George F. Kennan

This bleak assessment reflected the fact that Eisenhower, as expected, had nominated John Foster Dulles to be his secretary of state. Kennan’s relationship with Dulles had been strained since shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, when they differed over the desirability of admitting Mao’s China to the United Nations and of sending MacArthur’s forces across the 38th parallel: Dulles had described Kennan at the time as a “dangerous man.” With Dulles’s encouragement, Republican demands to replace “containment” with “liberation” had dominated the 1952 presidential campaign, and on September 26—the day Pravda attacked Kennan for his Tempelhof statement—Dulles also attacked him in a St. Louis speech for having repudiated, in American Diplomacy, legal and moral principles. “I disagree and have long disagreed with his basic philosophy,” Dulles explained to a friend who thought the criticism unfair, “and have repeatedly made this clear on many occasions.”²

Nevertheless, he was careful to send Kennan, who was still in Bad Godesberg, a copy of what he had said: “As you will see, I took issue with . . . your recent book. I hope you will not feel that I did so in any improper way.” Kennan responded by forwarding his unpublished reply to Father Walsh’s harsher denunciations, as a way of conveying “a somewhat clearer idea of how I feel about morality in foreign policy.” Dulles acknowledged this as “clarifying” but insisted that “there are certain basic moral concepts which all peoples and nations can and do comprehend, and to which it is legitimate to appeal as providing some common standard of international conduct.”³

The correspondence veiled changes of mind by both men. Dulles was distancing himself from “containment” despite the fact that he and his fellow Republicans had supported that concept when Kennan first articulated it: they raised no significant objections during the 1948 campaign. But in the aftermath of the Democrats’ victory that year, the Soviet atomic bomb, the communist takeover in China, espionage revelations, the Korean War, and China’s intervention in that conflict, Dulles had come to regard “containment” as fair game; hence his call for “liberation” as an alternative. Meanwhile Kennan was distancing himself from his own support, while running the Policy Planning Staff, for efforts to detach the Soviet Union from its satellites. Given the sensitivities he had witnessed in Moscow, Republican promises of “liberation” could, he worried, provoke a major war.⁴

Even if Kennan had not expected to become Dulles’s chief foreign policy adviser, as Charles Burton Marshall would subsequently claim, he did assume that the new administration “would still attach value to my opinions and to the preservation of a mutual relationship of cordiality and understanding.” Weeks passed without any word, however, “and I, over-proud and over-shy as usual, was reluctant to make the first move.” That was the situation when George wrote Kent on Christmas Day. Friends and colleagues were beginning to treat him, he later recalled, “with the elaborate politeness and forbearance one reserves for someone who has committed a social gaffe too appalling for discussion.... It was as though my objective judgment had been somehow discredited with my discretion.”⁵

There were, nonetheless, invitations to speak, most of which he declined. Kennan made an exception, however, for the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania State Bar Association in Scranton on January 16, 1953. “I am now a resident of Pennsylvania,” he explained to the State Department, “but have had very little opportunity to take part in civic affairs here, and feel that this is one way I can show an . . . appreciation for the many kindnesses people have shown me.” He had said nothing publicly about Soviet-American relations while serving as ambassador, and silence might also be necessary in any new appointment: “It seemed to me, therefore, that any statement I might make on this subject should be made during the incumbency of the old administration, in order that the new one might remain wholly uncommitted by what I had said.” Kennan submitted his text for review, and Bohlen, in his capacity as counselor, cleared it.⁶

He was hardly the first American who had gone to Moscow with high hopes and disappointing results, Kennan reminded his audience: “My own recent experience was unusual in form, but not in content.” Soviet hostility arose from “their necessities, not ours.” It would give way eventually “to something more healthy, because Providence has a way of punishing those who persist long and willfully in ignoring great realities.” The most prudent American response would be to stay strong and remain calm, while waiting for this to happen.

At this point, though, Kennan’s rhetoric ensnared him yet again. He chose this moment—four days before Eisenhower’s inauguration, one day after Dulles had reiterated his commitment to “liberation” before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—to denounce that concept:

It is not consistent with our international obligations. It is not consistent with a common membership with other countries in the United Nations. It is not consistent with the maintenance of formal diplomatic relations with another country. It is replete with possibilities for misunderstanding and bitterness. To the extent that it might be successful, it would involve us in heavy responsibilities. Finally the prospects for success would be very small indeed; since the problem of civil obedience is not a great problem to the modern police dictatorship.

The story, by Ferdinand Kuhn, reported that “the foremost government expert on Russia” had “sounded a warning last night against the John Foster Dulles policy of encouraging the liberation of captive peoples in Europe and Asia.” It didn’t matter that Kennan had neither named Dulles nor used the word “dangerous.” It appeared “that I had attacked a Secretary [of State] before he had even taken office. I hadn’t meant to do that.” Professing shock at what had happened, claiming that he had not had Dulles in mind and had no significant differences with him, Kennan asked Doc Matthews to let the new secretary know that all he wanted was “to make myself useful in some capacity until I become eligible for retirement.” Any job appropriate to his rank and experience would do.⁷

