George F. Kennan : an American life

foreseen any of this. Each belligerent had entered the war optimistically, even enthusiastically. If his new book could explain such miscalculations, perhaps it might dispel illusions out of which new tragedies could grow.

It would have to be thorough, he explained to Joan, for late-nineteenth-century European diplomacy was “a frightfully complicated subject with an enormous existing literature.” It would have to be scholarly, because the Institute for Advanced Study expected that of him. It would take years to complete, and “since no one in this generation will be interested in it,” it would be a lonely enterprise. And why the Franco-Russian alliance? Because it had replaced Bismarck’s system of unilateral restraint, which reconciled Germany’s neighbors to its post-1871 unification, with one of multilateral deterrence, which meant risking war to prevent war. It should have been obvious, even in 1894, that any great-power clash employing modern weaponry would be “a madness from which nobody [could] benefit.” Kennan would be writing a cautionary history of wolves, preparing to eat themselves up.⁹

II.

With Connie Goodman on leave from the Institute to raise a family, Kennan had a new secretary, Janet Smith. She was not shy about questioning his priorities: did he really think he could isolate himself to write history? It was probably unrealistic, he acknowledged from Oxford in March 1969, to suppose “that anyone in my position—i.e., with my past, my reputation, and my connections—would be able to find the time, the privacy, and the peace of mind to do a really major, serious work of historical scholarship.” He was now sixty-five, and demands for commentary on current events had not diminished. He had also come to realize, belatedly, the benefits of inadvertence: the fact that such influence as he had accumulated over the years had more often arisen unexpectedly than from his own plans.

So he must allow for opportunities like the “long telegram,” the “X” article, the Chicago lectures, the disengagement debate, the Fulbright hearings, and the Swarthmore speech, even if such “unwithstandable approaches from the outside” didn’t always produce the results he wanted. However much he might wish to be a prophet, life had burdened him with the role of pundit. “Let me then accept it and be prepared to play it with distinction.”¹⁰

Oxford was friendlier than it had been in 1957–58. The Kennans’ Iffley flat was adequately heated—no need to carry coal this time—and George had an office in All Souls College. He liked having his radio free of commercials, his roads uncluttered by billboards, and telephones that rang rarely “because the English don’t phone—they send notes.” He was dining occasionally with colleagues; even student life struck him as “relatively rich and gay and confused and happy.” But he couldn’t resist controversy. What was wrong with black power anyway? Kennan asked a startled assemblage of dignitaries at a Ditchley Park conference shortly after he arrived: why shouldn’t Americans follow South Africa’s example and give blacks their own state? It had taken that to satisfy the Jews, his friend Richard Crossman helpfully added. Having tossed these grenades, the two took their leave, under a full moon, cheered by the mayhem they had left behind.¹¹

Kennan’s chief task in Oxford was to deliver the Chichele lectures, a less demanding series than the two he had taken on twelve years earlier. He chose to analyze La Russe en 1839, the account of a trip through Russia by Astolphe Louis Leonor, the Marquis de Custine. Like Neill Brown’s dispatches from St. Petersburg in the 1850s, Custine’s book allowed viewing the recent past through a distant past, a perspective Kennan relished. Custine had been unfair to Nicholas I and his contemporaries, Kennan concluded in the published version of the lectures, which appeared in 1971, but he had accurately anticipated the Stalin regime and, to a lesser extent, those that followed. Another of Kennan’s epic sentences specified the analogies:

the absolute power of a single man; his power over thoughts as well as actions; the impermanence and unsubstantiality of all subordinate distinctions of rank and dignity—the instantaneous transition from lofty station to disgrace and oblivion; the indecent association of sycophancy upwards with brutality downwards; the utter disenfranchisement and helplessness of the popular masses; the nervous punishment of innocent people for the offenses they might be considered capable of committing rather than the ones they had committed; the neurotic relationship to the West; the frantic fear of foreign observation; the obsession with espionage; the secrecy; the systematic mystification; the general silence of intimidation; the preoccupation with appearances at the expense of reality; the systematic cultivation of falsehood as a weapon of policy; the tendency to rewrite the past. These were traits, some active, some latent, the recognition and correction of which would be vital to the Soviet Union’s future: “to its security, above all, not just against those external forces by whose fancied heretical will Russians of all ages have so easily seen themselves threatened, but [also] its security against itself.”¹²

That sounded a lot like the “X” article: how could there be a normal relationship with such a country until its internal configuration—indeed its culture—had changed? But Kennan was writing about Custine in the nuclear era: didn’t that require overlooking such issues? Wasn’t the important thing now to balance power among states, rather than to await—or even to encourage—changes from within? The questions came from the editors of a new journal, Foreign Policy, who had noticed (as those of Foreign Affairs had not) that 1972 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mr. X’s memorable appearance.

Eager “to welcome Professor Kennan to the pages of this magazine,” they published an interview with him in late May, a week before the first American presidential visit to the Soviet Union since Roosevelt had gone to Yalta in 1945. The Nixon-Brezhnev summit promised the greatest progress yet toward strategic arms control: an “interim agreement” limiting land- and sea-based missiles armed with nuclear warheads, and a treaty banning defenses against those that remained. It followed the even more surprising trips that Kissinger and Nixon had already made to the People’s Republic of China. What did Kennan think?

Brezhnev’s state, he acknowledged, was not Stalin’s. It had long since lost ideological authority beyond its borders: “The facade of solidarity can be maintained, today, only by extensive concessions to the real independence of the respective Communist parties.” It had stabilized, but not expanded, its control over half of Europe—perhaps NATO had been of some use, after all. And the Soviet Union now had its own “containment” problem in East Asia, where China posed at least as great a challenge as did the United States. All of this had left Kremlin leaders “no alternatives except isolation or alliance with the capitalist countries, which could undermine the legitimacy of their power at home.” The geopolitical balance was obviously preferable to that of 1947.

The military balance, however, was another matter. Always ahead in manpower and conventional armaments, the U.S.S.R. now had such formidable nuclear strength that American concerns no longer focused on who was to dominate Eurasia but rather on a “fantasy world” of weaponry.

It has no foundation in real interests—no foundation, in fact, but in fear, and in an essentially irrational fear at that. It is carried not by any reason to believe that the other side would, but only by a hypnotic fascination with the fact that it could. It is simply an institutionalized force of habit. If someone could suddenly make the two sides realize that it has no purpose and if they were then to desist, the world would presumably go on, in all important respects, just as it is going on today.

How might that happen? Not through the intricate agreements to be signed in Moscow, for these would only clarify the rules in a continuing contest. What was needed instead were “reciprocal unilateral steps of restraint.” If one could, by such means, shrink armed establishments to more reasonable dimensions, then the Soviet Union would pose no greater threat than had prerevolutionary Russia—even if it retained vestiges of the society Custine had described.