George F. Kennan : an American life

[George’s] relationship with the kids was terrific.”

His lectures, delivered twice a week in the Examination Schools building on High Street, were also impressive. Kennan wrote out every word and read them beautifully, Ullman recalled. As had happened at Chicago, they quickly outgrew the assigned space and were filling the largest hall available. “The terrible thing,” Kennan complained, was that they were “tremendously successful.” Berlin’s followed immediately, so hundreds of people came, staying for both. Dons were sitting on radiators and hanging from chandeliers, one attendee remembered. But Kennan was again drafting his lectures just prior to delivering them—about ten thousand words a week—while also carrying coal, getting sick, recoiling from common room banalities, helping to manage small children, and preparing for the Reith broadcasts that would begin on November 10, when he would have not hundreds but hundreds of thousands of listeners.³³

With television in its infancy, radio still dominated the British airwaves, so the lectures were a major event. Delivered on six successive Sunday evenings, each required rehearsal as well as careful editing to fit within the time allotted. Kennan would drive himself to the BBC’s London studios, make last-minute corrections while waiting for the nine o’clock news to end, and at nine-fifteen take his cue from the announcer’s remorseless “Mr. Kennan.”

I knew, then, that for twenty-eight and a half minutes into the future I would be left alone—alone as I had never been before—alone as I had never hoped to be—alone to acquit or disgrace myself, as my capacities might determine—but alone beyond the power of any other human being to help me.

Anything unexpected—a botched sentence, a misplaced page, even a sneeze or a blown nose—would be a national embarrassment: “I felt a tremendous sense of responsibility. Half of England was listening to these things.” Kennan sensed this shortly after the broadcasts began, when he stopped by his Oxford garage to pick up his car. “The man behind the parts desk, with his greasy hands, when he heard me speak, said: ‘Where did I hear that voice before?’ ”³⁴

V.

“Kennan Says Rule in Soviet is Shaky,” The New York Times reported on the morning after his first Reith lecture. The next week’s headline was a bit more startling—“Kennan Calls Talks with Soviet Futile”—but the story revealed that he was only questioning the need for high-level summitry. On November 25, however, the lead got more attention: “Kennan Offers Plan on Neutral Germany.” Was it not “quixotic,” he was reported as having asked, to be promoting “freedom” by consigning East Germans—and hence all of Eastern Europe—to indefinite Soviet domination? Only a mutual withdrawal of all foreign forces from Germany could bring about its reunification, and that would require its detachment from all Cold War alliances. “Kennan Calls Atom Race Suicidal,” The Washington Post shrieked on December 2. NATO allies should therefore reduce their military establishments to militia levels, “somewhat on the Swiss pattern,” for the Soviet challenge lay more in the realm of politics than on battlefields. It followed, then, both the Times and the Post reported on December 16, that Kennan had warned against seeing NATO as an end in itself. To strengthen it would risk war, to perpetuate it would delay peace, and its continental European members had no reason to fear an Anglo-Canadian-American special relationship.³⁵

The stories oversimplified, but not by much. Kennan had made substantially these points. Curiously, neither newspaper picked up what turned out to be his most provocative suggestion: that Europe would be safe if each of its countries not now under Moscow’s control could credibly promise resistance after occupation.

Look here, you may be able to overrun us, if you are unwise enough to attempt it, but you will have a small profit from it; we are in a position to assure that not a single Communist or other person likely to perform your political business will be available to you for this purpose; you will find here no adequate nucleus of a puppet regime; on the contrary, you will be faced with the united and organized hostility of an entire nation; your stay among us will not be a happy one; we will make you pay bitterly for every day of it; and it will be without favorable long-term political prospects.

Kennan was again, of course, channeling Gibbon on the difficulty of holding distant provinces. And how could he be sure that the Soviet Union had learned the great historian’s lesson? “I think I can give personal assurance that any country which is in a position to say this to Moscow . . . will have little need of foreign garrisons to assure its immunity from Soviet attack.”³⁶

Each of these arguments had appeared over the past decade in Policy Planning Staff papers, war college lectures, correspondence, articles, and books. Never before, though, had Kennan pulled them together and broadcast them, quite literally, to the world. The hitherto “mysterious Mr. X,” all the more so now for having been kicked out of both Stalin’s Soviet Union and Dulles’s State Department, appeared at last to be emerging from the constraints imposed by official secrecy, personal discretion, and the lack of an appropriate forum. He was, before an immense audience, baring his soul. The Reith lectures were “secular sermons,” one listener recalled. “George Kennan was the best sermonizer I’ve heard, anywhere.”³⁷

Kennan had accepted the BBC’s invitation because it further bolstered his scholarly reputation: Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, and Arnold Toynbee had been earlier Reith lecturers. But having done so with no particular topic in mind, and having misjudged how long it would take to prepare when he finally did choose one, he fell back on familiar concepts but was close to panic as he was conveying them. And as with the “long telegram,” the “X” article, the Chicago lectures, the Tempelhof statement, and the Scranton speech, he gave little if any thought to what the response would be to what he said. The first hint of trouble came when a reporter asked John Foster Dulles at a press conference, after the fifth lecture, whether he might now bring Kennan back into the State Department to get the benefit of his thinking. “Well,” Dulles replied, provoking laughter, “we have an opportunity to get his thinking anyway, don’t we?”³⁸

The timing, unplanned by Kennan, could hardly have been better: his final broadcast had long been scheduled for Sunday evening, December 15, 1957, but the NATO heads of government had only recently decided to convene a conference that would begin in Paris on the following morning. It was the first time they had all gathered since establishing the alliance in 1949. From their point of view, though, the content of Kennan’s lectures could hardly have been worse.

NATO was reeling from the shocks of the Suez crisis, the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, and the unexpected launch, on October 4, of the first earth satellite, Sputnik, which appeared to confirm Khrushchev’s claims to have developed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Dulles sought to reassure the allies with an offer of tactical nuclear weapons and intermediate-range missiles, but since these were meant for use on their own territory, this did little to diminish their anxiety. Eisenhower added to it when he suffered a mild stroke on November 25—coming after his 1955 heart attack and an emergency operation for ileitis in 1956, it was his third health crisis in as many years. Meanwhile West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer had not yet fully convinced his countrymen—especially his critics in the Social Democratic Party—that they should forgo reunification in return for American protection. The last thing any of the leaders in Paris wanted, therefore, was for the principal American strategist of containment, in the most public manner possible, to be calling on them to reconsider it.

That is why Adenauer complained to Eisenhower on December 17, “with some impatience” as the official record understated it, about “the recent lectures by George Kennan which unfortunately had made quite an impression.” The opposition newspapers were “quick to pick up this kind of thing.” Eisenhower agreed explosively —no small matter in a man upon whose blood pressure the fate of the West appeared to depend:

The President said that nothing could be more wicked for Germany and the world than the neutralization of