Dulles asked to see Kennan on January 23, listened to his explanation but promised no new appointment. That afternoon his press spokesman, Michael McDermott, announced that the secretary regarded the matter as “closed.” Did that mean, a reporter asked, that Kennan “is in good standing and that everything is fine and dandy?” Dulles had been “too busy on other things” to think about Kennan’s future, McDermott replied, but the Scranton speech would not jeopardize it. “Still not a single word or hint,” Kennan fretted on the twenty-fifth; “nor has any one in the new administration [sought] my opinion about anything to do with the Soviet Union.” Several weeks later he was still in a state of suspension, “the only advantages of which are that I continue to receive salary checks (as Ambassador) and am under no obligation to be in Washington.”⁸

“[W]e still don’t know any more about what we are going to do,” Annelise complained to Jeanette, except that “with each appointment it seems to become clear that they are not going to use their top Foreign Service people for much.” “To say that we are on tenterhooks,” Jeanette commiserated, seemed slight “compared to what you must be feeling.” Things were “going very badly indeed,” George admitted to Annelise early in February. It was “not just that they have been too busy. There has been a decision that I am not to be consulted or used in any way in this country, but am to be ‘sent away’ as a sort of punishment for my association with the Truman administration.” It might be Turkey or Yugoslavia, and under normal circumstances he would be happy to have either of those posts. In the current climate, though, he was inclined to retire if, as it now appeared, he might be allowed to do so. That would require “a pretty drastic financial readjustment,” but “the more I see of the new administration, the less I wish to have anything to do with it.”⁹

After learning that Eisenhower had asked Bohlen to replace him in Moscow, Kennan twice sought clarification of his status from Dulles: he was still the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, and the president would at some point have to accept his resignation. But the secretary of state chose not to respond to either of these communications, despite the fact that the second one was written while Kennan was in Washington consulting with Bohlen and Allen Dulles, the new director of the CIA, on the implications of Stalin’s death, which had occurred on March 5. The uncertainty finally ended on the twelfth with a call from William H. Lawrence of The New York Times, who let Kennan know that he would not be getting another post. Under Foreign Service rules, any ambassador not assigned to a new one within three months of leaving the previous one had to retire. Lawrence published his story the next day, revealing that Kennan’s pension would be $7,000 annually, about $500 less than it would have been with a final ambassadorship.¹⁰

Only at that point—Friday, March 13, 1953—did the secretary of state call Kennan in to tell him “that he knew of no ‘niche’ for me in government at this time, and thought I would have difficulty getting confirmation by the Senate for any representative position, tainted as I am with ‘containment.’ ” And then, as if nothing had happened, Dulles asked Kennan to assess the implications of Stalin’s demise: “You interest me when you talk about these matters. Very few other people do.” It was, Kennan thought, as if he had told Annelise that he was divorcing her but had added that “I love the way you cook scrambled eggs, and I wonder if you’d mind fixing me up a batch of them right now, before you go.” The two men parted, Kennan reported to Oppenheimer, “in what was apparently a hearty agreement that I should now retire, although our reasons for this view were not identical.”¹¹

Kennan asked Dulles to announce the arrangement as soon as possible but another long silence ensued, until on April 6 he was shown a draft statement implying that he was retiring at his own request. He refused to approve it, so Dulles—claiming confusion—called him in again the next day to ask what he really wanted. That depended, Kennan replied, on whether the secretary of state and the president really wanted him. Dulles again dithered, so Kennan wrote the press release himself:

Mr. Kennan expects to retire from the Foreign Service in the near future and to return to private activity in the academic field. He hopes to be able to . . . function, following his retirement, as a regular consultant to the Government. These plans are the result of discussions between him and the Secretary, and are agreeable to both.

When his last day at the State Department came, Kennan spent the morning working in an empty office, had lunch, and then went looking for Hessman, who would be staying on for a few weeks. Not finding her, he left a note saying “that I was leaving and would not be back—ever.” He was able to take leave of another secretary and the fifth-floor receptionist: “We all nearly wept.” Then he rode the elevator down, “as on a thousand other occasions, and suddenly there I was on the steps of the building, in the baking glaring heat: a retired officer, a private citizen, after 27 years of official life. I was not unhappy.”

Perhaps—but it was an inglorious conclusion to an illustrious career. No Foreign Service officer had advanced more rapidly within its ranks. None had more significantly shaped grand strategy at the highest levels of government. None had created, if inadvertently, a “school” of international relations theory. And yet Kennan walked out of the State Department on July 29, 1953, with hardly anyone noticing. He was not prepared to reflect, at that point, on how this had happened: “Someone else, I knew, would have to strike the balance, if one was ever to be struck, between justice and injustice, failure and accomplishment.”¹²

Kennan was the same age as Bohlen, similarly trained, and—in Ferguson’s view, at least—less controversial. He had not been at Yalta and had made no secret of his objections to Roosevelt’s policies. His “X” article had been an attack on Henry Wallace. He was, to be sure, the architect of “containment” and had spoken out against “liberation,” but it would have been hard to portray the author of American Diplomacy as a dangerously naïve idealist. Nor would it have been easy to suspect him of sympathy for the Soviet Union, that country having just kicked him out. And even if Dulles did not think highly of Kennan, Eisenhower did: he knew Kennan from the National War College, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Policy Planning Staff. “I respect the man’s mind as well as his integrity and knowledge,” he had written a friend in 1950. As president of Columbia University, Eisenhower even tried to recruit Kennan to run its Institute of War and Peace Studies. Why did he not, then, as president of the United States, insist that his secretary of state find Kennan a “niche”?¹⁴

