He saw it as a metaphor for his future: he would become a mobile movie camera, recording impressions on this or that, for whoever wanted them. There would still be choices to make, but only among insignificances. He hoped biographers would see him “as one who, having indeed had the aptitude for it, had tried valiantly to live as a scholar, only to be prevented in the end from doing so.” Now, though, he should get home to watch
IX.
It was good that he did, because Kennan joined several other former ambassadors in the Oval Office two days later to brief the president, Vice President Dan Quayle, and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft on the implications of what had happened. Kennan had come to like Bush but regarded him as “not independently thoughtful.” He did better adjusting to the views of others “in whom he sensed political influence and authority.” Kennan had no sense that he fell into that category: nothing he had said or written, he believed, had made any impression on the president’s mind. On his own mind, Kennan acknowledged sheepishly early in December, was— tennis. He had “grandly wasted” a weekend watching Becker, Edberg, and McEnroe play, “while the Communist domination of Eastern and parts of Central Europe was going up in flames.”
He could fairly say that he had seen it coming: “I was trying to tell the government, as early as the late 1940s and early 1950s, that Russian Communism as an ideology had entirely lost its hold on the Soviet people.” Years before Gorbachev, he had been arguing “that the structure of Soviet authority in Eastern Europe was seriously undermined, and would, if challenged, prove unable to stand up against any pressure.” But he could not have foreseen when the collapse would come, and now it was happening too quickly. None of the “excited peoples” being liberated had yet learned, as the Finns had long ago, that “the only safe way to establish their true independence is to show a decent respect for Soviet security interests.” If they failed to do that, they would destroy Gorbachev, who had given them their freedom.70
Kennan saw him briefly in another receiving line, this time at a White House state dinner, on May 31, 1990. Standing next to the president, the Soviet leader was again gracious, praising a recent Kennan statement with such warmth that he, overwhelmed, “failed to notice Mesdames Bush and Gorbachev, . . . and had to be yanked back by Annelise to greet them.” Apart from his own faux pas, Kennan thought the event well managed, but he could not help worrying about the issues Bush and Gorbachev would have to discuss the next day.71
The most important was German reunification. Kennan had opposed it in 1945, but by 1949 had come to favor it, on the grounds that the Germans would not indefinitely accept the division of their country. Because the Soviet Union would never agree to the inclusion of a single Germany within NATO, however, the price of reunification would have to be neutralization. Those had been the premises of Program A, which Kennan had proposed while running the Policy Planning Staff, and he had controversially made them public in the Reith lectures. Now, though, President Bush and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl were insisting that the unified German state—unavoidable now without the Berlin Wall—remain within NATO. With the Warsaw Pact crumbling and his own government facing secession threats from its non-Russian nationalities, Gorbachev no choice but to agree.72
The two Germanies became one on October 3, 1990, and the Kennans were in Berlin to witness the event: “We joined the tens of thousands of people shuffling along in two great streams, in opposite directions, on Unter den Linden.” George took no pleasure in what he saw, not just because his aging legs made it difficult to keep up. For German reunification had come about, not from anyone’s planning, but as a consequence of the spontaneous actions of thousands of young East Germans, motivated “by the hope of getting better jobs, making more money, and bathing in the fleshpots of the West.” Of course everyone cheered, but “was this, over the long term, what we really wanted?”73
TWENTY-FIVE
Last Things: 1991–2005
HAVING ENCOUNTERED IT AT BIRTH, GEORGE KENNAN HAD MORE time than most people do to think about death. As he got older, the occasions—often dreams—became more frequent. One of these, in 1979, had him laid out in a hilltop temple, surrounded by mourners who believed him to be dying. Feeling fine, he was tempted to get up and walk away, but that would have disappointed his admirers. So he reconciled himself to his fate, except for one complication: “I needed to piddle.” A pause in the proceedings allowed him to perform this act without anyone noticing, after which he returned to his bier, surrounded now by scrolls containing hundreds of written tributes. How would he ever respond to them all? Why, with Connie Goodman’s help, of course, and so he cheerfully entered the afterlife, assured that the present would continue to provide secretarial assistance.1
He had long known, or thought he knew, the day on which he would die. It would be May 9, 1983, at which point he would have lived precisely seventy-nine years, two months, and twenty-three days. That was how old the first George Kennan had been when he died in 1924. Had both not been born on February 16, in 1845 and 1904? Had their lives not corresponded in too many ways for coincidence to explain? The fateful day, however, passed uneventfully: Kennan spent it in his Institute office preparing a speech, receiving visitors, and reading a set of conference papers by historians Michael Howard (“excellent”), Adam Ulam (“good in many ways”), and John Gaddis (no comment). That evening, at home with his family, there was “much animation”—although not, presumably, because he had alerted them to the significance of the day.2
Having survived it, he could see that what lay ahead was a kind of petrification: Kennan the public intellectual would become Kennan the public monument. The process would resemble death, because while people on pedestals tend to be respected, even venerated, they’re also beyond being listened to, or argued with—or invited to share lunch. He was eating alone regularly now, he noticed, in the Institute for Advanced Study cafeteria. Younger colleagues vigorously debated this or that at surrounding tables, but the great man was left to himself. None was any more inclined to intrude upon his privacy than Kennan had been upon Einstein’s, decades earlier: “I am caught, like a fly in the spider web, in the golden filigrees of my wretched image; and there is no use flapping the wings too violently—it will not help.”3
In Washington one evening a few months after the day his death did not occur, Kennan again dined alone and walked back to DACOR House, the F Street lodging for retired diplomats, accompanied only by a breeze, which swept indifferently over the White House and “its insignificant occupant.” He had spent the day “weak, shaky, unstrung, devoid of composure, the voice high, hoarse, and cracking.” Never had he played his part less well. “I despise the George Kennan that appears before other people—despise him not for being what he is, but for not appearing to be what he ought to appear to be. They should hire an actor in my place.”4
They could not for his eightieth birthday party, held in Princeton a day late, on February 17, 1984. Nitze’s was the most memorable toast: Kennan had long been for him “a teacher and an example,” although “George has, no doubt, often doubted the aptness of his pupil.” Kennan graciously declined the opportunity to agree. Dick Ullman was not alone, among those present, in wondering how two men who had disagreed about so much over so many years could retain such respect for one another: “This was really the Establishment rallying around, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”5
