George F. Kennan : an American life

immediately afterward at Northwestern University.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whereas at one time the individual citizen swam in a relatively narrow stream, the banks of which were clearly visible to him, and could therefore measure easily his progress and position, today he is borne on vast expanses where too often the limits are not visible to him at all, and where he is incapable, with such subjective criteria of judgment as he possesses, to measure the rate and direction of the currents by which he is being borne.

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

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

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

Our life is so strangely composed that the best way to make ourselves better seems sometimes [to be] to act as though we were better. The man who makes it a point to behave with consideration and dignity in his relations with others, regardless of his inner doubts and conflicts, will suddenly find that he has achieved a great deal in his relations with himself.

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

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

IV.

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

This was a sufficiently good deal for Kennan to resign from the Foreign Service again, thereby greatly upsetting Bohlen. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., witnessed the argument they got into, after dinner one evening in New York. “Chip, growing increasingly heated, began to denounce George for having left.” The Foreign Service had made him: he could not desert the country in an hour of crisis. “George, much more composed and clearly aware that Chip was