George F. Kennan: An American Life (71 page)

KENNAN’S EMPYREAN WAS THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY, one of the first American think tanks. Founded in 1930, located on a large tract of meadows and woods outside of Princeton, the Institute—never a part of Princeton University—made itself famous by creating a position for Albert Einstein when he left Germany after the Nazis came to power. He remained there for the rest of his life. During its early years, the Institute recruited mostly mathematicians: like its model, All Souls College, Oxford, it had no students and hence no teaching responsibilities. Its fellows’ only obligations were to ponder, research, occasionally publish—and to stay out of each other’s way. How did Kennan get along with Einstein? “I never went to see him,” he admitted ruefully, half a century after the great physicist’s death. “This was partly a reflection of my youthful arrogance. I felt I knew nothing about his subject and knew it. Einstein knew nothing about my subject, and didn’t know it .”
¹

Oppenheimer became the Institute’s third director in 1947, determined to broaden the diversity of its fellows without changing what was expected of them. This led him to offer Kennan a visiting appointment, over objections from several mathematicians who wondered what contribution a Foreign Service officer with no advanced degree and no scholarly publications would be able to make. Kennan accepted it despite the continuing efforts of Princeton’s president, Harold Dodds, to give him a university professorship. “I want to make sure,” Kennan wrote, “that I do not move from a sphere in which I have occasionally . . . accomplish[ed] things despite a great number of diversions to one where I keep the diversions and dispense with the accomplishment.”
²

Kennan and Oppenheimer had first met at the National War College in the fall of 1946. “He shuffled diffidently and almost apologetically out to the podium,” Kennan remembered,

They then become consultants to one another. Oppenheimer advised Kennan on European federation—not very successfully—when the Policy Planning Staff considered that issue in the summer of 1949. Kennan advised Oppenheimer, in turn, on what the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission should recommend with respect to the “super” bomb: Oppenheimer chaired its General Advisory Committee. Despite his reservations about Acheson’s suggested moratorium, Oppenheimer found the new weapon as abhorrent as Kennan did, and strongly opposed building it. Kennan’s long January 1950 report, Oppenheimer’s biographers have observed, might as well have been coauthored with him.
³

“Could there be,” Kennan wrote of Oppenheimer after his death, “anyone harder to describe than he? . . . [P]art scientist, part poet; sometimes proud, sometimes humble; in some ways formidably competent in practical matters, in other ways woefully helpless: he was a bundle of marvelous contradictions.” To many, he seemed abrasive.

Thanks to Oppenheimer, the Institute for Advanced Study became Kennan’s professional and intellectual home for the next half century: he would spend twice as many years there as he did in the Foreign Service. Oppenheimer saw in Kennan—as Kennan saw in Oppenheimer—something of himself.

The Kennans arrived in Princeton on Sunday, September 10, 1950, unpacked their belongings in the house they had rented, and stashed young Christopher in a playpen. There he stood, George recalled, “leaning his head idyllically on his arm (belying, in this peaceful pose, . . . the more frantic tendencies of later years).” Outside, mists rose on the meadows, while crickets soothed with their dreamlike drone. On Monday Kennan spent his first day at the Institute. A gentle rain was falling, “an English sort of rain,” as though deferring “to the quiet green of the place.”

Oppenheimer welcomed him with two pieces of advice. One was not to try to write anything immediately, but rather to use his first months at the Institute for unsystematic reading, to broaden what Kennan knew to be “an intense but narrow educational experience.” The other was to learn “that there is nothing harder in life than to have nothing before you but the blank page and nothing to do but your best.” Savoring the suggestion, impressed by the admonition, “I installed myself in my new office, with windows looking out over the fields to the woods, and had a sense of peace and happiness such as I have not had for a long time.”
⁴

Kennan promised Acheson that he would rule out distractions: he could hardly seek refuge from Washington without accomplishing things he could never have done while there. But he was already swamped with invitations to speak, write, and consult. Most he could decline and did: his diary records seventy-seven between July and October; six more arrived on a single day, November 1. Others were more difficult to reject, whether because they came from people too prominent to put off, or from friends, family, even the children’s schools. Miss Fine’s in Princeton, where Joan was enrolled, got a carefully prepared lecture the following spring on the past and future of Soviet-American relations. Finally, there were the flattering ones that promised to amplify “one’s own voice and with it one’s possibilities for usefulness.”
⁵

Outstanding obligations also ensnared him. Kennan had agreed to write a new article for
Foreign Affairs
, in yet another effort to update and clarify what he had said four years earlier as “X.” He had accepted, “with staggering frivolity,” invitations to give two series of lectures, one at Northwestern University and the other at the University of Chicago. He was participating in a Council on Foreign Relations study group on aid to Europe. He was reading book manuscripts: the historian S. Everett Gleason got five pages of single-spaced comments on a single draft chapter of
The Challenge to Isolation,
the semiofficial history of pre–World War II American foreign policy he was coauthoring with William L. Langer. And Kennan had assured Dodds that he would participate in university affairs, even if not as a professor. So he ran, successfully, for alumni trustee in 1951—despite having fled his own class reunion a year earlier because he couldn’t afford the fee.
⁶

