]hanks awfully for the grapefruit. They are delicious.”¹⁵

Kennan was getting a lot done, although the results did not begin to show until January. Between then and the end of April, he completed his article for Foreign Affairs, submitted a forty-page study on American participation in international organizations to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and began studying the relationship between population growth, industrialization, and diminishing water reserves in the eastern United States, while preparing ten original lectures, each of them different, none to be delivered extemporaneously. He was trying, he said in the first of these, given in New York on January 27, “to disentangle the snarled skeins” of contemporary American foreign policy, “to bring order out of the chaos.” But he was also clarifying his own thinking, most successfully in the two lectures he gave—little noticed at the time and less remembered since—immediately afterward at Northwestern University.

He began with a universally known piece of World War II graffiti. Anyone attempting to lead, he observed, encountered relics of those who had gone before. Wherever you looked, the scribbles would appear: “Kilroy—Kilroy the statesman, Kilroy the historian, Kilroy the policy maker—was here.” Ahead was the future, shrouded in silence, mystery, and probably danger, all the greater if one advanced without looking back. For there was in the past a fund of human wisdom to draw upon. The wording might be cumbersome, or the imagery unfamiliar, but “a lot of people have thought very hard about human affairs for a long time, and may have done a lot of work that we need not repeat.” It was vital, therefore, to use this “credit balance of experience and wisdom,” because that was the only way to locate the point beyond which “we are really on our own.”

Human nature had hardly changed since humans first evolved. What had changed was the environment surrounding them, not because of any alteration in biological cycles of growth and decay, or rhythms of climate, or even global warming—Kennan was looking into that problem then—but because of the population explosion that had taken place over the past two centuries. Martians with good telescopes and long life spans might note this: “These little microbes have suddenly begun to multiply at the most tremendous rate.” The planet earthlings occupied was exhausting its empty space.

Some had sought to solve that problem by turning their homelands into workshops, buying what they needed by selling what they produced. Mercantile in their habits, mostly maritime in their capabilities, these people had accumulated enough wealth to dominate much of the rest of the world—for the moment. But the vast majority of its inhabitants were reproducing themselves without getting richer: this was tragedy for which the mercantile states had no answer. That being the case, it behooved the United States to refrain from offering one: “It is never easy for a rich man to talk with conviction to a poor man.”

Meanwhile, the great wars of the twentieth century had disrupted the balance of power among the workshops. Few Americans realized it, but Germany and Japan had once contributed to their safety. With their defeat, the Soviet Union—a state neither mercantile nor maritime—had won most of Eurasia. Once this would not have mattered, because large territories were difficult to control. Now, though, technology had given totalitarians the capacity to monitor and hence to manage everything that was happening within their boundaries. That endangered civilization, for wars among land powers tended to leave behind “devastation, atrocity, and bitterness.” Sea power had always been “more humane, more tempered, less drastic and less final in its objectives.”

The danger for Americans lay less in another Pearl Harbor than in what they might do to themselves because they feared one. For confronting totalitarians required, in many respects, emulating them. The leader who would attempt this “must learn to regiment his people, to husband his resources, to guard against hostile agents in his midst, to maintain formidable armed forces in peacetime, to preserve secrecy about governmental decisions, to wield the weapons of bluff and surprise, to wage war in peacetime—and peace in wartime. Can these things be done without the selling of the national soul?”

That raised a larger problem, which was that Americans no longer saw, as clearly as they once had, their own self-interest.

The nation was thus vulnerable to “powerful trends of thought that promised clarity.” Marxism, of course, was one. Another was “modern psychology,” which saw behavior as dominated by influences of which people were unaware. A third, Kennan added—not with tongue in cheek—was advertising, which found thousands of ways daily to convince consumers that their material existence depended on “almost every sort of reaction except the direct and rational one.”

Isaiah Berlin had recently suggested that there were two kinds of freedom. One was that of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: “We shall persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom and submit to us.” The other appeared in the Declaration of Independence, which sought to secure freedom without prescribing its nature. This, Kennan believed, was the great contest of the age. The great enemy was abstraction, which promised perfection while denying the imperfections of human nature. Left to itself, it would construct “an international Antarctica, in which there would be no germs because there would be no growth, in which there would be no sickness because there would be no people, in which all would be silence and peace because there was no life.”

What, then, was a policy maker to do? Here Kennan returned to what he had learned as a policy planner: that how one did things was as important as what one did.

The same was true of nations. “Where purpose is dim and questionable, form comes into its own.” Good manners, which might seem “an inferior means of salvation, may be the only means of salvation we have at all.”¹⁶

Kennan managed, in these Northwestern lectures, to make sense out of much that had puzzled colleagues—sometimes even himself—over many years: his pessimism about human nature; his growing concerns about ecology and demography; his despair about what was coming to be called the “third world”; his nostalgia for the international system that had preceded the two world wars; his distrust of land power and respect for sea power; his suspicions of Marx, Freud, McCarthy, and advertising; his admiration for Isaiah Berlin, the great classics of Russian literature, and the American Founding Fathers; his enlistment of elitism in defense of democracy. It was as if Oppenheimer’s institute had given him the opportunity, at last, to resolve his contradictions.

IV.

It certainly allowed him to rebuild his finances. Oppenheimer had used his discretionary funds, together with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, to match Kennan’s $15,000 State Department salary when he first arrived at the Institute, but those were temporary arrangements. On February 19, 1951, the new president of the Ford Foundation, Paul G. Hoffman—formerly director of the Economic Cooperation Administration, which had run the Marshall Plan—announced that the former director of the Policy Planning Staff was to become a “consultant” while remaining at the Institute for Advanced Study on leave from the State Department. Ford offered $25,000 plus expenses: Kennan in turn would advise the foundation on how to spend some of the $25 million its endowment generated each year. “[Y]ou are [the] master,” Hoffman assured him, “of all arrangements affecting you or your activities for the Ford Foundation.”¹⁷

This was a sufficiently good deal for Kennan to resign from the Foreign Service again, thereby greatly upsetting Bohlen. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., witnessed the argument they got into, after dinner one evening in New York. “Chip, growing increasingly heated, began to denounce George for having left.” The Foreign Service had made him: he could not desert the country in an hour of crisis. “George, much more composed and clearly aware that Chip was hurt and a bit drunk, tried to mollify [him], but did not retract his position.” Big businessmen, Bohlen retorted, could not be trusted. “I hope you have an ironclad contract, boy…. One day Paul Hoffman will decide that it is all over—and you’ ll be swept out with the leavings.”

They struck Schlesinger as “a marvelous pair…. They loved each other and were enthralling company together.” In the end, Kennan withdrew yet another resignation, explaining to Hoffman that State Department colleagues had “called me in the middle of the night” pleading “that I not take this step at this time—that it would be taken as another blow to Dean Acheson.”

So Hoffman agreed to pay his salary for as long as the department would permit Kennan to be away, with the understanding that the job would become permanent as soon as he qualified for his Foreign Service pension and could gracefully retire. Ford also promised the Institute $225,000 over the next five years to fund whatever projects Kennan wished to undertake there. It was all “somewhat complicated,” George wrote Kent, “but by and large it is as favorable a setup as I could wish for. I enjoy the life of a scholar and have little wish to return to government.”¹⁸

Kennan had two major projects in mind beyond his own writing and public speaking. One was to set up a study group, at the Institute, that would “suggest a rationale for foreign policy and a set of premises and principles by which we could all be guided in our thinking on this subject.” It would be a Policy Planning Staff operating independently of the State Department. The second project, to be run from Ford, would—in Kennan’s mind at least—follow the example of the first George Kennan by helping exiles and refugees from the Soviet Union establish themselves in the United States. The foundation announced the formation of the Free Russia Fund, with a $200,000 annual budget and with Kennan as its president, on May 17, 1951.¹⁹

There was more to this initiative than met the eye. Hoffman had maintained close connections with Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination while administering the Marshall Plan, and he wanted the Ford Foundation, under his direction, to do the same. That made Kennan particularly useful to him. Kennan, in turn, kept Acheson, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and the new director of central intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, informed about the Free Russia Fund—which, to avoid confusion with other CIA projects, changed its name a few months later to the East European Fund. The new organization operated openly, relying on Ford Foundation support, but it coordinated its activities with other refugee support groups that received, or were hoping to receive, secret CIA funding. Their purpose was to collect recent intelligence on the U.S.S.R., to ensure that defectors did not re-defect, and to build a community of exiles who might one day return to Russia to form the nucleus of a post-Soviet government.²⁰

One beneficiary was the Tolstoy Foundation, established in 1939 by Leo Tolstoy’s youngest daughter, which ran a farm in upstate New York where it welcomed, trained, and helped resettle Russian refugees. The organization was running out of money by 1951, so Kennan arranged an initial grant through the East European Fund, and after the Ford trustees had second thoughts—perhaps because of the group’s monarchist tendencies—he persuaded the CIA to subsidize it. “[W]hat the hell was wrong with this?” Kennan demanded years later, after this information became public. “There were Russian professors working as janitors in seamy New York buildings, because nobody had made any effort to tap their knowledge, to help them learn the language, to put them to some use, something useful for them and for us. It was things like this that I had supposed we could do with an outfit for secret operations.”

Kennan was even prouder of his role in helping to publish cheap editions of Russian literary classics—in the original Russian—that could never have appeared in the Soviet Union. This project originated as an initiative of the banker R. Gordon Wasson, the man who persuaded Kennan, in 1947, to contribute what became the “X” article to Foreign Affairs. Kennan asked Ford to take over the responsibility four years later by setting up the Chekhov Publishing House. They agreed to do so “as sort of a sop to me, but they didn’t understand it.” Ford supported Chekhov until 1956, at which point Kennan was unable to convince the CIA to continue its funding, and the company folded. It did manage to publish over a hundred books, relying almost entirely on the support Kennan had arranged. “We really, for the first time, broke the monopoly of the Soviet government on current literary publication in the Russian language.”

The Ford Foundation appointment, however, left Kennan with less time for his own work than he had expected. It required several trips each year to California, never a preferred destination, where Hoffman ran the organization from Pasadena. The émigrés Kennan tried to help often disagreed about what was needed. The foundation’s trustees continued to fret about Hoffman’s—and Kennan’s—ties to the intelligence community. The whole effort required so much attention, Kennan complained in the fall of 1951, that it was “mak[ing] ridiculous my continued presence here at the Institute under the pretense of being a scholar.”²¹ Meanwhile Kennan was undergoing one of the gravest personal crises that ever afflicted him.

V.

Hans Morgenthau had arranged for Kennan to deliver a second set of lectures, in April at the University of Chicago, under the sponsorship of the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation. The topic would be U.S. foreign relations during the first half of the twentieth century. By early 1951 he had prepared rough drafts on the Spanish-American War, the Open Door Policy, and East Asia through the outbreak of war with Japan in 1941. He also had notes for a lecture on Woodrow Wilson and World War I, and these he casually showed to Earle, who tactfully suggested bringing in a few diplomatic historians to comment on Kennan’s conclusions prior to their delivery. He agreed. It was easy to forget, he admitted to Hoffman, “how serious a matter scholarship can be, and how implacable its requirements.”²²

The historians included Dexter Perkins, Gordon A. Craig, Richard W. Leopold, and Wilson’s biographer, Arthur S. Link. The seminar took place at the Institute on March 10. “Most of us were pretty appalled,” Link remembered. The lectures were “ahistorical, very presentist and personal, lacking even the semblance of what we would ordinarily think of as historical scholarship.” Kennan showed no resentment of the criticisms he got: “Quite the contrary, he seemed very grateful.” He kept assuring the group that “of course I’m not a professional historian.” But the experience shook his self-confidence about doing history, only a month before his public debut as a historian. “They took me to pieces, quite properly.” Dean Rusk, now a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, heard that Oppenheimer called Kennan in to give him “a shirt-tail lecture on the standards that were expected in the world of scholarship. George’s later books reflect the influence of that lecture.”²³

Something else, simultaneously, was causing Kennan to take himself to pieces. Were it not for the diary in which he could atone for “the damage I have done,” he wrote in it on April 2, “the situation would indeed be desperate.” For he had placed the happiness of others in jeopardy. Unsure “that the blow would not still fall, I would continue to feel myself half a murderer, to have horror of myself, and to place limitations, in my own mind, on my ability to be useful to anyone else in any physical intimacy.” He was “like a person who has placed poison in one of two glasses before a person he loves—looks back upon his act with horror and incredulity—but still does not know from which glass the person will drink.” The next day he added: “It is right and necessary that I should become much older in a short space of time.”

He found some solace in the daily rhythms of work, “where people wear their professional personalities like uniforms.” During the past two days, he noted on April 5, he had rewritten one lecture, finished a new one, consulted Earle, talked with a student, lunched with Oppenheimer, “and done a dozen necessary and unavoidable little things.” But these didn’t alleviate the nightmares. Perhaps

On April 7, he would be leaving for Chicago, where “there will be all the things that are difficult for me”:

He had another nightmare before he left, which had to do with concealment: “Unquestionably, there is an abnormality here: a dread of being found out. This can probably be repaired only by making my life such that there is genuinely nothing to conceal and that means making it such that it will no longer, in a sense, be my life at all.”²⁴

Kennan opened his lecture series on the afternoon of April 9. It would, he told his audience, examine the record of the past half century in search of lessons “for us, the generation of 1951, pressed and hemmed in as we are by a thousand troubles and dangers.” Before giving it, he had attempted to rest in his hotel room. But

The newspapers that day were reporting public disagreements between Truman and MacArthur over Korean War strategy, and on the eleventh—the day of Kennan’s second lecture—the president fired the general. Kennan might have been pleased had he received the news within the familiar surroundings of Princeton or Washington, but the reaction in Chicago frightened him.

He was glad he had not gone to Milwaukee: “I hope never to go there again until McCarthyism has burned itself out there and people are thoroughly ashamed of it.” Even Jeanette and her family, in Highland Park, could offer no refuge. The day would soon come when they “will be afraid and embarrassed to have me in the house, when my presence will bring unpleasantness and danger to them, when—if I came—they would want me to sneak in and out in the middle of the night.”²⁵

That was hardly the response, however, of his University of Chicago audience: “Respectable at the start, attendance grew most alarmingly.” By the third lecture, students were sitting on the floor and in the aisles, requiring that the fourth be moved to an auditorium, where Kennan worried that he was only “a remote silhouette and a canned, electrified voice.” But they still kept coming: “I was surprised, delighted, and yet in a sense sobered, by the success of the undertaking.” One cause for concern was that he had not yet written the final lecture, scheduled for April 20. On learning of this that morning, the editors at the university press, which would be publishing the series, summoned him to “a great office clattering with a dozen typewriters, and with my letter of acceptance lying reproachfully before me, I was put to work to produce some sort of publishable document.”

The panic seared itself so deeply into his consciousness, Kennan recalled two decades later, “that I continue even now to relive it as a recurring nightmare.” But a young professor who attended the lectures detected no signs of unease. Kenneth W. Thompson remembered Kennan’s “marvelous melodic flow.” Listening to him was “like an experience on the road to Damascus.” One evening, at a fraternity house, Kennan sat talking with students until the early hours of the morning. It was “an absolutely elevating experience for everyone.”²⁶

Except Kennan. By April 16—the day his lecture was moved to accommodate the hundreds who wanted to hear it—he had concluded that with his combination of personal and public problems, it would be a miracle if “anything remained for me personally in life…. This will be a time for leadership or for martyrdom or for both. I may as well prepare myself for it.” And on the seventeenth:

Farming would be the only salvation. He would finish his work at the Institute “for consistency’s sake” and to get Joan through school. He would retire from the Foreign Service as soon as his pension was earned “or forfeited”—here he had in mind the plight of his colleague Davies, whose loyalty investigation was still under way. But all of these plans were problematic because war would probably break out within two years: “Except for the little boy, the best thing that could happen would be that I should go with the services and get myself killed.”²⁷

Kennan never said, explicitly, what lay behind all of this, but diary fragments provide hints:

Given Kennan’s tendency to blame himself for so much, the offense could have been almost anything: a covetous glance, a casual dalliance, a full-blown affair. Did Annelise know? Nothing in George’s diary confirms that she did, but she didn’t miss much. If she suspected something, or even if she knew a lot, she would not have let whatever it was imperil the marriage or hurt the family. That was the way of a wife who saw no contradiction in simultaneously loving her husband and anchoring him.

George, at this point, badly needed anchoring, for the upheavals of April 1951 had come close to overwhelming him. He was lecturing on history in Chicago, having been told, by historians, that he was not yet one. He was carrying the weight of a personal crisis as wrenching as the ones he had gone through in Vienna in 1935 and at Bad Nauheim in 1942. His audiences were expanding as his texts were diminishing. He spoke at a moment when the part of the country from which he came seemed to be sinking into dementia. And he was filling his diary with despair: perhaps his ability to do that, together with Annelise’s anchoring, was what got him through this bad month—although never beyond the bad dreams.

VI.

One of Kennan’s better dreams had been the possibility that he might represent the United States—alone, on a top-secret basis, using his knowledge of the Russian language and of the Soviet system—in some form of direct negotiations with the U.S.S.R. looking toward a relaxation of Cold War tensions. Stalin’s sabotage of the Smith-Molotov initiative killed any chance of this while Kennan was on the Policy Planning Staff, and he himself opposed approaching Moscow after the Chinese intervened in Korea at the end of 1950. By May 1951, however, the situation had changed. Truman had sacked MacArthur. The new U.N. commander, General Matthew B. Ridgway, had halted Mao’s offensive in the vicinity of the 38th parallel. And an opportunity for diplomacy had arisen—strangely—from a high-level hitchhike.

With the permanent headquarters of the United Nations still under construction alongside New York’s East River, the Security Council had been meeting in temporary quarters at Lake Success, on Long Island. The drive into Manhattan could take almost an hour, and at the end of a session on May 2, two American diplomats, Thomas J. Cory and Frank P. Corrigan, found themselves without transportation. A large Chrysler drove up, stopped, and its occupants offered a ride. They turned out to be Jacob Malik, the chief Soviet representative at the United Nations, and Semyon K. Tsarapkin, his deputy. The Russians were in an unusually good humor, and after pleasant exchanges about American automobiles, military bases, imperialist ambitions, capitalist profiteers, and warmongers, the conversation turned to how the Korean War might be settled. The four men agreed that some sort of Soviet-American consultation would have to take place, whereupon Malik, returning to the theme of warmongers, asked what had become of George Kennan.

Cory explained that Kennan was “engaged in advanced study at Princeton.” Kennan had had “a great and unfortunate influence,” Malik observed: no doubt his voice was still heard in Washington. When Cory protested that Kennan admired the Russian people and hoped to write Chekhov’s biography, Malik was unimpressed. But by the normal standards of Soviet diplomacy, the two Americans reported to their superiors, he had been “a charming and cordial host.”²⁹

Their account set off speculation within the State Department as to whether the pickup had been deliberate. Cory thought not but added that he had suggested dinner sometime and that Malik had agreed. “The question,” Davies wrote Nitze, “is whether we should follow up on Malik’s evident willingness to talk about American-Soviet relations. I think we should.” Stalin might be planning another trick, but the risks would be minimal “if our representative is someone [who]… although not a high American official, is in a position to speak with authority and in confidence for the Government. That person is Kennan.”³⁰

As Davies probably knew, Kennan was thinking similarly. He had advised Acheson in March that as the military front stabilized in Korea, the time would come to deal with the Russians. The talks should take place “through informal channels” and in “complete secrecy,” using “some intermediary who could be denied in case of necessity.” They would acknowledge a simple reality: that the situation in Korea was unsatisfactory to both the Soviet Union and the United States. There should be, then, “a mutuality of interest” that might make a settlement possible.³¹

That made sense to Acheson, who had come through the difficult winter of 1950–51 with renewed admiration for Kennan. And so, when the Malik report came in, the secretary of state accepted Davies’s suggestion. “On Friday, May 18,” Kennan wrote in his own report of the events that followed,

P was Doc Matthews, then serving as deputy under secretary of state. O was Acheson. E was Malik’s passenger, Tom Cory. E agreed to suggest to X—not Kennan, who had given up pseudonyms, but Tsarapkin—that it might be useful for him to talk with the former Mr. X, but there was no reply. Whereupon Kennan wrote to Tsarapkin on the twenty-sixth, asking him to tell Malik that it might be useful “if he and I could meet and have a quiet talk some time in the near future. I think that my diplomatic experience and long acquaintance with problems of American-Soviet relations should suffice to assure you that I would not make such a proposal unless I had serious reasons to do so.”³²

Three days later Kennan’s secretary at the Institute received a cryptic telephone message informing her that the “gentleman Mr. Kennan had asked to see” could receive him on the afternoon of the thirty-first at a Long Island address. This turned out to be the Soviet U.N. delegation’s dacha, an estate in Glen Cove, to which Kennan drove himself alone. Malik began the conversation nervously, upsetting a tray of fruit and wine. After each man had expressed regret about the isolation of diplomats in the other’s country, Kennan explained that he had come to explore the possibility of a Korean cease-fire, roughly along the current line of military operations, to be supervised by some international authority. Malik said he would think about it, which Kennan took to mean consulting Moscow. When asked if it would be useful to meet again, Malik replied “that it was a good thing in general for people to talk things over and that he would always be happy to receive me and to pass the time of day.”³³

They did meet again, at Glen Cove on June 5, and Malik was ready with an answer: the Soviet Union wanted to end the Korean War at the earliest possible moment, but because its forces were not involved it could take no direct part in any cease-fire negotiations. The United States should contact the North Koreans and the Chinese Communists. Kennan promised to pass this message to Washington, noting however that it would be difficult to rely on anything those adversaries might say. The Soviets, in contrast, “took a serious and responsible attitude toward what they conceived to be their own interests.” Malik deflected this compliment with the complaint that a Wall Street conspiracy dominated American life. “You see our country as in a dream,” Kennan replied. “No, this is not [a] dream,” Malik insisted, “this is the deepest reality.”

Kennan concluded from these meetings that the Soviet leadership did indeed want a cease-fire, that it had instructed the North Koreans and the Chinese Communists to accept an American proposal for one, and that it was willing to see the talks proceed without bringing in such wider issues as the future of Japan or Taiwan. “I hope that we will not hesitate to grasp at once the nettle of action…. We may not succeed; but I have the feeling we are moving much closer to the edge of the precipice than most of us are aware, and that this is one of the times when the dangers of inaction far exceed those of action.”³⁴

The precipice he had in mind, Kennan wrote Acheson in a personal letter on June 20, was the possibility of war with the U.S.S.R. While Stalin had no appetite for such a conflict, he would view with “mortal apprehension” any U.S. military presence along the Soviet or the Chinese border with North Korea. That was why he had encouraged Mao to cross the Yalu and hurl MacArthur’s forces back. Now that the Chinese offensive had stalled, the Russians feared another American drive north. If that happened, they would have no choice but to intervene themselves, and a catastrophe would result. The whole Korean experience had been, for the Kremlin leaders, “a nerve-wracking and excruciating experience, straining to the limit their self-control and patience.” That explained Malik’s response, which the United States should not reject. For even though it might not seem so at the moment, “our action in Korea, so often denounced as futile, may prove to have… laid the foundation for the renewal of some sort of stability in the Far East.”³⁵

Three days later, as if on cue, Malik made his cease-fire suggestion public. Talks began in July between the opposing military commanders in Korea, even as the fighting continued. It would take two years to achieve an armistice, partly because of disagreements over repatriating prisoners of war, partly because Stalin, reassured now that the war would be limited, was in less of a hurry to see it end. When it did finally in July 1953, shortly after his death, the terms were close to what Kennan had suggested.

His role in the Korean War, Kennan wrote later, had been “relatively minor,” but that was an understatement. For on several issues—his recommendation to deploy the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait, his concerns about crossing the 38th parallel, his warnings about MacArthur, his advice against negotiating after the Chinese had intervened, his reversal of that advice after the Chinese had been contained, and his delicate conversations with Malik—he won a degree of respect within the government that he had not enjoyed since 1947.³⁶ Which is probably why Acheson asked Kennan, on July 23, 1951, if he would like to become the next U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.

VII.

“I did not turn it down cold,” George wrote Annelise from Washington—she and the family were in Kristiansand. “I said I would not be available, in any case, before completion of the next Institute term.” He would write Acheson a fuller response, “but [I] want to talk to you first.” The Kennans had sailed to Norway on the SS Oslofjord in late June, with George traveling on Ford funds since, as he had explained to Hoffman, “I would otherwise not be able to go at all.” He would use the opportunity to make contacts useful to the foundation. He had remained depressed through most of the voyage, despite his recent diplomatic achievements. “My children would laugh at me,” he wrote in his diary while still at sea, “but it is true. The adult world is a broken-hearted world, …because there is no leadership in it, and no inspiration.”³⁷

As the ship neared the Norwegian coast, however, George’s mood brightened. On the Fourth of July, he watched children parading around the deck waving American flags, listened as the ship’s orchestra played “The Star Spangled Banner,” and at the captain’s invitation made a speech, linking what had happened in his country 175 years earlier with what Annelise’s had experienced at the hands of the Nazis: who could really appreciate the value of freedom “who hasn’t seen it attacked by a foreign invader and occupier on his own soil”? He even praised NATO—Norway had been a founding member. The alliance’s commitment to interdependence, he reminded the ship’s passengers and crew, meant that there was “really no such thing as a purely national independence day any more in this area.”³⁸

The ship called at Bergen early the next morning, and then navigated the rugged coastline to the south. “Norway simply took my breath away,” George recorded,

They reached Kristiansand at about midnight, with a midsummer glow on the horizon reminiscent of Riga “in other days.” At the Sørensens’, after the children had gone to sleep, “[w]e sat up with the old people and drank vermouth with brandy until near four o’clock. Then A. and I dragged ourselves back to the little cottage, in the morning light, and went to bed.”³⁹

George had little time to enjoy Norway, though, because he insisted on flying back to Washington, at his own expense, to testify on behalf of Davies before the State Department’s loyalty board on July 23: that was where Acheson raised the possibility of a return to Moscow. “I believe the hearing went well,” George wrote Annelise, “but have not yet heard the final result.” The case had stirred enough indignation, however, that the secretary of state had promised to rethink procedures for such investigations. “I am very pleased about this, as it makes it unnecessary for me to pursue the matter further.”⁴⁰

So he returned to Europe by way of Portugal—which Kennan found little changed since he was last there in 1944—as well as Italy, Austria, West Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. It was his first European trip in a private capacity since the one he and Nick Messolonghitis had made in the summer of 1924. The Norwegians had been unsure of his status, so Kennan asked the State Department to inform other governments along his route that he required “no official courtesies or attentions beyond those that would be extended to the ordinary traveler.” “I dream about you all, including Christopher, with the greatest regularity,” he wrote Annelise from Lisbon. And, from Rome: “If you would like to join me [in Basel], wire to Vienna.”⁴¹

An English weekend at the beginning of September gave Kennan a chance to respond to Acheson, in longhand and at length, about Moscow as well as what might follow. Many opportunities had arisen over the past year: this came, he supposed, with “being a public figure.”

It made sense, then, to return to government long enough to retire with a pension, and then to resume work at the Institute with “academic life as my normal pursuit from that time on.”

The position should be an overseas mission not associated with the formulation of policy. For it was only right to acknowledge “the full measure of divergence” between his views and those of the Truman administration.

Moscow might be feasible, therefore, for the work there involved the analysis of Soviet policy, not the making of policy in Washington. Commitments at the Institute and elsewhere, however, would keep him from going until well into 1952. Perhaps Admiral Alan G. Kirk, the current ambassador, could stay on; if not, the mission could probably be left under a chargé d’affaires.⁴²

The Kennans sailed for home on September 5, with George worried that the children had enjoyed Europe less than he had. “My friends,” he wrote them gravely one day at sea,

He also composed, for himself, a bucolic poem about flies—which could also have been State Department gadflies:

Kennan decided not to send Acheson a four-page summary of “points of difference” with the State Department that he had prepared. It listed disagreements over the United Nations, nuclear weapons, the future of Europe, the Near and Middle East, East Asia, Latin America, relations with Congress, and the administration of foreign policy. “This is, in my opinion, important,” he wrote across the top, presumably with historians and maybe even a biographer in mind. It was certainly comprehensive: when he finished, it was hard to find a policy with which he did agree.⁴³

“It is reasonable that I should look forward with a sense of relief to the prospect of being an ambassador,” Kennan commented in an undated diary fragment that summer. “It is just about the only profession one can have these days in which nothing—but really nothing—is either expected or required of you.” But there was more to it than that. He was still a Foreign Service officer: “I did not feel it proper to decline any assignment given to me.” It would be difficult to pass up an appointment to the Soviet Union, “a task for which my whole career had prepared me, if it had prepared me for anything at all.” Finally, Bohlen had urged him to take the job, on the grounds that Stalin might be more open than in the past to negotiations, particularly on Germany. So with Acheson having assured him that the president really wanted him in Moscow, Kennan agreed to go.⁴⁴

There was, however, one last effort to derail the appointment. It came from Annelise, who knew how bleak conditions there would be, and how reluctant George was to disrupt his work at the Institute. She surely had some sense, from the spring and summer, of how precarious his psychological balance had become. And she had just learned that she was again pregnant. So she took it upon herself—without asking George—to go to Washington and talk with their old Moscow friend Elbridge Durbrow, then in charge of State Department personnel assignments. “I told him that I thought this was a very bad time, that he should send somebody else, and then we could go afterwards in a couple of years.”

