The Kennans, at the beginning of 1950, were renting a house at 3707 33rd Place NW, a cul-de-sac in the Cleveland Park section of Washington, not far from the National Zoo. Grace was seventeen, Joan was thirteen, and Christopher was just over a month old: he was “very healthy and good natured,” George wrote a friend, “and vegetates quite normally.” Meanwhile Annelise had written to Kent, now a professor of music at the University of Texas, to thank him for a basket of grapefruit. These became regular Christmas gifts, and the appreciative letters back to Austin—sometimes from Annelise, more often from George—would over the next several decades chronicle family life. Apart from the children, the main topic in Annelise’s first grapefruit letter was George’s upcoming sabbatical: “We haven’t decided where to go yet, but the chances are pretty much in favour of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. They have asked him to come.” In the meantime George had taken up carpentry. He had built himself a workshop, was repairing old things, and making new ones. He would love to get some classical guitar music. Having taught himself to read it, “he struggles along in his spare moments.”37
Finances were also a struggle. “My mother was a very feminine woman who greatly enjoyed pretty clothes,” Joan recalled, “but not to the point of ever neglecting what was most important. She could make do when she had to.” One day a Washington policeman stopped her because the car she was driving had Pennsylvania plates. When asked where they lived, Annelise was about to say East Berlin when Grace blurted out: “Oh, we live just around the corner.” This got them a fifteen-dollar fine, which meant that Annelise wouldn’t be able to buy the new dress for which she’d been saving money. She surprised her daughters by—uncharacteristically—bursting into tears.38
The Institute appointment was definite by the middle of February, although Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dartmouth, as well as Princeton and Yale, had also tried to recruit Kennan. He would receive the equivalent of his Foreign Service salary, which he would be free to supplement through occasional lecturing and perhaps part-time teaching. Kennan would leave his job as State Department counselor, as he had requested, at the end of June. What he would do at the Institute was left vague, although he had hinted at an agenda a few days after his November 1949 meeting with Oppenheimer, when he wrote of the need for “an intensive educational effort directed toward our public opinion in general and particularly toward the work of our universities.”39 For the moment, though, he had a more immediate objective: this was to write, for the widely circulated
The idea came from Paul Palmer, senior editor of the magazine, who had approached Kennan the previous September about critiquing the “preventive war psychology” that he saw sweeping the country. Kennan agreed, knowing that news of the Soviet atomic bomb was about to break. Acheson approved the idea, but the need for State Department clearances delayed the article’s appearance: it had been “plucked and torn,” Kennan wrote Palmer, by people more interested in reducing its vulnerability than in improving its legibility. The original “X” article, “happily, though fortuitously,” had avoided such pitfalls and appeared “in all its helpless innocence.” The new piece finally came out in late February 1950, under Kennan’s own name, with the title: “Is War with Russia Inevitable? Five Solid Arguments for Peace.”
The subtitle answered the question. War was always possible, Kennan argued, but highly unlikely. Soviet imperialism had bitten off more than it could chew. The end of the American atomic monopoly had not significantly shifted the military balance. A strong defense was necessary, but not “a morbid preoccupation with what
Disappointed by this, and by the tepid response to his Milwaukee speech, Kennan hoped to cheer himself up by attending the twenty-fifth reunion of his Princeton class: he had, he wrote Oppenheimer, “succumbed to some very decent and considerate letters from fellow alumni.” On June 8 he, Annelise, and Jeanette drove there from the farm. An undergraduate “checked my name off the list, and coolly asked me for $75.00. I was horrified. I was head over heels in debt. I couldn’t have raised $75.00 by any stretch of the imagination. I fled, and repaired in panic to the Institute.” Oppenheimer offered to cover the cost, but Kennan refused and arranged instead for a telegram to be sent—from his Washington office—conveying regrets that he would not be able to attend after all. The three disheartened celebrants then slipped quietly out of town, driving to Dartmouth where, on the eleventh, George received an honorary degree. Another, from Yale, was awarded on the next day, “as a gesture of respect,” Kennan was told, “for the Department of State in the face of MacCarthy’s [
On June 14 he was back in Washington, where Webb wanted to talk about his future. His plan, Kennan told the under secretary of state, was to be away for at least an academic year: what happened after that depended on “what use [the department] could make of me.” If no one else qualified, perhaps ambassador to Great Britain? Webb said he had already spoken with Acheson about that post, which was “so expensive that I would not be able to afford it.” Kennan sat in for Nitze at one last meeting of the Policy Planning Staff, spent a gloomy afternoon griping to Joe Alsop about the hopelessness of conducting coherent policy in a democracy, and then went back to the farm. While he was driving to a nursery a few days later to pick up some trees, inspiration struck, so he pulled over and composed a poem.
