George F. Kennan: An American Life

THAT HE DID. “OUR FOREIGN POLICY IS PARALYZED,” LOOK MAGAZINE had Kennan complaining, in an interview that ran under a large photograph, showing him apparently wincing in pain. The causes, he insisted, lay in Congress, where just a few powerful legislators could tie things up; in the bureaucracy, which suffered from “ponderousness”; and among allies, who found it easier to demand “everything but the kitchen sink, rather than take a real negotiating position.” There had been, thus, no “New Frontier” in diplomacy because Kennedy had no latitude to construct one. Kennan had resigned his ambassadorship, not over differences with the administration but because he lacked credibility and authority. It had not even been clear how much humanitarian assistance the United States could legally provide after the Skopje earthquake. At least he had given blood: “No Congressional committee could stop me from doing that.”¹

The article appeared in the November 19, 1963, issue. Kennan was with Oppenheimer three days later when they heard the news. “He said nothing, nor did I—there was no need…. [B]ut we were both aware that it was more than just one life that had been obliterated: that the world we cared about had been grievously diminished, together with our own ability to be in any way useful in it.” In the sad days that followed, Kennan composed a eulogy for the only president under whom he had served of whom he approved.

John F. Kennedy understood, Kennan wrote, two great principles of statecraft: “First, that no political judgments must ever be final; and second, that the lack of finality must never be an excuse for inaction.” Blessed with “a clear mind, a quick intelligence, an uncommonly retentive memory,” Kennedy appraised dispassionately the people and problems he confronted.

Kennedy approached issues with an open mind, studied them carefully, and embraced answers while asking further questions. He respected the past, never assuming that those who had gone before “were idiots or men of bad will.” Despite setbacks, he never lost heart: he bore disappointments “in manly loneliness,” seldom revealing them to others. An extraordinarily gallant and gifted man,” he was only approaching his full potential when “the hand of the assassin reached him.”²

The eulogy itself was extraordinary, given Kennan’s disappointments over the past two and a half years. Kennedy had repeatedly subordinated foreign policy to the interests of Congress, the bureaucracy, and the allies, precisely the habits Kennan had so often condemned, most recently in his Look interview. Survivors rarely speak ill of the dead; but Kennan had spoken well of Kennedy before his death, despite compromises that differed little from those Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower had made, toward which Kennan had been far less charitable.

Kennedy, however, consulted Kennan—indeed treated him almost as a mentor—in a way no previous president had done. They met, after Kennedy’s election, at least fourteen times, an unusually large number for a serving overseas ambassador. Their conversations softened, although they never removed, Kennan’s bitterness over his defeats: “When I came home and saw him there in his room—that bedroom of his upstairs in the White House—and realized the pressures that were brought to bear against him, realized even what it meant to him to take an hour out to sit down in his rocking chair and talk with me, I always was aware that I must not look at his position from the standpoint of my own problems.”

Kennan the historian understood that all presidents confront inadequate information and irreconcilable choices: his two volumes on Wilson and the Bolshevik Revolution had portrayed these brilliantly. But Kennan the diplomat, the policy planner, and the public intellectual rarely showed such sympathy. Kennedy, with some success, brought the two Kennans together, perhaps because Kennan—self-critical as always—saw in Kennedy what he himself should have been.³

I.

He had known, since October 1962, that he would be resigning: what to do next, however, was as usual unclear. There were, as always, invitations to teach, this time at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Yale asked him to replace its great diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis. Harvard offered a “university professorship,” tied to no particular department. But these would involve “a disorderly, harried life,” Kennan explained to Oppenheimer. “I would probably be pressed to speak too much; the voice would soon wear thin; nothing permanent or identifiable would remain to mark the effort.”

The alternative was immersion in history, possibly the transition “from the clear and symmetrical concepts of 18th-century culture to the strange Victorian world of the latter half of the 19th century.” He could try to become conscious of all “the currents and impulses to which men were exposed at that time—to let this work in me, and then to determine, as spirit and occasion might dictate, what I want to express, and what form to give it.” Were he to take this course, he would return to the Institute, where “I would expect to detach myself completely from the public discussion of contemporary affairs (Dorothy [Hessman] smiles as I dictate this; but she is wrong).” Yet another possibility would be a memoir. “But what if it should be a success?” Could he really retire into the past? This was “the whirlpool of questions in which I rotate.”⁴

“I cherish you as a colleague and neighbor far too much to trust my own objectivity,” Oppenheimer replied, in a letter exquisitely attuned to these ambivalences. He went on to remind Kennan, though, that the Institute could allow all of these options. It would expect scholarship, but the topics pursued need not always be the same. Most of its faculty taught, from time to time, “in nearby campi.” As for public commentary, Einstein, Earle, von Neumann, “and indeed I myself have not felt silenced, or even inhibited, by our attachment to this place.” There need be no final commitment: Harvard could keep its chair warm while Kennan sampled life back in Princeton. He should say no to Yale. In the end, he ought to give “an appropriately small weight to what other people expect of you, and a very great one to what you expect of yourself.”⁵

As Oppenheimer had hoped, that settled it. Kennan promised that he would be on hand for the Institute’s fall term. The other offers had left him “much torn,” George admitted to Kent, but returning to Princeton would give him the greatest flexibility, while not forcing another relocation upon his family. He and Annelise had moved, he later estimated, some thirteen times while he was in government. “I recognized her need for a permanent home.” So the White House resignation announcement made it official: Ambassador Kennan would resume his duties at the Institute for Advanced Study, in accordance with “long standing plans.”⁶

He would do so without Hessman, who had spent almost two decades with him. Now a Foreign Service employee, she decided to stay on to work for C. Burke Elbrick, Kennan’s successor in Yugoslavia. Her own successor turned out to be Constance Moench (later Goodman), a Smith College graduate who had applied for a secretarial position in Oppenheimer’s office but was assigned instead to Kennan. It was “a blind date,” she recalled, “because the two of us agreed to this sight unseen.” However, “I did know something about Professor Kennan. I’d been a government major, and I’d read the ‘X Article’ and American Diplomacy.” She had also seen, in The New York Times, an account of the ambassador’s last days in Belgrade. “I thought, well, if his staff is weeping when he’s leaving, he can’t be all that bad.”

Moench found her new boss “slim, elegant, and rather young in the face, although balding—balding? He was bald.” Kennan was shyer than she had expected, and sensitive to everything around him: “By that I mean his [capacity] to observe and to feel beauty, to drink it all in like a sponge, his caring for other people.” His eyes, she noticed, resembled Oppenheimer’s: “extraordinary eyes, just absolutely riveting, those clear blue eyes. I sensed a very real affection between the two men.” Kennan was a man of many moods, “although I never felt terribly dragged down by them.” He always treated her “with kindness and affection and respect.”⁷

Princeton University made Kennan a “visiting” professor of history and international affairs in the fall of 1963. This was an unpaid position, in line with the Institute’s policy on outside academic appointments, but the courses were for credit, and he welcomed the interaction with students. It would counter, George wrote Kent, “the unbroken loneliness of pure research and writing [which] is not good for me.” His spring semester courses would include lectures on Russia in the era of Nicholas II, a seminar on recent diplomatic history, and a preceptorial, Princeton’s version of a tutorial. Moench remembered his working hard on these, compiling bibliographies, searching out maps, even locating recordings of famous speeches. “It was very lively, there was a lot of wonderful discussion that went on, and he spent almost full-time making [it] exciting and interesting and rich for the students.”

Kennan enjoyed teaching, although he soon realized that he would have to cut back his course load if he was to get anything else done. He preferred undergraduates to graduate students: the latter were too beaten down, too lacking in spontaneity, too worried about what he might think of them. Both groups wrote badly and were poorly prepared linguistically. Kennan agonized over grades but was generous when his own role in history came up. “I think he deserves an A,” he wrote a few years later of a student who had turned in a paper on Harriman without discussing him. “Better people than ____ have failed to mention me in this connection.”⁸

II.

Kennan was also working that fall on the Elihu Root lectures, a series of three to be delivered at the Council on Foreign Relations in early November. He would type out first drafts—embarrassingly, Moench found him to be faster than she was—then mark them up, rearrange passages using scissors and tape, and return them for further editing. He still dictated, at times horizontally, but chiefly for correspondence, or to relieve kidney stone pain. Published in 1964 as a short book, On Dealing with the Communist World, the lectures were Kennan’s attempt to extract lessons from his Yugoslavia experience. He meant them “as a polemic” against the ill-informed anticommunism so evident within Congress. They were a Cold War primer: “Little steps for little feet.” They were also, as it happened, little read. In the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, Kennan’s ambassadorial travails seemed inconsequential. The implications he drew from them, however, marked an important shift in his thinking about the postwar international system.

Owing to a sequence of events that began in 1948—Tito’s defection, Mao’s triumph, Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign, unrest in Poland, rebellion in Hungary, and now the Sino-Soviet split—it hardly made sense anymore, Kennan argued, to speak of “communism” as a unitary phenomenon. That opened opportunities, because by exploiting divisions within that ideology—by selectively extending support to or withholding it from regimes that still espoused one variety or another of Marxism-Leninism—the West could determine “whether the Chinese view, or the Soviet view, or perhaps a view more liberal than either, would ultimately prevail within the Communist camp.” Capitalism, in theory at least, could shape communism’s future.

In practice, though, this was not happening. Mindful only of mindless constituencies, Congress was indiscriminately legislating trade and aid policy. Deference to the West Germans precluded any disavowal of their irredentist ambitions in East Germany and Poland. These, in turn, prevented the Soviet Union from reducing its military presence in Eastern Europe, something it would have to do before “polycentrism” could flourish there. The great colonial powers, during the nineteenth century, had alienated millions through insensitivity toward those who were within their power. Weren’t the United States and its allies offending “just as many more through lack of imagination and feeling toward those who were in the power of their ideological adversaries”?⁹

Kennan had based his call for “disengagement,” in the Reith lectures, on his own assurances that Soviet ambitions were limited. That seemed, at the time, too thin an assumption upon which to risk so much. But if Moscow no longer controlled its satellites—if Titoism was becoming the norm and not the exception within the international communist movement—then what did it matter what Kremlin leaders thought? Perhaps ideology, for these old men, was like sex, Kennan explained to a puzzled Japanese audience in the summer of 1964: “I think men just like to exercise power over other people just as they have certain other things that they like to do.”

They tended “to clothe this love for power in ideological terms, and sometimes they really believe them. I am sure that Lenin did.” But as regimes aged, ideology declined, leaving only the more normal competition “for prestige with the public, for admiration, for respect, for all these things that make up a position of power.” And what of their children? “They care about the twist and they care about certain types of hairdo for the ladies. They would like to hear the Beatles sing but they do not seem to be much interested in communism as an ideology.”¹⁰

Kennan said nothing in On Dealing with the Communist World about what U.S. policy toward China ought to be. His Asia trip gave him a chance to think about this, though, and by November 1964—a few weeks after the first Chinese atomic bomb test and Khrushchev’s almost simultaneous deposition by his Kremlin colleagues—Kennan had answers ready. He began, in The New York Times Magazine, with one of his portentous single sentences:

But—the United States was not “the avenging angel of all humanity.” It lacked the power or the will to rescue Mao’s victims. It could not even defend allies along China’s periphery “if we fail to find support in the temper of the inhabitants.” The best Americans could do would be to assist other Asians in preserving their independence as long as the help they needed fell within the scope of what “we might reasonably be expected to give.”

Meanwhile the Chinese leaders, for all of their brutality, were only human. They once had “mothers and children and affections.” They were what circumstances had made them, and circumstances would determine what they, or their successors, would become. It was up to the West, therefore, to shape those “in such a way that the fruitlessness of some of their undertakings will become apparent to them,” even as it held open “the possibility of negotiation and accommodation if their ambitions are moderated and their methods change.” Not least among those circumstances was rivalry with the Soviet Union, an antagonism too deep to be resolved by Khrushchev’s removal. The United States would be foolish not to take advantage of this. “We should be prepared to talk to the devil himself,” Kennan had said in his Look interview the year before, “if he controls enough of the world to make it worth our while.”¹¹

III.

As had happened in Oxford six years earlier, illness complicated Kennan’s teaching in the spring of 1964. He came down with infectious hepatitis, which kept him hospitalized for several weeks and left him debilitated for several more—although he did manage to write all of his lectures and deliver some, while continuing to dictate long letters. The sixteen points made in one of these, he assured its recipient, “are all views I held before the color of the world turned a jaundiced yellow.” He was well enough by June, however, to risk the Asian journey as a guest of the International House of Japan. It was his first trip back since 1948, and Annelise’s first ever. It gave him a chance to reassess a country he had long regarded, like Germany, as a Cold War anomaly.¹²

After formally making peace in 1951, the United States had taken on the responsibility of defending Japan and still had military bases there. Sooner or later, Kennan was sure, the Americans would make themselves so unpopular that they would have to leave. The constitution MacArthur had imposed prohibited rearmament, so Japan’s only alternative would be an agreement with the Soviet Union to “neutralize” the country—Kennan’s East Asian equivalent of European disengagement. Protests over renewing the bilateral security treaty had forced Eisenhower to cancel a visit in the summer of 1960, leading Kennan to revive his proposal to withdraw American forces when he briefed the Policy Planning Staff in February 1961. He gave little further thought to Japan’s affairs, though, until he arrived there in June 1964.¹³

Kennan’s lectures, chiefly historical, aroused no particular controversy, but shortly after returning to the United States, he published a Foreign Affairs article that did. Entitled “Japanese Security and American Policy,” it stressed the “great schizophrenia of thought and feeling” he had encountered, induced by the shock of defeat, the humiliation of occupation, and the fear of nuclear war.

So had the time not come to seek Moscow’s cooperation in guaranteeing Japan’s security, under United Nations auspices, while leaving its government free to make its own arrangements with Beijing? Had not MacArthur himself once insisted, “if the writer of these lines understood him correctly,” that Japan’s most suitable long-term status would be “permanent demilitarization and neutralization”?¹⁴

Worried that the Japanese would regard a Kennan appearance in Foreign Affairs as an official trial balloon, the American ambassador in Tokyo, Edwin P. Reis-chauer, urgently arranged a rebuttal. The task fell to Bill Bundy, now assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, who while literally in flight across the Pacific had to turn a previously written speech into a repudiation of Kennan’s article. Knowing little about Japan, Kennan had fallen victim, Bundy believed, “to a rather common syndrome of the liberally inclined American who finds liberally inclined conversational partners in a foreign country and concludes that’s where opinion is headed.”

“I feel guilty [for] having kicked up so much dust,” Kennan contritely wrote one of his Japanese hosts. He saw now how few people, either in Washington or in Tokyo, hoped to improve Soviet-Japanese relations. That was unfortunate, because Japan’s ability to manage the Chinese, “with whom an accommodation must sooner or later be negotiated,” would be enhanced if it first settled its differences with the U.S.S.R. Unlike the Reith lectures, this particular Kennan heresy did little to shake prevailing orthodoxies. It did, however, Bundy recalled, reinforce the views of those in Washington, especially Secretary of State Rusk, who “didn’t feel [that] George really knew a hell of a lot about Asia.”¹⁵

IV.

Kennan had not returned to the Soviet Union since Stalin declared him persona non grata in 1952, but its diplomats had for some time been regularly approaching him, obviously with the permission of the Foreign Office, usually with a bottle of Caucasian brandy in hand, to ask: “Why don’t you ever come to Russia?” The queries reminded Kennan of a line to a former lover in an Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet: “I find this frenzy insufficient reason for conversation when we meet again.” The frenzy of his expulsion need not now be discussed. He would be welcomed back.¹⁶

Knowing that he was to be in Japan, Kennan decided to test Soviet hospitality. He had taken the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Novosibirsk and Kuznetsk in 1945, he wrote Anatoly Dobrynin, the new ambassador in Washington, but he had never ventured beyond those points, despite the fact that the elder George Kennan, the author of “a well-known work” praised by the early Bolsheviks, had traveled extensively in eastern Siberia. So might it be possible, after his Japanese visit, to travel to Norway by rail, seeing the rest of the Trans-Siberian and revisiting Moscow, “which has changed so much since I was last in the Soviet Union”?

The embassy’s consular division replied curtly that Kennan should consult Intourist, the notoriously unfriendly Soviet travel agency. Dobrynin apologized a few weeks later, claiming a misunderstanding and offering to help with the arrangements, but by then Kennan had contracted hepatitis. The illness required a recovery not likely to be facilitated by a long Russian train ride, so he let the matter drop. Sadly, he never made the trip.¹⁷

Instead the Kennans flew from Tokyo to Oslo, by way of Bangkok, New Delhi, Tehran, Beirut, and Geneva. While Annelise waited for Christopher and Wendy to arrive from the United States, George traveled alone to Kristiansand to open the Sørensen house, empty in the wake of her parents’ recent deaths. “The old, so-little-used Buick, …which no one else was allowed to touch, was now standing there,” George wrote in his diary, “our property, officially.”

The family got there the next day, and after dinner George, Christopher, and Wendy walked to the boathouse, dragged the rowboat down to the water, and watched as it promptly sank.¹⁸

But there was a better boat waiting. On July 10, just outside Bergen, the Kennans took possession of Nagawicka, their new seagoing sailing vessel. “I was so excited,” George recorded, that “I could scarcely pay the taxi-driver.” After a few days of trials in a nearby fjord, they stocked up on supplies, took on a Norwegian deckhand, and set off for Kristiansand, a voyage of some 220 miles down the coast and around the southern tip of the country, partly in protected waters, partly in open ocean. They almost didn’t make it.

On the second day out—the first beyond the shelter of islands—they ran into a strong headwind accompanied by stinging rain, an “uninterrupted shower-bath” that left Wendy, huddled against her mother, “barely recognizable under her heavy oilskins.” The next afternoon, with fog approaching, they anchored near Stavanger, from where George had intended to put Annelise and Wendy on the train to Kristiansand, to spare them the long sea-exposed stretches that lay to the south. But the weather was fine the following morning, and there was another port with a rail connection—Egersund—on the way, so George decided, “influenced, I must say, by the common desire of the male contingent to continue to have the services of a cook,” to proceed there.

They were off Egersund at five that evening, with another five hours of daylight left, when George changed his plans again: why not do another twenty or thirty miles? He quickly regretted this. The diesel engine quit, just as visibility diminished and a sudden storm began driving them toward the coast—the one portion for which he had neglected to bring a chart. Sturdy as she was, Nagawicka could not easily tack if forced into a confined harbor or a narrow fjord. With darkness approaching, George finally saw the beam from a distant lighthouse. He knew then that he was at the mouth of the Listafjord, into which he blindly sailed boat and family, finally locating, at around midnight, a secure anchorage. Annelise, imperturbably, had kept a stew simmering throughout the excitement, and they all now devoured it, relishing the implausibility of ever having been “in danger near so snug and peaceful a spot.” Two days later, her engine repaired but unused, Nagawicka tacked “manfully” into the sound at Kristiansand. She had, on the whole, “behaved splendidly throughout—exceeded, in fact, our highest hopes…. If her master is able to develop qualities comparable to her own, she will go anywhere.”¹⁹

It was the first of many such voyages with family and friends, some equally hair-raising. “George obviously responds to this sailing life,” his Princeton neighbor Frank Taplin recalled of a trip they made together on a successor sailboat, Northwind. Sailing also brought out, as Kennan’s guitar sometimes did, a ribaldry quite at odds with the his public image. Taplin preserved one example, recited gleefully by George while at sea:

George never allowed Annelise to take the tiller when sailing out of a harbor, Dick Dilworth noticed, “although she’s fully competent to do so.” So because Northwind had no winch, on at least one occasion—it happened to be July 4, 1976—the task of hauling up her heavy slimy anchor fell to this financial adviser to the Rockefeller family, trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study, member of the Yale Corporation, and chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while Captain Kennan kept his eye firmly fixed on the nautical horizon.²⁰

V.

The Soviet Foreign Ministry was still trying to get Kennan back to Moscow, and in December 1964 Mikhail Smirnovsky, the head of its American desk, brought the matter to the attention of White House aide David Klein at a Washington dinner: why was Kennan so reluctant? “I said the reason was probably the obvious one,” Klein wrote him, “the treatment you received in 1952.” Smirnovsky insisted that the expulsion was “no longer valid,” that Kennan would be received cordially. Dobrynin then followed up with another invitation. So Kennan finally decided to go, not as an official guest but as an ordinary tourist, and to bring Christopher with him.²¹

They left Budapest by rail on the evening of June 21, 1965, in a Soviet sleeping car on which George was relieved to hear Russian spoken—Hungarian being one of the few European languages to have eluded him. The rough roadbed irritated his kidney stone, but the car attendant did her best to make him comfortable. “I saw it in your eyes,” she said of his pain. There was a late-night border crossing, after which George and Christopher slept through the Carpathians and spent the next day crossing the fertile plains of the western Ukraine. An Intourist guide took them around Kiev on the twenty-third—the cathedral, the university, the catacombs, the banks of the Dnieper, the deep but excellent subway. The next day they flew to Moscow.

Foy Kohler, the American ambassador, had invited them to stay at Spaso House, which to George’s eyes looked “absolutely splendid—immensely improved.” There was time that afternoon for a drive through the city, a walk around the Kremlin, and an evening at the Bolshoi, where the dancers conveyed simultaneous impressions of proficiency and of “something already done too often.” The Soviet foreign minister, Andrey Gromyko, came to lunch at Spaso the following day, bringing only Smirnovsky with him—it was, The New York Times noted, “a special tribute.” Positions were “stoutly maintained on both sides,” Kennan recorded, but “I gained a new respect for our visitor, in whom I was obliged to recognize an able and seasoned statesman, not unkind or unreasonable, nor devoid of a sense of humor.” Gromyko was saying, in effect: “Please understand that the Foreign Office had nothing to do with your expulsion, and was not even informed about it. Therefore, I hope that we can have as pleasant relations as we would normally have, had this never occurred.” It was Edna St. Vincent Millay, improbably channeled.

On the next morning a chauffeur drove George and his son to the ancient city of Novgorod, where they admired the local Kremlin, enjoyed the view of the Volkhov River and Lake Ilmen, soaked in the long rays of the evening sunshine, felt the breezes blowing in from the Baltic, and savored the cheerful disorder of the Russian families picnicking, fishing, swimming, sailing, or just walking around. Following dinner in the hotel, they had an unexpected visit from two students, who wondered whether they might be willing to sell Christopher’s only pair of shoes, “i.e., his ghastly loafers.”

There were, then, two days in Leningrad, after which George took Christopher on another train ride, this time to Helsinki, from where they would go on to Norway. At the Finnish border, they watched “with more than a detached interest” the train’s slow progress across the heavily guarded frontier zone. George had been there before, both in his diplomatic career and in his historical imagination: The Decision to Intervene ends with this description of the site, as it would have appeared to the last official Americans to leave Russia in the fall of 1918.

How had he known that there had been a goat? He couldn’t prove it, he later admitted, but “I never saw such a scene in Russia without a goat,” so it seemed safe enough to include one. Now he was there with Christopher, and perhaps even in the distance another goat. It was the end of a train trip George had hoped to begin in Vladivostok. This one didn’t, but the border crossing brought a kind of closure, nonetheless.²²

VI.

“I spent the day laboriously endeavoring not to think about the event,” Kennan confessed on January 20, 1965, the day Lyndon B. Johnson was inaugurated for the full term he had won by defeating Barry Goldwater the previous November. “Is this just sour grapes—the fact that I am rejected by Washington? In part, perhaps.” Probably “I would like, deep down, to be called upon to serve again,” but “I know I should dread, on closer contact, having actually to do so.” With Kennedy’s death, Kennan had lost his chief listener in the White House. He expected no such relationship with Johnson.

“I had a horror of Mr. Johnson,” Kennan recalled years later. “I think he did worthy things internally, but, my God!—he did them with such methods that I couldn’t have lasted in his entourage.”²³

Johnson did, in the spring of 1965, attempt a connection to Kennan, or at least his aide, the historian Eric Goldman, did. In an effort to evoke Kennedy’s style, Goldman had proposed a White House Festival of the Arts, but by the time Johnson got around to approving the idea, he had begun escalating the war in Vietnam and had ordered military intervention to prevent an alleged pro-Castro coup in the Dominican Republic. Goldman asked Kennan to speak, in his capacity as the newly elected president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The invitation came at an awkward moment, because Kennan’s predecessor, Lewis Mumford, had used his departing speech to the organization in May to launch a vitriolic attack on Johnson. He had then “fled, leaving the meeting to me.” Kennan’s conscience would not have allowed such a thing, he wrote Mumford afterward, “but this implies no lack of respect on my part for the faithfulness with which you followed the dictates of your own.”²⁴

Convinced that he had to represent the National Institute at the White House event, Kennan flew back at his own expense from Europe, where he was preparing for his trip to the Soviet Union with Christopher. The festival took place on June 14 with extensive media coverage, much of it generated by the poet Robert Lowell’s highly public rejection of the invitation he had received. Kennan addressed the luncheon, with Lady Bird Johnson in attendance. He defended the “eccentricities” of artists but cut from his prepared remarks a passage endorsing their right to address controversial issues: it would, Goldman had warned him, offend the president. “Are we his guests?” Kennan asked. Goldman said yes, and that settled it as far as Kennan was concerned. Mrs. Johnson thanked him for avoiding controversy, but reporters noticed the omission, obliging a presidential press spokesman to claim, lamely, that Kennan had run over his allotted time. Johnson, who had been in his office most of the day, appeared only for the concluding evening address and never bothered to greet Kennan: “That was my only contact with the White House in his time.”²⁵

Kennan’s own doubts about Vietnam developed gradually. He had gone out of his way, while in Belgrade, to defend Kennedy’s support for Ngo Dinh Diem against Yugoslav press criticism. But by the time of the Look interview in November 1963—which appeared just after Diem’s overthrow and assassination—Kennan was advising caution: “When you have regimes of this sort, …[y]ou always have to be ready to get out.” In Japan, several months later, he acknowledged uncertainty about Johnson’s intentions but suggested that the domino theory did make sense. By March 1965, though, with American military involvement growing, Kennan was privately expressing deep concern “about what our people are doing in Southeast Asia. It seems to me that they have taken leave of their senses.” And in May, writing to Annelise: “I am absolutely appalled at what is going on. It looks to me as if Mr. J[ohnson] had lost his head completely.”²⁶

Nevertheless, he kept these views to himself. When he saw Gromyko in Moscow on June 25, Kennan used the occasion, Ambassador Kohler reported, to mount an “able and effective” defense of American policy. That was a diplomatic facade: Kennan was in fact wondering how the United States could hope to exploit Sino-Soviet differences while fighting a major war in Vietnam. Washington had lost “almost all flexibility of choice not only in that particular area but in our approach to the communist world generally,” he wrote Yale’s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin. He saw no point, however, in speaking out. “I have had my day in court. My views are known…. I can do no more, it seems to me, than to fall silent.”²⁷

But he didn’t. Kennan’s first published criticism of Johnson’s strategy appeared in The Washington Post on December 12, 1965. If victorious, he argued, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong would surely impose a ruthless dictatorship: young Americans marching on their behalf were choosing “a very strange way” to support freedom. But the world contained much more oppression than the United States could ever hope to remedy, some of it “closer to home than what transpires in Vietnam.” A communist triumph there would not shift the global balance of power. Meanwhile the war was overshadowing everything else. “[E]nslaved to the dynamics of a single unmanageable situation,” the United States was losing the initiative, “not just locally but on a world scale.”²⁸

Kennan was recovering, when the piece appeared, from yet another health crisis, this time a prostate operation, which laid him low through the Christmas holidays. “[T]he incomparable grapefruit,” he assured Kent, “are already contributing to my recovery in a most welcome way.” He was well enough by February 1966 to draft a statement on Vietnam for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose chairman, J. William Fulbright, had invited him to testify. Kennan then traveled to Ohio for lectures at the College of Wooster and at Denison University. He took a late flight to Washington on the ninth, arriving sleep-deprived and exhausted—only to find himself, for five hours the next day, on national television.²⁹

Angered by Johnson’s decision to resume the bombing of North Vietnam after a five-week halt failed to produce negotiations, Fulbright and his staff director, Carl Marcy, had arranged live coverage of the hearings they had convened. Worried by this, Johnson tried to seize the spotlight by scheduling, on the spur of the moment, a “summit” conference in Honolulu with South Vietnamese president Nguyen Cao Ky. He also pressed the television networks to resume their normal programming. CBS executives obliged with I Love Lucy reruns on the day Kennan appeared, provoking the resignation of their respected news division director, Fred W. Friendly. NBC, however, carried Kennan’s testimony in full.

