of weakness, not strength, in Afghanistan. But Kennan’s grand strategic logic—the ability to see how contents mix after compartments are opened—eluded him altogether in this instance. What would the implications have been of the first formal declaration of war by anybody since 1945? What was to prevent escalation? How might Kremlin leaders respond to the prospect of American military action in a country bordering their own and Afghanistan? What conspiracies might they see in the rise of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland, the rapturous reception accorded Pope John Paul II on his first visit back after his election, and in the Polish-born Brzezinski’s recent well- publicized trip to the Khyber Pass? It was not at all clear that Kennan’s method of rescuing the hostages would reassure the aging officials in Moscow who now controlled half of the world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Kennan always had trouble keeping his emotions apart from his strategies, but as he grew older, the problem got worse. He commanded, as an elder statesman, increasing respect: there was supposed to be some kind of connection, he knew, between advanced age and wisdom. But “as one to whom these imputations would presumably be applicable, I am bound to say that this theory is at best complicated, and at worst questionable.”59 He had fewer contemporaries, now, who could insist that he reconcile his contradictions before publicly displaying them. Bohlen had most frequently played that role, but so too had Acheson, Lippmann, and Harriman—the last still living and selectively donating, but in no condition to set Kennan right, as he used to do in Moscow, on the limits of policy feasibility. Nitze, a personal friend, was a public adversary who delighted in pouncing (or having associates like Eugene Rostow pounce) on Kennan’s lapses. No one had asked, with respect to his
But in October 1980 one old friend tried. With events in Iran and Afghanistan having produced so much “confusion, bewilderment, and fuzzy thinking,” Elbridge Durbrow wrote, he could not help but recall “how realistic, sound and prophetic” Kennan had been in the “long telegram” and the “X” article. “Practically everything you predicted has transpired,” but hardly anyone in government was even aware of this. So did each new administration have to learn all over again “that the Soviet leaders since Lenin have not fundamentally changed their basic aims, goals, and methods of operation”? It was a polite way of asking, Durbrow later explained, “what the devil is the difference? I see them as still the same enemies we always had. Why does George see [them] differently?”60
“Mr. Carter’s performance is only a bit of history,” Kennan replied grimly on November 10, six days after Reagan’s landslide victory. Foreign policy would now be in the hands of Nitze, Scoop Jackson, and other hard-liners. There would be no limits to the arms race, or to preparations for a military showdown. Kennan had tried, since the end of the last war, to find a way of dealing with the Soviet Union that would not require a new war: “[T]oday I have to recognize the final and irreparable failure of this effort.” How all of this could please Durbrow—himself a hard-liner—Kennan could not understand, “but if it does—my congratulations. It is a small consolation to know that even if one cannot, one’s self, see hope in a situation, one has friends who can.”61
IX.
Kennan was just back from attending the annual meeting of Pour le Merite, an elite eighteenth-century Prussian military order revived by the West German government to celebrate civilian achievements in the arts and sciences. He had become one of its thirty foreign members in 1976, regarding the honor at least as seriously as his membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The German organization combined his love of ceremony with his affinity for that culture, and despite the fact that attendance required flying across the Atlantic instead of simply slipping into New York, he rarely missed its meetings. The 1980 convocation took place in Regensburg in late September, after which the Kennans went to Garmisch, where, on October 1, George was to give the principal address at the Second World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies.
Characteristically, he had put off finishing it until the last moment, so while waiting for it to be typed, he sat wearily on a park bench in the fading afternoon sunlight, envying other old people around him who seemed free of such weighty responsibilities. Could he ever be like them? Would anything come of it, if he tried, apart from physical and intellectual decay? Thirteen hundred people were present when he rose to address them that evening, and just as he came to the passage of which he was proudest, a woman in the audience let out a piercing shriek, as if to herald what he was about to say—which was what he wished he could say, simultaneously, to leaders in both Washington and Moscow:
For the love of God, of your children, and of the civilization to which you belong, cease this madness. You have a duty not just to the generation of the present—you have a duty to civilization’s past, which you threaten to render meaningless, and to its future, which you threaten to render nonexistent. You are mortal men. You are capable of error. You have no right to hold in your hands—there is no one wise enough and strong enough to hold in his hands—destructive powers sufficient to put an end to civilized life on a great portion of our planet. No one should wish to hold such powers. Thrust them from you. The risks you might thereby assume are not greater—could not be greater—than those which you are now incurring for us all.
The outburst, he later determined, had no connection to the lecture. But the Slavicists, expecting neither a shriek nor a prophet, responded with only polite applause. And so Kennan was left “as uncertain of the suitability (not the truth) of what I had had to say as I had been before saying it.”62
TWENTY-FOUR
A Precarious Vindication: 1980–1990
KENNAN HAD NEVER HEARD OF THE ALBERT EINSTEIN PEACE PRIZE when he got a phone call on March 9, 1981, informing him that he had won it. The prize was a new one, selection committee chairman Norman Cousins explained, established only a year earlier by the trustees of Einstein’s estate. Kennan would be the second recipient. “I was, of course, in one way pleased over this news—a pleasure not diminished, I must confess, although not mainly occasioned, by the fact that the award carries with it a $50,000 check.” He and Einstein had, after all, once been “colleagues of sorts” at the Institute for Advanced Study, even if they had never spoken. But in Kennan’s continuing struggle between scholarship and prophecy, the award might tip the balance irrevocably in the latter direction. Accepting it would imply a commitment “to do what I can to bring people to their senses and to halt a wholly unnecessary and infinitely dangerous drift towards war—and all of this at a time when I would like to finish my historical study, really retire, work around the house and garden, etc. Oh dear!”1
While researching his second volume on the Franco-Russian alliance in Moscow the following month, Kennan received two other unexpected accolades. Jack Matlock, the American
The ceremony took place in Washington on May 19 before an audience including members of the new Reagan administration as well as the longtime Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Kennan used the occasion not to
