November 1, when Kennan again saw John Maury. “I think there is a hooker in this somewhere,” he warned. “I cannot understand their accepting this kind of humiliation.” Khrushchev was indeed wavering, but he soon stopped by ordering a full-scale invasion of Hungary on November 4, which brutally crushed the rebellion. The fighting killed some 2,700 people, and another 230, including Nagy, were eventually executed.
While all of this was happening, the British, French, and Israelis—with exquisitely bad timing and without having consulted the United States—had launched an ill-planned invasion of Egypt with a view to retaking the Suez Canal. That left Eisenhower wondering how to condemn one such action and not the other: he solved the problem by condemning both, while asking the United Nations to do the same. Under brutal pressure from Washington, the Anglo-French-Israeli forces had no choice but to accept a cease-fire and withdraw. Khrushchev and Nasser achieved their objectives, leaving NATO to face the worst crisis in its history. Nevertheless, on November 6, Eisenhower won reelection by a landslide.26
“The events of these recent days have been so shattering,” Kennan wrote on the seventh, “that I am at a loss to know how to react to them.” They had confirmed, “beyond my wildest dreams,” his doubts about “liberation” and the appeasement of “third world” dictators. But the United States and its allies were now in a dangerous situation over which they appeared to have little control. Despite this, Americans had voted Eisenhower a second term with a huge majority. So of what use was Kennan’s advice, even if anyone were willing to listen to it?
He was sure that in most instances he had been right. Almost alone, in 1945, he had foreseen “the horror of Russia’s rule in the satellites, and the necessity of its eventual disintegration.” He had accurately diagnosed the weaknesses of Stalin’s rule. The Marshall Plan had been his idea, and he had correctly calculated what was needed for its success. Had he been listened to on Germany, that country would now have been reunited, free of communist control. He had urged, before the Korean War broke out, that Taiwan be placed under MacArthur’s control: “no nonsense about returning it to China.” He had warned against invading North Korea. He had opposed deferring to the United Nations rather than to allies with “a traditional stake in our future.” So what should he do with insights like these? “Bury them? Hide them? Die with them? They are not wanted.”27
IV.
The George Eastman Professorship in Balliol College, established in 1929 by the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, was meant to bring to Oxford each year a senior American scholar “of the highest distinction,” regardless of field. Kennan’s 1955 appointment came at a good time, strengthening his case for tenure at the Institute for Advanced Study. Before accepting it, though, he checked with Loy Henderson to make sure that the secretary of state had no plans to recall him to duty, as Foreign Service rules would allow him to do until Kennan was sixty-five. Dulles assured Henderson that he had no such intention, so Kennan was free to go. The appointment required giving a set of lectures, an obligation he took seriously enough to propose writing between twenty-five and thirty on the history of Soviet foreign policy. “I think you rather overestimate the amount of care you ought to give to these,” a former Rhodes scholar cautioned. Few people in Oxford spoke from full texts. As at Princeton, “notes would be all you need.”28
Relieved by this advice, determined to finish
Four of the six Kennans—Grace, now graduated from Radcliffe, had a job in Washington, and Joan was about to begin her third year at Connecticut College—sailed for Norway in late July on the SS
So Kennan amused himself by outlining a set of Reith lectures that would begin with the sterility of American society, point out the overpopulated nastiness of the rest of the world, and conclude by proposing a new country composed of Great Britain, Canada, and the healthy parts of the United States (the South, Texas, and California would go elsewhere), with its capital to be near Ottawa. Democracy would then save itself from itself by half a century of benevolent dictatorship. “How would all this sound over the BBC?” Miss Kallin, fortunately, was not on board to say, and after arriving in Kristiansand Kennan settled—or so he thought—for something less controversial. The series would be “Russia, the Atom, and the West,” and he had rough drafts ready by the time he left for Oxford at end of August. But “damn poor lectures they are, by and large. This is no longer my
“Oxford!” Kennan exclaimed in his diary. “Serene courtyards. Magnificent old towers, graceful but strong, seeming to swim against the background of the blowing clouds.” But that was as far as romanticism went. Industrial plants bracketed the university, with grimly goggled motorcyclists shuttling noisily between them. Tourists dutifully dragged themselves among colleges and churches. Restaurant patrons whispered over menus that never changed. Sundays, with everything closed and children to be amused, seemed meant to “try men’s souls.” The parks were damp, the suburbs prim, and lovers huddled for warmth along riverbanks: “Ah, love in England, so frail, so handicapped, so overwhelmingly without a chance, and so terribly poignant by consequence!” Michaelmas term would not begin until October, so there was hardly anyone to talk with beyond the family. And when dons and students did return, they brought viruses with them. All the Kennans came down with influenza.
Balliol housed them in a Merton Street flat that presumed servants no longer present. There was no central heating, so it fell to George to carry coal up two flights of stairs and ashes back down. “Your brother thinks he is quite a martyr,” Annelise wrote Jeanette. The dining room doubled as his office, and he had to hire his own secretaries. The library system bewildered him. He was “vastly over-committed.” Real work could only be done at night, in weariness, without inspiration, “getting something written, even if inferior.” There was no point in trying to rest: strength would only be drained “by trivia or one sort or another, the following morning.”31
Trivia infused the university itself. Kennan had imagined its colleges, Berlin was sure, “as grand, old, almost feudal institutions,” in which distinguished men dined at high table, then lingered in common rooms over port, claret, nuts, and snuff, their conversation “polished by deep traditions, refinement, moral quality.” What he found instead was “a lot of idle gossip about local affairs, academic tittle-tattle. He was horrified by that. Profound disappointment. England was not as he thought. An idealized image had been shattered.” Attendance at a single Balliol fellows’ meeting convinced Kennan never to return: “I’ve never seen such backbiting, such fury, such factions in my life.” Oxford was “a tight, tough community,” he wrote Oppenheimer at the end of October, and “few of its mysteries are to be penetrated in the course of a few months by the casual visiting professor.” He had not had a serious discussion with a colleague since arriving, “except with Is[a]iah Berlin—where you can’t help having it.”32
The Kennans did, however, befriend two American graduate students, Anthony Quainton, later a career Foreign Service officer, and Richard H. Ullman, a historian of early Anglo-Soviet relations who would become a professor of international affairs at Princeton. The informality of Sunday lunches surprised Ullman: Wendy and Christopher roamed freely and even romped boisterously under the dining room table. “I was quite impressed by that. I thought
