As on his seventieth birthday, Kennan read a poem—not his own, this time, but his translation of one by Hermann Hesse. It portrayed a man who had returned from a long trip, found a stack of mail from admirers waiting, and burned the lot in the fireplace. Noting furrowed brows, Kennan explained that only a saint or a mystic could, from within, keep the flame of life fluttering. For anyone else, this required “the respect, affection, support, forbearance, and even forgiveness of those around him.” Whose letters, unanswered, had just gone up in smoke. The poem meant something to him, Kennan wrote, a bit defensively, in his diary. “Whether to anyone else, I could not tell.”6
Something else had happened on his and the first George Kennan’s real birthday, though, that meant much more. For on February 16, 1984, the second Kennan’s youngest daughter, Wendy, now the wife of a Swiss businessman, Claude Pfaeffli, gave birth to a son. “There was no way,” his uncle Christopher recalled, “that that kid was not going to be named George Kennan Pfaeffli.” And so, three weeks later in Geneva, George Frost Kennan held his own and his namesake’s namesake in his arms and gave him a silent blessing, “persuaded, almost superstitiously, that his preoccupations will some day have some strange connection with my own.”7
I.
Kennan’s preoccupation now was to find a life within the limits imposed by an aging body and an enhanced reputation. It would have to be “unrelated to this epoch” and yet, “somehow or other, worthwhile.” He would become a disembodied spirit, like the one haunting the gloomy great rooms of Spaso House in 1952. But he was thinking these thoughts in 1983, in Paris, in the spring. He was entering the Metro, and a train was approaching. He quickened his steps. In this new life of being old, though, why hurry? Then, distracted by an alluring female figure,
I questioned myself again: You . . . profess to be seeing these women as though you were thousands of miles off in space; what possible difference could it have for you whether or not they are attractive? But then I thought to myself: even if a spirit is disembodied, it may still have yearnings.
It could at least sigh, as the aged Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had once done: “Ah, to be seventy again!”8
He could offer his country little, Kennan believed, because those who ran it would not listen. He was living in a country—indeed a civilization—that was well on its way to catastrophe. His own and Annelise’s physical decline lay ahead, as did anguish for their children, all of whom had faced, or were likely to face, disappointments greater than anything their parents had experienced. At the same time, his name evoked respect among thousands of people. He must not let his pessimism drive them to despair. He disliked the term “role model,” but he had become one. So what to do?
Perhaps attempt to look “like what people believe me to be—to encourage them in the illusion that there really is such a person—and, by doing this, to try to add, just a little bit, to their hope and strength and confidence in life.” Results were irrelevant, for these might be “burned in the rubble of a nuclear war.” The important thing was to hold up his end of his reputation, whatever the consequences or the costs: “Duty, then, as a dedication—as a means of redemption in the final years—yes. But no hope; no fear; and, to the extent [that] the line is firmly and consistently pursued, no apologies.”9
That was, of course, easier to write than to accomplish. Demands on his time were as great as ever: “Come here; come there; speak here; write these; attend this conference; receive this visitor.” Under no circumstances sit quietly, or read a book, or “try to learn something.” Kennan’s body, however, was approaching the point at which reading was one of the few things it would permit. “I feel like hell,” he complained, in one of hundreds of such diary entries. “How hard it is to pace one’s self at this age. One is too old to try to win, too young to give up.”10
His illnesses had long since earned him the right to hypochondria: appendicitis and scarlet fever in his youth, amoebic dysentery followed by several hospital-strength bouts with ulcers as a young man, a kidney stone that accompanied him through much of his later life, periodic herpes zoster outbreaks, prostate difficulties, jaundice, arthritis, and beginning in his mid-eighties, debilitating heart irregularities. Treatments often provoked new problems. Drug reactions were frequent; lithotripsy broke up the kidney stone but at the cost of uremic poisoning in 1984, and by 1992 Kennan’s heart problems had become serious enough to require a pacemaker. His relationship with it was not amicable: “Mine is a body, I suspect, that
He was “a tough old bird,” though, Annelise rightly observed. It upset George when, at seventy-eight, protesting knees forced him to improvise a walking stick at the farm. He was still, in his eighties, riding a one-speed bicycle around Princeton, pushing it up hills when he came to them. He was cutting his own firewood in the Institute’s forest, hauling it to the Hodge Road house, and stashing it in a woodshed he had recently built. He remained agile on and around his Norwegian sailboat, and he took literally Goethe’s admonition that, when beset by old age, one should “take a spade and dig.” He tested poet, proposition, and pacemaker one day in Kristiansand by trying, at eighty-eight, to uproot yet another dead tree. For the first time in many such excavations, the tree won: “this, I clearly understand, is the beginning of my real and final old age.”12
Kennan hated how he now looked. He hardly recognized “this strange, tall, scrawny-necked apparition of an old man, clutching the marble of the lectern, swaying back and forth like a bush in the wind, bending down occasionally to peer through his glasses at the manuscript below,” he wrote, after seeing himself on television in 1982. He must never again appear before any group larger than could “grace a drawing-room.” But he continued to do so because duty demanded it. And in the eyes of others—as in his 1989 triumph before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—he conveyed an antique gravity almost extinct in the modern age. A new generation had suddenly discovered his existence, Kennan concluded. That accounted for their enthusiasm. There was, after all, “not much competition.”13
II.
Bill Clinton was as eager to align his administration with Kennan’s image—if not his advice—as George H. W. Bush had been. Clinton had first encountered Kennan as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1969, where he attended a talk that turned out to be an attack on shaggy students. Being one at the time, the future president was unimpressed. But in the White House one day in 1994, Clinton asked his deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott —his housemate and fellow Oxonian years before—why they didn’t have a concept as succinct as “containment.” Talbott, who had known Kennan since Oxford and still regularly consulted him, undertook to solicit suggestions from the source.
The opportunity arose at an October dinner in Kennan’s honor given by the secretary of state, Warren Christopher. It had been forty-one years, Kennan could not help but recall, since John Foster Dulles had arranged his ignominious departure from the building in which he was now being feted. But when Christopher mentioned that he and Talbott had been trying to package post–Cold War policy in a single phrase, Kennan said they shouldn’t. “Containment” had been a misleading oversimplification; strategy could not be made to fit a “bumper sticker.” The president laughed when Talbott told him what had happened: “that’s why Kennan’s a great diplomat and scholar but not a politician.”14
Clinton had another honor in mind for Kennan, however, which had to do with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Would Kennan accompany him to the ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery and then—taking advantage of the fact that the Soviet Union had declared the war over a day later than its allies in 1945—fly with