The Bohlen nomination fight suggests one reason. Kennan was not as vulnerable, but Dulles had attacked him during the campaign and Kennan appeared to have struck back in his Scranton speech. Eisenhower didn’t need another controversy just at this moment. Moreover, Kennan had mentioned retirement in the apology he asked Matthews to convey to Dulles: “This was foolish. I shouldn’t have done it.” Dulles was “a cagey, tricky man,” with no appreciation of what lay behind this gesture: “He simply used this as a way of getting rid of me.” Kennan could have “raised hell” by going to Eisenhower and saying: “Look here, I’ve [had] an honorable career. How can you let me be fired in this way?” But Dulles could have simply said: “I understood you’d wanted to leave the Service.”¹⁵

Kennan had the intuitions and insights—but also the volatility—of a poet, Bowie thought: these made him too “reactive.” Convinced that people in power were taking the wrong direction, he would simplify and thus dramatize his argument, as in his call for toughness toward the U.S.S.R. in the “long telegram” and the “X” article. That would persuade them, but Kennan would then worry that they had gone too far. They were now seeing the Soviets “as an implacable foe, not subject to change, and not open to the ordinary rules of Great Power rivalry.” So Kennan would jump to the opposite camp, where once more he would exaggerate “because he feels it’s so important to get things back into balance. And so it goes.”

With constituencies to hold together and coalitions to maintain, Bowie pointed out, governments can’t manage such fine adjustments. Acheson understood that, but “I don’t think George feels those constraints, or if he does feel them I think he resists them. Getting it intellectually right is of very high value.” Kennan had an “academic” mentality, in that he always wanted to reconsider things. He preferred committing himself not “to a course of action, but to a course of analysis, and therefore if he gets better insights later on, he not only feels free but feels obligated to modify it.” In doing so, his empathy would “go deaf.” That left Kennan surprised when people took what he had said or done in ways he hadn’t anticipated. Of course the Soviets were going to expel him after he compared life in Moscow to internment in Nazi Germany, but he was “genuinely taken aback.” Of course the Scranton speech was going to offend Dulles, but Kennan just “didn’t visualize it.”

Bowie saw one other problem, which was that the higher Kennan rose in the Foreign Service, the more he took things personally. However passionate his prose, the author of the “long telegram” had not seen himself as the target of Stalin’s hostility. The recently expelled ambassador to the Soviet Union did see himself in this way. Kennan was convinced, his friend Bill Bundy added, “that they were deliberately doing nasty things to him, not just to the United States.” His “extreme sensitivity” made it hard for him not to be affected even in situations “where there was nothing you could do about it.” Success in government was a kind of “slavery,” Berlin explained, because the more responsibility you wielded, the less freedom you had to say what you really thought. “The State Department dehydrates you.”¹⁶

Eisenhower sensed without saying so that Kennan had outlived his usefulness as a diplomat: he made no effort to reverse Dulles’s decision. At least one White House aide, though, believed that Kennan was being shabbily treated. The secretary of state’s dislike for Kennan’s “theorizing” was understandable, Emmet John Hughes, a presidential speechwriter, pointed out to Chief of Staff Sherman Adams. But there was a difference “between (a) the manifest right to ‘ease out’ a diplomat whose views are felt to be contrary to prevailing policy and (b) the use of this right in a way that is needlessly rude and perhaps offensive not only to one man but to the service he represents.” Dulles had let two months pass without acknowledging Kennan’s resignation. Now he was using “the crude—and silent—expedient of simply failing to offer him a diplomatic post,” a procedure “designed for the dismissal of plain incompetents.” It was a “singular and studied insult.”

“I can appreciate and must respect your wishes [to retire],” Eisenhower wrote to Kennan on July 8, using a draft Hughes had prepared. “Your years of devoted work in the Foreign Service certainly entitle you to such a choice.” It would have been a routine send-off, had it not been for the fact that, at just this moment and in a characteristically subtle way, the president was making Kennan his top, if temporary, policy planner. His assignment—of which Hughes knew nothing—was to liberate Eisenhower from the “liberation” strategy to which Dulles had tried to commit him during the 1952 campaign.

Consisting of seven members each, the teams met at the National War College from June 10 to July 15. They had access to everything, Kennan recalled, even the most sensitive intelligence information. “It was all highly secret.... I was not permitted—nobody was permitted—to say anything about it.” The cover story, which Kennan used even in his private diary, was that the work involved updating the school’s curriculum. “We all knew we couldn’t expect to put our own personal opinion through pure, that we would have to come to some sort of a collective idea.... And that we did.”¹⁸

Task Force A’s report nevertheless reflected Kennan’s thinking throughout its 152 pages. It identified three great principles, each consistent with what he had been arguing since returning from Moscow in 1946:

First, the U.S. must avoid . . . pursuing in time of peace aims which have essentially a wartime objective: namely, the complete destruction or unconditional surrender of the enemy. Accordingly, we must see to it that our negotiating positions vis-à-vis the Soviet Union appear sincere and reasonable, and that U.S. power appears everywhere as power for peace.

Second, the U.S. must take great pains to create an impression of steadiness and reliability in the formulation and implementation of its foreign policy. This means that special emphasis must be laid on discipline and unity of approach, . . . avoiding every indication of abruptness or erratic behavior.

