his friends?60 It’s in the nature of classics that they defy categories. Among these is the distinction, so indistinct in Kennan’s life, between what one sets out to do, and what one does.
XI.
It might come as a surprise, Kennan warned an audience at Swarthmore College on December 9, 1967, that having been invited to help dedicate its new library, he should choose to speak on a subject so remote from the spirit of silence with which libraries were associated: “the present state of mind of the radical Left on the American campus.” But could the first be realized “without a drastic change” in the second? Did not education imply a voluntary withdrawal from contemporary life in order to achieve a better perspective on it? Was there not a “dreadful incongruity” between that vision and “the condition of mind and behavior in which a portion of our student youth finds itself today”?
Instead of withdrawal, there was intense involvement. Instead of calm, “transports of passion.” Instead of self-possession, “screaming tantrums and brawling in the streets.” Instead of rational discourse, “banners and epithets and obscenities and virtually meaningless slogans.” And instead of hope, “eyes glazed with anger,” as well as by “artificial abuse of the psychic structure that lies behind them.” In saying all of this, Kennan knew he sounded parental, a prisoner of all the “seamy adjustments” to practicality that came with that status. He made no apologies, for without such compromises, children would not enjoy the privilege of “despising us for the materialistic faint-heartedness that made their maturity possible.”
Behind the protests was legitimate outrage over racial injustice at home and an apparently endless war in Vietnam. If the young had a plan for resolving these issues, “then many of us, I am sure,” could join them. But
when we are offered, as the only argument for change, the fact that a number of people are themselves very angry and excited; and when we are presented with a violent objection to what exists, unaccompanied by any constructive concept of what, ideally ought to exist in its place—then we of my generation can only recognize that such behavior bears a disconcerting resemblance to phenomena we have witnessed within our own time in the origins of totalitarianism.
As a consequence, “many of us who are no happier” would have “no choice but to place ourselves on the other side of the barricades.”61
The speech, to put it much too mildly, was not well received. On being escorted to a reception at the president’s house, Kennan found himself surrounded “by a number of bearded creatures who were absolutely hissing at me, like a crowd of geese!” His host, Courtney C. Smith, was also not pleased: “He was trying to appease these people.” (Smith would later die of a heart attack during a student occupation of the college admissions office.) Having heard of the controversy,
Several of the faculty letters were silly. One professor suggested that Kennan stage an emotional breakdown, in front of his own children, as an act of contrition. He could not believe, however, that they “would be greatly enlightened by such a spectacle, however much they might enjoy it for its unexpected dramatic aspects.” How, another wanted to know, could a student pursue scholarship with Marines recruiting on campus? By “taking a book, going into the library, and reading,” Kennan answered. “I doubt that the recruiter would follow him there.” Still another, defending the students’ objections to university parietal rules, wondered how Kennan would feel if he were in a room with someone about whom he cared deeply and was forced to leave the door open: “To this reproach, I freely confess myself devoid of any adequate answer.”
The students he took more seriously, if no less critically. Their only apparent agenda, the 1962
Whatever their chances of being drafted, the students had a point, Kennan acknowledged, when they complained of having to register for military service at eighteen, while not being allowed to vote until they were twenty-one. Nor was there any excuse for sending draftees into wars “of obscure origin and rationale,” halfway around the world. If such conflicts were necessary, professionals ought to handle them. If there weren’t enough to do so, then the wars shouldn’t be fought. These were failures of
And what of civil rights? In their sympathy for oppressed blacks, the students reminded Kennan of that shown for peasants by the Russian populists of the late nineteenth century. In neither case had the sympathizers known much about those with whom they sympathized. In both they viewed the oppressed as “helpless” and therefore expected of them no accountability for their own behavior: “The American Negro is not going to be aided by an approach which treats him only as object and not at all as subject.” Nor would apartheid’s sufferers benefit from American universities withdrawing their South African investments, as the student left was demanding. The time had come for the academy to reclaim its authority from those who had “no experience of its past, no expertise for its present, no responsibility for its future.”
It was characteristic of radicals to abhor being outflanked. This had led, in Russia, to the nihilism that undermined the old order, thereby opening the way for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who allowed no defiance. That was not likely to happen in the United States, Kennan thought: with an end to the war, a phasing out of the draft, and the aging of students beyond thirty, things would settle down. But it was worth asking why the students had become radicalized in the first place.
The answer, Kennan insisted, went well beyond the immediate targets of protest. For the students reflected the “sickly secularism” of society as a whole: its shallow convictions; its preoccupation with gadgetry; its disconnection from nature; its lack of understanding for “the slow powerful processes of organic growth.” These had created, in college youth, “an extreme disbalance in emotional and intellectual growth.” In the end, then, the culture itself would have to change, and here Kennan fell back on familiar jeremiads: the evils of automobiles, advertising, and environmental degradation; the corruption of politics; the possibility that the country itself might be too big to solve its problems. Were the students gloomy about the American future? “[T]hey haven’t seen anything yet. Not only do my apprehensions outclass theirs but my ideas of what would have to be done to put things to rights are far more radical than theirs.”63
XII.
“George was somewhat shrill,” Dilworth recalled, “at least we thought so, and our children thought so.” It went beyond that. Kennan was getting FBI reports on student and black protests throughout this period, and at one point suggested that the government suppress them, in a manner “answerable only to the voters at the next election but
