George F. Kennan: An American Life (107 page)

Kennan’s luxury—but also his burden—was not having to be Pasternak. He spoke wistfully of wanting to detach himself from contemporary events, but no one forced him to do so. That left him resisting temptation, mostly unsuccessfully. It had seemed safe enough that summer, for example, to publish his 1938–40 dispatches from Prague, unearthed while preparing his memoirs. But on August 20–21, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the growing reform movement there. The new Kremlin leadership of Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksey Kosygin had made “a colossal mistake,” Kennan was sure, and
The New York Times
quickly connected that violation of sovereignty with his reports on another such event three decades earlier. Soon Kennan was calling for an additional hundred thousand American troops to be sent to West Germany as a show of force, to counter what he saw as an increasingly “adventuristic streak” in Soviet behavior.
⁵

He was also still thinking, wistfully, about politics. “I think I could have been successful at it,” he wrote Joan a few days before the 1968 presidential election. “I have never found it hard to communicate with people from a platform, and I rather love all the human and intellectual intricacies.” But he could never have afforded to run for office; his views, moreover, were “light years ahead of the current drift of public opinion.” If the next administration were to offer him a position like under secretary of state or ambassador to the United Nations, though, he might take it.
⁶

Kennan called the office of Richard M. Nixon two days after his victory at the polls to offer whatever advice the president-elect might want. None was sought, but Nixon’s appointment of Henry A. Kissinger as his national security adviser surprised and pleased Kennan. He had been reading Kissinger since the 1950s and now regarded him as “fully recovered from the militaristic preoccupations of earlier years”—his writings, presumably, on the “limited” use of nuclear weapons. Shortly after learning of his new job, Kissinger in turn assured Kennan of Nixon’s regard for him as “a leading example of people whose possibilities were not being used by the last administration,” the implication being that the new one might find a way to do so.
⁷

That conversation took place at a Princeton cocktail party on December 4, 1968. The occasion was the inaugural conference of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, a privately funded reincarnation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, exposed the previous year as having had CIA support. Other attendees included Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, Stanley Hoffmann, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Norman Podhoretz, Marion Dönhoff, and Kennan’s old Moscow friend Lillian Hellman, but also a clamorous contingent of young black power advocates and white New Leftists. Understandably confused, the local Students for a Democratic Society chapter prepared an all-purpose poster: “Down With Racism, Imperialism, Genocide, Corporation Capitalism, Policy Planners, etc.” (A stronger exhortation had been crossed out, at the last moment, on the advice of a university official.) Kennan, improbably, delivered the dinner address. With his “gray suit, silk tie, elegant gold chain across his vest, [and] dignified bearing,”
The New York Times
reported, he personified a lifestyle “for which the young could muster little sympathy or understanding. He reciprocated completely.”

The nation had many problems, Kennan told his audience, not the least of which was “the extremely disturbed and excited state of mind of a good portion of our student youth, floundering around as it is in its own terrifying wilderness of drugs, pornography and political hysteria.” This was not Pasternak-like detachment, and a heated discussion followed. “Since when [are] youth not allowed to be asses?” Hellman demanded, prompting one young activist to announce that he had just fallen in love with an older woman. She was not amused. “He did a very brave thing,” she said in defense of Kennan: “He refused to be a swinger.”
⁸

“The new administration must be given a fair opportunity to show what it can do,” Kennan commented that evening. He got no invitation to work for it, though, and this time he didn’t agonize over phones that didn’t ring. He had decided to return to Oxford during the spring of 1969, and he had a new project in mind: he would write the first full English-language history of the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894. The logic of doing so was not immediately obvious, but Kennan’s academy address provided a clue.

Unlike the artists he had cited, he was neither a painter nor a playwright nor a philosopher. His poetry was chiefly whimsical, his musicianship only companionable. But he could write history: his distinction lay in the skill with which he represented the past to the present and future. World War I, Kennan believed, had been the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, having set so many subsequent tragedies in motion. No one in 1914, however, had foreseen any of this. Each belligerent had entered the war optimistically, even enthusiastically. If his new book could explain such miscalculations, perhaps it might dispel illusions out of which new tragedies could grow.

It would have to be thorough, he explained to Joan, for late-nineteenth-century European diplomacy was “a frightfully complicated subject with an enormous existing literature.” It would have to be scholarly, because the Institute for Advanced Study expected that of him. It would take years to complete, and “since no one in this generation will be interested in it,” it would be a lonely enterprise. And why the Franco-Russian alliance? Because it had replaced Bismarck’s system of unilateral restraint, which reconciled Germany’s neighbors to its post-1871 unification, with one of multilateral deterrence, which meant risking war to prevent war. It should have been obvious, even in 1894, that
any
great-power clash employing modern weaponry would be “a madness from which nobody [could] benefit.” Kennan would be writing a cautionary history of wolves, preparing to eat themselves up.
⁹

With Connie Goodman on leave from the Institute to raise a family, Kennan had a new secretary, Janet Smith. She was not shy about questioning his priorities: did he really think he could isolate himself to write history? It was probably unrealistic, he acknowledged from Oxford in March 1969, to suppose “that anyone in my position—i.e., with my past, my reputation, and my connections—would be able to find the time, the privacy, and the peace of mind to do a really major, serious work of historical scholarship.” He was now sixty-five, and demands for commentary on current events had not diminished. He had also come to realize, belatedly, the benefits of inadvertence: the fact that such influence as he had accumulated over the years had more often arisen unexpectedly than from his own plans.

