those personally lovable people who just can’t bear to recognize that anything is ugly and when he gets a hint of it turns and flees or reaches for his kid gloves. I never thought he had great scope or imagination and he looks to me like a fish in water too deep for him.
“Your analysis of George’s character seems to me wholly right,” Acheson responded. “I had quite forgotten that he was engaged to Eleanor. What an interesting subject for speculation that is.”45
Kennan was still in Crans when he saw newspaper stories reporting Acheson’s assault and Truman’s comment: there had been no warning. He was at a loss to account for “this sudden vehement outburst of malevolence” by people he had never publicly criticized “who had hitherto treated me only with cordiality.” His difficulty in Moscow, after all, had been “that I
Not surprisingly, Kennan’s ulcer flared up again under the stress. The demands of the autumn had left him physically debilitated, and he had picked up a sinus infection on the arduous drive to Switzerland. Feeling miserable, he checked himself into a Zurich hospital in mid-January, while Annelise kept Christopher and Wendy busy with skiing lessons in Crans. That at least got George out of a further discussion of the Reith lectures, which the Congress for Cultural Freedom—the secretly CIA-funded organization for European intellectuals—had arranged in Paris. While Joe Alsop, Raymond Aron, Denis Healey, and Sidney Hook were dismantling Kennan’s arguments, his doctors were probing his “ghastly digestive system.” Sitting for hours one morning with a tube in his stomach, he reached the unsettling conclusion that Dulles might understand him better than Acheson did. “One would think,” Kennan wrote of the chorus of critics singing to the tune of his former boss, that “I had caught them all doing something they were ashamed of.”47
Discharged from the hospital with orders to avoid further tension, George packed the family into the car and drove it back across the Alps into France through a raging blizzard. Fighting snow and ice all the way, they crossed the Channel, this time in an automobile air ferry, and by the end of January were back in Oxford, where George was swamped with unanswered correspondence, demands for interviews, and the need to prepare a new set of lectures. The children, who had thrived in Switzerland, soon had severe coughs, and even Annelise, unusually, was depressed. “Between you and me we just loathe [Oxford],” she wrote Jeanette, and could easily “start chalking up the days until we can leave.”48
VII.
“The way in which the Establishment set out to swat him down—the things that Dean Acheson said in print about him—wounded [Kennan] very much,” Ullman recalled. Meanwhile well-meaning friends, dismayed by the rift, were trying to heal it. “I suppose it was necessary,” Joseph C. Harsch, the National Broadcasting Company correspondent in London, wrote Acheson: “If he had to be destroyed only you could do it.” But couldn’t Acheson let Kennan know that there had been nothing personal in the “dissection”? Not yet, Acheson replied: Kennan’s lectures had been not only silly but “extremely harmful.”
An appeal to the lotus-eating spirit in mankind, which urges him to relax just at the time when real effort might possibly cause a great improvement, could be disastrous. . . . I decided to let him have it, and the reports which have come to me from the continent indicate that it was well worthwhile.
Someday he would write George a friendly note. “For the present, I wish to God that he would devote himself to giving us a new volume on the period 1917–1920 as delightful as the last, and would leave the next forty years alone.” Harsch tried again, pointing out that Kennan had been sick and was still convalescing. Acheson was unmoved: “One can hardly do as much damage as George has done,” he grumbled to William Tyler, of the American embassy in Bonn, “and then rush off to immunity in the hospital.”49
“Your January broadside was perfect as a bucket-full of cold water down George’s neck and into the faces of the admiring throng,” Tyler replied. “As soon as the Germans found out that George was unlikely to be the next secretary of state in a Democratic administration, (and you removed any expectations they may have had on that score) they lost interest in his arabesques.” The “brawl” with Kennan had indeed pained their friends, but as Acheson reminded Philip Jessup, “I was not writing for our friends.... I was writing for the Germans to destroy as effectively as I could the corroding effect of what he had said and the belief that he was a seer in these matters.” Kennan had been trotting out Program A as a “panacea” for every crisis since 1948. Of course it could be looked at again, “just as a loaded gun can be.” But “I am against it.”50
One prominent Democrat, however, chose not to let Acheson tell him what to think. Senator John F. Kennedy wrote Kennan on February 13 to say that he had read the Reith lectures, thought them excellent, and regretted the extent to which their contents had been “twisted and misrepresented”—nothing justified “the personal criticisms that have been made.” He did disagree with Kennan on several points; still it was
most satisfying that there is at least one member of the “opposition” who is not only performing his critical duty but also providing a carefully formulated, comprehensive, and brilliantly written set of alternative proposals and perspectives. You have directed our attention to the right questions and in a manner that allows us to test rigorously our current assumptions.
“It meant a great deal to me,” Kennan responded, “to know that you were not among those who consider the Reith lectures to have been some kind of outrage.” Composed under difficult circumstances, they certainly had their shortcomings. Surely, though, NATO policy was sufficiently robust “to stand re-examination at this moment, which seems to me a very dangerous and crucial one.”51
Unaware of this correspondence, Acheson had sent “Jacquie” Kennedy—whose family he had long known—a copy of a speech he had made objecting to her husband’s attacks on French policy in Algeria. “Mr. Acheson” got back a handwritten note praising his “beautifully constructed prose,” while wondering how someone “capable of such an Olympian tone can become so personal when attacking policy differences.” Caught off guard, Acheson reminded her that the Olympians had been “a pretty personal lot,” but he admitted that “[p]erhaps lawyers, who are always contentious fellows, are too hardened to be sensitive to these things.... So, you see, you have me very much mixed up.” Two days later, on March 10, he asked a mutual friend to tell Kennan that although he would soon be restating his argument in
Kennan wrote back immediately, claiming to harbor no bitterness but seizing the moment to indulge in a bit of it nonetheless: “I could have wished that your statement had not been so promptly and eagerly exploited by people for whose integrity of motive I have not the same respect I have for your own.” He had also been “saddened” by Truman’s outburst. “I did not thrust myself on General Marshall or yourself as head of a planning staff, nor on Mr. Truman as Ambassador to Russia, and the efforts I put forward, in all three instances, were the best of which I was capable.” As for Acheson’s
