George F. Kennan: An American Life (88 page)

He later explained what he meant. His work involved warming himself alongside fires kindled four decades earlier. Their heat was now as pale and faint as moonlight. If the era seemed remote, however, it was “because I was a poor historian, incapable of re-creating the flesh-and-blood images of the characters I was studying.” Only through the deepest identification with the past could there be the “intimacy of acquaintance which permits historical personages really to become alive again.” Being a good historian, then, required cutting one’s self off from the present. Contemporaries rarely forgave that, because each age believed its own to be the most important that ever had existed, or ever would. What normal person would spend time with people suffering from “the obvious inferiority of not being alive”?

And so Kennan did. Because he disapproved of so much in the present, it was a party he was content to leave for “a never ending communion” with wax-museum figures “whose eyes never move and whose voices one never hears.”

If they spoke at all, it was in words hovering above their heads “like the bubbles of utterance” that emerged from the characters in the comic strips of his boyhood. Context—those “elusive nuances of circumstances, of feeling, of environment, of intuition and telepathy”—was mostly lost. The relationship, for the historian, was not reciprocal.

Historians, then, were disembodied spirits. Their task was to understand while remaining “unseen, unknown, unaided.” That, for Kennan, was “loneliness.”
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But if loneliness lay in both the present and the past, where was consolation? George worked out an answer of sorts while staying with Jeanette and her family in Highland Park one day in August 1956. He drove himself, alone, around Milwaukee. The Cambridge Avenue house was still there, looking as it always had despite taller trees and a deteriorating neighborhood. It struck him as “strangely serene and timeless,” as though content to live by memories “and to await, without either complaint or haste, the day—which cannot be far off now—when it will disappear from the face of the earth and all that once transpired in it and around it will be swallowed up in the forgotten past.”

A half hour later he was at the Forest Home cemetery, which he had visited for the first time only a year earlier: “I sat at the head of my parents’ graves and wept my heart out, like a child.”

Kennan had lived with loneliness—but had found it difficult to accept—all his life. Being a historian required and even rewarded it, offering something like the reassurances he thought he heard on that day. History brought wholeness closer than anything else he had ever done. It was a way of coming home.

ONLY THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY COULD HAVE GRANTED Kennan the freedom to live in the past with so few obligations in the present. Any university appointment would have involved teaching, and Kennan—despite his superb skills as a lecturer—had no desire to supervise students, grade examinations, or serve on faculty committees. “He had no conception of what academic life is like,” the Princeton historian Cyril Black recalled. “It’s hard work, especially here. He wanted it to be like Oxford, I suppose: give a lecture or two a week and then stay away as much as possible.” The Institute was in fact better than Oxford—or at least all parts of it except All Souls—since it enrolled no students, required no lecturing, and specified no expectations for publication. So Kennan was delighted when Oppenheimer called him in on a cold and rainy December 29, 1954, to say that the board of trustees “would be glad to have me there as a member, and to help with the attendant financial problems, for some years to come. Nothing could have been more gratifying to me.”
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But the proposed Kennan appointment—which amounted to lifetime tenure—became a test of Oppenheimer’s authority as director. The man who built the atomic bomb had found that task considerably easier than running the Institute. Its faculty remained bitterly divided between the mathematicians, mostly past their professional prime with plenty of time to make trouble, and their more productive colleagues in other fields. Oppenheimer favored the latter group while cultivating friendships with sympathetic trustees. This was an unhealthy situation, board member Dick Dilworth thought, but it was from such conversations that the idea of a permanent position for Kennan probably arose.
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Until this point in the Institute’s history, the faculty had approved all such appointments unanimously. Kennan’s, it quickly became clear, would break that precedent. The School of Historical Studies, weakened by the recent death of Edward Mead Earle and the impending retirement of the diplomatic historian Sir Llewellyn Woodward, was strongly in favor. Kennan was known at the Institute, had recently been asked to spend a year at Oxford as George Eastman Professor, and was at work on a book that, as one of the historians put it, was sure to earn “the highest praise [in] that it would not have to be done again.” The School of Mathematics, however, protested vociferously. Its heavyweights, among them John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel, pointed out that Kennan had no advanced degree, no scholarly publications, and no reputation as a professional historian. He had, moreover, involved himself in “politics.” Tenuring him would “debauch the standards of the Institute and set its feet upon a downward path.” In no other instance had it taken such a risk.
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Anticipating objections, Oppenheimer solicited external assessments, but these were not reassuring. Joseph Strayer, the chairman of the Princeton history department, foresaw “surprise and adverse comment” if the Institute were to make Kennan a professor of history. “He simply does not have the standing.” Strayer’s colleague Gordon Craig agreed: “He is not a historian, although he has taken to writing history.” Ray Billington, of Northwestern University, worried that Kennan’s “knowledge of men in the field is limited.” Philip Mosely, of the Columbia University Russian Institute, wondered whether he would apply “traditional academic standards in the selection of people and projects.” Only Theodor Mommsen of Cornell University, among the historians consulted, regarded Kennan as qualified: even he, though, suggested that an Institute appointment might more appropriately rest on Kennan’s strengths as a “humanist.”

