George F. Kennan : an American life

in the field of academic, scientific, and personal exchanges,” he acknowledged in December. But “behind it—in the fields that really count—stands a stone wall he has no intentions of dismantling.”⁵²

“I have no cheerful thoughts to offer as you leave this country,” Kennan wrote Dobrynin in March 1986. His long Washington ambassadorship was coming to an end, and although “the future is full of surprises—sometimes even pleasant ones,” Reagan, Kennan was sure, would not provide them. He saw the president at times as a sinister political wizard, at others as an amiable actor speaking lines sinister writers had prepared for him. Whatever he was, Reagan would never seek nuclear arms reduction. Thanks to him, “we love these apocalyptic devices; we have taken them to our hearts; and we would not give them up if the Russians had none at all.”⁵³

At the Reykjavik summit in October, however, Reagan and Gorbachev did agree to remove all intermediate- range nuclear missiles in Europe. They also endorsed the concept of a 50 percent cut in intercontinental-range missiles, and they even discussed the possibility of eliminating all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. Only the president’s unwillingness to dismantle the Strategic Defense Initiative brought the negotiations to an angry halt, but as Gorbachev was quick to acknowledge, Reykjavik had “created a qualitatively new situation. And nobody is now in a position to act the way he was able to act before.”⁵⁴

The New York Times ran Gorbachev’s statement on the morning of October 15. Kennan read it, set aside another attack on Reagan—“a deeply prejudiced, ill-informed, and stubborn man, not above the most shameless demagoguery”—and after talking with McGeorge Bundy agreed that “we should try to be helpful and not just critical.” He could not resist inflicting on Annelise, however, what he would like to have said to Gorbachev:

You could give in to us on every point in our negotiations; you would still encounter nothing but a stony hostility in official American circles; and your concessions would be exploited by the President as evidence that he had frightened you into compliance, that the only language you understood was the language of force.

The problem was not just Reagan. Other powerful “elements” in American society felt the need for an inhuman enemy “as a foil for what they like to persuade themselves is their own exceptional virtue.” Through no fault of his own, Gorbachev had been cast in that role.⁵⁵

Fortunately, this communication went no further than Kennan’s diary and his wife’s seasoned discretion. For it sounded embarrassingly close to a dispatch, now published, that Kennan had sent from Moscow forty years earlier. “Some of us here,” he had written the State Department then, had been trying to guess what the United States would have to do if it wished to win Stalin’s trust. The list included unconditional surrender, complete disarmament, a transfer of power to the Communist Party, and even then “Moscow would smell a trap.” Now, Kennan seemed to be saying, Gorbachev in his dealings with Reagan was facing an American Stalin.⁵⁶

VII.

“Mr. Kennan,” Gorbachev said to him, in an actual conversation that took place in Washington on December 8, 1987: “We in our country believe that a man may be a friend of another country and remain, at the same time, a loyal and devoted citizen of his own; and that is the way we view you.” The tribute came at a Soviet embassy reception on the occasion of Gorbachev’s first trip to the United States. “I was just standing on the fringes,” George recalled, until Annelise took charge: “For goodness sake, go up and greet people.” So he pushed his way past Kissinger, McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and John Kenneth Galbraith, as well as less familiar luminaries—Billy Graham, Paul Newman, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Robert De Niro, and John Denver. Maybe, as Kennan approached Gorbachev, somebody whispered his name. Maybe they didn’t need to. However it happened, he “recognized me, opened his arms, and embraced me.” It was not what Kennan expected from the first successor to Stalin he had ever met.

Kennan had not expected either, though, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which Reagan and Gorbachev had just signed at the White House. It was the “zero option” brought to fruition: the first abolition, by mutual consent, of an entire category of the “apocalyptic devices” Kennan so greatly feared. The day was full of surprises. Seated at Kennan’s table while Gorbachev spoke was “a lady of most striking appearance, who chain- smoked Danish cigars and appeared to be rather bored with the whole performance.... I was later told that I should have recognized her—as the widow of a famous rock star.” His name, strangely, was something like “Lenin.” Gorbachev’s “extraordinarily gracious and tactful statement,” Kennan concluded, had brought a fitting end to his long involvement in Soviet affairs: “If you cannot have this sort of recognition from your own government . . . , it is nice to have it at least from the one-time adversary.”

How, though, had Kennan’s idea—that nuclear weapons should not be just “controlled” but reduced or even eliminated—taken hold in Reagan’s administration? Perhaps it had to do with simplicity, Kennan suggested, when asked this question a few days after meeting Gorbachev. Stalin had known that “complicated things never wash in high politics.” Reagan knew that too. He had wanted “some simple formula,” and the Einstein Prize proposal provided it. “[T]he things that are done by great statesmen publicly have to be quite simple.”⁵⁷

As the comparison suggested, the “greatness” of which Kennan spoke was not meant as a compliment. Reagan’s policies, Kennan had predicted at the beginning of 1987, were likely “to preclude the pursuit of any sensible policy towards [the Soviet Union] for years to come.” When the president demanded, in June in Berlin, that Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” Kennan, speaking two weeks later within sight of it, deplored “confrontational tactics.” The time was “plainly not ripe,” the onetime architect of “disengagement” now maintained, for German reunification, or for any shift in existing military alliances. “The approach of Mr. Gorbachev depresses me profoundly,” Kennan had written before the December summit in Washington. “I cannot understand why he consented to come.”⁵⁸

Joe Alsop, now dying of cancer, hosted a dinner for some old friends just prior to Gorbachev’s arrival. Kennan was startled to find everyone there more optimistic than he was. Might something more come out of the summit than the “zero option” treaty, which Reagan had obviously proposed in the belief that the Soviets would never accept it? Had Gorbachev done so out of weakness? Or perhaps out of cleverness? “There is nothing that so upsets the NATO commanders, Mr. Reagan among them, than a sudden and unexpected consent to their more outrageous demands.” But Kennan had been demanding the removal of nuclear missiles from Europe for decades, and now he was upset that it was about to happen. His attitude itself bordered on the outrageous: how could he have loved John F. Kennedy, who repeatedly rejected his advice, and loathed Ronald Reagan, whose actions in this and other respects were consistent with it?⁵⁹

Gorbachev’s tribute to Kennan suggests one answer, for Reagan never offered one. There are no references to Kennan in any of Reagan’s prepresidential radio broadcasts, in his speeches and press conferences as president, or in his voluminous White House diaries, which he kept more regularly, if less introspectively, than Kennan did his. Recognition was important to Kennan, whose vanity equaled his self-doubt. Kennedy’s cultivation of Kennan softened the disappointments he inflicted. Reagan’s failure to do so kept Kennan from seeing that his own vindication was taking place.

But even if the president had tried, he might not have succeeded, for he embodied what Kennan deplored about America. Reagan’s roots lay in movies, television, and advertising. His political home was the Republican Party’s right wing, where McCarthy had once resided. Reagan viewed the world through dangerous simplicities, not realist subtleties. He was not the first California president—Hoover and Nixon had preceded him—but he was the first happy one. With Kennan distrusting both happiness and California, he probably would have distrusted Reagan, even if the president had tried to win his trust. Shultz and Matlock did try but, perhaps sensing the pitfalls, did not