George F. Kennan : an American life

uniforms.” During the past two days, he noted on April 5, he had rewritten one lecture, finished a new one, consulted Earle, talked with a student, lunched with Oppenheimer, “and done a dozen necessary and unavoidable little things.” But these didn’t alleviate the nightmares. Perhaps

the subconscious mind, like the workings of history, is often years out of date in its causality. Even were I to bow before the suggestions that the dream contained—were I to say to the subconscious: you are right, you are unanswerable, I will cut all the fateful knots and follow you—none of it would work out. Ten years ago—it would have; not today. How dangerous a guide, in later age, is then that which is most powerful—or nearly the most powerful (for that remains to be seen)—within us.

On April 7, he would be leaving for Chicago, where “there will be all the things that are difficult for me”:

a strange city, a hotel, solitude, boredom, strange women, the sense of time fleeting, of time being wasted, of a life pulsating around me—a life unknown, untasted, full of mystery—and yet not touched by myself. . . . Let us see whether, if I can stand the first day, the next will not be easier. It will be a real test, an opportunity for a real triumph—no—that is an exaggeration—there are no triumphs—an opportunity to inch a tiny bit along the road.

He had another nightmare before he left, which had to do with concealment: “Unquestionably, there is an abnormality here: a dread of being found out. This can probably be repaired only by making my life such that there is genuinely nothing to conceal and that means making it such that it will no longer, in a sense, be my life at all.”²⁴

Kennan opened his lecture series on the afternoon of April 9. It would, he told his audience, examine the record of the past half century in search of lessons “for us, the generation of 1951, pressed and hemmed in as we are by a thousand troubles and dangers.” Before giving it, he had attempted to rest in his hotel room. But

[w]hen I try, as I did then, to bring the spirit to a state of complete repose, shutting out all effort and all seeking, I become aware of the remnants of anxieties and desires still surging and thrashing around, like waves in a swimming-pool when the last swimmer has left; and I realize in what a turmoil the pool of the soul usually is, and how long it must lie untroubled before the surface becomes clear and one can see to the bottom.

The newspapers that day were reporting public disagreements between Truman and MacArthur over Korean War strategy, and on the eleventh—the day of Kennan’s second lecture—the president fired the general. Kennan might have been pleased had he received the news within the familiar surroundings of Princeton or Washington, but the reaction in Chicago frightened him.

For the first time in my life I have become conscious of the existence of powerful forces in the country to which, if they are successful, no democratic adjustment can be made: people . . . who have to be regarded as totalitarian enemies.... [M]y homeland has turned against me. . . . I am now in the truest sense of the word an expatriate.

He was glad he had not gone to Milwaukee: “I hope never to go there again until McCarthyism has burned itself out there and people are thoroughly ashamed of it.” Even Jeanette and her family, in Highland Park, could offer no refuge. The day would soon come when they “will be afraid and embarrassed to have me in the house, when my presence will bring unpleasantness and danger to them, when—if I came—they would want me to sneak in and out in the middle of the night.”²⁵

That was hardly the response, however, of his University of Chicago audience: “Respectable at the start, attendance grew most alarmingly.” By the third lecture, students were sitting on the floor and in the aisles, requiring that the fourth be moved to an auditorium, where Kennan worried that he was only “a remote silhouette and a canned, electrified voice.” But they still kept coming: “I was surprised, delighted, and yet in a sense sobered, by the success of the undertaking.” One cause for concern was that he had not yet written the final lecture, scheduled for April 20. On learning of this that morning, the editors at the university press, which would be publishing the series, summoned him to “a great office clattering with a dozen typewriters, and with my letter of acceptance lying reproachfully before me, I was put to work to produce some sort of publishable document.”

Only one who has faced many lecture audiences knows . . . that peculiar sense of tension and desperation that can overcome the unprepared lecturer as the hour of the lecture inexorably draws nearer and his mind is whipped by the realization that within so and so many minutes he must get up there and say something, but he does not yet know what he wants to say.

The panic seared itself so deeply into his consciousness, Kennan recalled two decades later, “that I continue even now to relive it as a recurring nightmare.” But a young professor who attended the lectures detected no signs of unease. Kenneth W. Thompson remembered Kennan’s “marvelous melodic flow.” Listening to him was “like an experience on the road to Damascus.” One evening, at a fraternity house, Kennan sat talking with students until the early hours of the morning. It was “an absolutely elevating experience for everyone.”²⁶

Except Kennan. By April 16—the day his lecture was moved to accommodate the hundreds who wanted to hear it—he had concluded that with his combination of personal and public problems, it would be a miracle if “anything remained for me personally in life.... This will be a time for leadership or for martyrdom or for both. I may as well prepare myself for it.” And on the seventeenth:

Myths and errors are being established in the public mind more rapidly than they can be broken down. The mass media are too much for us. . . . McCarthyism has already won, in the sense of making impossible the conduct of an intelligent foreign policy. The result is that there is no place in public life for an honest and moderate man. . . . I should not have signed up with the Ford Foundation.... I should not have started the enterprise to help Soviet fugitives. Some day we will have to give it up out of sheer embarrassment and humiliation over the conduct of our country.... I should not be speaking out here in Chicago. It will do no good—any of it. I must stop this public speaking, this writing for publication.

Farming would be the only salvation. He would finish his work at the Institute “for consistency’s sake” and to get Joan through school. He would retire from the Foreign Service as soon as his pension was earned “or forfeited”—here he had in mind the plight of his colleague Davies, whose loyalty investigation was still under way. But all of these plans were problematic because war would probably break out within two years: “Except for the little boy, the best thing that could happen would be that I should go with the services and get myself killed.”²⁷

Kennan never said, explicitly, what lay behind all of this, but diary fragments provide hints:

June 19, 1951: More and more I feel myself becoming a receptacle for the confidence of other people. Am I not deceiving them all? . . . . [They] believe that I am an honest man and are thereby relieved. Have I any right, in these circumstances, to accept their confidence?

August 3, 1951: I was annoyed with myself for my habit of staring after women. What could they give me? Nothing but trouble and disillusionment and dissipation of valuable strength. I must teach myself to remember that I do not really want them: that this habit is a sort of echo of youth, and a very misleading one at that. In this endeavor, . . . I have the best of all possible allies: increasing age.

Undated: Physical desire, in a man my age, is often like the experiment the teachers of psychology used to use as an example: where a finger pressed to the brow for a time is removed, but the sensation, and the illusion of its presence, lingers after.

September 5, 1951: I am ill, of course, with the old malady which is a condition and not a disease. But I am resolved that this time I will not cure it