George F. Kennan : an American life

Why history? The immediate reason, of course, was that Kennan had promised Oppenheimer scholarship, and American Diplomacy—his first venture into the field—had not delivered it. Kennan was determined to do better. But history had always been a lodestone, attracting him when opportunities arose. He liked working as a research assistant for Professor Karl Stahlin at the University of Berlin in 1930: his assignment had been a Kremlin librarian during Napoleon’s invasion. He gleefully excavated Neill Brown’s dispatches from the era of Nicholas I for Bullitt to resend to Washington. He exhausted the State Department with his exhaustive study of the Alaska Purchase. He lectured on Russian history while interned at Bad Nauheim. He discovered Gibbon while in flight during the war. And even if his own past might not be useful in solving the problems of the future, he had long believed that the study of the past could be: that was a recurring theme in Kennan’s National War College lectures.

Now, thanks to the Institute, he could concentrate on history. His first impulse had been to survey all of Soviet-American relations, but “I immediately realized that the archival resources had never been properly touched, that anything I might say after reading what few memoirs there were would be superficial and maybe not even accurate. So I happily went to the sources.” That meant immersion in the intricacies of the Bolshevik Revolution, a topic recent enough for there to be living—if unreliable—witnesses, close enough to Kennan’s experience for him to use his linguistic and diplomatic skills, distant enough that he had not been personally involved. Would the world be different “when I have finished”? he wondered aloud in a talk he gave at the National Archives in the fall of 1954. Not much, he conceded, but “a few people may have been helped to understand some of our failures and failings today.” At the top of his speaking notes, he wrote a single word: “Loneliness.”⁴⁹

He later explained what he meant. His work involved warming himself alongside fires kindled four decades earlier. Their heat was now as pale and faint as moonlight. If the era seemed remote, however, it was “because I was a poor historian, incapable of re-creating the flesh-and-blood images of the characters I was studying.” Only through the deepest identification with the past could there be the “intimacy of acquaintance which permits historical personages really to become alive again.” Being a good historian, then, required cutting one’s self off from the present. Contemporaries rarely forgave that, because each age believed its own to be the most important that ever had existed, or ever would. What normal person would spend time with people suffering from “the obvious inferiority of not being alive”?

The historian too often finds himself, I fear, in the position of the man who has left the noisy and convivial party, to wander alone on cold and lonely paths. The other guests . . . murmur discontentedly among themselves: “Why should he have left? Who does he think he is? Obviously, he doesn’t like our company. He thinks us, plainly, a band of frivolous fools.... Let him sulk.” So they say. And he does.

And so Kennan did. Because he disapproved of so much in the present, it was a party he was content to leave for “a never ending communion” with wax-museum figures “whose eyes never move and whose voices one never hears.”

If they spoke at all, it was in words hovering above their heads “like the bubbles of utterance” that emerged from the characters in the comic strips of his boyhood. Context—those “elusive nuances of circumstances, of feeling, of environment, of intuition and telepathy”—was mostly lost. The relationship, for the historian, was not reciprocal.

He takes an interest in them. He supports them. He becomes their posthumous conscience. He tries to see that justice is done them. He follows their trials and experiences, in many instances, with greater sympathy and detachment than any of their egocentric and jealous contemporaries ever did. But do they support him? Not in the least. They couldn’t care less.

Historians, then, were disembodied spirits. Their task was to understand while remaining “unseen, unknown, unaided.” That, for Kennan, was “loneliness.”⁵⁰

But if loneliness lay in both the present and the past, where was consolation? George worked out an answer of sorts while staying with Jeanette and her family in Highland Park one day in August 1956. He drove himself, alone, around Milwaukee. The Cambridge Avenue house was still there, looking as it always had despite taller trees and a deteriorating neighborhood. It struck him as “strangely serene and timeless,” as though content to live by memories “and to await, without either complaint or haste, the day—which cannot be far off now—when it will disappear from the face of the earth and all that once transpired in it and around it will be swallowed up in the forgotten past.”

A half hour later he was at the Forest Home cemetery, which he had visited for the first time only a year earlier: “I sat at the head of my parents’ graves and wept my heart out, like a child.”

They seemed to say: we have reached a reality beyond all your strivings and sufferings; on your terms it is neither good nor bad; you cannot conceive of it; you cannot help us now, any more than we can help you; but we are serene and timeless and you are not; we have our secret, infinitely sad to your mind, no doubt, but in tune with Nature; we have known all the suffering you now know, and then some; we are beyond your sympathy, as you are beyond our pity; Look: we give you the breath of peacefulness—we are a part of the long afternoon of life; take the hint, go your way as best you can; do not ask too many questions; it will not be long before you join us.⁵¹

Kennan had lived with loneliness—but had found it difficult to accept—all his life. Being a historian required and even rewarded it, offering something like the reassurances he thought he heard on that day. History brought wholeness closer than anything else he had ever done. It was a way of coming home.

TWENTY

A Rare Possibility of Usefulness: 1955–1958

ONLY THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY COULD HAVE GRANTED Kennan the freedom to live in the past with so few obligations in the present. Any university appointment would have involved teaching, and Kennan— despite his superb skills as a lecturer—had no desire to supervise students, grade examinations, or serve on faculty committees. “He had no conception of what academic life is like,” the Princeton historian Cyril Black recalled. “It’s hard work, especially here. He wanted it to be like Oxford, I suppose: give a lecture or two a week and then stay away as much as possible.” The Institute was in fact better than Oxford—or at least all parts of it except All Souls —since it enrolled no students, required no lecturing, and specified no expectations for publication. So Kennan was delighted when Oppenheimer called him in on a cold and rainy December 29, 1954, to say that the board of trustees “would be glad to have me there as a member, and to help with the attendant financial problems, for some years to come. Nothing could have been more gratifying to me.”¹

But the proposed Kennan appointment—which amounted to lifetime tenure—became a test of Oppenheimer’s authority as director. The man who built the atomic bomb had found that task considerably easier than running the Institute. Its faculty remained bitterly divided between the mathematicians, mostly past their professional prime with plenty of time to make trouble, and their more productive colleagues in other fields. Oppenheimer favored the latter group while cultivating friendships with sympathetic trustees. This was an unhealthy situation, board member