George F. Kennan : an American life

not to the press or even to the courts.” There should even be special prisons for “political offenders,” to keep them apart from common criminals. “One may think what one will of the events of the last two or three years,” he wrote the master of Yale’s Branford College in 1970, asking to be removed from its roster of nonresident fellows, “but that they have impaired the ability of old and young to communicate with each other is something all of us, I think, must recognize.”⁶⁴

Kennan’s anxieties—extreme even for him—arose from fears for his own children as much as for his country. Grace’s marriage had broken up, and Joan’s was about to. Christopher had found adjustment to Groton difficult. Wendy, her father worried, was growing up too fast. “[W]e have failed badly, somewhere, in the way we have brought these children up and the sort of life we have offered them,” George complained after spending a Thanksgiving at the farm with slouchy, sullen teenagers—his two youngest, plus some of their friends. Soon they would be off to the great universities, which would quickly expose them to “the morbidity of the present student population. We are in a hell of a shape, here at home.”⁶⁵

Left to himself, he often claimed, he would have become an exile, even a hermit: the west coast of Scotland still beckoned. His family could hardly follow, though, so the next best choice was to avoid, as far as possible, “all confrontation with American life.... I must learn to live in it as though I did not live in it.” But could his children? That seemed implausible, given their need for education, employment, love, and families. How could he shield them, then, from “this false life,” as he had once described it, in which “innocence is lost before maturity is achieved”? ⁶⁶

The Kennans spent the summer of 1968, as usual, in Norway. Unusually—but as an expression of confidence— George allowed Christopher and three of his buddies to sail Nagawicka from Denmark to Sweden in early August, without adult supervision. On leaving them at the dock,

I was suddenly seized with a great pang of love and concern for these young creatures: so helpless, so vulnerable, so endangered despite their changed voices, their incipient whiskers, and their great protective show of callous amusement over life—vulnerable and endangered not so much by the sea to which I was now entrusting them in my little boat, and not so much by the built-in tragic nature of the individual human predicament which men had always had to face, but rather by the enormity of what the human community was now doing to itself, with its overpopulation, its precipitate urbanization, its feverish hyperintensity of communication, its destruction of the natural environment, and its cultivation of weapons too terrible for the wisdom and strength of any that might command their custody and use.

To George’s relief, they arrived safely and flew home, a few days later, with Wendy and Annelise. He stayed behind to secure the Kristiansand house for the winter and spent his last evening there going through family photographs. “I think of the way that Fate has tied our lives together,” he wrote Joan, “and how we struggle along, half knowing what we are doing, but with our destinies also largely formed by the accidents of birth and circumstance.”

All depended, he could see, “on God’s grace and on each other; and with this, the whole monstrous fragility and tragedy of our lives, and yet also their poetry and their occasional heroism, become visible and real to me. I wish I could capture this moment of awareness and make it a part of my view of the world, instead of being absorbed and carried away, as I shall be tomorrow morning, by a thousand trivialities and vanities.”⁶⁷

TWENTY-THREE

Prophet of the Apocalypse: 1968–1980

J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER DIED IN PRINCETON, OF THROAT CANCER, on February 18, 1967, at the age of sixty-two. A week later six hundred people crowded into Alexander Hall for the memorial service, at which Kennan delivered the final eulogy. He praised his friend’s scientific mind, “rigorous but humane, fastidious but generous and powerful, uncompromisingly responsible in its relationship to ascertainable truth but never neglectful of the need for elegance and beauty in the statement of it.” He deplored the official injustice inflicted upon Oppenheimer: the government had used his talents to exploit the destructive capabilities of nuclear physics, but denied him the opportunity to explore “the great positive ones he believed that science to possess.” His life cruelly illustrated “the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength.”

Shakespeare’s image of a “universal wolf” as a “universal prey” eating itself up had haunted Kennan ever since he incorporated it into his long but mostly unread January 1950 paper on the “super” bomb. The idea, however, was Oppenheimer’s: it was he who first alerted Kennan to the ecological consequences of the nuclear revolution. “[N]o one paid any attention to us,” Kennan recalled, “but that brought us together.” Oppenheimer gave Kennan an institutional home after he left government. Kennan, in turn, spoke for Oppenheimer after allegations about the beleaguered physicist’s loyalty effectively silenced him. A war fought with modern weapons, Kennan warned in his 1957 Reith lectures, would risk everything: “the kindliness of our natural environment to the human experience, the genetic composition of the race, the possibilities of health and life for future generations.” In bidding Oppenheimer farewell a decade later, Kennan acknowledged that without his help “some of us—most of us, I suppose—would never have been quite where we are today.... [A]ny further progress we now make is in part his achievement.”¹

There were, at the time of Oppenheimer’s death, about forty thousand nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union—three-fourths of them American. Most were thermonuclear warheads, designed for near-instantaneous delivery by land-based and submarine-launched missiles. The least powerful, intended for battlefield use, each approximated the strength of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Kennan lacked access to these numbers, but he didn’t need it to conclude that seeking security by these means was an absurdity.

Since the Cuban missile crisis, there had been fewer explicit threats to use nuclear weapons. Satellite reconnaissance was reducing the risk of surprise attack. Diplomacy had produced a Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, and a Soviet-American agreement, that same year, to begin negotiations on limiting nuclear weapons delivery systems while restricting the deployment of defenses against them. The goal, it appeared, was no longer to win a nuclear arms race but rather to stabilize it by ensuring equal opportunities for destruction. Both superpowers seemed to have embraced Bernard Brodie’s 1946 argument that the best way to avoid war was to make its prospect as horrible as possible.

Kennan did not doubt the proposition but wondered—with Oppenheimer—why it required retaining the capacity to end civilization so many times over. That was why he distrusted detente, which most people understood to mean something he should have favored: the use of diplomacy to secure peace by balancing power. Kennan saw it as applying outdated techniques to a world in which the relationship between war and politics had changed. The nineteenth-century view had been that “you really could win a war and gain something from it.” Now, though, the destructiveness of weaponry had made such calculations meaningless. War and politics, in Kennan’s mind at least, were becoming equally dangerous.

Where, then, did the strategy of “containment,” which was to have bridged the gap between war and politics,