George F. Kennan : an American life

company of her old man, with his muddy boots, his bills and workmen, his ditches and gutters, and his grim physiognomy—well, at least he takes a walk occasionally.”⁷

The old man, that fall and winter, was grimly regarding his country, the world, the afterlife, and of course himself. He found Eisenhower’s determination to defend Chiang Kai-shek’s offshore outposts on Quemoy and Matsu to be tautological, since their importance lay only in the administration’s assurances that they were important. He worried about Khrushchev’s increasing unpredictability: a mature and “statesmanlike” enemy—Stalin?—was manageable, “but God save us from the erratic and distraught one.” He was reading Henry Kissinger and Reinhold Niebuhr on nuclear weapons, finding the former unconvincing and the latter prophetic. Seeking safety in such devices, Kennan concluded, was like a child wandering through his father’s house “with a faggot of burning papers in his hand.” He wondered, on Christmas Day 1958, how there could be hope for earthly progress if Christ had been born “to save us in the next world, not in this.” And on the following Easter Sunday, having exhausted himself with farm work, he lay down in the fading Pennsylvania light to ponder “the genuine dead-end” at which his life had arrived: “I haven’t the faintest idea what now to do with myself.”⁸

“Here I am: 55 years of age,” Kennan wrote a few weeks later. “I have some talents and some strength. I have nothing to lose by dedicating myself to something,” for without that, life would be “a gradual rotting and disintegrating in the warm, debilitating narcotic bath of upper-class American civilization.” Anything would be better than that. “I am, after all, expendable,” but for what? “Where is a vehicle, a framework, in which energy can usefully be expended?”⁹

Thanks largely to Acheson, Kennan had become persona non grata with much of the American—and Western European—foreign policy establishment. White House press secretary James Hagerty felt it necessary to assure reporters, when Kennan attended a conference there in January, that he would not be meeting alone with the president. “Why, hello Kennan,” a startled Eisenhower said as they shook hands in the receiving line. “It’s some time since I’ve seen you.” Kennan showed up at a Council on Foreign Relations discussion in April but was made to feel “as if the Devil had been occupying a pew in church.” It was clear, he acknowledged in July, that “[t]here is to be no disengagement.... The line of division in Europe is to be made steadily sharper, more meaningful, more ineradicable.”¹⁰

Kennan continued to get compliments, however, from Senator John F. Kennedy, who, having read his reply to Acheson in Foreign Affairs, praised the way it avoided “the kind of ad hominem irrelevancies in which Mr. Acheson unfortunately indulged last year.” Kennedy was always looking for negotiating possibilities with the Russians, Arthur Schlesinger remembered: also, he “admired Kennan as a historian.” Another admirer, unexpectedly, was Richard M. Nixon, in whose company Kennan found himself at a Washington reception in July. The vice president greeted him warmly, insisted on being photographed with him, and went out of his way to explain, to a very surprised Loy Henderson, that “Kennan here has performed a great service in his lectures and writings. We need someone like this to stir things up.” “Poor Loy, who probably thinks I ought to be shot at sunrise, had no choice but to agree,” George wrote Annelise afterward.¹¹

John Foster Dulles had resigned as secretary of state shortly before his death, from cancer, in May 1959. His successor, Under Secretary Christian A. Herter, harbored no particular animus toward Kennan but gave him no reason to anticipate an appointment during the remainder of Eisenhower’s term. The Institute would expect Kennan to continue as a historian: having established his credentials in that field, however, he felt the need now only to deliver lectures, write periodic reviews, and encourage younger scholars. The promised third volume on early Soviet-American relations was less important than commentary on public affairs: “I owe it to people here who have confidence in me to write, in book form, the rationale of my despair with the country.” At least in England there had been a community “to which I was civilly and fully admitted, during the period of my residence there.”¹²

Kennan had not forgotten how much, only a year earlier, he had despised the place: the “community” he really missed was a great friend. “I sometimes think I would accept again all the asperities of English life,” he wrote Isaiah Berlin, “for the delights of sheer conversation.” He had even dreamed recently of trying to talk with Berlin, over “the roar and surge of some enormous cocktail party.” Perhaps this reflected “the desperate intensity with which England seems to be trying to become like ourselves.... How the good old subconscious does go to the heart of things!”¹³

Never had he lived in any place “where the present did not seem to represent a deterioration as compared with the past,” George realized in a flash of self-recognition that spring. This had been true of Riga, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Moscow—the only exception, perhaps, had been Lisbon under Salazar. It was as if he blighted his own surroundings. If Christopher were to ask where, “in this world to which you have introduced me,” he could have a rewarding life, “what could I say? Only at the ends of the earth: in the Arctic, perhaps; where almost no other men live; where Nature, not man, is your companion. For my own country, I have not a shred of hope, not one.”¹⁴

And what of his own weaknesses? In Chicago, in April, “I took X to tea.” Wandering around the lobby of the Palmer House, they found a quiet place to talk. She was “her old self: impulsive, warm, and very foolish.” When they parted, her final word, “flung over the heads of the startled passers-by,” was: “Sorry to have been so miserable.” She thereby negatively illustrated a positive principle: “If you have tendencies which you know yourself are wrong, which you cannot control yet cannot leave, don’t apologize for them—brave them out; they are, after all, a part of you.”¹⁵

Joan’s wedding took place in Princeton that June, just after her graduation, under unexpectedly dramatic circumstances. As the guests gathered, there was a screeching of brakes and Christopher came running to say that Krisha had been run over. George and Jeanette’s son Gene rushed her to the veterinarian, who determined that she had been frightened but not hurt, while the rest of the family conspired to keep the news from Joan. Despite the near-tragedy, the wedding went off smoothly: “The present, at least, had been well lived through,” George wrote with relief in his diary. “[T]he future would have to take care of itself.”¹⁶

He sailed for Europe, where he would be attending a series of conferences, in early September. His family, this time, did not accompany him, so he spent most of the voyage in the company only of his diary. “I have been very heroic.... I have lived for a week in studied solitude among this crowd of people; I have had a drink with no one at the bar; aware of my age and dignity, I have let the ladies all pass me by; I have resisted the temptation to hear myself talk.” Why make “such a fetish of my loneliness”? Why take such satisfaction “in a total abstention from contact with any one else?” Why, for that matter, at Oxford, had he never watched a crew race or dined at high table in Balliol, his host college? It was of course a neurosis, perhaps inherited: “I have an idea that my father was much the same way.” But it was also “for myself that I do this.... I am determined that if I cannot have all, or the greater part, of what I want, no one is going to deprive me of the glorious martyrdom of having none of it.”¹⁷

“I still think constantly about what we should do,” George wrote Annelise from Rheinfelden, in Switzerland, where he was trying in vain to extract coherence from a meandering meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. “I suppose we shall end up by continuing to do exactly what we have been doing.” But “I have washed my clothes so regularly, and have acquired such expertise, that I could set up in the laundry business when I get back.”¹⁸

II.

Strangely, the American political process, in which Kennan had so little faith, produced presidential candidates in 1960 who professed to admire him. As an Eisenhower administration exile, Kennan dismissed Nixon’s praise as