So he must allow for opportunities like the “long telegram,” the “X” article, the Chicago lectures, the disengagement debate, the Fulbright hearings, and the Swarthmore speech, even if such “unwithstandable approaches from the outside” didn’t always produce the results he wanted. However much he might wish to be a prophet, life had burdened him with the role of pundit. “Let me then accept it and be prepared to play it with distinction.”
¹⁰

Oxford was friendlier than it had been in 1957–58. The Kennans’ Iffley flat was adequately heated—no need to carry coal this time—and George had an office in All Souls College. He liked having his radio free of commercials, his roads uncluttered by billboards, and telephones that rang rarely “because the English don’t phone—they send notes.” He was dining occasionally with colleagues; even student life struck him as “relatively rich and gay and confused and happy.” But he couldn’t resist controversy. What was wrong with black power anyway? Kennan asked a startled assemblage of dignitaries at a Ditchley Park conference shortly after he arrived: why shouldn’t Americans follow South Africa’s example and give blacks their own state? It had taken that to satisfy the Jews, his friend Richard Crossman helpfully added. Having tossed these grenades, the two took their leave, under a full moon, cheered by the mayhem they had left behind.
¹¹

Kennan’s chief task in Oxford was to deliver the Chichele lectures, a less demanding series than the two he had taken on twelve years earlier. He chose to analyze
La Russe en 1839
, the account of a trip through Russia by Astolphe Louis Léonor, the Marquis de Custine. Like Neill Brown’s dispatches from St. Petersburg in the 1850s, Custine’s book allowed viewing the recent past through a distant past, a perspective Kennan relished. Custine had been unfair to Nicholas I and his contemporaries, Kennan concluded in the published version of the lectures, which appeared in 1971, but he had accurately anticipated the Stalin regime and, to a lesser extent, those that followed. Another of Kennan’s epic sentences specified the analogies:
These were traits, some active, some latent, the recognition and correction of which would be vital to the Soviet Union’s future: “to its security, above all, not just against those external forces by whose fancied heretical will Russians of all ages have so easily seen themselves threatened, but [also] its security against itself.”
¹²

That sounded a lot like the “X” article: how could there be a normal relationship with such a country until its internal configuration—indeed its culture—had changed? But Kennan was writing about Custine in the nuclear era: didn’t that require overlooking such issues? Wasn’t the important thing now to balance power among states, rather than to await—or even to encourage—changes from within? The questions came from the editors of a new journal,
Foreign Policy
, who had noticed (as those of
Foreign Affairs
had not) that 1972 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mr. X’s memorable appearance.

Eager “to welcome Professor Kennan to the pages of this magazine,” they published an interview with him in late May, a week before the first American presidential visit to the Soviet Union since Roosevelt had gone to Yalta in 1945. The Nixon-Brezhnev summit promised the greatest progress yet toward strategic arms control: an “interim agreement” limiting land- and sea-based missiles armed with nuclear warheads, and a treaty banning defenses against those that remained. It followed the even more surprising trips that Kissinger and Nixon had already made to the People’s Republic of China. What did Kennan think?

Brezhnev’s state, he acknowledged, was not Stalin’s. It had long since lost ideological authority beyond its borders: “The façade of solidarity can be maintained, today, only by extensive concessions to the real independence of the respective Communist parties.” It had stabilized, but not expanded, its control over half of Europe—perhaps NATO had been of some use, after all. And the Soviet Union now had its own “containment” problem in East Asia, where China posed at least as great a challenge as did the United States. All of this had left Kremlin leaders “no alternatives except isolation or alliance with the capitalist countries, which could undermine the legitimacy of their power at home.” The geopolitical balance was obviously preferable to that of 1947.

The military balance, however, was another matter. Always ahead in manpower and conventional armaments, the U.S.S.R. now had such formidable nuclear strength that American concerns no longer focused on who was to dominate Eurasia but rather on a “fantasy world” of weaponry.

How might that happen? Not through the intricate agreements to be signed in Moscow, for these would only clarify the rules in a continuing contest. What was needed instead were “reciprocal unilateral steps of restraint.” If one could, by such means, shrink armed establishments to more reasonable dimensions, then the Soviet Union would pose no greater threat than had prerevolutionary Russia—even if it retained vestiges of the society Custine had described.

No one should expect such a state
not
to behave as its predecessor had done. It would want to preserve, and where possible expand, its spheres of influence. It might well build a blue-water navy. It would not, in its culture or politics, become a democracy. Why, then, should “the peace of the world [depend] on the ability of the rest of us to prevent the Soviet Union indefinitely from acting like a great power?” The priority now should be to reduce or even eliminate nuclear weapons, not simply to tinker, as Kennan had put it earlier in his diary, with “the wretched ABMs and MRVs and MIRVs and SALTs and what not.”
¹³

Kennan’s reasoning reflected his thinking on the origins of World War I. For then, as now, great-power rivalries had existed. So too had diplomacy as a means of managing them. Nixon and Kissinger were following Bismarck’s example by balancing power, a considerable improvement over Johnson’s practice of expending it where no vital interests were at stake. But like the Europeans who came after Bismarck, the United States and the Soviet Union were simultaneously accumulating arms of such strength that any use of them would destroy what they were meant to defend. It had taken the belligerents of 1914–18 four years to accomplish this. In the nuclear age, it would take about forty minutes.