She never doubted that George should return to Moscow. “I felt very strongly that he was a specialist and he should go back, [and] at that time one still felt pretty young.” It was also “a nice honor to go as an ambassador, because we don’t have so many career ambassadors in the major countries. It was just that the timing was not so good.”⁴⁵

Annelise had still one other reason for not wanting to go to Moscow at that moment: the Kennans had just bought a house of their own in Princeton. The all-electric one they had rented, Patricia Davies recalled, had become barely inhabitable the previous winter when a blizzard knocked out the power: the family survived by huddling around the fireplace, which contained a hook from which Annelise could cook, “in her proper Norwegian fashion.” The new house—old enough to match George’s age, having been built in 1904—was located on a large lot at 146 Hodge Road, a tree-lined street half a mile from the university and a mile from the Institute. George was soon bicycling to both destinations and would continue to do so for decades.

Apart from the farm, it was the first permanent residence the Kennans had occupied during their twenty years of marriage. The first floor contained large living and dining rooms, a library, a kitchen, and a breakfast nook. Upstairs there were seven bedrooms, some meant for maids, one in a third-story tower. There was even a separate apartment over the garage, useful for visiting family and, at times, for renters. “We lack beds now,” George wrote Jeanette in October 1951, “but I am sure we will have them by Thanksgiving.” The Ford Foundation salary had made the purchase possible, he explained to Kent, even though “we haven’t saved any money.” The house was “friendly and receptive in a relaxed way,” George wrote in his memoir two decades later, “but slightly detached, like a hostess to a casual guest—as though it did not expect us to stay forever.” The Kennans did stay for a long time: George and Annelise would each die in the house, fifty-four and fifty-seven years, respectively, after they moved into it.⁴⁶

VIII.

“A book by George Kennan is an event in Washington,” James Reston wrote in The New York Times on September 30, 1951. The relentlessly efficient University of Chicago Press had rushed Kennan’s Walgreen lectures into print as American Diplomacy: 1900–1950. To flesh out the thin volume, Kennan added the 1947 “X” article, as well as the essay he intended as its successor, “America and the Russian Future,” which had appeared in the April issue of Foreign Affairs. But the first piece was familiar and the second looked too far into the future to attract much attention: it was an unclassified update of PPS/38, the 1948 study in which Kennan had tried to specify American objectives for a post-Soviet Russia. The lectures, however, enthralled their readers, just as they had packed the room—and then the auditorium—in which he delivered them. It was Kennan’s first book, but it sold better than anything else he ever wrote.

Characteristically, he did not enjoy this triumph. He didn’t like the idea of publishing lectures, he grumbled to Alsop, who wrote to congratulate him: “Either you write or you talk, but you don’t do both together.” He had been heartened, but also shamed, by the favorable reaction. Hostile reviews would have made him miserable, Kennan admitted to Oppenheimer; nevertheless the complimentary ones “leave me with a sense of discomfort,” because the lectures were not nearly as good as he could have made them. There was, however, the satisfaction of having produced a book, “if only by inadvertence.”

American Diplomacy succeeded for several reasons. It was, as Reston noted, the most critical account of U.S. foreign policy produced by any government official since the end of the war. Not “ghost-written,” it was “straight Kennan,” and he was “perhaps the most reflective of the young American professional diplomats.” The author himself, more modestly, would later attribute the book’s success to its shallowness, for it met the needs of teachers eager to find easy reading for their students. His foreword, however, had promised more: he would show why the United States, which in 1900 could not have imagined threats from abroad to its prosperity and way of life, had reached the point by 1950 “where it seemed to think of little else.”⁴⁷

Kennan’s explanation was short but shocking: the insecurity the United States faced resulted less from what its adversaries had done than from its own leaders’ illusions. Forgetting their forefathers’ warnings, American statesmen in the twentieth century had come to prefer the proclamation of principles to the balancing of power. The pattern began with John Hay’s Open Door notes, announced as an afterthought in the wake of the Spanish-American War and the American occupation of the Philippines, with a view to discouraging China’s division into European, Russian, and Japanese spheres of influence. Hay accomplished little for the Chinese, but he set a style for his own country’s diplomacy: it manifested itself, with more serious consequences, in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, in Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter, and in the World War II demand for the “unconditional surrender” of Germany and Japan, which had opened the way for Soviet domination of half of Europe and much of Asia. Far from securing its interests, the “legalism-moralism” with which the United States had conducted its diplomacy had left it in grave peril.

It had encouraged toothless treaties like the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which between the two greatest wars in history had outlawed war as an instrument of national policy. It had caused hopes to be invested in, and time to be wasted on, the League of Nations and the United Nations, which could act only if the great powers had already settled their differences. It had led to long periods of inattention, punctuated by spasms of senseless violence. “I sometimes wonder,” Kennan wrote, in the book’s most memorable passage,

Kennan’s imagery—the dinosaur in particular—would pursue him for decades. It dramatized, but vastly oversimplified, what he had been trying to say since studying Clausewitz at the National War College in 1946: that while war must always be subordinate to policy, alternatives to war can always fail. Hence, the need for grand strategy in peace as well as in war.⁴⁸

Hastily composed, passionately written, brilliantly if not deliberately timed, American Diplomacy became Kennan’s “long telegram” to the American academy: it insisted on the need to see the world as it was, not as professors of international relations might like it to be. For the young Kenneth Thompson, who had studied with the University of Chicago legal and institutional scholar Quincy Wright, Kennan opened “a whole new world. I’d never really heard a ‘realist’ interpretation of foreign policy.” One grateful reader wrote to Time magazine that, having read Kennan, he could now retire his well-worn copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. To be sure, Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Lippmann had all warned, in their writings, against relying on principles while neglecting power. They, however, had done so from outside the government. Kennan was still, to most of his audience, an insider, and that—together with his flair for the dramatic—was what made his argument so compelling.⁴⁹

It was also, to careful readers, unsettling. He had not meant to say that Americans should abandon “decency and dignity and generosity,” he assured the historian Arnold Toynbee. His point, rather, had been that the United States should refrain from claiming to know what was right or wrong in the behavior of other societies. Its policy should be one of avoiding “great orgies of violence that acquire their own momentum and get out of hand.” It should employ its armies, if they were to be used at all, in what Gibbon called “temperate and indecisive contests,” remembering that civilizations could not stand “too much jolting and abuse.” There was no room, in the modern world, for moral indignation, “unless it be indignation with ourselves for failing to be what we know we could and should have been.” He should have said all of this at Chicago, but “the material had to be compressed, I was dilatory, the last lecture was written in the publishers’ office on the day it was delivered, and there I was, before I knew it, making myself out an amoral cynic for all time.”⁵⁰

Father Edmund A. Walsh, the legendary founder of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, certainly saw it that way: he publicly attacked Kennan in July 1952 for having abandoned “the concept of right and wrong in judging the actions of a foreign state.” That logic led “straight back to the jungle” and had even been “used as a defense for Hitler’s extermination of 6,000,000 Jews.” Kennan was in Moscow by then, but Walsh’s excoriation worried him enough that he drafted—but wisely did not send—a letter to The New York Times restating the explanation he had given Toynbee. It would not have been the moment, while trying to run an embassy in a forbiddingly hostile state, to get into an open argument with the most formidable American Jesuit.

“[T]he reaction in academic circles is really intense,” Philip Jessup warned the Policy Planning Staff in September, “and I think it is doing some harm.” Morgenthau’s hefty Politics Among Nations had already become a standard university text, but Kennan’s brief book, which was about to appear in a thirty-five-cent reprint, would surely compete with it. And yet, “as I have gathered from talking with him, it is not a final and profound statement of his thinking…. It is by no means the complete negation of law and morals which many people think it is.”⁵¹

As if to confirm the fears of Toynbee, Walsh, Jessup, and even Kennan himself, the American Political Science Association had already by then named American Diplomacy “the best book of the year in the field of international relations.” And so its author—told by diplomatic historians that he was not yet ready to join their guild—found himself enshrined instead within a “realist” theoretical tradition that dated back to Thucydides—whom Kennan had not yet even read. Meanwhile his Northwestern lectures, a far more careful exposition of his thinking, had appeared unheralded in the Illinois Law Review, where they have languished in obscurity ever since. It was yet another example of Kennan’s strange tendency to be remembered more for what he said in haste than for what he took the time to ponder.⁵²

IX.

The well-informed Reston broke the news of Kennan’s ambassadorship on November 20, 1952, before the Soviet foreign ministry had provided the necessary agrément. A delay of several weeks followed, along with a Pravda complaint about Kennan’s association with the East European Fund—he had by now resigned as its president. This convinced Harrison Salisbury, the New York Times Moscow correspondent, that Stalin was about to veto the appointment. Kennan was well known, after all, as the author of the “long telegram” and the “X” article; moreover, Ralph Parker, a left-leaning British journalist, had been allowed to publish a book in Moscow in 1949, entitled Conspiracy Against Peace, claiming that at the victory celebration outside the Mokhovaya four years earlier, Kennan had turned away cynically from the cheering crowds to predict a new world war. By December 26, Salisbury had a story ready on the impending rejection, but the censors refused to clear it.

Andrey Gromyko, the wartime Soviet ambassador in Washington, had advised Stalin that “it is hardly conceivable that the USA government at present may appoint a more acceptable candidate.” Whether for that reason or some other, the Kremlin boss then gave his approval, allowing the White House to confirm that Kennan was indeed Truman’s choice. Salisbury, for once, was grateful to the censors: “By killing my adverse speculation [they] spared me an embarrassing error.”⁵³

A week later, in bed at the Princeton house with a sprained back from having fallen off his bicycle, the ambassador-designate wrote out in longhand, for his future embassy counselor Hugh Cumming, what he hoped to accomplish:

This might seem an “overly modest set of aspirations,” Kennan added, “but I think you will agree with me that it is job enough for any man; and if I am able to acquit myself of it with as few mistakes and as much distinction as have my immediate predecessors, I shall be satisfied.”⁵⁴

Cumming would probably also have agreed—a very long telegram once having made its way from Moscow—on the appropriateness of a very long sentence now making its way back.

“GEORGE F. KENNAN, THE STATE DEPARTMENT’S ‘MR. X,’ IS LEAVING for Moscow this spring to take over a job for which he has been preparing for 25 years—and which he doesn’t want.” This is how the journalist Louis Cassels introduced the new U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union to the readers of Collier’s in March 1952. Based on a conversation with Kennan at the farm on the day after Truman announced the appointment, the article portrayed an envoy who “probably knows as much about Russia’s history, literature, and national characteristics as many members of the Politburo.” He would be the first since the opening of relations with the U.S.S.R. to need no interpreter when meeting Stalin. He “certainly ought to know his way around,” the president was said to have commented. Even Pravda had honored the ambassador-designate by awarding him “its highest decorations for Western statesmen—‘spy,’ ‘warmonger,’ and ‘tool of Wall Street.’”

Why, then, did Kennan not want the job? The “deep dark truth about Mr. X,” Cassels revealed (not quite accurately), “is that he has never had any great ambition to be ambassador to Russia, or anywhere else.” What he wanted instead was “to write a dozen or so books that have been stillborn in his wide-ranging mind during his hectic two and a half decades as a public servant.” The Institute for Advanced Study had given Kennan that opportunity, so why had he agreed to go to Moscow? Because, Cassels suggested (not inaccurately), Kennan believed in predestination.

He was, after all, the son of three men. One was his real father, a stern Scotch Presbyterian with a strong sense of duty and—owing to his youthful travels in Europe—an international outlook rare in turn-of-the-century Wisconsin. Kossuth Kent Kennan would not have wanted George to decline the job for which the Foreign Service had trained him, at public expense, over so many years. “I’ve never had the opportunity of serving in the armed forces,” the younger Kennan added. “I don’t think any man has the right to refuse to serve his country in any position where he might be useful.”

A second “father” was the first George Kennan. When given the choice, in 1928, of studying Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Russian, young George had chosen the last out of deference to his famous ancestor. The many parallels in their lives, down to sharing the same birthday, “almost makes me believe in astrology,” the mature George admitted. Then, while studying Russian in Berlin, he had encountered a third “father,” Anton Chekhov, whose plays and short stories Kennan came to regard “as Russia’s and perhaps the world’s greatest literature.” Trained in medicine, Chekhov made his reputation as a writer—a trajectory Kennan envied as he weighed his professional obligations against his literary inclinations. And it had been Chekhov, he believed, who had posthumously persuaded him to buy the farm. George knew he had to do it when Annelise compared the place with the run-down Russian estate in The Cherry Orchard.

No visitor could regard its owner as an aloof intellectual after seeing him tramping around “in torn khaki trousers, plaid cotton shirt, heavy leather boots and a Russian-style fur hat.” Kennan did much of the work himself to hold down expenses: “He is not independently wealthy, as some people suppose.” Finances, not fame, preoccupied him on the day the newspapers reported his appointment: “Well-wishers found him behind a paper-strewn desk in the parlor of the farmhouse, struggling with ‘the books’ and trying to make out his income-tax return.”

Cassels concluded his profile by reporting one further step Kennan had taken to put down roots: in a “full-cycle return to the faith of his fathers,” he had recently joined the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton. “I drifted away from the church when I was a young man,” Kennan explained. “But I have come back to it. I still see much in formal religion that is imperfect, but I know now that a man with no religion is a very hideous character. I have a great horror of people who have no fear of God.”

Arthur Link, who knew Kennan well, was certain of his belief in predestination: “He was reared a Presbyterian, but he’s been much more influenced by Russian Orthodoxy: the acceptance of things as they are, without getting too high expectations; [the view] that the world is fundamentally evil and that really there’s not a great deal that you can do about it.” Kennan himself, recalling his stay as a young man at the Pskovo-Pechorsky monastery in Estonia, assured a Russian Orthodox bishop late in 1951 that “I have never felt anything but the deepest respect for the grandeur of [the Church’s] spiritual tradition, the power and beauty of its ritual, and the warm current of human feeling that flows through all of its life.”

Princeton was a long way from Pskovo-Pechorsky, however, so First Presbyterian would have to do. He worried that he would be “a very imperfect Christian,” Kennan wrote its pastor on accepting membership early in 1952, but he would be bearing a burden “far away and in loneliness.” The Soviet Union was

One model, he thought, might be the Prince in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot: “To make one’s self as pure of heart as one is capable of becoming, to put fear and cynicism and craftiness behind one, and to abandon one’s self to the reflection that if the simple truth will not do, then nothing will.” He would have to remind himself, however, that what he would be managing was “not the encounter of George Kennan with the phenomenon of Soviet power but the encounter of the political entity known as the Government of the United States of America.”

Had he not already spent enough time in that awful place? Kennan stared into the fire for a long time before answering: “[F]ate pushed me into the diplomatic service. A man has to do what fate calls him to do, as best he can.”¹

I.

His task, Kennan told guests at a dinner given by Paul Hoffman early in February, would be exploit possibilities for “continuing to exist in the same world with Soviet power and yet avoid the calamities of a third world conflict.” Americans must not conclude that war was inevitable “just because we find the absence of it to be unpleasant and difficult.” Diplomacy was not disloyalty: “It is tragic that in the course of recent events we have permitted not only valuable people, but also valuable words to be deprived of their usefulness.” Harriman, Smith, and most recently Kirk had all served with self-effacement in Moscow under difficult circumstances. “[I]f I can meet the requirements of the job with as much competence and dignity as they did, and make no more mistakes, I will be pleased enough.”²

Meanwhile, Kennan was winding up his affairs at the Institute. The study group he had hoped to make a Policy Planning Staff in exile became the first casualty: after “considerable anguish,” he told the assistants whom he had recruited to work on the project that he would have to drop it. He could not resist, however, sending a long letter to Acheson—at some three thousand words, it could have been a paper from the original planning staff—complaining about the indulgence of emerging nationalism in Asia and the Middle East. There was little to be gained, Kennan insisted, from trying to win the goodwill of its leaders, “on whose bizarre frames the trappings of statesmanship rest like an old dress suit on a wooden scarecrow.” But Washington policy making, he cautioned himself in his diary, was now beyond the control of any individual: people were spending most of their time in “a dream-like futile battle against the folds of [their] own bureaucratic clothing.” He “shuddered inwardly at the prospect of going into the lion’s den” as the representative of such a place.³

Few forebodings were apparent, however, when Kennan appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his confirmation hearing on March 12. Moscow was “a hard city to live in,” he acknowledged. “You are surrounded with hostility and hatred and meanness on every side.” But war was unlikely, and relations with the Soviet Union deserved “to be handled with the greatest of circumspection and care and self-control.” The senators treated Kennan respectfully, if ramblingly. The only reference to ongoing loyalty investigations came when Theodore Francis Green, Democrat of Rhode Island, asked facetiously whether previous associations with Kremlin leaders might be taken as evidence that Kennan was a communist. “I assume, Senator,” the ambassador-designate responded, “that I must have been investigated quite a number of times.” The Senate confirmed the nomination unanimously on the next day.⁴

Would attacks by Soviet propagandists affect his ability to do his job? He didn’t think so, he told reporters in an off-the-record press conference at the State Department on April 1. Totalitarian regimes “always enlist hatred against individuals.” After the “X” article came out, he and Forrestal had been called “cannibalistic hyenas.” But being insulted “does not necessarily mean that you’re not respected. It may mean almost the contrary.” He would be happy simply “to see the diplomatic amenities observed and not too closely connected with emotions.”⁵

The new ambassador met that same day with the president of the United States, who had just announced that he would not be running for reelection. Truman agreed that Stalin did not want war, and asked Kennan to write from time to time, saying that he liked getting personal reports from overseas representatives. “Beyond this, he gave me no instructions of any kind.” The same thing happened when Kennan lunched with Acheson the next day: “He, too, was cordial but very reserved; and he said nothing that could give me any clue to the basic line of policy I was to follow in my new capacity.”

Courtesy calls on Soviet officials in Washington and New York were no more instructive. Ambassador Aleksandr Panyushkin and his staff seemed worn down by the hostility they had encountered in the United States. Jacob Malik, with whom Kennan had had useful conversations about a Korean War cease-fire a year earlier, was now “much more bitter and sour.” The Soviet Union was being threatened, he complained, at the end of their talk. “Are you sure,” Kennan asked, “that your Government does not prefer to be threatened?” “Positively,” Malik answered.

Soviet attitudes were no surprise, but Kennan did find the State Department’s silence unsettling. So he arranged, through Bohlen, another meeting with Acheson on April 18: “It was left entirely to me to set the trend of the discussion.” His reputation and the publicity surrounding his appointment, Kennan tried to point out, meant that

Should he not have, then, a clear understanding of policy on such issues as Germany—did the United States really want reunification? Or Korea—what kind of a settlement should follow a cease-fire? Or disarmament—did this not require, first, a reduction of tensions? Kennan got no answers to any of these questions: “Our position seemed to me to be comparable to the policy of unconditional surrender in the recent war.”

A private conversation with Bohlen was even more disturbing. He appeared to have embraced “the flat and inflexible thinking of the Pentagon,” which privileged “the false mathematics of relative effectiveness” regarding weapons of mass destruction over all other considerations that might attend their use.

Kennan returned to Princeton “feeling extremely lonely.” No one in Washington sympathized with his views, and no one in Moscow was likely to. It seemed “that I was being sent on a mission to play a game at which I could not possibly win and that part of my obligation consisted of… taking upon myself the onus of whatever overt failures were involved.”⁶

What Kennan expected remains unclear. Exhausted from constant crises and furious criticism, Acheson knew that his term would soon end. This was no time for new initiatives, and Kennan had disagreed, over the past several years, with most of the old ones. He still harbored hopes of redesigning the Soviet-American relationship: the fact that “a friend of the Russian tradition” would be representing the United States “might not be lost” among Moscow’s artists and intellectuals, Kennan explained, a bit forlornly, to Richard Rovere of The New Yorker on the eve of his departure. Even Stalin was not “irretrievably provincial, doctrinaire, and inflexible in his outlook on the rest of the world.” But with Truman leaving office, the Korean War still raging, and the old dictator’s rule not likely to last much longer—he had just turned seventy-three when he agreed to Kennan’s appointment—breakthroughs seemed less than likely.⁷

On April 24, 1952, the New York Herald Tribune ran a picture of a smiling Ambassador Kennan, departing for Europe the day before with Annelise and Christopher on the Queen Elizabeth—Grace and Joan, still in school, were to follow later. He shared the page, for they shared the ship, with the comedian Jimmy Durante and the Indian film star Sabu, known for playing characters from Rudyard Kipling novels. Kennan’s mood, however, was darker than the photograph suggested. A few nights earlier, at the farm, he had written out on the back of an envelope this valedictory:

The words were Kennan’s, but the tone, as he knew well, was that of Chekhov’s Madame Ranyevskaya, standing surrounded by suitcases in the final act of The Cherry Orchard, listening to the sound of it being cut down.⁹

II.

After an uneventful voyage, the Kennans spent a few days in London before meeting their own Air Force plane, which came equipped with a colonel—Annelise, “highly pregnant,” would have preferred a midwife. It flew them to Wiesbaden, where she was impressed to see George get the military honors of a five-star general. They then drove to Bad Godesberg, where she was to have the baby, while John and Patricia Davies, recently posted to Bonn, would help take care of Christopher. George proceeded to Berlin and after that Moscow, arriving there on the afternoon of May 6, having arranged to avoid the May Day celebrations with their inevitably anti-American character.¹⁰

It was his first trip back since 1946. A building boom was under way: massive wedding-cake structures were rising around the city, each thirty to forty stories high, all to be topped off with spires supporting garishly illuminated red stars. In contrast to what Kennan remembered from the war, urban transit was working: “They have traffic regulated within an inch of its life.” Off the main streets, there were still log cabins with no indoor plumbing, “but they are making progress.” At Spaso House, a few servants he remembered were there to greet him, including two elderly Chinese, who retained “a concept of their calling somewhat higher than that by which the Russians were animated.” All appeared to be under orders to show no pleasure at his arrival, however, and to do as little as possible to help him move in. Setting out for a walk the next day, he found his “angels”—the plainclothesmen assigned to follow him everywhere—waiting at the gate. Hugh Cumming and Elim O’Shaughnessy, the embassy’s second- and third-ranking officers, gave him lunch in the Kennans’ old apartment at the Mokhovaya. Dinner that evening was on a tray, “and here I am,” George wrote Annelise, “alone at night in the vast recesses of an empty Spaso.”

Recently redecorated, the house looked good on the inside, but the servant problem was serious: “I wish you were here to help, for I think you are the only person who can do anything.” He was already missing his family: “It seems like years, instead of just four days, since I said goodby to you.” Finding a bag filled with Christopher’s clothes had almost caused him to weep. But the little park in front of Spaso was full of children, “and I have hopes that if he is not too conspicuously dressed he will be able to play there normally.” There were hundreds of things to say, but it was hard to know where to begin, “and I am sleepy, so I will close now.”

“So you have had your baby!” he wrote on the eleventh, after the communications officer awakened him at three A.M. with the news. Because there were no direct telephone connections between Moscow and Bonn, he knew nothing other than that Annelise and her daughter were well, and that she was to be called Wendy. He was “mad with curiosity. What a feeling of frustration.” Nevertheless, “three girls and a boy now…. Just like my own mother’s family.”¹¹

The new American ambassador presented his credentials to the figurehead Soviet president, Nikolay Shvernik, in a carefully scripted Kremlin ceremony on May 14. Speaking in Russian from a memorized text, Kennan expressed hope that his actions in Moscow would “meet with the understanding and collaboration of the Soviet Government.” Shvernik promised “collaboration” in his reply but said nothing about “understanding.” The event took place in the same ballroom where eighteen and a half years earlier a younger Kennan—having learned the night before of his father’s death—had stood behind a self-confident Bullitt, trying very hard not to faint. It had all gone like clockwork this time, George wrote Annelise: at least “what little potential value the position might have has not been diminished by anything that has happened so far.” Meanwhile “[w]e have gotten a vegetable garden worked up—lettuce, radishes, and dill already planted—tomatoes and beans to go in, with luck, this weekend.”¹²

Annelise’s first letter, written two days before the baby’s birth, reached Moscow via diplomatic pouch only on the fifteenth. By that time George was deeply into the round of calls he was expected to make on Soviet officials and members of the diplomatic corps. There would be, he estimated, fifty or sixty of these: he, in turn, would host return calls at Spaso House, a process that would go on for weeks. The mood, he warned her, “has become grim in a way it never was before.” Reinforcing it was a propaganda campaign that exceeded “in viciousness, shamelessness, mendacity and intensity” anything he had experienced before in the Soviet Union, or even in Nazi Germany. The purpose, he reported to the State Department on the twenty-second, appeared to be “to arouse hatred, revulsion and indignation with regard to Americans,” who were said to be using bacteriological weapons in Korea while torturing prisoners “with red hot irons, hanging them upside down, pouring water into their noses, forcibly tattooing them, forcing them to sign treasonable statements in blood, etc.” The vilification was “on a scale hardly excelled in human history.”¹³

Managing Spaso was still an ordeal. Burobin, the Central Bureau for Services to the Diplomatic Corps, supplied a staff of twenty-two, all of whom presumably reported to the secret police. They were under orders not to do anything other than what they had been told to do, to remain on the premises for as short a time as possible, “and above all never to permit themselves to enjoy, or feel a part of, the family in which they are working.” It was like being served by “tight-lipped ghosts.” Determined to make a point, Kennan fired the night watchman, who was showing up only occasionally. But that left him alone every evening, wandering around like a ghost himself. Guards outside followed his movements from room to room by watching the lights go on and off: “Somehow or other, it doesn’t seem to get me down; but I really wonder whether we can or should be asked to live this way.” Spaso was safe enough: no one would dare break in. But the atmosphere—Annelise would not have missed the allusion to Bad Nauheim—“is more like a sort of a prison-hotel than like a home.”¹⁴

“Anneliesschen—sweetheart,” George wrote her early in June: “If there has been a gap in these letters, it has been because I did not send the one I wrote to you on Sunday.” It had seemed too depressing: “Letters are unsatisfactory things.” But there were less than three weeks left. “That’s not so terrible, though it seems a long time.” He would travel to Leningrad, he added a week later, and then “only five days will remain before this separation is over. Dreamed the other night that I saw Christopher, but he had grown quite big and didn’t recognize me.”¹⁵

The opportunity to see his wife, son, and new daughter in Bad Godesberg arose from an Acheson trip to London. Kennan would meet the secretary of state, update him on Soviet-American relations, and then bring all of the family—Grace and Joan would be out of school by then—back with him to Moscow along with their own small staff, a modest declaration of independence from Burobin. There was, however, a strangely sinister aspect to this visit. On June 25 Samuel Reber, the political adviser to the U.S. high commissioner in Bonn, John McCloy, passed the word to Frank Wisner, at the CIA in Washington, that Kennan could meet briefly in London the next day with the “Representatives.”¹⁶

There turned out to be only one, Peer de Silva of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, who had been sent to discuss assigning an undercover agent to work out of the Moscow embassy. Kennan opposed the idea, as had Bohlen when consulted on it earlier. De Silva noticed, though, that “the ambassador was very tense and nervous.” At the end of the meeting, he said he had something to ask of the agency. As de Silva remembered it, Kennan handed him an envelope, which he said contained a letter to Pope Pius XII. He wanted it passed to Allen Dulles, the deputy director of central intelligence, with the request that it reach the Vatican by secure means. There was “a good possibility that I will wind up someday before long on the Soviet radio,” Kennan explained. “I may be forced to make statements that would be damaging to American policy. This letter will show the world that I am under duress and am not making statements under my own free will.” Did the CIA not have “some sort of a pill that a person could use to kill himself instantly”?

De Silva acknowledged that it did: small glass vials containing cyanide, which, when bitten, would release the chemical with lethal results. “I think I must have two of these,” Kennan told him. De Silva promised to pass the request along—if Dulles approved, the pills could be sent by diplomatic pouch. There was a long puzzled silence when de Silva conveyed this to Dulles after flying back to Washington, but he finally decided that the agency could not deny Kennan the pills if he really wanted them.¹⁷

When asked about this in 1987, Kennan pointed out that the prospect of war was very real at the time. He had no confidence that the Soviets would observe “the amenities,” as the Germans had done in 1941–42, and that internment had been bad enough: “If they had decided to sacrifice their mission [in the United States], they wouldn’t have hesitated to arrest us and then to put me in solitary confinement.” Having held senior positions in the State Department, he had information his interrogators might try to extract by torture: “If that was what I had to face, I was quite prepared to—I asked for this.” But he had asked to be provided “with pills that you could easily conceal…. God knows what Stalin would have done.”¹⁸

Elbridge Durbrow, who read de Silva’s account shortly after it appeared in 1978, had a different explanation: “Something got to George. I don’t know what it was, [maybe] the KGB got to him and said: ‘We’ve got the goods on you.’” After all, “they tried to screw up every ambassador there the best they could one way or another.” Hugh Cumming was more specific. Kennan had gotten into trouble “with some ‘dame’ and thought the Russians might in some way publicize it.” They did not do this, “and he’s been grateful ever since.”¹⁹

III.

Kennan was lonely during his first six weeks in Moscow, and there was an opportunity for romance. The American embassy still maintained a dacha outside of the city, but it had become so run-down that he was reluctant to use it. He preferred a smaller one rented by correspondents Harrison Salisbury, Thomas P. Whitney, and Whitney’s Russian wife, Juli Zapolskaya—soon he had his own key. “There is a sound of hammers, dogs barking, chickens, children’s cries, and distant trains,” George wrote Annelise from the front porch one afternoon at the end of May, “a relief from the old beat between Spaso and Mokhovaya.” The dacha was a refuge for a temporary bachelor: he could go on walks (accompanied by angels, to be sure, but they allowed him a sympathetic distance), indulge in long late conversations in rapid Russian with the Whitneys (Salisbury, still learning the language, struggled to keep up), and accompany songs that they all could sing (Russian and American) on his guitar. The atmosphere, Kennan recalled, was one of “health and simplicity and subdued hope which I drank in, on my brief visits there, as one drinks in fresh air after long detention in a stuffy room.”

