George F. Kennan: An American Life (75 page)

The ship called at Bergen early the next morning, and then navigated the rugged coastline to the south. “Norway simply took my breath away,” George recorded,

They reached Kristiansand at about midnight, with a midsummer glow on the horizon reminiscent of Riga “in other days.” At the Sørensens’, after the children had gone to sleep, “[w]e sat up with the old people and drank vermouth with brandy until near four o’clock. Then A. and I dragged ourselves back to the little cottage, in the morning light, and went to bed.”
³⁹

George had little time to enjoy Norway, though, because he insisted on flying back to Washington, at his own expense, to testify on behalf of Davies before the State Department’s loyalty board on July 23: that was where Acheson raised the possibility of a return to Moscow. “I believe the hearing went well,” George wrote Annelise, “but have not yet heard the final result.” The case had stirred enough indignation, however, that the secretary of state had promised to rethink procedures for such investigations. “I am very pleased about this, as it makes it unnecessary for me to pursue the matter further.”
⁴⁰

So he returned to Europe by way of Portugal—which Kennan found little changed since he was last there in 1944—as well as Italy, Austria, West Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. It was his first European trip in a private capacity since the one he and Nick Messolonghitis had made in the summer of 1924. The Norwegians had been unsure of his status, so Kennan asked the State Department to inform other governments along his route that he required “no official courtesies or attentions beyond those that would be extended to the ordinary traveler.” “I dream about you all, including Christopher, with the greatest regularity,” he wrote Annelise from Lisbon. And, from Rome: “If you would like to join me [in Basel], wire to Vienna.”
⁴¹

An English weekend at the beginning of September gave Kennan a chance to respond to Acheson, in longhand and at length, about Moscow as well as what might follow. Many opportunities had arisen over the past year: this came, he supposed, with “being a public figure.”

It made sense, then, to return to government long enough to retire with a pension, and then to resume work at the Institute with “academic life as my normal pursuit from that time on.”

The position should be an overseas mission not associated with the formulation of policy. For it was only right to acknowledge “the full measure of divergence” between his views and those of the Truman administration.

Moscow might be feasible, therefore, for the work there involved the analysis of Soviet policy, not the making of policy in Washington. Commitments at the Institute and elsewhere, however, would keep him from going until well into 1952. Perhaps Admiral Alan G. Kirk, the current ambassador, could stay on; if not, the mission could probably be left under a
chargé d’affaires
.
⁴²

The Kennans sailed for home on September 5, with George worried that the children had enjoyed Europe less than he had. “My friends,” he wrote them gravely one day at sea,

He also composed, for himself, a bucolic poem about flies—which could also have been State Department gadflies:

Kennan decided not to send Acheson a four-page summary of “points of difference” with the State Department that he had prepared. It listed disagreements over the United Nations, nuclear weapons, the future of Europe, the Near and Middle East, East Asia, Latin America, relations with Congress, and the administration of foreign policy. “This is, in my opinion, important,” he wrote across the top, presumably with historians and maybe even a biographer in mind. It was certainly comprehensive: when he finished, it was hard to find a policy with which he did agree.
⁴³

“It is reasonable that I should look forward with a sense of relief to the prospect of being an ambassador,” Kennan commented in an undated diary fragment that summer. “It is just about the only profession one can have these days in which nothing—but really nothing—is either expected or required of you.” But there was more to it than that. He was still a Foreign Service officer: “I did not feel it proper to decline any assignment given to me.” It would be difficult to pass up an appointment to the Soviet Union, “a task for which my whole career had prepared me, if it had prepared me for anything at all.” Finally, Bohlen had urged him to take the job, on the grounds that Stalin might be more open than in the past to negotiations, particularly on Germany. So with Acheson having assured him that the president really wanted him in Moscow, Kennan agreed to go.
⁴⁴

There was, however, one last effort to derail the appointment. It came from Annelise, who knew how bleak conditions there would be, and how reluctant George was to disrupt his work at the Institute. She surely had some sense, from the spring and summer, of how precarious his psychological balance had become. And she had just learned that she was again pregnant. So she took it upon herself—without asking George—to go to Washington and talk with their old Moscow friend Elbridge Durbrow, then in charge of State Department personnel assignments. “I told him that I thought this was a very bad time, that he should send somebody else, and then we could go afterwards in a couple of years.”