“An unusual hush fell over the prelunch drinkers at the Metropolitan Club,” The New York Times reported, “as members and guests, including Government officials, bankers, lawyers and journalists, grouped, glasses in hand, around a television set.” What they and the nation saw, Washington Post columnist Murrey Marder added, was not the explosive drama of past congressional hearings, “only a bald, soft-spoken, well-tailored man just five days short of 62, …calmly and decorously surgically dissecting a whole concept of foreign policy [of] which he profoundly disapproved.”

Ho Chi Minh was not Hitler, Kennan explained; nor would he be, if he won, a puppet of Moscow or Beijing. Defeating him, however, would cost civilian lives and suffering on a scale “for which I would not like to see this country responsible.” The United States could not continue to “jump around” like “an elephant frightened by a mouse.” Instead its standard must be that of John Quincy Adams: to sympathize with freedom everywhere; to fight for it only where feasible; and to “go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Kennan added, to this famous aphorism, one of his own: “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”³⁰

“Your testimony,” Kennan’s friend Louis Fischer wrote, “resembled a supersonic plane breaking the sound barrier; it ripped through the nation, and perhaps the world, breaking windowpanes of the mind.” That was extravagant, but Johnson did find it necessary, in a press conference the next day, to deny significant disagreement with Kennan, or with retired Army general James M. Gavin, who had earlier made a similar argument. Privately, Johnson was fuming. “They both would just rather not be troubled with Asia,” he complained to his aides. Why would Kennan even talk about Vietnam when he had never been there and knew nothing about the situation? But George Reedy, Johnson’s former press secretary, pointed out that Kennan and Gavin were reasonable men, who had expressed their uneasiness from a moderate perspective and in a sensible tone. Perhaps they had a point in wondering whether the war was being conducted “as an integral part of an overall United States world strategy.” Could Johnson meet with them and see that they got regular briefings? The president, now very much on the defensive, chose not to do so.³¹

Kennan had not sought this visibility. He had participated in no public protests against the war, he assured a former State Department colleague, not even university teach-ins. But he had felt it necessary, when asked by Fulbright, to make his views known. The response astonished him: “It was perfectly tremendous. I hadn’t expected anything remotely like this.” One woman wrote to say that when his testimony began, she had been ironing: “I ironed all day.” She was not alone. CBS might have thought that the typical opinion maker didn’t watch daytime television, humorist Art Buchwald wrote, “but in my house it happens to be my wife.”

One poll, shown to Johnson, revealed support for his handling of the war dropping from 63 to 49 percent in the single month that followed the Senate hearings. More than any other episode in Kennan’s career, this one confirmed his long-standing belief that style was as important as substance. After seeing them on television, nobody could dismiss Kennan or Gavin as “irresponsible students or wild-eyed radicals,” Fulbright’s biographer has written. Their testimony “made it respectable to question, if not to oppose, the war.”³²

On the Sunday after he testified, Kennan gave the chapel sermon at Princeton University. His theme was “Why Do I Hope?” There were many reasons not to: the state of the world, the fallibility of human nature, the frailties of the human frame. And yet:

There was hope, then, in simply struggling, against whatever odds: “Churchill taught us that, in 1940.” There was hope in “this marvelous earth around us.” There was hope in professional dedication, which “like some gigantic spiritual ski-lift” overcame “the abysses of our true loneliness and helplessness.” But the strongest reason for hope was love:

No act of love, he was sure, “will not ultimately be given its true value in the settlement of the affairs of the human spirit—in ways, perhaps, that defy our powers of imagination, but fully and in such a way to make it a thousand times worthwhile.”³³

VII.

“Dearest Annelise,” George wrote her from Geneva, where he had been lecturing at the Graduate Institute of International Relations, on May 5, 1965. “I have been thinking constantly about ourselves and our future…. I thought it might be easier to write some of this to you than to say it when I get home.” They were approaching

a serious crisis, not in our relations, which are unaffected, but a crisis brewed of the point of change to which my life, and partly our life, has come: with the growing up of our children, the exhaustion of my public usefulness, the passage of the farm beyond the limits of our mutual strength, and my own need for some steady and creative purpose, if I am to move cheerfully through the strains of advancing age.

There would be “more of Princeton, and more of the loneliness of the Institute,” but this would raise problems. “We’ll have to dream up something, I think, to prevent a complete drying-up of my personality…, and to make our life and home sufficiently interesting to hold some attraction for the children—as well as for ourselves.” It wouldn’t be easy, “for our taste in people and in recreations is not always the same.” Annelise’s reply, if she wrote one, is not on record, but the issue was one of which they were both aware. Marriages, like life, go through stages. Some survive the transitions; others don’t. How this happens is often a mystery, since few couples document—and fewer outsiders witness—the inner workings of an intimate relationship.³⁴

Of their love there can be no doubt: the marriage could not otherwise have lasted for as long as it did. How two people love, though, is—as George’s letter gently suggested—not always the same. “I think they must have had a lot of hard times with each other,” a close friend surmised. George acknowledged as much—also gently—in his Princeton chapel sermon: “The path of true love indeed never does run smooth, [given] the inevitability of jealousies, of unrequited affections, of separations and bereavements.”

He had known, as a young man, that he must marry, but he also dreaded the prospect. “[O]nce married,” George informed Jeanette before he had even met Annelise, “very few men ever think at all any more.” Annelise wasn’t his equal as a thinker and never tried to be. “I wonder what it’s going to be like, living here with all these great brains,” she teased Oppenheimer, on the day they were introduced in the spring of 1950. She had been living with George for a long time by then, though, and his brain was still functioning. Some other wife, facing his slides into self-absorption, might have given up on him, Jeanette speculated. But “Annelise would make him go out and buy her a birthday present! She wouldn’t sit and sulk.” She was, George’s older sister Constance observed, totally unlike him, and therefore “[s]he couldn’t have been a better wife for him.”³⁵

Annelise’s resilience, their neighbor Dick Dilworth thought, reflected her Scandinavian origins: an American would not have had the patience. Another Princeton friend, Bill Bundy, admired her skill in getting George to relax: “One has seen matrimonial relations where you feel that it’s too jangly, because they’re both trying to show off to each other.” Annelise had been a Washington wife when Mary Bundy first encountered her: “You talk about your husband. It’s tedious beyond measure.” In Princeton, though, “I began to see the other side, and to think she was just wonderful.” But George might have found Annelise “a little boring at times,” even there.³⁶

“George is more apt to talk about himself with women than with men,” Annelise herself acknowledged. “Much more so.” Shrewdly, she used the plural. She could always discuss with him where to live and travel, what they could afford, and how to raise the children. But George never wrote her the kind of long, self-revelatory letters he sent to Jeanette. Annelise had seen some, and they made it appear “as if he were having absolutely the worst time. I knew it wasn’t like this. I can’t explain to you why always when he took pen in hand—” “Gloom and depression would set in?” “Yes.”³⁷

Dorothy Fosdick, with whom Kennan shared his troubles when they served together on the Policy Planning Staff, attributed his need to confide in women to “deep psychological considerations.” Annelise agreed, pointing out that the loss of George’s mother, and then of Cousin Grace after his father remarried, had changed “his whole feeling about women.” George went even further: his relations with women, he wrote when he was seventy-seven, had been “unfortunately affected by the bewildering succession of female figures who flitted in and out of the house, each taking care of me in her way, through the years of my infancy and childhood.”³⁸

The stability of a long marriage never quite balanced this instability in his upbringing; hence his dependence on Jeanette, as well as on a succession of female friends from whom George sought solace, to one degree or another, at one time or another: Frieda Por, Dorothy Hessman, Juli Zapolskaya, Fosdick herself. Others—more secretly—became lovers in times of loneliness, lapses George explained in Freudian terms without absolving himself of Calvinist guilt.

The best you could do, when afflicted by such “emotional and instinctual chaos,” was “to learn to act as though you weren’t.” But concealment too had its price: “There’s no use pretending that it’s anything other than what it is.”³⁹

That’s why he used Russian, at times, to chronicle concealments. “I am ringing her up,” George wrote under an English-language entry in his diary on February 14, 1965. “No one is answering. I am calling again. She has picked up but I can hear in the tone of her voice that she is not alone. Embarrassed, I am ending the conversation. I am absolutely devastated and driving home.” Similar passages stretched across the bottom of pages for the next three months. They were to be understood, he explained to himself and to whoever would later read them, as “a story or novel based on fantasies flowing from my own life, representing its [switching back to English] fictional extension.” A few of these entries, however, also recounted dreams. “Enticing opportunities of getting intimate with particular women,” he wrote of one, “which don’t materialize because of the presence—the watchful presence—of my wife.”⁴⁰

He even left instructions for his son, not to be passed on “until I am dead,” on how to manage such matters. Marriage could indeed provide “the deepest moments of happiness a man is capable of experiencing and the best conceivable background for the great constructive tasks of life.” But not all marriages were successful, and even those that were did not always fully satisfy “the sexual instinct,” second only to self-preservation in the demands that it made. So what about affairs? If conducted openly, the woman would become possessive, in an effort to demonstrate “her proprietary rights and the security of her status.” If clandestine, the affair risked becoming “the source of endless gnawing shame and apprehension.” If the woman was not married, “you may be fairly sure she wants to be, or will at some point want to be.” If she was married, there was always the possibility “of a sudden and unwanted intimacy with her husband.” If asked which was worse, “the friendship of an unsuspecting husband, or the resentment of a discerning one, I should not be able to tell you. God save you from them both.”⁴¹

Domesticity, George griped in another “imaginary” letter, was “children, diapers, illnesses, relatives, tiresome questions of money, [and] the sex-destroying question: ‘Have you remembered the key?’” He ought to be able to stroll, “sometimes alone, sometimes in company, through shady allées. There should be just enough of the female sex to ease the mind, not enough to destroy it. Can one have these things in Princeton?” He was not sure. It would require

keeping in mind at all times that which is physically absent as well as that which is present: the people, dependent on you, whom you do not at the moment see; the responsibilities that do not at the moment impinge themselves on your life and consciousness; your past failures; the appalling acts of weakness of which you have been guilty; the injustices you have done to people; the tragedies that may not yet have happened, but do happen—and are bound to;—in short, the whole tragic bedrock of existence.

Tragic indeed—until one notes that George began this last diary entry in the transit lounge at the London airport and completed it hours later as his plane was landing in New York: air travel almost always drove him, with pen in hand, into sloughs of despond. During the three weeks he had been away on this trip, he had sent Annelise an affectionate letter every other day. “It will be good to get home,” the last of them ended. “Love, G.”⁴²

George led multiple lives through most of their marriage, and Annelise knew that he did. What these were when—which were real, which imagined, which dreamt—is harder to establish and doesn’t much matter. He was hardly alone, in this respect, among his contemporaries. He was unusual in taking responsibility for these affairs, whatever their nature, and in leaving behind an account of what they cost. He would hardly have done so had they not filled a void, the origins of which lay further in the past than he could remember. Annelise, missing little, understood much. George, in turn, understood how much greater his emptiness would have been without her.

VIII.

“Received this morning the proofs of some portrait photos I had taken for publicity purposes,” George wrote one day in January 1965, “and was so appalled at the hideousness of my own visage that I went off… to the library and worked alone there, that others might be spared the ordeal of looking at me.” So how could he expect female companionship to ease the mind if the body was so visibly advancing beyond middle age? In fact, it seemed to help.

“He’s adorable,” the journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn had written another of George’s admirers a few months earlier: “so naïve really, so gentle, so conscience eaten that he feels he ought to suffer every minute for the US.” Gellhorn had not been so smitten when she stormed into the Prague legation in the fall of 1938, demanding that a younger Kennan “do something” about the German takeover of the Sudetenland. Now, though, she found him charming and began a passionate but one-sided correspondence about their mutual detestation of the war in Vietnam. George saw her less frequently than she wished and responded laconically to her letters: “What, you ask, does the private citizen do? If he is capable of it, I think he prays.”⁴³

A less needy friend was the formidable Die Zeit editor Marion Dönhoff, an East Prussian aristocrat who had joined the anti-Hitler resistance during the war and then, in 1945, escaped on horseback to the west, just ahead of the Red Army. George saw her as “a rare phenomenon in German life: a person who has preserved a real knowledge and understanding of the values of the past, a clear conscience, and a detached judgment, into the modern age.” That she had done this without self-pity was the source of her strength, “now so widely recognized.” When Dönhoff’s nephew, Hermann Hatzfeldt, enrolled as a Princeton graduate student in the mid-1960s, the Kennans treated him as a surrogate son, and after inheriting Schloss Crottorf, the Rhineland family estate, he would host them there, along with his famous aunt, for many visits over many years.⁴⁴

The most famous of George’s female friendships, however, was one about which the father of the woman involved would have spun furiously in his grave, had it not been encased under tons of concrete just outside the Kremlin wall. She was Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Josef Stalin, and on the evening of March 6, 1967, she appeared at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi to request political asylum. She had with her a memoir that, Ambassador Chester Bowles informed Washington, was likely to sell extremely well if published with “timely guidance from some American whom she trusts.” Bowles arranged to fly her to Rome, and shortly after midnight on the tenth, Connie Goodman (as Moench was now, having recently married) got a phone call “from a gentleman I knew to be connected with the C.I.A.” He was Donald “Jamie” Jameson: “I’ve been trying very hard to get in touch with Mr. Kennan. Can you tell me where he is?”

Upon learning that he was at the farm, Jameson waited until a more reasonable hour to call: “We have a tremendous defection.” The agency had the manuscript. Could Kennan assess it, both for its intelligence value and with a view to possible publication? It arrived in Princeton on the sixteenth, by which time Kennan was in bed with the flu: “I read it through the night, and realized that this was not only publishable but also probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.” After receiving this information, the State Department asked Kennan to meet Alliluyeva in Switzerland, where the authorities were now hiding her: the news was out, and journalists were on her trail. So he flew to Milan, and the Swiss smuggled him across their border. They were “very good at this sort of thing—don’t ever underestimate the Swiss!”

“George Kennan was tall, thin, blue-eyed, elegant,” Alliluyeva wrote of their first meeting, which took place at a safe house in Bern on the twenty-fourth. “That hour proved that fantasies and dreams could sometimes come true.” She should indeed publish, he told her, and perhaps also emigrate to the United States. It would be unlike the Soviet Union, but she would have friends, not least his own family, who would welcome her to the Pennsylvania farm, a place like “your Zub-alovo.” That was the dacha outside Moscow where Alliluyeva had grown up, and “I knew then that he had read my manuscript very attentively.” Kennan had already found her a lawyer, his Princeton neighbor and Institute trustee Edward Green-baum, who in turn secured a publisher’s advance that made Alliluyeva wealthy before she ever set foot on American soil. She did that on April 21, and The New York Times described the scene: “A vibrant figure danced down the steps of a Swissair jetliner,” approached the microphones, and said cheerfully, in English, “Hello there, everybody!”⁴⁵

Now a media sensation, Alliluyeva at first sought refuge on the Long Island estate of Stuart H. Johnson, whose daughter, Priscilla McMillan, was translating her memoirs: the Kennans went there to greet her, using young Hatzfeldt as their driver. “Annelise by nature was very calm,” Svetlana recalled. Neither “a university professor, nor a writer, nor a historian,” she would “give good advice.” George, in the meantime, was trying to portray Svetlana not as a “defector” but “as a human being in herself…. She is a remarkable and courageous woman.” The elder Kennans were about to leave for Africa and then Norway, though, so Joan offered to host—and hide—Stalin’s daughter in East Berlin.

Svetlana spent two months incognito at the Cherry Orchard with Joan, Larry, and their two young sons. The house reminded her, as it had George and Annelise, of a prerevolutionary Russian country estate. She found something special in every room, especially George’s study on the third floor: “full of sunshine, reflected in squares on the yellow parquet floor,” it was “rather empty, and this was the most wonderful part of it.” One wall was full of books, Russian newspapers, and journals. There was a big plain wooden table with no drawers, “so convenient for work, it seemed to invite one to settle down.” By the window was a hard rocking chair, “polished by time,” and nearby an old-fashioned typewriter, sitting on a stand “nailed together by the professor himself.” Svetlana had confided in her, Joan wrote her father, “that she loved you very much, [and] missed you.” This was “not to be interpreted in some overly emotional sense—it meant simply that you were the first person she met after leaving India, with whom she had an instant rapport.”⁴⁶

Soviet propagandists, by then, were trying to discredit Alliluyeva: she was, they claimed, psychologically unstable; her arrival in the United States had been a plot to divert attention from the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution; Kennan had arranged it. So she retaliated, on a day when no grown-ups were present to try to stop her, by summoning Joan’s and the farmer’s children, their babysitter, and Christopher, then seventeen and just back from his spring term at Groton. She had him light the hibachi. On it went her Soviet passport, incinerated before small solemn American witnesses, its ashes then scattered in the Pennsylvania wind.⁴⁷

After his return from abroad that fall, George introduced Svetlana to Princeton. They walked through the Institute’s woods, toured the university campus, and visited the chapel, “leaving outside his black poodle [Krisha], who followed us everywhere. No one paid the slightest attention to us, and this was the best thing I could have wished for.” She rented a house and became, for several years, a neighbor. Bill Bundy remembered a dinner, in 1975, to which the Dilworths, the Taplins, the Kennans, and Alliluyeva came. “Let’s have some music,” someone said. So “George started playing his guitar, singing these sad Russian songs, and, well, Svetlana brightened, she effervesced, in a way that I didn’t ever see her do on any of the other half-dozen occasions we met her. Her devotion to George was very clear that evening.”⁴⁸

“Dear George,” she wrote him the following year from California, where she had recently moved, “you are unhappy—and this is very obvious—because you constantly betray yourself.” What followed was a bizarre form of poetic justice. Kennan, famously, had analyzed Stalin from afar three decades earlier. Now Stalin’s daughter, from a shorter distance and in still slightly erratic English, was analyzing him.

Like Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Frank Lloyd Wright—Alliluyeva had lived briefly at Taliesin West, the late architect’s compound—Kennan had been “born to be constantly misunderstood.” She saw in him the aging Tolstoy, “trying to be an old homebody, a patriarch of all big family crowd; so what? You were never good in this role.” He never would be, “no matter how much you might try—in full sincerity—to brake your own bones to fit that pattern.” He needed “freedom; travel; opened sea; life on the boat and with the Nature; life on the farm, among trees, animals and manual work.”

Changing one’s life, however, took an effort. She had done it by leaving the Soviet Union. He could do it by separating himself “from that killing vanity of Hodge Road; from that depressing Norwegian narrow practicality; from constant calls from Washington, D.C. which only frustrate you, and remind you that you are a ‘retired ambassador.’… Because, George, you deserve to be happy, you deserve more than anyone else to live your way.”⁴⁹

It’s not clear whether George showed this letter—one of many he received from Alliluyeva—to Annelise. When later asked about her in his presence, however, Annelise succinctly said a lot: “George, you don’t realize—there’s something about that female! She gets a little jealous!” It was an unusual reprimand. For if Annelise resented George’s need for female companionship—or the need of other females for George’s—she rarely showed it. “Whatever difficulties she and my father might have had were never aired in public,” their daughter Joan recalled. “She never spoke disparagingly about him, aside from the minor frustrations common to all married couples.” With an even temperament and practical good sense, self-pity was not her style. “She had a healthy sense of herself…. She was like the rock of Gibraltar.” George had been “extraordinarily lucky,” Frank Taplin concluded. Annelise was “the greatest thing that ever could have happened to him.”⁵⁰

IX.

The Kennans went to Africa in the spring of 1967, George later explained, to “cure my ignorance, since I’d never been there.” The trips—there turned out to be two of them—came about through his friend Harold Hochschild, an Institute trustee with extensive mining interests in the region. The United States–South Africa Leader Exchange Program and the African-American Institute sponsored the visits, drawing on help from the State Department to arrange an arduous schedule of tours, luncheons, receptions, dinners, press interviews, and meetings with public figures. Kennan also lectured on his historical research but found his audiences more interested in the Vietnam War and in the now-famous Alliluyeva.⁵¹

Determined to miss nothing, George kept an unusually detailed diary, employing undiminished descriptive skills to capture Johannesburg’s sprawl and the aridity of the plain surrounding it; the California-like cultural sparseness of Pretoria; the stately elegance of the Blue Train to Cape Town; the excitement of standing at the windswept tip of the continent, where great swells from the Atlantic collided with smaller ones from the Indian Ocean. He noted jarring contrasts: modern universities, luxurious country clubs, and efficient mining operations, but also townships into which Bantus were being relocated against their will. Kennan had no objection in principle to the idea of separate development, having long believed that race shaped culture. Recent American efforts to pretend otherwise had even left him sympathetic to apartheid, he confessed to Dönhoff in 1965. But separation should not require humiliation, and that was what bothered him about South Africa.

In the Transkei, the first of the “homelands” the white minority government had established, the Kennans visited a hut with a thatched roof and a dirt floor, surrounded by human and animal excrement because there were no sanitary facilities. It was, George guessed, how most of the territory’s residents lived. He found it “heart-rending” to see how cruelly apartheid oppressed the people he met, “particularly the younger ones.” He doubted, therefore, that it could last.

It was a relief, paradoxically, to arrive in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, where Kennan saw fewer signs of “racial tension and artificiality.” The chief excitement there was a visit to a game preserve near Beira. Lions appeared, as expected, but just at that moment the Kennans’ Volkswagen minibus broke down, unexpectedly. “So there we stood” while the driver nervously attempted repairs, “with our heads sticking out above the roof…, surveying the scene, but powerless to move.” A passing car at last rescued George and Annelise from the prospect of being eaten.

The next stop was Lusaka, in Zambia, on June 4, and here things began to fall apart. Arriving exhausted, George found that his hosts had lined up, beginning early the next morning, a long series of calls “on people I did not know, whose country I had never seen, and with whom I had nothing in common.” One was President Kenneth Kaunda, to whom he was introduced as “Mr. Frost.” Even worse, Kennan was asked to meet exiles from South Africa, Mozambique, and Rhodesia who were seeking to overthrow the governments of those countries. A set of book proofs he had needed to work on had not caught up with him. And then, on June 5, war broke out between the Israelis and the Arabs. If it escalated, “we would be stuck here for God knows how long.”

“I was over-reacting,” George knew, “not sleeping, not digesting, suffering—literally—from a touch of jaundice and viewing everything with a jaundiced eye.” But to continue in that condition would be unfair to the organizers and to the remaining countries they had him visiting. So he proposed, and Annelise agreed upon, a quick escape to Norway. “I feel terribly about having to break off the trip,” George wrote Joan from Kristiansand, but had it gone on it would have ended badly. He hoped to go back: for the moment, though, “I must go out and mow the lawn.”⁵²

The Kennans did go back, for two weeks in September, first to Zambia, and then on to Rhodesia, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast. What George saw strengthened his pessimism. He was used to having communist governments treat him as an enemy, while the people were friendly. In Africa, “everyone equivocates.” But he did, this time, meet all of his obligations. On the last evening in Abidjan, “amour-propre thus partially restored,” George was satisfied “that I had had just about as much enlightenment as I could absorb at my age in any concentrated dose.”⁵³

Apartheid, Kennan wrote the president of the African-American Institute shortly after returning to Princeton, was “not only offensive to our sensibilities, but clearly inadequate to South Africa’s own needs and doomed to eventual failure.” Any quick shift to majority rule there or elsewhere, though, would be “a disaster for all concerned.” Blacks were not ready for it, and whites were determined to fight rather than yield. So did it make sense for the United States to be supporting “national liberation” movements? Was it prepared to liquidate the war in Vietnam to fight an even bigger one on their behalf? It was “not our business, nor does it lie within our capabilities,” to compel changes in institutions and practices of other countries “when they do not meet with our approval.” With the passage of time, South Africa’s leaders would see that they could not continue to keep most of their population in “ignorance and civil helplessness.” The greatest service Americans could provide to apartheid’s victims would be to permit “the logic of that situation to work itself out.”⁵⁴

X.

The proofs pursuing Kennan around Africa were for his first volume of memoirs. Edward A. (Ted) Weeks, the Atlantic–Little, Brown editor who published Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin in 1961, had long encouraged this project, but Kennan didn’t begin working on it until the fall of 1966. With Goodman’s help, he had finished a five-hundred-page book by mid-March 1967, at which point he checked to see who rejected the earlier autobiography he had prepared in the late 1930s, when “we were incredibly broke, and I [hoped to] make a couple of hundred dollars.” It turned out to have been Atlantic–Little, Brown: both author and publisher had forgotten this previous disappointment with one another.

George wrote the memoir, he explained to Joan that summer, “primarily for you children, so that you would have some idea of what I did and tried to do.” A few scholars might also find it useful. With the declassification of American documents on the early Cold War, and in response to the escalating Vietnam War, a new generation of scholars was questioning the premises of “containment”: had the Soviet Union really been as dangerous as Kennan claimed? Some of their criticisms, he thought, reflected “lack of knowledge as to how I came by [my] views…. I ought to try to explain.” Others he agreed with: the United States had made itself dangerous in attempting to “contain” the Soviet Union, and he wanted to account for that as well.