Third, the positive emphasis of U.S. policy must be placed on . . . the creation generally within the non-Communist area of an atmosphere of confidence and hope. These efforts should not be openly related in each case to the winning of the cold war, but should be addressed in good faith primarily to basic and long-term problems . . . , many of which would exist in important degree even if there were no Soviet Union.

Two great temptations, Kennan warned, might deflect the nation from this course. One was resorting to war, a path “full of risk, empty of calculation, and unwarrantedly hazardous to the continued existence of the U.S.” The other was succumbing to internal “totalitarian” pressures, for that would ruin the reputation of a nation seeking to lead the world in “the defense of free institutions.” Within those limits, the United States could expect the “progressive retraction of Soviet control” from Eastern Europe and China; the “discrediting of Soviet power and Communist ideology” elsewhere; and an increase “in internal stresses and conflicts within the Soviet system,” which would force its rulers “to accept the necessity of adjusting their objectives to those of peaceful co-existence with the Free World.”

Kennan even got Task Force A to endorse his own Program A. The United States should seek “a reunified, sovereign, independent Germany with a democratic form of government.” All foreign occupation forces would withdraw, or at least retreat to enclaves supplied by sea. The new state would have its own military establishment, except for “atomic or other weapons of mass destruction.” And it would operate free from political control by either the Soviet Union or the West. If Stalin’s successors accepted these proposals, they would have rolled back their own influence in Central Europe. If they rejected them, they would “bear the onus of remaining in East Germany solely on the basis of naked power.” This policy would achieve beneficial results “under either eventuality.”¹⁹

The Task Force A report easily overshadowed the others in the force of its logic and the quality of its prose. It showed that “containment” and “liberation” were not mutually exclusive, indeed that the first could bring about the second. It stressed the extent to which irresponsibility in choosing means—whether by too casually risking war or by too fecklessly indulging McCarthy—could corrupt the ultimate end, which was to preserve the American way of life. It was a far more effective attack on Dulles than Kennan’s Scranton speech had been. And most important, it carried the authority of Eisenhower, who had entrusted him with preparing it in the first place.

All three task forces presented their recommendations to the president and his top advisers at a White House meeting on July 16, 1953. As Kennan began speaking, he was amused to find a “silent and humble but outwardly respectful” Dulles sitting in the first row: “I could talk, and he had to listen.” Eisenhower, fully in charge, dominated the discussion that followed. What he said convinced Kennan that “he was prepared to accept the thesis we had put forward, that our approach to the Soviet Union, as it had been followed in the immediately preceding years, was basically sound.” Some adjustments might be necessary, but “there was no need for a drastic change.” If, therefore, Dulles had triumphed “by disembarrass-ing himself of my person, I . . . had my revenge by saddling him, inescapably, with my policy.”²⁰

Historians, on the whole, have sustained that judgment. Kennan would find much to criticize in the Eisenhower-Dulles strategy as it evolved over the next seven and a half years: his chief concerns were its reliance on nuclear retaliation as a way of minimizing containment’s costs, and its refusal to seek a reunified Germany. But in its doubts that the Soviet Union would risk war, in its determination to apply Western strengths against Communist weaknesses, in its willingness to wait for contradictions within the latter system to shatter its unity while sustaining strength and self-confidence in the United States and among its allies—in all of these things, the “New Look,” as it came to be called, was closer to Kennan’s strategy than NSC 68 had been.²¹

Kennan’s departure from government, therefore, was not as lonely as he made it look in his memoirs. For even though Dulles gave him no appointment, Eisenhower accepted the basic elements of the strategy Kennan had designed under Marshall’s supervision: it was not irrelevant that Eisenhower worked for Marshall longer during the war than Kennan had after it. And so Kennan’s final act as a policy planner was to explain all of this to a newly deferential secretary of state, as well as to the president and the vice president of the United States, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and the director of the CIA. It may not have been a “niche,” but it was a more prestigious platform than he had occupied before—or ever would again.

There were, as usual, other opportunities. Freedom House wanted Kennan to become its president: he politely declined. The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies hoped that he would help build a research center in Washington for refugees from government like himself: Kennan liked the idea but balked at having to do fund-raising. Allen Dulles made it clear that if his older brother did not wish to employ Kennan, he did; Walter Bedell Smith, the younger Dulles’s predecessor at the CIA, enthusiastically seconded this proposal. Kennan respected both men, but the organization’s increasing reliance on covert operations worried him; its cooperation with the Ford Foundation had not gone well; and it had, he believed, mishandled the Davies case, an unresolved issue for which he felt personally responsible. With one exception, Oppenheimer and Kennan’s other Princeton friends all felt that he should make the break from government a clean one, “and not permit the situation to be obscured by getting loaned to the CIA. The more I thought about it, the more this seemed to me to be the correct answer, too.”²³

That left the Institute, Kennan’s preference all along, and the arrangements were quickly made. Dean Rusk, the new president of the Rockefeller Foundation, had no problem persuading Robert Lovett, John J. McCloy, and his other trustees to approve a grant of $15,000 for Kennan’s work during the 1953–54 academic year. “If he wanted to be at Princeton,” Rusk recalled, “then this was the natural thing to do to make it possible.” Oppenheimer added another $5,000, which with Kennan’s Foreign Service pension brought his income close to what he had been making as an ambassador—a respectable but not munificent sum for someone maintaining a house, a farm, and a family. His responsibilities would be to seek a more “solid foundation” for his views on “utopian tendencies” in U.S. foreign policy, Kennan explained to Princeton University president Harold Dodds, and to study the internal politics of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. “Curiosity has thrown me into contact with one, experience with the other. I would like to get both off my chest in a scholarly form before I turn to other things.”²⁴

