George F. Kennan : an American life

When Kennan published his speech in The New Yorker the following October, he had to make a few revisions. One was to acknowledge that Harriman’s Soviet experience went back further than his own: the older man had put the younger in his place yet again. The other was to mention, if only briefly, the shooting down of a South Korean airliner that had strayed over Sakhalin on the night of August 31–September 1, 1983. Andropov and his subordinates should learn from this “what harm they do to themselves when they let military considerations ride roughshod over wider interests.” Kennan should have stopped there.

Feeling the need for further explanation, though, he decided to provide one in The Washington Post. The incident should have surprised no one familiar with the “exaggerated sensitivity” of the Kremlin leaders, their inflexible ideology, and their inability to control their military. This was not as reassuring as Kennan had meant it to be. He went on to insist that the event would never have happened had it not been for the dangerous games intelligence agencies on both sides were playing, and for the Korean pilot’s “inexplicable obstinacy” in flying at night through forbidden airspace. It was understandable, then, that Andropov had given up hope for anything other than “implacable hostility” from Reagan’s administration.

Now even Annelise, to whom George had not shown the piece before submitting it, “rose in revolt.” She was “a woman of good judgment,” he told himself, obviously shaken. “And if it makes her intensely unhappy that I should, once or twice a year, speak my mind publicly, that in itself is a reason for not doing so.” There was, however, such a thing as paralysis from frustration. “The people who experiment on rats know that. I, poor rat, am close to experiencing it.”³⁵

On November 15, 1983, the Woodrow Wilson Center—still the Washington home of the Kennan Institute—held a dinner to “celebrate” fifty years of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Kennan was the main speaker, but the mood was noticeably subdued. A few other American ex-ambassadors attended, as did Dobrynin; the only Reagan administration official present, however, was Jack Matlock, who had recently replaced Pipes as the president’s Soviet and East European adviser on the National Security Council. Kennan praised Franklin D. Roosevelt, a very rare thing for him. If that president still occupied the White House, he would not have fallen into cynicism and despair over the state of Soviet-American relations. He would be setting about, “with boldness and good cheer, to make things better.” Why should anyone now accept anything less? ³⁶

Stalin’s daughter was asking the same question. Desperately worried that war was about to break out, she demanded that Harriman and Kennan undertake a mission to Moscow to save the situation. “What are you going to do about it?” Harriman asked. Alliluyeva was emotional, Kennan answered, “with certain oddities and disabilities of character that have been a great trial to all her friends.” Like her father, though, she was at times capable of “penetrating insights.” This was one, and Kennan would not reject the role if offered it. But that Reagan and Shultz might welcome such an initiative seemed doubtful, “and without their recognition and acceptance of it, I am not sure whether it could be of any value.”³⁷

V.

On Saturday, January 14, 1984, to Kennan’s astonishment, he did get a call from the White House. It would have come a day earlier, but Annelise, still hoping for a less visible husband, had refused to disturb him. The caller was Matlock. He had no Moscow trip in mind, but he did want Kennan to know that on the morning of the sixteenth—timed for European television—Reagan would be making an important speech.

He then told me very interesting things: that the President felt some regret over certain of the things he had said, in the early period of his presidency, about the Soviet Union; and that the reason why he had been unwilling to deal with the Soviet government at that time was that he had felt that we were too weak militarily for our word to have any weight. Now, he felt we were stronger, and that he was in a better position to deal with them.

Matlock, whom Kennan greatly respected, would not have called without authorization: that this had been granted was “extraordinary.” But by whom? Shultz, rumored to have read the New Yorker article? The new national security adviser, Robert McFarlane? The president himself? “[I]t is assuredly a straw in the wind, and certainly a part of the significant change of policy toward the Soviet Union which Matlock assures me is taking place.”³⁸

The speech, one of Reagan’s most memorable, deplored the possibility that “dangerous misunderstanding[s] and miscalculations” might wreck the hopes of parents everywhere “to raise their children in a world without fear and without war.” In a peroration only he or FDR could have composed, the president envisaged a Soviet couple, Ivan and Anya, meeting an American couple, Jim and Sally. Finding how much they had in common, they would not have debated differences between their governments. Instead they might have gone out for dinner somewhere, thereby demonstrating that “people don’t make wars.”³⁹

Kennan was momentarily reassured. “I have a sense that respect for me has recently risen in White House circles,” he wrote on January 29. The president’s advisers were not consulting him directly, “but I suspect they listen, if apprehensively, to what I say.” He had found three references, in Reagan’s address, to the New Yorker article, although he didn’t specify what they were. Given the president’s strong position, given the mess Andropov and his associates had made of their relations with the Western Europeans—the West German Bundestag had voted to deploy NATO intermediate-range missiles in November— maybe Kennan should try to help Reagan.

But then I thought of all of his other follies and of his unlimited commitment to a military showdown, and I also reflected on my own age and on the limitations that imposes; and I thought: no, the faintly more positive tone of his recent speech is surely no more than a minor tactical concession, he is a stubborn man who, precisely because his political position is a strong one, is unlikely to wander very far from the primitive preconceptions he has already formed. Better, I thought, for you, Kennan, to keep out of this.

So he was “effectively stymied.” He should simply accept old age, and “let the tragedy take its course.”⁴⁰

Unbeknownst to Kennan, it almost had. Andropov turned out to have been less capable than his predecessors of calculating interests rationally, and in his fear of nuclear war—which was real enough—had almost set one off. Convinced while still at the KGB that the Reagan administration was planning a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, he had ordered an intelligence alert that went on for two years, with agents throughout the world looking for evidence to confirm his suspicions. The Korean airliner incident occurred within that context, as did Andropov’s subsequent denials that any error had taken place. Already on kidney dialysis at the time, he was in no condition to be running a superpower, much less exchanging ideas with Reagan on how to reduce tensions.⁴¹

Kennan had been right, then, to stress the hypersensitivity of Soviet leaders, but because he had been doing this for years while also emphasizing their common sense, his warnings lacked the weight they might otherwise have had. What made the situation doubly dangerous was that Reagan too assumed rationality. He expected Andropov to take him at his word when he said, publicly and in private, that the last thing he wanted was a war. But Andropov, like Kennan, doubted Reagan’s sincerity.

Both were wrong to do so. On October 10, 1983, the president previewed The Day After, an ABC television movie about the effects of a Soviet missile strike on an American city, Lawrence, Kansas. “It’s very effective & left me profoundly depressed,” Reagan acknowledged, hence the need