George F. Kennan : an American life

“I think this leaves the honors to George,” Acheson acknowledged to C. C. Burlingham, a distinguished New York lawyer, then ninety-nine, whom both men knew and revered. He had written to Kennan, Acheson assured the old man—the tone was more that of an apologetic schoolboy than of an aggrieved elder statesman—to say that “although we were engaged in committing mutual mayhem, I was still fond of whatever might be left of him.”⁵⁴

VIII.

Not much was. The Reith lectures controversy was really about Germany’s place in postwar Europe, and Acheson easily prevailed. He did so because he knew when not to plan policy. He had supported Program A until leaks to the press ruled out its pursuit in the spring of 1949; then, to Kennan’s bewilderment, he simply dropped it. “If you couldn’t get it done you’d proceed another way, but you didn’t agonize over things,” Acheson’s daughter Mary Bundy recalled. “[H]e was a lot tougher than George, and he was a lot more practical a person.”

Kennan, in contrast, was constantly recycling, rearranging, and repackaging his ideas. The BBC broadcasts contained no proposals that Acheson hadn’t heard before. He had never heard them all at once, though, or in so public a forum, or at such a critical moment. They made it seem as though Kennan, having lost the policy battle in Washington, was now appealing over the heads of elected NATO leaders to their domestic opponents, and even to the Soviet Union itself, the country he had once sought to contain. Acheson was “absolutely furious,” Kennan admitted. Bundy remembered this as the moment her father lost confidence “in the stability of the man’s thinking, really.”

Stability was indeed the issue, but it applied to the entire postwar European settlement. For Kennan, who believed himself more an expert on Germany than Acheson and his supporters, it was absurd to seek safety in that country’s indefinite division. “I had, after all, spent five years of my life in Berlin. I was bilingual in the language. What the hell [did] these people know?” No one in his right mind could have planned such an arrangement, which could fall apart at any moment under the combined pressures of German irredentism, Anglo-French anxiety, Eastern European irresponsibility, Soviet neocolonialism, and American militarism. Over it all loomed the unprecedented danger of nuclear war: any other course, Kennan was sure, would be better than that.⁵⁵

Acheson, despite his fury, was more hopeful. He saw more clearly than Kennan that however illogical the division of Germany was, few people anywhere—not even most Germans—were seeking to overturn it. The very danger of war that Kennan regarded as destabilizing had, in Acheson’s view, the opposite effect: it was “deterrence.” A post–World War II order was evolving in Europe, much as legal precedents evolve, without anyone having designed it, as had happened with so little success after World War I. Trained as a lawyer, Acheson understood and respected this process, so much so that it became almost theology. Anything that might deflect NATO from its present path bordered on heresy—even the grand design of a former policy planner, the logic of which Acheson had once embraced.

Both men were right, but in different eras. Acheson’s settlement kept the peace in Europe for the next three decades, and by the 1970s even Kennan could see its robustness. “[W]e might all have been spared a lot of trouble if someone in authority had come to me before these lectures were given and had said: ‘Look here, George, the decision to leave Europe divided . . . has already been taken, even if it hasn’t been announced; the talk about German unification is all eyewash; and there isn’t the faintest thing to be gained by your attempting to change this situation.’” Or as he put it in 1984, “the right thing said at the wrong time is almost worse than saying the wrong thing at the right time.”⁵⁶

But by the end of the 1980s, the division of Germany was breaking down, as Kennan had predicted it would while on the Policy Planning Staff in 1948–49 and over the BBC in 1957. This was occurring, though, not through the negotiations he had envisaged with Moscow but because the Soviet system itself was breaking apart, something an earlier Kennan had foreseen from his vantage point in Riga in 1932 and in the “X” article of 1947. He had, his friend Oliver Franks pointed out, put the cart before the horse in making German reunification the prerequisite for ending the Cold War: the sequence, in fact, was the other way around. “It’s very difficult,” Franks added, “to distinguish between those insights of Kennan which are almost prophetic in their accuracy, and those which just aren’t.”⁵⁷

IX.

Kennan resumed his Oxford lectures late, on February 18, 1958, delivering only five before Hilary term ended the following month. This disappointed his audience, because he had promised a history of Soviet foreign policy and got only as far as the Rapallo Conference of 1922. Health was cited as one of the reasons, but the Reith controversy was still a major distraction for Kennan, leaving little time for anything else. Late-winter Oxford was as depressing as ever, so much so that he now missed—however implausibly—the United States. Hearing an American accent made him realize “how much this period abroad has caused me to love my own people.” To be sure, they faced great problems: they were destined “within my children’s time to know unprecedented horrors and miseries and probably to pass entirely from the scene of world history.” If he could do anything to keep them from that fate, “this would be the most useful purpose to which I could put the remainder of my life.”

But what? The crisis he had been through had shown that scholarship and current events were “like oil and water; they have nothing to do with one another; attention given to one is given at the cost of the other.” Nobody thought his historical writing relevant to the present, but giving it up for journalism or politics would require sacrificing the independence that the Institute for Advanced Study had provided him. “I am in some travail,” he admitted to “Eka” Kantorowicz, over “how to reconcile the obligations of a historian with the maddening and unaccountable preference of the public . . . to hear what I have to say about contemporary events, concerning which I know almost nothing. If you have any suggestions, I should be grateful.”⁵⁸

The Kennans spent the Oxford spring break at Cascais, in their much-loved Portugal, where George finished his response to Acheson for Foreign Affairs and began pondering his future. The leisure, the sun, and the sea caused him to tell himself—most uncharacteristically—that he should lighten up:

I see myself laughing at myself—even at my weaknesses—recognizing the latter for the anachronisms that they are—sketching and writing fiction when the alternative would be restlessness—trying harder than I have ever tried to taste and preserve in this way the texture of life, the flavour of each day, as though it were the last I had to live—inflicting a certain asceticism on the body (for what is worse than an aging body indulged), but doing so, by all means, gaily, ironically, without grimness, taking with a laugh and without fear the body’s aches and pains, its desires, and its need for discipline.

The next evening he started Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, couldn’t stop until he finished it, and then was so excited that he got no sleep. The following morning found him “dead tired and full of remorse. Time to begin laughing at myself.”

An excellent opportunity arose the following day when Kennan paid his respects to Dr. Antonio Salazar, still Portugal’s prime minister, whom he had first met during the Azores bases crisis of 1943. Then almost seventy, the durable autocrat was happy to see Kennan, but totally unsympathetic to his recent proposals. “Disengagement” made no sense because no one trusted the Germans or the Russians. Nuclear weapons were too terrible ever to be used and hence nothing to worry about. Intercontinental ballistic missiles had hardly even registered with Salazar. Kennan had the good sense not to argue with the old man, or even to fall into a diary funk afterward—this was progress.⁵⁹

The last months in England were far more relaxed than the fall and winter had been. Kennan lectured in