It was not enough simply to restate positions, as he had done in Realities of American Foreign Policy, and in the published version of the Reith lectures, Russia, the Atom, and the West. Few people had read those books, and they offered no biographical context. Kennan’s histories, in contrast, described other lives vividly. Could he depict his own? “I rather hate it,” George complained to Kent, as he began the task. “The best that can be said… is that it would be more unfortunate if I failed to write [it] than if I did.” So he was grinding out pages, wincing at each use of the first person singular, constantly falling into “traps of vanity, distortion of memory, hindsight and pompousness.” He had done the book “much too hastily,” he admitted, and “of the excitement of authorship there is none.”⁵⁵

But by the time it appeared in October 1967, under the title Memoirs: 1925–1950, Kennan was ready for a little publicity. So he granted an interview, in his Institute office, to the New York Times Book Review editor Lewis Nichols. The younger Kennan might have had to settle for the last room in Princeton when he arrived as a student in 1921, Nichols wrote, having read George’s account of his undergraduate years. But now, on the second floor of Fuld Hall, he had one of the best rooms in town. Its wide windows looked out on a forest in fall foliage. His desk was two tables, with a sturdy typewriter alongside. His sofa was “so comfortable that it is left with regret.” Bookcases lined the walls, the volumes on Russia filling one side and those on diplomacy the other. The books Kennan had written—nine by Nichols’s count—were stashed in a corner, battered from frequent use. One was American Diplomacy, which its author dismissed as “that old pot-boiler.” When Nichols reminded him that Russia Leaves the War had won four major prizes, thereby bettering the Triple Crown in horse racing, Kennan smiled like a small boy who “not only had found the cookie jar but found it full.”⁵⁶

That was not the tone, however, of his memoir. In the alienation it expressed from his era, his country, and himself, it most closely resembled The Education of Henry Adams—with whose author the two George Kennans, eerily, shared a birthday. The second Kennan had read Adams and, like him, used autobiography for self-reproach. Both rejected the self-congratulation typical of the modern genre; both reflected an ancient prototype, Saint Augustine’s Confessions. It was not an example Acheson would follow when he chose, as the title for his 1969 memoir, Present at the Creation.

Where Kennan differed from Adams was in the quality of his writing: he left indelible impressions in print. Thanks to him, there will always be fairies in Milwaukee’s Juneau Park. Midwesterners will always find Princeton inhospitable. The Foreign Service will always have its roots in the cool, sleepy corridors of the venerable State-War-Navy building. Stalin will always be “an old battle-scarred tiger,” with “pocked face and yellow eyes.” Marshall will always peer, “penetratingly,” over the rims of his glasses. Acheson will always treat Kennan as “a court jester, expected to enliven discussion, privileged to say shocking things.”⁵⁷

Unlike Acheson, but in the manner of Adams, Kennan underestimated his own influence. He credited himself with having sorted out wartime confusion over Azores bases, accurately sensing Stalin’s intentions, organizing the Policy Planning Staff, designing the Marshall Plan, and realigning occupation policy in Japan. He made no claim, though, to having designed any long-term strategy of “containment.” He said nothing about anticipating the Sino-Soviet split. And he devoted at least as much space to what he regarded as his failures: the Truman Doctrine; the “X” article; the Smith-Molotov exchange; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Program A; the idea of an integrated Europe apart from the United States and Great Britain; and the decision to build the hydrogen bomb.

Some issues were too delicate for Kennan to discuss. One was his ties to the CIA: Ramparts magazine had exposed the agency’s secret funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom—of which Kennan had long been aware—only months before his memoir appeared, but the full extent of his role in originating covert operations would not become apparent for years to come. He said little, beyond childhood, about his family, and certainly nothing about his affairs. He did, through the diary entries he quoted, suggest the complexities of his inner life, but some of his selections raised questions about his values. He gave four lines, for example, to an account of turning away a Jewish acquaintance from the Prague legation on the day the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, then four pages to a sexless encounter with a Berlin prostitute a few months later, in an effort to show that not all Germans were Nazis. No reader would have known, from his memoir, of the efforts Kennan made to get Jews out, in both Prague and Berlin.⁵⁸

The omission reflected Kennan’s chronic insensitivity to impressions created by what he said and wrote: even his most charitable biographer found his portrayal of the Prague events, if not callous, then “self-consciously, cold.”⁵⁹ But Kennan was using his memoir to establish a literary, not a moral, reputation. He had experimented with his writing since first beginning to keep a diary in the late 1920s. Now he was publishing excerpts for the first time, and at considerable length. He meant them to display descriptive skills, and this they did. The greatest surprise of the memoir was its novelist’s eye—which is probably what earned it Kennan’s second National Book Award and his second Pulitzer Prize, this time for biography.

These explorations in style, however, caused controversies over substance that would plague Kennan for years to come. Did his memoir reveal him to be pro-German? Anti-Semitic? Amoral? Contrite? A Cold War apologist? A Cold War revisionist? An evader of tough issues? A visionary who saw beyond them? Or simply someone who tried to write, for his children, a book that they might read, much as Henry Adams claimed to be writing one simply for his friends?⁶⁰ It’s in the nature of classics that they defy categories. Among these is the distinction, so indistinct in Kennan’s life, between what one sets out to do, and what one does.

XI.

It might come as a surprise, Kennan warned an audience at Swarthmore College on December 9, 1967, that having been invited to help dedicate its new library, he should choose to speak on a subject so remote from the spirit of silence with which libraries were associated: “the present state of mind of the radical Left on the American campus.” But could the first be realized “without a drastic change” in the second? Did not education imply a voluntary withdrawal from contemporary life in order to achieve a better perspective on it? Was there not a “dreadful incongruity” between that vision and “the condition of mind and behavior in which a portion of our student youth finds itself today”?

Instead of withdrawal, there was intense involvement. Instead of calm, “transports of passion.” Instead of self-possession, “screaming tantrums and brawling in the streets.” Instead of rational discourse, “banners and epithets and obscenities and virtually meaningless slogans.” And instead of hope, “eyes glazed with anger,” as well as by “artificial abuse of the psychic structure that lies behind them.” In saying all of this, Kennan knew he sounded parental, a prisoner of all the “seamy adjustments” to practicality that came with that status. He made no apologies, for without such compromises, children would not enjoy the privilege of “despising us for the materialistic faint-heartedness that made their maturity possible.”

Behind the protests was legitimate outrage over racial injustice at home and an apparently endless war in Vietnam. If the young had a plan for resolving these issues, “then many of us, I am sure,” could join them. But

As a consequence, “many of us who are no happier” would have “no choice but to place ourselves on the other side of the barricades.”⁶¹

The speech, to put it much too mildly, was not well received. On being escorted to a reception at the president’s house, Kennan found himself surrounded “by a number of bearded creatures who were absolutely hissing at me, like a crowd of geese!” His host, Courtney C. Smith, was also not pleased: “He was trying to appease these people.” (Smith would later die of a heart attack during a student occupation of the college admissions office.) Having heard of the controversy, The New York Times Magazine published a revised version of Kennan’s speech in January 1968. It brought in hundreds of letters, all of which he read, many of which he found impressive: “These people challenged me on things that were perfectly fair. I had to face up to this.” So he did so in a short book, Democracy and the Student Left, which included the Swarthmore lecture, twenty-eight letters from students, and another eleven from members of “the older generation,” together with a response six times the length of his original address. “A lot of people didn’t like [it]. I didn’t care.”⁶²

Several of the faculty letters were silly. One professor suggested that Kennan stage an emotional breakdown, in front of his own children, as an act of contrition. He could not believe, however, that they “would be greatly enlightened by such a spectacle, however much they might enjoy it for its unexpected dramatic aspects.” How, another wanted to know, could a student pursue scholarship with Marines recruiting on campus? By “taking a book, going into the library, and reading,” Kennan answered. “I doubt that the recruiter would follow him there.” Still another, defending the students’ objections to university parietal rules, wondered how Kennan would feel if he were in a room with someone about whom he cared deeply and was forced to leave the door open: “To this reproach, I freely confess myself devoid of any adequate answer.”

The students he took more seriously, if no less critically. Their only apparent agenda, the 1962 Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, was social science “gobbledygook.” Even more alarming was their absence of humor, their tendency to treat people impersonally, and their belief in “the total ubiquity of responsibility.” Everyone, of a certain generation at least, was to blame for everything. Kennan’s antiwar testimony on national television had not absolved him: “There should, I gather, have been more evidences of excitement and indignation on my part—more noise and less thought.”

Whatever their chances of being drafted, the students had a point, Kennan acknowledged, when they complained of having to register for military service at eighteen, while not being allowed to vote until they were twenty-one. Nor was there any excuse for sending draftees into wars “of obscure origin and rationale,” halfway around the world. If such conflicts were necessary, professionals ought to handle them. If there weren’t enough to do so, then the wars shouldn’t be fought. These were failures of policy, though, not of institutions. Democracy provided means of redress, even if not immediate. “But, the students will say, this is too slow. What you are talking about will take years. By that time, we will all be dead.” As usual, Kennan observed, “they exaggerate. I shall be dead. They probably will not.”

And what of civil rights? In their sympathy for oppressed blacks, the students reminded Kennan of that shown for peasants by the Russian populists of the late nineteenth century. In neither case had the sympathizers known much about those with whom they sympathized. In both they viewed the oppressed as “helpless” and therefore expected of them no accountability for their own behavior: “The American Negro is not going to be aided by an approach which treats him only as object and not at all as subject.” Nor would apartheid’s sufferers benefit from American universities withdrawing their South African investments, as the student left was demanding. The time had come for the academy to reclaim its authority from those who had “no experience of its past, no expertise for its present, no responsibility for its future.”

It was characteristic of radicals to abhor being outflanked. This had led, in Russia, to the nihilism that undermined the old order, thereby opening the way for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who allowed no defiance. That was not likely to happen in the United States, Kennan thought: with an end to the war, a phasing out of the draft, and the aging of students beyond thirty, things would settle down. But it was worth asking why the students had become radicalized in the first place.

The answer, Kennan insisted, went well beyond the immediate targets of protest. For the students reflected the “sickly secularism” of society as a whole: its shallow convictions; its preoccupation with gadgetry; its disconnection from nature; its lack of understanding for “the slow powerful processes of organic growth.” These had created, in college youth, “an extreme disbalance in emotional and intellectual growth.” In the end, then, the culture itself would have to change, and here Kennan fell back on familiar jeremiads: the evils of automobiles, advertising, and environmental degradation; the corruption of politics; the possibility that the country itself might be too big to solve its problems. Were the students gloomy about the American future? “[T]hey haven’t seen anything yet. Not only do my apprehensions outclass theirs but my ideas of what would have to be done to put things to rights are far more radical than theirs.”⁶³

XII.

“George was somewhat shrill,” Dilworth recalled, “at least we thought so, and our children thought so.” It went beyond that. Kennan was getting FBI reports on student and black protests throughout this period, and at one point suggested that the government suppress them, in a manner “answerable only to the voters at the next election but not to the press or even to the courts.” There should even be special prisons for “political offenders,” to keep them apart from common criminals. “One may think what one will of the events of the last two or three years,” he wrote the master of Yale’s Branford College in 1970, asking to be removed from its roster of nonresident fellows, “but that they have impaired the ability of old and young to communicate with each other is something all of us, I think, must recognize.”⁶⁴

Kennan’s anxieties—extreme even for him—arose from fears for his own children as much as for his country. Grace’s marriage had broken up, and Joan’s was about to. Christopher had found adjustment to Groton difficult. Wendy, her father worried, was growing up too fast. “[W]e have failed badly, somewhere, in the way we have brought these children up and the sort of life we have offered them,” George complained after spending a Thanksgiving at the farm with slouchy, sullen teenagers—his two youngest, plus some of their friends. Soon they would be off to the great universities, which would quickly expose them to “the morbidity of the present student population. We are in a hell of a shape, here at home.”⁶⁵

Left to himself, he often claimed, he would have become an exile, even a hermit: the west coast of Scotland still beckoned. His family could hardly follow, though, so the next best choice was to avoid, as far as possible, “all confrontation with American life…. I must learn to live in it as though I did not live in it.” But could his children? That seemed implausible, given their need for education, employment, love, and families. How could he shield them, then, from “this false life,” as he had once described it, in which “innocence is lost before maturity is achieved”?⁶⁶

The Kennans spent the summer of 1968, as usual, in Norway. Unusually—but as an expression of confidence—George allowed Christopher and three of his buddies to sail Nagawicka from Denmark to Sweden in early August, without adult supervision. On leaving them at the dock,

To George’s relief, they arrived safely and flew home, a few days later, with Wendy and Annelise. He stayed behind to secure the Kristiansand house for the winter and spent his last evening there going through family photographs. “I think of the way that Fate has tied our lives together,” he wrote Joan, “and how we struggle along, half knowing what we are doing, but with our destinies also largely formed by the accidents of birth and circumstance.”

All depended, he could see, “on God’s grace and on each other; and with this, the whole monstrous fragility and tragedy of our lives, and yet also their poetry and their occasional heroism, become visible and real to me. I wish I could capture this moment of awareness and make it a part of my view of the world, instead of being absorbed and carried away, as I shall be tomorrow morning, by a thousand trivialities and vanities.”⁶⁷

J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER DIED IN PRINCETON, OF THROAT CANCER, on February 18, 1967, at the age of sixty-two. A week later six hundred people crowded into Alexander Hall for the memorial service, at which Kennan delivered the final eulogy. He praised his friend’s scientific mind, “rigorous but humane, fastidious but generous and powerful, uncompromisingly responsible in its relationship to ascertainable truth but never neglectful of the need for elegance and beauty in the statement of it.” He deplored the official injustice inflicted upon Oppenheimer: the government had used his talents to exploit the destructive capabilities of nuclear physics, but denied him the opportunity to explore “the great positive ones he believed that science to possess.” His life cruelly illustrated “the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength.”

Shakespeare’s image of a “universal wolf” as a “universal prey” eating itself up had haunted Kennan ever since he incorporated it into his long but mostly unread January 1950 paper on the “super” bomb. The idea, however, was Oppenheimer’s: it was he who first alerted Kennan to the ecological consequences of the nuclear revolution. “[N]o one paid any attention to us,” Kennan recalled, “but that brought us together.” Oppenheimer gave Kennan an institutional home after he left government. Kennan, in turn, spoke for Oppenheimer after allegations about the beleaguered physicist’s loyalty effectively silenced him. A war fought with modern weapons, Kennan warned in his 1957 Reith lectures, would risk everything: “the kindliness of our natural environment to the human experience, the genetic composition of the race, the possibilities of health and life for future generations.” In bidding Oppenheimer farewell a decade later, Kennan acknowledged that without his help “some of us—most of us, I suppose—would never have been quite where we are today…. [A]ny further progress we now make is in part his achievement.”¹

There were, at the time of Oppenheimer’s death, about forty thousand nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union—three-fourths of them American. Most were thermonuclear warheads, designed for near-instantaneous delivery by land-based and submarine-launched missiles. The least powerful, intended for battlefield use, each approximated the strength of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Kennan lacked access to these numbers, but he didn’t need it to conclude that seeking security by these means was an absurdity.

Since the Cuban missile crisis, there had been fewer explicit threats to use nuclear weapons. Satellite reconnaissance was reducing the risk of surprise attack. Diplomacy had produced a Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, and a Soviet-American agreement, that same year, to begin negotiations on limiting nuclear weapons delivery systems while restricting the deployment of defenses against them. The goal, it appeared, was no longer to win a nuclear arms race but rather to stabilize it by ensuring equal opportunities for destruction. Both superpowers seemed to have embraced Bernard Brodie’s 1946 argument that the best way to avoid war was to make its prospect as horrible as possible.

Kennan did not doubt the proposition but wondered—with Oppenheimer—why it required retaining the capacity to end civilization so many times over. That was why he distrusted détente, which most people understood to mean something he should have favored: the use of diplomacy to secure peace by balancing power. Kennan saw it as applying outdated techniques to a world in which the relationship between war and politics had changed. The nineteenth-century view had been that “you really could win a war and gain something from it.” Now, though, the destructiveness of weaponry had made such calculations meaningless. War and politics, in Kennan’s mind at least, were becoming equally dangerous.

Where, then, did the strategy of “containment,” which was to have bridged the gap between war and politics, fit into all of this? When Kennan described its objective, in 1947, as bringing about peacefully either the breakup or “gradual mellowing” of the Soviet Union, that country had no nuclear capability. By the beginning of the 1960s, its warhead and missile technology was qualitatively approaching that of the United States. By the end of the decade, it was doing so quantitatively. By 1986, when the number of nuclear weapons peaked at around seventy thousand, just under two-thirds belonged to the U.S.S.R.²

So did the risks of attempting to change that state now exceed the benefits? Was the danger to be contained no longer its behavior but nuclear war itself? If so, did that suggest accepting the Soviet Union and its satellites as permanent features of the international landscape? What would that mean for the future of Germany, and of Europe itself? None of these were new questions for Kennan: he had wrestled with all of them prior to Oppenheimer’s death. In the years that followed, though, they took on a renewed urgency. It was as if Kennan felt an obligation to keep Oppenheimer’s prophetic vision alive, whatever that might imply for the original concept of “containment.”

I.

Late in 1967 Kennan was elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Established in 1898, limited to fifty members, and modeled on the much older Académie française, the organization’s mission was to recognize distinction in literature, music, and the fine arts. Kennan had been invited to join five years earlier because of his accomplishments as a writer, sixty-four years after the first George Kennan was similarly honored. The academy’s parent organization, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, had made the second Kennan its president in 1965, just in time for the ill-fated White House Festival of the Arts. He took all of these institutional responsibilities seriously. Kennan’s sense of having been excluded as a young man, Arthur Schlesinger speculated, had left him with a love of ritual as an older man: “He believes strongly that the ceremonies of life are important. It’s an endearing, interesting characteristic.”³

Kennan addressed the academy for the first time in his new capacity on May 28, 1968, three months after the Tet offensive in Vietnam, two months after Johnson’s announcement that he would seek a negotiated settlement of the war but not reelection, seven weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and one week before that of Robert F. Kennedy. “[W]e are meeting,” Kennan acknowledged, “in a very troubled time.” The artist’s duty was not to get involved in politics, which were always “polluted with the passions and the myopia of the moment.” Nor was it to attempt to correct, in any immediate sense, “the manifold follies and stupidities to which man, in his capacity as a political actor, is prone.”

Perhaps it might be, though, to “lend to the comprehension of the human predicament a deeper dimension of insight,” through which “the tragic illusions of power and anger will lose their force.” Had not Cranach and Grünewald painted during peasant rebellions and religious wars? Had not Goethe, Beethoven, and Schiller flourished alongside the upheavals of the Napoleonic era? Most moving of all was Boris Pasternak, “scratching out his poems through the night in that abandoned country house in the Urals during the Russian civil war, while each night the dark shadows of the wolves against the snow came nearer.” It took forty years for his writings to appear, but they were now “an imperishable component of Russian literature.” Much would have been lost if those artists had sacrificed their creativity “in order to throw themselves into political pursuits for which they were ill-prepared and in which, as Pasternak realized, they could do nothing comparable in importance to what they could achieve by the employment of their real talents.”⁴

Kennan’s luxury—but also his burden—was not having to be Pasternak. He spoke wistfully of wanting to detach himself from contemporary events, but no one forced him to do so. That left him resisting temptation, mostly unsuccessfully. It had seemed safe enough that summer, for example, to publish his 1938–40 dispatches from Prague, unearthed while preparing his memoirs. But on August 20–21, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the growing reform movement there. The new Kremlin leadership of Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksey Kosygin had made “a colossal mistake,” Kennan was sure, and The New York Times quickly connected that violation of sovereignty with his reports on another such event three decades earlier. Soon Kennan was calling for an additional hundred thousand American troops to be sent to West Germany as a show of force, to counter what he saw as an increasingly “adventuristic streak” in Soviet behavior.⁵

He was also still thinking, wistfully, about politics. “I think I could have been successful at it,” he wrote Joan a few days before the 1968 presidential election. “I have never found it hard to communicate with people from a platform, and I rather love all the human and intellectual intricacies.” But he could never have afforded to run for office; his views, moreover, were “light years ahead of the current drift of public opinion.” If the next administration were to offer him a position like under secretary of state or ambassador to the United Nations, though, he might take it.⁶

Kennan called the office of Richard M. Nixon two days after his victory at the polls to offer whatever advice the president-elect might want. None was sought, but Nixon’s appointment of Henry A. Kissinger as his national security adviser surprised and pleased Kennan. He had been reading Kissinger since the 1950s and now regarded him as “fully recovered from the militaristic preoccupations of earlier years”—his writings, presumably, on the “limited” use of nuclear weapons. Shortly after learning of his new job, Kissinger in turn assured Kennan of Nixon’s regard for him as “a leading example of people whose possibilities were not being used by the last administration,” the implication being that the new one might find a way to do so.⁷

That conversation took place at a Princeton cocktail party on December 4, 1968. The occasion was the inaugural conference of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, a privately funded reincarnation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, exposed the previous year as having had CIA support. Other attendees included Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, Stanley Hoffmann, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Norman Podhoretz, Marion Dönhoff, and Kennan’s old Moscow friend Lillian Hellman, but also a clamorous contingent of young black power advocates and white New Leftists. Understandably confused, the local Students for a Democratic Society chapter prepared an all-purpose poster: “Down With Racism, Imperialism, Genocide, Corporation Capitalism, Policy Planners, etc.” (A stronger exhortation had been crossed out, at the last moment, on the advice of a university official.) Kennan, improbably, delivered the dinner address. With his “gray suit, silk tie, elegant gold chain across his vest, [and] dignified bearing,” The New York Times reported, he personified a lifestyle “for which the young could muster little sympathy or understanding. He reciprocated completely.”

The nation had many problems, Kennan told his audience, not the least of which was “the extremely disturbed and excited state of mind of a good portion of our student youth, floundering around as it is in its own terrifying wilderness of drugs, pornography and political hysteria.” This was not Pasternak-like detachment, and a heated discussion followed. “Since when [are] youth not allowed to be asses?” Hellman demanded, prompting one young activist to announce that he had just fallen in love with an older woman. She was not amused. “He did a very brave thing,” she said in defense of Kennan: “He refused to be a swinger.”⁸

“The new administration must be given a fair opportunity to show what it can do,” Kennan commented that evening. He got no invitation to work for it, though, and this time he didn’t agonize over phones that didn’t ring. He had decided to return to Oxford during the spring of 1969, and he had a new project in mind: he would write the first full English-language history of the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894. The logic of doing so was not immediately obvious, but Kennan’s academy address provided a clue.

Unlike the artists he had cited, he was neither a painter nor a playwright nor a philosopher. His poetry was chiefly whimsical, his musicianship only companionable. But he could write history: his distinction lay in the skill with which he represented the past to the present and future. World War I, Kennan believed, had been the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, having set so many subsequent tragedies in motion. No one in 1914, however, had foreseen any of this. Each belligerent had entered the war optimistically, even enthusiastically. If his new book could explain such miscalculations, perhaps it might dispel illusions out of which new tragedies could grow.

It would have to be thorough, he explained to Joan, for late-nineteenth-century European diplomacy was “a frightfully complicated subject with an enormous existing literature.” It would have to be scholarly, because the Institute for Advanced Study expected that of him. It would take years to complete, and “since no one in this generation will be interested in it,” it would be a lonely enterprise. And why the Franco-Russian alliance? Because it had replaced Bismarck’s system of unilateral restraint, which reconciled Germany’s neighbors to its post-1871 unification, with one of multilateral deterrence, which meant risking war to prevent war. It should have been obvious, even in 1894, that any great-power clash employing modern weaponry would be “a madness from which nobody [could] benefit.” Kennan would be writing a cautionary history of wolves, preparing to eat themselves up.⁹

II.

With Connie Goodman on leave from the Institute to raise a family, Kennan had a new secretary, Janet Smith. She was not shy about questioning his priorities: did he really think he could isolate himself to write history? It was probably unrealistic, he acknowledged from Oxford in March 1969, to suppose “that anyone in my position—i.e., with my past, my reputation, and my connections—would be able to find the time, the privacy, and the peace of mind to do a really major, serious work of historical scholarship.” He was now sixty-five, and demands for commentary on current events had not diminished. He had also come to realize, belatedly, the benefits of inadvertence: the fact that such influence as he had accumulated over the years had more often arisen unexpectedly than from his own plans.

So he must allow for opportunities like the “long telegram,” the “X” article, the Chicago lectures, the disengagement debate, the Fulbright hearings, and the Swarthmore speech, even if such “unwithstandable approaches from the outside” didn’t always produce the results he wanted. However much he might wish to be a prophet, life had burdened him with the role of pundit. “Let me then accept it and be prepared to play it with distinction.”¹⁰

Oxford was friendlier than it had been in 1957–58. The Kennans’ Iffley flat was adequately heated—no need to carry coal this time—and George had an office in All Souls College. He liked having his radio free of commercials, his roads uncluttered by billboards, and telephones that rang rarely “because the English don’t phone—they send notes.” He was dining occasionally with colleagues; even student life struck him as “relatively rich and gay and confused and happy.” But he couldn’t resist controversy. What was wrong with black power anyway? Kennan asked a startled assemblage of dignitaries at a Ditchley Park conference shortly after he arrived: why shouldn’t Americans follow South Africa’s example and give blacks their own state? It had taken that to satisfy the Jews, his friend Richard Crossman helpfully added. Having tossed these grenades, the two took their leave, under a full moon, cheered by the mayhem they had left behind.¹¹

Kennan’s chief task in Oxford was to deliver the Chichele lectures, a less demanding series than the two he had taken on twelve years earlier. He chose to analyze La Russe en 1839, the account of a trip through Russia by Astolphe Louis Léonor, the Marquis de Custine. Like Neill Brown’s dispatches from St. Petersburg in the 1850s, Custine’s book allowed viewing the recent past through a distant past, a perspective Kennan relished. Custine had been unfair to Nicholas I and his contemporaries, Kennan concluded in the published version of the lectures, which appeared in 1971, but he had accurately anticipated the Stalin regime and, to a lesser extent, those that followed. Another of Kennan’s epic sentences specified the analogies:

That sounded a lot like the “X” article: how could there be a normal relationship with such a country until its internal configuration—indeed its culture—had changed? But Kennan was writing about Custine in the nuclear era: didn’t that require overlooking such issues? Wasn’t the important thing now to balance power among states, rather than to await—or even to encourage—changes from within? The questions came from the editors of a new journal, Foreign Policy, who had noticed (as those of Foreign Affairs had not) that 1972 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mr. X’s memorable appearance.

Eager “to welcome Professor Kennan to the pages of this magazine,” they published an interview with him in late May, a week before the first American presidential visit to the Soviet Union since Roosevelt had gone to Yalta in 1945. The Nixon-Brezhnev summit promised the greatest progress yet toward strategic arms control: an “interim agreement” limiting land- and sea-based missiles armed with nuclear warheads, and a treaty banning defenses against those that remained. It followed the even more surprising trips that Kissinger and Nixon had already made to the People’s Republic of China. What did Kennan think?

