George F. Kennan: An American Life (118 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 him to Moscow to celebrate the event there? Moved by the invitation, Kennan wanted to accept: “I was, after all, the senior American official present in Moscow on that memorable day.” He would welcome returning “as an honored and friendly guest,” not as “the dangerous enemy that I was always supposed to be.”

Annelise was willing as long as she could go too. George’s family thought it a fine idea, as did his doctors, who could find nothing wrong with him “except for the failing heart and arthritic knees.” But every morning, when he got up, his body was telling him: “Never, never.” He would be a burden to others, while making “a pathetic exhibit of myself.” Clinton wanted him, he suspected, as a portable public monument. And he was not quite ready to give up being a public intellectual.
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The Clinton administration, since 1993, had been exploring the idea of expanding NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, against the wishes of the Russians. Kennan wondered why the alliance should even survive the end of the Cold War, much less grow. He kept his doubts to himself, though, until October 1996, when he heard Talbott make the case for expansion in a talk at Columbia’s Harriman Institute. Kennan spoke first at the dinner that followed, denouncing the idea as a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” With one exception, everyone else present agreed with him.

It was a “cold shower,” Talbott remembered in his memoir, published six years later. In his diary five days later, Kennan expressed surprise that what he said had made “such a fuss,” but he no longer worried “about the opinions of others concerning my conduct.” Then in February 1997 he went public. Expanding NATO, he wrote in
The New York Times
, would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” The op-ed was on Clinton’s desk the next morning. “Why isn’t Kennan right?” he asked Talbott. “Isn’t he a kind of guru of yours going back to when we were at Oxford?” He was, Talbott acknowledged, but Kennan had opposed NATO since its creation. The Russians would go along with expansion, whatever he thought. “Just checking, Strobe,” Clinton chuckled. “Just checking.”
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For Kennan, the episode evoked Shakespeare’s dying John of Gaunt: “Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain, / For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain. . . . Though Richard my life’s counsel would not hear, / My death’s sad tale may yet undeaf his ear.” Not very likely, though, Kennan had to admit. His words would have no more effect on Clinton and his advisers than had Gaunt’s on “the foolish Richard II.”
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He was, Kennan had written a few years earlier, “the most elaborately-honored non-political and non-governmental person in the country, yet totally without influence where it counts.”
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What else could a disembodied spirit approaching his tenth decade expect, though, even if yearnings for lost causes did persist? Kennan had already disengaged from the writing of history—at least diplomatic history—so detachment from the making of history did not really surprise him, however much it frustrated him. Now, though, he faced a new problem, which was that history was attaching itself to him: he had lived long enough to become its subject. Adjusting to that process was not easy.

He accelerated it, without foreseeing the consequences, by opening his papers early. Most donors prohibit access while they are alive, but as Kennan finished each volume of his memoirs, he transferred the materials he had used to Princeton University, in the hope that “mature” scholars might also find them useful. He failed to review the files carefully, though; there was confusion about which portions were to be opened when; and determining “maturity” proved to be impractical. So rather than close the collection altogether, Kennan resigned himself to living uncomfortably alongside it—the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library was only about a mile from his house—without control over who would go through his papers, what they would find, or how they might employ it. All he did was to forbid photocopying, by then a standard archival procedure. Kennan researchers took notes laboriously in longhand or on portable typewriters, therefore, while envying those working nearby on the duplicatable dead.
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When the dissertations, articles, and eventually books began to appear, their authors tended to be young. They were the most in need of fresh topics, and they had the stamina to survive the photocopying ban. Several, however, were also of the “student left” generation Kennan had so vociferously condemned. They generally respected, even admired him: he had, after all, opposed the Vietnam War. But their scholarship reflected revisionist historiography of the origins of the Cold War, of which Kennan strongly disapproved. Nor did they hesitate to highlight documents from his papers that he now found embarrassing. Some, like his 1938 “Prerequisites” essay, he had simply forgotten. Others he had deliberately passed over in his memoirs. Still others succumbed to political correctness: words unexceptional when written could shock when published half a century later.

