George F. Kennan : an American life

solely on the basis of naked power.” This policy would achieve beneficial results “under either eventuality.”¹⁹

The Task Force A report easily overshadowed the others in the force of its logic and the quality of its prose. It showed that “containment” and “liberation” were not mutually exclusive, indeed that the first could bring about the second. It stressed the extent to which irresponsibility in choosing means—whether by too casually risking war or by too fecklessly indulging McCarthy—could corrupt the ultimate end, which was to preserve the American way of life. It was a far more effective attack on Dulles than Kennan’s Scranton speech had been. And most important, it carried the authority of Eisenhower, who had entrusted him with preparing it in the first place.

All three task forces presented their recommendations to the president and his top advisers at a White House meeting on July 16, 1953. As Kennan began speaking, he was amused to find a “silent and humble but outwardly respectful” Dulles sitting in the first row: “I could talk, and he had to listen.” Eisenhower, fully in charge, dominated the discussion that followed. What he said convinced Kennan that “he was prepared to accept the thesis we had put forward, that our approach to the Soviet Union, as it had been followed in the immediately preceding years, was basically sound.” Some adjustments might be necessary, but “there was no need for a drastic change.” If, therefore, Dulles had triumphed “by disembarrass-ing himself of my person, I . . . had my revenge by saddling him, inescapably, with my policy.”²⁰

Historians, on the whole, have sustained that judgment. Kennan would find much to criticize in the Eisenhower-Dulles strategy as it evolved over the next seven and a half years: his chief concerns were its reliance on nuclear retaliation as a way of minimizing containment’s costs, and its refusal to seek a reunified Germany. But in its doubts that the Soviet Union would risk war, in its determination to apply Western strengths against Communist weaknesses, in its willingness to wait for contradictions within the latter system to shatter its unity while sustaining strength and self-confidence in the United States and among its allies—in all of these things, the “New Look,” as it came to be called, was closer to Kennan’s strategy than NSC 68 had been.²¹

Kennan’s departure from government, therefore, was not as lonely as he made it look in his memoirs. For even though Dulles gave him no appointment, Eisenhower accepted the basic elements of the strategy Kennan had designed under Marshall’s supervision: it was not irrelevant that Eisenhower worked for Marshall longer during the war than Kennan had after it. And so Kennan’s final act as a policy planner was to explain all of this to a newly deferential secretary of state, as well as to the president and the vice president of the United States, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and the director of the CIA. It may not have been a “niche,” but it was a more prestigious platform than he had occupied before—or ever would again.

III.

“We reflect that you are a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and have much unfinished to do,” Oppenheimer had cabled Kennan on October 6, 1952, three days after the Soviet Union declared him persona non grata. “We hope the time will come when you will be happy to reflect on this too.” Kennan responded gratefully: “No mark of confidence received means more to me.” It was not yet clear that he would be leaving government, but when he did, the best contribution he could make would probably be “the independent pursuit of truth . . . in the field of public affairs.” His time away from the Institute had made him appreciate all the more its benefits. Oppenheimer renewed the invitation in March 1953, on the day he read in The New York Times that Kennan would be retiring: “I want you to be quite sure that in addition to the formal welcome, of which your membership here is a warrant, there is a deeper welcome that awaits you whenever and in whatever form you can accept it.”²²

There were, as usual, other opportunities. Freedom House wanted Kennan to become its president: he politely declined. The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies hoped that he would help build a research center in Washington for refugees from government like himself: Kennan liked the idea but balked at having to do fund-raising. Allen Dulles made it clear that if his older brother did not wish to employ Kennan, he did; Walter Bedell Smith, the younger Dulles’s predecessor at the CIA, enthusiastically seconded this proposal. Kennan respected both men, but the organization’s increasing reliance on covert operations worried him; its cooperation with the Ford Foundation had not gone well; and it had, he believed, mishandled the Davies case, an unresolved issue for which he felt personally responsible. With one exception, Oppenheimer and Kennan’s other Princeton friends all felt that he should make the break from government a clean one, “and not permit the situation to be obscured by getting loaned to the CIA. The more I thought about it, the more this seemed to me to be the correct answer, too.”²³

That left the Institute, Kennan’s preference all along, and the arrangements were quickly made. Dean Rusk, the new president of the Rockefeller Foundation, had no problem persuading Robert Lovett, John J. McCloy, and his other trustees to approve a grant of $15,000 for Kennan’s work during the 1953–54 academic year. “If he wanted to be at Princeton,” Rusk recalled, “then this was the natural thing to do to make it possible.” Oppenheimer added another $5,000, which with Kennan’s Foreign Service pension brought his income close to what he had been making as an ambassador—a respectable but not munificent sum for someone maintaining a house, a farm, and a family. His responsibilities would be to seek a more “solid foundation” for his views on “utopian tendencies” in U.S. foreign policy, Kennan explained to Princeton University president Harold Dodds, and to study the internal politics of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. “Curiosity has thrown me into contact with one, experience with the other. I would like to get both off my chest in a scholarly form before I turn to other things.”²⁴

The Institute appointment would not begin until the fall, though, so that left Kennan free to get other things off his chest. One was his worry that American universities were trying to teach international relations as if it were an extension of law, or some newly fashionable “social science.” It was neither, he argued in the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly, whose editors put him on its cover. The world would never accept constitutional governance as it existed within the United States, while politics could never resemble physics because people were unpredictable. The only useful preparation for diplomacy came from history, as well as “from the more subtle and revealing expressions of man’s nature” found in art and literature. Students should be reading “their Bible and their Shakespeare, their Plutarch and their Gibbon, perhaps even their Latin and their Greek.” These alone would build those qualities of “honor, loyalty, generosity, [and] consideration for others” that had been the basis for effectiveness in the Foreign Service “as I have known it.”

McCarthyism remained another concern. It fed on contempt for artists and writers, Kennan warned a University of Notre Dame audience in a well-publicized speech on May 15, “as though virility could not find expression in the creation of beauty, as though Michelangelo had never wielded his brush, as though Dante had never taken up his pen, as though the plays of Shakespeare were lacking in manliness.” This “anti-intellectualism” flaunted its own virility, fearing that in the absence of such exhibitions, “it might be found wanting.” Unchallenged, its practitioners would reduce the range of respectability to “only themselves, the excited accusers,” excluding anyone not engaged in “the profession of denunciation.” Having lived for years in totalitarian states, “I know where this sort of thing leads.”²⁵

The costs of confronting totalitarianism were on Kennan’s mind two weeks later as he stood in a cemetery near East Berlin, delivering a Memorial Day address meant only for his Pennsylvania neighbors. He could hardly improve on what Lincoln had said almost ninety years earlier at a similar place only a few miles away, but he would try to reflect on the meaning those words still carried:

Under each of these stones there lies the remains of a son of this township. Each had half a life behind him, and each should have had another half a life before him. Someone had guided each of them through the trials and illnesses of early childhood. Each of these boys had passed, before he died, through the wonder of adolescence.