George F. Kennan : an American life

former government employee, then in a mental institution, did raise questions about Kennan’s loyalty a few months later, but Hoover chose not to pursue the matter. Before departing for Moscow as ambassador in 1952, Kennan let the bureau know that he would be calling on his Soviet counterparts in Washington and at the United Nations; after returning to the Institute the following year, he informed Hoover that he would be subscribing to Pravda for research purposes, unless the director thought this “undesirable or unwise.” Hoover did not, passing the word to the Post Office Department that “the Bureau has had cordial relations with him.”³⁸

Did Kennan protect himself by reporting on others? He had done so on one or two occasions, he told the Oppenheimer investigators, but only in the case of “minor employees.” Kennan had long been sure that Soviet espionage was taking place within the United States, but he was equally convinced that spies had never significantly influenced policy. It was on that last point that he differed with McCarthy and his supporters. Staying on the right side of Hoover may have made that possible: confronting evil did require compromises.³⁹

Survivor’s guilt, under these circumstances, was inescapable. It was one of the impulses that led Kennan early in 1954 to surprise himself, his family, his friends, and his funders by deciding—on the spur of an emotional moment—to enter politics. The story began when the East Berlin Veterans of Foreign Wars honored him on February 11 for distinguished national service. It was important, Kennan said in thanking them, that the country “show itself united and confident—not afraid of anyone else, and above all, not afraid of itself.” What was happening, though, was just the opposite:

The tone of political life has become sharper; the words have become meaner; the attempt is often made today to bring people to distrust other Americans—not on the grounds that they are dumb or selfish or short-sighted (that sort of thing has always gone on in our political life) but on the grounds that they are disloyal, that they are connected with hostile outside forces, that they are enemies to their own people.

Veterans had a special responsibility to avoid such hysteria: “Fellows, don’t fall for this.” It gratified him deeply that instead of suspecting someone, they had found an occasion “for announcing your trust.”⁴⁰

A few weeks later a young farmer and his wife rang the doorbell in Princeton, having driven there from Pennsylvania without knowing whether they would find the Kennans at home. Some of “us fellows” had gotten together, he announced, decided they didn’t like the candidates being put up for the House of Representatives, and wondered if Kennan would agree to run. “Well, I was very much moved by this. I think it’s a duty of citizenship, if your fellow citizens want you to represent them, that you don’t turn it down.” So he drove to Gettysburg to meet local Democratic leaders, who with the “marvelous brutality” of grassroots politics “picked me to pieces right in my presence.” Kennan loved it. “These were such absolutely genuine people.” Decades later he could still quote them: “He ain’t even registered as a Democrat!” “Yeah, but his wife is.” “Well, what would you say if you had to run here?” He said a few things. “Why, we could run him for the Senate!” Kennan announced his candidacy on March 13. The next morning’s New York Times quoted the Adams County Democratic Party chairman, Fred Klunk, who with his neighbors welcomed the idea “of George Kennan being our nominee.”⁴¹

Had that happened and had he been elected, Kennan would have been the president’s congressman, because Eisenhower’s farm was just outside Gettysburg. But he wanted to run only if unopposed in the primary, on the grounds that his other responsibilities—which included finishing the Little lectures—left him no time to campaign. The other two candidates, unimpressed by an “outsider” who had only just declared himself a Democrat, refused to withdraw. Pennsylvania law limited the money Kennan could legally raise: he was not prepared, less than legally, to approach dairy owners, the usual way of getting around this problem. Finally Rusk and Oppenheimer let Kennan know that the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study, ample though it was in other respects, did not extend to supporting candidates for public office.

The problem, Rusk later explained, was that as a tax-exempt foundation, Rockefeller—which provided most of Kennan’s Institute funding—could not appear to be involving itself in politics. The only option would be a terminal grant, but when Oppenheimer suggested this, Kennan was not prepared to sever the Institute connection. “I could not afford to remain without regular income.... I do take seriously the commitments I have made in the academic world.” And so, four days after he entered the race, he abruptly abandoned it. He was “full of agony over this. I felt I’d let down the people in the country. On the other hand, I couldn’t see going deeply in[to] personal debt. I think I was quite right.”⁴²

So did almost everyone else, apart from the disappointed Pennsylvanians. Men qualified to serve in Congress were “not altogether rare,” John V. A. MacMurray, the retired diplomat whose views Kennan had long respected, wrote him with stately delicacy, “but one who combines your integrity and intellectual grasp with actual experience . . . is of irreplaceable value [in] refining of its grossness the thinking of the American people.” Others were franker. “I was horrified,” Jeanette recalled. “Oh, goodness! That’s the last thing in the world he could have done.” But Kennan always regretted this path not taken. “All my friends laugh and say: ‘You were never cut out for politics.’ I think I could have done it if I’d wanted to throw myself into it. I might have gone on to a senatorial position.”

The episode seems, at first glance, inexplicable. How could Kennan, supposedly a realist, expect to succeed in politics without competing in primaries or soliciting contributions? What of his insight, recorded in his diary only a few months earlier, that the moral man drafted into government would have to surround himself with immoral advisers? What of his elitism, which included a long-standing contempt for Congress itself? Shrewd observers of Kennan, without too much trouble, found explanations. One was Jeanette, herself a keen critic of McCarthyism: “He was so complimented by being asked.” A second was a Princeton friend, the historian Cyril Black, who saw Kennan confusing the rough-and-tumble of American politics with the British tradition of invited “safe” seats. A third was his Hodge Road neighbor J. Richardson Dilworth: “George is ultra-conservative. He’s almost a monarchist.” And finally there was Isaiah Berlin, who detected more than a whiff of Tolstoy in Kennan’s desire to be among but above his country neighbors: “Close to the soil, and simple views. Simple truths, shining out. The prophets of the world—you know, he wasn’t too modest, Tolstoy.” Would the two have gotten along? “Tolstoy would have approved of him. He’d have had a good time with Tolstoy.”⁴³

People who have “what you might call genius of some sort, intellectual or artistic,” find it hard to arrange their relationships “in a manner which is wholly conventional.” That was Kennan, speaking not of himself but of Oppenheimer in testimony before the Atomic Energy Commission’s personnel security board on April 20, 1954. Such a person could be “profoundly honest and yet . . . have associates and friends who may be misguided and misled.” Did this mean, one of the commissioners wanted to know, “that all gifted individuals [are] more or less screwballs?” Kennan would not go that far, “but I would say that when gifted individuals come to a maturity of judgment which makes them valuable public servants, you are apt to find that the road by which they have [traveled] may have had zigzags in it of various sorts.”

Wasn’t Kennan himself gifted? one of Oppenheimer’s lawyers asked. How had he remained in government for so many years with so little suspicion? The answer, Kennan suggested, was that he had encountered evil at an impressionable age. As a young Foreign Service officer, he had visited the square in Riga where the Bolsheviks had executed their hostages only a few years earlier, for no better reason than that they were members of the bourgeoisie.

I was so affected by what I saw of the cruelty of Soviet power that I could never receive any of its boasts about social improvement with anything other than skepticism. I think that experience helped me a great deal at an early date, and helped me to avoid mistakes that I otherwise might have made.