Brezhnev’s state, he acknowledged, was not Stalin’s. It had long since lost ideological authority beyond its borders: “The façade of solidarity can be maintained, today, only by extensive concessions to the real independence of the respective Communist parties.” It had stabilized, but not expanded, its control over half of Europe—perhaps NATO had been of some use, after all. And the Soviet Union now had its own “containment” problem in East Asia, where China posed at least as great a challenge as did the United States. All of this had left Kremlin leaders “no alternatives except isolation or alliance with the capitalist countries, which could undermine the legitimacy of their power at home.” The geopolitical balance was obviously preferable to that of 1947.

The military balance, however, was another matter. Always ahead in manpower and conventional armaments, the U.S.S.R. now had such formidable nuclear strength that American concerns no longer focused on who was to dominate Eurasia but rather on a “fantasy world” of weaponry.

How might that happen? Not through the intricate agreements to be signed in Moscow, for these would only clarify the rules in a continuing contest. What was needed instead were “reciprocal unilateral steps of restraint.” If one could, by such means, shrink armed establishments to more reasonable dimensions, then the Soviet Union would pose no greater threat than had prerevolutionary Russia—even if it retained vestiges of the society Custine had described.

No one should expect such a state not to behave as its predecessor had done. It would want to preserve, and where possible expand, its spheres of influence. It might well build a blue-water navy. It would not, in its culture or politics, become a democracy. Why, then, should “the peace of the world [depend] on the ability of the rest of us to prevent the Soviet Union indefinitely from acting like a great power?” The priority now should be to reduce or even eliminate nuclear weapons, not simply to tinker, as Kennan had put it earlier in his diary, with “the wretched ABMs and MRVs and MIRVs and SALTs and what not.”¹³

Kennan’s reasoning reflected his thinking on the origins of World War I. For then, as now, great-power rivalries had existed. So too had diplomacy as a means of managing them. Nixon and Kissinger were following Bismarck’s example by balancing power, a considerable improvement over Johnson’s practice of expending it where no vital interests were at stake. But like the Europeans who came after Bismarck, the United States and the Soviet Union were simultaneously accumulating arms of such strength that any use of them would destroy what they were meant to defend. It had taken the belligerents of 1914–18 four years to accomplish this. In the nuclear age, it would take about forty minutes.

III.

“I could not be more pleased than I am by this appointment,” Kennan wrote Kissinger on September 19, 1973, shortly after the beleaguered Nixon, now deeply enmeshed in the Watergate scandal, had nominated his national security adviser also to become secretary of state. Kennan’s congratulations came, however, only in the last two lines of a long letter criticizing the novelist-historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union’s closest contemporary equivalent to Tolstoy himself, and the nuclear physicist Andrey Sakharov, whose anguish over the bombs he had built paralleled Oppenheimer’s. Both were “behaving very unwisely” by provoking a showdown over their alleged official mistreatment. Even worse, they were trying to enlist Americans in support of their cause. The United States could not sacrifice its entire relationship with the U.S.S.R. to satisfy “the grievances of these people.”¹⁴

It was a surprisingly harsh tone for the self-regarded heir of the other Kennan, the most prominent nineteenth-century defender of Russian dissidents, and for George F. Kennan as well. He had made his reputation in 1946–47, after all, by blurring the distinction between domestic and foreign policy in the Soviet Union. He had worked for years afterward to help settle refugees from Stalin’s regime in the United States, right down through the arrival, in 1967, of the most famous of them all, the dead dictator’s daughter. He had gone out of his way to honor Pasternak in his May 1968 American Academy presidential address. “I wouldn’t trust any so-called détente,” he had told The New York Times after the invasion of Czechoslovakia three months later, “if it is not supported by free contacts between governments and peoples.” And six months after his letter to Kissinger, Kennan publicly praised Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.” Why, then, was Kennan becoming less sympathetic to the Kremlin’s domestic critics as the attention they attracted, during the early 1970s, began to grow?¹⁵

One reason was that he was becoming more sympathetic to the conduct of American foreign policy. By the time Nixon relinquished the presidency to Gerald Ford in August 1974, his administration had reached agreements with the Soviet Union to limit strategic arms, brought China out of its long diplomatic isolation, negotiated an end to the war in Vietnam, contained an unexpected Arab-Israeli war, and endorsed the concept of a multipolar world that resembled in principle, if not in all its details, Kennan’s thinking while on the Policy Planning Staff a quarter-century earlier. Kissinger “understands my views better than anyone at State ever has,” Kennan acknowledged. It was a relief to know that he would stay on: “Henry’s a fine person, and I think very highly of him,” but at the same time “he scares me.” For “with opportunists like Scoop Jackson around, he could go at any moment.”¹⁶

“Scoop” was Senator Henry M. Jackson, a long-serving Washington State Democrat who, in the aftermath of the 1972 Nixon-Brezhnev summit, had taken it upon himself to dismantle détente. He wanted to return the Democratic Party—whose presidential nominee that year was the haplessly dovish George McGovern—to the tough foreign policy traditions of Truman and Acheson. Nixon and Kissinger, Jackson claimed, had ceded superiority in strategic weaponry to the Soviet Union through ill-conceived arms control agreements, while failing to condemn that country’s growing harassment of dissidents and potential emigrants, chiefly Jews. Jackson would use his considerable influence in the Senate to demand numerical parity in any new strategic arms treaties. He would also withhold “most-favored nation” status and Export-Import Bank credits—both promised by Nixon in Moscow—until the U.S.S.R. relaxed its restrictions on emigration. Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, as Kennan saw it, were cheering him on.

The intricacies of arms control mattered little to Kennan. With both sides possessing the capacity for “fantastic overkills,” he had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee several years earlier, all calculations of advantage and disadvantage were meaningless. Human rights, though, were a trickier issue. Like John Quincy Adams, Kennan doubted the feasibility of trying to right wrongs committed by foreign governments against their own citizens. He still hoped for change within the Soviet Union but had lost faith in the ability of American leaders to bring this about. He had long deplored the ease with which domestic politics could derail foreign policy—Scoop Jackson was hardly the first example—but now the stakes were higher: with weapons of mass destruction available in such numbers, even a slight miscalculation could produce universal destruction. What gave Soviet dissidents the right, then, even if they were the figurative descendants of the Russians the elder Kennan had tried to help, to place détente at risk?¹⁷

They would have replied, with good reason, that the Soviet leaders were using détente to suppress dissent. Following the crushing of the “Prague spring” in 1968, Brezhnev had proposed an international conference to confirm post–World War II boundaries throughout Europe, with a view to regaining, through diplomacy, the legitimacy his own and other Eastern European regimes had lost. For if the United States and its allies formally recognized the status quo, what basis would domestic dissidents have for challenging communist party rule? The persistence with which Moscow pressed this plan gave the Western Europeans and the Canadians—Washington, in this instance, paid little attention—the opportunity to attach a Jackson-like condition of their own: that all parties to any such agreement acknowledge “the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Brezhnev, equally inattentively, accepted the compromise. So on July 31, 1975, thirty-five heads of government from the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, and all European states except Albania gathered in Helsinki to sign, on the next day, the “Final Act” of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.¹⁸

It was “a lot of nonsense,” Kennan wrote privately, “two years of wrangling over language, most of it of a general nature, none of it committing anyone specifically to anything.” The Americans and their allies had lost nothing, since none intended to reunify Europe—particularly Germany—in the first place. The Soviets had made some significant verbal concessions, subscribing to language that appeared to proscribe, in the future, what they had done to Czechoslovakia, but hardly anyone in the United States understood this. Nixon, Ford, and even Kissinger had promised too much, and now—with allegations from hard-line Democrats and right-wing Republicans that the United States had again, as at Yalta, sold out Eastern Europe—the reaction was setting in. As far as Kennan could see, Americans were “right back where we were in Mr. Dulles’s time.” If anyone should devise “really sound and brilliant diplomacy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the country at large would not recognize it and would call with great acclaim for its abandonment.”¹⁹

Despite the Helsinki agreements, Kennan wrote in a bicentennial history of Soviet-American relations published in the July 1976 issue of Foreign Affairs, the Nixon-Kissinger approach to détente had, on the whole, improved them. President Ford, however, was finding it impossible to say so, having barely survived a challenge for the Republican nomination from a Kissinger critic, Ronald Reagan, and now facing another, the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter. “[N]ot unnaturally,” Kennan noted, after lunching with Kissinger in late August, he was “somewhat dispirited, believing that he had failed in his effort to instill into American diplomacy some depth of concept and some subtlety of technique…. He is a wise, learned and agreeable man.” His memoirs would be “worth the enormous price the publishers will offer for them.”

And what of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and the first Kennan’s legacy? The second Kennan made no mention of them in Foreign Affairs, noting only that “[t]he Soviet authorities will no doubt continue to adhere to internal practices of a repressive nature that will continue to offend large sections of American opinion.” But in an interview that summer, with unusual asperity, he did:

He had “the greatest misgivings about any of us, Americans or West Europeans, taking upon ourselves the responsibility for trying to overthrow this, or any other, government in Russia.” Kennan’s attitude earned him a stinging rebuke from a sensitive source. She found it pitiful, Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote him, “that of all people… it is George Kennan who surrendered, and forgot his own words, [which] he said in 1952. It is still true, George—even though Stalin [is] 20 years [sic] in grave, they are all—still—no better than Nazis. And you know this better than I do.”²⁰

Containment, as Kennan had conceived it, never required action from the outside to change the internal character of the Soviet system: that was to happen from within, in response to external circumstances the West should have wished to create in any event. Reforms would require visionaries—dissidents, if you will—who would sense these new circumstances and would have the courage to respond to them. Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and their allies met that standard. But by the time they did, Kennan, fearing that disruptions of any kind could lead to nuclear war, had come to regard them as dangerous enemies.

IV.

Kennan published the second volume of his own memoirs in 1972. “I don’t think it is my best work,” he wrote after finishing it. This time he was right—his first volume had set a high standard. Covering the years 1950 through 1963, the new one focused on the Korean War, the Moscow ambassadorship and its aftermath, Kennan’s unsuccessful efforts to save the Foreign Service career of his former subordinate John Paton Davies, the Reith lectures controversy, and service under Kennedy in Yugoslavia. It was oddly uneven, treating these episodes in detail while ignoring most of what Kennan was otherwise doing, notably writing history. “I don’t see how a memoir could be better,” John Kenneth Galbraith observed in The New York Times, before proceeding to show how it might have been. What the book did reveal, he concluded accurately enough, was that Kennan “derives no special pleasure—as I always do—from the feeling that everyone else is wrong.”²¹

He certainly took no pleasure in the latest crisis at the Institute for Advanced Study. After the ailing Oppenheimer resigned as director in 1966, the board of trustees appointed an economist, Carl Kaysen, to that position. A skillful fundraiser, Kaysen upgraded the Institute’s physical facilities but lacked Oppenheimer’s tact in managing its prickly personalities. After he overruled a majority of the Institute’s permanent professors to offer that status to a sociologist, Robert Bellah, in 1972, they demanded Kaysen’s resignation. Soon both sides were attacking one another in The New York Times, which did not normally cover academic politics in such gruesome detail. “I am very, very much distressed about the dispute,” Kennan himself told the Times. “A lot of it has been sheer misunderstanding of a tragic nature.”

That was part of the problem, but the larger issue was one of governance: did authority reside with the trustees, the tenured faculty, or the director, and if all three, in what proportion? Diplomacy, Kennan ruefully recalled, had been much easier than trying to answer this question. For the most part, he avoided taking sides: the trustees even approached him, at one point, about becoming interim director if Kaysen was forced to step down. To Kennan’s great relief, that didn’t happen. Bellah decided to go elsewhere, and Kaysen stayed on until 1976, when he yielded the directorship to a historian of science, Harry Woolf. But the furor robbed Kennan of the calm the Institute had once provided him. “As far as I can see,” he wrote one friend, “just about everybody here who has had any responsibility in this matter has done, with remarkable consistency, the wrong thing.” And, to another: “What fools these mortals be.”²²

Kennan was hard at work, in the meantime, establishing an institute of his own, as a way of repaying “something of the debt I owe to those who once taught and inspired me.” One was his Foreign Service mentor, Robert Kelley, who had insisted that the best way to understand the Soviet Union was to study Russian history and culture. Kennan’s book on Custine reflected that principle, but there was no American center for Russian research independent of major universities. Kennan wanted one, to be located in Washington. “Of the necessity,” he wrote his former Moscow boss (and later New York governor) W. Averell Harriman, “there can, in my opinion, be no doubt whatsoever.” Only Harriman had “the position, the authority, and the institutional detachment”—Kennan was too tactful to mention the cash—“to carry things forward.”²³

Richard Ullman, now a Princeton professor for whom Kennan had been a mentor, found it fascinating that he still deferred to Harriman: “I’d never seen [Kennan] with anybody else with whom he had that junior relationship.” Ullman watched it crack, briefly but revealingly, at a dinner Kaysen arranged shortly after Alliluyeva’s arrival. Harriman had been eager to meet her, but she found his questions about her father intimidating and refused to say much. Richard Holbrooke, Harriman’s feisty young aide, came gallantly to her rescue: “Governor, you are the most impossible man to work with I have ever encountered.” “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve said that,” Kennan burst out. “I’ve always felt that. Averell, you really were impossible!”²⁴

Now, though, he needed Harriman’s help, and the old man had not mellowed. “I always distrust statements [like] ‘of the necessity… there can be no doubt whatsoever,’” he grumbled to his secretary after reading Kennan’s letter about the new institute. Why not expand existing centers at Harvard or Columbia? If a Washington site really was necessary, he advised Kennan, then “[t]he School of Advanced International Studies, started by Paul Nitze and associated with Johns Hopkins, might be a good home.” But Kennan did not like this idea. “I am naturally disappointed,” he responded to Harriman. The need for a Washington program that would not be an adjunct to something else was clear to “all the leading authorities in our country. I know that to find the money for it is not going to be an easy task.”²⁵

That proved to be correct, but with the help of two energetic young historians, James Billington (later Librarian of Congress) and S. Frederick Starr (later president of Oberlin College), Kennan was able to get a small “Institute for Advanced Russian Studies” established at the new Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a congressionally mandated memorial to the former president, housed in the old Smithsonian building on the Washington Mall. “[A]s you will see from this stationery,” Kennan wrote Harriman again at the end of 1975, the new institute “bears, at the insistence of my younger colleagues, my own name and that of my great-uncle—the one who did all the travel in Siberia and wrote the book on your father.” The Kennan Institute still needed help: might Harriman purchase a “modest” building nearby, to be known as “Harriman House,” at which it could accommodate visiting scholars?²⁶

Harriman did make a contribution, but the idea of a modest house named for him within the Kennan Institute carried no greater appeal than the idea of putting the latter in Nitze’s school had carried for Kennan. He approached Harriman once more in 1978, asking for help in raising a $3–5 million endowment, but this time got a flat rejection: “My prior commitments are such that I cannot give the substantial sum that you speak of in your letter to your Institute.” Kennan should approach the industrialist Armand Hammer, taking care to “give his name [sufficient] recognition to excite his interest.” Four years later Harriman announced that he and his family were giving Columbia University $11.5 million to endow its Russian Institute, which would henceforth be the “W. Averell Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.”²⁷

Knowing Harriman’s ego, Kennan might have expected this. Having one of his own, he did not. Despite the two Kennans for whom his institute was named, the younger one had hoped through it, he later admitted, “to ‘institutionalize’ myself”—and had been bold enough to seek Harriman’s help. Harriman liked the concept, but thought that a different person deserved the distinction. It was a contest of the vanities Kennan could not win. If he had been willing to name his institute for Harriman, the Princeton historian Cy Black speculated, “he might have gotten the money. But a man like Harriman doesn’t give it to Kennan’s institute.”²⁸

Kennan wondered, on getting the bad news, whether he should recommend liquidating his institute altogether, “the shattering of one more dream.” In the end, though, he agreed to go on the Harriman Institute’s advisory board, Harriman’s wife Pamela went on his, and the Kennan Institute became the primary Washington center for research on Russia, as well as on the non-Russian territories of the former Soviet Union. Fund-raising was always difficult, though, and so it was never able to separate itself, as Kennan had hoped it might, from the Wilson Center. His institute remained “beautiful, valuable, full of promise, but, like a young lovely Victorian governess without fortune or family, at the mercy of the one who gives her meals, a roof, and a pittance of salary.”²⁹

V.

The Kennans celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary on September 11, 1971. Their children surprised them with a dinner followed by a ball, featuring engraved invitations, guests brought in from all over, and an orchestra playing George’s Dixieland favorites. “They organized it all by themselves, without a word to us…. All Princeton was impressed.” Mortality, however, was intimating itself more regularly now. Chip Bohlen died after a long illness on the first day of January 1974. He was “closest to me in professional experience and interest,” George wrote his widow, Avis. “I find it quite impossible to believe that he, who was so much a part of my world, is really gone. Perhaps, in one way, he is not.”³⁰

Six weeks later Kennan turned seventy, thereby becoming, in line with Institute for Advanced Study procedure, a professor-emeritus. To mark the occasion, he composed a poem, which he read aloud at his birthday dinner. It sounded playful, but it was not casual: he reworked it several times before he was satisfied, and then ensured its survival by saving it in several locations. As if to humiliate future biographers, he compressed much of himself within just fifteen stanzas.

Kennan also resolved, with posterity in mind, to keep his diary more conscientiously: “An occasional hour of intimate reflection will be no less useful—and have no smaller chances of usefulness—than anything else I might be doing,” he wrote on the first day of January 1975. “And there is so little time left in which the real ‘me,’ as distinct from the mind alone or the various things I seem to mean to other people, can be expressed.”³¹

A week later he was sitting under the great vault in Washington’s National Cathedral—where his own memorial service would be held thirty years later—thinking “highly egoistic and improper, but very human thoughts” while the late Walter Lippmann’s friends eulogized him. Why had Lippmann had more influence than he? Kennan’s own education had been “broader, if less deep,” his mind “no less powerful,” his stylistic ability “fully as great,” his insights “bolder, more penetrating and more prophetic,” but his impact on American public life was “undetectable.” So why not give up punditry altogether and concentrate on history? “Will it make any difference, several decades later, whether what I wrote about… was my own dreary time or the period of the 1880s?”³²

Kennan spent the spring and summer of 1975 researching the Franco-Russian alliance in European archives. “I feel detached,” he wrote late in April, just prior to the final collapse of South Vietnam. “I have done what little I could.” He seemed strangely connected, however, to the departed. Walt Butterworth, another Foreign Service colleague and, in recent years, a Princeton neighbor, had also recently died. But Kennan dreamed, one night in Vienna, of a “visitation” from Butterworth, who

Two weeks later, on a visit to Hermann Hatzfeldt’s Crottorf, Kennan was left to work alone, as was his preference, in the castle’s great library.

Until then, he needed “to quiet down, grow up, act my age, gather my strength,” and it struck him that if he made the effort, “God will help me.” Even God, though, would find it difficult “to teach this old dog new tricks.” For as soon as he joined the company of others, “the old fool—Kennan the enthusiast—Kennan the entertainer—takes over before I can control him, and we are off again.”³³

While in Bonn early in May, Kennan walked through a hotel lounge, found the movie version of South Pacific—dubbed into German—playing on television, and was “suddenly obliged—to my own amazement and amusement—to repress tears.” It was a relic from a lost civilization: “these fresh, boyish images of American sailors, the harmless inanities of the plot, the heroine’s belief in a happy future.” He could not say, with Oppenheimer, “Dammit, I happen to love this country,” but “I can say that I loved, and love in memory, something of what the country once was…. [T]he young will never know it.”³⁴

Kennan was in Helsinki in July 1975, on the eve of the great thirty-five-nation conference, but his mind was on the archival remains of a late-nineteenth-century world a lifetime removed from his own: “Yet all of this has now faded into the shadows.” Empires had disappeared. Names once “mountain-high in grandeur” were now known “only to a handful of historians like myself.” Stepping out onto the streets, where preparations were under way to welcome the notables of his era, Kennan could see that within another lifetime they too would be “carried off with the wind into the obscurity of time.” The present could only be captured “as in some old photograph, never to be recaptured as a living reality. Such is the dizziness, with relation to time, that can, on occasion, seize the historian.”³⁵

God had not yet induced in Kennan the habit—also once recommended by Acheson—of “taciturnity.” That became clear in an interview Kennan granted to the writer and broadcaster George Urban, which, when published in the September 1976 issue of the journal Encounter, filled thirty-three of its pages. “[T]ried to read it,” Kennan admitted on the day his copy arrived, but “found it much too long, and so boring that I went to sleep, literally, before I could finish it.” As with other Kennan pronouncements over the years, however, his critics found this one anything but boring.

He began with a bicentennial prediction for the United States: “This country is destined to succumb to failures which cannot be other than tragic and enormous in their scope.” They would arise from the familiar evils of industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, secularization, and environmental degradation. The only remedy would be “a much simpler form of life, a much smaller population, a society in which the agrarian component is far greater in relation to the urban component…. In this sense I am, I suppose, an 18th-century person.” Short of coercion, there was no way a nation the size of the United States could manage its affairs without never-ending compromises among self-centered constituencies. But if that was the only way the country could govern itself, then “this places certain limitations on what it can hope to do in the field of foreign affairs.” Its policy should be “a very restrained one.”

Had Kennan become, then, an isolationist? Not if that meant abruptly curtailing existing commitments. It should be possible, though, to reduce these gradually, with a view to “leaving other people alone and expect[ing] largely to be left alone by them.” Would that not consign European allies to Soviet domination? Perhaps they deserved it, Kennan replied: they had grown far too self-indulgent under American protection. While recently cruising in the Baltic, he had happened upon a Danish youth festival “swarming with hippies—motorbikes, girlfriends, drugs, pornography, drunkenness, noise—it was all there. I looked at this mob and thought how one company of robust Russian infantry would drive it out of town.”

But with an ideology “at least 70–80 years out of date,” Kremlin leaders would not know what to do with Western Europe if they were to take it over. And if the moderate socialists of the region ever summoned the resolve to end their countries’ dependence on the United States, the Soviet Union would have no plausible justification for continuing to control Eastern Europe. Disarray, therefore, “cuts both ways.”

Kennan’s most startling comments were on nuclear weapons. People would always find excuses to fight one another, so they had to be prevented “from playing with the worst kind of toys.”

Compared to the ecological and demographic consequences of a nuclear conflagration, Soviet domination of Western Europe would be only “a minor catastrophe.”

Because there could be no recovery from a war fought with nuclear weapons, the United States should be “much bolder” in seeking their elimination, if necessary unilaterally. Was Kennan advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament? “Not all at once,” he replied, “or not without reciprocation, but if no one takes the lead in imposing self-restraint in the development of these weapons, we are never going to get any reduction of them by negotiation.”

Did this mean that Western civilization was no longer worth defending? “Of course not,” Kennan retorted, but defense had to begin at home:

Show me first an America which has successfully coped with the problems of crime, drugs, deteriorating educational standards, urban decay, pornography, and decadence of one sort or another—show me an America that has pulled itself together and is what it ought to be, then I will tell you how we are going to defend ourselves from the Russians. But as things are, I can see very little merit in organising ourselves to defend from the Russians the porno-shops in central Washington.

This and much else in the interview was self-indulgent nonsense. It was Kennan’s confirmation of Parkinson’s Law: given space, he would fill it, wisely or not. Kennan the enthusiast, Kennan the entertainer, Kennan the old fool, had taken over yet again.

But so had Kennan the prophet. We do not demand, of such seers, that they be logical, proportional, or brief. It’s their function to detect big dangers in little ones, to sense doom around each corner, to inflate admonitions, like balloons, to the bursting point. It’s also their lot to be derided, and in that respect Kennan’s bicentennial jeremiad could not have been better timed.³⁶

VI.

“He’s on their side,” Paul Nitze wrote angrily on his copy of the Encounter interview, where Kennan had imagined the Red Army dispersing the Danish hippies. Meanwhile Kennan had taken on Nitze—without naming him—in his Foreign Affairs article: people like him required the image of an implacable adversary, to be displayed repeatedly like a ventriloquist’s dummy, until to question its reality seemed frivolous or treasonous. Nitze was “a very good friend,” Kennan later acknowledged, but he believed in “a fictitious and inhuman Soviet elite, whereas I am dealing with what I suspect to be, and think is likely to be, the real one.” “George and I have always been good friends,” Nitze confirmed. They had known each other since serving together on the Policy Planning Staff in the late 1940s and had never differed “except on matters of substance.” Each was convinced, their joint biographer has written, “that the other’s desired policies could lead the United States to the ultimate catastrophe.”³⁷

A week after Jimmy Carter’s election in November 1976, Nitze and a bipartisan group of fellow détente critics announced the formation of a new Committee on the Present Danger—an earlier one, in 1950, had rallied support for increases in defense spending after the Korean War broke out. Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger, they insisted, had underestimated the threat posed by the Soviet military buildup over the past decade. Carter had made it clear that he would not seek to reverse the trend. The committee would therefore, as loudly as possible, sound the alarm.³⁸

Kennan decided, that same week, to sound one of his own. He put aside his research on the Franco-Russian alliance and began writing a new book, to be called The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy. The title left no doubt about its purpose: it would be a critique of Nitze and the movement he had started. With Connie Goodman’s help—she had come back to work for Kennan in 1975—he finished it in three months. He dedicated it “[t]o my wife Annelise, whose lack of enthusiasm for this and my other excursions into public affairs has never detracted from the loyalty with which she supported these endeavors.”³⁹

The book was “a big disappointment,” Goodman acknowledged. The New York Times thought it insufficiently newsworthy even to review. Philip Geyelin, who did review it for The Washington Post, found Kennan to have a “lamentably loose grip” on policy practicalities. Could the United States really restrain its military-industrial complex and achieve energy independence and correct the corruptions that afflicted its culture? Reduce its global commitments to the defense of Western Europe, Japan, and—in a rare Kennan bow to domestic politics—Israel? Abandon “obsolescent and nonessential” positions in Panama, the Philippines, and South Korea? Refrain from involving itself elsewhere in the “third world,” especially southern Africa? Sympathize with Soviet dissidents while trusting the Soviet government? Acknowledge, with respect to nuclear weapons, that there was “simply no need for all this overkill,” that both sides could “give up four fifths of it tomorrow,” and that a unilateral reduction of 10 percent, “immediately and as an act of good faith,” would hurt neither of them?

