he was “somewhat dispirited, believing that he had failed in his effort to instill into American diplomacy some depth of concept and some subtlety of technique.... He is a wise, learned and agreeable man.” His memoirs would be “worth the enormous price the publishers will offer for them.”
And what of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and the first Kennan’s legacy? The second Kennan made no mention of them in
[M]y namesake, George Kennan the elder, was busy for many years trying to whip up sympathy for the Russian revolutionaries, admittedly not the Bolsheviks but their moderate predecessors the Populists. The assumption behind all this was that if one could only overthrow the old Czarist autocracy, something much better would follow. Have we learned anything from this lesson?
He had “the greatest misgivings about any of us, Americans or West Europeans, taking upon ourselves the responsibility for trying to overthrow this, or any other, government in Russia.” Kennan’s attitude earned him a stinging rebuke from a sensitive source. She found it pitiful, Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote him, “that
Containment, as Kennan had conceived it, never required action from the outside to change the internal character of the Soviet system: that was to happen from within, in response to external circumstances the West should have wished to create in any event. Reforms would require visionaries—dissidents, if you will—who would sense these new circumstances and would have the courage to respond to them. Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and their allies met that standard. But by the time they did, Kennan, fearing that disruptions of any kind could lead to nuclear war, had come to regard them as dangerous enemies.
IV.
Kennan published the second volume of his own memoirs in 1972. “I don’t think it is my best work,” he wrote after finishing it. This time he was right—his first volume had set a high standard. Covering the years 1950 through 1963, the new one focused on the Korean War, the Moscow ambassadorship and its aftermath, Kennan’s unsuccessful efforts to save the Foreign Service career of his former subordinate John Paton Davies, the Reith lectures controversy, and service under Kennedy in Yugoslavia. It was oddly uneven, treating these episodes in detail while ignoring most of what Kennan was otherwise doing, notably writing history. “I don’t see how a memoir could be better,” John Kenneth Galbraith observed in
He certainly took no pleasure in the latest crisis at the Institute for Advanced Study. After the ailing Oppenheimer resigned as director in 1966, the board of trustees appointed an economist, Carl Kaysen, to that position. A skillful fundraiser, Kaysen upgraded the Institute’s physical facilities but lacked Oppenheimer’s tact in managing its prickly personalities. After he overruled a majority of the Institute’s permanent professors to offer that status to a sociologist, Robert Bellah, in 1972, they demanded Kaysen’s resignation. Soon both sides were attacking one another in
That was part of the problem, but the larger issue was one of governance: did authority reside with the trustees, the tenured faculty, or the director, and if all three, in what proportion? Diplomacy, Kennan ruefully recalled, had been much easier than trying to answer this question. For the most part, he avoided taking sides: the trustees even approached him, at one point, about becoming interim director if Kaysen was forced to step down. To Kennan’s great relief, that didn’t happen. Bellah decided to go elsewhere, and Kaysen stayed on until 1976, when he yielded the directorship to a historian of science, Harry Woolf. But the furor robbed Kennan of the calm the Institute had once provided him. “As far as I can see,” he wrote one friend, “just about everybody here who has had any responsibility in this matter has done, with remarkable consistency, the wrong thing.” And, to another: “What fools these mortals be.”22
Kennan was hard at work, in the meantime, establishing an institute of his own, as a way of repaying “something of the debt I owe to those who once taught and inspired me.” One was his Foreign Service mentor, Robert Kelley, who had insisted that the best way to understand the Soviet Union was to study Russian history and culture. Kennan’s book on Custine reflected that principle, but there was no American center for Russian research independent of major universities. Kennan wanted one, to be located in Washington. “Of the necessity,” he wrote his former Moscow boss (and later New York governor) W. Averell Harriman, “there can, in my opinion, be no doubt whatsoever.” Only Harriman had “the position, the authority, and the institutional detachment”—Kennan was too tactful to mention the cash—“to carry things forward.”23
Richard Ullman, now a Princeton professor for whom Kennan had been a mentor, found it fascinating that he still deferred to Harriman: “I’d never seen [Kennan] with anybody else with whom he had that junior relationship.” Ullman watched it crack, briefly but revealingly, at a dinner Kaysen arranged shortly after Alliluyeva’s arrival. Harriman had been eager to meet her, but she found his questions about her father intimidating and refused to say much. Richard Holbrooke, Harriman’s feisty young aide, came gallantly to her rescue: “Governor, you are the most impossible man to work with I have ever encountered.” “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve said that,” Kennan burst out. “I’ve always felt that. Averell, you really were impossible!”24
Now, though, he needed Harriman’s help, and the old man had not mellowed. “I always distrust statements [like] ‘of the necessity . . . there can be no doubt whatsoever,’ ” he grumbled to his secretary after reading Kennan’s letter about the new institute. Why not expand existing centers at Harvard or Columbia? If a Washington site really was necessary, he advised Kennan, then “[t]he School of Advanced International Studies, started by Paul Nitze and associated with Johns Hopkins, might be a good home.” But Kennan did not like this idea. “I am naturally disappointed,” he responded to Harriman. The need for a Washington program that would not be an adjunct to something else was clear to “all the leading authorities in our country. I know that to find the money for it is not going to be an easy task.”25
That proved to be correct, but with the help of two energetic young historians, James Billington (later Librarian of Congress) and S. Frederick Starr (later president of Oberlin College), Kennan was able to get a small “Institute for Advanced Russian Studies” established at the new Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a congressionally mandated memorial to the former president, housed in the old Smithsonian building on the Washington Mall. “[A]s you will see from this stationery,” Kennan wrote Harriman again at the end of 1975, the new institute “bears, at the insistence of my younger colleagues, my own name and that of my great-uncle—the one who did all the travel in Siberia and wrote the book on your father.” The Kennan Institute still needed help: might Harriman purchase a “modest” building nearby, to be known as “Harriman House,” at which it could accommodate visiting scholars?26
Harriman did make a contribution, but the idea of a modest house named for him within the Kennan Institute carried no greater appeal than the idea of putting the latter in Nitze’s school had carried for Kennan. He approached Harriman once more in 1978, asking for help in raising a $3–5 million endowment, but this time got a flat rejection:
