George F. Kennan : an American life

Moscow no longer controlled its satellites—if Titoism was becoming the norm and not the exception within the international communist movement—then what did it matter what Kremlin leaders thought? Perhaps ideology, for these old men, was like sex, Kennan explained to a puzzled Japanese audience in the summer of 1964: “I think men just like to exercise power over other people just as they have certain other things that they like to do.”

They tended “to clothe this love for power in ideological terms, and sometimes they really believe them. I am sure that Lenin did.” But as regimes aged, ideology declined, leaving only the more normal competition “for prestige with the public, for admiration, for respect, for all these things that make up a position of power.” And what of their children? “They care about the twist and they care about certain types of hairdo for the ladies. They would like to hear the Beatles sing but they do not seem to be much interested in communism as an ideology.”¹⁰

Kennan said nothing in On Dealing with the Communist World about what U.S. policy toward China ought to be. His Asia trip gave him a chance to think about this, though, and by November 1964—a few weeks after the first Chinese atomic bomb test and Khrushchev’s almost simultaneous deposition by his Kremlin colleagues—Kennan had answers ready. He began, in The New York Times Magazine, with one of his portentous single sentences:

The great country of China, forming the heart of Asia, a country which for many years we befriended above all others and in defense of whose interests, in part, we fought the Pacific war, has fallen into the hands of a group of embittered fanatics: wedded to a dated and specious ideology but one which holds great attraction for masses of people throughout Asia; finding in this ideology a rationale for the most ruthless exertion of power over other people; associating this ideological prejudice with the most violent currents of traditional nationalism and xenophobia; linking their power to the arrogance and pretension traditional to governing groups in a country which long regarded itself as the center of the world; consumed with ambition to extend to further areas of Asia the dictatorial authority they now wield over the Chinese people themselves; sponsoring for this reason every territorial claim of earlier Chinese Governments for which history could show even the flimsiest evidence; and now absolutely permeated with hatred toward ourselves, not only because the ideology pictures us all as villains, but also because we, more than any other people, have had the strength and the temerity to stand in their path and to obstruct the expansion of their power.

But—the United States was not “the avenging angel of all humanity.” It lacked the power or the will to rescue Mao’s victims. It could not even defend allies along China’s periphery “if we fail to find support in the temper of the inhabitants.” The best Americans could do would be to assist other Asians in preserving their independence as long as the help they needed fell within the scope of what “we might reasonably be expected to give.”

Meanwhile the Chinese leaders, for all of their brutality, were only human. They once had “mothers and children and affections.” They were what circumstances had made them, and circumstances would determine what they, or their successors, would become. It was up to the West, therefore, to shape those “in such a way that the fruitlessness of some of their undertakings will become apparent to them,” even as it held open “the possibility of negotiation and accommodation if their ambitions are moderated and their methods change.” Not least among those circumstances was rivalry with the Soviet Union, an antagonism too deep to be resolved by Khrushchev’s removal. The United States would be foolish not to take advantage of this. “We should be prepared to talk to the devil himself,” Kennan had said in his Look interview the year before, “if he controls enough of the world to make it worth our while.”¹¹

III.

As had happened in Oxford six years earlier, illness complicated Kennan’s teaching in the spring of 1964. He came down with infectious hepatitis, which kept him hospitalized for several weeks and left him debilitated for several more—although he did manage to write all of his lectures and deliver some, while continuing to dictate long letters. The sixteen points made in one of these, he assured its recipient, “are all views I held before the color of the world turned a jaundiced yellow.” He was well enough by June, however, to risk the Asian journey as a guest of the International House of Japan. It was his first trip back since 1948, and Annelise’s first ever. It gave him a chance to reassess a country he had long regarded, like Germany, as a Cold War anomaly.¹²

After formally making peace in 1951, the United States had taken on the responsibility of defending Japan and still had military bases there. Sooner or later, Kennan was sure, the Americans would make themselves so unpopular that they would have to leave. The constitution MacArthur had imposed prohibited rearmament, so Japan’s only alternative would be an agreement with the Soviet Union to “neutralize” the country—Kennan’s East Asian equivalent of European disengagement. Protests over renewing the bilateral security treaty had forced Eisenhower to cancel a visit in the summer of 1960, leading Kennan to revive his proposal to withdraw American forces when he briefed the Policy Planning Staff in February 1961. He gave little further thought to Japan’s affairs, though, until he arrived there in June 1964.¹³

Kennan’s lectures, chiefly historical, aroused no particular controversy, but shortly after returning to the United States, he published a Foreign Affairs article that did. Entitled “Japanese Security and American Policy,” it stressed the “great schizophrenia of thought and feeling” he had encountered, induced by the shock of defeat, the humiliation of occupation, and the fear of nuclear war.

The instincts, outlooks and needs of the Japanese people simply will not tolerate for long anything that appears to be an effort to enlist Japan as a passive instrument in an all-out cold war to which no one in Japan can see a favorable issue generally and which seems to imply the indefinite renunciation by Japan of all hopes for a better relationship with the mainland.

So had the time not come to seek Moscow’s cooperation in guaranteeing Japan’s security, under United Nations auspices, while leaving its government free to make its own arrangements with Beijing? Had not MacArthur himself once insisted, “if the writer of these lines understood him correctly,” that Japan’s most suitable long-term status would be “permanent demilitarization and neutralization”?¹⁴

Worried that the Japanese would regard a Kennan appearance in Foreign Affairs as an official trial balloon, the American ambassador in Tokyo, Edwin P. Reis-chauer, urgently arranged a rebuttal. The task fell to Bill Bundy, now assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, who while literally in flight across the Pacific had to turn a previously written speech into a repudiation of Kennan’s article. Knowing little about Japan, Kennan had fallen victim, Bundy believed, “to a rather common syndrome of the liberally inclined American who finds liberally inclined conversational partners in a foreign country and concludes that’s where opinion is headed.”

“I feel guilty [for] having kicked up so much dust,” Kennan contritely wrote one of his Japanese hosts. He saw now how few people, either in Washington or in Tokyo, hoped to improve Soviet-Japanese relations. That was unfortunate, because Japan’s ability to manage the Chinese, “with whom an accommodation must sooner or later be negotiated,” would be enhanced if it first settled its differences with the U.S.S.R. Unlike the Reith lectures, this particular Kennan heresy did little to shake prevailing orthodoxies. It did, however, Bundy recalled, reinforce the views of those in Washington, especially Secretary of State Rusk, who “didn’t feel [that] George really knew a hell of a lot about Asia.”¹⁵

IV.

Kennan had not returned to the Soviet Union since Stalin declared him persona non grata in 1952, but its diplomats had for some time been regularly approaching him, obviously with the permission of the Foreign Office,