Each of these might be goals worth considering, but to propose them all without explaining how to achieve them—in what order, on what time scale, with what trade-offs—was to compile a catalog, not to suggest a strategy. The Cloud of Danger in this respect paralleled its author’s complaints, to the New York Times columnist James Reston, about Carter’s initial approaches to Moscow: that by pushing for deep cuts in strategic weaponry while simultaneously pressing the issue of human rights, his administration had already made “just about every mistake it could make.” Kennan’s mistake, in this hurriedly composed book, was to expand into 234 pages of large type what he had taken too many pages of small type to say in Encounter, without adding anything new. Meanwhile he was living with the frustration “of having no influence on the conduct of foreign policy and, at the same time, being invited and expected to talk about it on every conceivable occasion.”⁴⁰

One he could hardly avoid was the “X” article’s thirtieth anniversary. Not wanting to be caught off guard, as the Foreign Affairs editors had been five years earlier, the Council on Foreign Relations invited Kennan to reflect on the event—he appeared somewhat belatedly in November 1977—at the organization’s recently established Washington headquarters. Little was now left of Stalinism, he insisted: Brezhnev was a moderate, even conservative figure, “confidently regarded by all who know him as a man of peace.” That made it hard to see why détente had become so controversial in the United States. Without specifying Nitze and the Committee on the Present Danger, Kennan blamed those who “lose themselves in the fantastic reaches of what I might call military mathematics—the mathematics of possible mutual destruction in an age of explosively burgeoning weapons technology.”⁴¹

Nitze had been a banker, Kennan later explained. He liked statistics: “He was happier when he could take a blank sheet and do calculations than he was [with] the imponderables.” Because an adversary’s intentions could never be quantified, Nitze dismissed them as irrelevant. Capabilities did count, because they could be counted. Kennan had characterized him correctly, Nitze acknowledged. “When people say ‘more,’ I want to know how much ‘more’? I can understand it a hell of a lot better if you can put it into numbers or calculus or something like that. Then you can be precise as to what you’re talking about.”⁴²

Kennan was being imprecise, in Nitze’s view, when he called Brezhnev a “man of peace.” How did Kennan know this? What if he turned out to be wrong? Even if he was right, what did Brezhnev mean by “peace” in the first place? Why, if his intentions were peaceful, was his military so compulsively acquiring weaponry? Kennan had always found it difficult to answer questions like these, because he relied so heavily on his intuitive sense that the Russians were not going to start a war. When an interviewer for The New York Times Magazine asked him in May 1978 whether he accepted the principle “better red than dead,” Kennan unwisely admitted that he did, although “I don’t think there’s any need for us to be red, because I don’t think that war is the way the Russians would like to expand their power.”

That was just the point, Nitze retorted, in an article the Times ran alongside Kennan’s interview. Soviet leaders did not want a war, but they did want the “strategic nuclear preponderance,” upon which “all other levers of pressure and influence depend.” If allowed to achieve it, they would indeed expand their power, while containing that of the United States and its allies. Their goal was a world in which they would be “the unchallenged hegemonic leaders.” It had been “little short of bizarre,” Kennan complained, that the Times had felt obliged to balance him with “a good dose of hard-line conventional wisdom from Nitze.” He could not understand why so many friends were now criticizing him “in this way.”⁴³

It got worse the following month when an enemy joined the chorus. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, expelled from the Soviet Union four years earlier, attacked Kennan in a widely publicized Harvard commencement address for having denied the applicability of morality in politics: “On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well-planned world strategy.” With Kennan calling for “unilateral disarmament,” even the youngest of Kremlin officials were laughing “at your political wizards.” Kennan heard of this only when his mail caught up with his sailboat, appropriately enough, in a Danish port. “Abruptly yanked back… from the harsh but simple realities of the sea,” he wandered disconsolately among a forest of “indifferent masts,” but as the evening wore on, “the annoyances of life ashore, about which for the moment one could do so little, faded from consciousness. This, I suppose, is the therapeutic quality of cruising in small sailing craft.”⁴⁴

Kennan had criticized the Committee on the Present Danger “at length and with care,” Eugene V. Rostow, one of the organization’s cofounders and close friend of Nitze, wrote in The Yale Law Journal that summer. But as Kennan’s Memoirs had shown, he had long suffered inner conflicts “about himself, his dream world, his work, his goals, and his relationship to the American nature and culture.” These had brought him “perilously close to preaching that we don’t really need a foreign and defense policy at all.” He had, in this way, outdone the Old Testament prophets, for however sharply they scolded the ancient Israelites, “not even Jeremiah despaired of their survival.” Kennan had no sense of what it would take to ensure that of the West, because his mind had “never moved along mathematical lines, and never will.” He was “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”⁴⁵

Having been called many things but never before an extraterrestrial, Kennan wrestled in his diary with how to respond. “Blast the stupidities? Expend, in this way, such authority as I possess?” In the end he wrote a long letter, typed it himself, and sent it off late in November 1978 to Reston. “I shall soon be 75 years of age,” he pointed out. “[M]y means and energies are obviously limited. For me to try to involve myself in public disputes with Paul Nitze and others would merely mean to get myself chewed up in controversy, and I would soon lose what little value I may have as a force in public opinion.”

He then went on to show how the skills of an impressionist or a poet—if not an alien—could be valuable. He did so by imagining himself in the position of Brezhnev and his closest associates, most of whom were approaching Kennan’s age. They might “like to have everything under such perfect control that they could address themselves exclusively to schemes for our early undoing,” as the Committee on the Present Danger had suggested, “but the fact is: they don’t.” Whatever their self-confidence, it had to be vastly overshadowed by their fears

Now they had something else to worry about: the unexpected election of a Polish pope. To claim, in the light of all this, that the old men in the Kremlin could want anything more than to hang on to what they had was “to distort out of all verisimilitude their nature, their situation, and their interests.”

But, Nitze and his friends would protest, weren’t the Soviets busily exploiting “third world” opportunities? Had they not moved into Angola in the wake of the Portuguese empire’s collapse? What about the “horn of Africa,” where the superpowers were competing for influence in Somalia and Ethiopia? Or Afghanistan, where a Marxist revolution had taken place earlier that year? In fact, Kennan insisted, in each of these situations local Marxists had exploited the Soviet Union, whose leaders knew that if they failed to aid these causes, the Cubans or the Chinese would, and their own credibility would suffer. Far from opportunities, these were liabilities, depleting strengths needed to maintain the status quo.

Kennan was now, he reminded Reston, “the patriarch.” No one else living, not even the Kremlin’s long-serving foreign minister Andrey Gromyko, could draw on his half-century of diplomatic experience. He would not claim, in all respects, to speak for the dead—Bohlen, in particular, had “never encountered a statement of mine to which he could not take some exception”—but his late Foreign Service colleagues would share, he believed, his astonishment at how little respect their kind of professionalism commanded in the face of current frivolities, abuses, and misrepresentations: “There, Scottie, I have chosen you as the object for what I hope will be my last statement on Soviet-American relations. Make what you will of it.”⁴⁶

No one, not even Reston, made much of it at the time. But when Soviet archives opened after the Cold War ended, they showed Kennan’s impression of a frightened, overstretched gerontocracy, desperately trying to regain the initiative lost by its own ineptitude dating back at least as far as the invasion of Czechoslovakia, to be much closer to reality than Nitze’s calculation of a purposefully rising hege-mon. The difference, to oversimplify, was between what and why. Nitze could see what the Brezhnev regime was doing and from this he concluded, inaccurately, that he knew why. Kennan sensed why, and so worried much less about what. Nitze seemed right in the short run, because only the long run could confirm Kennan’s claim. But, with the passage of time, it did.⁴⁷

VII.

“[I]t isn’t easy being George Kennan,” his friend Dick Ullman once observed. “I’ve always thought that that was a heavy weight to bear.” Kennan seemed genuinely reluctant to get into policy debates, but he rarely resisted the opportunity. He appeared to regard himself as “an asset to be treasured,” a historical figure whose life needed to be documented as thoroughly as possible. He was keeping more complete diaries now than ever before, and he had his research assistants—one was Ullman’s wife, Yoma—filling scrapbooks with Kennan-related newspaper clippings in multiple languages from all over the world. “I’ll bet you,” Ullman commented, “that there is no Nitze scrapbook.”⁴⁸

Yoma Ullman was one of several assistants who worked with Kennan on his Franco-Russian alliance book. Connie Goodman, who still handled his correspondence, was another: she helped Kennan devise an elaborate system of color-coded note cards—pink for the French, blue for the Russians—which his color-blindness at times caused him to confuse. Mimi Bull, who had been Goodman’s college roommate, also worked for Kennan in Princeton and later in Austria. “I was in awe and frankly terrified to begin with,” she recalled, but soon “[t]he austere scholar diplomat relaxed and became a gifted raconteur with a delight in the absurd.” She found him, on one occasion in Vienna, sporting an old beret, a new pencil moustache, and a radiant smile, “pleased with the wealth of material he realizes is here.”⁴⁹

In addition to the European and American archives he visited, Kennan returned to the Soviet Union several times during the 1970s to research the foreign policies of the last tsars, a privilege granted to few Western scholars. He learned to request specific documents, identified from previously published histories, whereupon the archivists would please him by producing entire files, with the explanation that they hadn’t had time to find the individual items he had requested: “They can loosen up when they want to.” They mostly did, for with Kennan’s criticisms of dissidents, he was back in favor in the Kremlin. Pravda reviewed The Cloud of Danger even if The New York Times didn’t, pointing out that his views had evolved “in the direction of good sense.”⁵⁰

Kennan’s “retirement” from the Institute for Advanced Study would normally have left him on half salary without the use of an office, but the trustees were well aware, Dick Dilworth recalled, that he had been “infinitely more productive and certainly more prominent” than anyone else there. So they allowed Professor-Emeritus Kennan to continue as a fully active professor in all but name, exempting him only from faculty meetings. To Kennan’s embarrassment, the arrangement required raising the funds needed to support him, but the Institute found them easily enough from sources including Dilworth himself, the Rockefeller family, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and because of his interest in nuclear issues, the legendary Omaha investor Warren Buffett.⁵¹

Continuing to write history, therefore, met his continuing obligation to the Institute, but Kennan still hoped to connect his research, in some way, to contemporary affairs. It was also, his friend Cy Black observed, a kind of hobby: “It is fun for him. It keeps him busy.” Goodman agreed: “He enjoyed this so much more than any other work.” Being Kennan, of course, he could hardly have fun without feeling guilty: his book had become “a pretence,” he told himself as he neared completion of his first volume, “an excuse for existence.” He should have recognized it years ago as “a quixotic undertaking.”⁵²

The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890, came out from the Princeton University Press in the fall of 1979. It was not as meticulously documented as Kennan’s volumes on early Soviet-American relations, but at over four hundred pages it was an impressive performance for a man of seventy-five. Paul Kennedy, a cheeky young historian less than half Kennan’s age, congratulated him in The Washington Post for his “mature, warm, beautifully written book,” although it was “not a little questionable” that Kennan had neglected the French military archives, the Bismarck family papers, and the monographs of Professors Hillgruber and Mueller-Link. Kennedy acknowledged, however, that these were points “about which the general reader will care little.” One with a particular interest in Bismarck confirmed this. “I have enjoyed reading your book,” Kissinger wrote Kennan. “Not that it fails to be depressing. If even Bismarck could not prevent what he clearly foresaw, what chance does the modern period have? That is the real nightmare.”⁵³

“Bismarck did all that he could, in his outwardly rough but essentially not inhumane way,” Kennan replied. “What surprises me more is the failure of our own generation, with the warning image of the atom bomb before it, to learn from his example.” This, of course, had been Kennan’s point all along. Had he been born only a few years earlier, he noted in his introduction, he might have been among the millions of young men who fought in World War I. He would have done so, he imagined, with the same “delirious euphoria” most of them had felt: that an era of “self-sacrifice, adventure, valor, and glory” lay ahead. Having had the luck to avoid their experiences, he wanted now to focus in detail on the statesmen of that age, for in them “we can see, not entirely but in larger degree than is generally supposed, ourselves.”⁵⁴

“I don’t think it explains anything,” Black grumbled about The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order, and he had a point. Kennan had enjoyed writing the book too much to make its message clear. He spent months, for example, tracking down information on a relatively minor figure, the French-Russian double agent Elie de Cyon, not because his role was in any way critical to the coming of the war, but because Kennan relished this kind of detective work. It was an all-weather form of recreation: the scholarly equivalent of summer sailing. But it left Kennan with another volume to write if he was even going to get to the alliance of 1894—and that event would still precede, by two decades, the outbreak of the conflict whose origins he had meant to explain, and whose consequences he had hoped to assess.⁵⁵

Kennan had again rambled, as in his Encounter interview and in The Cloud of Danger. He produced, this time, a wonderfully readable history—it could almost be a novel, he thought⁵⁶—but its literary and scholarly strengths made it ineffective as prophecy. Despite the pleasures it held for Kennan, using the past to instruct the future was a Sisyphean task: as his sources proliferated, his energy faded, and the distractions of the present, as always, demanded comment.

VIII.

Détente collapsed completely during the last half of 1979. After years of negotiations, Carter and a visibly enfeebled Brezhnev were able to sign the SALT II arms control treaty in Vienna in June, but a rapid succession of unexpected crises left it languishing in the U.S. Senate. The first occurred in August, when a CIA source leaked the news that the Soviet Union had placed a combat brigade in Cuba. Carter demanded its removal but had to back down after learning that the unit had been there since the missile crisis of 1962. He had never before seen “such dilettantism, amateurism and sheer bungling,” Kennan complained: it had been “an artificially-manufactured domestic-political event if there ever was one.” What he didn’t know was that he knew the manufacturer. Nitze had helped arrange the leak with a view to delaying, perhaps preventing, the treaty’s ratification.⁵⁷

The second crisis broke on November 4, when Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six hostages, with the subsequent approval of the Islamist government that had recently deposed Washington’s longtime ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Furious at this violation of diplomatic immunity, recalling his own five and a half months of internment in Nazi Germany, angry that the Carter administration had let almost four months go by without securing the Americans’ release, Kennan told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 27, 1980, that the United States should simply declare war on Iran. This would allow detaining Iranians within its boundaries, while enlisting the aid of a neutral country in arranging an exchange of internees, as Switzerland had done for the Bad Nauheim “hostages” thirty-eight years earlier.

What made Kennan’s testimony particularly striking, however, was his equally emphatic insistence that the Carter administration had overreacted to the third and most serious crisis that had developed in recent months: the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979. Eleven years earlier Kennan had criticized the Johnson administration’s tepid response to Czechoslovakia’s occupation. Now, though, in the face of Carter’s more vigorous retaliations—withdrawing the SALT II treaty from the Senate, embargoing grain and technology shipments to the U.S.S.R., calling for military draft registration, increasing defense spending, and demanding a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics—Kennan claimed that the president had gone too far. Brezhnev had sent troops into Afghanistan in a desperate effort to save the imperiled Marxist government there, not—as Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had argued—with a view to beginning an offensive aimed at controlling the Persian Gulf. The Soviets would soon see that they had made a mistake, would be looking for a way out, and the United States should help them find one.⁵⁸

There was a compartmentalized logic in Kennan’s positions. Iran had, under a strict interpretation of international law, committed an act of war against the United States. The U.S.S.R. had indeed acted from a position of weakness, not strength, in Afghanistan. But Kennan’s grand strategic logic—the ability to see how contents mix after compartments are opened—eluded him altogether in this instance. What would the implications have been of the first formal declaration of war by anybody since 1945? What was to prevent escalation? How might Kremlin leaders respond to the prospect of American military action in a country bordering their own and Afghanistan? What conspiracies might they see in the rise of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland, the rapturous reception accorded Pope John Paul II on his first visit back after his election, and in the Polish-born Brzezinski’s recent well-publicized trip to the Khyber Pass? It was not at all clear that Kennan’s method of rescuing the hostages would reassure the aging officials in Moscow who now controlled half of the world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Kennan always had trouble keeping his emotions apart from his strategies, but as he grew older, the problem got worse. He commanded, as an elder statesman, increasing respect: there was supposed to be some kind of connection, he knew, between advanced age and wisdom. But “as one to whom these imputations would presumably be applicable, I am bound to say that this theory is at best complicated, and at worst questionable.”⁵⁹ He had fewer contemporaries, now, who could insist that he reconcile his contradictions before publicly displaying them. Bohlen had most frequently played that role, but so too had Acheson, Lippmann, and Harriman—the last still living and selectively donating, but in no condition to set Kennan right, as he used to do in Moscow, on the limits of policy feasibility. Nitze, a personal friend, was a public adversary who delighted in pouncing (or having associates like Eugene Rostow pounce) on Kennan’s lapses. No one had asked, with respect to his Encounter interview, The Cloud of Danger, the Bismarck book, or his remarkable appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “George, how will all of this hang together?”

But in October 1980 one old friend tried. With events in Iran and Afghanistan having produced so much “confusion, bewilderment, and fuzzy thinking,” Elbridge Durbrow wrote, he could not help but recall “how realistic, sound and prophetic” Kennan had been in the “long telegram” and the “X” article. “Practically everything you predicted has transpired,” but hardly anyone in government was even aware of this. So did each new administration have to learn all over again “that the Soviet leaders since Lenin have not fundamentally changed their basic aims, goals, and methods of operation”? It was a polite way of asking, Durbrow later explained, “what the devil is the difference? I see them as still the same enemies we always had. Why does George see [them] differently?”⁶⁰

“Mr. Carter’s performance is only a bit of history,” Kennan replied grimly on November 10, six days after Reagan’s landslide victory. Foreign policy would now be in the hands of Nitze, Scoop Jackson, and other hard-liners. There would be no limits to the arms race, or to preparations for a military showdown. Kennan had tried, since the end of the last war, to find a way of dealing with the Soviet Union that would not require a new war: “[T]oday I have to recognize the final and irreparable failure of this effort.” How all of this could please Durbrow—himself a hard-liner—Kennan could not understand, “but if it does—my congratulations. It is a small consolation to know that even if one cannot, one’s self, see hope in a situation, one has friends who can.”⁶¹

IX.

Kennan was just back from attending the annual meeting of Pour le Mérite, an elite eighteenth-century Prussian military order revived by the West German government to celebrate civilian achievements in the arts and sciences. He had become one of its thirty foreign members in 1976, regarding the honor at least as seriously as his membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The German organization combined his love of ceremony with his affinity for that culture, and despite the fact that attendance required flying across the Atlantic instead of simply slipping into New York, he rarely missed its meetings. The 1980 convocation took place in Regensburg in late September, after which the Kennans went to Garmisch, where, on October 1, George was to give the principal address at the Second World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies.

Characteristically, he had put off finishing it until the last moment, so while waiting for it to be typed, he sat wearily on a park bench in the fading afternoon sunlight, envying other old people around him who seemed free of such weighty responsibilities. Could he ever be like them? Would anything come of it, if he tried, apart from physical and intellectual decay? Thirteen hundred people were present when he rose to address them that evening, and just as he came to the passage of which he was proudest, a woman in the audience let out a piercing shriek, as if to herald what he was about to say—which was what he wished he could say, simultaneously, to leaders in both Washington and Moscow:

The outburst, he later determined, had no connection to the lecture. But the Slavicists, expecting neither a shriek nor a prophet, responded with only polite applause. And so Kennan was left “as uncertain of the suitability (not the truth) of what I had had to say as I had been before saying it.”⁶²

KENNAN HAD NEVER HEARD OF THE ALBERT EINSTEIN PEACE PRIZE when he got a phone call on March 9, 1981, informing him that he had won it. The prize was a new one, selection committee chairman Norman Cousins explained, established only a year earlier by the trustees of Einstein’s estate. Kennan would be the second recipient. “I was, of course, in one way pleased over this news—a pleasure not diminished, I must confess, although not mainly occasioned, by the fact that the award carries with it a $50,000 check.” He and Einstein had, after all, once been “colleagues of sorts” at the Institute for Advanced Study, even if they had never spoken. But in Kennan’s continuing struggle between scholarship and prophecy, the award might tip the balance irrevocably in the latter direction. Accepting it would imply a commitment “to do what I can to bring people to their senses and to halt a wholly unnecessary and infinitely dangerous drift towards war—and all of this at a time when I would like to finish my historical study, really retire, work around the house and garden, etc. Oh dear!”¹

While researching his second volume on the Franco-Russian alliance in Moscow the following month, Kennan received two other unexpected accolades. Jack Matlock, the American chargé d’affaires, gave a dinner at which he praised his guest in more generous terms than Kennan could ever remember hearing from anyone in government. The toast made up “for all the slights and rebuffs I have had from… J[ohn] Foster Dulles on down.” Then at a luncheon the next day, Georgi Arbatov, the influential director of the USA and Canada Institute, offered an equally handsome tribute from the Soviet side, which also had not always passed out “posies and compliments.” Moved by these honors, Kennan came home resolved to make the most of the Einstein award: “May God give me the insight to retain, in the light of my weaknesses, my humility, and the strength to do something useful in the remaining time.”²

The ceremony took place in Washington on May 19 before an audience including members of the new Reagan administration as well as the longtime Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Kennan used the occasion not to thunder dire warnings, as at Garmisch, or to descend into details, as in his recent historical writing, or to redesign America, as he had tried to do in The Cloud of Danger and in the Encounter interview. Nor did he contradict himself, as in his puzzling congressional testimony the previous year. Rather, he spoke softly, reasoned strategically, and put forward a single striking proposal, the logic of which swept aside conventional wisdoms almost effectively as the “long telegram” had done three and a half decades earlier.

Kennan began with the question he and Oppenheimer had often posed to each other: why, if nuclear weapons were so destructive, did there have to be so many of them? With the megatonnage of more than a million Hiroshima bombs between them, Soviet and American arsenals were “fantastically redundant to the purpose in question,” which was supposed to be deterrence. The superpowers had no excuse for holding themselves hostage to such devastation, along with the rest of the northern hemisphere. Their leaders seemed hypnotized, “like men in a dream, like lemmings heading for the sea, like the children of Hamlin marching blindly behind their Pied Piper.”

However well intentioned, the SALT agreements of the 1970s had worsened the situation by exaggerating the importance of intricate balances, so that even slight shifts could set off clamorous alarms. What was needed, instead, was an acknowledgment, on all sides, of lethal redundancies. This should then lead to

A 50 percent cut would be more symbolic than systematic, but it would be a start. For if the superpowers could accept that arbitrary number, then why continue haggling over the complex calculations that had stalemated SALT? Why not cut the arsenals by half again, and then by half after that, until nuclear stockpiles were approaching the point at which, as President Reagan had recently and “very wisely” said, “neither side threatens the survival of the other”? Kennan concluded his address with an exhortation from Bertrand Russell, endorsed by Einstein just before his death: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”³

I.

“It was a radical proposal from a figure not known for radicalism,” Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer aptly observed. Certainly it was no small thing for Kennan to have enlisted Einstein, Russell, and Reagan in an attack on SALT, the centerpiece of détente. His speech was not just a challenge to orthodoxy: it was a scrambling of orthodoxies, and it produced surprising responses. Nitze, when asked the next day, acknowledged that a 50 percent reduction might make sense, provided the cuts started with the heaviest multiple-warhead ICBMs. Eugene V. Rostow, who in 1978 had dismissed Kennan as “not an earthling,” now told The New York Times that “[w]e are taking a careful look at [his] proposal.” Reagan had nominated Rostow to run the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and at his confirmation hearing a month later, he suggested replacing the acronym SALT—Strategic Arms Limitation Talks—with START—Strategic Arms Reduction Talks: “Such proposals have been made from time to time—notably by Paul H. Nitze in 1971 and by George Kennan a few weeks ago…. No American administration could reject such a possibility out of hand.”⁴

So how did Kennan, Nitze, and Reagan (for whom Rostow was speaking) wind up suddenly on almost the same page? The answer had to do with what the SALT process had become. Nitze had indeed proposed cuts of roughly 50 percent in ICBM launchers during the initial stages of the SALT I talks—the date was 1969, not 1971—on the assumption that the word “limitation” in the acronym meant reduction. His idea went nowhere, though, and “arms control” came to be seen as a way of stabilizing existing numbers of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. By the time Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty in 1979, its provisions had become so arcane that only experts could understand them. That allowed Nitze, himself an expert but now also a vociferous critic, to claim that technocrats were squandering American assets while the Soviets were surging ahead. It ought to be possible, with a new and simpler approach, to do better.⁵

Kennan also saw SALT as having lost its way but worried more about its dependence on “mutual assured destruction.” This was the idea, which had earned the acronym MAD, that each side’s safety lay in its capacity to annihilate the other many times over. Costs would be cataclysmic if the slightest miscalculation should ever occur, as had indeed happened, Kennan knew well, with the outbreak of World War I. Unlike Nitze, he supported SALT II, not on its merits but out of fear for the effect on Soviet-American relations if it should be rejected. After Carter withdrew the treaty from the Senate, however, Kennan too was ready for something new: hence his Einstein Prize proposal.⁶

Reagan, it turned out, agreed with both Nitze and Kennan. He wanted a more straightforward approach to arms control that would complement his efforts to regain American strategic superiority: that put him in Nitze’s camp. But his abhorrence of nuclear weapons went back at least as far as Kennan’s. Throughout Reagan’s slow shift from Hollywood liberalism to Goldwater conservatism, he had always believed that nuclear weapons should be abolished. They could be the means, he worried quite literally, by which the biblical prophecy of Armageddon might be fulfilled. Making no secret of his aversion to MAD, Reagan asked repeatedly during the 1980 campaign why there could not be “an honest, verifiable reduction in nuclear weapons.” He opposed SALT II because it failed to provide that.⁷

Whether by accident or design, the State Department chose the day of Kennan’s address to announce that the United States would no longer be bound by either SALT agreement, thereby ending twelve years of Soviet-American negotiations on “arms limitation.” In the fall of 1981, however, Reagan proposed a new round of talks on a different problem: the upgraded intermediate-range ballistic missiles the U.S.S.R. had deployed against Western European targets during the late 1970s, against which NATO now planned a counterdeployment. Kennan saw an opportunity to “denuclearize” Europe, by exchanging a Soviet removal of IRBMs for an American withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons from West Germany. Reagan did not go that far, but he came close. He put Nitze in charge of the negotiations, and then accepted a proposal from Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Richard Perle to offer a “zero option”—not a 50 percent cut but a verifiable ban on any IRBMs aimed at European targets by either side.⁸

Reagan announced the plan in his first major “arms reduction” speech—his preferred term—on November 18, 1981. He called also for cutting conventional forces in Europe, while resuming talks on strategic weapons under the acronym START, the one Rostow had suggested, which Kennan and Nitze had inspired. Reagan did so a day after Kennan, speaking at Dartmouth, had condemned the “systematic dehumanization” of the Soviet leadership in administration rhetoric, but the president was ready for that criticism too. He revealed that while recovering from an assassination attempt the previous spring, he had sent a handwritten letter to Brezhnev emphasizing the aspirations Americans and Russians held in common: “They want to raise their families in peace without harming anyone or suffering harm themselves.” The juxtapositions were striking enough for The New York Times to suggest editorially that some kind of Reagan-Kennan dialogue must be under way.⁹

II.