The Institute appointment would not begin until the fall, though, so that left Kennan free to get other things off his chest. One was his worry that American universities were trying to teach international relations as if it were an extension of law, or some newly fashionable “social science.” It was neither, he argued in the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly, whose editors put him on its cover. The world would never accept constitutional governance as it existed within the United States, while politics could never resemble physics because people were unpredictable. The only useful preparation for diplomacy came from history, as well as “from the more subtle and revealing expressions of man’s nature” found in art and literature. Students should be reading “their Bible and their Shakespeare, their Plutarch and their Gibbon, perhaps even their Latin and their Greek.” These alone would build those qualities of “honor, loyalty, generosity, [and] consideration for others” that had been the basis for effectiveness in the Foreign Service “as I have known it.”

McCarthyism remained another concern. It fed on contempt for artists and writers, Kennan warned a University of Notre Dame audience in a well-publicized speech on May 15, “as though virility could not find expression in the creation of beauty, as though Michelangelo had never wielded his brush, as though Dante had never taken up his pen, as though the plays of Shakespeare were lacking in manliness.” This “anti-intellectualism” flaunted its own virility, fearing that in the absence of such exhibitions, “it might be found wanting.” Unchallenged, its practitioners would reduce the range of respectability to “only themselves, the excited accusers,” excluding anyone not engaged in “the profession of denunciation.” Having lived for years in totalitarian states, “I know where this sort of thing leads.”²⁵

The costs of confronting totalitarianism were on Kennan’s mind two weeks later as he stood in a cemetery near East Berlin, delivering a Memorial Day address meant only for his Pennsylvania neighbors. He could hardly improve on what Lincoln had said almost ninety years earlier at a similar place only a few miles away, but he would try to reflect on the meaning those words still carried:

Under each of these stones there lies the remains of a son of this township. Each had half a life behind him, and each should have had another half a life before him. Someone had guided each of them through the trials and illnesses of early childhood. Each of these boys had passed, before he died, through the wonder of adolescence. Each had felt in his hands, at one time or another, the same shale soil we know so well. The same winds blew. The same hills were visible to them in the distance. The same sky was overhead.

When death finally faced them, each had to reconcile himself to the thought that all this should come to be as nothing, that all the love and sacrifice and hope others had placed in them should be in vain, that all the promise of life should suddenly be rendered, to all outward appearances, meaningless. With each of these deaths, some parent died a little bit, too. And to the agony of death, there must have been added the trial of knowing that many other young men did not die but were permitted to live on and complete their lives, as though nothing had happened.

These young men did not die voluntarily or gladly. Like most men who die in war, they probably died in pain and misery and horror and bewilderment. The only thought that could have helped them was that perhaps because of their death this country would be a tiny bit nearer to what they knew, and we know, it ought to be, than it would have been had they not died at all.

And for this reason the act of faith that they performed was not really complete with their passing. Part of its meaning remained to be written in by other people, and notably by ourselves. Every time we reply with selfishness and cynicism and cowardice to the demands which are placed upon us, we deal another blow to the men that lie here and to those who loved them. Every time we reply to these demands with generosity and faith and courage, we bring comfort and recompense to the souls of these people.

Seeking physical pleasures would be “nonsense” for someone his age. Eating and drinking invited obesity; “those of the flesh become ridiculous, unimportant, and hardly dignified.” He would instead embrace “solitude, depth of thought, and writing.” The first two would amount to nothing without the third, so “the great dictate” was to sit at a desk and begin. “The thoughts will come. They always do.” The crickets were subdued that evening, there was a half-moon, and the night was “deathly quiet, as though waiting.”²⁷

Oppenheimer’s vagueness about Institute expectations allowed Kennan to set his own priorities. One was to answer the question he had left unanswered in American Diplomacy: could governments behave as individuals should? His preliminary conclusion, sketched out in his diary, was that politics, whether within or among nations, would always be a struggle for power. It could never in itself be a moral act. It followed that government was “a sad necessity and not a glorious one.” Politics might, from time to time, draft moral men into government, but even they would never be “wholly unsullied,” for although an individual might remain uncorrupted by power, he would have to surround himself with others who were.²⁹

Foreign policy was not, therefore, a contest of good versus evil. To condemn negotiations as appeasement, Kennan told a Princeton University audience early in October, was to end a Hollywood movie with the villain shot. To entrust diplomacy to lawyers was to relegate power, “like sex, to a realm in which we see it only occasionally, and then in a highly sublimated and presentable form.” Both approaches ignored the fact that most international conflicts were “jams that people have gotten themselves into.” Trying to resolve them through rigid standards risked making things worse. Evil existed, to be sure: the Soviet regime reflected it, as had Nazi Germany. Sometimes you had to fight it, sometimes you had to deal with it. The important question was “what sort of compromises we make,” not how to “escape altogether from the necessity of making such compromises.”³⁰

