London, Swansea, Aberystwyth, and Cambridge, the latter on a spring day, with punters on the Cam, tennis players in the Backs, under “such a wonderful mellow, shimmering light as one sees only in the French impressionist paintings.” John Holmes, a Canadian diplomat who attended an off-the-record Chatham House discussion with Kennan, found him reluctant to disagree with any of his critics. “[W]ell beyond most mortals” in his sense of history but “incredibly naive” about current policy, Kennan left Holmes wondering “if perhaps it was I rather than he who was blind.... I could see, however, why so many people have a great affection for him and why, at the same time, they all grow so exasperated with him.”60
Kennan’s last Oxford talk, on May 13, was to American students at Rhodes House. He told them, as he later summarized it,
that neither our political system, nor the popular attitudes underlying it, were adequate to the solution of our national problems, but that one should nevertheless not hesitate to do whatever one could in public life, because (1) you could never tell; history performed strange tricks on us, and I might be wrong; and (2) even if we were going down, that was no reason for deserting the ship: I had sometimes thought, in my blacker moments, that even if the things I cared about were disappearing, I could find satisfaction in the feeling that they would disappear more slowly, more stubbornly, more majestically, for what I had done to invigorate them.
The young men, Kennan could see, were “interested but disturbed” by what he had said: coming from him, however, it was a rare expression of optimism.61
Three days later he traveled by rail to Cornwall to pick up a collection of Russian revolutionary newspapers, with the last leg of the trip on a branch line little changed since the nineteenth century: “The little locomotive puffed furiously as it pulled us up and up through the forests to Bodmin. . . . It reminded me of my youth; and I was aware of experiencing, this one last time, a form of transportation which the younger generation will probably never know.” Feeling this loss yet mindful of the future, he rode back to Oxford with an imaginary companion.
At fifty-four, he told himself and his fellow traveler, he could assume perhaps another ten or fifteen years of active life. Both his government experience and his scholarly pursuits were wearing thin. So what would he lose, his companion asked, “by setting out, like the [M]arxists, to act upon life rather than to understand it?” Why not seek “real power,” in the hope of accomplishing “at least one or two concrete things before turning [it] over entirely to the new generation?”
I saw myself shedding the naive sincerity I have worn on my sleeve throughout . . . my life; ceasing to be the wide-eyed child I have always been; becoming as wise as the serpent, and as lonely; taking no one fully into confidence; playing the game as others play it, but not for myself . . . , rather for the sake of what I represent and belong to, which is now in such urgent and mortal peril.
There could be, his friend whispered, great strength in choosing this path, for everything would fall into place: there would be “a rationale for all personal choices, as well as for professional decisions.” It could “take up the strains created, and fill the gaps opened up, by increasing age.” It could relieve personal frustrations—“the passage of sexual love, the growing up and weaning of one’s children, ... the decline of one’s powers of imagination and perception”—allowing their acceptance “with a scornful smile.” For as Goethe had written:
Perhaps, Kennan concluded, Mephistopheles had something to offer.62
TWENTY-ONE
Kennedy and Yugoslavia: 1958–1963
“NEVER, I BELIEVE, HAVE I PARTED WITH GREATER INDIFFERENCE from any place where I have lived,” George wrote of Oxford after he and his family finally left it in June 1958 for a summer in Kristiansand, before returning to the United States. Norway was brighter, cleaner, and more congenial than Great Britain, yet even there youths had few interests beyond motorbikes, sailing was a dying sport, walking was a forgotten pastime, and adults were succumbing to “an anti-intellectualism, a cultural flaccidity, a complacent materialism worse than ours—plus a devastating secularism.” If this was happening in Scandinavia, then did the West deserve to survive? Hadn’t the time really come for the Russians to take over?
It was another descent into diary despair, although this time with a twist: “I cannot believe it.” Once subject “to the wind of material plenty,” Kennan predicted, the Russians would be “as helpless as the rest of us—even more so—under its debilitating and insidious breath.” He had been forecasting the corruption of communism by capitalism since 1932, but his lack of faith in his own country had made it hard to see when or how that might occur. Now, though, having spent a year abroad, the United States was looking better to him.1
On June 27 Kennan flew to Copenhagen, where the State Department had opened a new embassy building. He found the male staffers “loose-jointed, casual, diffident, drawling, yet full of modesty and common sense”—qualities he had admired, during the war, in the young American occupiers of Italy. The women were crisp, controlled, and helpful, their voices as innocently unselfconscious as if “they had never left Kansas City.” Suddenly— melodramatically—Kennan was homesick:
Oh my countrymen, my countrymen, my hope and my despair! What virtues you conceal beneath your slouching self-deprecation: virtues inconceivable to the pompous continental. How strong you are in all that of which you are yourselves not conscious; and how childish and superficial you are in your own concept of the sources of your excellence.
His frustrations about America were really frustrations about himself: “These are my people; it is to them, with all their deficiencies, that I, with all my deficiencies, belong. It is to them that I must return, after every rebellion, for punishment or forgiveness.” Like distant but patient parents, their strengths were not to be underestimated:
Take heed, you scoffers, you patronizers, you envious and malicious detractors, you conceited and superior Europeans, you Nassers and Khrushchevs: if you continue with your efforts to tear us down, you will rouse us yet to maturity, to introspection, to disillusionment, to cunning in our own defense; and when you do, you will discover in us reserves of strength such as you never dreamed of; and then you, even more than we, will come to regret the passing of the days of our own innocence.
Kennan shared the next leg of his flight, to Warsaw, with an Air Force attache, his wife, and their family. Despite heavy turbulence, he chewed his gum, read his magazines, and exuded complete confidence. Would he do so in the face of “atomic death”? Probably, Kennan concluded. “Great institutions create, for those who are within them, their own illusions of security; and the United States Air Force is now a great institution.”
The Polish trip, arranged through Oxford friends, was Kennan’s first to a communist country since the Soviet Union expelled him in 1952. Most of Warsaw had been rebuilt from its near-obliteration, on Hitler’s orders, during