Despite his gloomy postelection letter to Durbrow, Kennan had reconciled himself quickly to Reagan’s victory, if only because the alternative would have been Carter. “I am hopeful that things will now be somewhat better,” he wrote in a 1980 Thanksgiving note. When the new president shocked even his own advisers by claiming, at his first press conference, that the Soviet Union would “commit any crime” in the pursuit of “world revolution,” Kennan warned publicly against “oversimplifications” without saying who had indulged in them. “It was an effort on my part to stake out a middle ground for myself between that sort of thing and its opposite: the sort of naïve pro-Sovietism of which I am so often accused by the hard-liners.”¹⁰

In his diary, though, Kennan was already fretting about the “childishness and primitivism” of Reagan’s advisers. Alexander Haig, now secretary of state, was so alarmed about Central America that one would think the Red Army was invading the region. Richard Pipes, the Harvard historian and Committee on the Present Danger member who handled Soviet and Eastern European affairs for the National Security Council, was insisting that war was inevitable unless the U.S.S.R. changed its system. Its leaders had behaved badly, Kennan acknowledged: their polemics were “as Russian as boiled cabbage and buckwheat kasha. But what about my own government and its state of blind militaristic hysteria?”¹¹

Reagan evoked Kennan, also not by name, in his first significant speech after being released from the hospital, on May 17, 1981. Delivered at the University of Notre Dame, it came five days after an assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, and two days before Kennan’s Einstein Prize address. In words well suited to the drama of the occasion, Reagan predicted that “[t]he West won’t contain communism, it will transcend communism. It won’t bother to… denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.” Strangely, Kennan took no notice of what the president had said, despite its resonance with his own—if more moderately phrased—prophecy in the “X” article thirty-four years earlier.¹²

Another Reagan speech given at West Point on May 27, however, did provoke a response. “It is a simple world picture that he paints,” Kennan wrote in his diary. “I ought to love it, as he sees it, and be thrilled by it. I cannot. I love certain old-fashioned values and concepts, but not his.” Kennan then imagined a conversation with Reagan if they should ever meet, “which is most unlikely.” Remembering “my evil reputation,” the president would “look me sternly in the eye and ask: ‘Kennan, are you patriotic?’” If that meant loving the land, he would reply, he had loved it the way it was when he was a boy, before its inhabitants had made “a wasteland, a garbage dump, a sewer out of it.” There would be little left once Reagan’s supporters had completed that process. If the president meant loving the people, Kennan would have to reject any claim that their superior virtue and strength entitled them to lead the world.¹³

Like many Kennan diary entries, this one demands discount. Reagan, always a gentleman, would never have asked so pointed a question, and Kennan, equally polite, would never have given such a harsh answer. The passage shows, though, that despite his resolve to keep an open mind, Kennan was beginning to project his anger about his country onto its new leader. Despite the credit he had given Reagan, in the Einstein address, for wanting reductions in nuclear weaponry, Kennan wasn’t listening carefully to what he said. Throughout Reagan’s presidency, Kennan would remain surprisingly inattentive to what he did.

“I have a foreign policy,” Reagan wrote a friend in July 1981. “I just don’t happen to think that it’s wise to [tell] the world what your foreign policy is.” Had Reagan had a chance to explain it to him, Kennan might have picked up additional echoes of his own earlier thinking. The president was seeking to restore Western self-confidence, not for the purpose of economic recovery, as in the Marshall Plan, but by redressing the military imbalance created by actual increases in Soviet strategic and conventional capabilities, as well as by psychological impressions of American weakness in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. He hoped thereby to prepare the way, not just for new negotiations aimed at reducing nuclear weapons, but also for sharpening the stresses under which the Soviet system operated. Although Reagan had joined the Committee on the Present Danger, he had never accepted its insistence that the U.S.S.R. was getting stronger. Instead, he would have agreed with what Kennan had written in his 1978 letter to James Reston: that Brezhnev’s aging, frightened, and overstretched regime had no choice, if it was to survive, but to alter its course.¹⁴

Reagan’s reasons for thinking this, however, puzzled his own advisers and would have appalled Kennan, had he known of them. Kennan had reached his conclusions after a systematic effort, over several years, to compile and compare statistical information on Soviet capabilities, gleaned from as many sources as he could find. The president, in contrast, based his view on the simple conviction that capitalism fit human nature better than communism—and on jokes about the Soviet economy. Both were right: Kennan’s statistics were revealing, as were Reagan’s anecdotes. But Kennan would have found them more frightening than funny.¹⁵

Meanwhile Reagan’s determination to exploit Soviet weaknesses struck Kennan as dangerous. He had indeed recommended efforts to undermine Stalin’s empire in 1947–48, but as the dictator’s successors softened their rule while expanding their military capabilities, Kennan became almost protective of them, fearing that challenges might provoke war. He dismissed the dissidents as troublemakers. He portrayed the invasion of Afghanistan as a defensive maneuver, posing no threat to American interests. And when, in December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland and arrested the leaders of Solidarity, Kennan saw the action as a realistic response to Moscow’s concerns. Reagan’s retaliatory sanctions, he insisted, were “driving the Soviet leadership to desperation by pressing it mercilessly against a closed door.” Even the normally sympathetic New York Times found this to be too much: the “Kennan Doctrine,” it editorialized, seemed to be “that might should at least define right in world affairs.”¹⁶

“I think there is a good deal of latent discontent with the Brezhnev regime among younger members of the hierarchy,” Kennan wrote Durbrow early in January 1982, “and that we could, and should, give greater encouragement to these people.” But Reagan would get nowhere with human rights “agitation,” because “Russia is not going to be ‘democratic’ in our time.” Nor did it make sense to seek to destroy the Soviet system: “Our task is to accept it, for the moment, as it is; to try to avoid… an unnecessary and mutually disastrous war; and to see that the influence we exert on that country by our words and policies is one conducive to gradual change in what we would regard as the right direction.”¹⁷

How, though, to exert that influence? He was beginning to feel “like a one-man His Majesty’s royal opposition,” Kennan wrote Charlie James. He could have avoided this isolation, he added in his diary, by becoming a politician. He would then have

That kind of leadership, however, was not his:

The choice, then, was Reagan versus Kennan: the politician versus the prophet. Neither could become the other. Meanwhile “there is a bit of life still to be lived—a bit to be seen of the tragic beauty and poetry of this world—a bit, in short, to be witnessed, perceived, and recorded.”¹⁸

III.

“I am only a small part of the resistance in the U.S. to the madness of the present Am[erican] administration,” Kennan wrote on March 11, 1982. What he meant was the campaign then under way to achieve a “mutual, verifiable freeze” in Soviet and American nuclear capabilities. Originating within the peace movement, galvanized by the journalist Jonathan Schell’s frightening New Yorker articles on the effects of a nuclear war, the freeze had won sufficiently widespread support by then for 139 members of Congress to have endorsed it. Kennan had too, but only because the freeze was the least controversial objective around which the largest “opposition” could rally. It would not be nearly enough, “and I would not like to appear to be suggesting, by associating myself with it, that it was enough.” He had already gone beyond the freeze by calling for sharp reductions in nuclear capabilities, and he was now reviving a proposal he had first made in his 1950 “super” bomb paper: that the United States should promise never to initiate the use of nuclear weapons in fighting a war.¹⁹

“No first use” attracted no support at that point and for decades afterward because NATO depended on nuclear deterrence. The alliance had never matched the Warsaw Pact’s conventional forces, so American nuclear superiority—in principle—was supposed to balance them. In fact, the Soviet Union had long since caught up with the United States in both categories of weaponry, which meant that NATO had a credibility problem: would Americans risk their own safety to defend Western Europeans, especially West Germans?

To show that they would, all administrations since Eisenhower’s had deployed troops equipped with tactical nuclear weapons along the East German–West German border, where they would bear the brunt of any Warsaw Pact attack. Like “mutual assured destruction,” however, this “rational” strategy assumed irrationalities: that armies could fight on battlefields their own armaments had made uninhabitable; that the enemy would not respond in kind; that there would be much left of West Germany if it had to be “defended” in this way. It was a strange sort of deterrence, Kennan pointed out: “If you dare to attack West Germany, we will destroy that country; and then where will you be?”²⁰

NATO’s nuclear doctrines “were marvelous instances of intellectual incoherence and practical success,” former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy observed, for despite their illogic, there had been no European war. But could they survive the collapse of détente, a new race to deploy intermediate-range missiles, the Soviet crackdown in Poland, the Reagan administration’s retaliations, and a harshness in official rhetoric on both sides not seen since the early Cold War? The president’s “zero option” proposal of November 1981 had done little to allay these concerns: even his supporters believed it to be a negotiating gambit—a crafty bit of public grandstanding—not a serious proposal.²¹

Shortly after the president’s speech, Kennan attended a Washington dinner hosted by R. Sargent Shriver, President Kennedy’s brother-in-law, the founder of the Peace Corps, a former ambassador to France, George McGovern’s running mate in 1972, and a devout Catholic. His other guests included former secretary of defense and World Bank president Robert S. McNamara; Gerard C. Smith, the chief American delegate at the SALT I negotiations; Paul Warnke, Smith’s SALT II counterpart; and Father J. Bryan Hehir, who was drafting a statement for the National Catholic Bishops on the danger of nuclear war. A lively discussion ensued, during which someone—probably Kennan—brought up “no first use.” To the surprise of all present, all now favored it.

Kennan agreed, therefore, to cooperate with McNamara and Smith in resurrecting the concept: they, in turn, decided that Bundy—who had not been present—should draft a proposal. Such collaboration was unusual for Kennan, but in this instance, he saw its value: “If I were to write [alone] about ‘first use’ people would say: ‘What the hell does Kennan know about military matters? He doesn’t know a damn thing about them.’” Bundy was initially skeptical but decided to go ahead because McNamara, who had originated the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction,” and Kennan, who had always despised it, had found common ground. Foreign Affairs was alerted, and the article appeared as “Nuclear Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance” early in April 1982. Its authors quickly came to be known—in a quirky homage to the victims of Mao Zedong’s last purge—as the “Gang of Four.”²²

The proposal, Kennan hoped, would “force” the Reagan administration to abandon “first use,” but Secretary of State Haig ruled that out immediately. Such a shift, he claimed in a speech on April 6, would make Europe “safe for conventional aggression” while endangering “the essential values of Western civilization.” No West German outdid Haig in hyperbole, but a spokesman for the ruling Social Democratic Party did point out that a long conventional war would be just as damaging as a limited nuclear war. A leading Christian Democrat called the idea “unusually dangerous, both politically and psychologically.”²³

So as a policy initiative, “no first use” died at birth. The episode was significant, though, because Kennan had allies, this time, in criticizing NATO strategy. With Bundy, McNamara, and Smith on his side, no one could claim, as had Acheson after the Reith lectures, that Kennan had a “mystical attitude” toward power relationships. Old orthodoxies, in the face of new tensions, were breaking up, winning Kennan at least a respectful hearing within the foreign policy establishment. Not, however, within the Reagan administration, which he now regarded as “ignorant, unintelligent, complacent and arrogant; worse still is the fact that it is frivolous and reckless.” The president seemed blithely above it all. “A few public statements professing his love for peace, in principle, and one or two propagandistic proposals put forward publicly and so designed as to assure Soviet rejection, and the problem, so far as he is concerned, will be resolved.”²⁴

Kennan wrote that last diary entry on May 7, 1982. Two days later Reagan spoke at his alma mater, Eureka College, in Illinois. He began his discussion of arms reduction by quoting from Carl Sandburg’s poem “Cornhuskers,” which his own class had included in its 1931 yearbook: “Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?” Then the president invoked, in words that could have come from Jonathan Schell, the “nightmarish prospect that a huge mushroom cloud might someday destroy such beauty.” Despite difficulties in Soviet-American relations, therefore, his START negotiating team would propose a mutual reduction of one-third in strategic missile warheads, with further cuts in other categories to follow: “My duty as President is to ensure that the ultimate nightmare never occurs.”²⁵

Two days after that, Kennan spoke to a predominantly Catholic audience in Davenport, Iowa, just ninety miles northwest of Eureka. He celebrated “[t]his habitat, the natural world around us, …the house the Lord gave us to live in.” No one had a right to deny it, “with all its beauty and fertility and marvelousness,” to future generations. The very existence of nuclear weapons endangered it. The situation would not change until Americans came to see themselves and their supposed Soviet adversaries together as “God’s creatures,” embodying “the struggle between good and evil, which is the fundamental mark of all humankind.”²⁶

“I fire my arrows into the air,” Kennan had written in a philosophical moment before Reagan took office. “Sometimes, they strike nothing; sometimes, they strike the wrong things; sometimes one or another of them strikes a bell and rings it, loud and clear.” Despite wishful thinking in The New York Times, none of these categories fits the Kennan-Reagan relationship: there was never a direct dialogue between them. But arrows fired from different points, at different times, by very different archers, can nonetheless converge.²⁷

IV.

“Louis and I have been talking, pleasantly, widely, and since we always ended up with the dilemmas, uselessly,” Kennan noted on October 1, 1982, while visiting friends in Switzerland. Louis J. Halle served under Kennan and Nitze on the Policy Planning Staff, had written the best early history of the Cold War, and had taught for years at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. A close observer of Kennan, he recorded the conversation more carefully, for it helped to explain “a public advocacy that does not, to my mind, stand up to reality.”

Could two men pointing pistols at one another trust a “no first use” declaration? Kennan had no answer. Wasn’t nuclear deterrence keeping the peace, so wouldn’t abolishing nuclear weapons imperil it? Kennan conceded the point. Hadn’t world government advocates foreseen a third world war if their advice wasn’t followed? Kennan acknowledged that they had been wrong. He nonetheless showed Halle a page from his diary—claiming that it had slipped out of its ringbinder—in which he foresaw his own children’s deaths within five years because no one heeded his warnings about a nuclear holocaust. He was a Christian, Kennan insisted, but in this situation God was helpless.²⁸

Unwilling to let his friend off the hook, Halle wrote a few months later to express dismay when people whose minds he respected “take positions for which I see no adequate basis.” It was wholly implausible to claim that the U.S.S.R. had recovered from Stalinism, a phenomenon whose roots, Kennan had once argued, went back through a thousand years of Russian paranoia. “I think you were right when you said the Soviet Union had to be contained, even if you had in mind something other than military containment.” Kennan’s reply rejected his younger self: Brezhnev’s successors—the ailing autocrat had finally succumbed in November 1982—were men who calculated their interests rationally and would do all they could to avoid a war. The same could not be said of their Washington counterparts, who were deliberately destabilizing the nuclear balance: “That is, presumably, what Mr. Reagan and his associates really want.”²⁹

But if Kennan could have read NSDD-75, the administration’s first top-secret review of policy toward the Soviet Union, approved by Reagan on January 17, 1983, he would have found still more echoes of “Mr. X.” American goals, the document specified, should be:

1. To contain and over time reverse Soviet expansionism by competing effectively on a sustained basis with the Soviet Union in all international arenas—particularly in the overall military balance and in geographical regions of priority concern to the United States.

2. To promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the ruling elite is gradually reduced.

3. To engage the Soviet Union in negotiations to attempt to reach agreements which protect and enhance U.S. interests and which are consistent with the principle of strict reciprocity and mutual interest.

It’s not clear whether Reagan had read Kennan’s famous Foreign Affairs article, but he did devote two 1977 radio broadcasts to an analysis of the recently declassified NSC 68, which incorporated its fundamental points. Whatever Kennan’s subsequent views on “X,” Reagan’s priorities were hardly those of a president bent on destroying the U.S.S.R. at the risk of ending life on the planet.³⁰

He had fired the incendiary Haig the previous summer, replacing him with the less combustible George Shultz. With the president’s approval, the new secretary of state quietly brought Soviet ambassador Dobrynin to the White House on February 15, 1983, for his first private meeting with Reagan. Neither the press nor the president’s staff—who doubted their boss’s ability to hold his own with the experienced diplomat—were informed. After talking for two hours “pretty nose to nose,” Reagan wrote in his diary, he asked Dobrynin and Shultz to help him communicate regularly with the new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov: “Geo. tells me that after they left, the ambas. said ‘this could be a historic moment.’”³¹

Knowing nothing of it, Kennan arranged his own meeting with Dobrynin while visiting Washington on March 2. He wanted to show Dobrynin that “our country could do a bit better in this respect than the Soviet Union had done by me”—he meant his own isolation in Moscow in 1952, when an invitation from Stalin never came.

If Dobrynin mentioned his visit to the White House—this seems unlikely given its secrecy—Kennan made no note of it. He did meet Shultz at a dinner that evening and liked his imperturbability but thought that “it jolted him a bit when I gave him the name.” Shultz was an improvement over Haig; nevertheless “I foresee something of [a] crisis between him and the fanatics… around the President, particularly if he tries to do anything sensible about relations with the Soviet Union.”³²

Shultz had some rough weeks ahead of him. Reagan gave him no warning before denouncing the Soviet Union, in an address to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, as “the focus of evil in the modern world,” and only minimal notice prior to his announcement, on March 23, of the Strategic Defense Initiative, his plan to protect the United States by building an antiballistic missile system. But the secretary of state soon saw Reagan’s logic in wanting to put both the U.S.S.R. and his own critics on the defensive. How could one reconcile religious faith with the political practice of “moral equivalency”? What was wrong with making nuclear weapons, as the president put it, “impotent and obsolete”?³³

Kennan was vulnerable on both counts. He trusted Andropov—until recently the head of the KGB—more than he did Reagan. He opposed MAD and the first serious effort to move beyond it. He took these positions not just because he feared war but also because he allowed sensitivity to style and susceptibility to emotion to cloud his judgment. How could an apparent lightweight like Reagan have any strategy at all, much less one that echoed what Kennan’s once had been? How could Kennan share aspirations with someone so unlike himself? The administration’s attitude toward the Soviet Union, he claimed in a Washington speech that spring, was “simply childish, inexcusably childish, unworthy of people charged with the responsibility for conducting the affairs of a great power in an endangered world.”

Delivered on May 17 under the sponsorship of the Committee on East-West Accord, Kennan’s address was in other ways worthy of its author. It was his first in the city since his Einstein Prize speech two years earlier. He delivered it before an audience including diplomats from NATO and Warsaw Pact countries, as well as an eagle-eyed Harriman, now ninety-two. Soviet negotiating techniques, Kennan admitted, could be “stiff, jerky, secretive, unpredictable,” lacking in “useful lubrication.” But it was wrong to apply, to their practitioners, “an image of unmitigated darkness,” as if they were the product of some “negative genetic miracle.” Nor was there any point in threatening the use, against their country, of useless weaponry: the goal should be to reduce nuclear arsenals, “with a view to their total elimination.” His fifty-five years of involvement in Soviet-American affairs—longer than that of anyone living—had never made him lose faith in constructive possibilities: “I wish I could convey some of that confidence to those around me here in Washington.”

The seventy-nine-year-old Kennan, Stephen Rosenfeld wrote in The New York Times, was “a driven, concentrated man of an increasingly spectral appearance” whose warnings, however imbalanced, reflected the widespread anxieties felt about Reagan. One turned to Kennan now not for policy analysis but “for glimpses of an uncommon, even mystical prophetic power.” There was “an old man’s economy of truth in him.” Kennan was, for once, pleased with his performance: “I came away with the impression that I had put one small barb into the complacent behind of the Administration.”³⁴

When Kennan published his speech in The New Yorker the following October, he had to make a few revisions. One was to acknowledge that Harriman’s Soviet experience went back further than his own: the older man had put the younger in his place yet again. The other was to mention, if only briefly, the shooting down of a South Korean airliner that had strayed over Sakhalin on the night of August 31–September 1, 1983. Andropov and his subordinates should learn from this “what harm they do to themselves when they let military considerations ride roughshod over wider interests.” Kennan should have stopped there.

Feeling the need for further explanation, though, he decided to provide one in The Washington Post. The incident should have surprised no one familiar with the “exaggerated sensitivity” of the Kremlin leaders, their inflexible ideology, and their inability to control their military. This was not as reassuring as Kennan had meant it to be. He went on to insist that the event would never have happened had it not been for the dangerous games intelligence agencies on both sides were playing, and for the Korean pilot’s “inexplicable obstinacy” in flying at night through forbidden airspace. It was understandable, then, that Andropov had given up hope for anything other than “implacable hostility” from Reagan’s administration.

Now even Annelise, to whom George had not shown the piece before submitting it, “rose in revolt.” She was “a woman of good judgment,” he told himself, obviously shaken. “And if it makes her intensely unhappy that I should, once or twice a year, speak my mind publicly, that in itself is a reason for not doing so.” There was, however, such a thing as paralysis from frustration. “The people who experiment on rats know that. I, poor rat, am close to experiencing it.”³⁵

On November 15, 1983, the Woodrow Wilson Center—still the Washington home of the Kennan Institute—held a dinner to “celebrate” fifty years of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Kennan was the main speaker, but the mood was noticeably subdued. A few other American ex-ambassadors attended, as did Dobrynin; the only Reagan administration official present, however, was Jack Matlock, who had recently replaced Pipes as the president’s Soviet and East European adviser on the National Security Council. Kennan praised Franklin D. Roosevelt, a very rare thing for him. If that president still occupied the White House, he would not have fallen into cynicism and despair over the state of Soviet-American relations. He would be setting about, “with boldness and good cheer, to make things better.” Why should anyone now accept anything less?³⁶

Stalin’s daughter was asking the same question. Desperately worried that war was about to break out, she demanded that Harriman and Kennan undertake a mission to Moscow to save the situation. “What are you going to do about it?” Harriman asked. Alliluyeva was emotional, Kennan answered, “with certain oddities and disabilities of character that have been a great trial to all her friends.” Like her father, though, she was at times capable of “penetrating insights.” This was one, and Kennan would not reject the role if offered it. But that Reagan and Shultz might welcome such an initiative seemed doubtful, “and without their recognition and acceptance of it, I am not sure whether it could be of any value.”³⁷

V.

On Saturday, January 14, 1984, to Kennan’s astonishment, he did get a call from the White House. It would have come a day earlier, but Annelise, still hoping for a less visible husband, had refused to disturb him. The caller was Matlock. He had no Moscow trip in mind, but he did want Kennan to know that on the morning of the sixteenth—timed for European television—Reagan would be making an important speech.

Matlock, whom Kennan greatly respected, would not have called without authorization: that this had been granted was “extraordinary.” But by whom? Shultz, rumored to have read the New Yorker article? The new national security adviser, Robert McFarlane? The president himself? “[I]t is assuredly a straw in the wind, and certainly a part of the significant change of policy toward the Soviet Union which Matlock assures me is taking place.”³⁸

The speech, one of Reagan’s most memorable, deplored the possibility that “dangerous misunderstanding[s] and miscalculations” might wreck the hopes of parents everywhere “to raise their children in a world without fear and without war.” In a peroration only he or FDR could have composed, the president envisaged a Soviet couple, Ivan and Anya, meeting an American couple, Jim and Sally. Finding how much they had in common, they would not have debated differences between their governments. Instead they might have gone out for dinner somewhere, thereby demonstrating that “people don’t make wars.”³⁹

Kennan was momentarily reassured. “I have a sense that respect for me has recently risen in White House circles,” he wrote on January 29. The president’s advisers were not consulting him directly, “but I suspect they listen, if apprehensively, to what I say.” He had found three references, in Reagan’s address, to the New Yorker article, although he didn’t specify what they were. Given the president’s strong position, given the mess Andropov and his associates had made of their relations with the Western Europeans—the West German Bundestag had voted to deploy NATO intermediate-range missiles in November—maybe Kennan should try to help Reagan.

So he was “effectively stymied.” He should simply accept old age, and “let the tragedy take its course.”⁴⁰

Unbeknownst to Kennan, it almost had. Andropov turned out to have been less capable than his predecessors of calculating interests rationally, and in his fear of nuclear war—which was real enough—had almost set one off. Convinced while still at the KGB that the Reagan administration was planning a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, he had ordered an intelligence alert that went on for two years, with agents throughout the world looking for evidence to confirm his suspicions. The Korean airliner incident occurred within that context, as did Andropov’s subsequent denials that any error had taken place. Already on kidney dialysis at the time, he was in no condition to be running a superpower, much less exchanging ideas with Reagan on how to reduce tensions.⁴¹

Kennan had been right, then, to stress the hypersensitivity of Soviet leaders, but because he had been doing this for years while also emphasizing their common sense, his warnings lacked the weight they might otherwise have had. What made the situation doubly dangerous was that Reagan too assumed rationality. He expected Andropov to take him at his word when he said, publicly and in private, that the last thing he wanted was a war. But Andropov, like Kennan, doubted Reagan’s sincerity.

Both were wrong to do so. On October 10, 1983, the president previewed The Day After, an ABC television movie about the effects of a Soviet missile strike on an American city, Lawrence, Kansas. “It’s very effective & left me profoundly depressed,” Reagan acknowledged, hence the need to do “all we can to have a deterrent & see that there is never a nuclear war.” On November 18—two days after Kennan demanded Rooseveltian reassurance—Reagan got his first full briefing on American war planning. Unlike previous presidents, he had postponed this as long as possible, apparently because he knew he would hate what he heard. “A most sobering experience,” he now recorded. “I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked[,] that without being in any way soft on them, we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that.” A subsequent briefing on December 9, covering Soviet war plans, left him wishing that “some of our pacifist loud talkers could have access to this information.”⁴²

The allusion was to probably the second most dangerous crisis—after Cuba in 1962—of the entire Cold War. NATO ran military maneuvers in the North Atlantic each fall, but it upgraded the 1983 exercise, code-named “Able Archer,” to include top-level decision makers. Alarmed by this, Soviet intelligence analysts concluded that the surprise attack they had been told to expect was about to happen. Oleg Gordievsky, a British spy in Moscow, alerted his London handlers, who in turn warned Washington. Reagan found the reports hard to believe but immediately began efforts to defuse the crisis. The purpose of his upcoming speech, he wrote on January 6, 1984, would be to “reassure the eggheads & our European friends”—and presumably also the Kremlin—“that I don’t plan to blow up the world.”⁴³

The idea for Reagan’s globally televised “fireside chat” didn’t come directly from Kennan. The president was no regular reader of The New Yorker, and The Washington Post buried its account of Kennan’s Wilson Center speech at the end of an inconspicuous story on page B13. But Matlock read what Kennan had written, heard what he had said about Roosevelt, and happened to be drafting Reagan’s speech—until the president himself took it over to introduce Jim and Sally to Ivan and Anya. There were again convergences, if not causes. “Reagan’s Soviet policy had more in common with Kennan’s thinking than the policy of any of Reagan’s predecessors,” Matlock later recalled, even if “the rhetoric that offended Kennan’s sensibilities temporarily blinded him to the real substance of American policy.”⁴⁴

Andropov died on February 9. Kennan thought his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, the worst possible choice, exemplifying “all that the regime ought to be turning its back on.” Subordinates who would have to work with him deserved sympathy, not reproach: “Whatever their inner doubts, they could not admit to recognizing the justice of anything you might be saying without entering, if only so slightly, into the realm of the wholly treasonable.” Kennan might have been writing about Mikhail Gorbachev, but he hardly knew the name.⁴⁵

And what of Reagan, now running for reelection? The president had become a peace candidate, Kennan explained to Dobrynin, because the antinuclear campaign and the public reaction to The Day After, which eighty million people saw, had left him no choice. Fearing that Reagan would revert to his hard line after his probable reelection, Kennan had his own choice to make. He could oppose the president openly, remaining true to his convictions but forfeiting any possibility of influence in a second term. Or he could “lie low,” in the faint hope that the administration might seek his help in repairing the damage it had done: “I have, God knows, no admiration for Mr. Reagan, but if a certain amount of restraint, dissimulation, and self-abasement could be useful in sparing my children—and our civilization—the final catastrophe, there could be no question of what I should do.”⁴⁶

VI.

