years at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. A close observer of Kennan, he recorded the conversation more carefully, for it helped to explain “a public advocacy that does not, to my mind, stand up to reality.”
Could two men pointing pistols at one another trust a “no first use” declaration? Kennan had no answer. Wasn’t nuclear deterrence keeping the peace, so wouldn’t abolishing nuclear weapons imperil it? Kennan conceded the point. Hadn’t world government advocates foreseen a third world war if their advice wasn’t followed? Kennan acknowledged that they had been wrong. He nonetheless showed Halle a page from his diary—claiming that it had slipped out of its ringbinder—in which he foresaw his own children’s deaths within five years because no one heeded his warnings about a nuclear holocaust. He was a Christian, Kennan insisted, but in this situation God was helpless.28
Unwilling to let his friend off the hook, Halle wrote a few months later to express dismay when people whose minds he respected “take positions for which I see no adequate basis.” It was wholly implausible to claim that the U.S.S.R. had recovered from Stalinism, a phenomenon whose roots, Kennan had once argued, went back through a thousand years of Russian paranoia. “I think you were right when you said the Soviet Union had to be contained, even if you had in mind something other than military containment.” Kennan’s reply rejected his younger self: Brezhnev’s successors—the ailing autocrat had finally succumbed in November 1982—were men who calculated their interests rationally and would do all they could to avoid a war. The same could not be said of their Washington counterparts, who were deliberately destabilizing the nuclear balance: “That is, presumably, what Mr. Reagan and his associates really want.”29
But if Kennan could have read NSDD-75, the administration’s first top-secret review of policy toward the Soviet Union, approved by Reagan on January 17, 1983, he would have found still more echoes of “Mr. X.” American goals, the document specified, should be:
1. To contain and over time reverse Soviet expansionism by competing effectively on a sustained basis with the Soviet Union in all international arenas—particularly in the overall military balance and in geographical regions of priority concern to the United States.
2. To promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the ruling elite is gradually reduced.
3. To engage the Soviet Union in negotiations to attempt to reach agreements which protect and enhance U.S. interests and which are consistent with the principle of strict reciprocity and mutual interest.
It’s not clear whether Reagan had read Kennan’s famous
He had fired the incendiary Haig the previous summer, replacing him with the less combustible George Shultz. With the president’s approval, the new secretary of state quietly brought Soviet ambassador Dobrynin to the White House on February 15, 1983, for his first private meeting with Reagan. Neither the press nor the president’s staff —who doubted their boss’s ability to hold his own with the experienced diplomat—were informed. After talking for two hours “pretty nose to nose,” Reagan wrote in his diary, he asked Dobrynin and Shultz to help him communicate regularly with the new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov: “Geo. tells me that after they left, the ambas. said ‘this could be a historic moment.’ ”31
Knowing nothing of it, Kennan arranged his own meeting with Dobrynin while visiting Washington on March 2. He wanted to show Dobrynin that “our country could do a bit better in this respect than the Soviet Union had done by me”—he meant his own isolation in Moscow in 1952, when an invitation from Stalin never came.
So I marched bravely into the old embassy building on 16th Street, under the amazed eyes and furiously clicking cameras of God knows how many agents of the F.B.I. and others of the intelligence fraternity, was kindly and jovially received by my ambassadorial host, lunched and talked pleasantly with him for an hour or so, well aware that the recording devices of both governments were probably noting, for the benefit of posterity, every word of our rather innocuous conversation.
If Dobrynin mentioned his visit to the White House—this seems unlikely given its secrecy—Kennan made no note of it. He did meet Shultz at a dinner that evening and liked his imperturbability but thought that “it jolted him a bit when I gave him the name.” Shultz was an improvement over Haig; nevertheless “I foresee something of [a] crisis between him and the fanatics . . . around the President, particularly if he tries to do anything sensible about relations with the Soviet Union.”32
Shultz had some rough weeks ahead of him. Reagan gave him no warning before denouncing the Soviet Union, in an address to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, as “the focus of evil in the modern world,” and only minimal notice prior to his announcement, on March 23, of the Strategic Defense Initiative, his plan to protect the United States by building an antiballistic missile system. But the secretary of state soon saw Reagan’s logic in wanting to put both the U.S.S.R. and his own critics on the defensive. How could one reconcile religious faith with the political practice of “moral equivalency”? What was wrong with making nuclear weapons, as the president put it, “impotent and obsolete”?33
Kennan was vulnerable on both counts. He trusted Andropov—until recently the head of the KGB—more than he did Reagan. He opposed MAD and the first serious effort to move beyond it. He took these positions not just because he feared war but also because he allowed sensitivity to
Delivered on May 17 under the sponsorship of the Committee on East-West Accord, Kennan’s address was in other ways worthy of its author. It was his first in the city since his Einstein Prize speech two years earlier. He delivered it before an audience including diplomats from NATO and Warsaw Pact countries, as well as an eagle- eyed Harriman, now ninety-two. Soviet negotiating techniques, Kennan admitted, could be “stiff, jerky, secretive, unpredictable,” lacking in “useful lubrication.” But it was wrong to apply, to their practitioners, “an image of unmitigated darkness,” as if they were the product of some “negative genetic miracle.” Nor was there any point in threatening the use, against their country, of useless weaponry: the goal should be to reduce nuclear arsenals, “with a view to their total elimination.” His fifty-five years of involvement in Soviet-American affairs—longer than that of anyone living—had never made him lose faith in constructive possibilities: “I wish I could convey some of that confidence to those around me here in Washington.”
The seventy-nine-year-old Kennan, Stephen Rosenfeld wrote in
