George F. Kennan : an American life

“My prior commitments are such that I cannot give the substantial sum that you speak of in your letter to your Institute.” Kennan should approach the industrialist Armand Hammer, taking care to “give his name [sufficient] recognition to excite his interest.” Four years later Harriman announced that he and his family were giving Columbia University $11.5 million to endow its Russian Institute, which would henceforth be the “W. Averell Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.”²⁷

Knowing Harriman’s ego, Kennan might have expected this. Having one of his own, he did not. Despite the two Kennans for whom his institute was named, the younger one had hoped through it, he later admitted, “to ‘institutionalize’ myself”—and had been bold enough to seek Harriman’s help. Harriman liked the concept, but thought that a different person deserved the distinction. It was a contest of the vanities Kennan could not win. If he had been willing to name his institute for Harriman, the Princeton historian Cy Black speculated, “he might have gotten the money. But a man like Harriman doesn’t give it to Kennan’s institute.”²⁸

Kennan wondered, on getting the bad news, whether he should recommend liquidating his institute altogether, “the shattering of one more dream.” In the end, though, he agreed to go on the Harriman Institute’s advisory board, Harriman’s wife Pamela went on his, and the Kennan Institute became the primary Washington center for research on Russia, as well as on the non-Russian territories of the former Soviet Union. Fund-raising was always difficult, though, and so it was never able to separate itself, as Kennan had hoped it might, from the Wilson Center. His institute remained “beautiful, valuable, full of promise, but, like a young lovely Victorian governess without fortune or family, at the mercy of the one who gives her meals, a roof, and a pittance of salary.”²⁹

V.

The Kennans celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary on September 11, 1971. Their children surprised them with a dinner followed by a ball, featuring engraved invitations, guests brought in from all over, and an orchestra playing George’s Dixieland favorites. “They organized it all by themselves, without a word to us. . . . All Princeton was impressed.” Mortality, however, was intimating itself more regularly now. Chip Bohlen died after a long illness on the first day of January 1974. He was “closest to me in professional experience and interest,” George wrote his widow, Avis. “I find it quite impossible to believe that he, who was so much a part of my world, is really gone. Perhaps, in one way, he is not.”³⁰

Six weeks later Kennan turned seventy, thereby becoming, in line with Institute for Advanced Study procedure, a professor-emeritus. To mark the occasion, he composed a poem, which he read aloud at his birthday dinner. It sounded playful, but it was not casual: he reworked it several times before he was satisfied, and then ensured its survival by saving it in several locations. As if to humiliate future biographers, he compressed much of himself within just fifteen stanzas.

When the step becomes slow, and the wit becomes slower,

And memory fails, and the hearing declines;

When skies become clouded, and clouds become lower,

And you find yourself talking poetical lines;

When the path that you tread becomes steeper and darker;

And the question seems no longer whether, but when—

Then, my friend, you should look for the biblical marker,

The sign by the road that reads: Three Score and Ten;

At this point you’ll observe, if you care to look closely,

You’re no longer alone on the highway of life;

For there trudges behind you, and glowers morosely,

A bearded old man with a curious knife;

At first you defy this absurd apparition

(For it’s old Father Time, with his glass and his scythe);

You swear you were never in better condition—

The body more jaunty, the spirit more blythe;

And you laugh in his face, and you tell the old joker:

“You must be mistaken; I’m feeling just fine,”

But the wretched old scarecrow just picks up his poker

And gives you a jab and says: “Get back in line”;

So you swallow your pride, and you march with your brothers;

You do all the things you’re instructed to do;

But you’re sure this compulsion, just right for the others,

Could not have been really intended for you;

And you turn to the thought of your erstwhile successes—

How brilliant, how charming, how worthy of fame;

’Til a small voice protests and the conscience confesses

What an ass you once were and how empty the claim;

Then the ghosts of the past find you out in your sadness,

And gather about, and point fingers of shame—

The ghosts of stupidities spawned by your madness—

The ghosts of injustices done in your name;

And you grieve with remorse for the sins you’ve committed:

The fingers that roamed and the tongue that betrayed;

But you grieve even more for the ones you omitted:

The nectar untasted, the record unplayed.

But the cut most unkind, and the cruelest teacher,

Is the feeling you have when, as sometimes occurs,

The wandering eye of some heavenly creature

Encounters your own, and your own catches hers;

And you conjure up dreams too delightful to mention,

And you primp and you pose, ’til it’s suddenly seen

That the actual object of all her attention—

This burning, voluptuous female attention—

Is a fellow behind you who’s all of nineteen.

So you swallow your pride, and you scurry for cover

In the solaces characteristic of age:

You tell the same anecdotes over and over,

Forget the same names, and reread the same page;

And at length you concede, though with dim satisfaction,

That it’s not on yourself that your peace now depends—

That for this you must look to a different reaction:

To the weary indulgence of children and friends.

Yet, if given the chance to retread, as you’ve known it,

The ladder of life—to begin at the spot

Where the story picked up, and before you had blown it,

Would you take it, dear friends?

I suspect you would not;

So let us take heart; we are none of us friendless;

And fill up your glasses, and raise them again

To the chance that an interval, seemingly endless,

Will ensue

Before you