George F. Kennan : an American life

but “I gained a new respect for our visitor, in whom I was obliged to recognize an able and seasoned statesman, not unkind or unreasonable, nor devoid of a sense of humor.” Gromyko was saying, in effect: “Please understand that the Foreign Office had nothing to do with your expulsion, and was not even informed about it. Therefore, I hope that we can have as pleasant relations as we would normally have, had this never occurred.” It was Edna St. Vincent Millay, improbably channeled.

On the next morning a chauffeur drove George and his son to the ancient city of Novgorod, where they admired the local Kremlin, enjoyed the view of the Volkhov River and Lake Ilmen, soaked in the long rays of the evening sunshine, felt the breezes blowing in from the Baltic, and savored the cheerful disorder of the Russian families picnicking, fishing, swimming, sailing, or just walking around. Following dinner in the hotel, they had an unexpected visit from two students, who wondered whether they might be willing to sell Christopher’s only pair of shoes, “i.e., his ghastly loafers.”

There were, then, two days in Leningrad, after which George took Christopher on another train ride, this time to Helsinki, from where they would go on to Norway. At the Finnish border, they watched “with more than a detached interest” the train’s slow progress across the heavily guarded frontier zone. George had been there before, both in his diplomatic career and in his historical imagination: The Decision to Intervene ends with this description of the site, as it would have appeared to the last official Americans to leave Russia in the fall of 1918.

The sky was leaden; a cold wind blew from the northwest. . . . The little stream, hurrying to the Gulf of Finland, swirled past the wooden pilings and carried its eddies swiftly and silently away into the swamps below. Along the Soviet bank a tethered nanny goat, indifferent to all the ruin and all the tragedy, nibbled patiently at the sparse dying foliage.... The Finnish gate now clanked down behind them—one more link in that iron curtain that was to constitute through the coming decades the greatest and saddest of the world’s political realities.

How had he known that there had been a goat? He couldn’t prove it, he later admitted, but “I never saw such a scene in Russia without a goat,” so it seemed safe enough to include one. Now he was there with Christopher, and perhaps even in the distance another goat. It was the end of a train trip George had hoped to begin in Vladivostok. This one didn’t, but the border crossing brought a kind of closure, nonetheless.²²

VI.

“I spent the day laboriously endeavoring not to think about the event,” Kennan confessed on January 20, 1965, the day Lyndon B. Johnson was inaugurated for the full term he had won by defeating Barry Goldwater the previous November. “Is this just sour grapes—the fact that I am rejected by Washington? In part, perhaps.” Probably “I would like, deep down, to be called upon to serve again,” but “I know I should dread, on closer contact, having actually to do so.” With Kennedy’s death, Kennan had lost his chief listener in the White House. He expected no such relationship with Johnson.

[W]hat this man represents—this oily, folksy, tricky political play-acting, this hearty optimism, this self- congratulatory jingoism, all combined with the whiney, plaintive, provincial drawl and the childish antics of the grown male in modern Texas—this may be the America of the majority of the American people but it’s not my America.

“I had a horror of Mr. Johnson,” Kennan recalled years later. “I think he did worthy things internally, but, my God!—he did them with such methods that I couldn’t have lasted in his entourage.”²³

Johnson did, in the spring of 1965, attempt a connection to Kennan, or at least his aide, the historian Eric Goldman, did. In an effort to evoke Kennedy’s style, Goldman had proposed a White House Festival of the Arts, but by the time Johnson got around to approving the idea, he had begun escalating the war in Vietnam and had ordered military intervention to prevent an alleged pro-Castro coup in the Dominican Republic. Goldman asked Kennan to speak, in his capacity as the newly elected president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The invitation came at an awkward moment, because Kennan’s predecessor, Lewis Mumford, had used his departing speech to the organization in May to launch a vitriolic attack on Johnson. He had then “fled, leaving the meeting to me.” Kennan’s conscience would not have allowed such a thing, he wrote Mumford afterward, “but this implies no lack of respect on my part for the faithfulness with which you followed the dictates of your own.”²⁴

Convinced that he had to represent the National Institute at the White House event, Kennan flew back at his own expense from Europe, where he was preparing for his trip to the Soviet Union with Christopher. The festival took place on June 14 with extensive media coverage, much of it generated by the poet Robert Lowell’s highly public rejection of the invitation he had received. Kennan addressed the luncheon, with Lady Bird Johnson in attendance. He defended the “eccentricities” of artists but cut from his prepared remarks a passage endorsing their right to address controversial issues: it would, Goldman had warned him, offend the president. “Are we his guests?” Kennan asked. Goldman said yes, and that settled it as far as Kennan was concerned. Mrs. Johnson thanked him for avoiding controversy, but reporters noticed the omission, obliging a presidential press spokesman to claim, lamely, that Kennan had run over his allotted time. Johnson, who had been in his office most of the day, appeared only for the concluding evening address and never bothered to greet Kennan: “That was my only contact with the White House in his time.”²⁵

Kennan’s own doubts about Vietnam developed gradually. He had gone out of his way, while in Belgrade, to defend Kennedy’s support for Ngo Dinh Diem against Yugoslav press criticism. But by the time of the Look interview in November 1963—which appeared just after Diem’s overthrow and assassination—Kennan was advising caution: “When you have regimes of this sort, . . . [y]ou always have to be ready to get out.” In Japan, several months later, he acknowledged uncertainty about Johnson’s intentions but suggested that the domino theory did make sense. By March 1965, though, with American military involvement growing, Kennan was privately expressing deep concern “about what our people are doing in Southeast Asia. It seems to me that they have taken leave of their senses.” And in May, writing to Annelise: “I am absolutely appalled at what is going on. It looks to me as if Mr. J[ohnson] had lost his head completely.”²⁶

Nevertheless, he kept these views to himself. When he saw Gromyko in Moscow on June 25, Kennan used the occasion, Ambassador Kohler reported, to mount an “able and effective” defense of American policy. That was a diplomatic facade: Kennan was in fact wondering how the United States could hope to exploit Sino-Soviet differences while fighting a major war in Vietnam. Washington had lost “almost all flexibility of choice not only in that particular area but in our approach to the communist world generally,” he wrote Yale’s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin. He saw no point, however, in speaking out. “I have had my day in court. My views are known.... I can do no more, it seems to me, than to fall silent.”²⁷

But he didn’t. Kennan’s first published criticism of Johnson’s strategy appeared in The Washington Post on December 12, 1965. If victorious, he argued, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong would surely impose a ruthless dictatorship: young Americans marching on their behalf were choosing “a very strange way” to support freedom. But the world contained much more oppression than the United States could ever hope to remedy, some of it “closer to home than what transpires in Vietnam.” A communist triumph there would not shift the global balance of power. Meanwhile the war was overshadowing everything else. “[E]nslaved to the dynamics of a single unmanageable situation,” the United States was losing the initiative, “not just locally but on a world scale.”²⁸

Kennan was recovering, when the piece appeared, from yet another health crisis, this time a prostate operation, which laid him low through the Christmas holidays. “[T]he incomparable grapefruit,” he assured Kent,