Dictatorships promised escapes from such dilemmas, he reminded the First Presbyterians when he delivered his sermon a few days later. Why not say “Why not?” when some Grand Inquisitor dangled relief from the discomforts of conscience and self-discipline? But that worked only until the approach of death, for which “there is no answer in the totalitarian book.” In theory, there could be no grief because there was no soul, “just an accumulation of chemicals.” In practice, “there is nothing more empty, nothing more mocking, than the trappings of a totalitarian funeral; for here we see the meaninglessness of life expounded and argued from the meaninglessness of death.” It was easier, then, to be a Christian than not to be one; but that meant confronting “the full rigor and severity of the great ethical problems” of which the founders of that faith “were so acutely aware.”³¹

Kennan spared the Presbyterians any detailed discussion of these, but when two Princeton seniors invited him to address a conference they were organizing on “Christianity Re-Examined,” he could no longer evade the issue. “[W]hat they really want to know is: what I believe.” He used his diary to make a list:

Human nature not perfectible.

Civilized life a compromise with nature.

Das Unbehagen in der Kultur [which he later translated as “The Discomfort of Man in the Civilized Context”].

No perfect human relationship.

No perfect solutions in political matters.

The dangers of romantic love: (love is at best a friendship and a practical partnership, complicated by an intensely intimate, impermanent and . . . unstable element that we call sex).

“I hope that nobody will think,” Kennan cautioned the conference when it convened in December, that “I am exhorting the student body to immorality.” But could it be that “the American male knows only one sexual object in life, namely the female with whom, at an appropriate age, he falls romantically and delightfully in love, whom he then marries and with whom he lives happily ever after?”

Really, gentlemen, . . . ask yourself: “How silly can people get?” . . . [L]ook around you, among those of us who are your elders and your teachers, and I think you will find not one in a thousand of us who has met these touching and idyllic standards.

Kennan returned to diplomacy in four lectures—the Stafford Little series—delivered on the Princeton campus in late March 1954, with President Dodds himself in attendance. The site was Alexander Hall, “that curious relic of [the] 1890s,” and “to my combined delight and consternation, the place was packed on each of these occasions to the last of its one thousand sixty uncomfortable seats.” Once again, Kennan revised right up to the last moment. “Forgetting my age (like anyone just turning fifty),” he felt like “the daring young man on the flying trapeze.”³⁴

Despite their precarious composition, the lectures were less provocative than the ones at Chicago three years earlier, and the book they became—published by the Princeton University Press as Realities of American Foreign Policy—was less widely read. Kennan regarded it, nonetheless, as “the most comprehensive statement I ever made of my outlook on the basic problems of American foreign policy.” Several of his themes were familiar: his respect for the Founding Fathers, his skepticism about international law and collective security, his criticism of World War II strategy, his analysis of the Soviet Union and international communism, his concern with concentrations of industrial-military power, his defense of “containment” over “liberation.” There was, however, a new emphasis on material and moral ecology.

Americans could no longer afford economic advances that depleted natural resources and devastated natural beauty, Kennan insisted. Nor could they tolerate dependency, for critical raw materials, on unreliable foreign governments. Nor could they tear their democracy apart internally because threats to democracy existed externally. Nor could they entrust defenses against such dangers to the first use of nuclear weapons, for what would be left after a nuclear war had taken place? These were all single policies, pursued without regard to how each related to the others, or to the larger ends the state was supposed to serve. They neglected “the essential unity” of national problems, thus demonstrating the “danger implicit in any attempt to compartmentalize our thinking about foreign policy.”

That lack of coordination ill-suited the separate “planes of international reality” upon which the United States had to compete. The first was “a sane and rational one, in which we felt comfortable, in which we were surrounded by people to whom we were accustomed and on whose reactions we could at least depend.” The second was “a nightmarish one, where we were like a hunted beast, oblivious of everything but survival; straining every nerve and muscle in the effort to remain alive.” Within the first arena, traditional conceptions of morality applied: “We could still be guided . . . by the American dream.” Within the second, “there was only the law of the jungle; and we had to do violence to our own traditional principles—or many of us felt we did—to fit ourselves for the relentless struggle.” The great question, then, was whether the two could ever be brought into a coherent relationship with one another.

They could, Kennan suggested, through a kind of geopolitical horticulture: “We must be gardeners and not mechanics in our approach to world affairs.” International life was an organic process, not a static system. Americans had inherited it, not designed it. Their preferred standards of behavior, therefore, could hardly govern it. But it should be possible “to take these forces for what they are and to induce them to work with us and for us by influencing the environmental stimuli to which they are subjected.” That would have to be done

gently and patiently, with understanding and sympathy, not trying to force growth by mechanical means, not tearing the plants up by the roots when they fail to behave as we wish them to. The forces of nature will generally be on the side of him who understands them best and respects them most scrupulously.

