George F. Kennan : an American life

Kennan’s career, he acknowledged, had been no freer from blunders than anyone else’s: his four-day congressional campaign, he did not have to say, had been a big one. But he had learned the value of discretion: he had managed “to conceal the difficulties on the intellectual road that I have gone through more than other people have been able to.” His habit was “to keep them within myself and fight them out myself.” And so, better than many, he had survived.⁴⁴

VI.

Oppenheimer survived as the Institute’s director, which allowed him to renew Kennan’s appointment for another year with the understanding that he would stay out of politics. But in a devastatingly public humiliation, the Atomic Energy Commission withdrew Oppenheimer’s security clearance, ending his ability to do further government work in nuclear physics. For Kennan, this meant that McCarthyism had claimed another close friend. Why, he wondered, did Oppenheimer not leave the United States, since universities throughout the world would have clamored to recruit him? “He stood there for a moment, tears streaming down his face.” Then he stammered: “Dammit, I happen to love this country.”⁴⁵

Kennan did too, but as he admitted during the Oppenheimer hearings, he was more critical of his country than most people: this was yet another thing “I have had to fight within myself.” He wasn’t fighting very hard, his diary suggests, in the spring of 1954. Princeton was “lush and beautiful,” but the university ’s reunion consisted of “gents” in ridiculous costumes looking “vaguely unhappy.” The resident farmer at the Cherry Orchard was paying no attention to his instructions—Kennan would have seen the resemblance to Tolstoy’s cheerfully dysfunctional peasants in Anna Karenina. Grace’s graduation from Radcliffe required a drive through Connecticut, which had been taken over by scrub forest, Italians, Portuguese, and the Catholic Church. Cambridge was “sooty, over-shaded, [and] dampish.” Giving the commencement address was an obligatory drudgery, redeemed only by the unexpected presence of Joe Alsop, whose views Kennan attacked: Alsop protested, but was “actually very pleased by the personal attention.” A visit to Washington found it overrun by the “great burly Babbitts” of the Eisenhower administration. A haircut for Christopher had his father marveling “at the combination of affection and irritation one can feel toward such a small person.”

The Kennans sailed for Europe in June on a slow and seedy freighter like the ones George had traveled on in his youth. That continent did not seem much better, though. His lectures on Soviet-American relations, given in German at the University of Frankfurt, were, he was told, a great success, “but if I were to be asked . . . what had been accomplished, or whether it would have made any difference if I had never appeared, I would not know what to say.” For most of those who heard him, “the highest spiritual aim seems to be a motorcycle.... One sees, today, how much the Jews added to Germany.” Of the Americans in that country, “I will not speak,” but he did anyway: “Their presence here infuriates me.”

Moscow continued to haunt him: a dream had him returning as counselor in the Ethiopian embassy, a job he had taken because it seemed “a loyal and self-effacing and almost heroic thing to do.” The ambassador, though, was an unhappy little man who left town on the day Kennan arrived, without having provided him a place to stay. Standing forlornly next to his suitcase, “I wondered whether I should call on _____ [probably Bohlen] and my other erstwhile colleagues at the American Embassy. Would they understand? Not likely.”⁴⁶

Whether because of his political misadventure, or Oppenheimer’s ordeal, or the more general sense that he had not yet found his footing, whatever equanimity Kennan had gained by moving back to Princeton now seemed to have deserted him. A long diary entry, composed while still at sea, became almost a biblical lamentation:

1. So far as my own feelings and interests are concerned, I have nothing to live for, yet fear death.

2. I abhor the thought of any occupation that implies any sort of association with, and adjustment to, other people. This is particularly true in the U.S. Nowhere there can I share any of the group or institutional enthusiasms.

3. So far as I myself am concerned, I may as well live in Europe.... I am an exile wherever I go, by virtue of my experience.

4. I do not see any way in which I can use any of my own past in approaching the problems of the future. That has all got to die on the vine: the languages, the intellectual interests, the acquaintances. It makes no whole. It is a museum of odds and ends and left-overs—and whatever value it had is declining day by day in geometric progression.

5. Intellectual life is barred for me, partly by the way of life forced upon me by the family whenever we are with other people, partly by the fact that intellectual exertion comes, with me, only from outside stimulus and constitutes a nervous and psychic strain; yet I have no means of relaxing from it and preserving the balance of life.

And so on, through seven other complaints, one of which involved teaching: “I should never be able to conceal my own intellectual despair, above all—the despair with U.S. society. But to reveal it would be inconsistent with the mythology of any American educational institution.”

“It is not I who have left my country,” he concluded early in 1955, not for the first time. “It is my country that has left me—the country I thought I knew and understood.”

I could leave it without a pang: the endless streams of cars, the bored, set faces behind the windshields, the chrome, the asphalt, the advertising, the television sets, the filling-stations, the hot-dog stands, the barren business centers, the suburban brick boxes, the country-clubs, the bars-and-grills, the empty activity, the competitiveness, the lack of spontaneity, the sameness, the drug-stores, the over-heated apartment houses, the bus terminals, the crowded campuses, the unyouthful youth and the immature middle-aged—all of this I could see recede behind the smoke of the Jersey flats without turning a hair.

And so, he now realized, “Mr. Dulles was quite right to fire me.” People like himself had no role in government. Why, then, was he unhappy? “Here, of course, the trouble is with me. . . . I sometimes ask myself whether there is anything I am interested in—anything I would like to do.”⁴⁷

VII.

Dysfunctional peasants had nothing on Kennan, one might conclude from these entries, but that would be to miss the function his diary served. It allowed him despair in order to shield others from it. Family, friends, and colleagues saw some, but by no means all, of this inner turmoil. The diary, in turn, failed fully to reflect what Kennan’s contemporaries could clearly see: that with Oppenheimer’s help he was finding a niche, sufficiently satisfying that he would remain within it—or at least near it—for the last half of his long life. George’s 1953 Christmas Day letter to Kent hinted at what was happening.

I am just beginning to get my teeth into my work for this [coming] year, which is a beginning on what I suppose will eventually be a two-volume history of Soviet-American relations. It is slow work, and laborious; but it is one way of earning a living, and it might just help to steady American thinking on the contemporary aspects of the subject—something which seems to me to be sorely needed.

Speaking of teeth, “[y]ou can’t imagine how good the grapefruits taste to us. They are the first good fruit I have had this year.”⁴⁸