Isaiah Berlin, writing from Oxford, came vigorously to Kennan’s defense. The Eastman electors had chosen Kennan unanimously: his had been the only name suggested by everyone consulted. He was “one of the most interesting and attractive human beings I [have] ever met.” His books and articles contained “more ideas per page, and more freshness and directness of vision,” than most academic publications.

The Institute would perform a great service by allowing Kennan to do history there indefinitely. “I myself would ask no greater privilege than that of being able to communicate with him about such matters for the rest of my natural life.”
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These mixed reviews emboldened the mathematicians, who demanded the right to make their case directly to the board of trustees. Fearing that this procedure would undermine Oppenheimer, the trustees rejected it in a contentious meeting on November 15, 1955: fortunately Lewis Strauss was not present. After summarizing the arguments for and against, Oppenheimer proposed that Kennan be made a professor of international relations, not of history. The board agreed with a single dissent, from a trustee concerned that for the first time “an appointment had been recommended by less than a unanimous vote of the faculty and [that] a substantial minority of the faculty seemed quite upset about this.” Oppenheimer then amended his own compromise: Kennan’s appointment, which took effect on January 1, 1956, was simply “professor” in the School of Historical Studies.
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How much Kennan knew of the controversy is unclear. His diary makes no mention of it, and Oppenheimer—knowing how easily he bruised—appears to have spared him the details. He explained only that certain colleagues had doubted Kennan’s long-term commitment to scholarship, and that if he himself had doubts, he should not accept the position. “That seemed fair enough,” Kennan recalled, grateful that he now had the means of supporting his family after his temporary appointment had ended. “The Institute took me,” he wrote years later, “already a middle-aged man devoid of academic credentials, substantially on faith, gambling on the existence of scholarly capacities that remained to be demonstrated.... I can find no adequate words in which to acknowledge the debt I owe to this establishment.”
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Kennan worked throughout 1954 on
Russia Leaves the War
, the first of his projected two volumes—which soon became three—on the early American response to the Bolshevik Revolution. Arthur Link, who thought
American Diplomacy
“extraordinarily simplistic,” became Kennan’s tutor: “I advised him to go back and read some good manuals on how one goes about doing research. What is a primary document? What is a secondary document? How much reliance can you put on memoirs?” Kennan went to the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, manuscript collections at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago, even to the state historical societies of Wisconsin and Missouri for the papers, respectively, of Raymond Robins, the American Red Cross representative in Petrograd in 1917–18, and David R. Francis, the American ambassador at the time. Hessman, still Kennan’s secretary, accompanied him on most of these trips, copying out long passages from the materials he selected. He wrote (and dictated) as he researched, mixing narrative with analysis, resisting the temptation to stockpile notes. His speed, as a consequence, exceeded that of most academic historians.
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“It was my first major effort,” Kennan later recalled, “and I was not quite sure what it was, actually, that I had produced.” So he sought out readers as he neared completion. Despite differences over Woodrow Wilson, Link liked what he saw: “There’s no question that he [had] learned a great deal.” The most helpful comments, however, came from the Institute’s medievalist Ernst “Eka” Kantorowicz, who had fought in the German army during World War I but afterward, like Einstein, fled the Nazis.

Whereupon he subjected it to “unforgettable criticism,” not from the standpoint of factual accuracy or interpretive logic, but from that of style. “This, I thought, was the mark not just of a great scholar but of a great gentleman.”
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By March 1955 Kennan was almost done. “The book is my diary,” he wrote apologetically in his neglected diary. “My own life has been of no importance.” On the tenth he delivered the manuscript, with great trepidation, to the Princeton University Press. The editors took their time, and Kennan continued to make revisions, so the book did not appear until the summer of 1956. One of the first reviews came from Harrison Salisbury, who sardonically credited Dulles with coauthorship: deprived of any current policy position, Kennan had had little choice but to turn to the past. “I thought of you many times as I wrote it,” Kennan assured Acheson, who had read the book and praised it.

It meant a great deal, he added, to have Acheson’s approval. “There is no one for whom I could more have wished that the tale would prove interesting and worth reading.”
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