George F. Kennan : an American life

already kindled by Republican charges “that our Far Eastern policy has been over-lenient to Communism and therefore neglectful of our national security.” But all of that, he too grandly concluded, “is not really my competence, and I do not think I should discuss it in this paper.” It was, as Acheson later summarized it, “a memorandum typical of its gifted author, beautifully expressed, sometimes contradictory, in which were mingled flashes of prophetic insight [with] suggestions ... of total impracticality.”⁵³

VII.

Precisely so, which raises the question of what Kennan was trying to say, or do, or mean. He did not deliberately set out to irritate his boss, who was at the time and even in retrospect surprisingly restrained in his response to this document, which was yet another demonstration, or so it seemed, of Kennan’s volatility. Acheson saw him as “not a very useful policy adviser,” Nitze answered crisply years later, when asked what the secretary of state really thought of Kennan. “But there did seem to be a certain affection on Acheson’s part for Kennan, and vice versa,” Nitze’s interviewer protested. “There was,” he acknowledged. Isaiah Berlin, like Joe Alsop, saw in Kennan a dual personality, one part professional, the other elsewhere:

Provided he had before him the machine, whatever it is, which encodes the telegrams, he behaved like an exceptional State Department official. His famous dispatches were concrete, clear, useful and truly important. Once he got away from that, he was in the empyrean, a mystic and a visionary, you see. You couldn’t tell which way he would turn. In short, a kind of Jekyll and Hyde.

Most people have mood swings, if not that extreme: few, however, turn theirs into prophetically impractical policy memoranda. Toward what empyrean, then, was Kennan drifting?⁵⁴

One way to answer that question is to return to Kennan’s December 1949 National War College lecture, which focused on the underlying systems of international relations: over the past two centuries, he argued, states and statesmen had been carried along by structural shifts that few of them fully understood. Kennan’s distinctiveness lay in his ambition, as a policy planner, to detect such evolutions in international systems and to align statecraft with them. It was another Bismarckian reach for the hem of history.

He reached, however, just as the international system was undergoing its most radical shift in centuries. Kennan’s frame of reference was the balance of power system of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, in which several great powers—most recently the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Russia, and Japan—had balanced one another. This was, for him, the default: the gravitational center to which world politics must sooner or later return, however drastic the disruptions of recent decades. That those disruptions had themselves altered that structure—that bipolarity had replaced multipolarity—was not, and in some ways would never be, visible to him.

He was hardly alone in this. Who would have anticipated, in 1950, that a divided Germany could form the basis, over the next four decades, for a peaceful Europe? That despite devastating regional wars that left Korea divided and unified Vietnam, there would be no world wars? That the United States and the Soviet Union, soon to have tens of thousands of thermonuclear weapons pointed at one another, would agree tacitly never to use any of them? That the only empires of consequence left anywhere in the world would be those run from Washington and Moscow? That China and Taiwan, still under separate regimes and without admitting it, would half a century later share a common capitalist ideology?

The answer, obviously, is that no one did. What set Kennan apart from his contemporaries was not his failure to see this future, but rather his constant concern for how policies and structures related to one another. With the latter shifting in ways that not even Kennan understood, his anxieties came across as contradictions, volatility, even to Alsop and Berlin as a dual personality disorder. Acheson paid little more attention than they did to grand international systems. But he did know, from his legal training, that decisions—however expedient, hasty, or ill informed—built practices, which established precedents, which over time made law, which then became structures. It was enough, he believed, to have some vague sense of the destination toward which you were stumbling, to be of good cheer, and not to look back. The hyperconscientious Kennan could never reconcile himself to such an attitude. Which was why he now chose to depart, at last, for his own empyrean.

Part IV

SEVENTEEN

Public Figure, Private Doubts: 1950–1951

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

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

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

a frail, stooped figure in a heavy brown tweed suit with trousers that were baggy and too long, big feet that turned outward, and a small head and face that caused him, at times, to look strangely like a young student. He then proceeded to speak for nearly an hour, without the use of notes—but with such startling lucidity and precision of expression that when he had finished, no one dared ask a question—everyone was sure that somehow or other he had answered every possible point. I say “somehow or other,” because, curiously enough, no one could remember exactly what he said.

They then become consultants to one another. Oppenheimer advised Kennan on European federation—not very successfully—when the Policy Planning Staff considered that issue in the summer of 1949. Kennan advised Oppenheimer, in turn, on what the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission should recommend with respect to the “super” bomb: Oppenheimer chaired its General Advisory Committee. Despite his reservations about Acheson’s suggested