George F. Kennan : an American life

Become Three Score and Ten.

Kennan also resolved, with posterity in mind, to keep his diary more conscientiously: “An occasional hour of intimate reflection will be no less useful—and have no smaller chances of usefulness—than anything else I might be doing,” he wrote on the first day of January 1975. “And there is so little time left in which the real ‘me,’ as distinct from the mind alone or the various things I seem to mean to other people, can be expressed.”³¹

A week later he was sitting under the great vault in Washington’s National Cathedral—where his own memorial service would be held thirty years later—thinking “highly egoistic and improper, but very human thoughts” while the late Walter Lippmann’s friends eulogized him. Why had Lippmann had more influence than he? Kennan’s own education had been “broader, if less deep,” his mind “no less powerful,” his stylistic ability “fully as great,” his insights “bolder, more penetrating and more prophetic,” but his impact on American public life was “undetectable.” So why not give up punditry altogether and concentrate on history? “Will it make any difference, several decades later, whether what I wrote about . . . was my own dreary time or the period of the 1880s?”³²

Kennan spent the spring and summer of 1975 researching the Franco-Russian alliance in European archives. “I feel detached,” he wrote late in April, just prior to the final collapse of South Vietnam. “I have done what little I could.” He seemed strangely connected, however, to the departed. Walt Butterworth, another Foreign Service colleague and, in recent years, a Princeton neighbor, had also recently died. But Kennan dreamed, one night in Vienna, of a “visitation” from Butterworth, who

embraced me affectionately, we both being fully aware of the fact of his deadness, and allowed himself to be assured by me in the absurd, stammering language of dreams (for we were both much moved) of our continued companionship of the spirit, death notwithstanding. What to make of this I know not.... But that there was something in it more than just what is of this world—was clear.

Two weeks later, on a visit to Hermann Hatzfeldt’s Crottorf, Kennan was left to work alone, as was his preference, in the castle’s great library.

[I]t is of course haunted—not in a particularly sinister sense, although it does have a whiff of death about it, in all its loveliness. One is somehow aware of a recent, lingering, still significant presence. But then, I thought to myself, perhaps I, who work here and love the place and respond to its atmosphere, will join the company of spirits (or is it one, alone?) who inhabit it.

Until then, he needed “to quiet down, grow up, act my age, gather my strength,” and it struck him that if he made the effort, “God will help me.” Even God, though, would find it difficult “to teach this old dog new tricks.” For as soon as he joined the company of others, “the old fool—Kennan the enthusiast—Kennan the entertainer—takes over before I can control him, and we are off again.”³³

While in Bonn early in May, Kennan walked through a hotel lounge, found the movie version of South Pacific—dubbed into German—playing on television, and was “suddenly obliged—to my own amazement and amusement—to repress tears.” It was a relic from a lost civilization: “these fresh, boyish images of American sailors, the harmless inanities of the plot, the heroine’s belief in a happy future.” He could not say, with Oppenheimer, “Dammit, I happen to love this country,” but “I can say that I loved, and love in memory, something of what the country once was.... [T]he young will never know it.”³⁴

Kennan was in Helsinki in July 1975, on the eve of the great thirty-five-nation conference, but his mind was on the archival remains of a late-nineteenth-century world a lifetime removed from his own: “Yet all of this has now faded into the shadows.” Empires had disappeared. Names once “mountain-high in grandeur” were now known “only to a handful of historians like myself.” Stepping out onto the streets, where preparations were under way to welcome the notables of his era, Kennan could see that within another lifetime they too would be “carried off with the wind into the obscurity of time.” The present could only be captured “as in some old photograph, never to be recaptured as a living reality. Such is the dizziness, with relation to time, that can, on occasion, seize the historian.”³⁵

God had not yet induced in Kennan the habit—also once recommended by Acheson—of “taciturnity.” That became clear in an interview Kennan granted to the writer and broadcaster George Urban, which, when published in the September 1976 issue of the journal Encounter, filled thirty-three of its pages. “[T] ried to read it,” Kennan admitted on the day his copy arrived, but “found it much too long, and so boring that I went to sleep, literally, before I could finish it.” As with other Kennan pronouncements over the years, however, his critics found this one anything but boring.

He began with a bicentennial prediction for the United States: “This country is destined to succumb to failures which cannot be other than tragic and enormous in their scope.” They would arise from the familiar evils of industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, secularization, and environmental degradation. The only remedy would be “a much simpler form of life, a much smaller population, a society in which the agrarian component is far greater in relation to the urban component.... In this sense I am, I suppose, an 18th-century person.” Short of coercion, there was no way a nation the size of the United States could manage its affairs without never-ending compromises among self-centered constituencies. But if that was the only way the country could govern itself, then “this places certain limitations on what it can hope to do in the field of foreign affairs.” Its policy should be “a very restrained one.”

Had Kennan become, then, an isolationist? Not if that meant abruptly curtailing existing commitments. It should be possible, though, to reduce these gradually, with a view to “leaving other people alone and expect[ing] largely to be left alone by them.” Would that not consign European allies to Soviet domination? Perhaps they deserved it, Kennan replied: they had grown far too self-indulgent under American protection. While recently cruising in the Baltic, he had happened upon a Danish youth festival “swarming with hippies—motorbikes, girlfriends, drugs, pornography, drunkenness, noise—it was all there. I looked at this mob and thought how one company of robust Russian infantry would drive it out of town.”

But with an ideology “at least 70–80 years out of date,” Kremlin leaders would not know what to do with Western Europe if they were to take it over. And if the moderate socialists of the region ever summoned the resolve to end their countries’ dependence on the United States, the Soviet Union would have no plausible justification for continuing to control Eastern Europe. Disarray, therefore, “cuts both ways.”

Kennan’s most startling comments were on nuclear weapons. People would always find excuses to fight one another, so they had to be prevented “from playing with the worst kind of toys.”

This is why I feel that the great weapons of mass-destruction—and nuclear arms are not the only conceivable ones—should never be in human hands, that it would be much better to go back, symbolically speaking, to bows and arrows which at least do not destroy nature. I have no sympathy with the man who demands an eye for an eye in a nuclear conflict.

Compared to the ecological and demographic consequences of a nuclear conflagration, Soviet domination of Western Europe would be only “a minor catastrophe.”

After all, people do live in the Soviet Union. For the mass of people there, life is not intolerable. The same is true in East Germany; the same is true in Hungary. It is not what these people would like;