George F. Kennan : an American life

Communist China, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Albania.” As for the pickets, he got them all the time himself.⁸⁹

Worse was to come. When Tito arrived in New York to address the U.N. General Assembly, he and his entourage were literally besieged in the Waldorf-Astoria, with two young protesters almost breaking into his suite. Kennan was at least able to greet the Titos peacefully in Princeton, where, he reported with relief to Kennedy, the visit had gone well. But if New York was to continue to host the United Nations, it would have to take “greater responsibility than it now does for the protection of its foreign guests against insult and molestation.”⁹⁰

Some spirit told him, though, not to end his ambassadorship on a sour note. So Kennan added a handwritten compliment, reminiscent of one he had sent Acheson in even more trying times thirteen years earlier:

Dear Mr. President:

You get many brickbats; and of those who say approving and encouraging things, not all are pure of motive.

I am now fully retired, and a candidate for neither elective nor appointive office. I think, therefore, that my sincerity may be credited if I take this means to speak a word of encouragement. I am full of admiration, both as a historian and as a person with diplomatic experience, for the manner in which you have addressed yourself to the problems of foreign policy with which I am familiar. I don’t think we have seen a better standard of statesmanship in the White House in the present century. I hope you will continue to be of good heart and allow yourself to be discouraged neither by the appalling pressures of your office nor by the obtuseness and obstruction you encounter in another branch of the government. Please know that I and many others are deeply grateful for the courage and patience and perception with which you carry on.

Very sincerely yours,

George Kennan

The date was October 22, 1963. The reply went out on the twenty-eighth:

Dear George:

Your handwritten note . . . is a letter I will keep nearby for reference and reinforcement on hard days. It is a great encouragement to have the support of a diplomat and historian of your quality, and it was uncommonly thoughtful for you to write me in this personal way.

Sincerely,

John Kennedy

“Many thanks,” the president added, in his own handwritten postscript. Kennan later recalled what Kennedy had said at the end of their last private conversation, on the day before Tito’s visit to the White House: “George, I hope you’ ll keep on talking.”⁹¹

Part V

TWENTY-TWO

Counter-Cultural Critic: 1963–1968

THAT HE DID. “OUR FOREIGN POLICY IS PARALYZED,” LOOK MAGAZINE had Kennan complaining, in an interview that ran under a large photograph, showing him apparently wincing in pain. The causes, he insisted, lay in Congress, where just a few powerful legislators could tie things up; in the bureaucracy, which suffered from “ponderousness”; and among allies, who found it easier to demand “everything but the kitchen sink, rather than take a real negotiating position.” There had been, thus, no “New Frontier” in diplomacy because Kennedy had no latitude to construct one. Kennan had resigned his ambassadorship, not over differences with the administration but because he lacked credibility and authority. It had not even been clear how much humanitarian assistance the United States could legally provide after the Skopje earthquake. At least he had given blood: “No Congressional committee could stop me from doing that.”¹

The article appeared in the November 19, 1963, issue. Kennan was with Oppenheimer three days later when they heard the news. “He said nothing, nor did I—there was no need.... [B]ut we were both aware that it was more than just one life that had been obliterated: that the world we cared about had been grievously diminished, together with our own ability to be in any way useful in it.” In the sad days that followed, Kennan composed a eulogy for the only president under whom he had served of whom he approved.

John F. Kennedy understood, Kennan wrote, two great principles of statecraft: “First, that no political judgments must ever be final; and second, that the lack of finality must never be an excuse for inaction.” Blessed with “a clear mind, a quick intelligence, an uncommonly retentive memory,” Kennedy appraised dispassionately the people and problems he confronted.

He had the rare quality of being sensitive without being vain; and when, as sometimes befell him . . . , he was faced with behavior on the part of others which seemed to fall little short of outright deception, his reaction was less one of anger than of wonder and of renewed curiosity as to what it was that had caused men to act in this way.

Kennedy approached issues with an open mind, studied them carefully, and embraced answers while asking further questions. He respected the past, never assuming that those who had gone before “were idiots or men of bad will.” Despite setbacks, he never lost heart: he bore disappointments “in manly loneliness,” seldom revealing them to others. An extraordinarily gallant and gifted man,” he was only approaching his full potential when “the hand of the assassin reached him.”²

The eulogy itself was extraordinary, given Kennan’s disappointments over the past two and a half years. Kennedy had repeatedly subordinated foreign policy to the interests of Congress, the bureaucracy, and the allies, precisely the habits Kennan had so often condemned, most recently in his Look interview. Survivors rarely speak ill of the dead; but Kennan had spoken well of Kennedy before his death, despite compromises that differed little from those Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower had made, toward which Kennan had been far less charitable.

Kennedy, however, consulted Kennan—indeed treated him almost as a mentor—in a way no previous president had done. They met, after Kennedy ’s election, at least fourteen times, an unusually large number for a serving overseas ambassador. Their conversations softened, although they never removed, Kennan’s bitterness over his defeats: “When I came home and saw him there in his room—that bedroom of his upstairs in the White House—and realized the pressures that were brought to bear against him, realized even what it meant to him to take an hour out to sit down in his rocking chair and talk with me, I always was aware that I must not look at his position from the standpoint of my own problems.”

Kennan the historian understood that all presidents confront inadequate information and irreconcilable choices: his two volumes on Wilson and the Bolshevik Revolution had portrayed these brilliantly. But Kennan the diplomat, the policy planner, and the public intellectual rarely showed such sympathy. Kennedy, with some success, brought