George F. Kennan : an American life

well as the Democrats’ timidity in not opposing him more vigorously.³⁸

By the summer of 2003 Kennan could still read his correspondence but no longer reply: friends received messages, through Barrett, assuring them that silence did not mean negligence, or lack of regard. Meanwhile, preparations were under way for the grandest birthday of them all, George’s hundredth. Princeton University’s Firestone Library opened an exhibit on his life that fall, the centerpiece of which was every page of the “long telegram” displayed in a correspondingly long case. It was diplomacy’s Bayeux Tapestry.

There were three celebrations of the real birthday, in February 2004. One was for family on February 16, when George eased his way downstairs for dinner, blew out an unrecorded number of candles on his cake, and wound up making three speeches. A second, on the eighteenth, was at the Institute for Advanced Study, which George’s family, helpers, and Dr. Wei conspired to have him attend: it had been “a plot,” he muttered. The third was a full- scale “George F. Kennan Centennial Conference” at the university, with the major address given by the secretary of state, Colin Powell. He did so with such respect, George’s grandson Brandon Griggs commented on the way out, that one would never have guessed his grandfather’s detestation of the administration in which Powell served. This enormous event was too much for Kennan to attend, so the secretary of state came to see him afterward, in his own bedroom. Tony Mano had ordered him to stay alive for the great day, George commented, and that had gotten him through it.³⁹

He lived for another thirteen months, but with little life left. He could read newspapers and receive visitors, but his mind was fading. So was Annelise, whose decline seemed synchronous with his own. One of the last outsiders to see them together was George’s old friend the historian John Lukacs: “His head, resting on a pillow, now had a kind of skeletal beauty; he could speak only a little, forcing out a few words with increasing difficulty; near the foot of the bed she sat huddled in a wheelchair at a table, uttering a few sensible words, not many.” They still shared that bed, and one day in March 2005 Betsy Barrett heard George turn to Annelise and ask: “Are you content?” She didn’t hear or perhaps didn’t understand, but he said clearly: “I am content.”⁴⁰

VII.

George F. Kennan died peacefully of old age—he was 101—in his own bed, surrounded by his family, on the evening of March 17, 2005. Annelise followed, under similar circumstances, on August 7, 2008. His memorial service was held, a few weeks after his death, in the National Cathedral in Washington. Hers took place two days after she died, in Princeton’s Trinity Episcopal Church. Both were appropriate, but funerals only faintly suggest lives. His inspired countless obituaries; hers—as she would have thought fitting—very few. One of his best he composed himself when I asked him to do so, with no warning, one day in 1995:

Giving full recognition to the fact that no one fully understands himself, that no one can conceivably be fully objective about himself, I would like to tell you—I’m now quite old, most of my life lies behind me—how I view myself, and my usefulness, or lack of it, in this world. I realize the delicacy of my nervous structure. I don’t think I would have been well qualified for a very high office, especially not a political one. I see, in other words, certain of my weaknesses.

Somebody once said to me: “George, you are by nature really a teacher.” I think that there’s a lot to that. I have certain [other] things going for me. First of all, that I am independent, and have always kept my independence. I’ve always revolted against trying to say things as a member of a collective group, simply because it’s what the others said. I don’t belong to any organization where I feel that I have to say things they decide they want said. That is a relatively rare quality for anybody who writes a lot and speaks a lot.

I think I have certain insights, from time to time. They are not organized. I’ve never tried to put them in the strait-jacket of an intellectual discipline of any sort. But they could have been more useful to people than they have been. How much that’s my fault and how much theirs I don’t know. I leave that alone.

And finally, I credit myself with having been honest all my life. This is a very simple virtue, but outside of that I see all my faults. How much it’s going to mean, when looked back on, I have no idea. I hope that I’m right about these qualities. They exist on the surface of a great many which are no better than anybody else’s, and sometimes worse.⁴¹

Click here for more books by this author

EPILOGUE¹

Greatness

LORD MOUNTBATTEN’S BIOGRAPHER, PHILIP ZIEGLER, BECAME SO enraged with his subject while writing his life that he found it necessary to place a sign on his desk: “Remember, in spite of everything, he was a great man.”² I never felt the need to do that while preparing Kennan’s biography, but the experience did convince me that “greatness” takes multiple forms. There may be as many definitions as there are subjects for biography: my own would be that greatness is one of the things that distinguishes immortality from mortality. It was not, for Kennan, the only thing, or even the most important thing. He was a man of deep faith, and when he spoke of immortality, he generally had in mind the kind God provides. Biographers must aim lower but can perhaps suggest qualities that might make a life, for mortals, memorable.

Begin with grand strategy, by which I mean the discipline of achieving desired ends through the most efficient use of available means. Its most memorable practitioners have attained that status by leaving behind examples— whether through their actions or their writing—of how to do this. These transcend time, space, and circumstance. Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli, the American Founding Fathers, Metternich, Clausewitz, Lincoln, Bismarck, and Isaiah Berlin remain as relevant to the twenty-first century as to their own time. Students of grand strategy will study them well into the future. Will they study Kennan?

Henry Kissinger, himself a plausible subject of such study, made the case that they should when he credited Kennan with having come “as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.”³ Historians, to be sure, debated what that doctrine was, and Kennan more than once disavowed it. With the demise of the Cold War, however, these controversies faded in the light of a more important question: what did “containment” accomplish? More than any other idea, this one appears now to have illuminated the path by which the international system found its way from the trajectory of self-destruction it was on during the first half of the twentieth century to one that had, by the end of the second half, removed the danger of great- power war, revived democracy and capitalism, and thereby enhanced the prospects for liberty beyond what they ever before had been.

This outcome was by no means predetermined. To see why, go back to the moment in February 1946 when Kennan, sick in bed from the rigors of a Moscow winter and irritated as usual at the Department of State, summoned Dorothy Hessman and from his preferred horizontal position dictated a lengthy telegram. The world was not safe then from the scourge of great-power war: how could it have been, when in contrast to the previous world war, it had not even been possible to convene a peace conference? Nor was the world safe from authoritarianism, given the democracies’ recent reliance on one such regime to defeat another. Nor was it safe from economic collapse, in the absence of any assurance that a global depression would not return. The world was certainly not safe from abuses of human rights, with one of the most advanced nations in Europe having just resorted to genocide on an unprecedented scale. Nor was it safe from the fear that in a future war no one would be safe. How could it have been, with atomic weapons now available, and with no guarantee that they would remain under one