George F. Kennan : an American life

Characteristically, he did not enjoy this triumph. He didn’t like the idea of publishing lectures, he grumbled to Alsop, who wrote to congratulate him: “Either you write or you talk, but you don’t do both together.” He had been heartened, but also shamed, by the favorable reaction. Hostile reviews would have made him miserable, Kennan admitted to Oppenheimer; nevertheless the complimentary ones “leave me with a sense of discomfort,” because the lectures were not nearly as good as he could have made them. There was, however, the satisfaction of having produced a book, “if only by inadvertence.”

American Diplomacy succeeded for several reasons. It was, as Reston noted, the most critical account of U.S. foreign policy produced by any government official since the end of the war. Not “ghost-written,” it was “straight Kennan,” and he was “perhaps the most reflective of the young American professional diplomats.” The author himself, more modestly, would later attribute the book’s success to its shallowness, for it met the needs of teachers eager to find easy reading for their students. His foreword, however, had promised more: he would show why the United States, which in 1900 could not have imagined threats from abroad to its prosperity and way of life, had reached the point by 1950 “where it seemed to think of little else.”⁴⁷

Kennan’s explanation was short but shocking: the insecurity the United States faced resulted less from what its adversaries had done than from its own leaders’ illusions. Forgetting their forefathers’ warnings, American statesmen in the twentieth century had come to prefer the proclamation of principles to the balancing of power. The pattern began with John Hay’s Open Door notes, announced as an afterthought in the wake of the Spanish- American War and the American occupation of the Philippines, with a view to discouraging China’s division into European, Russian, and Japanese spheres of influence. Hay accomplished little for the Chinese, but he set a style for his own country’s diplomacy: it manifested itself, with more serious consequences, in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, in Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter, and in the World War II demand for the “unconditional surrender” of Germany and Japan, which had opened the way for Soviet domination of half of Europe and much of Asia. Far from securing its interests, the “legalism-moralism” with which the United States had conducted its diplomacy had left it in grave peril.

It had encouraged toothless treaties like the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which between the two greatest wars in history had outlawed war as an instrument of national policy. It had caused hopes to be invested in, and time to be wasted on, the League of Nations and the United Nations, which could act only if the great powers had already settled their differences. It had led to long periods of inattention, punctuated by spasms of senseless violence. “I sometimes wonder,” Kennan wrote, in the book’s most memorable passage,

whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath—in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat.

Kennan’s imagery—the dinosaur in particular—would pursue him for decades. It dramatized, but vastly oversimplified, what he had been trying to say since studying Clausewitz at the National War College in 1946: that while war must always be subordinate to policy, alternatives to war can always fail. Hence, the need for grand strategy in peace as well as in war.⁴⁸

Hastily composed, passionately written, brilliantly if not deliberately timed, American Diplomacy became Kennan’s “long telegram” to the American academy: it insisted on the need to see the world as it was, not as professors of international relations might like it to be. For the young Kenneth Thompson, who had studied with the University of Chicago legal and institutional scholar Quincy Wright, Kennan opened “a whole new world. I’d never really heard a ‘realist’ interpretation of foreign policy.” One grateful reader wrote to Time magazine that, having read Kennan, he could now retire his well-worn copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. To be sure, Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Lippmann had all warned, in their writings, against relying on principles while neglecting power. They, however, had done so from outside the government. Kennan was still, to most of his audience, an insider, and that—together with his flair for the dramatic—was what made his argument so compelling.⁴⁹

It was also, to careful readers, unsettling. He had not meant to say that Americans should abandon “decency and dignity and generosity,” he assured the historian Arnold Toynbee. His point, rather, had been that the United States should refrain from claiming to know what was right or wrong in the behavior of other societies. Its policy should be one of avoiding “great orgies of violence that acquire their own momentum and get out of hand.” It should employ its armies, if they were to be used at all, in what Gibbon called “temperate and indecisive contests,” remembering that civilizations could not stand “too much jolting and abuse.” There was no room, in the modern world, for moral indignation, “unless it be indignation with ourselves for failing to be what we know we could and should have been.” He should have said all of this at Chicago, but “the material had to be compressed, I was dilatory, the last lecture was written in the publishers’ office on the day it was delivered, and there I was, before I knew it, making myself out an amoral cynic for all time.”⁵⁰

Father Edmund A. Walsh, the legendary founder of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, certainly saw it that way: he publicly attacked Kennan in July 1952 for having abandoned “the concept of right and wrong in judging the actions of a foreign state.” That logic led “straight back to the jungle” and had even been “used as a defense for Hitler’s extermination of 6,000,000 Jews.” Kennan was in Moscow by then, but Walsh’s excoriation worried him enough that he drafted—but wisely did not send—a letter to The New York Times restating the explanation he had given Toynbee. It would not have been the moment, while trying to run an embassy in a forbiddingly hostile state, to get into an open argument with the most formidable American Jesuit.

“[T]he reaction in academic circles is really intense,” Philip Jessup warned the Policy Planning Staff in September, “and I think it is doing some harm.” Morgenthau’s hefty Politics Among Nations had already become a standard university text, but Kennan’s brief book, which was about to appear in a thirty-five-cent reprint, would surely compete with it. And yet, “as I have gathered from talking with him, it is not a final and profound statement of his thinking.... It is by no means the complete negation of law and morals which many people think it is.”⁵¹

As if to confirm the fears of Toynbee, Walsh, Jessup, and even Kennan himself, the American Political Science Association had already by then named American Diplomacy “the best book of the year in the field of international relations.” And so its author—told by diplomatic historians that he was not yet ready to join their guild—found himself enshrined instead within a “realist” theoretical tradition that dated back to Thucydides— whom Kennan had not yet even read. Meanwhile his Northwestern lectures, a far more careful exposition of his thinking, had appeared unheralded in the Illinois Law Review, where they have languished in obscurity ever since. It was yet another example of Kennan’s strange tendency to be remembered more for what he said in haste than for what he took the time to ponder.⁵²

IX.

The well-informed Reston broke the news of Kennan’s ambassadorship on November 20, 1952, before the Soviet foreign ministry had provided the necessary agrement . A delay of several weeks followed, along with a Pravda complaint about Kennan’s association with the East European Fund—he had by now resigned as its president. This convinced Harrison Salisbury, the New