But he turned down an invitation to join the advisory board of the Woodrow Wilson School’s new Center for Research on World Political Institutions, which was seeking to apply social and behavioral sciences to the making of public policy. “[U]seful thought in the political sciences,” Kennan explained to a Columbia professor who had tried to interest him in these techniques, “is the product not just of rational deduction about phenomena external to ourselves but also of emotional and esthetic experience and of a recognition of the relationship of ‘self ’ to environment.” He was more candid with Edward Meade Earle, the wartime editor of
Makers of Modern Strategy
, now a historian at the Institute. Such people seemed to think “that all you have to do is put these problems in the hopper of a group of qualified social scientists and the proper answers [will] emerge from the other end, along the lines of the Institute’s computer.”
⁷

There really was a computer at the Institute in 1950, or at least the mathematician John von Neumann was building one. Located in the basement of Fuld Hall, beneath Kennan’s new office, it was enormous and unreliable but the first in the world. Its processing capabilities would prove good enough to speed development of the American hydrogen bomb and later to form the basis for the discipline of game theory. Kennan had already opposed the first invention; he would come to despise the second. His coexistence in space but not in sympathy with von Neumann reflected the Institute’s failure to foster the “rich and harmonious fellowship of the mind” that its director hoped for. “[M]athematicians and historians continued to seek their own tables in the cafeteria,” Kennan recalled, while Oppenheimer remained largely alone “in his ability to bridge in a single inner world these wholly disparate workings of the human intellect.” For the moment, though, this did not matter.
⁸

Joe Alsop went to see the Korean War for himself two weeks after his June 1950 run-in with Kennan’s balalaika. Forgivingly, he had allowed George and Annelise to camp out amid the Soong eggshell ware in his Dumbarton Oaks house—the lease had run out on the more modest quarters they had rented in Cleveland Park. “Your battle accounts were the best I have seen in our press,” Kennan wrote, thanking him. “Like Tolstoy, you are an artist and should write about what you see and perceive rather than what you think. For the latter, I have respect too, but not as much.” With that barb implanted, Kennan admitted to having been “startlingly wrong” in some of his views about Asia, “and you, it would seem, much righter.” But “not necessarily” for the right reasons. “I can’t help but feel that you overrate my descriptive powers and perhaps just slightly underrate my poor intellect,” Alsop responded, “but you and I will argue as long as we are friends.”
⁹

Once out of Washington, Kennan watched with admiration as MacArthur landed American and South Korean forces at Inchon on September 15, and then with foreboding as they swept into North Korea at the beginning of October. No less a figure than George C. Marshall, recruited by Truman to replace the hopeless Louis Johnson as secretary of defense, had cabled MacArthur that he was “to feel unhampered strategically and tactically” in operating north of the 38th parallel. Meeting little opposition, United Nations forces advanced rapidly through the narrow neck of the Korean peninsula and toward the much longer border with China at the Yalu River. Mao Zedong ordered his armies to cross into North Korea on October 19. A week later they attacked South Korean units, but MacArthur kept going. As he neared the Yalu on November 25, the Chinese surprised him with a massive counteroffensive, which soon had his forces retreating in disarray and Washington in a state of panic.

Kennan had indeed been wrong about some things and right about others. He had warned of intervention, but it was the Soviet Union that worried him: he hardly mentioned the possibility that the Chinese might enter the war. He opposed trying to occupy all of North Korea, but Chinese sources suggest that Mao might have attacked even if United Nations forces had remained south of the 38th parallel. There were strains in the Sino-Soviet relationship, but they originated more from Stalin’s uncertainty about how to handle MacArthur’s advance than from Mao’s determination to assert his independence from Moscow. Still eager to show his loyalty to the Soviet Union, Mao welcomed a war with the Americans, partly for ideological reasons but chiefly because the Truman administration had accepted Kennan’s recommendation to deploy the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. That, as Mao saw it, was intervention in the internal affairs of China.
¹⁰

But none of this was known then. What was clear was that official Washington—having spent the past five months experiencing despair, and then euphoria, and then despair again—was badly rattled. Asked at a press conference on November 30 whether he had considered using the atomic bomb in Korea, Truman acknowledged that he had, and then alarmed everyone by adding that “the military commander in the field” would decide when its employment would be appropriate. The White House quickly backtracked, insisting that only the president could make such a decision, but British prime minister Clement Attlee invited himself to Washington anyway to try to figure out what was going on. The next morning Bohlen called Kennan from Paris to point out that there was now no one in the State Department with “a deep understanding” of the Soviet Union. Kennan must volunteer his services once again.
¹¹

He immediately did so, received thanks from Acheson, and caught the next train. He spent the evening of Saturday, December 2, with the Davieses and on Sunday morning reported for duty. With the secretary of state tied up at the Pentagon and the White House, it fell to Webb to brief Kennan. Military planners required a decision within thirty-six hours as to whether to withdraw completely from Korea. Attlee would be arriving the next morning. The State Department needed an urgent assessment of what the prospects might be for negotiating something—just what was left unclear—with the Soviet Union.

Kennan, Davies, and their colleague G. Frederick Reinhardt produced, within four hours, four pages of what Kennan remembered as “the bleakest and most uncomfortable prose that the department’s files can ever have accommodated.” There had never been a worse time to approach Moscow, they concluded. There was “not the faintest reason why the Russians should wish to aid us in our predicament.” Diplomacy would work only when there were “solid cards in our hand, in the form of some means of pressure on them to arrive at an agreement [which would be] in their own interests.” Acheson, looking exhausted, was leaving his office when Kennan brought the report to him. Could he come home for dinner? Kennan did, saving the depressing news for the next morning.