George F. Kennan : an American life

but, still, it is a way of living, and it does not mean the end of the experiment of human civilisation; it leaves the way open for further developments.

Because there could be no recovery from a war fought with nuclear weapons, the United States should be “much bolder” in seeking their elimination, if necessary unilaterally. Was Kennan advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament? “Not all at once,” he replied, “or not without reciprocation, but if no one takes the lead in imposing self-restraint in the development of these weapons, we are never going to get any reduction of them by negotiation.”

Did this mean that Western civilization was no longer worth defending? “Of course not,” Kennan retorted, but defense had to begin at home:

Show me first an America which has successfully coped with the problems of crime, drugs, deteriorating educational standards, urban decay, pornography, and decadence of one sort or another—show me an America that has pulled itself together and is what it ought to be, then I will tell you how we are going to defend ourselves from the Russians. But as things are, I can see very little merit in organising ourselves to defend from the Russians the porno-shops in central Washington.

This and much else in the interview was self-indulgent nonsense. It was Kennan’s confirmation of Parkinson’s Law: given space, he would fill it, wisely or not. Kennan the enthusiast, Kennan the entertainer, Kennan the old fool, had taken over yet again.

But so had Kennan the prophet. We do not demand, of such seers, that they be logical, proportional, or brief. It’s their function to detect big dangers in little ones, to sense doom around each corner, to inflate admonitions, like balloons, to the bursting point. It’s also their lot to be derided, and in that respect Kennan’s bicentennial jeremiad could not have been better timed.³⁶

VI.

“He’s on their side,” Paul Nitze wrote angrily on his copy of the Encounter interview, where Kennan had imagined the Red Army dispersing the Danish hippies. Meanwhile Kennan had taken on Nitze— without naming him—in his Foreign Affairs article: people like him required the image of an implacable adversary, to be displayed repeatedly like a ventriloquist’s dummy, until to question its reality seemed frivolous or treasonous. Nitze was “a very good friend,” Kennan later acknowledged, but he believed in “a fictitious and inhuman Soviet elite, whereas I am dealing with what I suspect to be, and think is likely to be, the real one.” “George and I have always been good friends,” Nitze confirmed. They had known each other since serving together on the Policy Planning Staff in the late 1940s and had never differed “except on matters of substance.” Each was convinced, their joint biographer has written, “that the other’s desired policies could lead the United States to the ultimate catastrophe.”³⁷

A week after Jimmy Carter’s election in November 1976, Nitze and a bipartisan group of fellow detente critics announced the formation of a new Committee on the Present Danger—an earlier one, in 1950, had rallied support for increases in defense spending after the Korean War broke out. Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger, they insisted, had underestimated the threat posed by the Soviet military buildup over the past decade. Carter had made it clear that he would not seek to reverse the trend. The committee would therefore, as loudly as possible, sound the alarm.³⁸

Kennan decided, that same week, to sound one of his own. He put aside his research on the Franco-Russian alliance and began writing a new book, to be called The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy. The title left no doubt about its purpose: it would be a critique of Nitze and the movement he had started. With Connie Goodman’s help—she had come back to work for Kennan in 1975—he finished it in three months. He dedicated it “[t]o my wife Annelise, whose lack of enthusiasm for this and my other excursions into public affairs has never detracted from the loyalty with which she supported these endeavors.”³⁹

The book was “a big disappointment,” Goodman acknowledged. The New York Times thought it insufficiently newsworthy even to review. Philip Geyelin, who did review it for The Washington Post, found Kennan to have a “lamentably loose grip” on policy practicalities. Could the United States really restrain its military-industrial complex and achieve energy independence and correct the corruptions that afflicted its culture? Reduce its global commitments to the defense of Western Europe, Japan, and—in a rare Kennan bow to domestic politics—Israel? Abandon “obsolescent and nonessential” positions in Panama, the Philippines, and South Korea? Refrain from involving itself elsewhere in the “third world,” especially southern Africa? Sympathize with Soviet dissidents while trusting the Soviet government? Acknowledge, with respect to nuclear weapons, that there was “simply no need for all this overkill,” that both sides could “give up four fifths of it tomorrow,” and that a unilateral reduction of 10 percent, “immediately and as an act of good faith,” would hurt neither of them?

Each of these might be goals worth considering, but to propose them all without explaining how to achieve them—in what order, on what time scale, with what trade-offs—was to compile a catalog, not to suggest a strategy. The Cloud of Danger in this respect paralleled its author’s complaints, to the New York Times columnist James Reston, about Carter’s initial approaches to Moscow: that by pushing for deep cuts in strategic weaponry while simultaneously pressing the issue of human rights, his administration had already made “just about every mistake it could make.” Kennan’s mistake, in this hurriedly composed book, was to expand into 234 pages of large type what he had taken too many pages of small type to say in Encounter, without adding anything new. Meanwhile he was living with the frustration “of having no influence on the conduct of foreign policy and, at the same time, being invited and expected to talk about it on every conceivable occasion.”⁴⁰

One he could hardly avoid was the “X” article’s thirtieth anniversary. Not wanting to be caught off guard, as the Foreign Affairs editors had been five years earlier, the Council on Foreign Relations invited Kennan to reflect on the event—he appeared somewhat belatedly in November 1977—at the organization’s recently established Washington headquarters. Little was now left of Stalinism, he insisted: Brezhnev was a moderate, even conservative figure, “confidently regarded by all who know him as a man of peace.” That made it hard to see why detente had become so controversial in the United States. Without specifying Nitze and the Committee on the Present Danger, Kennan blamed those who “lose themselves in the fantastic reaches of what I might call military mathematics—the mathematics of possible mutual destruction in an age of explosively burgeoning weapons technology.”⁴¹

Nitze had been a banker, Kennan later explained. He liked statistics: “He was happier when he could take a blank sheet and do calculations than he was [with] the imponderables.” Because an adversary’s intentions could never be quantified, Nitze dismissed them as irrelevant. Capabilities did count, because they could be counted. Kennan had characterized him correctly, Nitze acknowledged. “When people say ‘more,’ I want to know how much ‘more’? I can understand it a hell of a lot better if you can put it into numbers or calculus or something like that. Then you can be precise as to what you’re talking about.”⁴²

Kennan was being imprecise, in Nitze’s view, when he called Brezhnev a “man of peace.” How did Kennan know this? What if he turned out to be wrong? Even if he was right, what did Brezhnev mean by “peace” in the first place? Why, if his intentions were peaceful, was his military so compulsively acquiring weaponry? Kennan had always found it difficult to answer questions like these, because he relied so heavily on his intuitive sense that the Russians were not going to start a war. When an interviewer for