He described Juli, in his memoirs, only as “a musician and chanteuse of talent.” Salisbury, in his, went further. She had, he was certain, fallen in love: “No one who saw Juli’s face light up and her eyes glow in George’s presence could mistake the feeling.” He was, to her, “a character out of not Chekhov but Turgenev, sophisticated, wise, urbane, gifted with a philosophy and emotion close to the Russian heart. He was Russian but not Russian, American but a special kind of American. She could talk to him all day and all night.” Only wife and country kept George from reciprocating: “He was an extraordinarily happily married man, and strongly as he was drawn to this most Russian of relationships, he was not prepared to venture on an excursion down that path.” He told Juli, according to Salisbury, that he had

Salisbury believed Juli did. “She smiled at him, she gave him her most tender looks, but she made no effort by the arts of her coquetry to woo him from his resolve.”²⁰

To be sure, Salisbury—and Whitney, for that matter—may not always have been present. But angels were, and as George was well aware, they reported on his activities in the country as carefully as they tracked his movements within the gloomy precincts of Spaso House. “The great good earth of Mother Russia,” he wrote a friend later that summer,

It was hardly the setting for an affair, however lonely Kennan may have been. So what else could have caused him to request suicide pills in the same week that he rejoined his family and first met his new daughter?

Kennan kept no diary during this period, probably for fear that it might fall into the hands of the Soviet authorities. Major General Robert W. Grow, the Army attaché in Moscow while Kirk was ambassador, had suffered just that misfortune in 1951 and had been court-martialed as a result. Kirk’s wife, Lydia Chapin Kirk, had committed a less serious indiscretion by rushing a gossipy account of Spaso House life into print in the United States before her husband had formally resigned. George was not about to risk adding to “the follies of our predecessors,” he wrote to Annelise early in June 1952. Because of them, she should “not be surprised at the coolness of the reception that awaits you in Moscow… I am not.”²²

Nonetheless he was surprised. Sir Alvary Gascoigne, the British ambassador, found Kennan unprepared for how differently foreign missions were treated from when he had last served in the U.S.S.R.: “This came as quite a shock to him.” Cumming remembered Kennan returning from a walk one day soon after his arrival, so subdued that he seemed ill. “Hugh, I am shocked to discover [that] the Soviets regard me as such a dangerous person.” I said: “What do you mean?” “Why, this outbreak of anti-American posters all over the town.” “George, those damn things have been there for months! I honestly don’t think that they have anything personally to do with you.” But Kennan wasn’t listening: he got “that rather distant, misty look in his eyes,” which showed that he was composing a dispatch. Calling in a secretary—not Hessman, who would only later join him in Moscow—he “lay down on the sofa to dictate, almost like a patient in a psychoanalyst’s office. I envied him the ability,” Cumming recalled, “to do that.”²³

The result was a long letter to Doc Matthews, pouched to Washington to ensure security. There were, Kennan suggested, four possible reasons for the Kremlin’s propaganda offensive. The first was to boost sagging morale in the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist world, where there was “widespread political apathy and skepticism.” With the exception of the wartime years, however, that disillusionment had been present since the purges of the late 1930s—alone it could not account for what now was going on. A second explanation was mobilization for war: Kennan had never believed, though, that Stalin would deliberately unleash one. A third was some kind of leadership struggle, but there was no hard evidence for this. That left a fourth possibility, which was that the campaign “might have something to do with my own appointment and arrival.”

Kennan was known to Stalin and his associates, after all, as someone who was not “bloodthirsty and boorish, …lacking in good will, ignorant and contemptuous of Russian cultural values, [or] obtuse to developments in the world of the Russian spirit.” Because of his prior service in the country and his knowledge of the language, they might have interpreted his appointment as an indication that the U.S. government was ready for “real” discussions on significant issues. Why, then, the anti-American campaign? To the normal mind, it could hardly be a less fitting prelude for diplomacy. But Stalin’s mind was not normal:

It was also important to the Kremlin leaders, when on the verge of making even minor concessions, not to seem to have been pressured into doing so.

If Stalin did see any possibility of a Cold War settlement, then, he might think it useful “to remind a new and somewhat inscrutable American Ambassador… that if he is going to talk to anyone around here it is going to be to Papa—that the other members of the family know their places and are well in hand.”

But an invitation to talk with Papa would have thrilled Kennan, even though he had resolved—given his lack of instructions from Washington—not to ask for one: why did he still feel threatened? He now came up with a fifth explanation, which was that the Soviet authorities had developed a “reckless contempt for whatever values and safeguards might conceivably still lie in the maintenance of the normal diplomatic channel.” That had not happened during Kennan’s previous service in Moscow. Now, though, the restraint was gone. There was, in its place, “the excited, uncertain bravado of the parvenu who thinks that his fortunes have advanced to the point where he need no longer pretend to be a man of correct behavior or even a man of respect for correct behavior.” It was

If this was right, “then we have a bitter problem on our hands.” Restoring sobriety and decorum among such people would take “real thought and skillful action on our part, and probably luck as well.”²⁴

The contradictions in this letter can only have bewildered its readers. Kennan portrayed a Soviet leadership that both needed a settlement and did not need one. He hoped for diplomacy in a state that, he insisted, had given up on diplomacy. He described anti-Americanism as a shocking development, but he had been arguing, as far back as the “long telegram,” that Stalin’s regime required a hostile outside world. He placed himself at the center of the aging dictator’s concerns despite having noted, before leaving for Moscow, that successful ambassadors there practiced self-effacement. Kennan cast himself in the role of someone Stalin might enjoy eliminating, or at least forcing into an “embarrassing position,” but with whom he would be eager to negotiate. None of these claims were necessarily implausible: they could hardly all be plausible, however, at the same time. “George is an egocentric person, a highly emotional person,” Cumming explained years later. “It’s a strange combination of a well-drilled mind, a fine command of the English language, and yet shot through all of this is this emotional response to external stimuli, which somehow or another his well-drilled mind doesn’t seem to be able to control.”²⁵

The problem was evident in a second letter Kennan pouched to Matthews two weeks later, complaining about the intelligence-gathering activities of American military attachés in Moscow. These involved the use of cameras, radio receivers, and listening devices to collect information from embassy buildings and vehicles. A favorite opportunity was Aviation Day, in July, when the Americans would invite their British and Norwegian counterparts to the roof of the Mokhovaya to photograph the planes flying over, and then downstairs for drinks. It was done so openly, Kennan pointed out, that the Soviets had their own photographers documenting the activity, apparently with a view to compiling a dossier. Like the Grow diary and Mrs. Kirk’s book, these provocations encouraged retaliation: their continuation placed in jeopardy “the physical security of the members of the [American] mission and their families.” Diplomatic immunity could only extend so far: if relations ruptured or if war broke out, it was entirely possible that the staff “might suffer seriously by virtue of these activities that have been conducted in the past.”

So he had ordered a halt to them—despite warnings from the attachés that their superiors would not welcome the prohibition—and he would stick to that policy unless otherwise instructed from Washington. Cumming thought this naïve: “The Russians would do it in [the United States] if they didn’t have other ways of getting things.” And Kennan knew, from his own experiences dating back to the days of Joe Davies, how thoroughly the Soviets had compromised the immunity of Spaso House by installing their own bugs, as well as servants who were also spies. “We never talked, really, very much, even in the privacy of [our] bedroom,” Annelise recalled. “It makes you absolutely tongue-tied.” By 1952 there was even a microwave beam aimed at the windows in Kennan’s Mokhovaya office, presumably in an effort to pick up conversations there.²⁶

Kennan became even more worried about provocations when Joseph and Stewart Alsop published a series of alarming columns, in mid-June, reporting in rapid succession on American reconnaissance flights into Soviet airspace, on similar Soviet flights over Alaska, on progress in developing the hydrogen bomb, on rumors of a new Berlin blockade, and—most disturbing—on his own confidential reports to the State Department about the anti-American campaign in the U.S.S.R., which had caused Kennan to reconsider earlier assurances that its leaders would not risk war. Their reports in turn alerted Henry Luce, whose correspondents hounded Kennan while he was in Bonn and London, trying to confirm the story. Could Bohlen not plead with the Time-Life editors to spare the American embassy in Moscow “the spotlight of further press curiosity”?²⁷

All of this, then, puts the suicide pills episode in a broader context than that of “some dame.” Kennan’s loneliness had led to affairs in Berlin in 1940–41, probably at Bad Nauheim in 1942, and surely somewhere in 1951. He had even admonished himself, in his most recent agony over infidelity, that were it not for his youngest (at that time Christopher), he should go into the military and get himself killed in a war.²⁸ What concerned Kennan now, though, if war broke out, was the risk of internment, torture, and the compromise of state secrets: taking a pill under these circumstances would be an act of patriotism, not just an escape from embarrassment. There are, then, multiple explanations for his behavior in late June 1952: it need not have been the fear of blackmail. And the letter to the pope, if de Silva’s account is to be believed? Kennan was indeed egocentric, and he was becoming deeply religious. Not so much so, though, that he would have sought absolution, from the supreme pontiff, for a dalliance with a dame. He had worse things than that on his mind.²⁹

IV.

The severely functional office of the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Salisbury reported to the readers of The New York Times Magazine shortly after Kennan arrived, was less impressive than what a deputy price administrator in Washington might occupy. There was a desk in one corner, a table for books and out-of-date American magazines in a second, and a couch, some armchairs, and a coffee table in a third. The fourth corner was empty. The only decorations were photographs of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, the latter slightly larger. The view, though, was spectacular: swiveling in his chair, Kennan could look out across Manege Square to the walls of the Kremlin, only a two-minute walk away. Thanks to the acquisition of the Mokhovaya in 1934, no foreign embassy was closer. And should Stalin seek to see Kennan, few men were better qualified to explain American policy “in terms and language which have real meaning to Soviet minds.”

Apart from ceremonial occasions like the presentation of credentials, however, visits to the Kremlin had become rare for American ambassadors in recent years. Kirk had met Stalin only once, shortly after arriving in 1949. It was not at all clear when, or even whether, Kennan would be received. The Mokhovaya’s proximity therefore could be frustrating: as if to illustrate this, Salisbury’s article carried a photograph of Kennan staring expectantly from his window at the Kremlin’s dark towers, as if waiting for the invitation.³⁰

In one sense life was easier: “The world’s most efficient police system protects me from my old enemies—the telephone and the visitors.” Knowing that he would not soon return to the United States, Kennan could see his own country “with detachment, with charity, with serenity—as I imagine the dead look back on life.” There was consolation also in the “comfortable consciousness, underlying all government work, that it was someone else besides yourself who decided that… you should be where you are and doing what you are doing.” Duty relieved guilt, “and in its soothing influence lies, I am sure, something of the appeal of totalitarianism.”³¹

Still, he could not help looking for signs and portents. The Moscow theater offered Kennan proximity to the Soviet artistic community: its members, he felt, must have been aware of his presence, if for no other reason than that his angels bumped anyone seated around him. Attending a performance of Tolstoy’s Resurrection one night with Robert C. Tucker, a young Foreign Service officer who would become a distinguished professor of Soviet studies at Princeton, Kennan was startled to see the leading man advance to the footlights, appear to address him directly, and say: “There is an American by the name of George, and with him we are all in agreement.” Kennan and Tucker rushed back to the embassy to check the text, only to find that the line referred to Henry George, the late nineteenth-century proponent of the single tax. “But was the actor aware of the play on words? And did he enjoy it as much as we did?” Like astronomers listening for life on other planets, “we were forced to try to gain our feeling for the Russian cultural world” by such indirect means, despite its “presence and vitality… all around us.”³²

Exasperated by the silence, Kennan called in Cumming one day in mid-June to ask if the embassy staff had run across anyone who might have known him earlier in Moscow. Cumming suggested Boris Fedorovich Podserob, a former secretary to Molotov, now secretary general of the Foreign Ministry, with whom Kennan had had reasonably good relations during the 1930s. “If you find yourself talking with Podserob,” Kennan replied, “I wish you’d tell him that I regret that there is no person here in the entire apparat with whom I could occasionally come together and have a cup of tea and talk.” Cumming had no Russian and Podserob little English, but they did both have French, so at the next opportunity—a diplomatic reception at the Moskva Hotel—Cumming conveyed the message, bringing O’Shaughnessy along as a linguistic backup: Kennan was picking up his family in West Germany at the time. Podserob appeared interested, remained with the Americans long enough to make sure that he understood, and then departed.

Kennan returned to Moscow on July 1, and an invitation to talk soon followed, although not in the form he had expected. A young Russian appeared inside the Mokhovaya, having somehow got past the Soviet militia who controlled access to the building. “I was startled,” Cumming recalled. “Is this a joke or something?” “No, it’s not a joke.” So he went out and talked to the man. “He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite identify him. His clothes looked good, but disheveled. He wanted to see the ambassador.” “Don’t you recognize me?” he said. “I have interpreted for you a number of times on your calls to the Foreign Office. I have asked to see you so you can identify me.” Cumming then remembered him, asked a colleague to keep an eye on the visitor, and went in to inform Kennan.

“Do you think I should see him?” “I don’t know, George. It’s entirely up to you. He has either broken through the militiamen outside, or they ’ve allowed him to enter.” But the American Marines guarding the embassy reported no scuffle. “So it was obvious to me that the militia had let him come in.” Part of Kennan’s office was exposed to the microwave beam, but the corner with the sofa and the armchairs was not. Kennan asked his visitor to sit there and to speak in English, so that Cumming could follow the conversation. He then identified himself as the son of Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov, the minister for state security, who he said had been arrested. “That was the first knowledge that any of us had that Abakumov had disappeared.” Kennan recalled what came next: “Like the sons of other high figures here, I think what’s going on is very dangerous. We know the comings and goings of the leaders here, and we would be in a position to mount an action to remove them.”

“Look here,” Kennan replied. “I did not come here to violate the laws of the Soviet Union, or to encourage anyone else to do it. I think you’d better leave this room and this building immediately.” The young man protested that he would be arrested as soon as he stepped outside: “They saw me come in here.” Could the Americans not smuggle him out in a car, or allow him to leave through one of the steam tunnels that connected the Mokhovaya to the central heating plant? “No,” Kennan insisted, “you’ll have to go out the way you came in.” He was escorted to the front entrance. Cumming, with Kennan, watched from the window as the militiamen seized him. “One crooked his arm up behind his back, they put him in a car with the curtains down, and they drove off. The interesting thing was that there were crowds moving back and forth on the street. Nobody even turned a head to look at this. You don’t do that in the Soviet Union.”

Kennan concluded that this was a message to him from Stalin: “I know, you son of a bitch, what you’re here for. I’ll send the fitting sort of fellow to you. Let’s see what you do.” Cumming was at first more skeptical, because “George always tended to regard things personally, as a provocation of some kind.” There had been other incidents of Russians trying to break into the Mokhovaya: one, at just this time, involved a demented man who ran past the militia, stationed himself in the commissary, seized a hammer, demanded asylum, and threatened to kill himself if he did not get it. With Kennan’s approval, the Soviet authorities were allowed into the embassy to remove him. That intruder, however, had not proposed an assassination plot. This one did, and the fact that he was a Foreign Ministry interpreter—Cumming confirmed this by finding him in a photograph, taken a year earlier, of the ceremony at which Gascoigne, the British ambassador, had presented his credentials—lent plausibility to Kennan’s hypothesis. No genuine conspirator would have used so conspicuous a method of signaling his intentions, without any prior assurance of how he would be received.³³

The intruder was in fact Nikolay Nikolayevich Yakovlev, the son not of Abakumov but of a Soviet marshal who had just been arrested—so too had young Nikolay. A third Nikolay, General Vlasik, the head of Stalin’s security detail, “came to see me in my solitary confinement and offered a deal: my only chance to survive… was to go to the American Embassy, to see Kennan himself, and make him believe a story which had been prepared for me.” Yakovlev was given no other information, “but the whole plot was clear to me even without that.”

Yakovlev later became one of the first Soviet historians of the Cold War, well known for his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy (based only on American sources, no Soviet documents being available at the time), his attacks on prominent dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov (which he probably had no choice but to make), and his tortured ambivalence about George F. Kennan.³⁴

Was the Yakovlev intrusion a test Stalin devised? Salisbury thought so at the time, and there is some evidence to support this possibility. It emerges, circuitously, from an interview the Kremlin boss granted to the Italian socialist Pietro Nenni, a recent recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize, on July 17, 1952. Such meetings were rare enough to send embassies all over Moscow scrambling for information, and in a report to Acheson on the twenty-fifth, Kennan summarized what he had learned about this one. His source was the Italian ambassador, Mario Di Stefano, an old friend from earlier service together in the U.S.S.R. Stalin had been in good health, Nenni told Di Stefano, had shown a keen interest in Italian politics, and had reconciled himself to the indefinite division of Germany. Nenni then asked about Kennan: “whether I really entertained friendly feelings toward Russia.” Di Stefano replied “that I had come here in the hopes of bettering the situation and of getting some idea of the thinking of the Kremlin on present international problems.”³⁵

Kennan made no immediate effort to assess this query, although it would not have struck him as an idle one: had Stalin asked Nenni to make it? Salisbury, who also talked with Di Stefano, concluded that he had: “I wish Kennan and I had known each other better in those times and had been able to talk more freely.” Salisbury had something else to regret, which was that the indefatigable Alsops scooped him. It was “at least conceivable,” they wrote in their syndicated column on August 8, that “Nenni’s questions about Ambassador Kennan… might mean that the men in the Kremlin are considering some sort of approach to the American Government through Kennan.” Combined with the information about Germany, the Nenni interview “seems to hold out two rather small and quite possibly deceptive crumbs of comfort.”³⁶

The next day the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera ran a front-page story with the headline: “Stalin Tries an Oblique Maneuver Aimed at a Relaxation of Tension With America: A Report of the American Ambassador in Moscow.” He and Di Stefano were distressed by the leaks, Kennan cabled Acheson: “Suppose it quixotic to wish means could be found to make Alsop[s] understand how difficult they make my task here by reckless and needless references to personalities, particularly myself in their column.” It turned out, though, that the French too had the story—probably provided by the garrulous Nenni—which strengthens the likelihood that Stalin had instructed him to mention Kennan’s name.³⁷

Then, on August 23, Stalin received the new French ambassador, Louis Joxe, for a twenty-minute visit. Kennan was furious. Joxe had not informed him that he was seeking the meeting: he had been “ill-advised” to proceed without receiving any indication that Stalin wished to see him. The “obvious purpose” was to drive a wedge between the French, the British, and the Americans, since neither Kennan nor Gascoigne had received an invitation. (Someone in Washington, on reading this telegram, scribbled in the margin: “Did GFK ever ask?”) Joxe’s reception “may have been… intended as a reproach to me or as a means of embarrassing me,” Kennan wrote Doc Matthews, “by conveying the implication that had I made a similar request I also would have been received.” But he professed to be content:

After reading a similar complaint from Gascoigne, however, Sir Pierson Dixon of the British Foreign Office put a different spin on the situation: “There is a certain puckishness about Stalin, and I dare say he could not resist the temptation of setting the Chancelleries buzzing by seeing the new French ambassador on the eve of the latest Soviet note on Germany.”³⁸

The note on Germany restated a surprising proposal Stalin had first put forward on March 10, 1952: that the four occupying powers agree to hold free elections throughout Germany, looking toward the establishment of an independent, reunified, rearmed, but neutral state. This seemed to confirm Bohlen’s sense, from the previous summer, that Stalin was ready to talk; it also echoed, remarkably closely, Kennan’s Program A. Yet few historians today believe that Stalin was sincere, and Kennan at the time was skeptical. The Soviet initiative appeared to be a last-minute effort to split West Germany from its European and American allies on the eve of its integration into a European Defense Community closely linked to NATO. When it failed, as Stalin seems to have expected it would, he at last reconciled himself to the prospect that the Soviet Union would never control any more than the eastern third of its former adversary: short of war, Germany and Europe would remain divided. The Nenni interview gave Western diplomats their first hint of this shift in Stalin’s thinking.³⁹ There is irony, nonetheless, in the fact that Stalin’s ideas appear to have come closest to Kennan’s—if only briefly—during a period in which Kennan was just a phone call, and a few minutes’ walk, away. But neither picked up the phone: each may have been waiting for the other to do so.

Kennan, of course, had no instructions from Acheson to explore Stalin’s intentions. The March 1952 note had initially intrigued the secretary of state—as had Program A—but he backed off when the British, the French, and the West Germans made it clear that they did not wish to pursue the idea. By late May, Kennan was dismissing the most recent version of Stalin’s suggestion as having been prepared “by hacks supplied only with grudging, cryptic, and guarded instructions and told to make the best of it.”⁴⁰ And by the end of August—after the Nenni leak and the Joxe interview—he was insisting that the Soviet leader must come to him, not the other way around, a tone more appropriate for a head of state than for an ambassador.

Stalin’s behavior is more difficult to explain. He certainly knew who Kennan was, having read both the “long telegram” and the “X” article—as well as, through espionage, an unknown number of other Kennan dispatches and policy papers. He had made no effort to call off Soviet propagandists, who had been attacking Kennan for several years: Parker’s 1949 book, for example, had denounced him as “the first and in some ways the most influential agent of America’s warmongers,” a man “of violent hatred not only of the Soviet Union but of all democratic mankind.” The Foreign Ministry briefing prepared for Shvernik when Kennan presented his credentials in May 1952 claimed that he had shared the views of Nazi diplomats prior to World War II, called for the criminal prosecution of Soviet sympathizers in the United States, headed a foundation financing “reactionary organizations and political émigrés” from Eastern Europe, and was plotting war against the U.S.S.R. and the other “people’s democracies.” It concluded, as if this were an offense also, that Kennan “knows the Russian language well.”⁴¹

And yet—Stalin did agree to accept Kennan as the new U.S. ambassador. It’s possible that he was playing a game all along, first by delaying the agrément to the appointment, then by greeting Kennan with an intensified anti-American propaganda campaign, then by trying to compromise him within his own embassy, then by planting a tantalizing question about him with Nenni, then by snubbing him while receiving Joxe—all the while plaguing him with bad service in Spaso House. That’s how it looked to Kennan, and that possibility would parallel the view most historians have of Stalin’s March 1952 note on Germany: that the old man was trying to keep his enemies off balance.

Another explanation, though, is that he was simply an old man. It’s at least as likely that Stalin had no coherent strategy, that his attention wandered from day to day, and that his subordinates were too terrified to point out the contradictions. It was during this period, after all, that Stalin unwisely launched a purge against his own doctors. Joxe, in contrast to Nenni, had found him showing his age. The French had the impression, Kennan reported, that Stalin “moved his left arm only with difficulty and that his bodily movements were in general labored and jerky.” There had been a revealing moment, also, during the Nenni interview: Stalin suddenly informed his guest that the staunchly anticommunist American Francis Cardinal Spellman had been present at the 1945 Yalta conference—he had not—and that it had been he who had turned Roosevelt against the Soviet Union, thereby confirming the Vatican’s hand behind every development unfavorable to Moscow.⁴² Perhaps it was just as well that Stalin didn’t know of Kennan’s letter to the pope, if it ever existed. Or maybe, even if it didn’t, he thought it did.

V.

“You should have seen us arrive in great style,” Annelise wrote Cousin Grace and Frieda Por in mid-July, two weeks after all six Kennans had landed in Moscow on their four-engine U.S. Air Force plane: “I almost felt important.” Accompanying them were a Danish couple to take over the Spaso House responsibilities of butler and cook, their three-year-old daughter who would be a playmate for Christopher, and a Danish nurse to manage all of the younger children—plus what seemed to Annelise a fortune in frozen meat, canned goods, whiskeys, and wines. Grace, on vacation from Radcliffe, took several embassy jobs, was pleased to get paid for them, but was not getting much sleep because “young girls are at a premium in the foreign colony.” Joan, who had stayed briefly in Moscow, was now in Kristiansand, not a bad thing since “there was nothing for her to do and she would have been very bored.” Full of energy but not as tractable as he used to be, “Tiffer Tennan” made sure that he was the center of attention: Wendy would “have to wait until she gets bigger.” It was just as well that she had turned out to be a girl.

Unlike George, Annelise did not find Moscow to be as oppressive as it had been in the late 1930s. There were goods, albeit expensive, in the stores, and people were better dressed than during the war: “They seem pretty friendly in spite of the anti-American campaign that [is] going on. They don’t dare have anything to do with us, but I am sure they would if the taboo was lifted.” With Spaso’s staff and her Danish helpers, Annelise could imagine spending a lot of time in bed, “but somehow it doesn’t work out quite that way. The house is really big and I would like to put a speedometer on myself to see how much ground I cover [in] a day.” Nevertheless, it seemed natural to be back in Moscow: “I’d been in Russia more than any other place since I’d been married.”⁴³

Things did get better, George acknowledged, after his family arrived. Under Annelise’s supervision and with the assistance of the Danes—whom the police could not easily intimidate—Spaso became more hospitable. There was even an opportunity for George, with Grace, to revisit Tolstoy’s home Yasnaya Polyana, where he had last been in 1935, sick, during a snowstorm, being nursed by the GPU. His ambassadorial angels again respected his privacy, allowing him a long talk with the great writer’s last secretary, Valentin Fedorovich Bulgakov, whose Russian carried “the authentic accent—rich, polished, elegant and musical—of the educated circles of those earlier times. So, I thought to myself, must Tolstoi himself have spoken.”⁴⁴

But running the embassy continued to frustrate Kennan. It was, he believed, “absurdly overstaffed.” The Soviet authorities were pressing for its relocation to a site more distant from the Kremlin. Meanwhile the younger Foreign Service officers were treating him, he complained to Bohlen, “with the same weary correctness which we reserved in our youth for chiefs whom we thought were hopelessly behind in their mental processes.” Two in particular provoked Kennan’s ire. They were Malcolm Toon and Richard Davies, later themselves ambassadors, respectively, to the Soviet Union and Poland, who after studying Russian at Columbia had been assigned to Moscow prior to Kennan’s appointment. They had the reputation, Cumming remembered, of being brilliant but troublesome: this the new ambassador certainly found them to be.⁴⁵

Toon and Davies had made the mistake, while still at Columbia, of entering an essay contest sponsored by the Foreign Service Journal. Without knowing that they would be working for Kennan, they decided to try their hand at a new “X” article, entitled “After Containment, What?” That strategy had been all right as far as it went, they argued, but it had done nothing to bring about “the destruction of Stalinism.” This would require a sustained effort to detach the Eastern European satellites from Soviet control, beginning right away with East Germany. Admittedly this might risk a third world war, but they concluded—rather too grandly—that such an outcome was unlikely. It “may not have been,” Davies later admitted, “the most judicious proposal” to have put forward at that particular time. “I may have been brash,” Toon added, “but I wasn’t stupid. I certainly would never have written this paper had I known [Kennan] was going to be our ambassador.” He and Davies were “quaking in our boots as to what would happen to us.”

