George F. Kennan : an American life

years.”⁴⁰

VII.

“I seem to have hit the jackpot as a ‘Russian expert,’ ” George wrote Jeanette on Christmas Day 1946. “You’d be amazed, what seems to be coming my way.” Harvard, Princeton, and Yale had all asked him to join their faculties. “As far as I can see, I can write my own ticket.” The State Department was willing to keep him on the payroll while “loaning me out” for research: he would soon be promoted to the rank of “minister” with a salary rumored to be $15,000. It was “almost too good to be true, and I really doubt that it will materialize; but it all goes to show that nothing succeeds like success.”⁴¹

The Kennans had been living, since September, in a graceful three-story brick house on “General’s Row” at Fort McNair, courtesy of the U.S. Army. Facing the parade ground with a view of the Potomac out the back, it was large, well staffed, and came with full commissary privileges, which George noted “considerably reduce the cost of living.” There were tennis courts, a golf club, a swimming pool, an officers’ club, and it was all within reach of the East Berlin farm on weekends.

Saturdays flew by in veritable orgies of labor on various “projects.” The energies of guests were employed no less enthusiastically and no less inefficiently than our own. Then, on Sunday mornings, there would be the sad cleaning up . . . , followed by the long trek back amid Sunday-afternoon traffic; and finally—the sudden confrontation with the . . . fat stacks of the waiting Sunday paper and the insistent phone calls of people who had been trying to reach us ever since Friday noon.

The farm, George believed, kept him healthy: “When, for one reason or another, I omitted these weekend expeditions to the country, I fell ill.” And his Pennsylvania neighbors provided not only practical advice but “a shrewd, reassuring common sense ... that gave new, and sometimes healing, perspective to the trials, excitements, and disappointments of a hectic official existence.”⁴²

The disappointments, that fall and winter, were remarkably few. The children loved living in their Army house and, to their parents’ relief, liked their Washington schools, to which a bus delivered them every day. Grace, now fourteen, had been to several local dances; Joan, however, missed ballet classes in Moscow. Hearing The Nutcracker Suite, her father noticed, caused her to go “through all the dances as she remembered them.... She certainly has it in her blood.” George, for his part, was coming to see in his children something that he and his siblings had missed. “I hope you will get married,” he wrote Kent, “if only because you— like the rest of us—did not have a normal family life in childhood; and the re-living of it in one’s own family helps to overcome the effects of that.” The war college allowed as “normal” an existence as the Kennans had yet managed.⁴³

George was “terribly happy” at the National War College, Annelise remembered. “You must think me a little dotty,” he would come home and say, but “this was said, and this was discussed, and this is wonderful.” There had been eighty-five lectures that fall, he explained to Kent, probably the best series on international affairs that had ever been given. The contacts were “like manna to me after many years of the philistinism of American foreign colony life.” He was not sure now that he would want to return to diplomacy: “I have found such generous appreciation . . . among the academicians for what little I know about Russia and have had such tempting offers to continue working with them that I am sorely tried.” That knowledge now was “a chance aggregate of odds and ends, gathered without system and in large part without purpose.” If he could spend a year or two in systematic study, “I might really be able to do something more worthwhile in scholarship than in diplomacy.”

The months since his return from Moscow had also allowed a reacquaintance with his own country, but here Kennan’s conclusions—admittedly tentative—were more measured.

At work, it is certainly admirable. At play, it could hardly be worse. Its liberal intellectuals are in large part below criticism. Its emotional strength lies largely in the smaller and quieter communities, where intellectual life is least developed. I have no doubt that as a people we have tremendous latent power of every sort. But it is buried behind so much immaturity, such formidable artificialities in manner of living, such universal lack of humility and discipline, and such strange prejudices about the organization of human society that I am not sure whether it can be applied . . . successfully in another crisis, as it was in this last.⁴⁴

Having educated himself in grand strategy, and having shown that he could educate others, he would get a chance to answer that question, sooner than he could have expected.

TWELVE

Mr. X: 1947

“ THE REAL CONSEQUENCES OF STATESMANSHIP,” KENNAN ONCE OBSERVED, citing the historian Herbert Butterfield, “are always ironic in their relationship to what the statesman thought he was achieving.”¹ What Kennan had hoped to do, during his time at the National War College, was to lay the intellectual foundations for an American grand strategy that would counter the Soviet Union’s challenge to the postwar international system, without resort to war or appeasement. No one has a better claim to having accomplished just that. As Henry Kissinger observed with professional admiration in 1979: “George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.”²

But Kennan took little pride in this achievement. If indeed he originated the strategy of “containment,” he wrote bitterly in his memoirs, composed as the Viet-nam War was escalating, then “I emphatically deny the paternity of any efforts to invoke that doctrine today in situations to which it has, and can have, no proper relevance.” Even after the Cold War had ended and the Soviet Union was itself history, Kennan regarded the “success” of his strategy as a failure because it had taken so long to produce results, because the costs had been so high, and because the United States and its Western European allies had demanded, in the end, “unconditional surrender.” That outcome had been “one of the great disappointments of my life.”

Kennan made this complaint, strangely, at a birthday party. The date was February 15, 1994—the eve of his ninetieth—and the celebration took place at Harold Pratt House on East 68th Street in New York, long the home of the Council on Foreign Relations. The organization had meant to honor Kennan’s accomplishments, but he used the occasion to lament them. He did so with a dejected felicity, reminding his audience of another event that had taken place in the same building almost half a century earlier. It had been then and there, he believed, that the consequences of his actions first began to diverge significantly from his intentions.³

When a younger Kennan, not quite forty-three, arrived at Pratt House on January 7, 1947, to address the Council’s discussion group on “Soviet Foreign Relations,” he did so with considerably less fanfare. The talk was one of dozens he had given since returning from Moscow. The audience would be small, and as was customary for Council events, everything said would be on a “not for attribution” basis. Like many speakers who have heard themselves repeat themselves too often, Kennan did not bother to prepare a text: the rapporteur’s notes are the only record of what he said.

Marxist-Leninist ideology, he told the group, did not guide the actions of Soviet leaders, but it was “a sort of mental eye or prism” through which they viewed the outside world. It justified an amorality little different from that of Russian rulers as far back as Ivan the Terrible; this was, however, at odds with the strong moral sense of the