George F. Kennan : an American life

persist. Nitze, another possible intermediary, did not even bother. Kennan’s complaints about Reagan, he wrote at one point, were “entirely a red herring,” followed by “a lot of drivel.”⁶⁰

Reagan, for his part, had little need of Kennan. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was an instinctive grand strategist, fully capable of operating without policy planners. He saw more clearly than his advisers the sequences of actions, together with the coalitions of constituencies, necessary to get him where he wanted to go. He refused to let complications obscure destinations, or to make conventional wisdom a compass. And he understood that, in order to lead, he could never despair. Kennan saw destinations clearly enough, and he certainly defied orthodoxies. But he was bad at sequencing: as he himself admitted, he too often did the right things at the wrong times. He tended more often to shatter than to solidify coalitions. And he despaired constantly, whatever he was doing. So Kennan turned himself into a complication, leaving it to Reagan to bring his strategy to its successful conclusion.⁶¹

Eventually, grudgingly, and a bit wistfully, Kennan came to see this. When asked, in 1996, who had ended the Cold War, he predictably named Gorbachev. But then he added, watching carefully to see whether his interviewer, who came close, would fall off his chair: “also Ronald Reagan, who in his own inimitable way, probably not even being quite aware of what he was really doing, did what few other people would have been able to do in breaking this log jam.”⁶²

VIII.

When President George H. W. Bush took office in January 1989, it was not yet clear that the Cold War was over. Gorbachev, speaking at the United Nations the previous month, had announced a unilateral withdrawal of half a million Soviet troops from Central and Eastern Europe, but Bush nonetheless ordered a policy review, implying that Reagan had been too trustful. Kennan was glad to have “new and more intelligent people” at the White House. He worried, though, about loss of momentum in responding to Gorbachev and so resolved, by going public again, to make the case for regaining it. “If I don’t say something now, and the new people go the wrong way, I will never know whether something I could have said and didn’t would make a difference.”

An avid fan of the Public Broadcasting System’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Kennan made himself available for interviews on it. He regretted, in The New York Times Magazine, the “reluctant, embarrassed, and occasionally even surly” American reactions to Gorbachev’s concessions. As it had done three and a half decades earlier, The Atlantic again put him on its cover, this time to publicize Sketches from a Life, a forthcoming book of selections Kennan had made from his diaries. And he agreed to testify, on April 4, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “I dare not be optimistic.... I don’t think I do so well anyway, under this sort of questioning. But here we go.”⁶³

“Grandeur on Capitol Hill? Yes, it sometimes happens,” an enthralled Mary McGrory assured her readers in The Washington Post. “Kennan is 85. His back is as straight as a young man’s, his jaw as chiseled.” He spoke “with such lucidity, learning, and large-mindedness that the senators did not want to let him go.” Gorbachev, he told them repeatedly, had ended the Russian revolutionary experiment that had begun in 1917, with the result that the Soviet Union was now becoming a normal state. When Kennan did finish, after two and a half hours, everyone in the room—even the committee’s stenographer—rose in an unprecedented standing ovation. The sense seemed to be, journalist Peter Jenkins wrote, that “[i]f anyone is entitled to call off the Cold War, it is George Kennan, the man who invented the Western strategy for winning it.”⁶⁴

On May 13 President Bush went to Texas A&M University to announce the results of his policy review. He began by praising the “wise men” who “crafted the strategy of containment,” among them Marshall, Acheson, and Kennan. Because they had shown the way, the United States could now move “beyond containment” toward the Soviet Union’s full integration into the community of nations. One source for the phrase, White House staffers revealed to columnist William Safire in “passionate anonymity,” was the National Security Council’s young Soviet specialist, Condoleezza Rice—the future secretary of state had recently met Kennan at a conference of Soviet and American Cold War historians. The slogan would serve as Mount Kilimanjaro, another Bush adviser explained, “something you can see in the distance as a goal.”⁶⁵

While in Kristiansand at the end of June, Kennan got the word that the president wished to confer upon him, in Washington the following week, the Medal of Freedom. “I am somewhat bewildered by this development,” he wrote in his diary. Bush had indeed spoken favorably of him, as had others in recent months. But why this gesture on behalf of someone “whose views on a number of important subjects are known to be so little in accord with those that he represents?” Perhaps it was a consolation prize, “given in recognition not of my success but of my failure.” Without the failure, “it would never have been accorded.”⁶⁶

The ceremony took place at the White House on July 6. The other honorees were retired Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, an early critic of Joe McCarthy; General James Doolittle, aviation pioneer and war hero; former Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon; and the late television comedienne Lucille Ball, for whose reruns CBS had bumped Kennan’s 1966 congressional testimony on the Vietnam War. Once again Bush spoke not of failure but of “the successful strategy of containment which George Kennan did so much to develop.” Responses were not expected, but Kennan could not help composing one silently, “[t]he usual disclaimers of merit seem[ing] no less invidious, in their obvious hypocrisy, than the more blatant evidences of self-satisfaction.” It followed the example of Adlai Stevenson, who after hearing a comparably lengthy list of his many virtues, had assumed a noble pose and announced: “Right on target.”⁶⁷

By the time Kennan got his medal, the Hungarians had given Imre Nagy, the reluctant and subsequently executed leader of the 1956 rebellion, a belated state funeral; meanwhile they were tearing down the barbed wire along the Austrian border that had been their stretch of the Iron Curtain. In Poland, restrictions on Solidarity had been lifted, and its candidates had swept the first free postwar parliamentary elections. In the Soviet Union, Gorbachev had allowed contested candidacies for the Congress of People’s Deputies and then television coverage of unconstrained debates within it. Antiauthoritarian protests had even reached Beijing, where the Chinese government, at Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3–4, forcibly suppressed them. But what struck Kennan, after returning to Kristiansand, was not “how much I read of the news from the outside world but how little of it.... I see nothing hopeful in any of it.”

That was because none of these developments, in his view, diminished the nuclear danger—instability in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union might even be increasing it. There was nothing more Kennan could do about this: “My own efforts to save civilization should be considered as substantially completed.” He had another less cosmic grievance against all of this current history, which was that it kept him from doing earlier history. His second volume on the Franco-Russian alliance had appeared in 1984, but had only reached 1894. He would need to finish a third if he was going to connect his years of research to the outbreak of World War I, and at his age there could not be much more time left. It was a “publish before perishing” obligation, compounded by the fact that despite being “retired” from the Institute for Advanced Study for the past fifteen years, he still had an office there and was expected to make good use of it. But he should try to follow the news, “if only in order not to become entirely a bore to one’s children.”⁶⁸

Kennan was in Princeton on November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall came down. He had cleared his calendar that week for the writing of history, and “[p]recariously, almost desperately, I continued the struggle.” Elizabeth Stenard, his current secretary, heroically fended off phone calls, but it was clear from their number and from the distinction of some of the callers that the battle was lost: there would be no third volume. “Put the books away,” Kennan told himself. “Reconcile yourself to the inevitable.... [Y]ou are never again, in the short remainder of your life, to be permitted to do anything significant.” So he dashed off a warning for The Washington