“Friends” of the two arranged for Kennan to read their essay: soon thereafter the journal editors dropped it from consideration for a prize, indeed from publication in any form. Meanwhile the ambassador set about getting the miscreants out of Moscow. He requested early transfers—a cumbersome process—and approved unfavorable fitness reports that would plague the two for years to come. Three years earlier, however, Kennan himself had approved covert operations meant to bring about much of what Toon and Davies advocated. Some of his exasperation with them grew out of their open discussion of what should have been kept secret. Some of it may also have reflected concern over the 1952 presidential campaign: John Foster Dulles, no fan of Kennan’s, had condemned “containment” publicly in May and was calling for “liberation” as an alternative.⁴⁶

Kennan’s chief concern, however, was that the very success of Western policies—overt and covert—was making the Soviet regime desperate. It was behaving, he wrote to Doc Matthews, like a “savage beast” that “hisses and spits and snarls at us incessantly.” Only flimsy barriers deprived it of the pleasure, in the words of the Russian poet Aleksandr Blok, “of making our skeleton ‘clatter in his fond embrace.’” That made it all the more important to avoid provocations like the Toon-Davies article, or efforts to publicize a recent congressional report that had linked Stalin and his subordinates to the 1940 Katyn Forest massacre. It was of course accurate: no “serious student” of Soviet affairs believed otherwise. The truth would not shame the perpetrators of that atrocity, however, since their victims prior to Katyn ran “into the hundreds of thousands and probably millions.” Poking or prodding the beast made little sense, therefore, but perhaps someday, “if we keep cool and use our heads, we will manage to subdue him in such a way that he will cause us less trouble.”⁴⁷

Would the Americans, though, stay cool and use their heads? Late in the summer of 1952 Kennan learned, through a military attaché, of a plan he considered so shocking that he was unwilling to reveal its specifics for several decades to come: it involved preparations, if war broke out, to mine the Turkish Straits. The information convinced him that “the Pentagon now had the bit in its teeth.” As had been the case during World War II, there was insufficient vigor “on the political side of the Potomac” to balance military considerations. The scheme hardly seems surprising in retrospect. Turkey had joined NATO a few months earlier, and even prior to its doing so the National Security Council had deemed it a vital American interest to deny the Soviet Union the use of the straits if hostilities occurred.⁴⁸

Kennan was now hypersensitive, however, to the danger of blundering into a major war. Kremlin leaders did not want one, he still insisted, but NATO’s actions might provoke one. He felt caught “between immense forces over which I have little or no control.” His only hope was “to handle things in such a manner as to lessen the likelihood of the blindest and wildest sort of reactions on both sides.” With that objective in mind, he pouched a dispatch to Washington on September 8—at ten thousand words, it was one of his longest—that tried to see the situation through Soviet eyes. It made him sound, he admitted years later, like one of the early “revisionist” historians of the Cold War.⁴⁹

It was more sophisticated than that. Kennan portrayed a Soviet regime shaped by history and ideology, to be sure, but also subject to “considerable vacillation, doubt and conflict,” not only between individuals and groups but also “within individual minds.” Of course the system required the appearance of external hostility to justify its own internal oppression. That did not mean, however, that it always distinguished what it needed to see from what was really happening. Stalin and his associates combined rationality with its opposite. Because they were secretive and often erratic, “it is not easy to tell when you are going to touch one of their neuralgic and irrational points.”⁵⁰

Kennan wrote this document—or rather dictated it, since Hessman had now made it to Moscow—for a meeting of American chiefs of missions in Western Europe, to be held in London on September 24–26, 1952. These took place periodically, but it was unusual for the ambassador to the Soviet Union to be invited. That Kennan was asked to come suggests the seriousness with which his views were still taken, despite his having no instructions from Washington and no one to whom to talk in Moscow. The State Department would be remiss, one of Nitze’s aides wrote of Kennan’s lengthy dispatch, “if, in the light of this penetrating diagnosis of Soviet motivations and intentions, it did not review NATO objectives and activities.” But Under Secretary of State David Bruce, who organized the event, was less impressed: he had reached the point, he later recalled, where he no longer read Kennan’s reports “because they were so long-winded and so blatantly seeking to be literary rather than provide information.”⁵¹

Two Spaso House incidents deepened Kennan’s pessimism before he departed. One was the discovery that, during the mansion’s recent renovation, a sophisticated listening device had been installed inside the wooden Great Seal of the United States that hung in the ambassador’s study, a “gift” the Soviet government had presented to Harriman shortly after the end of the war. The embassy’s technicians found it by having Kennan dictate loudly to Hessman while they swept the room with their own detectors—a more sophisticated method than the ones he and Charlie Thayer had used in trying to fumigate Spaso against more primitive bugs during Joe Davies’s ambassadorship. With a grim sense of history, Kennan used as his text his own compilation of Neill Brown’s dispatches from the early 1850s, which Bullitt had sent to Washington in 1936: the State Department had just published these in 1952. The exposure of the new apparatus terrified the Burobin staff, while the guards at the gate scowled even more menacingly. “So dense was the atmosphere of anger and hostility,” Kennan remembered, “that one could have cut it with a knife.”⁵²

The other incident was more innocent but, for him, more significant. It involved Christopher—not quite three at the time—and a late summer afternoon he spent playing in a sand pile in the front garden, while his father sat reading a book. Bored with this,

At this point the guards—presumably under orders now to be even more vigilant—shooed the children away. The revelation that the beast could not tolerate even this most minimal poking caused Kennan’s patience to snap. Had he been a better ambassador, he later admonished himself, this would not have happened: “But give way it did; and it could not soon be restored.”⁵³

VI.

On the afternoon before his departure, Kennan asked to see Salisbury, Whitney, Eddy Gilmore, and Henry Shapiro, the principal American correspondents in Moscow. He was concerned about leaks in Washington, which seemed to suggest that his views of the Soviet Union were more critical than what he was saying publicly. Kennan assured the journalists, Salisbury recalled, that “he would say absolutely nothing while on this trip abroad; if he had something on his mind, he would call us in when he returned.” Salisbury accompanied him to the airport the next morning, September 19, 1952. “He was in a silent, withdrawn mood.”⁵⁴

The ambassadorial plane flew Kennan to West Berlin, accompanied this time not by his family but by the gadget found in the Great Seal. Expecting reporters when he landed at Tempelhof, determined to have safe answers ready, Kennan conducted an interview with himself in a small notebook while still airborne:

Upon arrival, though, one of the questions caught him off guard: were there many “social contacts” with Russians in Moscow? “Why, I thought to myself, must editors send reporters of such ignorance to interview ambassadors at airports?” The New York Times reported what he said next:

Kennan thought he had made the comment off the record. There was airplane noise, though, and if he did restrict it, he didn’t do so loudly enough. “Correct or incorrect, accurate or inaccurate, it was an extremely foolish thing for me to have said.”⁵⁵

He saw at once that he had gone too far. “Don’t be a boy, and don’t feed the little ego,” he scribbled in his notebook, just below his practice press conference, probably on the next leg of the flight to London—the shakiness of the handwriting suggests nervousness or turbulence or both. “Be deliberate. Learn not to mind pauses and silences…. Never be a raconteur unless you are desperate.” Upon his arrival he met Cumming, who was returning from Washington with the suicide pills Kennan had requested from the CIA. “George, why in the hell did you make that remark at Tempelhof?” Cumming asked, after watching him pocket the package. “Particularly since one thing you’ve always drilled in on all of us was: never, never, never, never compare the totalitarian structure of the Soviet Union with that of Nazi Germany?”

The only explanation Kennan provided was the story of Christopher and his friends playing at the Spaso House fence. “There is no Iron Curtain between children,” he claimed to have been thinking, until the guards corrected him. “I was still under that emotional strain when I made that statement.” “You’ll probably be ‘png’d’ for that [declared persona non grata],” Cumming warned. “Oh, no,” Kennan protested, “they wouldn’t dream of a ‘png.’”⁵⁶

For a week nothing happened. Kennan met with the other chiefs of mission, cautioned them that there was no longer a “diplomatic cushion between peace and war,” and came away convinced that he had made no impression, either orally or in his long dispatch: “The NATO people, as well as our own military authorities, were completely captivated and lost in the compulsive logic of the military equation.” Nor was there flexibility on Germany. No one had wanted to talk about reunification, or even a mutual withdrawal of occupation forces. The only option was to wait for Moscow’s authority to collapse in East Germany and in turn over all of Eastern Europe—in short, the Toon-Davies plan. “[I]t was hopeless to expect the Soviet Government to agree to any such thing as this.”

What, then, was an ambassador in the U.S.S.R. to say or do? Walking the streets of London afterward with his embassy counselor Elim O’Shaughnessy, Kennan concluded “that war had to be accepted as inevitable, or very nearly so.” To think that he would have to return to confront more “foul, malicious, and insulting propaganda,” knowing that there was just enough truth behind it to make it impossible to challenge, “seemed to me as bitter [a reflection] as a representative of our country could ever have had.”⁵⁷

It fell to Pravda to spare him that prospect, when on September 26 it furiously attacked him for his Tempelhof statement. “Kennan in ecstasy lied,” it shrieked, by claiming that Americans had no social contacts with Soviet citizens: had not the vice president of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union praised the ease with which his delegation talked with Muscovites during their visit a year earlier? Such “truthful and sincere words… nail to the pillar of shame the American slanderer under the mask of a diplomat.” But Kennan had committed a much greater offense by

This was, after all, the same Kennan who, as related by “the English journalist Parker,” had sneered at the crowds celebrating Hitler’s defeat outside the American embassy in May 1945: “They think that the war has ended and it is just beginning.”⁵⁸

Kennan’s first instinct was to defend himself. What he had said was not new, he assured the State Department—that was true as far as it went, but he failed to mention the comparison to Nazi Germany. Instead he cited his conciliatory attitude toward the Soviet Union to explain Pravda’s anger. It had alarmed “elements” who wanted him out of Moscow, because if he ever did talk with Stalin, the old man would realize the extent to which his subordinates had “consistently misinformed him about [the] outside world.” The delay in Kennan’s agrément, his protests over the propaganda campaign, the provocateur in the embassy, the prestige he enjoyed among foreign diplomats in the city, the fact that his experience in Soviet affairs went back “farther than it is wise for even Soviet memories and acquaintances to go”—all of this had made his ambassadorship an issue within the Kremlin hierarchy beyond what the “dominant group” was willing to allow.⁵⁹

“Cannot anticipate Department’s reaction,” George cabled Annelise from London, “but think it quite possible they may wish me to return and brave it out. Meanwhile there is no change in my plans, and see no reason for any change in yours at the moment…. Lots of love, and don’t worry.” The attack on Kennan, Acheson did indeed announce, had been “wholly unjustified,” since he had accurately described life in the Soviet Union. Nor was the State Department planning to recall him, its press spokesman commented on the twenty-ninth, noting that “we haven’t had a peep” out of Moscow regarding his status.⁶⁰

By that time, though, Kennan had begun to grasp the paradox that confronted him. He had given up on Washington for being too warlike, but now Moscow was giving up on him for just the same reason. “What the United States Government started on one day,” he lamented in his diary, “the Soviet Government finished on the next.” In this exposed position, with the world watching,

Then, on October 3, Moscow produced not a peep but a cannon blast: Andrey Vyshinsky, the foreign minister, summoned the American chargé d’affaires, John McSweeney, and handed him a note declaring Kennan persona non grata for having made “slanderous attacks hostile to the Soviet Union in a rude violation of generally recognized norms of international law.” It demanded his immediate recall. Kennan thereby became the first—and so far the only—U.S. minister or ambassador to be so ejected in over 230 years of Russian-American diplomatic relations.⁶¹

This produced, however, no major crisis. Preoccupied by the heated presidential contest between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, most Americans hardly noticed. Even Jeanette, writing from Highland Park, devoted three pages to the election but just two sentences to George’s travails. The only significant demand for severing diplomatic ties came from a right-wing Republican senator, William Knowland of California: Acheson brushed it aside, with Kennan’s approval. Despite his public support, the secretary of state blamed Kennan more than he did Moscow. Kennan’s had been, Acheson wrote in the single paragraph he devoted to the affair in his massive memoir, an “unusual statement by an experienced diplomat.” He held the barb for the end. “I sent… Bohlen to accompany Ambassador Kennan to Switzerland, there to await the arrival of Mrs. Kennan and their children with such patience and taciturnity as he could summon.”⁶²

In fact, Kennan was already in Geneva visiting Joan, who had just enrolled at the International School, when the news of his expulsion reached him. He took refuge in a movie theater to “make myself comprehend the whole incredible reality of what had occurred”—only to find, with disgust, that he was becoming absorbed “in the damned film.” So he turned to copying out lines in his notebook from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII:

But Cardinal Wolsey offered little consolation for Kennan’s personal and professional humiliations, and was of no help at all in resolving a major logistical difficulty, which was how to get the family out of Moscow.⁶³

That task fell chiefly to Annelise, who had already had some difficult weeks. Accompanied by Toon, she had taken Grace to Leningrad, but the police harassed them throughout the visit. They then sailed to Stockholm on a Soviet ship that had not been much better: upon docking, “we were like two colts being let out in the spring after having been in the barn!” Grace went from there back to Radcliffe, while Annelise met Joan in Denmark and dropped her off in Geneva. Then in Bonn, visiting John and Patricia Davies, Annelise came down with ptomaine poisoning. After recovering, she flew back to Moscow on September 18, using the Air Force plane that was to take George out the next day. It “wasn’t much fun,” she recalled, being buzzed by a Soviet fighter on the descent, and upon landing “the first thing I heard about was the microphone they had found.” But Wendy and Christopher could not be without at least one parent. “George flew to London this morning and I am left behind,” Annelise wrote Jeanette on the nineteenth, in an unusual acknowledgment that she was beginning to feel sorry for herself: “It seems like a mistake.”⁶⁴

She learned from McSweeney, immediately after he saw Vyshinsky on October 3, that George had been declared persona non grata. As surprised as everyone else, Annelise now had to organize an abrupt departure. She had agreed to dine and attend a dance concert that evening with the wife of the British ambassador, who was also away. With the news still secret, “I felt like a fool—I couldn’t tell her. I thought: ‘This is the last time. I’m never going to do this again.’” By the time she returned to Spaso, the word was out. “They asked: ‘When can you leave?’ I said: ‘I can leave as soon as that plane can get in!’”

It came on October 8. Annelise gave a party that afternoon for the entire embassy staff, the American journalists, the crew of the plane, and Father Louis Robert Brassard, a Catholic priest serving the diplomatic community in Moscow. He offered her a ticket for that evening’s performance of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Annelise was reluctant to go by herself, so he came up with another one using his Belgian embassy connections, and she took Mrs. McSweeney. “That was my last night in Moscow.”⁶⁵

The next morning Annelise, the two children, and their three Danish servants left for Cologne, where George was to meet them, on the now ubiquitous Air Force plane. “Embassy staff and quasi totality of non satellite diplomatic corps were present at her departure,” O’Shaughnessy cabled the State Department: the military attachés showed up in full uniform. “Whether or not I had been up to my job,” George recalled, in admiration, “she had been up to hers.”⁶⁶

VII.

The postmortems began at once: how could so skilled a diplomat have said such a stupid thing? Kennan at first feigned insouciance. “I have a good conscience about the matter,” he wrote his old Princeton classmate Bernard Gufler at the end of October. The Soviets would not have expelled him unless he was making them “uncomfortable” by “coming too close to the exposure of some of their frauds and outrages, which it seems to me it was my job to do.” He was happy not to have to go back, and expected to spend another year and a half in Washington before becoming eligible for retirement.⁶⁷

But had it indeed been his job, a British Foreign Office professional wondered, to deliver “an unforgivable insult to Soviet ears” and to do it, of all places, in Berlin? “As ‘Mr. X’, and perhaps as a too-penetrating observer, [Kennan] has never in reality been persona grata; once he stepped outside what the Russians consider the role of an ambassador, the Soviet leaders may have taken some malicious pleasure in making him look rather foolish.” Kennan had weakened the position of all Western diplomats in Moscow, Joxe complained. He would never be allowed back in the U.S.S.R. An Irish journalist called Kennan’s Tempelhof outburst “one of the worse gaffes of postwar diplomacy.”⁶⁸

Given how often Kennan had stressed the need to avoid provocations, one of the Moscow embassy’s junior provocateurs, Dick Davies, wondered if he had done it on purpose. Having built himself up as “the right man in the right spot at the right time,” Kennan found it intolerable that Stalin had not received him and that the atmosphere in Moscow had been so hostile. “[T]here is a great hand pressing down on all of us,” Davies remembered him saying one evening as they watched his angels—“goons,” the younger man called them—insulating a theater audience from them during an intermission. Kennan believed that he had somehow failed, “both in terms of his own self-image and of the image he felt he had in the eyes of others.” He could not resign: that would have been an admission of failure. “So how to get out of this?… [P]erhaps that was the way.”⁶⁹

Charles Burton Marshall, a member of Nitze’s Policy Planning Staff who saw Kennan in Germany soon after his expulsion, was even more certain of this. If there were to be no contacts with the Soviet leadership, Marshall remembered him saying, then there was no point to remaining in Moscow, but there was a compelling reason to come home. Eisenhower would be elected president and would probably appoint John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state. Recognizing his own limitations, Dulles would make Kennan his under secretary. Kennan would agree, on the condition that Eisenhower and Dulles repudiate McCarthyism unequivocally. It was thus necessary to return to Washington, for there would be a lot to do in getting the new administration under way.⁷⁰

The only source for this conversation is Marshall’s memory three decades later. It’s possible, though, that Kennan could have said something like this. He needed a better explanation for what had happened than that he had lost control of himself, as he had initially admitted to Cumming, over an interrupted children’s game. And he was capable of erratic grandiosity. He had felt neglected in Moscow while simultaneously placing himself at the center of Stalin’s concerns. Why should he not have assumed that Washington, which had also neglected him, was now eagerly awaiting his arrival?

Two pieces of contemporary evidence suggest that he did. Kennan had alerted the State Department back in July that he might have to resign if John Paton Davies were convicted of perjury. Both presidential candidates were busy, he knew, but it might be worth letting them know “that this cloud hangs over my own future,” for “they will both find that the problem of replacing me [in Moscow] is not the simplest of problems.” Then on October 7, four days after it had become clear, for a different reason, that he would have to be replaced, Kennan suggested to Bohlen that he be reassigned to the National Security Council to assess Soviet developments for the president and the secretary of state. He did not specify which ones, but he knew that Truman and Acheson would not be there much longer. Bohlen responded positively, but—on Acheson’s instructions—he did not encourage Kennan to hurry home.⁷¹

If Kennan had not meant to provoke his own expulsion, Paul Mason, the assistant under secretary in the British Foreign Office, observed, then “his lack of self control is extraordinary.” So Adam Watson, of the Washington embassy, sought an explanation from Bohlen, now back from seeing Kennan in Geneva. Kennan had hoped to keep the Kremlin from grievous miscalculations like those of Hitler with respect to the British in 1939 or Stalin’s in setting off the Korean War, Bohlen surmised. But the “Hate America” campaign, together with his own isolation, had quickly convinced Kennan that this would not be possible. Feeling “that sense of escape from prison which people have when they emerge from behind the Iron Curtain,” he had spoken unguardedly at Tempelhof, believing his comments to be off the record. Kennan had not done so to “see whether they would throw him out,” Bohlen insisted, but Watson could not help wondering “whether subconsciously he did not feel inclined to take some risk.”⁷²

In fact, Bohlen himself was mystified. “Why he did it, I don’t know,” he recalled when asked about the incident years later. “George is certainly an experienced enough man… to realize that you can’t make a statement [like that] without having it get in the papers.” It had been “one of the most extraordinary things in George’s career.” But Bohlen was able to determine, to his satisfaction, why the Soviets responded in the way that they did. Two years after Eisenhower appointed him as Kennan’s successor—Bohlen had arrived in Moscow in April 1953, five weeks after Stalin’s death—he found himself in a conversation with Politburo members Anastas Mikoyan and Lazar Kaganovich at a diplomatic reception. All Kremlin leaders including Stalin, they assured Bohlen, had held Kennan in high regard “as a serious and intelligent student of Soviet affairs.” They particularly respected ambassadors “who stood up firmly for their country’s interest,” as opposed to those “who attempt to ingratiate themselves with the Soviet Government by hypocrisy or other means.” They regretted the remarks that had led to Kennan’s expulsion and were still not able to understand how he could have “departed from the accepted tenets of diplomacy.”

Bohlen defended his friend, pointing out how “tricky” it was to deal with the press in impromptu settings, something with which Soviet officials had little experience: the expulsion had been “far and away beyond the requirements of the situation.” But the problem, Mikoyan explained, was where Kennan had made his remarks: “In Berlin it was too much. That we should be insulted precisely from Berlin was intolerable.” Both men seemed to be saying, Bohlen concluded, “that it was Stalin himself who had ordered George’s expulsion.”⁷³

Kennan eventually acknowledged having provoked his own expulsion. All of his excuses, he admitted in his 1972 memoir, had been attempts to “salve the wounded ego…. At heart, I was deeply shamed and shaken by what had occurred.” Had he really been fit for the job in the first place? He was a good reporting officer, he thought, and did not normally shatter crockery. He had not understood, to be sure, that he was simply to “keep the seat warm” in Moscow until the next administration took over: “A little more clarity on this point might have… helped me to accept more philosophically the irritations of the situation into which I had been placed.” But even with such guidance,

The exposure of these inadequacies was painful at the time and would long remain so. “When I reflect, however, that it [caused a] change in my own life which I would never have encompassed on my own initiative, I realize that I must not protest this turn of fate too much. God’s ways are truly unfathomable. Who am I to say that I could have arranged it better?”⁷⁴

VIII.

George, Annelise, Christopher, and Wendy waited out the 1952 presidential election in the comfortable guest quarters of the U.S. high commissioner in Bad Godesberg. “Just what dangers my presence in the country would have added to the fortunes of the Democratic party I was unable to imagine,” George recalled, “but I was thoroughly humbled by what had just befallen me, and was in no mood to argue.” Following Eisenhower’s landslide victory on November 4, the family sailed for home on the SS America, arriving in New York on the eleventh. All four Kennans rated photographs in the New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times, but George was wary about answering questions. “I would like to say something,” he assured the reporters, but he refrained apart from observing, when asked whether the Moscow post was the most difficult an American diplomat could take, “I think your imagination will tell you as much as I could say.”⁷⁵

With the Princeton house rented in the expectation of a longer Moscow stay, the only place the Kennans could go was the Pennsylvania farm: not unusually, it was in need of repairs. As far as the U.S. government was concerned, George F. Kennan was still its ambassador to the Soviet Union: he would remain so until his replacement was named. But he spent these weeks negotiating only with plumbers, carpenters, and painters, while doing a fair amount of the work himself. The family were well and happy to be back, Jeanette wrote Kent after spending Thanksgiving with them, although “disappointed not to have been able to continue their good work in Moscow.” It was just for that reason, she added, that the Soviets wanted “to get rid of them.” The method chosen “was very harmless compared to what it might have been.”⁷⁶

Kennan saw Acheson shortly after his arrival and paid his respects to Truman early in December. Neither mentioned a future appointment: both had “the faraway look of men who know that they are about to be relieved of heavy responsibilities.” Back in town on the eighteenth to deliver his customary end-of-term lecture at the National War College, Kennan avoided any discussion of recent events other than to acknowledge, regarding the challenge of communism, that “we have held our own.” Mistakes had been made, but with proper attention to lessons learned, there was no reason why, fifteen or twenty years hence, “our children will still not be listening to the World Series and running around in Chevro-lets and doing all the things we associate with the American way of life.”⁷⁷

By Christmas, the work at the farm was mostly done. Joan was home from Geneva, Grace had arrived from Radcliffe, and the Burlinghams—Annelise’s sister Mossik’s American relatives—were also there. “[Y]ou can imagine how very lively it was,” Annelise wrote Frieda Por. “It is nice to be a large noisy family.” Meanwhile George had thanked Kent for the grapefruit, “the like of which we never see locally.” With fifteen people in the house, it had come in handy. The house was Chekhovian in a happier sense, then, than when they had left it in April: the Cherry Orchard outside East Berlin remained reassuringly distant from Moscow.

“I thought it was unfortunate what he said,” Annelise replied many years later, when asked about George’s Tempelhof embarrassment. “He should certainly never have said it, and I think he feels that way himself.” She was sure, though, that if he had said nothing at all, “they would have tried to do something else. They had decided that they were going to get him out. I think they would have done something much worse.”⁷⁸

“I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ME AFTER THE 20th of January,” George wrote Kent on Christmas Day 1952, “but think it doubtful that I shall be given any post of major political responsibility.” One reason was that he had worked with Democrats, and that “my name has been prominently connected with the word ‘containment,’ which has gone out of style.” Another was that “I have had the temerity to say things about the role of morality in foreign policy which sound disrespectful of some of the favorite poses of American statesmen.” He had only a year and a quarter to go before becoming eligible for retirement, however. At that point, “I hope to leave government service altogether and contribute what I can, thenceforth, as a scholar, commentator, and critic.”¹

This bleak assessment reflected the fact that Eisenhower, as expected, had nominated John Foster Dulles to be his secretary of state. Kennan’s relationship with Dulles had been strained since shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, when they differed over the desirability of admitting Mao’s China to the United Nations and of sending MacArthur’s forces across the 38th parallel: Dulles had described Kennan at the time as a “dangerous man.” With Dulles’s encouragement, Republican demands to replace “containment” with “liberation” had dominated the 1952 presidential campaign, and on September 26—the day Pravda attacked Kennan for his Tempelhof statement—Dulles also attacked him in a St. Louis speech for having repudiated, in American Diplomacy, legal and moral principles. “I disagree and have long disagreed with his basic philosophy,” Dulles explained to a friend who thought the criticism unfair, “and have repeatedly made this clear on many occasions.”²

Nevertheless, he was careful to send Kennan, who was still in Bad Godesberg, a copy of what he had said: “As you will see, I took issue with… your recent book. I hope you will not feel that I did so in any improper way.” Kennan responded by forwarding his unpublished reply to Father Walsh’s harsher denunciations, as a way of conveying “a somewhat clearer idea of how I feel about morality in foreign policy.” Dulles acknowledged this as “clarifying” but insisted that “there are certain basic moral concepts which all peoples and nations can and do comprehend, and to which it is legitimate to appeal as providing some common standard of international conduct.”³

The correspondence veiled changes of mind by both men. Dulles was distancing himself from “containment” despite the fact that he and his fellow Republicans had supported that concept when Kennan first articulated it: they raised no significant objections during the 1948 campaign. But in the aftermath of the Democrats’ victory that year, the Soviet atomic bomb, the communist takeover in China, espionage revelations, the Korean War, and China’s intervention in that conflict, Dulles had come to regard “containment” as fair game; hence his call for “liberation” as an alternative. Meanwhile Kennan was distancing himself from his own support, while running the Policy Planning Staff, for efforts to detach the Soviet Union from its satellites. Given the sensitivities he had witnessed in Moscow, Republican promises of “liberation” could, he worried, provoke a major war.⁴

Even if Kennan had not expected to become Dulles’s chief foreign policy adviser, as Charles Burton Marshall would subsequently claim, he did assume that the new administration “would still attach value to my opinions and to the preservation of a mutual relationship of cordiality and understanding.” Weeks passed without any word, however, “and I, over-proud and over-shy as usual, was reluctant to make the first move.” That was the situation when George wrote Kent on Christmas Day. Friends and colleagues were beginning to treat him, he later recalled, “with the elaborate politeness and forbearance one reserves for someone who has committed a social gaffe too appalling for discussion…. It was as though my objective judgment had been somehow discredited with my discretion.”⁵

There were, nonetheless, invitations to speak, most of which he declined. Kennan made an exception, however, for the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania State Bar Association in Scranton on January 16, 1953. “I am now a resident of Pennsylvania,” he explained to the State Department, “but have had very little opportunity to take part in civic affairs here, and feel that this is one way I can show an… appreciation for the many kindnesses people have shown me.” He had said nothing publicly about Soviet-American relations while serving as ambassador, and silence might also be necessary in any new appointment: “It seemed to me, therefore, that any statement I might make on this subject should be made during the incumbency of the old administration, in order that the new one might remain wholly uncommitted by what I had said.” Kennan submitted his text for review, and Bohlen, in his capacity as counselor, cleared it.⁶

He was hardly the first American who had gone to Moscow with high hopes and disappointing results, Kennan reminded his audience: “My own recent experience was unusual in form, but not in content.” Soviet hostility arose from “their necessities, not ours.” It would give way eventually “to something more healthy, because Providence has a way of punishing those who persist long and willfully in ignoring great realities.” The most prudent American response would be to stay strong and remain calm, while waiting for this to happen.

At this point, though, Kennan’s rhetoric ensnared him yet again. He chose this moment—four days before Eisenhower’s inauguration, one day after Dulles had reiterated his commitment to “liberation” before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—to denounce that concept:

There was no place in foreign policy for “emotionalism, the striking of heroic attitudes, and demagoguery of all sorts, …no place for impulsiveness, no place for self-seeking, no place for irresponsible experiments, and no place for the spotlight of sensationalism.” It was as if he invited the front-page headline that ran the next morning in The Washington Post: “Dulles Policy ‘Dangerous,’ Kennan Says.”

The story, by Ferdinand Kuhn, reported that “the foremost government expert on Russia” had “sounded a warning last night against the John Foster Dulles policy of encouraging the liberation of captive peoples in Europe and Asia.” It didn’t matter that Kennan had neither named Dulles nor used the word “dangerous.” It appeared “that I had attacked a Secretary [of State] before he had even taken office. I hadn’t meant to do that.” Professing shock at what had happened, claiming that he had not had Dulles in mind and had no significant differences with him, Kennan asked Doc Matthews to let the new secretary know that all he wanted was “to make myself useful in some capacity until I become eligible for retirement.” Any job appropriate to his rank and experience would do.⁷

Dulles asked to see Kennan on January 23, listened to his explanation but promised no new appointment. That afternoon his press spokesman, Michael McDermott, announced that the secretary regarded the matter as “closed.” Did that mean, a reporter asked, that Kennan “is in good standing and that everything is fine and dandy?” Dulles had been “too busy on other things” to think about Kennan’s future, McDermott replied, but the Scranton speech would not jeopardize it. “Still not a single word or hint,” Kennan fretted on the twenty-fifth; “nor has any one in the new administration [sought] my opinion about anything to do with the Soviet Union.” Several weeks later he was still in a state of suspension, “the only advantages of which are that I continue to receive salary checks (as Ambassador) and am under no obligation to be in Washington.”⁸

“[W]e still don’t know any more about what we are going to do,” Annelise complained to Jeanette, except that “with each appointment it seems to become clear that they are not going to use their top Foreign Service people for much.” “To say that we are on tenterhooks,” Jeanette commiserated, seemed slight “compared to what you must be feeling.” Things were “going very badly indeed,” George admitted to Annelise early in February. It was “not just that they have been too busy. There has been a decision that I am not to be consulted or used in any way in this country, but am to be ‘sent away’ as a sort of punishment for my association with the Truman administration.” It might be Turkey or Yugoslavia, and under normal circumstances he would be happy to have either of those posts. In the current climate, though, he was inclined to retire if, as it now appeared, he might be allowed to do so. That would require “a pretty drastic financial readjustment,” but “the more I see of the new administration, the less I wish to have anything to do with it.”⁹

After learning that Eisenhower had asked Bohlen to replace him in Moscow, Kennan twice sought clarification of his status from Dulles: he was still the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, and the president would at some point have to accept his resignation. But the secretary of state chose not to respond to either of these communications, despite the fact that the second one was written while Kennan was in Washington consulting with Bohlen and Allen Dulles, the new director of the CIA, on the implications of Stalin’s death, which had occurred on March 5. The uncertainty finally ended on the twelfth with a call from William H. Lawrence of The New York Times, who let Kennan know that he would not be getting another post. Under Foreign Service rules, any ambassador not assigned to a new one within three months of leaving the previous one had to retire. Lawrence published his story the next day, revealing that Kennan’s pension would be $7,000 annually, about $500 less than it would have been with a final ambassadorship.¹⁰

Only at that point—Friday, March 13, 1953—did the secretary of state call Kennan in to tell him “that he knew of no ‘niche’ for me in government at this time, and thought I would have difficulty getting confirmation by the Senate for any representative position, tainted as I am with ‘containment.’” And then, as if nothing had happened, Dulles asked Kennan to assess the implications of Stalin’s demise: “You interest me when you talk about these matters. Very few other people do.” It was, Kennan thought, as if he had told Annelise that he was divorcing her but had added that “I love the way you cook scrambled eggs, and I wonder if you’d mind fixing me up a batch of them right now, before you go.” The two men parted, Kennan reported to Oppenheimer, “in what was apparently a hearty agreement that I should now retire, although our reasons for this view were not identical.”¹¹

Kennan asked Dulles to announce the arrangement as soon as possible but another long silence ensued, until on April 6 he was shown a draft statement implying that he was retiring at his own request. He refused to approve it, so Dulles—claiming confusion—called him in again the next day to ask what he really wanted. That depended, Kennan replied, on whether the secretary of state and the president really wanted him. Dulles again dithered, so Kennan wrote the press release himself:

It had been, Kennan admitted to Acheson, “a strange and chilling experience.” His ambassadorship ended officially on April 29, but George remained on call in Washington for another three months, so he and Annelise rented a house on Quebec Street for the summer.

