George F. Kennan : an American life

press conference, that the Soviet Union would “commit any crime” in the pursuit of “world revolution,” Kennan warned publicly against “oversimplifications” without saying who had indulged in them. “It was an effort on my part to stake out a middle ground for myself between that sort of thing and its opposite: the sort of naive pro-Sovietism of which I am so often accused by the hard-liners.”¹⁰

In his diary, though, Kennan was already fretting about the “childishness and primitivism” of Reagan’s advisers. Alexander Haig, now secretary of state, was so alarmed about Central America that one would think the Red Army was invading the region. Richard Pipes, the Harvard historian and Committee on the Present Danger member who handled Soviet and Eastern European affairs for the National Security Council, was insisting that war was inevitable unless the U.S.S.R. changed its system. Its leaders had behaved badly, Kennan acknowledged: their polemics were “as Russian as boiled cabbage and buckwheat kasha. But what about my own government and its state of blind militaristic hysteria?”¹¹

Reagan evoked Kennan, also not by name, in his first significant speech after being released from the hospital, on May 17, 1981. Delivered at the University of Notre Dame, it came five days after an assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, and two days before Kennan’s Einstein Prize address. In words well suited to the drama of the occasion, Reagan predicted that “[t]he West won’t contain communism, it will transcend communism. It won’t bother to . . . denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.” Strangely, Kennan took no notice of what the president had said, despite its resonance with his own—if more moderately phrased—prophecy in the “X” article thirty-four years earlier.¹²

Another Reagan speech given at West Point on May 27, however, did provoke a response. “It is a simple world picture that he paints,” Kennan wrote in his diary. “I ought to love it, as he sees it, and be thrilled by it. I cannot. I love certain old-fashioned values and concepts, but not his.” Kennan then imagined a conversation with Reagan if they should ever meet, “which is most unlikely.” Remembering “my evil reputation,” the president would “look me sternly in the eye and ask: ‘Kennan, are you patriotic?’” If that meant loving the land, he would reply, he had loved it the way it was when he was a boy, before its inhabitants had made “a wasteland, a garbage dump, a sewer out of it.” There would be little left once Reagan’s supporters had completed that process. If the president meant loving the people, Kennan would have to reject any claim that their superior virtue and strength entitled them to lead the world.¹³

Like many Kennan diary entries, this one demands discount. Reagan, always a gentleman, would never have asked so pointed a question, and Kennan, equally polite, would never have given such a harsh answer. The passage shows, though, that despite his resolve to keep an open mind, Kennan was beginning to project his anger about his country onto its new leader. Despite the credit he had given Reagan, in the Einstein address, for wanting reductions in nuclear weaponry, Kennan wasn’t listening carefully to what he said. Throughout Reagan’s presidency, Kennan would remain surprisingly inattentive to what he did.

“I have a foreign policy,” Reagan wrote a friend in July 1981. “I just don’t happen to think that it’s wise to [tell] the world what your foreign policy is.” Had Reagan had a chance to explain it to him, Kennan might have picked up additional echoes of his own earlier thinking. The president was seeking to restore Western self-confidence, not for the purpose of economic recovery, as in the Marshall Plan, but by redressing the military imbalance created by actual increases in Soviet strategic and conventional capabilities, as well as by psychological impressions of American weakness in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. He hoped thereby to prepare the way, not just for new negotiations aimed at reducing nuclear weapons, but also for sharpening the stresses under which the Soviet system operated. Although Reagan had joined the Committee on the Present Danger, he had never accepted its insistence that the U.S.S.R. was getting stronger. Instead, he would have agreed with what Kennan had written in his 1978 letter to James Reston: that Brezhnev’s aging, frightened, and overstretched regime had no choice, if it was to survive, but to alter its course.¹⁴

Reagan’s reasons for thinking this, however, puzzled his own advisers and would have appalled Kennan, had he known of them. Kennan had reached his conclusions after a systematic effort, over several years, to compile and compare statistical information on Soviet capabilities, gleaned from as many sources as he could find. The president, in contrast, based his view on the simple conviction that capitalism fit human nature better than communism—and on jokes about the Soviet economy. Both were right: Kennan’s statistics were revealing, as were Reagan’s anecdotes. But Kennan would have found them more frightening than funny.¹⁵

Meanwhile Reagan’s determination to exploit Soviet weaknesses struck Kennan as dangerous. He had indeed recommended efforts to undermine Stalin’s empire in 1947–48, but as the dictator’s successors softened their rule while expanding their military capabilities, Kennan became almost protective of them, fearing that challenges might provoke war. He dismissed the dissidents as troublemakers. He portrayed the invasion of Afghanistan as a defensive maneuver, posing no threat to American interests. And when, in December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland and arrested the leaders of Solidarity, Kennan saw the action as a realistic response to Moscow’s concerns. Reagan’s retaliatory sanctions, he insisted, were “driving the Soviet leadership to desperation by pressing it mercilessly against a closed door.” Even the normally sympathetic New York Times found this to be too much: the “Kennan Doctrine,” it editorialized, seemed to be “that might should at least define right in world affairs.”¹⁶

“I think there is a good deal of latent discontent with the Brezhnev regime among younger members of the hierarchy,” Kennan wrote Durbrow early in January 1982, “and that we could, and should, give greater encouragement to these people.” But Reagan would get nowhere with human rights “agitation,” because “Russia is not going to be ‘democratic’ in our time.” Nor did it make sense to seek to destroy the Soviet system: “Our task is to accept it, for the moment, as it is; to try to avoid . . . an unnecessary and mutually disastrous war; and to see that the influence we exert on that country by our words and policies is one conducive to gradual change in what we would regard as the right direction.”¹⁷

How, though, to exert that influence? He was beginning to feel “like a one-man His Majesty’s royal opposition,” Kennan wrote Charlie James. He could have avoided this isolation, he added in his diary, by becoming a politician. He would then have

said a thousand things I did not mean, cultivated a thousand people for whom I had no respect, mouthed all the fashionable slogans, got myself—at least briefly—into a position of authority, and then—playing, as others do, on popular emotions and slogans—wheedled less perceptive people into doing useful things, the real nature of which they would not have understood at all.

That kind of leadership, however, was not his:

My role, vain as this assertion may sound, [is] that of a prophet. It was for this that I was born. And my tragedy is to enact this part at a time when it becomes increasingly doubtful that there will, as little as ten or twenty years hence, be anyone left to recognize the validity of the prophecies, or whether, indeed, any record of these prophecies will have survived the conflagration to which nuclear war can lead, or any eyes would be there to read it, if it did.

The choice, then, was Reagan versus Kennan: the politician versus the prophet. Neither could become the other. Meanwhile “there is a bit of life still to be lived—a bit to be seen of the tragic beauty and poetry of this world—a bit, in short, to be witnessed, perceived, and recorded.”¹⁸