George F. Kennan : an American life

Oppenheimer had taken in proposing him for tenure at the Institute for Advanced Study: Kennan now had “security for life.” But the implications unsettled him as much as they reassured him. “Is it right,” he wondered, “that one should become, when this side of fifty, suddenly without anguish?”

The “torture of the constant presence of the opposite sex” was abating, but what about other forms of anguish? Chekhov had been lucky to die so young having achieved so much. “I still have work to do, and am doing it; but it seems too easy.... Men—or at least such men as I—are no good unless they are driven, hounded, haunted, forced to spend every day as though it were the last they were to spend on earth.” Old age must therefore become “a sort of self-torture—not driving one’s self, as some do, to pretend to be younger than one really is, but forcing the muscles of body, intellect, and capacity for sympathy to work full time, even at the cost of shortening life.”¹⁴

Physical self-torture came easily enough, as Kennan’s Hodge Road neighbor Bunny Dilworth discovered one weekend at the farm. “George had no sooner got there,” her husband Dick recalled, “than he rushed out and started the tractor to mow the lawn. Then he’d rush inside and go upstairs and type. He was typing on and off most of the night. But in the morning he was out again mowing the lawn.” On another occasion, visiting the Kennans in Kristiansand, both Dilworths were awakened by the sound of a wheelbarrow. “Here was George, with really immense stones, bigger than a normal person could pick up, building a set of steps down to the water. He was incapable of just stopping and taking a few hours off.” Kennan did much of his own yard work around the Princeton house, devoting several days in September 1956 to digging up a dead maple. On the morning of the twenty-third, the university awarded him an honorary degree, which Kennan accepted alongside Dag Hammarskjold, the secretary general of the United Nations. That afternoon “I returned to my tree and exhausted myself in two or three further hours of hacking.”¹⁵

Intellectual exertion—particularly when it involved empathy—was more difficult. Kennan achieved it in his histories: one of the most striking features of Russia Leaves the War and The Decision to Intervene was his ability to put himself in the position of the people he wrote about. He took pains to see things from their point of view, without imposing his own or those of a different age. He listened, but rarely judged. He showed respect for the dead.

But rarely for the living, or for the culture they had created. He loathed “this thin, tight, lonely American life.” He acknowledged “a growing gap between my own outlook and that of my countrymen,” but blamed their habits, not his, for it. He had a vision of what the country once was, Dick Dilworth sensed, “and what under better circumstances it could be.” But it hadn’t turned out that way. He was “like a rejected lover.” If not for the family, Kennan told himself, he would have become “a recluse and an esthete,” living somewhere on the west coast of Scotland, reading, traveling, studying “the beauty man has created,” to the end that “I might someday create some of my own.” What beauty was there, though, in the United States? “Before us stretches the whole great Pacific Coast,” he wrote while on a flight to California,

and my only thought, as we approach it, is: throughout the length and breadth of it not one single thing of any importance is being said or done; not one thing that gives hope for the discovery of the paths to a better and firmer and more promising human life, not one thing that would have validity beyond the immediate context of time and place in which all of it occurs.

Yes, but the people were happy, someone would say. Why not join them? “Forget that you have ever been a mature person. Learn to play and be amused, again, like a child.” “Perhaps, perhaps,” was the reply. But elsewhere “man has from time to time risen to great dignity and to immense creative stature. I have lived too long in the neighborhood of those evidences to forget them so easily.”

Kennan tried to be polite to the people he met. He imagined how his mother would have wanted him to live: “unhurriedly, with grace and dignity, secure and relaxed in the consciousness of her love and her forgiveness, not pecking at myself for past faults nor worrying about present limitations.” This required constant effort, though, for it meant acknowledging kindness and accepting hospitality while concealing from those providing these gifts all the things that “divide us so deeply.” He was learning to live “in an inner world. I am utterly without relationship to this country and this age.”¹⁶

Paradoxically, though, with every public statement, he had found wider and more appreciative audiences. Kennan’s platform skills partly accounted for this: Princeton students not only applauded a lecture he gave there but surprised him by roaring with laughter, “which I trust was with me and not at me.” With American Diplomacy required reading in university classrooms across the country, he was getting similar responses wherever he spoke. A Stanford instructor suggested that his students were finding, in Kennan’s views, a way to rebel against those of their parents. That led him to worry that he had courted popularity, that he had “watered down my own thoughts, sweetened them with a lot of optimistic baloney.” If his youthful admirers ever caught on to what he really believed, “they would probably hate me for it. If they approve of me, it is because I have been a hypocrite and have successfully disguised myself and my thoughts.”¹⁷

And what of his own children? If American culture encouraged healthy physical, intellectual, and spiritual development, he could leave them to thrive within it, he wrote in the summer of 1956. It did, however, just the opposite.

How can one sit by and see them become older without really maturing: socially uncertain, imitative, conformist, nervously over-wrought by too much television, exposed first to the false excitement of teen-age hot- rod adventure, then moving into some premature liaison with the opposite sex[?] . . . In this false life innocence is lost before maturity is achieved. To say nothing of the poverty of education, the incoherence of speech, the never- ending mumbling of stereotypes—the cult, in fact, of un-eloquence, of verbal awkwardness—the pretense of tough, disillusioned taciturnity.

Social adaptability required consigning children to mediocrity, “in order that they may feel comfortable in their time.” He should therefore advise Christopher, now six, that “whatever I like, you learn to dislike; whatever I believe in, you distrust; whatever I am, you try to be the opposite.” Only then could he have “the faintest chance of fitting into the new age.”¹⁸

For all of his pessimism about culture in the United States, Kennan had not yet given up on its politics. He respected Eisenhower but thought him too inclined to defer to Dulles and to McCarthyite pressures in foreign policy. He had registered as a Democrat during his brief Pennsylvania congressional candidacy, but in terms of domestic affairs, “I am much closer to the Republicans.” He opposed farm subsidies and distrusted labor unions while worrying increasingly about race relations, “still the most terrible . . . of our national problems.” In the privacy of his diary, however, he regretted Lincoln’s having kept the nation together during the Civil War: it would have been better off without the “Latin-American fringe” of California, Texas, and Florida. “I ought, in truth,” he concluded, “to have nothing to do with either political party.”

Politicians, however, could still attract him. Kennan admired Adlai Stevenson “as a sensitive, intelligent and valiant person” who ought to be running the country and “probably never will.” Nevertheless, he agreed early in 1956 to co-chair the New Jersey “Stevenson-for-President” committee. He suggested saying little about foreign policy but sent Stevenson four single-spaced typed pages on what he should say. He even made a campaign speech in Princeton, “a task for which I am very poorly fitted,” assuring his neighbors that Stevenson would bring an “intellectual and moral conscience” to government, would conduct “an exercise of national self-scrutiny,” and would have the courage to tell Americans what they would not necessarily like to hear.¹⁹