When his last day at the State Department came, Kennan spent the morning working in an empty office, had lunch, and then went looking for Hessman, who would be staying on for a few weeks. Not finding her, he left a note saying “that I was leaving and would not be back—ever.” He was able to take leave of another secretary and the fifth-floor receptionist: “We all nearly wept.” Then he rode the elevator down, “as on a thousand other occasions, and suddenly there I was on the steps of the building, in the baking glaring heat: a retired officer, a private citizen, after 27 years of official life. I was not unhappy.”

Perhaps—but it was an inglorious conclusion to an illustrious career. No Foreign Service officer had advanced more rapidly within its ranks. None had more significantly shaped grand strategy at the highest levels of government. None had created, if inadvertently, a “school” of international relations theory. And yet Kennan walked out of the State Department on July 29, 1953, with hardly anyone noticing. He was not prepared to reflect, at that point, on how this had happened: “Someone else, I knew, would have to strike the balance, if one was ever to be struck, between justice and injustice, failure and accomplishment.”¹²

I.

“Why hell,” Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan told Kennan, after learning that Dulles had denied him a new appointment, “you wouldn’t have had any trouble getting confirmed.” Ferguson had asked to see Kennan to get his opinion of Bohlen, whose Moscow nomination had run into trouble. The problem was Yalta, the wartime conference associated now, in the minds of Republicans eager for “liberation,” with the alleged “sell-out” of Eastern Europe. Bohlen had attended as Roosevelt’s interpreter and one of his advisers. So had Alger Hiss. That was enough to upset Ferguson, despite Kennan’s reassurances. It infuriated Joseph McCarthy and his senatorial allies.

Eisenhower fought back: otherwise, he feared, he would be relinquishing his authority over the conduct of foreign policy. The battle, which consumed most of March 1953, was heated, public, and ultimately successful. It was the first time the White House had defended a Foreign Service officer accused of disloyalty—Truman had done little to assist John Paton Davies and others similarly accused. The victory was all the more important given Dulles’s demands, which had offended many of his State Department subordinates, that they “positively” demonstrate their patriotism. But even as Eisenhower struggled to save Bohlen, he did nothing to retain Kennan who, as the Alsops pointedly noted in their column on April 12, would have accepted a position if one had been offered him. His “unequalled knowledge” and “intuitive brilliance” were assets “the American Government cannot replace at any price.” The Chicago Sun-Times ran an editorial cartoon a few days later showing Dulles in a baseball uniform winding up for a pitch, with an empty second base labeled “George Kennan’s retirement” looming behind him.¹³

Kennan was the same age as Bohlen, similarly trained, and—in Ferguson’s view, at least—less controversial. He had not been at Yalta and had made no secret of his objections to Roosevelt’s policies. His “X” article had been an attack on Henry Wallace. He was, to be sure, the architect of “containment” and had spoken out against “liberation,” but it would have been hard to portray the author of American Diplomacy as a dangerously naïve idealist. Nor would it have been easy to suspect him of sympathy for the Soviet Union, that country having just kicked him out. And even if Dulles did not think highly of Kennan, Eisenhower did: he knew Kennan from the National War College, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Policy Planning Staff. “I respect the man’s mind as well as his integrity and knowledge,” he had written a friend in 1950. As president of Columbia University, Eisenhower even tried to recruit Kennan to run its Institute of War and Peace Studies. Why did he not, then, as president of the United States, insist that his secretary of state find Kennan a “niche”?¹⁴

The Bohlen nomination fight suggests one reason. Kennan was not as vulnerable, but Dulles had attacked him during the campaign and Kennan appeared to have struck back in his Scranton speech. Eisenhower didn’t need another controversy just at this moment. Moreover, Kennan had mentioned retirement in the apology he asked Matthews to convey to Dulles: “This was foolish. I shouldn’t have done it.” Dulles was “a cagey, tricky man,” with no appreciation of what lay behind this gesture: “He simply used this as a way of getting rid of me.” Kennan could have “raised hell” by going to Eisenhower and saying: “Look here, I’ve [had] an honorable career. How can you let me be fired in this way?” But Dulles could have simply said: “I understood you’d wanted to leave the Service.”¹⁵

There was, however, a deeper issue, which was that Kennan had made himself hard to place: it’s revealing that Acheson, exasperated by the Tempelhof gaffe, had offered no new appointment either. Unlike Bohlen, always a smooth operator, Kennan had gained a reputation for brittleness. “He doesn’t bend,” Isaiah Berlin recalled. “He breaks.” Years later Robert R. Bowie, who became Dulles’s Policy Planning Staff director, suggested some reasons why.

Kennan had the intuitions and insights—but also the volatility—of a poet, Bowie thought: these made him too “reactive.” Convinced that people in power were taking the wrong direction, he would simplify and thus dramatize his argument, as in his call for toughness toward the U.S.S.R. in the “long telegram” and the “X” article. That would persuade them, but Kennan would then worry that they had gone too far. They were now seeing the Soviets “as an implacable foe, not subject to change, and not open to the ordinary rules of Great Power rivalry.” So Kennan would jump to the opposite camp, where once more he would exaggerate “because he feels it’s so important to get things back into balance. And so it goes.”

With constituencies to hold together and coalitions to maintain, Bowie pointed out, governments can’t manage such fine adjustments. Acheson understood that, but “I don’t think George feels those constraints, or if he does feel them I think he resists them. Getting it intellectually right is of very high value.” Kennan had an “academic” mentality, in that he always wanted to reconsider things. He preferred committing himself not “to a course of action, but to a course of analysis, and therefore if he gets better insights later on, he not only feels free but feels obligated to modify it.” In doing so, his empathy would “go deaf.” That left Kennan surprised when people took what he had said or done in ways he hadn’t anticipated. Of course the Soviets were going to expel him after he compared life in Moscow to internment in Nazi Germany, but he was “genuinely taken aback.” Of course the Scranton speech was going to offend Dulles, but Kennan just “didn’t visualize it.”

Bowie saw one other problem, which was that the higher Kennan rose in the Foreign Service, the more he took things personally. However passionate his prose, the author of the “long telegram” had not seen himself as the target of Stalin’s hostility. The recently expelled ambassador to the Soviet Union did see himself in this way. Kennan was convinced, his friend Bill Bundy added, “that they were deliberately doing nasty things to him, not just to the United States.” His “extreme sensitivity” made it hard for him not to be affected even in situations “where there was nothing you could do about it.” Success in government was a kind of “slavery,” Berlin explained, because the more responsibility you wielded, the less freedom you had to say what you really thought. “The State Department dehydrates you.”¹⁶

Eisenhower sensed without saying so that Kennan had outlived his usefulness as a diplomat: he made no effort to reverse Dulles’s decision. At least one White House aide, though, believed that Kennan was being shabbily treated. The secretary of state’s dislike for Kennan’s “theorizing” was understandable, Emmet John Hughes, a presidential speechwriter, pointed out to Chief of Staff Sherman Adams. But there was a difference “between (a) the manifest right to ‘ease out’ a diplomat whose views are felt to be contrary to prevailing policy and (b) the use of this right in a way that is needlessly rude and perhaps offensive not only to one man but to the service he represents.” Dulles had let two months pass without acknowledging Kennan’s resignation. Now he was using “the crude—and silent—expedient of simply failing to offer him a diplomatic post,” a procedure “designed for the dismissal of plain incompetents.” It was a “singular and studied insult.”

“I can appreciate and must respect your wishes [to retire],” Eisenhower wrote to Kennan on July 8, using a draft Hughes had prepared. “Your years of devoted work in the Foreign Service certainly entitle you to such a choice.” It would have been a routine send-off, had it not been for the fact that, at just this moment and in a characteristically subtle way, the president was making Kennan his top, if temporary, policy planner. His assignment—of which Hughes knew nothing—was to liberate Eisenhower from the “liberation” strategy to which Dulles had tried to commit him during the 1952 campaign.

II.

Dulles’s bluster had long made Eisenhower uneasy, but in a Republican Party still dominated by isolationists and McCarthyites, he seemed the only plausible possibility to run the Department of State. Despite the president’s military background, it was not his habit to discipline subordinates: instead, he sought to educate his secretary of state and others within his administration about the probable risks, costs, and consequences of a more aggressive strategy. The mechanism was Project Solarium, an elaborate National Security Council exercise Eisenhower authorized in May 1953. Three “teams” would make the case, respectively, for “containment” as the Truman administration had understood it; for “deterrence,” which would involve threatening nuclear retaliation if the Soviet Union or its allies attempted further gains anywhere; and for “liberation,” which meant using political, psychological, economic, and covert methods to reverse the advances those adversaries had already made. The president asked Kennan, still on the State Department payroll, to chair the first group, “Task Force A.”¹⁷

Consisting of seven members each, the teams met at the National War College from June 10 to July 15. They had access to everything, Kennan recalled, even the most sensitive intelligence information. “It was all highly secret…. I was not permitted—nobody was permitted—to say anything about it.” The cover story, which Kennan used even in his private diary, was that the work involved updating the school’s curriculum. “We all knew we couldn’t expect to put our own personal opinion through pure, that we would have to come to some sort of a collective idea…. And that we did.”¹⁸

Task Force A’s report nevertheless reflected Kennan’s thinking throughout its 152 pages. It identified three great principles, each consistent with what he had been arguing since returning from Moscow in 1946:

Contrary to Dulles’s claims, the United States and its allies were already stronger than their adversaries. With “the wise and flexible application of [this] integrated national strategy,” that advantage would “bring about the diminution of Soviet-Communist external influence until it ceases to be a substantial threat to peace and security.”

Two great temptations, Kennan warned, might deflect the nation from this course. One was resorting to war, a path “full of risk, empty of calculation, and unwarrantedly hazardous to the continued existence of the U.S.” The other was succumbing to internal “totalitarian” pressures, for that would ruin the reputation of a nation seeking to lead the world in “the defense of free institutions.” Within those limits, the United States could expect the “progressive retraction of Soviet control” from Eastern Europe and China; the “discrediting of Soviet power and Communist ideology” elsewhere; and an increase “in internal stresses and conflicts within the Soviet system,” which would force its rulers “to accept the necessity of adjusting their objectives to those of peaceful co-existence with the Free World.”

Kennan even got Task Force A to endorse his own Program A. The United States should seek “a reunified, sovereign, independent Germany with a democratic form of government.” All foreign occupation forces would withdraw, or at least retreat to enclaves supplied by sea. The new state would have its own military establishment, except for “atomic or other weapons of mass destruction.” And it would operate free from political control by either the Soviet Union or the West. If Stalin’s successors accepted these proposals, they would have rolled back their own influence in Central Europe. If they rejected them, they would “bear the onus of remaining in East Germany solely on the basis of naked power.” This policy would achieve beneficial results “under either eventuality.”¹⁹

The Task Force A report easily overshadowed the others in the force of its logic and the quality of its prose. It showed that “containment” and “liberation” were not mutually exclusive, indeed that the first could bring about the second. It stressed the extent to which irresponsibility in choosing means—whether by too casually risking war or by too fecklessly indulging McCarthy—could corrupt the ultimate end, which was to preserve the American way of life. It was a far more effective attack on Dulles than Kennan’s Scranton speech had been. And most important, it carried the authority of Eisenhower, who had entrusted him with preparing it in the first place.

All three task forces presented their recommendations to the president and his top advisers at a White House meeting on July 16, 1953. As Kennan began speaking, he was amused to find a “silent and humble but outwardly respectful” Dulles sitting in the first row: “I could talk, and he had to listen.” Eisenhower, fully in charge, dominated the discussion that followed. What he said convinced Kennan that “he was prepared to accept the thesis we had put forward, that our approach to the Soviet Union, as it had been followed in the immediately preceding years, was basically sound.” Some adjustments might be necessary, but “there was no need for a drastic change.” If, therefore, Dulles had triumphed “by disembarrass-ing himself of my person, I… had my revenge by saddling him, inescapably, with my policy.”²⁰

Historians, on the whole, have sustained that judgment. Kennan would find much to criticize in the Eisenhower-Dulles strategy as it evolved over the next seven and a half years: his chief concerns were its reliance on nuclear retaliation as a way of minimizing containment’s costs, and its refusal to seek a reunified Germany. But in its doubts that the Soviet Union would risk war, in its determination to apply Western strengths against Communist weaknesses, in its willingness to wait for contradictions within the latter system to shatter its unity while sustaining strength and self-confidence in the United States and among its allies—in all of these things, the “New Look,” as it came to be called, was closer to Kennan’s strategy than NSC 68 had been.²¹

Kennan’s departure from government, therefore, was not as lonely as he made it look in his memoirs. For even though Dulles gave him no appointment, Eisenhower accepted the basic elements of the strategy Kennan had designed under Marshall’s supervision: it was not irrelevant that Eisenhower worked for Marshall longer during the war than Kennan had after it. And so Kennan’s final act as a policy planner was to explain all of this to a newly deferential secretary of state, as well as to the president and the vice president of the United States, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and the director of the CIA. It may not have been a “niche,” but it was a more prestigious platform than he had occupied before—or ever would again.

III.

“We reflect that you are a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and have much unfinished to do,” Oppenheimer had cabled Kennan on October 6, 1952, three days after the Soviet Union declared him persona non grata. “We hope the time will come when you will be happy to reflect on this too.” Kennan responded gratefully: “No mark of confidence received means more to me.” It was not yet clear that he would be leaving government, but when he did, the best contribution he could make would probably be “the independent pursuit of truth… in the field of public affairs.” His time away from the Institute had made him appreciate all the more its benefits. Oppenheimer renewed the invitation in March 1953, on the day he read in The New York Times that Kennan would be retiring: “I want you to be quite sure that in addition to the formal welcome, of which your membership here is a warrant, there is a deeper welcome that awaits you whenever and in whatever form you can accept it.”²²

There were, as usual, other opportunities. Freedom House wanted Kennan to become its president: he politely declined. The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies hoped that he would help build a research center in Washington for refugees from government like himself: Kennan liked the idea but balked at having to do fund-raising. Allen Dulles made it clear that if his older brother did not wish to employ Kennan, he did; Walter Bedell Smith, the younger Dulles’s predecessor at the CIA, enthusiastically seconded this proposal. Kennan respected both men, but the organization’s increasing reliance on covert operations worried him; its cooperation with the Ford Foundation had not gone well; and it had, he believed, mishandled the Davies case, an unresolved issue for which he felt personally responsible. With one exception, Oppenheimer and Kennan’s other Princeton friends all felt that he should make the break from government a clean one, “and not permit the situation to be obscured by getting loaned to the CIA. The more I thought about it, the more this seemed to me to be the correct answer, too.”²³

That left the Institute, Kennan’s preference all along, and the arrangements were quickly made. Dean Rusk, the new president of the Rockefeller Foundation, had no problem persuading Robert Lovett, John J. McCloy, and his other trustees to approve a grant of $15,000 for Kennan’s work during the 1953–54 academic year. “If he wanted to be at Princeton,” Rusk recalled, “then this was the natural thing to do to make it possible.” Oppenheimer added another $5,000, which with Kennan’s Foreign Service pension brought his income close to what he had been making as an ambassador—a respectable but not munificent sum for someone maintaining a house, a farm, and a family. His responsibilities would be to seek a more “solid foundation” for his views on “utopian tendencies” in U.S. foreign policy, Kennan explained to Princeton University president Harold Dodds, and to study the internal politics of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. “Curiosity has thrown me into contact with one, experience with the other. I would like to get both off my chest in a scholarly form before I turn to other things.”²⁴

The Institute appointment would not begin until the fall, though, so that left Kennan free to get other things off his chest. One was his worry that American universities were trying to teach international relations as if it were an extension of law, or some newly fashionable “social science.” It was neither, he argued in the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly, whose editors put him on its cover. The world would never accept constitutional governance as it existed within the United States, while politics could never resemble physics because people were unpredictable. The only useful preparation for diplomacy came from history, as well as “from the more subtle and revealing expressions of man’s nature” found in art and literature. Students should be reading “their Bible and their Shakespeare, their Plutarch and their Gibbon, perhaps even their Latin and their Greek.” These alone would build those qualities of “honor, loyalty, generosity, [and] consideration for others” that had been the basis for effectiveness in the Foreign Service “as I have known it.”

McCarthyism remained another concern. It fed on contempt for artists and writers, Kennan warned a University of Notre Dame audience in a well-publicized speech on May 15, “as though virility could not find expression in the creation of beauty, as though Michelangelo had never wielded his brush, as though Dante had never taken up his pen, as though the plays of Shakespeare were lacking in manliness.” This “anti-intellectualism” flaunted its own virility, fearing that in the absence of such exhibitions, “it might be found wanting.” Unchallenged, its practitioners would reduce the range of respectability to “only themselves, the excited accusers,” excluding anyone not engaged in “the profession of denunciation.” Having lived for years in totalitarian states, “I know where this sort of thing leads.”²⁵

The costs of confronting totalitarianism were on Kennan’s mind two weeks later as he stood in a cemetery near East Berlin, delivering a Memorial Day address meant only for his Pennsylvania neighbors. He could hardly improve on what Lincoln had said almost ninety years earlier at a similar place only a few miles away, but he would try to reflect on the meaning those words still carried:

The point, then, was to respect “the suffering these stones tell us about,” to ensure that “the dying of these men will come to make sense, as a part of the whole great story that found its supreme expression in the death of our Lord on the Cross.”²⁶

Kennan remained in Washington through the middle of August to run a seminar at the School of Advanced International Studies, while his family abandoned the city for the farm. Then, on the eighteenth, he emptied the Quebec Street house and drove slowly to East Berlin, “reminding myself repeatedly that there was no hurry.” No one was at home when he arrived, so he spent much of the afternoon sitting quietly on the porch.

Seeking physical pleasures would be “nonsense” for someone his age. Eating and drinking invited obesity; “those of the flesh become ridiculous, unimportant, and hardly dignified.” He would instead embrace “solitude, depth of thought, and writing.” The first two would amount to nothing without the third, so “the great dictate” was to sit at a desk and begin. “The thoughts will come. They always do.” The crickets were subdued that evening, there was a half-moon, and the night was “deathly quiet, as though waiting.”²⁷

IV.

On the twentieth Kennan repacked the car, tied his bicycle on top of it, and drove alone to Princeton. The Hodge Road house was “empty, battered, and barn-like,” without electricity or telephone service but with poison ivy proliferating along the driveway, a broken tree branch hanging over an unkempt yard, rats in the basement, and cats in the garage. Rather than confront these crises, Kennan spent the rest of the day pondering a lay sermon he had agreed to give later that fall at the First Presbyterian Church. In search of inspiration, he went to the university bookstore, purchased John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, and sat on a bench outside reading it—although surely not all of it. “Very interesting,” he noted, but with the family arriving soon, the rest of the month had to go to making the house habitable, a process “not conducive to theoretic thought.”²⁸

Oppenheimer’s vagueness about Institute expectations allowed Kennan to set his own priorities. One was to answer the question he had left unanswered in American Diplomacy: could governments behave as individuals should? His preliminary conclusion, sketched out in his diary, was that politics, whether within or among nations, would always be a struggle for power. It could never in itself be a moral act. It followed that government was “a sad necessity and not a glorious one.” Politics might, from time to time, draft moral men into government, but even they would never be “wholly unsullied,” for although an individual might remain uncorrupted by power, he would have to surround himself with others who were.²⁹

Foreign policy was not, therefore, a contest of good versus evil. To condemn negotiations as appeasement, Kennan told a Princeton University audience early in October, was to end a Hollywood movie with the villain shot. To entrust diplomacy to lawyers was to relegate power, “like sex, to a realm in which we see it only occasionally, and then in a highly sublimated and presentable form.” Both approaches ignored the fact that most international conflicts were “jams that people have gotten themselves into.” Trying to resolve them through rigid standards risked making things worse. Evil existed, to be sure: the Soviet regime reflected it, as had Nazi Germany. Sometimes you had to fight it, sometimes you had to deal with it. The important question was “what sort of compromises we make,” not how to “escape altogether from the necessity of making such compromises.”³⁰

Dictatorships promised escapes from such dilemmas, he reminded the First Presbyterians when he delivered his sermon a few days later. Why not say “Why not?” when some Grand Inquisitor dangled relief from the discomforts of conscience and self-discipline? But that worked only until the approach of death, for which “there is no answer in the totalitarian book.” In theory, there could be no grief because there was no soul, “just an accumulation of chemicals.” In practice, “there is nothing more empty, nothing more mocking, than the trappings of a totalitarian funeral; for here we see the meaninglessness of life expounded and argued from the meaninglessness of death.” It was easier, then, to be a Christian than not to be one; but that meant confronting “the full rigor and severity of the great ethical problems” of which the founders of that faith “were so acutely aware.”³¹

Kennan spared the Presbyterians any detailed discussion of these, but when two Princeton seniors invited him to address a conference they were organizing on “Christianity Re-Examined,” he could no longer evade the issue. “[W]hat they really want to know is: what I believe.” He used his diary to make a list:

But was sex really sin? Had not biblical injunctions against adultery assumed polygamy, even the enslavement of women? It was hard to believe that human beings “are destined to rot in hell because their efforts to combine an animalistic nature with the discipline of civilization are not always successful.” After all, it was God “who placed these dilemmas upon us.”³²

“I hope that nobody will think,” Kennan cautioned the conference when it convened in December, that “I am exhorting the student body to immorality.” But could it be that “the American male knows only one sexual object in life, namely the female with whom, at an appropriate age, he falls romantically and delightfully in love, whom he then marries and with whom he lives happily ever after?”

Christianity’s value lay in its balancing of appetites against obligations, for Christ had shown that man could live tolerably with himself by taking responsibility for others. Only this could keep the conflict between nature and spirit from bringing disaster. The students should not brood, therefore, about whether life was worthwhile: “You might forget to live it.”³³

Kennan returned to diplomacy in four lectures—the Stafford Little series—delivered on the Princeton campus in late March 1954, with President Dodds himself in attendance. The site was Alexander Hall, “that curious relic of [the] 1890s,” and “to my combined delight and consternation, the place was packed on each of these occasions to the last of its one thousand sixty uncomfortable seats.” Once again, Kennan revised right up to the last moment. “Forgetting my age (like anyone just turning fifty),” he felt like “the daring young man on the flying trapeze.”³⁴

Despite their precarious composition, the lectures were less provocative than the ones at Chicago three years earlier, and the book they became—published by the Princeton University Press as Realities of American Foreign Policy—was less widely read. Kennan regarded it, nonetheless, as “the most comprehensive statement I ever made of my outlook on the basic problems of American foreign policy.” Several of his themes were familiar: his respect for the Founding Fathers, his skepticism about international law and collective security, his criticism of World War II strategy, his analysis of the Soviet Union and international communism, his concern with concentrations of industrial-military power, his defense of “containment” over “liberation.” There was, however, a new emphasis on material and moral ecology.

Americans could no longer afford economic advances that depleted natural resources and devastated natural beauty, Kennan insisted. Nor could they tolerate dependency, for critical raw materials, on unreliable foreign governments. Nor could they tear their democracy apart internally because threats to democracy existed externally. Nor could they entrust defenses against such dangers to the first use of nuclear weapons, for what would be left after a nuclear war had taken place? These were all single policies, pursued without regard to how each related to the others, or to the larger ends the state was supposed to serve. They neglected “the essential unity” of national problems, thus demonstrating the “danger implicit in any attempt to compartmentalize our thinking about foreign policy.”

That lack of coordination ill-suited the separate “planes of international reality” upon which the United States had to compete. The first was “a sane and rational one, in which we felt comfortable, in which we were surrounded by people to whom we were accustomed and on whose reactions we could at least depend.” The second was “a nightmarish one, where we were like a hunted beast, oblivious of everything but survival; straining every nerve and muscle in the effort to remain alive.” Within the first arena, traditional conceptions of morality applied: “We could still be guided… by the American dream.” Within the second, “there was only the law of the jungle; and we had to do violence to our own traditional principles—or many of us felt we did—to fit ourselves for the relentless struggle.” The great question, then, was whether the two could ever be brought into a coherent relationship with one another.

They could, Kennan suggested, through a kind of geopolitical horticulture: “We must be gardeners and not mechanics in our approach to world affairs.” International life was an organic process, not a static system. Americans had inherited it, not designed it. Their preferred standards of behavior, therefore, could hardly govern it. But it should be possible “to take these forces for what they are and to induce them to work with us and for us by influencing the environmental stimuli to which they are subjected.” That would have to be done

Democracy had the advantage over communism in this respect, because it did not rely on violence to reshape society. Its outlook was “more closely attuned to the real nature of man, …[so] we can afford to be patient and even occasionally to suffer reverses, placing our confidence in the longer and deeper workings of history.”

It was here, then, that Kennan’s views on foreign policy cycled back through his previous thinking on self-containment, Russian literature (especially Chekhov), environmentalism, religion, and even sex. For if the issue, in the end, was human nature, didn’t survival require balancing appetites and obligations? “Only too often in life we find ourselves beset by demons, sometimes outside ourselves, sometimes within us,” but they “have power over us only so long as they are able to monopolize our attention.” They lose that power “when we simply go on with the real work we know we have to do.” Nothing could be more shortsighted than “to sacrifice the traditional values of our civilization to our fears rather than to defend those values with our faith.”³⁵

V.

The particular demons Kennan had in mind were those of McCarthyism, which was not only deranging foreign policy but also ruining friends and former colleagues. Chief among them was John Paton Davies, who after being exonerated by the State Department’s loyalty board in 1951 had been subjected to a long series of inconclusive investigations by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Kennan worked hard to prevent these from leading to perjury charges, even to the point of threatening to withhold future consultations with the government if Davies should be prosecuted. He never was, but the ordeal ended Davies’s Foreign Service career. John and Patricia spent the next decade living in Peru. Kennan blamed himself, but Davies did not blame him: “The forces against which he was struggling were far stronger than he.”³⁶

Similar fates befell other “China hands,” among them John Stewart Service and O. Edmund Clubb, both of whom Kennan tried to help, and the fight over Bohlen’s nomination showed that even Soviet specialists could be suspect. Meanwhile the FBI was investigating Oppenheimer for alleged ties to communists and for having opposed building the hydrogen bomb. His chief accuser was Lewis Strauss, now chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and, ironically, a longtime trustee at the Institute for Advanced Study. So why not Kennan, who had spent years in the U.S.S.R., joined Oppenheimer in objecting to the new weapon, criticized the Republican strategy of “liberation,” railed against McCarthy, and was now also at the Institute? “I was sometimes attacked, sometimes even called a ‘socialist,’ or a ‘Marxist,’” he later recalled, “but the attacks made little impression.” That was more “by luck than by any just deserts.”³⁷

Perhaps, but Kennan was also careful. He had “always been friendly to the Bureau,” one of J. Edgar Hoover’s aides reminded the director in 1951, “furnishing pertinent and helpful information when in the State Department.” A former government employee, then in a mental institution, did raise questions about Kennan’s loyalty a few months later, but Hoover chose not to pursue the matter. Before departing for Moscow as ambassador in 1952, Kennan let the bureau know that he would be calling on his Soviet counterparts in Washington and at the United Nations; after returning to the Institute the following year, he informed Hoover that he would be subscribing to Pravda for research purposes, unless the director thought this “undesirable or unwise.” Hoover did not, passing the word to the Post Office Department that “the Bureau has had cordial relations with him.”³⁸

Did Kennan protect himself by reporting on others? He had done so on one or two occasions, he told the Oppenheimer investigators, but only in the case of “minor employees.” Kennan had long been sure that Soviet espionage was taking place within the United States, but he was equally convinced that spies had never significantly influenced policy. It was on that last point that he differed with McCarthy and his supporters. Staying on the right side of Hoover may have made that possible: confronting evil did require compromises.³⁹

Survivor’s guilt, under these circumstances, was inescapable. It was one of the impulses that led Kennan early in 1954 to surprise himself, his family, his friends, and his funders by deciding—on the spur of an emotional moment—to enter politics. The story began when the East Berlin Veterans of Foreign Wars honored him on February 11 for distinguished national service. It was important, Kennan said in thanking them, that the country “show itself united and confident—not afraid of anyone else, and above all, not afraid of itself.” What was happening, though, was just the opposite:

Veterans had a special responsibility to avoid such hysteria: “Fellows, don’t fall for this.” It gratified him deeply that instead of suspecting someone, they had found an occasion “for announcing your trust.”⁴⁰

A few weeks later a young farmer and his wife rang the doorbell in Princeton, having driven there from Pennsylvania without knowing whether they would find the Kennans at home. Some of “us fellows” had gotten together, he announced, decided they didn’t like the candidates being put up for the House of Representatives, and wondered if Kennan would agree to run. “Well, I was very much moved by this. I think it’s a duty of citizenship, if your fellow citizens want you to represent them, that you don’t turn it down.” So he drove to Gettysburg to meet local Democratic leaders, who with the “marvelous brutality” of grassroots politics “picked me to pieces right in my presence.” Kennan loved it. “These were such absolutely genuine people.” Decades later he could still quote them: “He ain’t even registered as a Democrat!” “Yeah, but his wife is.” “Well, what would you say if you had to run here?” He said a few things. “Why, we could run him for the Senate!” Kennan announced his candidacy on March 13. The next morning’s New York Times quoted the Adams County Democratic Party chairman, Fred Klunk, who with his neighbors welcomed the idea “of George Kennan being our nominee.”⁴¹

Had that happened and had he been elected, Kennan would have been the president’s congressman, because Eisenhower’s farm was just outside Gettysburg. But he wanted to run only if unopposed in the primary, on the grounds that his other responsibilities—which included finishing the Little lectures—left him no time to campaign. The other two candidates, unimpressed by an “outsider” who had only just declared himself a Democrat, refused to withdraw. Pennsylvania law limited the money Kennan could legally raise: he was not prepared, less than legally, to approach dairy owners, the usual way of getting around this problem. Finally Rusk and Oppenheimer let Kennan know that the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study, ample though it was in other respects, did not extend to supporting candidates for public office.