It was here, then, that Kennan’s views on foreign policy cycled back through his previous thinking on self-containment, Russian literature (especially Chekhov), environmentalism, religion, and even sex. For if the issue, in the end, was human nature, didn’t survival require balancing appetites and obligations? “Only too often in life we find ourselves beset by demons, sometimes outside ourselves, sometimes within us,” but they “have power over us only so long as they are able to monopolize our attention.” They lose that power “when we simply go on with the real work we know we have to do.” Nothing could be more shortsighted than “to sacrifice the traditional values of our civilization to our fears rather than to defend those values with our faith.”³⁵

Similar fates befell other “China hands,” among them John Stewart Service and O. Edmund Clubb, both of whom Kennan tried to help, and the fight over Bohlen’s nomination showed that even Soviet specialists could be suspect. Meanwhile the FBI was investigating Oppenheimer for alleged ties to communists and for having opposed building the hydrogen bomb. His chief accuser was Lewis Strauss, now chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and, ironically, a longtime trustee at the Institute for Advanced Study. So why not Kennan, who had spent years in the U.S.S.R., joined Oppenheimer in objecting to the new weapon, criticized the Republican strategy of “liberation,” railed against McCarthy, and was now also at the Institute? “I was sometimes attacked, sometimes even called a ‘socialist,’ or a ‘Marxist,’ ” he later recalled, “but the attacks made little impression.” That was more “by luck than by any just deserts.”³⁷

Perhaps, but Kennan was also careful. He had “always been friendly to the Bureau,” one of J. Edgar Hoover’s aides reminded the director in 1951, “furnishing pertinent and helpful information when in the State Department.” A former government employee, then in a mental institution, did raise questions about Kennan’s loyalty a few months later, but Hoover chose not to pursue the matter. Before departing for Moscow as ambassador in 1952, Kennan let the bureau know that he would be calling on his Soviet counterparts in Washington and at the United Nations; after returning to the Institute the following year, he informed Hoover that he would be subscribing to Pravda for research purposes, unless the director thought this “undesirable or unwise.” Hoover did not, passing the word to the Post Office Department that “the Bureau has had cordial relations with him.”³⁸

Did Kennan protect himself by reporting on others? He had done so on one or two occasions, he told the Oppenheimer investigators, but only in the case of “minor employees.” Kennan had long been sure that Soviet espionage was taking place within the United States, but he was equally convinced that spies had never significantly influenced policy. It was on that last point that he differed with McCarthy and his supporters. Staying on the right side of Hoover may have made that possible: confronting evil did require compromises.³⁹

Survivor’s guilt, under these circumstances, was inescapable. It was one of the impulses that led Kennan early in 1954 to surprise himself, his family, his friends, and his funders by deciding—on the spur of an emotional moment—to enter politics. The story began when the East Berlin Veterans of Foreign Wars honored him on February 11 for distinguished national service. It was important, Kennan said in thanking them, that the country “show itself united and confident—not afraid of anyone else, and above all, not afraid of itself.” What was happening, though, was just the opposite:

The tone of political life has become sharper; the words have become meaner; the attempt is often made today to bring people to distrust other Americans—not on the grounds that they are dumb or selfish or short-sighted (that sort of thing has always gone on in our political life) but on the grounds that they are disloyal, that they are connected with hostile outside forces, that they are enemies to their own people.

A few weeks later a young farmer and his wife rang the doorbell in Princeton, having driven there from Pennsylvania without knowing whether they would find the Kennans at home. Some of “us fellows” had gotten together, he announced, decided they didn’t like the candidates being put up for the House of Representatives, and wondered if Kennan would agree to run. “Well, I was very much moved by this. I think it’s a duty of citizenship, if your fellow citizens want you to represent them, that you don’t turn it down.” So he drove to Gettysburg to meet local Democratic leaders, who with the “marvelous brutality” of grassroots politics “picked me to pieces right in my presence.” Kennan loved it. “These were such absolutely genuine people.” Decades later he could still quote them: “He ain’t even registered as a Democrat!” “Yeah, but his wife is.” “Well, what would you say if you had to run here?” He said a few things. “Why, we could run him for the Senate!” Kennan announced his candidacy on March 13. The next morning’s New York Times quoted the Adams County Democratic Party chairman, Fred Klunk, who with his neighbors welcomed the idea “of George Kennan being our nominee.”⁴¹

Had that happened and had he been elected, Kennan would have been the president’s congressman, because Eisenhower’s farm was just outside Gettysburg. But he wanted to run only if unopposed in the primary, on the grounds that his other responsibilities—which included finishing the Little lectures—left him no time to campaign. The other two candidates, unimpressed by an “outsider” who had only just declared himself a Democrat, refused to withdraw. Pennsylvania law limited the money Kennan could legally raise: he was not prepared, less than legally, to approach dairy owners, the usual way of getting around this problem. Finally Rusk and Oppenheimer let Kennan know that the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study, ample though it was in other respects, did not extend to supporting candidates for public office.

The problem, Rusk later explained, was that as a tax-exempt foundation, Rockefeller—which provided most of Kennan’s Institute funding—could not appear to be involving itself in politics. The only option would be a terminal grant, but when Oppenheimer suggested this, Kennan was not prepared to sever the Institute connection. “I could not afford to remain without regular income.... I do take seriously the commitments I have made in the academic world.” And so, four days after he entered the race, he abruptly abandoned it. He was “full of agony over this. I felt I’d let down the people in the country. On the other hand, I couldn’t see going deeply in[to] personal debt. I think I was quite right.”⁴²

So did almost everyone else, apart from the disappointed Pennsylvanians. Men qualified to serve in Congress were “not altogether rare,” John V. A. MacMurray, the retired diplomat whose views Kennan had long respected, wrote him with stately delicacy, “but one who combines your integrity and intellectual grasp with actual experience . . . is of irreplaceable value [in] refining of its grossness the thinking of the American people.” Others were franker. “I was horrified,” Jeanette recalled. “Oh, goodness! That’s the last thing in the world he could have done.” But Kennan always regretted this path not taken. “All my friends laugh and say: ‘You were never cut out for politics.’ I think I could have done it if I’d wanted to throw myself into it. I might have gone on to a senatorial position.”