Reagan’s November victory was no surprise, therefore, but Kennan had trouble accounting for its landslide proportions. If public opinion had forced the president, against his will, to resume arms reduction talks, then why had he gotten so many votes for so little progress? Kennan shifted to the argument that the antinuclear movement had failed miserably and would have to pull itself together in some more effective form of resistance. Bill Bundy saw a draft “statement” to this effect but thought it too pessimistic for publication, and so Kennan adjusted his position yet again: after all, “new faces might appear [in Moscow] with whom, for one reason or another, people in our government might find it easier to talk.”⁴⁷

As if to confirm that possibility, Chernenko died on March 10, and Gorbachev immediately succeeded him. After making his third trip up 16th Street in as many years to sign the Soviet embassy’s “grief book,” Reagan offered to meet with the new leader, as he had unsuccessfully with Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Gorbachev, at fifty-four, was of a new generation, Kennan told The New York Times, despite having risen through the old system. With economic problems at home, unrest in Eastern Europe, war in Afghanistan, and rivalries with both China and the United States, he had every reason to reconsider existing policies.⁴⁸

Kennan had expected the Times to call, but not the State Department. He met there on April 2 with Under Secretary for Political Affairs Michael Armacost and his aides, who wanted to know what he thought of Gorbachev: “[T]his is the first time in many years that I have been consulted in this place…. I am mildly pleased to be given this attention.” But the “smooth remoteness” of the questioning left Kennan uneasy. It was too close to Dulles’s suggestion, after firing him in 1953, that he drop in from time to time when he had anything useful to say.

On April 11, however, Dulles’s successor dropped in on Kennan. Secretary of State Shultz, speaking at Princeton on international economic policy, went out of his way to seek Kennan’s advice, over lunch, on how to handle the new Kremlin leadership. Shultz’s cordiality so surprised Kennan that he could only dispense bromides: that these were insecure people who required reassurance and respect; that both sides should agree on what the talks were to be about; that it was unwise to raise irrelevant issues. For Shultz, this was nothing he didn’t know. For Kennan—himself an insecure person who required reassurance and respect—it was yet another reason to rethink his attitude toward the Reagan administration.⁴⁹

He found this very difficult to do. He was shocked, while in Oslo in August, to hear a recent Norwegian ambassador to Moscow defend Reagan’s firmness. “Was all diplomacy,” Kennan wondered, “some sort of dance in which we demonstrated our ‘resolve’… our unbending pursuit of our chosen course?” Where was the opposition? he asked himself in October: this “greatest escape artist since Houdini” had, with the help of the Democratic Party, “defeated us all. We are left powerless and unmanned.” These were diary lamentations, not to be taken too seriously, but Kennan displayed his distrust openly in a New York Times op-ed on November 3. The upcoming Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Geneva, he insisted, should focus on slowing the arms race. It would be “tragic in the uttermost degree if Washington failed to make the effort.”⁵⁰

On November 7, 1985, the president met at the White House with a group of academic experts on the Soviet Union. Kennan was not among them. “It sounds to me like Reagan invited people who tell him things he likes to hear,” an unnamed uninvited scholar grumbled to The Washington Post. By then, though, a senior presidential aide—also unnamed—had told the same newspaper that Kennan’s 1981 proposal for a 50 percent cut in nuclear arsenals was likely to come up at Geneva: “We have for a long time proposed a reduction of about half in land- and sea-based ballistic missiles.” This was indeed the first topic Reagan raised in his first substantive private conversation with Gorbachev, on November 19. When the Soviet leader hedged, citing concerns about the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan went further: why not get rid of nuclear weapons altogether, thereby removing any need for defenses against them?⁵¹

A few days later Kennan got an excited phone call from Congressman John F. Seiberling, an Ohio Democrat active in the peace movement. He had sent the White House, before the summit, a copy of the Einstein Prize address. Now Reagan and Gorbachev, in principle, had endorsed its chief recommendation. But Kennan was not prepared, yet, to accept the suggestion that he had, in any way, influenced the president, or even that the two had reached the same conclusions independently. “Mr. Reagan does not object to a certain amount of window-dressing in the field of academic, scientific, and personal exchanges,” he acknowledged in December. But “behind it—in the fields that really count—stands a stone wall he has no intentions of dismantling.”⁵²

“I have no cheerful thoughts to offer as you leave this country,” Kennan wrote Dobrynin in March 1986. His long Washington ambassadorship was coming to an end, and although “the future is full of surprises—sometimes even pleasant ones,” Reagan, Kennan was sure, would not provide them. He saw the president at times as a sinister political wizard, at others as an amiable actor speaking lines sinister writers had prepared for him. Whatever he was, Reagan would never seek nuclear arms reduction. Thanks to him, “we love these apocalyptic devices; we have taken them to our hearts; and we would not give them up if the Russians had none at all.”⁵³

At the Reykjavik summit in October, however, Reagan and Gorbachev did agree to remove all intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. They also endorsed the concept of a 50 percent cut in intercontinental-range missiles, and they even discussed the possibility of eliminating all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. Only the president’s unwillingness to dismantle the Strategic Defense Initiative brought the negotiations to an angry halt, but as Gorbachev was quick to acknowledge, Reykjavik had “created a qualitatively new situation. And nobody is now in a position to act the way he was able to act before.”⁵⁴

The New York Times ran Gorbachev’s statement on the morning of October 15. Kennan read it, set aside another attack on Reagan—“a deeply prejudiced, ill-informed, and stubborn man, not above the most shameless demagoguery”—and after talking with McGeorge Bundy agreed that “we should try to be helpful and not just critical.” He could not resist inflicting on Annelise, however, what he would like to have said to Gorbachev:

The problem was not just Reagan. Other powerful “elements” in American society felt the need for an inhuman enemy “as a foil for what they like to persuade themselves is their own exceptional virtue.” Through no fault of his own, Gorbachev had been cast in that role.⁵⁵

Fortunately, this communication went no further than Kennan’s diary and his wife’s seasoned discretion. For it sounded embarrassingly close to a dispatch, now published, that Kennan had sent from Moscow forty years earlier. “Some of us here,” he had written the State Department then, had been trying to guess what the United States would have to do if it wished to win Stalin’s trust. The list included unconditional surrender, complete disarmament, a transfer of power to the Communist Party, and even then “Moscow would smell a trap.” Now, Kennan seemed to be saying, Gorbachev in his dealings with Reagan was facing an American Stalin.⁵⁶

VII.

“Mr. Kennan,” Gorbachev said to him, in an actual conversation that took place in Washington on December 8, 1987: “We in our country believe that a man may be a friend of another country and remain, at the same time, a loyal and devoted citizen of his own; and that is the way we view you.” The tribute came at a Soviet embassy reception on the occasion of Gorbachev’s first trip to the United States. “I was just standing on the fringes,” George recalled, until Annelise took charge: “For goodness sake, go up and greet people.” So he pushed his way past Kissinger, McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and John Kenneth Galbraith, as well as less familiar luminaries—Billy Graham, Paul Newman, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Robert De Niro, and John Denver. Maybe, as Kennan approached Gorbachev, somebody whispered his name. Maybe they didn’t need to. However it happened, he “recognized me, opened his arms, and embraced me.” It was not what Kennan expected from the first successor to Stalin he had ever met.

Kennan had not expected either, though, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which Reagan and Gorbachev had just signed at the White House. It was the “zero option” brought to fruition: the first abolition, by mutual consent, of an entire category of the “apocalyptic devices” Kennan so greatly feared. The day was full of surprises. Seated at Kennan’s table while Gorbachev spoke was “a lady of most striking appearance, who chain-smoked Danish cigars and appeared to be rather bored with the whole performance…. I was later told that I should have recognized her—as the widow of a famous rock star.” His name, strangely, was something like “Lenin.” Gorbachev’s “extraordinarily gracious and tactful statement,” Kennan concluded, had brought a fitting end to his long involvement in Soviet affairs: “If you cannot have this sort of recognition from your own government…, it is nice to have it at least from the one-time adversary.”

How, though, had Kennan’s idea—that nuclear weapons should not be just “controlled” but reduced or even eliminated—taken hold in Reagan’s administration? Perhaps it had to do with simplicity, Kennan suggested, when asked this question a few days after meeting Gorbachev. Stalin had known that “complicated things never wash in high politics.” Reagan knew that too. He had wanted “some simple formula,” and the Einstein Prize proposal provided it. “[T]he things that are done by great statesmen publicly have to be quite simple.”⁵⁷

As the comparison suggested, the “greatness” of which Kennan spoke was not meant as a compliment. Reagan’s policies, Kennan had predicted at the beginning of 1987, were likely “to preclude the pursuit of any sensible policy towards [the Soviet Union] for years to come.” When the president demanded, in June in Berlin, that Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” Kennan, speaking two weeks later within sight of it, deplored “confrontational tactics.” The time was “plainly not ripe,” the onetime architect of “disengagement” now maintained, for German reunification, or for any shift in existing military alliances. “The approach of Mr. Gorbachev depresses me profoundly,” Kennan had written before the December summit in Washington. “I cannot understand why he consented to come.”⁵⁸

Joe Alsop, now dying of cancer, hosted a dinner for some old friends just prior to Gorbachev’s arrival. Kennan was startled to find everyone there more optimistic than he was. Might something more come out of the summit than the “zero option” treaty, which Reagan had obviously proposed in the belief that the Soviets would never accept it? Had Gorbachev done so out of weakness? Or perhaps out of cleverness? “There is nothing that so upsets the NATO commanders, Mr. Reagan among them, than a sudden and unexpected consent to their more outrageous demands.” But Kennan had been demanding the removal of nuclear missiles from Europe for decades, and now he was upset that it was about to happen. His attitude itself bordered on the outrageous: how could he have loved John F. Kennedy, who repeatedly rejected his advice, and loathed Ronald Reagan, whose actions in this and other respects were consistent with it?⁵⁹

Gorbachev’s tribute to Kennan suggests one answer, for Reagan never offered one. There are no references to Kennan in any of Reagan’s prepresidential radio broadcasts, in his speeches and press conferences as president, or in his voluminous White House diaries, which he kept more regularly, if less introspectively, than Kennan did his. Recognition was important to Kennan, whose vanity equaled his self-doubt. Kennedy’s cultivation of Kennan softened the disappointments he inflicted. Reagan’s failure to do so kept Kennan from seeing that his own vindication was taking place.

But even if the president had tried, he might not have succeeded, for he embodied what Kennan deplored about America. Reagan’s roots lay in movies, television, and advertising. His political home was the Republican Party’s right wing, where McCarthy had once resided. Reagan viewed the world through dangerous simplicities, not realist subtleties. He was not the first California president—Hoover and Nixon had preceded him—but he was the first happy one. With Kennan distrusting both happiness and California, he probably would have distrusted Reagan, even if the president had tried to win his trust. Shultz and Matlock did try but, perhaps sensing the pitfalls, did not persist. Nitze, another possible intermediary, did not even bother. Kennan’s complaints about Reagan, he wrote at one point, were “entirely a red herring,” followed by “a lot of drivel.”⁶⁰

Reagan, for his part, had little need of Kennan. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was an instinctive grand strategist, fully capable of operating without policy planners. He saw more clearly than his advisers the sequences of actions, together with the coalitions of constituencies, necessary to get him where he wanted to go. He refused to let complications obscure destinations, or to make conventional wisdom a compass. And he understood that, in order to lead, he could never despair. Kennan saw destinations clearly enough, and he certainly defied orthodoxies. But he was bad at sequencing: as he himself admitted, he too often did the right things at the wrong times. He tended more often to shatter than to solidify coalitions. And he despaired constantly, whatever he was doing. So Kennan turned himself into a complication, leaving it to Reagan to bring his strategy to its successful conclusion.⁶¹

Eventually, grudgingly, and a bit wistfully, Kennan came to see this. When asked, in 1996, who had ended the Cold War, he predictably named Gorbachev. But then he added, watching carefully to see whether his interviewer, who came close, would fall off his chair: “also Ronald Reagan, who in his own inimitable way, probably not even being quite aware of what he was really doing, did what few other people would have been able to do in breaking this log jam.”⁶²

VIII.

When President George H. W. Bush took office in January 1989, it was not yet clear that the Cold War was over. Gorbachev, speaking at the United Nations the previous month, had announced a unilateral withdrawal of half a million Soviet troops from Central and Eastern Europe, but Bush nonetheless ordered a policy review, implying that Reagan had been too trustful. Kennan was glad to have “new and more intelligent people” at the White House. He worried, though, about loss of momentum in responding to Gorbachev and so resolved, by going public again, to make the case for regaining it. “If I don’t say something now, and the new people go the wrong way, I will never know whether something I could have said and didn’t would make a difference.”

An avid fan of the Public Broadcasting System’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Kennan made himself available for interviews on it. He regretted, in The New York Times Magazine, the “reluctant, embarrassed, and occasionally even surly” American reactions to Gorbachev’s concessions. As it had done three and a half decades earlier, The Atlantic again put him on its cover, this time to publicize Sketches from a Life, a forthcoming book of selections Kennan had made from his diaries. And he agreed to testify, on April 4, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “I dare not be optimistic…. I don’t think I do so well anyway, under this sort of questioning. But here we go.”⁶³

“Grandeur on Capitol Hill? Yes, it sometimes happens,” an enthralled Mary McGrory assured her readers in The Washington Post. “Kennan is 85. His back is as straight as a young man’s, his jaw as chiseled.” He spoke “with such lucidity, learning, and large-mindedness that the senators did not want to let him go.” Gorbachev, he told them repeatedly, had ended the Russian revolutionary experiment that had begun in 1917, with the result that the Soviet Union was now becoming a normal state. When Kennan did finish, after two and a half hours, everyone in the room—even the committee’s stenographer—rose in an unprecedented standing ovation. The sense seemed to be, journalist Peter Jenkins wrote, that “[i]f anyone is entitled to call off the Cold War, it is George Kennan, the man who invented the Western strategy for winning it.”⁶⁴

On May 13 President Bush went to Texas A&M University to announce the results of his policy review. He began by praising the “wise men” who “crafted the strategy of containment,” among them Marshall, Acheson, and Kennan. Because they had shown the way, the United States could now move “beyond containment” toward the Soviet Union’s full integration into the community of nations. One source for the phrase, White House staffers revealed to columnist William Safire in “passionate anonymity,” was the National Security Council’s young Soviet specialist, Condoleezza Rice—the future secretary of state had recently met Kennan at a conference of Soviet and American Cold War historians. The slogan would serve as Mount Kilimanjaro, another Bush adviser explained, “something you can see in the distance as a goal.”⁶⁵

While in Kristiansand at the end of June, Kennan got the word that the president wished to confer upon him, in Washington the following week, the Medal of Freedom. “I am somewhat bewildered by this development,” he wrote in his diary. Bush had indeed spoken favorably of him, as had others in recent months. But why this gesture on behalf of someone “whose views on a number of important subjects are known to be so little in accord with those that he represents?” Perhaps it was a consolation prize, “given in recognition not of my success but of my failure.” Without the failure, “it would never have been accorded.”⁶⁶

The ceremony took place at the White House on July 6. The other honorees were retired Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, an early critic of Joe McCarthy; General James Doolittle, aviation pioneer and war hero; former Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon; and the late television comedienne Lucille Ball, for whose reruns CBS had bumped Kennan’s 1966 congressional testimony on the Vietnam War. Once again Bush spoke not of failure but of “the successful strategy of containment which George Kennan did so much to develop.” Responses were not expected, but Kennan could not help composing one silently, “[t]he usual disclaimers of merit seem[ing] no less invidious, in their obvious hypocrisy, than the more blatant evidences of self-satisfaction.” It followed the example of Adlai Stevenson, who after hearing a comparably lengthy list of his many virtues, had assumed a noble pose and announced: “Right on target.”⁶⁷

By the time Kennan got his medal, the Hungarians had given Imre Nagy, the reluctant and subsequently executed leader of the 1956 rebellion, a belated state funeral; meanwhile they were tearing down the barbed wire along the Austrian border that had been their stretch of the Iron Curtain. In Poland, restrictions on Solidarity had been lifted, and its candidates had swept the first free postwar parliamentary elections. In the Soviet Union, Gorbachev had allowed contested candidacies for the Congress of People’s Deputies and then television coverage of unconstrained debates within it. Antiauthoritarian protests had even reached Beijing, where the Chinese government, at Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3–4, forcibly suppressed them. But what struck Kennan, after returning to Kristiansand, was not “how much I read of the news from the outside world but how little of it…. I see nothing hopeful in any of it.”

That was because none of these developments, in his view, diminished the nuclear danger—instability in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union might even be increasing it. There was nothing more Kennan could do about this: “My own efforts to save civilization should be considered as substantially completed.” He had another less cosmic grievance against all of this current history, which was that it kept him from doing earlier history. His second volume on the Franco-Russian alliance had appeared in 1984, but had only reached 1894. He would need to finish a third if he was going to connect his years of research to the outbreak of World War I, and at his age there could not be much more time left. It was a “publish before perishing” obligation, compounded by the fact that despite being “retired” from the Institute for Advanced Study for the past fifteen years, he still had an office there and was expected to make good use of it. But he should try to follow the news, “if only in order not to become entirely a bore to one’s children.”⁶⁸

Kennan was in Princeton on November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall came down. He had cleared his calendar that week for the writing of history, and “[p]recariously, almost desperately, I continued the struggle.” Elizabeth Stenard, his current secretary, heroically fended off phone calls, but it was clear from their number and from the distinction of some of the callers that the battle was lost: there would be no third volume. “Put the books away,” Kennan told himself. “Reconcile yourself to the inevitable…. [Y]ou are never again, in the short remainder of your life, to be permitted to do anything significant.” So he dashed off a warning for The Washington Post that it was far too soon to be considering German reunification, and a few evenings later went for a long lonely walk.

He saw it as a metaphor for his future: he would become a mobile movie camera, recording impressions on this or that, for whoever wanted them. There would still be choices to make, but only among insignificances. He hoped biographers would see him “as one who, having indeed had the aptitude for it, had tried valiantly to live as a scholar, only to be prevented in the end from doing so.” Now, though, he should get home to watch MacNeil/Lehrer, “for one has to keep up, you know.”⁶⁹

IX.

It was good that he did, because Kennan joined several other former ambassadors in the Oval Office two days later to brief the president, Vice President Dan Quayle, and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft on the implications of what had happened. Kennan had come to like Bush but regarded him as “not independently thoughtful.” He did better adjusting to the views of others “in whom he sensed political influence and authority.” Kennan had no sense that he fell into that category: nothing he had said or written, he believed, had made any impression on the president’s mind. On his own mind, Kennan acknowledged sheepishly early in December, was—tennis. He had “grandly wasted” a weekend watching Becker, Edberg, and McEnroe play, “while the Communist domination of Eastern and parts of Central Europe was going up in flames.”

He could fairly say that he had seen it coming: “I was trying to tell the government, as early as the late 1940s and early 1950s, that Russian Communism as an ideology had entirely lost its hold on the Soviet people.” Years before Gorbachev, he had been arguing “that the structure of Soviet authority in Eastern Europe was seriously undermined, and would, if challenged, prove unable to stand up against any pressure.” But he could not have foreseen when the collapse would come, and now it was happening too quickly. None of the “excited peoples” being liberated had yet learned, as the Finns had long ago, that “the only safe way to establish their true independence is to show a decent respect for Soviet security interests.” If they failed to do that, they would destroy Gorbachev, who had given them their freedom.⁷⁰

Kennan saw him briefly in another receiving line, this time at a White House state dinner, on May 31, 1990. Standing next to the president, the Soviet leader was again gracious, praising a recent Kennan statement with such warmth that he, overwhelmed, “failed to notice Mesdames Bush and Gorbachev, …and had to be yanked back by Annelise to greet them.” Apart from his own faux pas, Kennan thought the event well managed, but he could not help worrying about the issues Bush and Gorbachev would have to discuss the next day.⁷¹

The most important was German reunification. Kennan had opposed it in 1945, but by 1949 had come to favor it, on the grounds that the Germans would not indefinitely accept the division of their country. Because the Soviet Union would never agree to the inclusion of a single Germany within NATO, however, the price of reunification would have to be neutralization. Those had been the premises of Program A, which Kennan had proposed while running the Policy Planning Staff, and he had controversially made them public in the Reith lectures. Now, though, President Bush and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl were insisting that the unified German state—unavoidable now without the Berlin Wall—remain within NATO. With the Warsaw Pact crumbling and his own government facing secession threats from its non-Russian nationalities, Gorbachev no choice but to agree.⁷²

The two Germanies became one on October 3, 1990, and the Kennans were in Berlin to witness the event: “We joined the tens of thousands of people shuffling along in two great streams, in opposite directions, on Unter den Linden.” George took no pleasure in what he saw, not just because his aging legs made it difficult to keep up. For German reunification had come about, not from anyone’s planning, but as a consequence of the spontaneous actions of thousands of young East Germans, motivated “by the hope of getting better jobs, making more money, and bathing in the fleshpots of the West.” Of course everyone cheered, but “was this, over the long term, what we really wanted?”⁷³

HAVING ENCOUNTERED IT AT BIRTH, GEORGE KENNAN HAD MORE time than most people do to think about death. As he got older, the occasions—often dreams—became more frequent. One of these, in 1979, had him laid out in a hilltop temple, surrounded by mourners who believed him to be dying. Feeling fine, he was tempted to get up and walk away, but that would have disappointed his admirers. So he reconciled himself to his fate, except for one complication: “I needed to piddle.” A pause in the proceedings allowed him to perform this act without anyone noticing, after which he returned to his bier, surrounded now by scrolls containing hundreds of written tributes. How would he ever respond to them all? Why, with Connie Goodman’s help, of course, and so he cheerfully entered the afterlife, assured that the present would continue to provide secretarial assistance.¹

He had long known, or thought he knew, the day on which he would die. It would be May 9, 1983, at which point he would have lived precisely seventy-nine years, two months, and twenty-three days. That was how old the first George Kennan had been when he died in 1924. Had both not been born on February 16, in 1845 and 1904? Had their lives not corresponded in too many ways for coincidence to explain? The fateful day, however, passed uneventfully: Kennan spent it in his Institute office preparing a speech, receiving visitors, and reading a set of conference papers by historians Michael Howard (“excellent”), Adam Ulam (“good in many ways”), and John Gaddis (no comment). That evening, at home with his family, there was “much animation”—although not, presumably, because he had alerted them to the significance of the day.²

Having survived it, he could see that what lay ahead was a kind of petrification: Kennan the public intellectual would become Kennan the public monument. The process would resemble death, because while people on pedestals tend to be respected, even venerated, they’re also beyond being listened to, or argued with—or invited to share lunch. He was eating alone regularly now, he noticed, in the Institute for Advanced Study cafeteria. Younger colleagues vigorously debated this or that at surrounding tables, but the great man was left to himself. None was any more inclined to intrude upon his privacy than Kennan had been upon Einstein’s, decades earlier: “I am caught, like a fly in the spider web, in the golden filigrees of my wretched image; and there is no use flapping the wings too violently—it will not help.”³

In Washington one evening a few months after the day his death did not occur, Kennan again dined alone and walked back to DACOR House, the F Street lodging for retired diplomats, accompanied only by a breeze, which swept indifferently over the White House and “its insignificant occupant.” He had spent the day “weak, shaky, unstrung, devoid of composure, the voice high, hoarse, and cracking.” Never had he played his part less well. “I despise the George Kennan that appears before other people—despise him not for being what he is, but for not appearing to be what he ought to appear to be. They should hire an actor in my place.”⁴

They could not for his eightieth birthday party, held in Princeton a day late, on February 17, 1984. Nitze’s was the most memorable toast: Kennan had long been for him “a teacher and an example,” although “George has, no doubt, often doubted the aptness of his pupil.” Kennan graciously declined the opportunity to agree. Dick Ullman was not alone, among those present, in wondering how two men who had disagreed about so much over so many years could retain such respect for one another: “This was really the Establishment rallying around, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”⁵

As on his seventieth birthday, Kennan read a poem—not his own, this time, but his translation of one by Hermann Hesse. It portrayed a man who had returned from a long trip, found a stack of mail from admirers waiting, and burned the lot in the fireplace. Noting furrowed brows, Kennan explained that only a saint or a mystic could, from within, keep the flame of life fluttering. For anyone else, this required “the respect, affection, support, forbearance, and even forgiveness of those around him.” Whose letters, unanswered, had just gone up in smoke. The poem meant something to him, Kennan wrote, a bit defensively, in his diary. “Whether to anyone else, I could not tell.”⁶

Something else had happened on his and the first George Kennan’s real birthday, though, that meant much more. For on February 16, 1984, the second Kennan’s youngest daughter, Wendy, now the wife of a Swiss businessman, Claude Pfaeffli, gave birth to a son. “There was no way,” his uncle Christopher recalled, “that that kid was not going to be named George Kennan Pfaeffli.” And so, three weeks later in Geneva, George Frost Kennan held his own and his namesake’s namesake in his arms and gave him a silent blessing, “persuaded, almost superstitiously, that his preoccupations will some day have some strange connection with my own.”⁷

I.

Kennan’s preoccupation now was to find a life within the limits imposed by an aging body and an enhanced reputation. It would have to be “unrelated to this epoch” and yet, “somehow or other, worthwhile.” He would become a disembodied spirit, like the one haunting the gloomy great rooms of Spaso House in 1952. But he was thinking these thoughts in 1983, in Paris, in the spring. He was entering the Métro, and a train was approaching. He quickened his steps. In this new life of being old, though, why hurry? Then, distracted by an alluring female figure,

It could at least sigh, as the aged Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had once done: “Ah, to be seventy again!”⁸

He could offer his country little, Kennan believed, because those who ran it would not listen. He was living in a country—indeed a civilization—that was well on its way to catastrophe. His own and Annelise’s physical decline lay ahead, as did anguish for their children, all of whom had faced, or were likely to face, disappointments greater than anything their parents had experienced. At the same time, his name evoked respect among thousands of people. He must not let his pessimism drive them to despair. He disliked the term “role model,” but he had become one. So what to do?