The problem, Rusk later explained, was that as a tax-exempt foundation, Rockefeller—which provided most of Kennan’s Institute funding—could not appear to be involving itself in politics. The only option would be a terminal grant, but when Oppenheimer suggested this, Kennan was not prepared to sever the Institute connection. “I could not afford to remain without regular income…. I do take seriously the commitments I have made in the academic world.” And so, four days after he entered the race, he abruptly abandoned it. He was “full of agony over this. I felt I’d let down the people in the country. On the other hand, I couldn’t see going deeply in[to] personal debt. I think I was quite right.”⁴²

So did almost everyone else, apart from the disappointed Pennsylvanians. Men qualified to serve in Congress were “not altogether rare,” John V. A. MacMurray, the retired diplomat whose views Kennan had long respected, wrote him with stately delicacy, “but one who combines your integrity and intellectual grasp with actual experience… is of irreplaceable value [in] refining of its grossness the thinking of the American people.” Others were franker. “I was horrified,” Jeanette recalled. “Oh, goodness! That’s the last thing in the world he could have done.” But Kennan always regretted this path not taken. “All my friends laugh and say: ‘You were never cut out for politics.’ I think I could have done it if I’d wanted to throw myself into it. I might have gone on to a senatorial position.”

The episode seems, at first glance, inexplicable. How could Kennan, supposedly a realist, expect to succeed in politics without competing in primaries or soliciting contributions? What of his insight, recorded in his diary only a few months earlier, that the moral man drafted into government would have to surround himself with immoral advisers? What of his elitism, which included a long-standing contempt for Congress itself? Shrewd observers of Kennan, without too much trouble, found explanations. One was Jeanette, herself a keen critic of McCarthyism: “He was so complimented by being asked.” A second was a Princeton friend, the historian Cyril Black, who saw Kennan confusing the rough-and-tumble of American politics with the British tradition of invited “safe” seats. A third was his Hodge Road neighbor J. Richardson Dilworth: “George is ultra-conservative. He’s almost a monarchist.” And finally there was Isaiah Berlin, who detected more than a whiff of Tolstoy in Kennan’s desire to be among but above his country neighbors: “Close to the soil, and simple views. Simple truths, shining out. The prophets of the world—you know, he wasn’t too modest, Tolstoy.” Would the two have gotten along? “Tolstoy would have approved of him. He’d have had a good time with Tolstoy.”⁴³

People who have “what you might call genius of some sort, intellectual or artistic,” find it hard to arrange their relationships “in a manner which is wholly conventional.” That was Kennan, speaking not of himself but of Oppenheimer in testimony before the Atomic Energy Commission’s personnel security board on April 20, 1954. Such a person could be “profoundly honest and yet… have associates and friends who may be misguided and misled.” Did this mean, one of the commissioners wanted to know, “that all gifted individuals [are] more or less screwballs?” Kennan would not go that far, “but I would say that when gifted individuals come to a maturity of judgment which makes them valuable public servants, you are apt to find that the road by which they have [traveled] may have had zigzags in it of various sorts.”

Wasn’t Kennan himself gifted? one of Oppenheimer’s lawyers asked. How had he remained in government for so many years with so little suspicion? The answer, Kennan suggested, was that he had encountered evil at an impressionable age. As a young Foreign Service officer, he had visited the square in Riga where the Bolsheviks had executed their hostages only a few years earlier, for no better reason than that they were members of the bourgeoisie.

Kennan’s career, he acknowledged, had been no freer from blunders than anyone else’s: his four-day congressional campaign, he did not have to say, had been a big one. But he had learned the value of discretion: he had managed “to conceal the difficulties on the intellectual road that I have gone through more than other people have been able to.” His habit was “to keep them within myself and fight them out myself.” And so, better than many, he had survived.⁴⁴

VI.

Oppenheimer survived as the Institute’s director, which allowed him to renew Kennan’s appointment for another year with the understanding that he would stay out of politics. But in a devastatingly public humiliation, the Atomic Energy Commission withdrew Oppenheimer’s security clearance, ending his ability to do further government work in nuclear physics. For Kennan, this meant that McCarthyism had claimed another close friend. Why, he wondered, did Oppenheimer not leave the United States, since universities throughout the world would have clamored to recruit him? “He stood there for a moment, tears streaming down his face.” Then he stammered: “Dammit, I happen to love this country.”⁴⁵

Kennan did too, but as he admitted during the Oppenheimer hearings, he was more critical of his country than most people: this was yet another thing “I have had to fight within myself.” He wasn’t fighting very hard, his diary suggests, in the spring of 1954. Princeton was “lush and beautiful,” but the university’s reunion consisted of “gents” in ridiculous costumes looking “vaguely unhappy.” The resident farmer at the Cherry Orchard was paying no attention to his instructions—Kennan would have seen the resemblance to Tolstoy’s cheerfully dysfunctional peasants in Anna Karenina. Grace’s graduation from Radcliffe required a drive through Connecticut, which had been taken over by scrub forest, Italians, Portuguese, and the Catholic Church. Cambridge was “sooty, over-shaded, [and] dampish.” Giving the commencement address was an obligatory drudgery, redeemed only by the unexpected presence of Joe Alsop, whose views Kennan attacked: Alsop protested, but was “actually very pleased by the personal attention.” A visit to Washington found it overrun by the “great burly Babbitts” of the Eisenhower administration. A haircut for Christopher had his father marveling “at the combination of affection and irritation one can feel toward such a small person.”

The Kennans sailed for Europe in June on a slow and seedy freighter like the ones George had traveled on in his youth. That continent did not seem much better, though. His lectures on Soviet-American relations, given in German at the University of Frankfurt, were, he was told, a great success, “but if I were to be asked… what had been accomplished, or whether it would have made any difference if I had never appeared, I would not know what to say.” For most of those who heard him, “the highest spiritual aim seems to be a motorcycle…. One sees, today, how much the Jews added to Germany.” Of the Americans in that country, “I will not speak,” but he did anyway: “Their presence here infuriates me.”

Moscow continued to haunt him: a dream had him returning as counselor in the Ethiopian embassy, a job he had taken because it seemed “a loyal and self-effacing and almost heroic thing to do.” The ambassador, though, was an unhappy little man who left town on the day Kennan arrived, without having provided him a place to stay. Standing forlornly next to his suitcase, “I wondered whether I should call on _____ [probably Bohlen] and my other erstwhile colleagues at the American Embassy. Would they understand? Not likely.”⁴⁶

Whether because of his political misadventure, or Oppenheimer’s ordeal, or the more general sense that he had not yet found his footing, whatever equanimity Kennan had gained by moving back to Princeton now seemed to have deserted him. A long diary entry, composed while still at sea, became almost a biblical lamentation:

And so on, through seven other complaints, one of which involved teaching: “I should never be able to conceal my own intellectual despair, above all—the despair with U.S. society. But to reveal it would be inconsistent with the mythology of any American educational institution.”

“It is not I who have left my country,” he concluded early in 1955, not for the first time. “It is my country that has left me—the country I thought I knew and understood.”

And so, he now realized, “Mr. Dulles was quite right to fire me.” People like himself had no role in government. Why, then, was he unhappy? “Here, of course, the trouble is with me…. I sometimes ask myself whether there is anything I am interested in—anything I would like to do.”⁴⁷

VII.

Dysfunctional peasants had nothing on Kennan, one might conclude from these entries, but that would be to miss the function his diary served. It allowed him despair in order to shield others from it. Family, friends, and colleagues saw some, but by no means all, of this inner turmoil. The diary, in turn, failed fully to reflect what Kennan’s contemporaries could clearly see: that with Oppenheimer’s help he was finding a niche, sufficiently satisfying that he would remain within it—or at least near it—for the last half of his long life. George’s 1953 Christmas Day letter to Kent hinted at what was happening.

Speaking of teeth, “[y]ou can’t imagine how good the grapefruits taste to us. They are the first good fruit I have had this year.”⁴⁸

Why history? The immediate reason, of course, was that Kennan had promised Oppenheimer scholarship, and American Diplomacy—his first venture into the field—had not delivered it. Kennan was determined to do better. But history had always been a lodestone, attracting him when opportunities arose. He liked working as a research assistant for Professor Karl Stählin at the University of Berlin in 1930: his assignment had been a Kremlin librarian during Napoleon’s invasion. He gleefully excavated Neill Brown’s dispatches from the era of Nicholas I for Bullitt to resend to Washington. He exhausted the State Department with his exhaustive study of the Alaska Purchase. He lectured on Russian history while interned at Bad Nauheim. He discovered Gibbon while in flight during the war. And even if his own past might not be useful in solving the problems of the future, he had long believed that the study of the past could be: that was a recurring theme in Kennan’s National War College lectures.

Now, thanks to the Institute, he could concentrate on history. His first impulse had been to survey all of Soviet-American relations, but “I immediately realized that the archival resources had never been properly touched, that anything I might say after reading what few memoirs there were would be superficial and maybe not even accurate. So I happily went to the sources.” That meant immersion in the intricacies of the Bolshevik Revolution, a topic recent enough for there to be living—if unreliable—witnesses, close enough to Kennan’s experience for him to use his linguistic and diplomatic skills, distant enough that he had not been personally involved. Would the world be different “when I have finished”? he wondered aloud in a talk he gave at the National Archives in the fall of 1954. Not much, he conceded, but “a few people may have been helped to understand some of our failures and failings today.” At the top of his speaking notes, he wrote a single word: “Loneliness.”⁴⁹

He later explained what he meant. His work involved warming himself alongside fires kindled four decades earlier. Their heat was now as pale and faint as moonlight. If the era seemed remote, however, it was “because I was a poor historian, incapable of re-creating the flesh-and-blood images of the characters I was studying.” Only through the deepest identification with the past could there be the “intimacy of acquaintance which permits historical personages really to become alive again.” Being a good historian, then, required cutting one’s self off from the present. Contemporaries rarely forgave that, because each age believed its own to be the most important that ever had existed, or ever would. What normal person would spend time with people suffering from “the obvious inferiority of not being alive”?

And so Kennan did. Because he disapproved of so much in the present, it was a party he was content to leave for “a never ending communion” with wax-museum figures “whose eyes never move and whose voices one never hears.”

If they spoke at all, it was in words hovering above their heads “like the bubbles of utterance” that emerged from the characters in the comic strips of his boyhood. Context—those “elusive nuances of circumstances, of feeling, of environment, of intuition and telepathy”—was mostly lost. The relationship, for the historian, was not reciprocal.

Historians, then, were disembodied spirits. Their task was to understand while remaining “unseen, unknown, unaided.” That, for Kennan, was “loneliness.”⁵⁰

But if loneliness lay in both the present and the past, where was consolation? George worked out an answer of sorts while staying with Jeanette and her family in Highland Park one day in August 1956. He drove himself, alone, around Milwaukee. The Cambridge Avenue house was still there, looking as it always had despite taller trees and a deteriorating neighborhood. It struck him as “strangely serene and timeless,” as though content to live by memories “and to await, without either complaint or haste, the day—which cannot be far off now—when it will disappear from the face of the earth and all that once transpired in it and around it will be swallowed up in the forgotten past.”

A half hour later he was at the Forest Home cemetery, which he had visited for the first time only a year earlier: “I sat at the head of my parents’ graves and wept my heart out, like a child.”

Kennan had lived with loneliness—but had found it difficult to accept—all his life. Being a historian required and even rewarded it, offering something like the reassurances he thought he heard on that day. History brought wholeness closer than anything else he had ever done. It was a way of coming home.

ONLY THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY COULD HAVE GRANTED Kennan the freedom to live in the past with so few obligations in the present. Any university appointment would have involved teaching, and Kennan—despite his superb skills as a lecturer—had no desire to supervise students, grade examinations, or serve on faculty committees. “He had no conception of what academic life is like,” the Princeton historian Cyril Black recalled. “It’s hard work, especially here. He wanted it to be like Oxford, I suppose: give a lecture or two a week and then stay away as much as possible.” The Institute was in fact better than Oxford—or at least all parts of it except All Souls—since it enrolled no students, required no lecturing, and specified no expectations for publication. So Kennan was delighted when Oppenheimer called him in on a cold and rainy December 29, 1954, to say that the board of trustees “would be glad to have me there as a member, and to help with the attendant financial problems, for some years to come. Nothing could have been more gratifying to me.”¹

But the proposed Kennan appointment—which amounted to lifetime tenure—became a test of Oppenheimer’s authority as director. The man who built the atomic bomb had found that task considerably easier than running the Institute. Its faculty remained bitterly divided between the mathematicians, mostly past their professional prime with plenty of time to make trouble, and their more productive colleagues in other fields. Oppenheimer favored the latter group while cultivating friendships with sympathetic trustees. This was an unhealthy situation, board member Dick Dilworth thought, but it was from such conversations that the idea of a permanent position for Kennan probably arose.²

Until this point in the Institute’s history, the faculty had approved all such appointments unanimously. Kennan’s, it quickly became clear, would break that precedent. The School of Historical Studies, weakened by the recent death of Edward Mead Earle and the impending retirement of the diplomatic historian Sir Llewellyn Woodward, was strongly in favor. Kennan was known at the Institute, had recently been asked to spend a year at Oxford as George Eastman Professor, and was at work on a book that, as one of the historians put it, was sure to earn “the highest praise [in] that it would not have to be done again.” The School of Mathematics, however, protested vociferously. Its heavyweights, among them John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel, pointed out that Kennan had no advanced degree, no scholarly publications, and no reputation as a professional historian. He had, moreover, involved himself in “politics.” Tenuring him would “debauch the standards of the Institute and set its feet upon a downward path.” In no other instance had it taken such a risk.³

Anticipating objections, Oppenheimer solicited external assessments, but these were not reassuring. Joseph Strayer, the chairman of the Princeton history department, foresaw “surprise and adverse comment” if the Institute were to make Kennan a professor of history. “He simply does not have the standing.” Strayer’s colleague Gordon Craig agreed: “He is not a historian, although he has taken to writing history.” Ray Billington, of Northwestern University, worried that Kennan’s “knowledge of men in the field is limited.” Philip Mosely, of the Columbia University Russian Institute, wondered whether he would apply “traditional academic standards in the selection of people and projects.” Only Theodor Mommsen of Cornell University, among the historians consulted, regarded Kennan as qualified: even he, though, suggested that an Institute appointment might more appropriately rest on Kennan’s strengths as a “humanist.”

Isaiah Berlin, writing from Oxford, came vigorously to Kennan’s defense. The Eastman electors had chosen Kennan unanimously: his had been the only name suggested by everyone consulted. He was “one of the most interesting and attractive human beings I [have] ever met.” His books and articles contained “more ideas per page, and more freshness and directness of vision,” than most academic publications.

The Institute would perform a great service by allowing Kennan to do history there indefinitely. “I myself would ask no greater privilege than that of being able to communicate with him about such matters for the rest of my natural life.”⁴

These mixed reviews emboldened the mathematicians, who demanded the right to make their case directly to the board of trustees. Fearing that this procedure would undermine Oppenheimer, the trustees rejected it in a contentious meeting on November 15, 1955: fortunately Lewis Strauss was not present. After summarizing the arguments for and against, Oppenheimer proposed that Kennan be made a professor of international relations, not of history. The board agreed with a single dissent, from a trustee concerned that for the first time “an appointment had been recommended by less than a unanimous vote of the faculty and [that] a substantial minority of the faculty seemed quite upset about this.” Oppenheimer then amended his own compromise: Kennan’s appointment, which took effect on January 1, 1956, was simply “professor” in the School of Historical Studies.⁵

How much Kennan knew of the controversy is unclear. His diary makes no mention of it, and Oppenheimer—knowing how easily he bruised—appears to have spared him the details. He explained only that certain colleagues had doubted Kennan’s long-term commitment to scholarship, and that if he himself had doubts, he should not accept the position. “That seemed fair enough,” Kennan recalled, grateful that he now had the means of supporting his family after his temporary appointment had ended. “The Institute took me,” he wrote years later, “already a middle-aged man devoid of academic credentials, substantially on faith, gambling on the existence of scholarly capacities that remained to be demonstrated…. I can find no adequate words in which to acknowledge the debt I owe to this establishment.”⁶

I.

Kennan worked throughout 1954 on Russia Leaves the War, the first of his projected two volumes—which soon became three—on the early American response to the Bolshevik Revolution. Arthur Link, who thought American Diplomacy “extraordinarily simplistic,” became Kennan’s tutor: “I advised him to go back and read some good manuals on how one goes about doing research. What is a primary document? What is a secondary document? How much reliance can you put on memoirs?” Kennan went to the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, manuscript collections at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago, even to the state historical societies of Wisconsin and Missouri for the papers, respectively, of Raymond Robins, the American Red Cross representative in Petrograd in 1917–18, and David R. Francis, the American ambassador at the time. Hessman, still Kennan’s secretary, accompanied him on most of these trips, copying out long passages from the materials he selected. He wrote (and dictated) as he researched, mixing narrative with analysis, resisting the temptation to stockpile notes. His speed, as a consequence, exceeded that of most academic historians.⁷

“It was my first major effort,” Kennan later recalled, “and I was not quite sure what it was, actually, that I had produced.” So he sought out readers as he neared completion. Despite differences over Woodrow Wilson, Link liked what he saw: “There’s no question that he [had] learned a great deal.” The most helpful comments, however, came from the Institute’s medievalist Ernst “Eka” Kantorowicz, who had fought in the German army during World War I but afterward, like Einstein, fled the Nazis.

Whereupon he subjected it to “unforgettable criticism,” not from the standpoint of factual accuracy or interpretive logic, but from that of style. “This, I thought, was the mark not just of a great scholar but of a great gentleman.”⁸

By March 1955 Kennan was almost done. “The book is my diary,” he wrote apologetically in his neglected diary. “My own life has been of no importance.” On the tenth he delivered the manuscript, with great trepidation, to the Princeton University Press. The editors took their time, and Kennan continued to make revisions, so the book did not appear until the summer of 1956. One of the first reviews came from Harrison Salisbury, who sardonically credited Dulles with coauthorship: deprived of any current policy position, Kennan had had little choice but to turn to the past. “I thought of you many times as I wrote it,” Kennan assured Acheson, who had read the book and praised it.

It meant a great deal, he added, to have Acheson’s approval. “There is no one for whom I could more have wished that the tale would prove interesting and worth reading.”⁹

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.”¹⁰

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.¹¹

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.’”¹²

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.”¹³

II.

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.”¹⁴

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.”¹⁵

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.”¹⁶

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.”¹⁷

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.”¹⁸

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.¹⁹

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.”²⁰

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.”²¹

III.

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.”²²

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.²³

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?²⁴

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.”²⁵

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.²⁶

“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.”²⁷

IV.

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.”²⁸

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.”²⁹

Four of the six Kennans—Grace, now graduated from Radcliffe, had a job in Washington, and Joan was about to begin her third year at Connecticut College—sailed for Norway in late July on the SS Stavangerfjord. While at sea one day Christopher asked his moody and irritable father what he was interested in. “I couldn’t answer him. What indeed? Boats, I said, vaguely.” Maybe also growing things, but certainly not international affairs. That field had produced so many frustrations “that I have only pessimism left; and I am too healthy to be interested in what I am pessimistic about.”

So Kennan amused himself by outlining a set of Reith lectures that would begin with the sterility of American society, point out the overpopulated nastiness of the rest of the world, and conclude by proposing a new country composed of Great Britain, Canada, and the healthy parts of the United States (the South, Texas, and California would go elsewhere), with its capital to be near Ottawa. Democracy would then save itself from itself by half a century of benevolent dictatorship. “How would all this sound over the BBC?” Miss Kallin, fortunately, was not on board to say, and after arriving in Kristiansand Kennan settled—or so he thought—for something less controversial. The series would be “Russia, the Atom, and the West,” and he had rough drafts ready by the time he left for Oxford at end of August. But “damn poor lectures they are, by and large. This is no longer my forte…. What miseries I let myself in for when I accepted this invitation.”³⁰

“Oxford!” Kennan exclaimed in his diary. “Serene courtyards. Magnificent old towers, graceful but strong, seeming to swim against the background of the blowing clouds.” But that was as far as romanticism went. Industrial plants bracketed the university, with grimly goggled motorcyclists shuttling noisily between them. Tourists dutifully dragged themselves among colleges and churches. Restaurant patrons whispered over menus that never changed. Sundays, with everything closed and children to be amused, seemed meant to “try men’s souls.” The parks were damp, the suburbs prim, and lovers huddled for warmth along riverbanks: “Ah, love in England, so frail, so handicapped, so overwhelmingly without a chance, and so terribly poignant by consequence!” Michaelmas term would not begin until October, so there was hardly anyone to talk with beyond the family. And when dons and students did return, they brought viruses with them. All the Kennans came down with influenza.

Balliol housed them in a Merton Street flat that presumed servants no longer present. There was no central heating, so it fell to George to carry coal up two flights of stairs and ashes back down. “Your brother thinks he is quite a martyr,” Annelise wrote Jeanette. The dining room doubled as his office, and he had to hire his own secretaries. The library system bewildered him. He was “vastly over-committed.” Real work could only be done at night, in weariness, without inspiration, “getting something written, even if inferior.” There was no point in trying to rest: strength would only be drained “by trivia or one sort or another, the following morning.”³¹

Trivia infused the university itself. Kennan had imagined its colleges, Berlin was sure, “as grand, old, almost feudal institutions,” in which distinguished men dined at high table, then lingered in common rooms over port, claret, nuts, and snuff, their conversation “polished by deep traditions, refinement, moral quality.” What he found instead was “a lot of idle gossip about local affairs, academic tittle-tattle. He was horrified by that. Profound disappointment. England was not as he thought. An idealized image had been shattered.” Attendance at a single Balliol fellows’ meeting convinced Kennan never to return: “I’ve never seen such backbiting, such fury, such factions in my life.” Oxford was “a tight, tough community,” he wrote Oppenheimer at the end of October, and “few of its mysteries are to be penetrated in the course of a few months by the casual visiting professor.” He had not had a serious discussion with a colleague since arriving, “except with Is[a]iah Berlin—where you can’t help having it.”³²

The Kennans did, however, befriend two American graduate students, Anthony Quainton, later a career Foreign Service officer, and Richard H. Ullman, a historian of early Anglo-Soviet relations who would become a professor of international affairs at Princeton. The informality of Sunday lunches surprised Ullman: Wendy and Christopher roamed freely and even romped boisterously under the dining room table. “I was quite impressed by that. I thought [George’s] relationship with the kids was terrific.”

His lectures, delivered twice a week in the Examination Schools building on High Street, were also impressive. Kennan wrote out every word and read them beautifully, Ullman recalled. As had happened at Chicago, they quickly outgrew the assigned space and were filling the largest hall available. “The terrible thing,” Kennan complained, was that they were “tremendously successful.” Berlin’s followed immediately, so hundreds of people came, staying for both. Dons were sitting on radiators and hanging from chandeliers, one attendee remembered. But Kennan was again drafting his lectures just prior to delivering them—about ten thousand words a week—while also carrying coal, getting sick, recoiling from common room banalities, helping to manage small children, and preparing for the Reith broadcasts that would begin on November 10, when he would have not hundreds but hundreds of thousands of listeners.³³

With television in its infancy, radio still dominated the British airwaves, so the lectures were a major event. Delivered on six successive Sunday evenings, each required rehearsal as well as careful editing to fit within the time allotted. Kennan would drive himself to the BBC’s London studios, make last-minute corrections while waiting for the nine o’clock news to end, and at nine-fifteen take his cue from the announcer’s remorseless “Mr. Kennan.”

Anything unexpected—a botched sentence, a misplaced page, even a sneeze or a blown nose—would be a national embarrassment: “I felt a tremendous sense of responsibility. Half of England was listening to these things.” Kennan sensed this shortly after the broadcasts began, when he stopped by his Oxford garage to pick up his car. “The man behind the parts desk, with his greasy hands, when he heard me speak, said: ‘Where did I hear that voice before?’”³⁴

V.

“Kennan Says Rule in Soviet is Shaky,” The New York Times reported on the morning after his first Reith lecture. The next week’s headline was a bit more startling—“Kennan Calls Talks with Soviet Futile”—but the story revealed that he was only questioning the need for high-level summitry. On November 25, however, the lead got more attention: “Kennan Offers Plan on Neutral Germany.” Was it not “quixotic,” he was reported as having asked, to be promoting “freedom” by consigning East Germans—and hence all of Eastern Europe—to indefinite Soviet domination? Only a mutual withdrawal of all foreign forces from Germany could bring about its reunification, and that would require its detachment from all Cold War alliances. “Kennan Calls Atom Race Suicidal,” The Washington Post shrieked on December 2. NATO allies should therefore reduce their military establishments to militia levels, “somewhat on the Swiss pattern,” for the Soviet challenge lay more in the realm of politics than on battlefields. It followed, then, both the Times and the Post reported on December 16, that Kennan had warned against seeing NATO as an end in itself. To strengthen it would risk war, to perpetuate it would delay peace, and its continental European members had no reason to fear an Anglo-Canadian-American special relationship.³⁵

The stories oversimplified, but not by much. Kennan had made substantially these points. Curiously, neither newspaper picked up what turned out to be his most provocative suggestion: that Europe would be safe if each of its countries not now under Moscow’s control could credibly promise resistance after occupation.

Kennan was again, of course, channeling Gibbon on the difficulty of holding distant provinces. And how could he be sure that the Soviet Union had learned the great historian’s lesson? “I think I can give personal assurance that any country which is in a position to say this to Moscow… will have little need of foreign garrisons to assure its immunity from Soviet attack.”³⁶

Each of these arguments had appeared over the past decade in Policy Planning Staff papers, war college lectures, correspondence, articles, and books. Never before, though, had Kennan pulled them together and broadcast them, quite literally, to the world. The hitherto “mysterious Mr. X,” all the more so now for having been kicked out of both Stalin’s Soviet Union and Dulles’s State Department, appeared at last to be emerging from the constraints imposed by official secrecy, personal discretion, and the lack of an appropriate forum. He was, before an immense audience, baring his soul. The Reith lectures were “secular sermons,” one listener recalled. “George Kennan was the best sermonizer I’ve heard, anywhere.”³⁷

Kennan had accepted the BBC’s invitation because it further bolstered his scholarly reputation: Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, and Arnold Toynbee had been earlier Reith lecturers. But having done so with no particular topic in mind, and having misjudged how long it would take to prepare when he finally did choose one, he fell back on familiar concepts but was close to panic as he was conveying them. And as with the “long telegram,” the “X” article, the Chicago lectures, the Tempelhof statement, and the Scranton speech, he gave little if any thought to what the response would be to what he said. The first hint of trouble came when a reporter asked John Foster Dulles at a press conference, after the fifth lecture, whether he might now bring Kennan back into the State Department to get the benefit of his thinking. “Well,” Dulles replied, provoking laughter, “we have an opportunity to get his thinking anyway, don’t we?”³⁸

The timing, unplanned by Kennan, could hardly have been better: his final broadcast had long been scheduled for Sunday evening, December 15, 1957, but the NATO heads of government had only recently decided to convene a conference that would begin in Paris on the following morning. It was the first time they had all gathered since establishing the alliance in 1949. From their point of view, though, the content of Kennan’s lectures could hardly have been worse.