She never doubted that George should return to Moscow. “I felt very strongly that he was a specialist and he should go back, [and] at that time one still felt pretty young.” It was also “a nice honor to go as an ambassador, because we don’t have so many career ambassadors in the major countries. It was just that the timing was not so good.”
⁴⁵

Annelise had still one other reason for not wanting to go to Moscow at that moment: the Kennans had just bought a house of their own in Princeton. The all-electric one they had rented, Patricia Davies recalled, had become barely inhabitable the previous winter when a blizzard knocked out the power: the family survived by huddling around the fireplace, which contained a hook from which Annelise could cook, “in her proper Norwegian fashion.” The new house—old enough to match George’s age, having been built in 1904—was located on a large lot at 146 Hodge Road, a tree-lined street half a mile from the university and a mile from the Institute. George was soon bicycling to both destinations and would continue to do so for decades.

Apart from the farm, it was the first permanent residence the Kennans had occupied during their twenty years of marriage. The first floor contained large living and dining rooms, a library, a kitchen, and a breakfast nook. Upstairs there were seven bedrooms, some meant for maids, one in a third-story tower. There was even a separate apartment over the garage, useful for visiting family and, at times, for renters. “We lack beds now,” George wrote Jeanette in October 1951, “but I am sure we will have them by Thanksgiving.” The Ford Foundation salary had made the purchase possible, he explained to Kent, even though “we haven’t saved any money.” The house was “friendly and receptive in a relaxed way,” George wrote in his memoir two decades later, “but slightly detached, like a hostess to a casual guest—as though it did not expect us to stay forever.” The Kennans did stay for a long time: George and Annelise would each die in the house, fifty-four and fifty-seven years, respectively, after they moved into it.
⁴⁶

“A book by George Kennan is an event in Washington,” James Reston wrote in
The New York Times
on September 30, 1951. The relentlessly efficient University of Chicago Press had rushed Kennan’s Walgreen lectures into print as
American Diplomacy: 1900–1950.
To flesh out the thin volume, Kennan added the 1947 “X” article, as well as the essay he intended as its successor, “America and the Russian Future,” which had appeared in the April issue of
Foreign Affairs.
But the first piece was familiar and the second looked too far into the future to attract much attention: it was an unclassified update of PPS/38, the 1948 study in which Kennan had tried to specify American objectives for a post-Soviet Russia. The lectures, however, enthralled their readers, just as they had packed the room—and then the auditorium—in which he delivered them. It was Kennan’s first book, but it sold better than anything else he ever wrote.

Characteristically, he did not enjoy this triumph. He didn’t like the idea of publishing lectures, he grumbled to Alsop, who wrote to congratulate him: “Either you write or you talk, but you don’t do both together.” He had been heartened, but also shamed, by the favorable reaction. Hostile reviews would have made him miserable, Kennan admitted to Oppenheimer; nevertheless the complimentary ones “leave me with a sense of discomfort,” because the lectures were not nearly as good as he could have made them. There was, however, the satisfaction of having produced a book, “if only by inadvertence.”

American Diplomacy
succeeded for several reasons. It was, as Reston noted, the most critical account of U.S. foreign policy produced by any government official since the end of the war. Not “ghost-written,” it was “straight Kennan,” and he was “perhaps the most reflective of the young American professional diplomats.” The author himself, more modestly, would later attribute the book’s success to its shallowness, for it met the needs of teachers eager to find easy reading for their students. His foreword, however, had promised more: he would show why the United States, which in 1900 could not have imagined threats from abroad to its prosperity and way of life, had reached the point by 1950 “where it seemed to think of little else.”
⁴⁷

Kennan’s explanation was short but shocking: the insecurity the United States faced resulted less from what its adversaries had done than from its own leaders’ illusions. Forgetting their forefathers’ warnings, American statesmen in the twentieth century had come to prefer the proclamation of principles to the balancing of power. The pattern began with John Hay’s Open Door notes, announced as an afterthought in the wake of the Spanish-American War and the American occupation of the Philippines, with a view to discouraging China’s division into European, Russian, and Japanese spheres of influence. Hay accomplished little for the Chinese, but he set a style for his own country’s diplomacy: it manifested itself, with more serious consequences, in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, in Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter, and in the World War II demand for the “unconditional surrender” of Germany and Japan, which had opened the way for Soviet domination of half of Europe and much of Asia. Far from securing its interests, the “legalism-moralism” with which the United States had conducted its diplomacy had left it in grave peril.

It had encouraged toothless treaties like the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which between the two greatest wars in history had outlawed war as an instrument of national policy. It had caused hopes to be invested in, and time to be wasted on, the League of Nations and the United Nations, which could act only if the great powers had already settled their differences. It had led to long periods of inattention, punctuated by spasms of senseless violence. “I sometimes wonder,” Kennan wrote, in the book’s most memorable passage,