George F. Kennan : an American life

fit into all of this? When Kennan described its objective, in 1947, as bringing about peacefully either the breakup or “gradual mellowing” of the Soviet Union, that country had no nuclear capability. By the beginning of the 1960s, its warhead and missile technology was qualitatively approaching that of the United States. By the end of the decade, it was doing so quantitatively. By 1986, when the number of nuclear weapons peaked at around seventy thousand, just under two-thirds belonged to the U.S.S.R.²

So did the risks of attempting to change that state now exceed the benefits? Was the danger to be contained no longer its behavior but nuclear war itself? If so, did that suggest accepting the Soviet Union and its satellites as permanent features of the international landscape? What would that mean for the future of Germany, and of Europe itself? None of these were new questions for Kennan: he had wrestled with all of them prior to Oppenheimer’s death. In the years that followed, though, they took on a renewed urgency. It was as if Kennan felt an obligation to keep Oppenheimer’s prophetic vision alive, whatever that might imply for the original concept of “containment.”

I.

Late in 1967 Kennan was elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Established in 1898, limited to fifty members, and modeled on the much older Academie francaise, the organization’s mission was to recognize distinction in literature, music, and the fine arts. Kennan had been invited to join five years earlier because of his accomplishments as a writer, sixty-four years after the first George Kennan was similarly honored. The academy’s parent organization, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, had made the second Kennan its president in 1965, just in time for the ill-fated White House Festival of the Arts. He took all of these institutional responsibilities seriously. Kennan’s sense of having been excluded as a young man, Arthur Schlesinger speculated, had left him with a love of ritual as an older man: “He believes strongly that the ceremonies of life are important. It’s an endearing, interesting characteristic.”³

Kennan addressed the academy for the first time in his new capacity on May 28, 1968, three months after the Tet offensive in Vietnam, two months after Johnson’s announcement that he would seek a negotiated settlement of the war but not reelection, seven weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and one week before that of Robert F. Kennedy. “[W]e are meeting,” Kennan acknowledged, “in a very troubled time.” The artist’s duty was not to get involved in politics, which were always “polluted with the passions and the myopia of the moment.” Nor was it to attempt to correct, in any immediate sense, “the manifold follies and stupidities to which man, in his capacity as a political actor, is prone.”

Perhaps it might be, though, to “lend to the comprehension of the human predicament a deeper dimension of insight,” through which “the tragic illusions of power and anger will lose their force.” Had not Cranach and Grunewald painted during peasant rebellions and religious wars? Had not Goethe, Beethoven, and Schiller flourished alongside the upheavals of the Napoleonic era? Most moving of all was Boris Pasternak, “scratching out his poems through the night in that abandoned country house in the Urals during the Russian civil war, while each night the dark shadows of the wolves against the snow came nearer.” It took forty years for his writings to appear, but they were now “an imperishable component of Russian literature.” Much would have been lost if those artists had sacrificed their creativity “in order to throw themselves into political pursuits for which they were ill-prepared and in which, as Pasternak realized, they could do nothing comparable in importance to what they could achieve by the employment of their real talents.”⁴

Kennan’s luxury—but also his burden—was not having to be Pasternak. He spoke wistfully of wanting to detach himself from contemporary events, but no one forced him to do so. That left him resisting temptation, mostly unsuccessfully. It had seemed safe enough that summer, for example, to publish his 1938–40 dispatches from Prague, unearthed while preparing his memoirs. But on August 20–21, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the growing reform movement there. The new Kremlin leadership of Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksey Kosygin had made “a colossal mistake,” Kennan was sure, and The New York Times quickly connected that violation of sovereignty with his reports on another such event three decades earlier. Soon Kennan was calling for an additional hundred thousand American troops to be sent to West Germany as a show of force, to counter what he saw as an increasingly “adventuristic streak” in Soviet behavior.⁵

He was also still thinking, wistfully, about politics. “I think I could have been successful at it,” he wrote Joan a few days before the 1968 presidential election. “I have never found it hard to communicate with people from a platform, and I rather love all the human and intellectual intricacies.” But he could never have afforded to run for office; his views, moreover, were “light years ahead of the current drift of public opinion.” If the next administration were to offer him a position like under secretary of state or ambassador to the United Nations, though, he might take it.⁶

Kennan called the office of Richard M. Nixon two days after his victory at the polls to offer whatever advice the president-elect might want. None was sought, but Nixon’s appointment of Henry A. Kissinger as his national security adviser surprised and pleased Kennan. He had been reading Kissinger since the 1950s and now regarded him as “fully recovered from the militaristic preoccupations of earlier years”—his writings, presumably, on the “limited” use of nuclear weapons. Shortly after learning of his new job, Kissinger in turn assured Kennan of Nixon’s regard for him as “a leading example of people whose possibilities were not being used by the last administration,” the implication being that the new one might find a way to do so.⁷

That conversation took place at a Princeton cocktail party on December 4, 1968. The occasion was the inaugural conference of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, a privately funded reincarnation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, exposed the previous year as having had CIA support. Other attendees included Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, Stanley Hoffmann, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Norman Podhoretz, Marion Donhoff, and Kennan’s old Moscow friend Lillian Hellman, but also a clamorous contingent of young black power advocates and white New Leftists. Understandably confused, the local Students for a Democratic Society chapter prepared an all-purpose poster: “Down With Racism, Imperialism, Genocide, Corporation Capitalism, Policy Planners, etc.” (A stronger exhortation had been crossed out, at the last moment, on the advice of a university official.) Kennan, improbably, delivered the dinner address. With his “gray suit, silk tie, elegant gold chain across his vest, [and] dignified bearing,” The New York Times reported, he personified a lifestyle “for which the young could muster little sympathy or understanding. He reciprocated completely.”

The nation had many problems, Kennan told his audience, not the least of which was “the extremely disturbed and excited state of mind of a good portion of our student youth, floundering around as it is in its own terrifying wilderness of drugs, pornography and political hysteria.” This was not Pasternak-like detachment, and a heated discussion followed. “Since when [are] youth not allowed to be asses?” Hellman demanded, prompting one young activist to announce that he had just fallen in love with an older woman. She was not amused. “He did a very brave thing,” she said in defense of Kennan: “He refused to be a swinger.”⁸

“The new administration must be given a fair opportunity to show what it can do,” Kennan commented that evening. He got no invitation to work for it, though, and this time he didn’t agonize over phones that didn’t ring. He had decided to return to Oxford during the spring of 1969, and he had a new project in mind: he would write the first full English-language history of the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894. The logic of doing so was not immediately obvious, but Kennan’s academy address provided a clue.

Unlike the artists he had cited, he was neither a painter nor a playwright nor a philosopher. His poetry was chiefly whimsical, his musicianship only companionable. But he could write history: his distinction lay in the skill with which he represented the past to the present and future. World War I, Kennan believed, had been the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, having set so many subsequent tragedies in motion. No one in 1914, however, had