NATO was reeling from the shocks of the Suez crisis, the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, and the unexpected launch, on October 4, of the first earth satellite, Sputnik, which appeared to confirm Khrushchev’s claims to have developed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Dulles sought to reassure the allies with an offer of tactical nuclear weapons and intermediate-range missiles, but since these were meant for use on their own territory, this did little to diminish their anxiety. Eisenhower added to it when he suffered a mild stroke on November 25—coming after his 1955 heart attack and an emergency operation for ileitis in 1956, it was his third health crisis in as many years. Meanwhile West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer had not yet fully convinced his countrymen—especially his critics in the Social Democratic Party—that they should forgo reunification in return for American protection. The last thing any of the leaders in Paris wanted, therefore, was for the principal American strategist of containment, in the most public manner possible, to be calling on them to reconsider it.

That is why Adenauer complained to Eisenhower on December 17, “with some impatience” as the official record understated it, about “the recent lectures by George Kennan which unfortunately had made quite an impression.” The opposition newspapers were “quick to pick up this kind of thing.” Eisenhower agreed explosively—no small matter in a man upon whose blood pressure the fate of the West appeared to depend:

Kennan knew nothing of this conversation, but other reactions reached him soon enough. The Reith lectures had “echoed around the world,” the moderator of a special BBC broadcast noted, while introducing him for a follow-up discussion on December 20. The nineteen hundred journalists present in Paris seemed to be spending more time discussing Kennan’s arguments than those of anyone else.

The other panelists were unimpressed. What Kennan had said, Economist editor Donald Tyerman told him bluntly, seemed dangerous. How could he be sure that the Soviet Union would not attack? The question had plagued Kennan since 1948, and he still had no answer. Soviet ideology, he pointed out, had never required the use of force to ensure communism’s triumph, but Soviet leaders were “rubbery,” and “infinitely flexible.” Might they not try to terrify the Europeans, Tyerman persisted, employing what Kennan himself had called the “psychological shadow” of military superiority? No, Kennan replied, all they wanted was to get communist regimes in power. But wouldn’t that have the same effect? Hadn’t Britain declared war in 1914 and 1939 because it feared intimidation, not because it had been attacked? “There I fully agree with you,” Kennan conceded, “and I think that the great danger today is that we will be put in a position where we would have to take the overt act.” How, then, would a neutralized Germany and a nonnuclear NATO make war less likely? He had not suggested either, Kennan claimed. “I did not feel that any outsider like myself could propose a specific plan of disengagement.”

So what had he proposed? the puzzled moderator asked. “You’re not all that much of an outsider.” He was, Kennan responded, in the sense that there were “military considerations” he didn’t know about. And he did know, from his State Department service, the limitations of uninformed advice: “I was trying to tell governments what they ought to think about, not what they ought to do.” But he proceeded to do that anyway: “I can see no solution to this present jam we’re getting ourselves [into]… except by some sort of a disengagement of the forces of the great powers in Europe and perhaps later in the Far East.”

All of this exasperated Sir John Slessor, of the Royal Air Force, who wondered how the Europeans would defend themselves in the absence of American and British forces “when we’ve got Sputnik whirling overhead.” Was Kennan really proposing that the Europeans rely, as their only deterrent, on the prospect of local resistance after their countries had been overrun? Resistance groups had given the Germans trouble in World War II, Kennan replied, much too lamely, and NATO “obligations” would remain in place after American and British troops had been withdrawn. But a neutralized Germany would not be in NATO, the moderator pointed out. No, but it would have its own conventional forces, Kennan retorted. Wouldn’t that frighten everybody else, all of the panelists wanted to know, including the Russians?

Kennan fell back, in the end, on something he had once condemned: reliance on “trust” in the conduct of international relations. The figurehead Soviet premier, Nikolay Bulganin, had formally offered to withdraw the Red Army from East Germany and the other Warsaw Pact countries in return for the removal of American and British troops from the European continent: he should be taken seriously. And Kennan himself was certain, on the basis of his residence in Germany as a little boy and as a young diplomat during the 1930s, that the Germans had changed, that they were now “on our side.” How the two claims meshed—how the Russians could confidently leave a unified Germany to itself if the Germans were pro-American—he did not explain.

“My feeling now,” Kennan wrote in his diary after this embarrassing exchange, “is that I have thoroughly exhausted the working capital of knowledge about international affairs with which I left government, five years ago.” He wished “never to open my mouth about them again until I have some opportunity to learn all over again.”⁴⁰

VI.

The Kennans left Oxford on December 28 to drive, via an English Channel ferry, to the Swiss resort town of Crans for what they hoped would be a rest. But the weather-plagued hair-raising trip took five days, and when they arrived, George found the proofs of his Reith lectures waiting. “I haven’t the faintest enthusiasm for this publication,” he lamented, sensing the furor following him around like a baleful ghost. The respected Neue Zürcher Zeitung, unaware of his presence in the country, began a series of attacks on him two days after he arrived. At tea that afternoon, one of his hosts jovially credited Kennan with killing the NATO alliance. Just then a message came from an old friend, Gladwyn Jebb, who wanted Kennan to know that his lectures had greatly complicated Jebb’s task as British ambassador in Paris. All of this worried Kennan, “because unless I can find some means of withdrawing from the discussion of contemporary affairs, I shall never be able to go successfully through the next term at Oxford.”⁴¹

Much worse came, a week later, in an eruption of monumental proportions from an enraged Dean Acheson. “I am told,” the former secretary of state announced in a widely publicized statement on January 11, 1958, “that the impression exists in Europe that the views expressed by Mr. George Kennan… represent the views of the Democratic Party in the United States. Most categorically they do not, as I’m sure Mr. Kennan would agree.” Kennan could speak authoritatively “in the field he knows,” which was Russian history and culture and Marxist-Leninist ideology. However, he “has never, in my judgment, grasped the realities of power relationships, but takes a rather mystical attitude toward them.” Had he not provided his “personal assurance” that there was “no Soviet military threat” in Europe? “On what does this guarantee rest, unless Divine revelation?”⁴²

The sarcasm was withering, as only Acheson’s pen could have made it. As he got older, “he got more drastic,” Arthur Schlesinger recalled. “He enjoyed being extravagantly dismissive.” But he was doing so, in this instance, on behalf of the American Council on Germany, an influential pro-NATO organization headed by James B. Conant, the ex-president of Harvard who had also served as U.S. high commissioner and later ambassador in West Germany. With Conant’s approval—and Nitze’s encouragement—the group’s vice-chairman, Christopher Emmet, had asked Acheson to reply to Kennan, lest the Europeans mistake him as a “semiofficial spokesman and super brain-truster for the Democratic Party.” Acheson did not simply jump at this opportunity: he pounced on it. He had written “more for European than American readers,” he explained to Emmet, but “it won’t hurt some of our Democrats to learn that they don’t agree with George.”⁴³

Harry S. Truman accepted instruction quickly. “I do not agree with Kennan,” he assured the press on the day Acheson’s statement appeared. “He is not a policy maker.” He had been a good ambassador, but only when he had Acheson “to tell him what to do.” Conant went further, condemning Kennan’s proposals as “a blueprint for the appeasement of the Soviet Union.” The Washington Post, however, found Acheson’s assault “savage” and “inexplicable,” coming from someone who had himself been the target of unfair attacks: “He seems to regard Mr. Kennan as an adversary scarcely less dangerous than Mr. Khrushchev, and one to be demolished in entirety.” That didn’t faze Acheson, but congratulations from Dulles did. “I am getting too respectable to be safe,” he wrote a friend. “Alice [Acheson] is already suspicious of me. When I got a letter from Foster thanking me for my attack on George Kennan she was about ready to leave me.”⁴⁴

Compliments arrived also from a couple who, had things worked out differently, would have had Kennan as a son-in-law. “Will you send me George Kennan’s skin to hang up as a trophy on my office wall?” Eleanor Hard’s father Bill wrote Acheson after reading his press release. “You took it off him completely.” Anne Hard, who had vetoed the marriage, then added her own reflections:

“Your analysis of George’s character seems to me wholly right,” Acheson responded. “I had quite forgotten that he was engaged to Eleanor. What an interesting subject for speculation that is.”⁴⁵

Kennan was still in Crans when he saw newspaper stories reporting Acheson’s assault and Truman’s comment: there had been no warning. He was at a loss to account for “this sudden vehement outburst of malevolence” by people he had never publicly criticized “who had hitherto treated me only with cordiality.” His difficulty in Moscow, after all, had been “that I had no instructions from Mr. Acheson.” Quite apart from the personal implications, Kennan took the criticism as ruling out any discussion of a European political settlement within the Democratic as well as the Republican Party. That left only the option of plunging “blindly, recklessly ahead” with an arms race, “wherever it leads us.” He was unsure whether even to reply: “The distortions of my thinking are so bad [that] I do not wish to let them ride; on the other hand, is there any use?… The die is now cast…. These people will have their war, on which they all seem so intent.”⁴⁶

Not surprisingly, Kennan’s ulcer flared up again under the stress. The demands of the autumn had left him physically debilitated, and he had picked up a sinus infection on the arduous drive to Switzerland. Feeling miserable, he checked himself into a Zürich hospital in mid-January, while Annelise kept Christopher and Wendy busy with skiing lessons in Crans. That at least got George out of a further discussion of the Reith lectures, which the Congress for Cultural Freedom—the secretly CIA-funded organization for European intellectuals—had arranged in Paris. While Joe Alsop, Raymond Aron, Denis Healey, and Sidney Hook were dismantling Kennan’s arguments, his doctors were probing his “ghastly digestive system.” Sitting for hours one morning with a tube in his stomach, he reached the unsettling conclusion that Dulles might understand him better than Acheson did. “One would think,” Kennan wrote of the chorus of critics singing to the tune of his former boss, that “I had caught them all doing something they were ashamed of.”⁴⁷

Discharged from the hospital with orders to avoid further tension, George packed the family into the car and drove it back across the Alps into France through a raging blizzard. Fighting snow and ice all the way, they crossed the Channel, this time in an automobile air ferry, and by the end of January were back in Oxford, where George was swamped with unanswered correspondence, demands for interviews, and the need to prepare a new set of lectures. The children, who had thrived in Switzerland, soon had severe coughs, and even Annelise, unusually, was depressed. “Between you and me we just loathe [Oxford],” she wrote Jeanette, and could easily “start chalking up the days until we can leave.”⁴⁸

VII.

“The way in which the Establishment set out to swat him down—the things that Dean Acheson said in print about him—wounded [Kennan] very much,” Ullman recalled. Meanwhile well-meaning friends, dismayed by the rift, were trying to heal it. “I suppose it was necessary,” Joseph C. Harsch, the National Broadcasting Company correspondent in London, wrote Acheson: “If he had to be destroyed only you could do it.” But couldn’t Acheson let Kennan know that there had been nothing personal in the “dissection”? Not yet, Acheson replied: Kennan’s lectures had been not only silly but “extremely harmful.”

Someday he would write George a friendly note. “For the present, I wish to God that he would devote himself to giving us a new volume on the period 1917–1920 as delightful as the last, and would leave the next forty years alone.” Harsch tried again, pointing out that Kennan had been sick and was still convalescing. Acheson was unmoved: “One can hardly do as much damage as George has done,” he grumbled to William Tyler, of the American embassy in Bonn, “and then rush off to immunity in the hospital.”⁴⁹

“Your January broadside was perfect as a bucket-full of cold water down George’s neck and into the faces of the admiring throng,” Tyler replied. “As soon as the Germans found out that George was unlikely to be the next secretary of state in a Democratic administration, (and you removed any expectations they may have had on that score) they lost interest in his arabesques.” The “brawl” with Kennan had indeed pained their friends, but as Acheson reminded Philip Jessup, “I was not writing for our friends…. I was writing for the Germans to destroy as effectively as I could the corroding effect of what he had said and the belief that he was a seer in these matters.” Kennan had been trotting out Program A as a “panacea” for every crisis since 1948. Of course it could be looked at again, “just as a loaded gun can be.” But “I am against it.”⁵⁰

One prominent Democrat, however, chose not to let Acheson tell him what to think. Senator John F. Kennedy wrote Kennan on February 13 to say that he had read the Reith lectures, thought them excellent, and regretted the extent to which their contents had been “twisted and misrepresented”—nothing justified “the personal criticisms that have been made.” He did disagree with Kennan on several points; still it was

“It meant a great deal to me,” Kennan responded, “to know that you were not among those who consider the Reith lectures to have been some kind of outrage.” Composed under difficult circumstances, they certainly had their shortcomings. Surely, though, NATO policy was sufficiently robust “to stand re-examination at this moment, which seems to me a very dangerous and crucial one.”⁵¹

Unaware of this correspondence, Acheson had sent “Jacquie” Kennedy—whose family he had long known—a copy of a speech he had made objecting to her husband’s attacks on French policy in Algeria. “Mr. Acheson” got back a handwritten note praising his “beautifully constructed prose,” while wondering how someone “capable of such an Olympian tone can become so personal when attacking policy differences.” Caught off guard, Acheson reminded her that the Olympians had been “a pretty personal lot,” but he admitted that “[p]erhaps lawyers, who are always contentious fellows, are too hardened to be sensitive to these things…. So, you see, you have me very much mixed up.” Two days later, on March 10, he asked a mutual friend to tell Kennan that although he would soon be restating his argument in Foreign Affairs, “[m]y disagreement does not involve any diminution of my affection for him.” A direct letter, enclosing the article proofs, went off three days later: “I am more accustomed to public controversy and criticism than you are. So you are entitled to a few earthy expletives.”⁵²

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

VIII.

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

IX.

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

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:

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

I.

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

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.”¹²

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!”¹³

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.”¹⁴

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.”¹⁵

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.”¹⁶

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.”¹⁷

“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.”¹⁸

II.

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.”¹⁹

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.”²⁰

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.”²¹

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.²²

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.”²³

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.”²⁴

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.”²⁵

III.

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.”²⁶

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.”²⁷

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.²⁸

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.”²⁹

There was no delay this time about the agrément: the Yugoslavs were delighted with Kennan’s appointment. They had liked his Reith lectures and were sure, despite his denials, that he had visited the country the previous summer “to case the joint.” So Kennan spent the first week of February receiving briefings in Washington while delivering one of his own to the Policy Planning Staff and its new director, George McGhee. The topic was not Yugoslavia, about which Kennan as yet knew little, but the future of Soviet-American relations. It was the first time since the Solarium exercise of 1953 that anyone within the government—apart from the CIA—had sought his views.

Kennan saw no possibility now of ending the division of Europe. But the United States should seek points of agreement with the U.S.S.R.—particularly on commercial ties, to which the Kremlin leadership attached symbolic significance—while avoiding unnecessary irritants like the annual congressional resolution that called for liberating the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe: “Khrushchev with all his bluster is a sensitive man. We need patience and humor in dealing with him. We should not be worried by his statement that the Soviet Union intends to bury us—this was metaphorical, and the Soviet leaders know where their real interests lie.” Kennan did not repeat his suggestion, made to Kennedy, that improving Soviet-American relations could sharpen Sino-Soviet differences. He did, however, revive his proposal—first made over a decade earlier—that the United States withdraw its military bases from Japan. And it would be helpful if the State Department could return “to the old practice of giving instructions to a newly-appointed Ambassador explaining the purposes and objectives of his mission.”³⁰

On February 11 Kennan, along with Rusk, Harriman, Bohlen, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, attended a briefing for President Kennedy at the White House from Ambassador Thompson, just back from Moscow. Kennan could not help noticing that Johnson sat “in what seemed to me to be a sulky silence.” There was general agreement with Thompson’s claim that Soviet military and economic strength was increasing but also with Kennan’s reminder that Khrushchev and his colleagues expected to win “by the play of other forces.” Among these were “third world” opportunities, as in Laos, the Congo, and Cuba. The Soviet leader was eager to resume talks with the United States, broken off after the U-2 incident, and would probably not react violently “to a possible swift action against the Castro government.” Bundy’s minutes failed to specify who made this last suggestion; nor did they record what Kennan recalled Bohlen and himself saying next to the president: “Whatever you feel you have to do here, be sure that it is successful.”³¹

At his confirmation hearing on March 6, Kennan reminded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that neither the Soviet Union nor Communist China controlled Yugoslavia: “We should be happy to see that country maintain maximum independence.” The committee confirmed Kennan’s appointment unanimously, the Senate quickly agreed, and he was sworn in on March 22. That afternoon Kennan again saw the president, who wanted to know what his new ambassador to Belgrade thought about the government to which he was now accredited.

The Yugoslavs, Kennan replied, accepted American economic and financial assistance, yet supported the Soviet position “on almost every important issue.” Tito and his associates were “too deeply affected by their early Communist training to be able to get away from it entirely.” The best hope lay in the next generation of Yugoslav leaders, who might welcome “normal and intimate relations with us.” Would it help, Kennedy asked, to invite Tito to the United States? Perhaps, Kennan replied, but only if the visit was likely to produce “some favorable effect of a tangible nature” on the mutual relationship.³²

The important thing for Kennan at the moment, though, was rehabilitation: having despaired of any such possibility at the beginning of January, he now, at the end of March, had regained his influence in Washington, had been given an ambassadorship in a country he had long considered significant, and was serving a president who sought and respected his counsel. “Kennedy was a fan,” Bundy recalled. He responded to “exactly the kind of unusual, sensitive, independent intelligence” that Kennan possessed. The president had been “very kind,” George wrote in his diary on the evening of the twenty-second, and “my admiration continues undiminished.”³³

Back at the farm that weekend, he found “the house dank, the pump broken, the furnace losing water—A. was very dispirited. However, by evening, I had the house warm. And when Dorothy [Hessman], Wendy, and Krisha arrived from Princeton, it seemed more like old times.” The Kennans’ final briefing on Yugoslavia came a few days later from a friend, Robert Strunsky:

IV.

Kennan’s first significant act as ambassador took place before he left the United States. On April 19, 1961, he stopped by the Yugoslav embassy in Washington to warn his counterpart, Ambassador Marko Nikezic, of the “mischief” that could ensue if Belgrade “joined in anti-U.S. hysteria over the Cuban fiasco”—this was the CIA’s failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro by landing Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs two days earlier, about which Kennan had expressed forebodings when he first learned of it at the White House in February. It was under that cloud—“not helpful” at the beginning of his assignment—that George, Annelise, Christopher, Wendy, and Krisha sailed for Cannes on the twenty-fourth.³⁵

From there George flew with his son to London, where Christopher would be attending the nearby Sunningdale School: “This was really the end of the pleasant and affectionate association I had had, these past years, with the little boy, who would never be a little boy again.” George rejoined the rest of his family in Milan, and after a weekend in Venice they arrived by train in Belgrade on May 8. Krisha had repressed all natural functions while on the last part of the journey, so “we feared complications for the red carpet.” None occurred, but George was worrying about something else. Always slightly superstitious, he had noticed how closely these travel dates corresponded to those of 1952, when he had taken up the Moscow ambassadorship: “I hoped history was not preparing to repeat itself.”³⁶

Kennan presented his credentials to Tito on May 16, at the Yugoslav president’s summer residence off the coast of the Istrian peninsula. Doing so required flying, with Annelise, to a military airfield, being ferried across to the Brioni islands, and staying overnight in the once-elegant Grand Hotel, now an almost-empty official guesthouse, surrounded by deer, pheasants, peacocks, and Roman ruins. Wandering around, George found himself picking up a mosaic stone laid down in the time of Christ. It was, he wrote Grace and Joan, “as though only twenty days, not twenty centuries, had intervened.” Transportation was by horse-drawn carriages, and that was how Kennan, in great solemnity, went to meet his host.

Despite his standing as a communist leader, Tito seemed comfortable in these imperial surroundings, and after the ceremony the two talked informally for an hour. Recent debacles like the U-2 affair and the Bay of Pigs landings had caused Tito to doubt American competence, but “we were beginning to learn from our past mistakes,” Kennan assured him, and would not indefinitely accept passively “the undermining of our world position at the hands of the Russians and Chinese.” It was a tough line with which to begin his ambassadorship, and Kennan was not at all certain that he had gotten through.

George and Annelise found the embassy’s massive Cadillac—known to envious fellow diplomats as “the flagship”—waiting for them when they returned to the mainland. It drove them to Pula, a former Austro-Hungarian naval base, which evoked in George a sense of the past and, as it happened, a distant future:

The “flagship” then dropped the Kennans off at the port of Rijeka, where they picked up their own less imposing vehicle, a battered British Sunbeam left over from Oxford and shipped from New York. Leaking oil and missing parts, it nonetheless got them back to Belgrade across 350 miles of bad roads, the ambassador driving it all the way.³⁷

Kennan’s embassy subordinates were unsure what to make of the legendary figure under whom they were serving: “They viewed me, I suspect, with a certain amused astonishment, enjoyed the rhetorical melodrama of my numerous telegraphic conflicts with the Department of State, were intrigued by my unorthodox reactions to the work they performed and the experiences they reported to me, and were aware—as I like to think—of the genuine respect and affection in which I came to hold them.” But he could not know for sure, given “that treacherous curtain of deference” that surrounds any ambassador. It parted only occasionally, as when, on “international night” at the American club, Kennan got out his guitar, propped a foot on a chair, and sang, to great acclaim, “Have Some Madeira, My Dear.” A British embassy secretary whispered to Dorothy Hessman: “I can’t imagine H[is] E[xcellency] doing anything like that!”³⁸

V.

Having never seen Stalin during his months in Moscow, Kennan found Tito’s accessibility striking: the Yugoslav leader received him three times within the next two and a half months, once in Belgrade and twice again at Brioni. Kennan briefed him on the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit, held in Vienna on June 2–4; they discussed escalating tensions over Berlin as well as decolonization crises in Africa; and Tito promised his guest that he would host an upcoming conference of “nonaligned” states without favoring either of the Cold War superpowers. The Americans, Kennan replied, would take “a very calm view.” Their common language was Russian—Kennan was still learning Serbo-Croatian—and they found, if not in all respects common ground, then at least mutual respect. Tito had none of Stalin’s “refined hypocrisy and cruelty,” Kennan reported. Marxist prejudices still confused him, and his people’s experiences had made him abnormally sensitive to the oppression of others. But he had “an excellent, pragmatic political mind” and had “gained both stature and mellowness with the years.”³⁹

Anticipating Yugoslav sensitivities, Kennan had urged before leaving for Belgrade that Kennedy not proclaim “Captive Nations Week” in response to the annual congressional resolution, which was sure to call for it. Among the “nations” regularly mentioned, Kennan pointed out, were “Ude-Ural” and “Cos-sackia,” which had never existed except in the minds of Nazi propagandists during the war. And did the United States really want real nations like the Ukraine to seek their independence from the Soviet Union? The time had come to end the charade “as soon as this can be tactfully and quietly arranged.”⁴⁰

The resolution passed, as usual, in July, but the State Department promised that Kennedy would not endorse it. Kennan passed the assurance on to the Yugoslavs. Then, on the fourteenth, Kennedy did just that. It was “the most discouraging thing that has happened to me since my arrival at this post,” Kennan complained to Bundy, for it conveyed the impression that the United States was seeking to break up the Soviet Union and perhaps Yugoslavia as well. Bundy, embarrassed, acknowledged the resolution’s “foolishness” but explained that Kennedy could not ignore it “for political reasons [such] as the strength of support for foreign aid.” So the president had issued his proclamation on a Saturday evening, “the quietest possible moment of the news week,” in the hope that it would attract little notice. “It was a tactical judgment,” Bundy admitted, but Kennan took it as a warning that the new administration would be no less inclined than its predecessor to resist the primacy of domestic politics over foreign policy.⁴¹

Khrushchev’s threats against West Berlin, by then, were approaching a climax. Kennan had refrained from offering advice, he wrote Bundy, since he knew that Kennedy was consulting Acheson, which must mean “a considered rejection of my own views.” Now even more embarrassed, Bundy replied, on the twenty-seventh, that Kennan had not been asked to rejoin the government “for the purpose of shutting you up.” The president would think it “absurd that the cardinal should be quiet while the bishops are squawking.” So Kennan should speak his mind, even if this meant bypassing the State Department. After all, “there are not many people in the current management who can hold their own, in purely stylistic terms, with Dean, and you are surely one of them.”⁴²

On the next day the other Dean—Secretary of State Rusk—asked Kennan to fly back to Washington with him from a meeting of American chiefs of mission in Paris that both would be attending early in August. The purpose would be consultations on Berlin, the general situation in Europe, and Tito’s upcoming conference. Another of Rusk’s passengers on that flight was the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, with whom Kennan had a long talk. It had been “the easiest trip I have ever made across the ocean,” George wrote Annelise from the farm on the evening of August 12. “Even I was not tired.”⁴³

But he was frightened. On the way from the airport, Kennan had stopped at the White House to see Arthur Schlesinger, now serving as a presidential aide—Kennedy was spending the weekend at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. “You and I are historians,” Schlesinger recorded Kennan as having said, “or rather you are a real historian and I am a pseudo-historian.”

Kennan was in East Berlin when the Wall went up on the thirteenth, but this being the Pennsylvania village of that name, he was not inconvenienced. Nor was he upset, Bundy reported to Kennedy on the fourteenth: to the contrary, Kennan was relieved. His conclusions—which, for once, paralleled Joe Alsop’s—were that

The Berlin Wall, then, might ease the crisis, by means that did Khrushchev little credit. Kennan presumably conveyed this thought to Kennedy when he saw the president in an off-the-record meeting, upstairs at the White House, on the fifteenth, but Kennedy was already thinking similarly. Khrushchev’s decision showed “how despised is the East German government, which the Soviet Union seeks to make respectable,” he had written Rusk the day before. So the question was “how far we should push this.”⁴⁴

Acheson had strongly opposed negotiations over Berlin. “I never found in him at any time any enthusiasm for agreements that would meet the requirements of both sides,” Bundy recalled. “I’m not sure he ever saw that animal.” This had been the basis for Acheson’s attack on Kennan in 1958: NATO’s solidarity was more important than resolving the issues that had led to its formation in the first place. Any compromise now, the former secretary of state was sure, would shake the alliance. But Kennedy, who had admired the Reith lectures, was tilting Kennan’s way.⁴⁵

He flew back to Belgrade, therefore, reassured about his influence in Washington and at least cautiously optimistic about Soviet-American relations. There was “no compelling reason,” Kennan wrote Oppenheimer in mid-September, why the world should now “tear itself to pieces” over Berlin. And his own morale was improving: his ambassadorship had “wrenched me out of established habits,” refreshing “an expertise which was rapidly disappearing through neglect but which so many outsiders still expected me to be cultivating.” Whatever contribution he could still make as a scholar would “be strengthened, even if it is delayed, by this feeding of the other side of my nature.”⁴⁶

VI.

Kennedy probably wanted to see Kennan secretly on August 15 to discuss the unsigned “personal and eyes only” instructions prepared the previous day in the Department of State: that upon his return to Belgrade, Kennan was to contact the Soviet ambassador, Aleksey Alekseyevich Yepishev, to suggest setting up a confidential channel about which no other governments, particularly Germans on either side of the wall, would know. “I had the opportunity,” Kennan later explained, of talking “without an interpreter or anybody else present.” All he would have to do would be to walk “from my home to the Soviet ambassador’s home, and sit down with him in his own living room.”⁴⁷

Whether by coincidence or on orders from Moscow, it was Yepishev who asked to see Kennan on August 21. They met, not in Yepishev’s living room, but in the garden of the Soviet embassy—to avoid detection devices, the ambassador whispered. Confining their first conversation to the relatively safe issue of how Laos might be neutralized, the two envoys agreed to meet again on the thirty-first, but on the previous day two Soviet correspondents tipped off the United Press representative in Belgrade to the fact that the meeting would be taking place. Fearing a repeat of the Smith-Molotov embarrassment of 1948, Kennan was initially inclined to cancel the talks altogether, but then decided to go ahead on the grounds that they might at least reveal something of Khrushchev’s intentions. If exposed, Kennan could say that they were social visits. He would “take great care not to betray more than a general knowledge of our policies.”⁴⁸

They met, a day later than planned, on September 1. Khrushchev had jumped at the opportunity to use the Belgrade channel, Yepishev reported: any message that Kennan might want to send would go straight to the Soviet leader without passing through intermediaries. Meanwhile an agreement on Laos seemed possible. Kennan took this communication seriously, “since things more important than Laos were potentially involved.” Chief among these was Khrushchev’s surprise announcement, on the preceding day, that the Soviet Union would be resuming the testing of nuclear weapons, ending an informal moratorium that had been in effect since 1958. Why, Kennan demanded, had Khrushchev chosen this particular moment, “a most delicate one from [the] standpoint of progress toward negotiations over Berlin”?

Yepishev had no answer, but he went on to state Soviet preconditions for a Berlin settlement with such specificity that Kennan was sure he was acting under instructions. They amounted to formal recognition, on the part of the United States and its allies, of the fact that two German states existed and that their boundaries could not now be changed. The West Germans would not have to “take tea” with the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, but they would have to end efforts to subvert his government. In return, the Soviet Union would “disinterest” itself in West Berlin: its citizens could have whatever government they wanted, secure communications with the outside world, and the continued presence of American, British, and French troops in the city to guarantee these rights. Kennan responded, cautiously, that none of this seemed “beyond the borders of what could conceivably be discussed if the right time and atmosphere and setting” could be arranged. But if Moscow “continued the sort of behavior we had recently witnessed that time might never come.”