Perhaps attempt to look “like what people believe me to be—to encourage them in the illusion that there really is such a person—and, by doing this, to try to add, just a little bit, to their hope and strength and confidence in life.” Results were irrelevant, for these might be “burned in the rubble of a nuclear war.” The important thing was to hold up his end of his reputation, whatever the consequences or the costs: “Duty, then, as a dedication—as a means of redemption in the final years—yes. But no hope; no fear; and, to the extent [that] the line is firmly and consistently pursued, no apologies.”⁹

That was, of course, easier to write than to accomplish. Demands on his time were as great as ever: “Come here; come there; speak here; write these; attend this conference; receive this visitor.” Under no circumstances sit quietly, or read a book, or “try to learn something.” Kennan’s body, however, was approaching the point at which reading was one of the few things it would permit. “I feel like hell,” he complained, in one of hundreds of such diary entries. “How hard it is to pace one’s self at this age. One is too old to try to win, too young to give up.”¹⁰

His illnesses had long since earned him the right to hypochondria: appendicitis and scarlet fever in his youth, amoebic dysentery followed by several hospital-strength bouts with ulcers as a young man, a kidney stone that accompanied him through much of his later life, periodic herpes zoster outbreaks, prostate difficulties, jaundice, arthritis, and beginning in his mid-eighties, debilitating heart irregularities. Treatments often provoked new problems. Drug reactions were frequent; lithotripsy broke up the kidney stone but at the cost of uremic poisoning in 1984, and by 1992 Kennan’s heart problems had become serious enough to require a pacemaker. His relationship with it was not amicable: “Mine is a body, I suspect, that should be dead; but the pacemaker won’t allow it to be.”¹¹

He was “a tough old bird,” though, Annelise rightly observed. It upset George when, at seventy-eight, protesting knees forced him to improvise a walking stick at the farm. He was still, in his eighties, riding a one-speed bicycle around Princeton, pushing it up hills when he came to them. He was cutting his own firewood in the Institute’s forest, hauling it to the Hodge Road house, and stashing it in a woodshed he had recently built. He remained agile on and around his Norwegian sailboat, and he took literally Goethe’s admonition that, when beset by old age, one should “take a spade and dig.” He tested poet, proposition, and pacemaker one day in Kristiansand by trying, at eighty-eight, to uproot yet another dead tree. For the first time in many such excavations, the tree won: “this, I clearly understand, is the beginning of my real and final old age.”¹²

Kennan hated how he now looked. He hardly recognized “this strange, tall, scrawny-necked apparition of an old man, clutching the marble of the lectern, swaying back and forth like a bush in the wind, bending down occasionally to peer through his glasses at the manuscript below,” he wrote, after seeing himself on television in 1982. He must never again appear before any group larger than could “grace a drawing-room.” But he continued to do so because duty demanded it. And in the eyes of others—as in his 1989 triumph before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—he conveyed an antique gravity almost extinct in the modern age. A new generation had suddenly discovered his existence, Kennan concluded. That accounted for their enthusiasm. There was, after all, “not much competition.”¹³

II.

Bill Clinton was as eager to align his administration with Kennan’s image—if not his advice—as George H. W. Bush had been. Clinton had first encountered Kennan as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1969, where he attended a talk that turned out to be an attack on shaggy students. Being one at the time, the future president was unimpressed. But in the White House one day in 1994, Clinton asked his deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott—his housemate and fellow Oxonian years before—why they didn’t have a concept as succinct as “containment.” Talbott, who had known Kennan since Oxford and still regularly consulted him, undertook to solicit suggestions from the source.

The opportunity arose at an October dinner in Kennan’s honor given by the secretary of state, Warren Christopher. It had been forty-one years, Kennan could not help but recall, since John Foster Dulles had arranged his ignominious departure from the building in which he was now being feted. But when Christopher mentioned that he and Talbott had been trying to package post–Cold War policy in a single phrase, Kennan said they shouldn’t. “Containment” had been a misleading oversimplification; strategy could not be made to fit a “bumper sticker.” The president laughed when Talbott told him what had happened: “that’s why Kennan’s a great diplomat and scholar but not a politician.”¹⁴

Clinton had another honor in mind for Kennan, however, which had to do with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Would Kennan accompany him to the ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery and then—taking advantage of the fact that the Soviet Union had declared the war over a day later than its allies in 1945—fly with him to Moscow to celebrate the event there? Moved by the invitation, Kennan wanted to accept: “I was, after all, the senior American official present in Moscow on that memorable day.” He would welcome returning “as an honored and friendly guest,” not as “the dangerous enemy that I was always supposed to be.”

Annelise was willing as long as she could go too. George’s family thought it a fine idea, as did his doctors, who could find nothing wrong with him “except for the failing heart and arthritic knees.” But every morning, when he got up, his body was telling him: “Never, never.” He would be a burden to others, while making “a pathetic exhibit of myself.” Clinton wanted him, he suspected, as a portable public monument. And he was not quite ready to give up being a public intellectual.¹⁵

The Clinton administration, since 1993, had been exploring the idea of expanding NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, against the wishes of the Russians. Kennan wondered why the alliance should even survive the end of the Cold War, much less grow. He kept his doubts to himself, though, until October 1996, when he heard Talbott make the case for expansion in a talk at Columbia’s Harriman Institute. Kennan spoke first at the dinner that followed, denouncing the idea as a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” With one exception, everyone else present agreed with him.

It was a “cold shower,” Talbott remembered in his memoir, published six years later. In his diary five days later, Kennan expressed surprise that what he said had made “such a fuss,” but he no longer worried “about the opinions of others concerning my conduct.” Then in February 1997 he went public. Expanding NATO, he wrote in The New York Times, would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” The op-ed was on Clinton’s desk the next morning. “Why isn’t Kennan right?” he asked Talbott. “Isn’t he a kind of guru of yours going back to when we were at Oxford?” He was, Talbott acknowledged, but Kennan had opposed NATO since its creation. The Russians would go along with expansion, whatever he thought. “Just checking, Strobe,” Clinton chuckled. “Just checking.”¹⁶

For Kennan, the episode evoked Shakespeare’s dying John of Gaunt: “Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain, / For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain…. Though Richard my life’s counsel would not hear, / My death’s sad tale may yet undeaf his ear.” Not very likely, though, Kennan had to admit. His words would have no more effect on Clinton and his advisers than had Gaunt’s on “the foolish Richard II.”¹⁷

III.

He was, Kennan had written a few years earlier, “the most elaborately-honored non-political and non-governmental person in the country, yet totally without influence where it counts.”¹⁸ What else could a disembodied spirit approaching his tenth decade expect, though, even if yearnings for lost causes did persist? Kennan had already disengaged from the writing of history—at least diplomatic history—so detachment from the making of history did not really surprise him, however much it frustrated him. Now, though, he faced a new problem, which was that history was attaching itself to him: he had lived long enough to become its subject. Adjusting to that process was not easy.

He accelerated it, without foreseeing the consequences, by opening his papers early. Most donors prohibit access while they are alive, but as Kennan finished each volume of his memoirs, he transferred the materials he had used to Princeton University, in the hope that “mature” scholars might also find them useful. He failed to review the files carefully, though; there was confusion about which portions were to be opened when; and determining “maturity” proved to be impractical. So rather than close the collection altogether, Kennan resigned himself to living uncomfortably alongside it—the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library was only about a mile from his house—without control over who would go through his papers, what they would find, or how they might employ it. All he did was to forbid photocopying, by then a standard archival procedure. Kennan researchers took notes laboriously in longhand or on portable typewriters, therefore, while envying those working nearby on the duplicatable dead.¹⁹

When the dissertations, articles, and eventually books began to appear, their authors tended to be young. They were the most in need of fresh topics, and they had the stamina to survive the photocopying ban. Several, however, were also of the “student left” generation Kennan had so vociferously condemned. They generally respected, even admired him: he had, after all, opposed the Vietnam War. But their scholarship reflected revisionist historiography of the origins of the Cold War, of which Kennan strongly disapproved. Nor did they hesitate to highlight documents from his papers that he now found embarrassing. Some, like his 1938 “Prerequisites” essay, he had simply forgotten. Others he had deliberately passed over in his memoirs. Still others succumbed to political correctness: words unexceptional when written could shock when published half a century later.

Kennan had always lived alongside his own history: self-scrutiny came naturally, even compulsively, to him. Scrutiny by others, however—especially by the youth of the 1960s—was something else again. That became evident in 1976 when C. Ben Wright, a recent University of Wisconsin Ph.D., pointed out in a Slavic Review article that Kennan’s original concept of “containment” had incorporated more of a military component than he had acknowledged in his memoirs. Wright’s dissertation had been the first serious biography of Kennan, based not just on his papers but on careful interviews with contemporaries, even his sister Jeanette. Now, though, Kennan was furious. “I stand, as I see, exposed,” he wrote in a rejoinder the journal published. “Mr. Wright has stripped me of my own pretenses and revealed me as the disguised militarist he considers me to be.” The attack was so devastating that Wright abandoned history altogether, and Kennan gained the reputation of devouring young scholars at dinner.²⁰

It was not a sustainable situation. Kennan couldn’t respond in print to every objectionable thing historians might write. But neither could he guide each one individually through his archives, providing context and commentary along the way: there were too many, and they would have insisted, entirely properly, on reaching their own conclusions. So Kennan’s solution, in the end, was to authorize a biographer whose biography he would never read.

He had mostly approved of my Strategies of Containment, an analytical study based partly on the Kennan papers that appeared (at the cost of a worn-out portable typewriter) late in 1981. I wanted to continue working on Kennan but had no desire to repeat Wright’s experience. Might there be the possibility, I gingerly asked Kennan, of a full biography, prepared with his cooperation and with access to all of his papers (including photocopying privileges), on the understanding that it would not appear for another ten to fifteen years? Kennan, seventy-eight at the time, replied—wholly implausibly—that he had never thought about a biography but would now do so. Delicate negotiations followed, in which neither he nor I used the term “posthumous,” even though we both had it in mind. For me, the advantage would be access with independence. For Kennan, it was that designating one biographer would deter others. How did he know that I would treat him fairly? He didn’t. We hardly knew each other. But Kennan did believe strongly in placing faith above reason.²¹

Despite the arrangement, the other biographers did not back off. Kennan at first found this irritating. “I ought really to be dead,” he grumbled about a particularly persistent one, “it would all then be much easier.” He could not resist reading what they wrote, though, and some of it he even liked. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’s The Wise Men (1986), a collective biography of himself, Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Lovett, and McCloy, was “a caricature gleaned from hasty oral interviews” but “not devoid of a certain amount of truth.” Although relentlessly critical, Anders Stephanson’s Kennan and the Art of American Foreign Policy (1989) was “truly a great work,” addressed “to a subject unworthy of so impressive an effort.” Wilson D. Miscamble’s careful study of the Policy Planning Staff years, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950 (1992), left its subject sobered “by the number and extent of my failures”; nonetheless “I would rate it as the best thing that has been written about me in published book form.”²²

He did, however, despise inaccuracy. A prominent offender was Nitze, whose brief essay on Kennan in his 1993 book, Tension Between Opposites, contained so many errors “that I suspect Paul, although we view each other as friends, really knows very little about me.” Even worse were attempts to impose the present upon the past. He was appalled to find himself criticized for publishing diary entries from the late 1930s and early 1940s that had not anticipated the Holocaust. Efforts to link his CIA involvement with the lenient treatment of German war criminals provoked lengthy, if unpublished, rebuttals: “I never knew I had such enemies.” And when, in 1997, the Journal of American History ran an article entitled “‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” its ninety-three-year-old target wondered why previous scholarship had been so slow to discover his “true sexual and ‘binary’ nature,” all of it permeated, whether he knew it or not, “with concealed desires to violate, to rape, and thus to dominate. Of such terrible motives the purer and more innocent spirit of [the author] was happily unbesmirched.”²³

IV.

The youngest of the Kennan scholars impressed him most. Barton Gellman was a twenty-two-year-old Rhodes scholar in 1983 when Kennan got around to reading his Princeton senior thesis, completed the previous year under Dick Ullman’s supervision. Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power was an attempt, Gellman explained in the book the thesis quickly became, to “cut and paste” Kennan into coherence, a project for which “the man himself has never had any taste.” Yet shouldn’t a person given to displaying his thinking in “bits and pieces” provide a more complete picture?²⁴

Kennan had been asking himself the same question. He had always distrusted philosophical systems: they were too gray, he believed, to reflect the colors of life, much less to guide one through their complexities. But he feared having his ideas whisked into oblivion, “like a paper-handkerchief carried away by the wind from the deck of an ocean-liner.” His diaries, usually written late at night, tended to bury what was worth saving beneath long stretches of “sleep-dulled humdrum.” Unwilling to rely on some future editor’s excavations, he felt the need “to clarify, to organize, and to state my general philosophy, before it becomes too late to do so.”²⁵

Gellman showed him that it could be done, while convincing Kennan that he could do it better. “I don’t in the least mind the critical reflections,” he wrote the astonished young man. “I am grateful to you for having put forward such a brilliant effort to make sense out of my scattered and so often cryptic utterances, and congratulate you most heartily on the success of that formidable effort.” But Gellman had “cheerfully mingled” things said decades apart, Kennan admonished me, as though circumstances had not changed. He would not respond directly, but he would try “to set forth, more systematically than I have done in the past, my views, as of this stage of my life, on some of the questions he raised.”²⁶

Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy appeared in 1993, a rare example of a book inspired by a critic a fourth its author’s age. The title came from a passage in John Donne’s third Satyre, a Kennan favorite:

As political philosophy, the book contained little Kennan had not said elsewhere. There were predictable condemnations of advertising, automobiles, Congress, consumerism, domestic politics, environmental degradation, juvenile delinquency, nuclear weapons, pornography, television, and even demands for unconditional surrender in World War II. Kennan proposed yet another revival of the Policy Planning Staff, this time as a “Council of State,” a presidentially appointed body of senior notables like himself who, freed from the lures of personal gain or political ambition, would determine long-term national interests. If philosophy at all, these portions of Cragged Hill were a Platonic contemplation of ideal forms, not an Aristotelian adaptation to practicality.²⁷

But as personal philosophy, the book was something new: it was Kennan’s first full public profession of private faith. It began, unexpectedly, with sex, a characteristic shared with the “lowest and least attractive” of mammals and reptiles. In addition to progeny, sex produced great happiness, great art, and great trouble, for “people’s physical needs change even when their deeper affections do not.” The results included “jealousies, suspicions, conflicting loyalties, wounded pride, and tragic unhappiness.” That these were trouble, however, reflected a higher aspect of human nature, which was the soul, the capacity “to perceive and to hold in mind the distinctions between right and wrong.” How had only one species developed this?

Not by way of Original Sin, Kennan was sure: sex had preceded people, and some Primary Cause—neither benevolent nor malevolent but indifferent—had preceded both. Where, then, did the soul come from? Of that, Kennan was unsure, but of the soul’s existence, indeed its immortality, he had no doubt. For bodily needs alone could not explain love or self-sacrifice. Those qualities constituted, then, another Deity, neither omnipotent nor omniscient but sympathetic, from whence came the strength, in the face of adversity, to endure, if not to prevail.

Each person’s Deity was his own, but there were compelling examples to emulate. By far the greatest, for Kennan, was Christ, but not as the Son of a benevolent God: there was too much evil in the world for such a Father to exist. Kennan even suspected—he refrained from saying so in the book—that it was Christ who conceived God, rather than the other way around. If so, it didn’t matter: Kennan’s faith in Christ was unshaken.

Organized religion reinforced it but was not its source. Faith lay in an inner voice that promised help, but only to the extent that one helped one’s self. For Kennan, that was Christ, but it was also the voices of the great poets, playwrights, and novelists, who mingled their brilliance with responsibility for others. It was the voices of dead parents and departed friends, which Kennan still sometimes heard in his dreams. But it was also the voice of his own conscience, as he walked the tightrope between selfishness and selflessness, beset by “little demons” at every step of the way. One could not simply brush them away. One could, however, deny them the satisfaction of having their existence acknowledged.

Salvation lay in forgiveness, a theme Kennan developed more clearly in his diary than in his book. Why, other Christians might ask, could he not more easily accept his inadequacies? “Your God is supposed, by virtue of Christ’s intercession, to be a forgiving God. Confess your sins and rely on His forgiveness.”

And so, with John Donne, Kennan went about, and around, and up and down his hill, in an uneasy soul’s acknowledgment that it soon must rest, “for none can work in that night.”²⁸

V.

He dreamed again about death one night in 1995, this time horribly. His dread, though, came not from what afflicted or awaited him but from a vision of Annelise bidding him farewell outside a large dark Victorian house, entering it, putting on a black gown, and disappearing behind a closing door. She was a widow, she would be alone, and “I could not stand it.” Should he not rush up, ring the doorbell, and ask for reconsideration: “Why don’t we disregard all the circumstances of our lives that have led to this dénouement and start all over again?” But this, he knew, was not possible, and even if it had been, it might have frightened her more than the loneliness she now faced. So he had no choice but to wake up, “still shattered by what had happened, and desperate.”²⁹

To be sure, not all deaths were devastating. What everyone understood to be the last reunion of George and his siblings—Frances, Constance, Jeanette, and Kent—had taken place at the farm on a brilliant fall day in 1982. Frances, the oldest, thought it extraordinary that all were alive, even ambulatory: “Nobody had to be wheeled in!” But this final reunion was their first in six decades. They had long since ceased relying on each other to fend off loneliness, and so when they did occur—in 1984, 1991, 1994, and 2003, respectively—these deaths did not drive George, the last to survive, into the despair he feared Annelise would face when he was gone.³⁰

She did all she could to keep him going. After a protracted visit from a tedious friend, George made a point of acknowledging, in his diary, “the sweetness of my wife and of the loyalty with which she, still enjoying a relative robustness, looked after both of us tottering, shambling and tiresome old men.” She, in turn, made her own point by acknowledging his infirmities as little as possible, a habit that at times exasperated him but that balanced the fretting with which he filled his diary:

He practiced death there once, when Annelise wasn’t looking: “I simply collapsed on the stony path near the boathouse, lay on my back staring at the oak leaves silhouetted against a cloudy Norwegian sky, and thought to myself: this would not be a bad time and place to die. But Fate (which, as Donne wrote, God fashioned ‘but doth not controul’) decided otherwise.”³¹

So did George’s hyperactivity, which countered his hypochondria. His mostly handwritten diaries—carefully recording each ailment and its attendant indignities—were as voluminous and legible as ever. He published a new book of “reflections” in 1996, chiefly his lectures and articles since 1982. He was driving himself and Annelise over much of New England researching a long-planned history of the Kennan family: even she thought this to be too much. He was compulsively reading, or rereading, and taking notes: on Shakespeare, whose plays suggested experiences with women—some presumably painful—that had left him “with high respect” for them; on Saint Augustine, whose Confessions had taken up far too much of God’s time; on Macaulay, who had made English “the most felicitous” of all languages for expressing “the higher ranges of thought and feeling”; on Saint Paul, whom Kennan found to be, disconcertingly, a Dostoyevskian “extremist.” And he had wisely come to relish the great naval history novels of Patrick O’Brian.³²

Major birthdays, now major events, also encouraged survival: it would have been irresponsible to die before the festivities had taken place. The Council on Foreign Relations celebration of his ninetieth in New York in February 1994 left Kennan, he claimed, “not only overwhelmed but unable to think of any even appropriately adequate response.” In fact he spoke vigorously, regretting how much had been made of a certain talk on “containment” given there in 1947, cautioning against any comparable oversimplification of post–Cold War foreign policy. Shortly after returning to Princeton, he had a minor stroke and spent a few days in the hospital, but within a week of his release was rigging a sump pump in the basement and driving himself, alone, to the office.³³

The Kennans were still traveling frequently, if to familiar destinations: Kristiansand for part of the summer, but also now regularly the island community of North Haven, Maine; Hermann Hatzfeldt’s castle at Crottorf for Pour le Mérite meetings in the fall; Captiva Island in Florida for winter visits with the naturalists Bill and Laura Riley—George left behind, on one such occasion, a set of poems, addressed in stately formality to the resident birds. His research trips were over by the late 1990s, but their results appeared in his last book, An American Family: The Kennans; The First Three Generations, published when he was ninety-six. He had made his ancestors, one reviewer observed, into what he wanted them to be; but at that age, perhaps he had earned that right.³⁴

The pace could not continue. “What a doctor!” George wrote with relief, when his primary physician, Dr. Fong Wei, ordered him in the spring of 1998 to stay at home for a week, not answer the phone, and watch whatever animals visited the backyard. George “wasted the time most grandly” and was grateful for having been told to do so. But he was having trouble walking by the time his book came out in 2000, and Annelise, now ninety herself, was becoming frailer. Worst of all, his ancient Royal typewriter broke down one day that fall, “initiating a very similar breakdown in him who does the writing.” He continued the diary entry in a quavering hand, inscribing “the end is nearing.” It almost came out “the near is ending.” It made little difference: “the one, come to think of it, was no less true than the other.”³⁵

The summer of 2001 was the last George was able to spend in Norway. Reduced almost to immobility, he found a typewriter there that worked and so resumed his diary as his extended family came and went. “[C]rippledom,” however, did not lead “to productive brilliance of the mind,” for his thoughts would evaporate while waiting for his limbs to catch up. One of his final afternoons in Kristiansand was spent watching anxiously from the lawn as his young namesake, now seventeen, expertly windsurfed himself across the great sound and safely back. In Princeton that fall, George at last closed the Institute for Advanced Study office that Oppenheimer had given him half a century earlier. The Kennans’ seventieth wedding anniversary fell, unhappily, on September 11, 2001—happily, though, Christopher, Joan, and her husband Kevin Delany had arranged a congratulatory dinner with a few Princeton friends the previous weekend. George and Annelise spent the terrible day quietly at home.³⁶

I found him, a few months later, stretched out on a couch in his living room, his legs covered in a blanket, his hearing aids malfunctioning, his profile still strong from the side, but emaciated head-on. His mind, though, was undiminished: the conversation was a healthy mix of convictions firmly held and curiosity keenly expressed. Why did no one read Toynbee anymore? Because his books dealt with forces, not people: “You could spend your life reading Toynbee, but what would you have at the end of it?” Kennan did not find it necessary to say, as on several previous occasions, that his own life soon would be ending. He was beyond the need for denial, or reassurance.³⁷

VI.

The Kennans had live-in help now in the Hodge Road house. A Portuguese couple, Tony and Ana Mano, cooked and gradually took over other duties as well: Tony even began bringing ocean water from the New Jersey shore to bathe George’s arthritic knees. Betsy Barrett, who lived in the garage apartment, started as a housekeeper, became George’s secretary, and wound up as his nurse. Days became indistinguishable, apart from a brief stay in a Washington “assisted living” facility in the fall of 2002, while the Manos were away. The word got out, reporters got in touch, and Kennan granted his last interviews, condemning President George W. Bush’s plans to invade Iraq as well as the Democrats’ timidity in not opposing him more vigorously.³⁸

By the summer of 2003 Kennan could still read his correspondence but no longer reply: friends received messages, through Barrett, assuring them that silence did not mean negligence, or lack of regard. Meanwhile, preparations were under way for the grandest birthday of them all, George’s hundredth. Princeton University’s Firestone Library opened an exhibit on his life that fall, the centerpiece of which was every page of the “long telegram” displayed in a correspondingly long case. It was diplomacy’s Bayeux Tapestry.

There were three celebrations of the real birthday, in February 2004. One was for family on February 16, when George eased his way downstairs for dinner, blew out an unrecorded number of candles on his cake, and wound up making three speeches. A second, on the eighteenth, was at the Institute for Advanced Study, which George’s family, helpers, and Dr. Wei conspired to have him attend: it had been “a plot,” he muttered. The third was a full-scale “George F. Kennan Centennial Conference” at the university, with the major address given by the secretary of state, Colin Powell. He did so with such respect, George’s grandson Brandon Griggs commented on the way out, that one would never have guessed his grandfather’s detestation of the administration in which Powell served. This enormous event was too much for Kennan to attend, so the secretary of state came to see him afterward, in his own bedroom. Tony Mano had ordered him to stay alive for the great day, George commented, and that had gotten him through it.³⁹

He lived for another thirteen months, but with little life left. He could read newspapers and receive visitors, but his mind was fading. So was Annelise, whose decline seemed synchronous with his own. One of the last outsiders to see them together was George’s old friend the historian John Lukacs: “His head, resting on a pillow, now had a kind of skeletal beauty; he could speak only a little, forcing out a few words with increasing difficulty; near the foot of the bed she sat huddled in a wheelchair at a table, uttering a few sensible words, not many.” They still shared that bed, and one day in March 2005 Betsy Barrett heard George turn to Annelise and ask: “Are you content?” She didn’t hear or perhaps didn’t understand, but he said clearly: “I am content.”⁴⁰

VII.

George F. Kennan died peacefully of old age—he was 101—in his own bed, surrounded by his family, on the evening of March 17, 2005. Annelise followed, under similar circumstances, on August 7, 2008. His memorial service was held, a few weeks after his death, in the National Cathedral in Washington. Hers took place two days after she died, in Princeton’s Trinity Episcopal Church. Both were appropriate, but funerals only faintly suggest lives. His inspired countless obituaries; hers—as she would have thought fitting—very few. One of his best he composed himself when I asked him to do so, with no warning, one day in 1995:

Giving full recognition to the fact that no one fully understands himself, that no one can conceivably be fully objective about himself, I would like to tell you—I’m now quite old, most of my life lies behind me—how I view myself, and my usefulness, or lack of it, in this world. I realize the delicacy of my nervous structure. I don’t think I would have been well qualified for a very high office, especially not a political one. I see, in other words, certain of my weaknesses.

Somebody once said to me: “George, you are by nature really a teacher.” I think that there’s a lot to that. I have certain [other] things going for me. First of all, that I am independent, and have always kept my independence. I’ve always revolted against trying to say things as a member of a collective group, simply because it’s what the others said. I don’t belong to any organization where I feel that I have to say things they decide they want said. That is a relatively rare quality for anybody who writes a lot and speaks a lot.

I think I have certain insights, from time to time. They are not organized. I’ve never tried to put them in the strait-jacket of an intellectual discipline of any sort. But they could have been more useful to people than they have been. How much that’s my fault and how much theirs I don’t know. I leave that alone.

And finally, I credit myself with having been honest all my life. This is a very simple virtue, but outside of that I see all my faults. How much it’s going to mean, when looked back on, I have no idea. I hope that I’m right about these qualities. They exist on the surface of a great many which are no better than anybody else’s, and sometimes worse.⁴¹