George F. Kennan : an American life

Each had felt in his hands, at one time or another, the same shale soil we know so well. The same winds blew. The same hills were visible to them in the distance. The same sky was overhead.

When death finally faced them, each had to reconcile himself to the thought that all this should come to be as nothing, that all the love and sacrifice and hope others had placed in them should be in vain, that all the promise of life should suddenly be rendered, to all outward appearances, meaningless. With each of these deaths, some parent died a little bit, too. And to the agony of death, there must have been added the trial of knowing that many other young men did not die but were permitted to live on and complete their lives, as though nothing had happened.

These young men did not die voluntarily or gladly. Like most men who die in war, they probably died in pain and misery and horror and bewilderment. The only thought that could have helped them was that perhaps because of their death this country would be a tiny bit nearer to what they knew, and we know, it ought to be, than it would have been had they not died at all.

And for this reason the act of faith that they performed was not really complete with their passing. Part of its meaning remained to be written in by other people, and notably by ourselves. Every time we reply with selfishness and cynicism and cowardice to the demands which are placed upon us, we deal another blow to the men that lie here and to those who loved them. Every time we reply to these demands with generosity and faith and courage, we bring comfort and recompense to the souls of these people.

The point, then, was to respect “the suffering these stones tell us about,” to ensure that “the dying of these men will come to make sense, as a part of the whole great story that found its supreme expression in the death of our Lord on the Cross.”²⁶

Kennan remained in Washington through the middle of August to run a seminar at the School of Advanced International Studies, while his family abandoned the city for the farm. Then, on the eighteenth, he emptied the Quebec Street house and drove slowly to East Berlin, “reminding myself repeatedly that there was no hurry.” No one was at home when he arrived, so he spent much of the afternoon sitting quietly on the porch.

Before me, literally, stretched the two fields: the first in wheat stubble, the second in corn, both parched and lifeless from the long drought. Behind me, figuratively, stretched 27 years of foreign service; and behind that an almost forgotten and seemingly irrelevant youth and boyhood. Ahead of me, figuratively, was only a great question-mark: somewhere between 1 and 30 years to live, presumably, and for what?

Seeking physical pleasures would be “nonsense” for someone his age. Eating and drinking invited obesity; “those of the flesh become ridiculous, unimportant, and hardly dignified.” He would instead embrace “solitude, depth of thought, and writing.” The first two would amount to nothing without the third, so “the great dictate” was to sit at a desk and begin. “The thoughts will come. They always do.” The crickets were subdued that evening, there was a half-moon, and the night was “deathly quiet, as though waiting.”²⁷

IV.

On the twentieth Kennan repacked the car, tied his bicycle on top of it, and drove alone to Princeton. The Hodge Road house was “empty, battered, and barn-like,” without electricity or telephone service but with poison ivy proliferating along the driveway, a broken tree branch hanging over an unkempt yard, rats in the basement, and cats in the garage. Rather than confront these crises, Kennan spent the rest of the day pondering a lay sermon he had agreed to give later that fall at the First Presbyterian Church. In search of inspiration, he went to the university bookstore, purchased John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, and sat on a bench outside reading it—although surely not all of it. “Very interesting,” he noted, but with the family arriving soon, the rest of the month had to go to making the house habitable, a process “not conducive to theoretic thought.”²⁸

Oppenheimer’s vagueness about Institute expectations allowed Kennan to set his own priorities. One was to answer the question he had left unanswered in American Diplomacy: could governments behave as individuals should? His preliminary conclusion, sketched out in his diary, was that politics, whether within or among nations, would always be a struggle for power. It could never in itself be a moral act. It followed that government was “a sad necessity and not a glorious one.” Politics might, from time to time, draft moral men into government, but even they would never be “wholly unsullied,” for although an individual might remain uncorrupted by power, he would have to surround himself with others who were.²⁹

Foreign policy was not, therefore, a contest of good versus evil. To condemn negotiations as appeasement, Kennan told a Princeton University audience early in October, was to end a Hollywood movie with the villain shot. To entrust diplomacy to lawyers was to relegate power, “like sex, to a realm in which we see it only occasionally, and then in a highly sublimated and presentable form.” Both approaches ignored the fact that most international conflicts were “jams that people have gotten themselves into.” Trying to resolve them through rigid standards risked making things worse. Evil existed, to be sure: the Soviet regime reflected it, as had Nazi Germany. Sometimes you had to fight it, sometimes you had to deal with it. The important question was “what sort of compromises we make,” not how to “escape altogether from the necessity of making such compromises.”³⁰

Dictatorships promised escapes from such dilemmas, he reminded the First Presbyterians when he delivered his sermon a few days later. Why not say “Why not?” when some Grand Inquisitor dangled relief from the discomforts of conscience and self-discipline? But that worked only until the approach of death, for which “there is no answer in the totalitarian book.” In theory, there could be no grief because there was no soul, “just an accumulation of chemicals.” In practice, “there is nothing more empty, nothing more mocking, than the trappings of a totalitarian funeral; for here we see the meaninglessness of life expounded and argued from the meaninglessness of death.” It was easier, then, to be a Christian than not to be one; but that meant confronting “the full rigor and severity of the great ethical problems” of which the founders of that faith “were so acutely aware.”³¹

Kennan spared the Presbyterians any detailed discussion of these, but when two Princeton seniors invited him to address a conference they were organizing on “Christianity Re-Examined,” he could no longer evade the issue. “[W]hat they really want to know is: what I believe.” He used his diary to make a list:

Human nature not perfectible.

Civilized life a compromise with nature.

Das Unbehagen in der Kultur [which he later translated as “The Discomfort of Man in the Civilized Context”].

No perfect human relationship.

No perfect solutions in political matters.

The dangers of romantic love: (love is at best a friendship and a practical partnership, complicated by an intensely intimate, impermanent and . . . unstable element that we call sex).