sense. “All of this impels me to the thought that if I am ever to do any good in this work, . . . it must be outside the walls of this institution and not inside them.”61
IX.
For once, Kennan was keeping a Washington diary: it was the only time he did so for more than a few days while serving as Policy Planning Staff director. He began it in August 1949, shortly after bringing Nitze onto the staff. He knew, even then, that he would be leaving and seemed to think it important to record the reasons why. In addition to Kennan’s daily schedule, the diary documents the sterling-dollar crisis, his organizational disagreements with Webb, his growing sense of isolation over Western European integration, and hints at his future. It also shows, despite their differences, Kennan’s continuing respect and affection for Acheson, which the secretary of state fully reciprocated.
Acheson was grateful to Kennan for having rescued the British negotiations from the Anglophobic Snyder. They shared a dislike, soon to become a loathing, for Secretary of Defense Johnson. And they still enjoyed each other’s company: Acheson too had a farm—his was in Maryland—to which he invited the Kennans for an overnight visit on September 1. When, on the next morning, Joseph and Stewart Alsop reported that Kennan had drafted key paragraphs of a recent Truman speech on Anglo-American relations, Kennan feared that Acheson might suspect him of leaking that information to the two journalists. “Dear George, Don’t worry about,” Acheson reassured him. “Nobody can both know you and suspect you. This is life in a disorderly democracy.”62
Kennan and Acheson had the pleasure—if it could be called that—of hosting the notoriously prickly Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, at the State Department on October 13. A few days earlier Kennan had entrusted to his diary the undiplomatic lecture he would
With Acheson’s encouragement, Kennan was still maintaining a regular schedule of public speaking. In New York, on November 10, he addressed the Academy of Political Science on the subject of American history. He chose as his text Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’s Fourth of July address from 1821, which had proclaimed that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” It would become Kennan’s favorite quotation, and it reflected the shift in his thinking while on the Policy Planning Staff: the danger was now not that Americans would attempt too little internationally but that they would try to do too much. If that happened, Adams had warned, the United States could become “the dictatress of the world,” but no longer “the ruler of her own spirit.” Kennan was proud of this excursion into the past, but it got no publicity whatever. “You speak off-the-record,” he complained, “and worry for weeks about the resulting leaks. Speak publicly, and it is as secure as a safe. No one knows what you said.”64
On November 16 Kennan spent the day in Princeton. He was there to talk with Oppenheimer about an issue weighing heavily on them both: the recently announced news that the Soviet Union had successfully tested its first atomic bomb, and the still-secret possibility that the United States might respond by building a “super” bomb, a weapon far more powerful than the ones that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was time, though, that afternoon, to walk around the university. “The early dusk was already falling on town and campus. It was Princeton as I remembered it from the moments of my greatest loneliness as a student.”
A light was on in his old window in the house where he had rented a room as a freshman. “Perhaps some other student was now there, much like myself, in many ways,” and yet with the “subtle, undefinable differences” that distanced generations. The dormitory windows let light, voices, and radio sounds into the night air. The swimmers in the gymnasium were plowing dutifully through the water. “Far below, on the athletic fields, football teams were working out under flood lights, the bright uniforms of the tiny figures gleaming like armor.” All of them regarded the people like himself at times as nuisances, at best as “regrettable and temporary necessities.” In their minds, “we were already consigned to the ash-heap of history.” Kennan and his contemporaries, however, would not be pushed.
There is plenty of space where we stand—space to the point of loneliness and terror. And any who work themselves into our vicinity . . . will soon feel the protective covering of the generations falling ominously away from them and they will huddle together with us and with the curious ones of all times and ages, seeking warmth and company before the coldness and the endlessness and the silence that confront them.
Despite these intimations of mortality, Princeton still appealed. Oppenheimer and Kennan also discussed the possibility of his spending his leave from the State Department at the Institute for Advanced Study. And although Kennan declined when President Harold Dodds proposed a permanent university appointment, he did acknowledge that “I would like to live in Princeton and am thinking seriously of doing so.”65
For the moment, though, there was another preoccupation: Grace and Joan had a little brother. “The wonder is to be officially known as Christopher James Kennan,” George wrote Charlie James early in December, thus giving him “an opportunity to immortalize both our names.” For weeks prior to his arrival, however, he had been referred to as “pumpkin,” and “he honored this title by appearing in this world on Thanksgiving Day.” That was still his nickname, but “I hope for his sake that it will not outlive his babyhood.” It was true, George added, that he would soon be leaving the State Department. “The reasons are many—but mostly private. I want to see what it feels like to be a free man.”66
Meanwhile the rumors were flying in Washington. “I got so blue that I got out of there as fast as possible,” Lovett wrote Bohlen, on hearing that Kennan would be leaving. “I am equally disturbed at George’s plans,” Bohlen replied, but “a breathing spell for a year or so would not be at all a bad thing.” The news became public on December 10, leading to careful analyses of its significance from the British embassy. “We have had the impression for some time past that Kennan was not feeling very happy in the State Department,” F. M. Hoyer Millar informed London. Roger Makins of the Foreign Office, who had seen Kennan recently, confirmed this: with his views having “aroused keen and deep controversy in the State Department and Administration,” Kennan doubted “whether this was a desirable state of affairs.” Nitze would be the replacement, but although “hard-working and clear-headed and well thought of, . . . he is hardly of the stature of George Kennan.”67
On December 21, 1949, the lucky students at the National War College got back-to-back lectures from Acheson and Kennan. The secretary of state took the opportunity to pay his subordinate a handsome tribute. The prospect of Kennan’s departure had at first “filled me with despair.... I have rarely met a man the depth of whose thought, the sweetness of whose nature combined to bring about a real understanding of the underlying problems of modern life.” Upon reflection, though, Acheson had concluded that a sabbatical was “the right and good thing” for Kennan. He had served the United States since the age of twenty-two, and the pressures were beginning to catch up with him. It would not be easy to have him gone, and “we will eagerly welcome him back.” “Dear Dean,” Kennan wrote that evening:
As one who was tempted, day before yesterday, to go into the baby’s room and say: “Go on, get up. You’re going to work today. I’ll get into the crib”—and who has since existed only on the reflection that “this, too, will pass”—I find no words to say how deeply moved I was by what you did and said this morning. Based on the past, you did me too much honor. Perhaps the future can correct some of the disparity.
