George F. Kennan : an American life

III.

“I am only a small part of the resistance in the U.S. to the madness of the present Am[erican] administration,” Kennan wrote on March 11, 1982. What he meant was the campaign then under way to achieve a “mutual, verifiable freeze” in Soviet and American nuclear capabilities. Originating within the peace movement, galvanized by the journalist Jonathan Schell’s frightening New Yorker articles on the effects of a nuclear war, the freeze had won sufficiently widespread support by then for 139 members of Congress to have endorsed it. Kennan had too, but only because the freeze was the least controversial objective around which the largest “opposition” could rally. It would not be nearly enough, “and I would not like to appear to be suggesting, by associating myself with it, that it was enough.” He had already gone beyond the freeze by calling for sharp reductions in nuclear capabilities, and he was now reviving a proposal he had first made in his 1950 “super” bomb paper: that the United States should promise never to initiate the use of nuclear weapons in fighting a war.¹⁹

“No first use” attracted no support at that point and for decades afterward because NATO depended on nuclear deterrence. The alliance had never matched the Warsaw Pact’s conventional forces, so American nuclear superiority—in principle—was supposed to balance them. In fact, the Soviet Union had long since caught up with the United States in both categories of weaponry, which meant that NATO had a credibility problem: would Americans risk their own safety to defend Western Europeans, especially West Germans?

To show that they would, all administrations since Eisenhower’s had deployed troops equipped with tactical nuclear weapons along the East German–West German border, where they would bear the brunt of any Warsaw Pact attack. Like “mutual assured destruction,” however, this “rational” strategy assumed irrationalities: that armies could fight on battlefields their own armaments had made uninhabitable; that the enemy would not respond in kind; that there would be much left of West Germany if it had to be “defended” in this way. It was a strange sort of deterrence, Kennan pointed out: “If you dare to attack West Germany, we will destroy that country; and then where will you be?”²⁰

NATO’s nuclear doctrines “were marvelous instances of intellectual incoherence and practical success,” former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy observed, for despite their illogic, there had been no European war. But could they survive the collapse of detente, a new race to deploy intermediate-range missiles, the Soviet crackdown in Poland, the Reagan administration’s retaliations, and a harshness in official rhetoric on both sides not seen since the early Cold War? The president’s “zero option” proposal of November 1981 had done little to allay these concerns: even his supporters believed it to be a negotiating gambit—a crafty bit of public grandstanding—not a serious proposal.²¹

Shortly after the president’s speech, Kennan attended a Washington dinner hosted by R. Sargent Shriver, President Kennedy’s brother-in-law, the founder of the Peace Corps, a former ambassador to France, George McGovern’s running mate in 1972, and a devout Catholic. His other guests included former secretary of defense and World Bank president Robert S. McNamara; Gerard C. Smith, the chief American delegate at the SALT I negotiations; Paul Warnke, Smith’s SALT II counterpart; and Father J. Bryan Hehir, who was drafting a statement for the National Catholic Bishops on the danger of nuclear war. A lively discussion ensued, during which someone —probably Kennan—brought up “no first use.” To the surprise of all present, all now favored it.

Kennan agreed, therefore, to cooperate with McNamara and Smith in resurrecting the concept: they, in turn, decided that Bundy—who had not been present—should draft a proposal. Such collaboration was unusual for Kennan, but in this instance, he saw its value: “If I were to write [alone] about ‘first use’ people would say: ‘What the hell does Kennan know about military matters? He doesn’t know a damn thing about them.’ ” Bundy was initially skeptical but decided to go ahead because McNamara, who had originated the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction,” and Kennan, who had always despised it, had found common ground. Foreign Affairs was alerted, and the article appeared as “Nuclear Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance” early in April 1982. Its authors quickly came to be known—in a quirky homage to the victims of Mao Zedong’s last purge—as the “Gang of Four.”²²

The proposal, Kennan hoped, would “force” the Reagan administration to abandon “first use,” but Secretary of State Haig ruled that out immediately. Such a shift, he claimed in a speech on April 6, would make Europe “safe for conventional aggression” while endangering “the essential values of Western civilization.” No West German outdid Haig in hyperbole, but a spokesman for the ruling Social Democratic Party did point out that a long conventional war would be just as damaging as a limited nuclear war. A leading Christian Democrat called the idea “unusually dangerous, both politically and psychologically.”²³

So as a policy initiative, “no first use” died at birth. The episode was significant, though, because Kennan had allies, this time, in criticizing NATO strategy. With Bundy, McNamara, and Smith on his side, no one could claim, as had Acheson after the Reith lectures, that Kennan had a “mystical attitude” toward power relationships. Old orthodoxies, in the face of new tensions, were breaking up, winning Kennan at least a respectful hearing within the foreign policy establishment. Not, however, within the Reagan administration, which he now regarded as “ignorant, unintelligent, complacent and arrogant; worse still is the fact that it is frivolous and reckless.” The president seemed blithely above it all. “A few public statements professing his love for peace, in principle, and one or two propagandistic proposals put forward publicly and so designed as to assure Soviet rejection, and the problem, so far as he is concerned, will be resolved.”²⁴

Kennan wrote that last diary entry on May 7, 1982. Two days later Reagan spoke at his alma mater, Eureka College, in Illinois. He began his discussion of arms reduction by quoting from Carl Sandburg’s poem “Cornhuskers,” which his own class had included in its 1931 yearbook: “Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?” Then the president invoked, in words that could have come from Jonathan Schell, the “nightmarish prospect that a huge mushroom cloud might someday destroy such beauty.” Despite difficulties in Soviet-American relations, therefore, his START negotiating team would propose a mutual reduction of one-third in strategic missile warheads, with further cuts in other categories to follow: “My duty as President is to ensure that the ultimate nightmare never occurs.”²⁵

Two days after that, Kennan spoke to a predominantly Catholic audience in Davenport, Iowa, just ninety miles northwest of Eureka. He celebrated “[t]his habitat, the natural world around us, . . . the house the Lord gave us to live in.” No one had a right to deny it, “with all its beauty and fertility and marvelousness,” to future generations. The very existence of nuclear weapons endangered it. The situation would not change until Americans came to see themselves and their supposed Soviet adversaries together as “God’s creatures,” embodying “the struggle between good and evil, which is the fundamental mark of all humankind.”²⁶

“I fire my arrows into the air,” Kennan had written in a philosophical moment before Reagan took office. “Sometimes, they strike nothing; sometimes, they strike the wrong things; sometimes one or another of them strikes a bell and rings it, loud and clear.” Despite wishful thinking in The New York Times, none of these categories fits the Kennan-Reagan relationship: there was never a direct dialogue between them. But arrows fired from different points, at different times, by very different archers, can nonetheless converge.²⁷

IV.

“Louis and I have been talking, pleasantly, widely, and since we always ended up with the dilemmas, uselessly,” Kennan noted on October 1, 1982, while visiting friends in Switzerland. Louis J. Halle served under Kennan and Nitze on the Policy Planning Staff, had written the best early history of the Cold War, and had taught for