George F. Kennan : an American life

The New York Times Magazine asked him in May 1978 whether he accepted the principle “better red than dead,” Kennan unwisely admitted that he did, although “I don’t think there’s any need for us to be red, because I don’t think that war is the way the Russians would like to expand their power.”

That was just the point, Nitze retorted, in an article the Times ran alongside Kennan’s interview. Soviet leaders did not want a war, but they did want the “strategic nuclear preponderance,” upon which “all other levers of pressure and influence depend.” If allowed to achieve it, they would indeed expand their power, while containing that of the United States and its allies. Their goal was a world in which they would be “the unchallenged hegemonic leaders.” It had been “little short of bizarre,” Kennan complained, that the Times had felt obliged to balance him with “a good dose of hard-line conventional wisdom from Nitze.” He could not understand why so many friends were now criticizing him “in this way.”⁴³

It got worse the following month when an enemy joined the chorus. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, expelled from the Soviet Union four years earlier, attacked Kennan in a widely publicized Harvard commencement address for having denied the applicability of morality in politics: “On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well-planned world strategy.” With Kennan calling for “unilateral disarmament,” even the youngest of Kremlin officials were laughing “at your political wizards.” Kennan heard of this only when his mail caught up with his sailboat, appropriately enough, in a Danish port. “Abruptly yanked back . . . from the harsh but simple realities of the sea,” he wandered disconsolately among a forest of “indifferent masts,” but as the evening wore on, “the annoyances of life ashore, about which for the moment one could do so little, faded from consciousness. This, I suppose, is the therapeutic quality of cruising in small sailing craft.”⁴⁴

Kennan had criticized the Committee on the Present Danger “at length and with care,” Eugene V. Rostow, one of the organization’s cofounders and close friend of Nitze, wrote in The Yale Law Journal that summer. But as Kennan’s Memoirs had shown, he had long suffered inner conflicts “about himself, his dream world, his work, his goals, and his relationship to the American nature and culture.” These had brought him “perilously close to preaching that we don’t really need a foreign and defense policy at all.” He had, in this way, outdone the Old Testament prophets, for however sharply they scolded the ancient Israelites, “not even Jeremiah despaired of their survival.” Kennan had no sense of what it would take to ensure that of the West, because his mind had “never moved along mathematical lines, and never will.” He was “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”⁴⁵

Having been called many things but never before an extraterrestrial, Kennan wrestled in his diary with how to respond. “Blast the stupidities? Expend, in this way, such authority as I possess?” In the end he wrote a long letter, typed it himself, and sent it off late in November 1978 to Reston. “I shall soon be 75 years of age,” he pointed out. “[M]y means and energies are obviously limited. For me to try to involve myself in public disputes with Paul Nitze and others would merely mean to get myself chewed up in controversy, and I would soon lose what little value I may have as a force in public opinion.”

He then went on to show how the skills of an impressionist or a poet—if not an alien—could be valuable. He did so by imagining himself in the position of Brezhnev and his closest associates, most of whom were approaching Kennan’s age. They might “like to have everything under such perfect control that they could address themselves exclusively to schemes for our early undoing,” as the Committee on the Present Danger had suggested, “but the fact is: they don’t.” Whatever their self-confidence, it had to be vastly overshadowed by their fears

of alarming declines in the rates of increase of national product and labor efficiency; of poor morale, expressing itself in cynicism, absenteeism and drunkenness in great portions of their population; of a developing labor shortage of truly spectacular dimensions; of disturbing demographic changes; of an extremely serious erosion of their moral authority and political position in Eastern Europe; of a Chinese ideological competition that threatens to deprive them of their position of leadership among the Marxist forces of the world; of a Chinese military competition that threatens them with a two-front war (the bete noire of every Russian strategist of all time) in the case of complications with the West; of their virtual isolation among the great advanced nations of the world; of the forthcoming difficulties of succession within their own party.

Now they had something else to worry about: the unexpected election of a Polish pope. To claim, in the light of all this, that the old men in the Kremlin could want anything more than to hang on to what they had was “to distort out of all verisimilitude their nature, their situation, and their interests.”

But, Nitze and his friends would protest, weren’t the Soviets busily exploiting “third world” opportunities? Had they not moved into Angola in the wake of the Portuguese empire’s collapse? What about the “horn of Africa,” where the superpowers were competing for influence in Somalia and Ethiopia? Or Afghanistan, where a Marxist revolution had taken place earlier that year? In fact, Kennan insisted, in each of these situations local Marxists had exploited the Soviet Union, whose leaders knew that if they failed to aid these causes, the Cubans or the Chinese would, and their own credibility would suffer. Far from opportunities, these were liabilities, depleting strengths needed to maintain the status quo.

Kennan was now, he reminded Reston, “the patriarch.” No one else living, not even the Kremlin’s long-serving foreign minister Andrey Gromyko, could draw on his half-century of diplomatic experience. He would not claim, in all respects, to speak for the dead—Bohlen, in particular, had “never encountered a statement of mine to which he could not take some exception”—but his late Foreign Service colleagues would share, he believed, his astonishment at how little respect their kind of professionalism commanded in the face of current frivolities, abuses, and misrepresentations: “There, Scottie, I have chosen you as the object for what I hope will be my last statement on Soviet-American relations. Make what you will of it.”⁴⁶

No one, not even Reston, made much of it at the time. But when Soviet archives opened after the Cold War ended, they showed Kennan’s impression of a frightened, overstretched gerontocracy, desperately trying to regain the initiative lost by its own ineptitude dating back at least as far as the invasion of Czechoslovakia, to be much closer to reality than Nitze’s calculation of a purposefully rising hege-mon. The difference, to oversimplify, was between what and why. Nitze could see what the Brezhnev regime was doing and from this he concluded, inaccurately, that he knew why. Kennan sensed why, and so worried much less about what. Nitze seemed right in the short run, because only the long run could confirm Kennan’s claim. But, with the passage of time, it did.⁴⁷

VII.

“[I]t isn’t easy being George Kennan,” his friend Dick Ullman once observed. “I’ve always thought that that was a heavy weight to bear.” Kennan seemed genuinely reluctant to get into policy debates, but he rarely resisted the opportunity. He appeared to regard himself as “an asset to be treasured,” a historical figure whose life needed to be documented as thoroughly as possible. He was keeping more complete diaries now than ever before, and he had his research assistants—one was Ullman’s wife, Yoma—filling scrapbooks with Kennan-related newspaper clippings in multiple languages from all over the world. “I’ll bet you,” Ullman commented, “that there is no Nitze scrapbook.”⁴⁸

Yoma Ullman was one of several assistants who worked with Kennan on his Franco-Russian alliance book. Connie Goodman, who still handled his correspondence, was another: she helped Kennan devise an elaborate system of color-coded note cards—pink for the French, blue for the Russians—which his color-blindness at times caused him to confuse. Mimi Bull, who had been Goodman’s college roommate, also worked for Kennan in Princeton and later in Austria. “I was in awe and frankly terrified to begin with,” she recalled, but soon “[t]he austere scholar