His assessment, for Washington, was that Khrushchev was balancing competing factions within his government. New initiatives on Berlin and Germany should be pursued, therefore, “only with utmost prudence on our part.” Nevertheless, it would be unwise to shut down the Belgrade channel, for “I am quite satisfied that it does indeed represent a means of private and earliest communication with Khrushchev.” As if to confirm this, Yepishev followed up with a ten-page unsigned memorandum reiterating the points he had made orally. Kennan himself translated it for the State Department and sent it off by pouch: having cabled its substance, he had no need this time for a long telegram. He had no doubt, though, that Khrushchev would regard any Kennan reply as coming from Kennedy.⁴⁹

That message, Kennan advised, should stress the inconsistency of “provocations” like the resumption of nuclear testing with the peaceful protestations Yepishev had conveyed. It was important to remember, however, that Khrushchev, for all his blustering, did not want a war. Washington’s position, then, should also reflect a readiness to negotiate, if necessary alone: “[W]e cannot let petty inhibitions of our allies, or even desire for moral support in unaligned camp, paralyze our action in any of the great decisions.” Rusk’s response was curt. “Approve your proposed reply on Berlin,” he cabled, but then added that Ambassador Thompson would soon be seeing Soviet foreign minister Andrey Gromyko in Moscow to make “tentative soundings on attitudes toward negotiations on Germany and Berlin. Believe your channel should be kept open but not developed on Berlin at this point.”⁵⁰

There were two more meetings with Yepishev, at which he seemed to be pleading for flexibility, but Kennan had no further instructions on how to respond. By mid-September, the NATO ambassadors had met in Paris and complained about lack of consultation; meanwhile the State Department was reverting, as Kennan saw it, to “a sullen and passive refusal to discuss Berlin.” That amounted to demanding “a unilateral Soviet military and political withdrawal from central Europe,” he complained to Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles on the twenty-second. “[I]f this is the only alternative presented to the Russians, it is clear that they would prefer to make war.” Acheson, it seemed, had prevailed after all.⁵¹

Khrushchev, with characteristic earthiness, had the last word. He had agreed, he wrote Kennedy on September 29, that Kennan and Yepishev should exchange views informally. “I never met Mr. Kennan,” but he seemed to be a man “with whom preparatory work could be done.” The two ambassadors were spending too much time, however, “sniffing each other.” For the Belgrade channel to work, they would need instructions “to start talks on concrete questions without needless procrastination and not merely indulge in tea-drinking, …walk[ing] round and about mooing at each other.” The instructions, from Washington at least, never came.⁵²

Kennan acknowledged, in 1965, that his conversations with Yepishev on Laos had been useful: “I attribute the subsequent quietness of the Laotian situation, in part, to these discussions.” But Rusk and his soon-to-be-appointed under secretary of state, George Ball, shut down the Berlin discussions, fearing that if news of them ever leaked, the West Germans would be horrified: “I always felt that it was a great shame that this channel was allowed to die, because they [would] not have found a better one.” That might well have been the case, for Khrushchev had been following Kennan’s thinking since the Reith lectures. “Many of Mr. Kennan’s ideas would be acceptable to us and should be to the advantage of the US as well,” the Soviet leader had told Harriman in 1959. Kennedy took a similar view, and in the wake of Kennan’s visit to Washington in August 1961, there was serious talk within the National Security Council about what form a deal on Berlin might take. “I suspect that Kennan provided expert reinforcement for views Kennedy already had,” Schlesinger later recalled.⁵³

In the end, though, Kennedy was no more prepared to take on his own State Department, Adenauer, and of course Acheson, than he had been Congress on “captive nations.” And so it would be left to a new generation of Germans a decade later, with the wary acquiescence of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, to work out much the same Berlin settlement that Khrushchev, through Yepishev, had recommended in 1961 and that Kennan could have negotiated.

VII.

The White House gave Kennan one other assignment during his August visit, which was to cultivate Tito’s guests at the September conference of “nonaligned” states. “[P]robably no American is more admired among the neutrals than George Kennan,” Schlesinger reminded Kennedy. “Many of those coming to Belgrade would wish to see him.” The American ambassador could hardly buttonhole delegates in the corridors, but he could attend receptions for them in other embassies, respond if they sought his views, and explain U.S. policy to them. “We would be depriving ourselves of one of our most powerful weapons at the conference if Kennan were told that he could have nothing to do with it.” That did not happen.⁵⁴

Now, however, Tito reneged on a promise. He had assured Kennan, during the summer, that he would host the conference in an impartial manner. But when he addressed the delegates on September 3, the Yugoslav leader said that although the timing had surprised him, he “could understand” Khrushchev’s decision to resume nuclear testing, given the “incomprehensible policies pursued by some powers” who believed that rearming West Germany would enhance European security. “George absolutely hit the ceiling,” Bill Bundy recalled. Khrushchev himself could have written the speech, Kennan reported with disgust. It looked, he later observed, “as though the Russians were in a position to make [Tito] say anything they wanted to.”⁵⁵

So instead of Kennan listening to the delegates, they—and the press—had to listen to him as he voiced his indignation: “The Yugoslavs didn’t like this at all,” but they had “chosen their road,” he wrote the State Department. They could no longer be considered “a friendly or neutral nation.” Tito had become a sycophant, it seemed, in a single speech. Ball detected in Kennan’s telegrams a sense of personal affront: “I never saw that attitude on the part of any other ambassador.” Most Foreign Service officers dealt with governments that behaved “like sons-of-bitches,” Bill Bundy added. “George found [that] very hard to accept.” Shocked, the Yugoslavs took to asking: “Is the Ambassador still angry with us?” But Kennedy backed Kennan: “I want you to know that I particularly like your insistence upon representing the interests and purposes of the United States Government, even when this involves abrasions with those to whom you are accredited.”⁵⁶

Since 1948 the United States had supported Tito’s regime with economic and even military assistance, despite its communist character: Kennan, more than anyone else, had originated that policy. Sustaining it had been difficult, given the objections of anti-Tito exiles, skepticism about foreign aid of any kind, and the widespread belief that all communists were enemies, whether they had split with Moscow or not. Yugoslavia was thus a tempting target for congressional critics, and now Tito was behaving, Kennan believed, as though he could not care less about “the preservation of American, or indeed western, influence anywhere in the world.” It was important that the Yugoslavs learn the “limits to American patience.” They had cheered Kennan’s appointment, the New York Times Belgrade correspondent reported, because they thought him a “big man.” They still did, but now there were “no happy grins.”⁵⁷

Despite these strains in the official relationship, Kennan liked the Yugoslav people. He appreciated “their sweetness to children, their feeling for beauty, their intense suspicions and loyalties, their individuality and charm and sense of humor,” he wrote Oppenheimer. His task was to reconcile three things: the lifelong ideological commitment of Tito’s generation; American support for West German rearmament, which the Yugoslavs would “never understand or forgive”; and their continuing need for aid from the United States, which, “proud as they are, they hate to take.” But perhaps he and their leaders were beginning to work out “what is possible and what is impossible in our relations.”⁵⁸

Kennedy asked Kennan to return for a review of Yugoslav policy in January 1962. After meeting with him twice, the president approved moderate amounts of food and development assistance, the sale of supplies for military equipment that the Yugoslavs had already obtained from the United States, and a continuation of trade on the same basis as with “non-Soviet bloc” nations. All of this required congressional approval, so Kennan presented the proposals to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, encountering no significant objections. He would return to Belgrade, he wrote Annelise, with understandings that “should get us over the major humps and make possible the continuation of my own work on a reasonably favorable basis.”⁵⁹

At the president’s request, Kennan had prepared a summary of administration policy, but on February 5 Rusk released a revised version of it which stressed—as Kennan had been careful not to do—that Yugoslavia was strengthening its Western ties at the expense of those with the East. The Chinese published Rusk’s statement, embarrassing Kennan, who knew how much Tito resented being portrayed as a tool of the “imperialists.” No one in the State Department was listening to him, Kennan complained to Schlesinger in March, despite the fact that Rusk and the new ambassador to the Soviet Union, Foy Kohler, had once been his subordinates. Perhaps it was time to resign. He would not do this “precipitately,” but he wanted the White House to know.⁶⁰

NSC staffer Robert Komer found in Kennan’s reporting few “constructive ideas” but thought the State Department reluctant to argue with an ambassador who had the ear of the White House. That he did have, McGeorge Bundy assured Kennan: the president “follows your reports with a personal interest that is matched only in one or two places which, on their surface, are more troublesome than Belgrade.” So Komer hoped that “we’re going to use Kennan’s visit here for a long cool look at what we could or should do to forestall or limit Tito’s lean leftward.”⁶¹

The occasion this time was a Washington trip by the Yugoslav foreign minister, Koča Popović. Kennedy received his guest in the White House living quarters on May 29 and from his rocking chair began gently questioning him on what ideology really meant in the modern world. Weren’t other issues shaping relations between Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Albania? If that was the case, why should ideology affect Yugoslavia’s relations with the United States? There were, to be sure, still American isolationists who were “not sophisticated” about communism. But if the Yugoslavs could avoid episodes like the Belgrade conference, then there could surely be friendly relations, since the purpose of American policy was to preserve Yugoslavia’s independence.⁶²

“I was full of admiration for the way the President handled him,” Kennan recalled. Kennedy’s boyish courtesy, bordering on naïveté, reminded him of the young Charles Lindbergh, perhaps even Lincoln: “There was something very appealing about it.” Kennan took the opportunity, nonetheless, to leave a letter with the president and the secretary of state confirming his intention to spend another year in Belgrade, and then to return to his academic responsibilities at the Institute for Advanced Study. Were it not for these, “nothing would give me greater satisfaction than to continue to serve… in any manner that was useful to your purposes.”⁶³

VIII.

Nonsophisticates were much on the minds of Kennedy and Kennan during their meeting with Popović, because two weeks earlier the House Ways and Means Committee had quietly approved an amendment to the trade expansion bill denying “most-favored nation” status—meaning generally applied tariffs and quotas—to all communist countries. “This news fills me with consternation,” Kennan had cabled from Belgrade. The Yugoslavs would interpret it as “a gratuitously offensive act.” Bundy replied, soothingly, that the bill made no explicit mention of Yugoslavia, that the administration expected to obtain an “escape clause” in the Senate, and that the Ways and Means chairman, Representative Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, had promised not to oppose this maneuver in the conference committee that would reconcile the bills prior to final passage. “I have some official worries—not with the Executive Branch but with Congress—and I won’t breathe easily until they are resolved,” George wrote Annelise on the thirty-first. But when Kennan paid a call on Mills the next morning, he disclaimed responsibility for the offending language and seemed willing to have it removed.⁶⁴

Then on June 6 Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, citing Tito’s handling of the “nonaligned” conference, proposed an amendment to the foreign aid bill denying assistance in any form to Yugoslavia. This pleased his colleagues, who extended the ban to include Poland, and it passed by a vote of 57 to 24. Reminded that they had precluded agricultural exports, the senators then amended the amendment to allow these. The world’s “greatest deliberative body,” columnist James Reston fumed, had thereby insulted both countries, first by cutting off all aid, and then, as an afterthought, by making them “a dumping ground for farm surpluses.” Kennan learned of this after returning to Belgrade. Nothing further was needed, he cabled despairingly, “to confirm Tito on his recent course and to discourage those who have argued in favor of [a] Western orientation.”⁶⁵

Caught off guard, Kennedy took the unusual step of releasing a paraphrased version of Kennan’s telegram, as well as one from John Moors Cabot, the American ambassador in Warsaw. These congressional actions, Kennan was quoted as saying, reflected “appalling ignorance” about Yugoslavia and amounted to “the greatest windfall Soviet diplomacy could encounter in this area.” His message read, reporter Max Frankel observed, as if Kennan were pleading to come back to try to save the situation. And so he was. The least he could do in Washington, Kennan wrote in his original cable, “would be more important than the most I could do, in present circumstances, at this end.” Kennedy agreed, and after only two weeks in Belgrade, Kennan was on an airplane once again.⁶⁶

“I am now launched, for the first time in my life, into the thick of a major Congressional struggle,” George wrote Annelise from Washington on July 3. “Chances of success are poor; but one doesn’t think of that in the heat of battle.” Rusk seemed unsure of why he had come, and the State Department offered little help. The president and his staff, however, arranged meetings with congressional leaders, lined up television interviews, and encouraged Kennan to state his position in The Washington Post. When he asked about trying to see Eisenhower, Kennedy instantly agreed: Kennan visited and secured the support of the former president at his Gettysburg farm, after which he stayed overnight at his own in nearby East Berlin. “I slept like a top, [and] woke up”—it was the Fourth of July—“feeling greatly refreshed.”

The next day was “hell day.” Kennan spent it “tramping from the office of one Texas or Arkansas congressman to another,” but it all seemed futile: not one would be ashamed to vote for the Proxmire amendment. “I am now desperately tired, and must be off to bed.” A second day of lobbying went better: the vote would probably be closer than it might otherwise have been. George took a bus from Washington that evening to the closest drop-off point for East Berlin, “where, in the late evening and in pitch-blackness, Joany and Larry miraculously found me by the roadside.” His Washington Post piece appeared on July 8, and two days later George wrote Annelise to say that he had finished—he hoped—his Capitol Hill diplomacy: “I have done about all that I can do.”⁶⁷

Kennan’s brief career as a lobbyist convinced him that the legislators were using Yugoslavia to demonstrate their anticommunism. It was harder to do this with the Soviet Union, because people were afraid of war. Everybody knew, though, that “Yugoslavia was not going to make war on us.” This left him, as an ambassador, with little to say. The Yugoslavs would ask: “Why is this being done to us?” He could only reply: “I have no knowledge of why it’s being done to you.” They would then inquire: “What would we have to do to avoid this?” He could only say: “I don’t know what you could do.”⁶⁸

The Proxmire amendment, in the end, fizzled: after Kennedy assured House and Senate conferees that the authority to aid Yugoslavia and Poland was one of his strongest Cold War weapons, they restored it on July 18. Kennan returned to Belgrade at the end of that month, assuming that the “most-favored nation” issue was also being resolved. But on September 27 the phone rang in the Belgrade embassy residence. The caller was Frederick G. Dutton, assistant secretary of state for congressional relations, with the news that the House-Senate conferees on the trade bill, to the surprise of the State Department, had voted to retain the denial of “most-favored nation” status to Yugoslavia and Poland. Wilbur Mills had reneged on his promise, or at least what Kennan understood it to have been. “There’s only one thing that could stop it at this point,” Kennan remembered Dutton as having said. “That would be if you would appeal personally by telephone directly to the President.”

Because the phone line was not secure, Kennan assumed that the Yugoslavs were listening: “I had no choice, then, but to call the President.” Rising to the occasion, the ambassador summoned his ancient Russian butler, Alexander, “the usual intermediary with telephone central,” and instructed him, to his amazement, to place a person-to-person call to the president of the United States. This he did, and to Kennan’s amazement, Kennedy immediately came on the line. Kennan stated as forcefully as he could what he saw as the implications of Mills’s action, whereupon the president suggested that he talk directly to the congressman and had the call transferred. Kennan was amazed again when Mills picked up the phone, but he had his speech ready, delivered “in my official capacity as ambassador in Belgrade and against the background of thirty-five years of experience with the affairs of Eastern Europe.” Denying “most-favored nation” treatment, he insisted,

Mills’s response was “cursory, negative, and offered no hope for a reversal of the action.” But at least the point had been made, and Yugoslav intelligence had had an amazingly interesting evening.⁶⁹

By a vote of 256 to 91, the House passed the trade expansion bill, with Mills’s language unchanged, on October 4. The Senate approved it by acclamation on the same day. On the fifth Kennan cabled Kennedy and Rusk to say that his usefulness as an ambassador had come to an end, and that he would soon be stepping down: the Yugoslavs did not wish for him to leave, but they understood his embarrassment “after adoption by Congress of measures I have publicly opposed.” This caused a flurry at the White House, where Bundy promised that Kennedy, in signing the bill, would make “emphatically plain” his objections to the language on Yugoslavia: “I feel sure that you would not want to do anything which might be construed, even by a few, as reflecting differences with the President.” Kennedy himself weighed in on the ninth: “Bundy is right. You must stay in Yugoslavia since you understand better than anyone else what our policy aims to accomplish.” Most convincingly, Annelise also opposed resignation: “You don’t want to do that.”⁷⁰

Sadly, Kennedy himself, when he did sign the trade bill on the eleventh, reneged on Bundy’s promise: he praised the legislation as the most important since the Marshall Plan, leaving it to an unnamed White House “source” to voice his dissatisfaction with the denial of “most-favored nation” status. “I want you to know that the matter is very much on his mind,” Bundy apologetically cabled Kennan. “Fearful agonies of decision whether to resign or not,” George recorded in his diary on the fourteenth. “Allowed myself finally to be persuaded (not just by A’s remonstrations alone, but by these as [the] last straw of many) not to do so; but went off for a long walk, totally discouraged, feeling defeated as I have not felt since 1953.”⁷¹

IX.

Kennedy learned, on the next morning, that there were Soviet missiles in Cuba: these gave him much more to worry about than Yugoslavia, Kennan, and Wilbur Mills. Kennan had cautioned the State Department by cable, on September 13, that it should not dismiss as “propaganda” Khrushchev’s warnings about the island: “When Soviet Union threatens to intervene militarily and to unleash world war if we move to defend our security and peace of Western Hemisphere, this is profoundly serious matter.” But he played no role in the crisis that followed, hearing of it only when the rest of the world did. “I recall vividly the strains of the last world war and the months that I was [separated] from any communication with the family,” he wrote Joan on October 23 from Milan, where he and Annelise were on a brief holiday. Could she take responsibility for Christopher if they, with Wendy, should be interned somewhere? “I feel it is very serious,” Annelise added, “but cannot work myself up to the same pitch as Daddy…. However, it is better to be prepared!”⁷²

The chauffeur of the embassy “flagship” rushed the Kennans back to Belgrade—over five hundred miles—in eleven hours, from where they watched the Soviet-American confrontation unfold. Appalled by the risks Khrushchev had run and not particularly sympathetic to Castro, the Yugoslavs kept their heads down, protesting the blockade of the island only after the larger crisis had been resolved. Kennedy’s handling of the situation had been “masterful,” Kennan thought. Tito’s colleagues quietly agreed, pointing out that if war had come, they would have had to come down on the Cuban side.⁷³

With the assurance, then, that there would be a future, Kennan turned to an analysis of where American policy toward Yugoslavia had gone wrong. The problem, he concluded in an eight-thousand-word dispatch pouched to Washington at the end of November, had been “heroic struggles with ourselves.” If the United States could not do better, then it might as well “fold up our tents, before the Yugoslavs fold them up for us.” Bundy passed Kennan’s analysis to the president, who ordered yet another review and again asked Kennan to fly back for it—his fifth such trip since becoming ambassador.⁷⁴

Meanwhile Tito was in Moscow, having been driven there, Kennan was sure, by American obtuseness. He had to acknowledge, though, that the Yugoslav leader was enjoying the “personal triumph of his life.” Khrushchev received him as an honored guest, with a deference that did not seem to expect subservience. Strangely, Kennan thought this a sham and even proposed, early in January 1963, that he begin cultivating Tito’s domestic opponents. Washington should provide no further food aid, and although Kennedy should seek the reinstatement of “most-favored nation” treatment, he should do this as a point of principle and not as way of luring Tito back to the side of the West.⁷⁵

These suggestions bewildered the NSC staff. “The Ambassador is clearly on the zag course now, having completed the zig with his [November] airgram,” David Klein complained to Bundy. No one in Washington or in the Moscow embassy shared Kennan’s suspicions of a Tito-Khrushchev plot. Clearly “matters of personality and intuition” were shaping Kennan’s judgment, making it “difficult to come to grips with the substance of the problem.” As for standing on principle, “[t]he President can do many things, but I doubt that even he could pull off this kind of a gambit with the U.S. Congress in the year of our Lord 1963.”⁷⁶

“It is by no means certain that the President will do, at this time, what I should like him to do,” George wrote Annelise from Washington, “and if it is not done now, I fear it will never be done.” That proved to be prescient. Kennedy received him on January 16 but ruled out any challenge to Congress for the foreseeable future. All that he agreed to do was to answer a planted press conference question a few days later, noting the importance of exploiting differences “behind the Iron Curtain” and hoping “that the Congress would reconsider the action it took last year.”⁷⁷

Bearing that crumb, Kennan saw Tito soon after returning to Belgrade. Tito seemed uneasy but made it clear that Yugoslavia was not about to abandon its independence. The Warsaw Pact no longer fitted “modern conditions.” The word “bloc” was losing its relevance. The other Eastern Europeans would soon follow Yugoslavia’s example. Tito hoped no longer to have to rely upon the United States, because “he never knew at what point they would get hit by some whim of the Congress.” But the Americans had nothing to fear from his policy. The State Department and its Belgrade embassy should simply give them “a true picture of [the] situation as of today.”⁷⁸

The meeting left Kennan deflated, dispirited, and on the way to the hospital. The trouble this time, the American military doctors in Frankfurt determined, was not ulcers but a kidney stone that would plague him for years to come. From his bed, Kennan reverted to another habit: he completed an eight-page letter to Walter Lippmann, not unlike the one he had dictated from another hospital in Washington a decade and a half earlier. “Being myself inhibited from writing for publication,” he wanted the Yugoslav situation to be known “to someone at home; and there could be no one better qualified than yourself to understand its complexities and implications.”

The ultimate goal of the United States, Kennan argued, should have been to loosen the cohesion of the Marxist-Leninist world, which might be “the only means short of war by which we can ever make headway against the communist colossus.”

To John Paton Davies, Kennan added, a few days later, that his had been “a disastrously unsuccessful tour of duty.” He would have accepted the blame had it not been for the fact that no one on either side had listened to him: “I am as remote from the counsels of the congressional and labor leaders who have made U.S. policy… as I am from the internal deliberations of the Yugoslav League of Communists.” Their insults “go past my head like bullets past the head of one who sits between the battle-lines (and for the safety of whose head neither side could care less).” He would “leave U.S.-Yugoslav relations at an all-time low.”⁷⁹

X.

The White House announced Kennan’s resignation on May 17, 1963. “We all knew George had been through a lot,” Schlesinger remembered, “and there was no surprise or bitterness over his leaving.” Seeking to dispel rumors to the contrary, Kennan claimed in his own statement to have had the support throughout of the president and the secretary of state, even though congressional actions regarding Yugoslavia had been “a great disappointment.” In fact, Kennan complained in 1965, neither Rusk nor his under secretary of state, George Ball, had ever concerned themselves with his problems: they had seen his appointment as having been Kennedy’s and “were not interested in what happened to me.”

Kennedy too disappointed Kennan—by proclaiming “Captive Nations Week,” by failing to keep open the Yepishev channel, by repeatedly promising a tougher line with Congress than he was willing to pursue—but Kennan bore him no grudge: “[T]he President completely understood what he did to me, and I, on the other hand, completely understood why he had to do it.” Because he had so narrowly won the presidency, Kennedy’s political position was weak. He could not afford to appear “soft” on communism. Taking a stand against Mills might have “gummed up” his civil rights program and other domestic legislation. “This was a tragic situation, and I think both of us came out of it entirely without bitterness…. I was sorry that it was myself whom he was obliged in a way to destroy.”⁸⁰

Kennan came around, as well, to a more charitable view of Tito. The Sino-Soviet split was in the open now, and neighboring Albania had sided with the Chinese. Tito knew how much credit he could get with Khrushchev by sticking up for him after his decision to resume nuclear testing: that accounted for the Belgrade conference speech, which had cost Kennan his ambassadorial equilibrium. The Moscow trip was Tito’s payoff: the “prodigal son” returned, but on his own terms. He would make verbal concessions, but with “no intention of giving up his independence.” As a consequence, Eastern Europe was safer for heterodoxy than it had been in 1958, when Kennan had detected some of the first signs of it in Poland. He and Tito, it turned out, had wanted much the same thing.⁸¹

Relations with Yugoslavia were therefore never close to collapse, but Kennan more than once was. As usual, he took too much personally. In contrast to colleagues like Rusk, Ball, and Bohlen, Kennan had never achieved the diplomatic equivalent of clinical detachment. Emotional fragility led to professional volatility, a problem that had afflicted him throughout his career and was still doing so in Belgrade. “I am attached to the man as a person,” Kennan’s economic counselor, Owen T. Jones, wrote in his private diary: to his “kindness and decency, his brilliance, his reputation and stature, his access to people at all levels, the essentially long term soundness of his judgments.” But “I am repelled by his self-centered egoism, …his mercurial moods, his meticulous arrogance.” Kennan’s “fixations,” Jones concluded, “haunt any dealings with him.”⁸²

Kennan had his own explanation for his difficulties in Belgrade. Progress generally resulted from accumulations of small services, he reminded himself in a note written while on a flight back to the United States—not for consultations this time—at the end of May 1963. Those who performed such tasks tended to have little sense of the larger picture. He had been trying, in Yugoslavia, “to do one small thing,” and he did not regret this: “It might have been worse if I had not been there.” But as he returned now to wider perspectives, “I find myself little aided by two and a half years’ immersion in the dust and heat.”⁸³

His first stop was a conference in upstate New York where gloom about his own country quickly resurfaced. His own speech had failed, while Oppenheimer’s had been “too compact and subtle to be fully understood, and too impressive to be answered.” A gang of sullen teenagers, encountered on an early morning walk, would have killed him “for kicks” if they not been exhausted from being up all night. There was nothing to do now but “stand by and watch the internal catastrophe… which will surely overtake us if the external catastrophe does not anticipate it.”⁸⁴

He was also having weird dreams. One moved the East Berlin farm to Nagawicka, where the Kennan children had spent their summers, which adjoined California, where Grace and her husband were living, which was just across the lake from Delafield, where George had attended St. John’s and now was considering entering local politics. Another occurred while traveling overnight to Chicago on the 20th Century Limited. The train was somehow diverted into Canada, where George had to board a bus to another railroad station, located with the aid of Prime Minister Lester Pearson, from which he caught another train, settled himself in the club car without a ticket, but was sure “that if I, being who I was, explained my predicament, there would be no difficulty.” The sugar bags in the real dining car the next morning read: “Have sweet dreams on the Century.”⁸⁵

George visited Jeanette and her family in Highland Park, spoke at the University of Wisconsin commencement in Madison, and helped Charlie James, now president and chairman of the board of the Northwestern National Insurance Company, open its new building in Milwaukee. He then picked up an honorary degree at Harvard, flew to Paris for a NATO meeting, and rescued Christopher from Sunningdale, where he had just finished his second and final year. They spent a day nostalgically in Oxford, drove from there to Harwich, and boarded a Channel ferry for Holland. Sitting on deck in the sun and out of the wind, George spent the afternoon reading Thurber aloud to his son, who “laughed until he got the hiccoughs.”⁸⁶

The Kennans’ last full day in Belgrade, July 26, 1963, was a somber one because of the earthquake that had occurred that morning in Skopje, killing over a thousand people and devastating most of the city. The next day they flew to Brioni, where on the twenty-eighth Tito hosted a luncheon for all four Kennans, with George able to announce the arrival, near the disaster site, of an American emergency field hospital. The children comported themselves appropriately in the presence of the Yugoslav president, who toasted their father as a “nauchnik”—a scholar—just the right thing to have said. From there the family flew to Venice, Christopher having negotiated permission to keep his turtle.⁸⁷

XI.

Kennan had one more ambassadorial duty to perform that fall, since Kennedy had not yet appointed his successor: this was to help host the long-planned Tito visit to the United States. Anticipating hostile demonstrations in Washington, the State Department had arranged to house the Yugoslavs within the controlled precincts of Colonial Williamsburg, and Kennan was dispatched there to welcome them. The horse-drawn carriages were a bonus, but also “a fitting answer,” George thought, to those at Brioni. The Kennans were the only Americans at dinner that evening, where the conversation veered off, improbably, onto snakes. “I ask Koča [Popović] whether they were much bothered by such things during their life in the mountains, in the Partisan war.” No, he replied, “for some reason, wild life avoided us.” “That,” Tito explained, “is because we never washed.” The Kennans spent the night in an overheated room at the Williamsburg Inn, with George “assailed by gloomy premonitions, harder to bear than the exhalations of the burning radiators.”⁸⁸

They were well-founded. Demonstrators noisily picketed the White House when the Yugoslavs were received there the next day. Reporters noticed Kennedy’s reluctance to be photographed shaking hands with his guest. The president explained to Tito that he had signed the Trade Expansion Act, despite its denial of the “most-favored nation” privilege, because it was “a very important measure.” He hoped to regain presidential discretion in the matter, perhaps within the next few weeks. Tito should understand, though, that “every member of Congress wanted to avoid being called pro-communist,” and it was hard for them “to distinguish among the Soviet Union, Communist China, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Albania.” As for the pickets, he got them all the time himself.⁸⁹

Worse was to come. When Tito arrived in New York to address the U.N. General Assembly, he and his entourage were literally besieged in the Waldorf-Astoria, with two young protesters almost breaking into his suite. Kennan was at least able to greet the Titos peacefully in Princeton, where, he reported with relief to Kennedy, the visit had gone well. But if New York was to continue to host the United Nations, it would have to take “greater responsibility than it now does for the protection of its foreign guests against insult and molestation.”⁹⁰

Some spirit told him, though, not to end his ambassadorship on a sour note. So Kennan added a handwritten compliment, reminiscent of one he had sent Acheson in even more trying times thirteen years earlier:

The date was October 22, 1963. The reply went out on the twenty-eighth:

“Many thanks,” the president added, in his own handwritten postscript. Kennan later recalled what Kennedy had said at the end of their last private conversation, on the day before Tito’s visit to the White House: “George, I hope you’ ll keep on talking.”⁹¹