Kennan had always lived alongside his own history: self-scrutiny came naturally, even compulsively, to him. Scrutiny by others, however—especially by the youth of the 1960s—was something else again. That became evident in 1976 when C. Ben Wright, a recent University of Wisconsin Ph.D., pointed out in a
Slavic Review
article that Kennan’s original concept of “containment” had incorporated more of a military component than he had acknowledged in his memoirs. Wright’s dissertation had been the first serious biography of Kennan, based not just on his papers but on careful interviews with contemporaries, even his sister Jeanette. Now, though, Kennan was furious. “I stand, as I see, exposed,” he wrote in a rejoinder the journal published. “Mr. Wright has stripped me of my own pretenses and revealed me as the disguised militarist he considers me to be.” The attack was so devastating that Wright abandoned history altogether, and Kennan gained the reputation of devouring young scholars at dinner.
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It was not a sustainable situation. Kennan couldn’t respond in print to every objectionable thing historians might write. But neither could he guide each one individually through his archives, providing context and commentary along the way: there were too many, and they would have insisted, entirely properly, on reaching their own conclusions. So Kennan’s solution, in the end, was to authorize a biographer whose biography he would never read.

He had mostly approved of my
Strategies of Containment
, an analytical study based partly on the Kennan papers that appeared (at the cost of a worn-out portable typewriter) late in 1981. I wanted to continue working on Kennan but had no desire to repeat Wright’s experience. Might there be the possibility, I gingerly asked Kennan, of a full biography, prepared with his cooperation and with access to all of his papers (including photocopying privileges), on the understanding that it would not appear for another ten to fifteen years? Kennan, seventy-eight at the time, replied—wholly implausibly—that he had never thought about a biography but would now do so. Delicate negotiations followed, in which neither he nor I used the term “posthumous,” even though we both had it in mind. For me, the advantage would be access with independence. For Kennan, it was that designating one biographer would deter others. How did he know that I would treat him fairly? He didn’t. We hardly knew each other. But Kennan did believe strongly in placing faith above reason.
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Despite the arrangement, the other biographers did not back off. Kennan at first found this irritating. “I ought really to be dead,” he grumbled about a particularly persistent one, “it would all then be much easier.” He could not resist reading what they wrote, though, and some of it he even liked. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’s
The Wise Men
(1986), a collective biography of himself, Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Lovett, and McCloy, was “a caricature gleaned from hasty oral interviews” but “not devoid of a certain amount of truth.” Although relentlessly critical, Anders Stephanson’s
Kennan and the Art of American Foreign Policy
(1989) was “truly a great work,” addressed “to a subject unworthy of so impressive an effort.” Wilson D. Miscamble’s careful study of the Policy Planning Staff years,
George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950
(1992), left its subject sobered “by the number and extent of my failures”; nonetheless “I would rate it as the best thing that has been written about me in published book form.”
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He did, however, despise inaccuracy. A prominent offender was Nitze, whose brief essay on Kennan in his 1993 book,
Tension Between Opposites
, contained so many errors “that I suspect Paul, although we view each other as friends, really knows very little about me.” Even worse were attempts to impose the present upon the past. He was appalled to find himself criticized for publishing diary entries from the late 1930s and early 1940s that had not anticipated the Holocaust. Efforts to link his CIA involvement with the lenient treatment of German war criminals provoked lengthy, if unpublished, rebuttals: “I never knew I had such enemies.” And when, in 1997, the
Journal of American History
ran an article entitled “ ‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” its ninety-three-year-old target wondered why previous scholarship had been so slow to discover his “true sexual and ‘binary’ nature,” all of it permeated, whether he knew it or not, “with concealed desires to violate, to rape, and thus to dominate. Of such terrible motives the purer and more innocent spirit of [the author] was happily unbesmirched.”
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The youngest of the Kennan scholars impressed him most. Barton Gellman was a twenty-two-year-old Rhodes scholar in 1983 when Kennan got around to reading his Princeton senior thesis, completed the previous year under Dick Ullman’s supervision.
Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power
was an attempt, Gellman explained in the book the thesis quickly became, to “cut and paste” Kennan into coherence, a project for which “the man himself has never had any taste.” Yet shouldn’t a person given to displaying his thinking in “bits and pieces” provide a more complete picture?
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Kennan had been asking himself the same question. He had always distrusted philosophical systems: they were too gray, he believed, to reflect the colors of life, much less to guide one through their complexities. But he feared having his ideas whisked into oblivion, “like a paper-handkerchief carried away by the wind from the deck of an ocean-liner.” His diaries, usually written late at night, tended to bury what was worth saving beneath long stretches of “sleep-dulled humdrum.” Unwilling to rely on some future editor’s excavations, he felt the need “to clarify, to organize, and to state my general philosophy, before it becomes too late to do so.”
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