“are already contributing to my recovery in a most welcome way.” He was well enough by February 1966 to draft a statement on Vietnam for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose chairman, J. William Fulbright, had invited him to testify. Kennan then traveled to Ohio for lectures at the College of Wooster and at Denison University. He took a late flight to Washington on the ninth, arriving sleep-deprived and exhausted—only to find himself, for five hours the next day, on national television.29
Angered by Johnson’s decision to resume the bombing of North Vietnam after a five-week halt failed to produce negotiations, Fulbright and his staff director, Carl Marcy, had arranged live coverage of the hearings they had convened. Worried by this, Johnson tried to seize the spotlight by scheduling, on the spur of the moment, a “summit” conference in Honolulu with South Vietnamese president Nguyen Cao Ky. He also pressed the television networks to resume their normal programming. CBS executives obliged with
“An unusual hush fell over the prelunch drinkers at the Metropolitan Club,”
Ho Chi Minh was not Hitler, Kennan explained; nor would he be, if he won, a puppet of Moscow or Beijing. Defeating him, however, would cost civilian lives and suffering on a scale “for which I would not like to see this country responsible.” The United States could not continue to “jump around” like “an elephant frightened by a mouse.” Instead its standard must be that of John Quincy Adams: to sympathize with freedom everywhere; to fight for it only where feasible; and to “go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Kennan added, to this famous aphorism, one of his own: “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”30
“Your testimony,” Kennan’s friend Louis Fischer wrote, “resembled a supersonic plane breaking the sound barrier; it ripped through the nation, and perhaps the world, breaking windowpanes of the mind.” That was extravagant, but Johnson did find it necessary, in a press conference the next day, to deny significant disagreement with Kennan, or with retired Army general James M. Gavin, who had earlier made a similar argument. Privately, Johnson was fuming. “They both would just rather not be troubled with Asia,” he complained to his aides. Why would Kennan even talk about Vietnam when he had never been there and knew nothing about the situation? But George Reedy, Johnson’s former press secretary, pointed out that Kennan and Gavin were reasonable men, who had expressed their uneasiness from a moderate perspective and in a sensible tone. Perhaps they had a point in wondering whether the war was being conducted “as an integral part of an overall United States world strategy.” Could Johnson meet with them and see that they got regular briefings? The president, now very much on the defensive, chose not to do so.31
Kennan had not sought this visibility. He had participated in no public protests against the war, he assured a former State Department colleague, not even university teach-ins. But he had felt it necessary, when asked by Fulbright, to make his views known. The response astonished him: “It was perfectly tremendous. I hadn’t expected anything remotely like this.” One woman wrote to say that when his testimony began, she had been ironing: “I ironed all day.” She was not alone. CBS might have thought that the typical opinion maker didn’t watch daytime television, humorist Art Buchwald wrote, “but in my house it happens to be my wife.”
The other day I came home from the office and said casually, “What’s new?”
“George Kennan made a very persuasive case against our present containment policy.”
“Oh,” I said, “that’s nice.”
“He differed in some respects from Gen. Gavin on the enclave policies, but he has come out for courageous liquidation of unsound positions rather than stubborn pursuit of extravagant or uncompromising [
“That’s fine,” I said. “What’s for dinner?”
One poll, shown to Johnson, revealed support for his handling of the war dropping from 63 to 49 percent in the single month that followed the Senate hearings. More than any other episode in Kennan’s career, this one confirmed his long-standing belief that style was as important as substance. After seeing them on television, nobody could dismiss Kennan or Gavin as “irresponsible students or wild-eyed radicals,” Fulbright’s biographer has written. Their testimony “made it respectable to question, if not to oppose, the war.”32
On the Sunday after he testified, Kennan gave the chapel sermon at Princeton University. His theme was “Why Do I Hope?” There were many reasons not to: the state of the world, the fallibility of human nature, the frailties of the human frame. And yet:
Repeatedly, in my own life, occurrences which seemed at the time to be personal misfortunes, turned out later to have been blessings in disguise. And on those occasions when I have tried to be very clever and far-sighted in my own interests, and to calculate nicely the best approach to the gratification of this or that ambition or desire, a wise and beneficent hand has seemingly intervened in the current of events to frustrate these puny, silly efforts, and to make of me the fool that deserved to be made.
There was hope, then, in simply struggling, against whatever odds: “Churchill taught us that, in 1940.” There was hope in “this marvelous earth around us.” There was hope in professional dedication, which “like some gigantic spiritual ski-lift” overcame “the abysses of our true loneliness and helplessness.” But the strongest reason for hope was love:
love in the family, love for friends, love—in the sense of genuine personal affection—for persons of the opposite sex, love for people with whom we are associated as neighbors or in our work; and finally, for those who are strong enough and great enough for it, love for mankind at large.
No act of love, he was sure, “will not ultimately be given its true value in the settlement of the affairs of the human spirit—in ways, perhaps, that defy our powers of imagination, but fully and in such a way to make it a thousand times worthwhile.”33
VII.
“Dearest Annelise,” George wrote her from Geneva, where he had been lecturing at the Graduate Institute of International Relations, on May 5, 1965. “I have been thinking constantly about ourselves and our future.... I thought it might be easier to write some of this to you than to say it when I get home.” They were approaching
a serious crisis, not in our relations, which are unaffected, but a crisis brewed of the point of change to which my life, and partly our life, has come: with the growing up of our children, the exhaustion of my public usefulness, the passage of the farm beyond the limits of our mutual strength, and my own need for some steady and creative