The episode seems, at first glance, inexplicable. How could Kennan, supposedly a realist, expect to succeed in politics without competing in primaries or soliciting contributions? What of his insight, recorded in his diary only a few months earlier, that the moral man drafted into government would have to surround himself with immoral advisers? What of his elitism, which included a long-standing contempt for Congress itself? Shrewd observers of Kennan, without too much trouble, found explanations. One was Jeanette, herself a keen critic of McCarthyism: “He was so complimented by being asked.” A second was a Princeton friend, the historian Cyril Black, who saw Kennan confusing the rough-and-tumble of American politics with the British tradition of invited “safe” seats. A third was his Hodge Road neighbor J. Richardson Dilworth: “George is ultra-conservative. He’s almost a monarchist.” And finally there was Isaiah Berlin, who detected more than a whiff of Tolstoy in Kennan’s desire to be among but above his country neighbors: “Close to the soil, and simple views. Simple truths, shining out. The prophets of the world—you know, he wasn’t too modest, Tolstoy.” Would the two have gotten along? “Tolstoy would have approved of him. He’d have had a good time with Tolstoy.”⁴³

People who have “what you might call genius of some sort, intellectual or artistic,” find it hard to arrange their relationships “in a manner which is wholly conventional.” That was Kennan, speaking not of himself but of Oppenheimer in testimony before the Atomic Energy Commission’s personnel security board on April 20, 1954. Such a person could be “profoundly honest and yet . . . have associates and friends who may be misguided and misled.” Did this mean, one of the commissioners wanted to know, “that all gifted individuals [are] more or less screwballs?” Kennan would not go that far, “but I would say that when gifted individuals come to a maturity of judgment which makes them valuable public servants, you are apt to find that the road by which they have [traveled] may have had zigzags in it of various sorts.”

Kennan’s career, he acknowledged, had been no freer from blunders than anyone else’s: his four-day congressional campaign, he did not have to say, had been a big one. But he had learned the value of discretion: he had managed “to conceal the difficulties on the intellectual road that I have gone through more than other people have been able to.” His habit was “to keep them within myself and fight them out myself.” And so, better than many, he had survived.⁴⁴

Kennan did too, but as he admitted during the Oppenheimer hearings, he was more critical of his country than most people: this was yet another thing “I have had to fight within myself.” He wasn’t fighting very hard, his diary suggests, in the spring of 1954. Princeton was “lush and beautiful,” but the university ’s reunion consisted of “gents” in ridiculous costumes looking “vaguely unhappy.” The resident farmer at the Cherry Orchard was paying no attention to his instructions—Kennan would have seen the resemblance to Tolstoy’s cheerfully dysfunctional peasants in Anna Karenina. Grace’s graduation from Radcliffe required a drive through Connecticut, which had been taken over by scrub forest, Italians, Portuguese, and the Catholic Church. Cambridge was “sooty, over-shaded, [and] dampish.” Giving the commencement address was an obligatory drudgery, redeemed only by the unexpected presence of Joe Alsop, whose views Kennan attacked: Alsop protested, but was “actually very pleased by the personal attention.” A visit to Washington found it overrun by the “great burly Babbitts” of the Eisenhower administration. A haircut for Christopher had his father marveling “at the combination of affection and irritation one can feel toward such a small person.”

The Kennans sailed for Europe in June on a slow and seedy freighter like the ones George had traveled on in his youth. That continent did not seem much better, though. His lectures on Soviet-American relations, given in German at the University of Frankfurt, were, he was told, a great success, “but if I were to be asked . . . what had been accomplished, or whether it would have made any difference if I had never appeared, I would not know what to say.” For most of those who heard him, “the highest spiritual aim seems to be a motorcycle.... One sees, today, how much the Jews added to Germany.” Of the Americans in that country, “I will not speak,” but he did anyway: “Their presence here infuriates me.”

Moscow continued to haunt him: a dream had him returning as counselor in the Ethiopian embassy, a job he had taken because it seemed “a loyal and self-effacing and almost heroic thing to do.” The ambassador, though, was an unhappy little man who left town on the day Kennan arrived, without having provided him a place to stay. Standing forlornly next to his suitcase, “I wondered whether I should call on _____ [probably Bohlen] and my other erstwhile colleagues at the American Embassy. Would they understand? Not likely.”⁴⁶

Whether because of his political misadventure, or Oppenheimer’s ordeal, or the more general sense that he had not yet found his footing, whatever equanimity Kennan had gained by moving back to Princeton now seemed to have deserted him. A long diary entry, composed while still at sea, became almost a biblical lamentation:

1. So far as my own feelings and interests are concerned, I have nothing to live for, yet fear death.

2. I abhor the thought of any occupation that implies any sort of association with, and adjustment to, other people. This is particularly true in the U.S. Nowhere there can I share any of the group or institutional enthusiasms.

3. So far as I myself am concerned, I may as well live in Europe.... I am an exile wherever I go, by virtue of my experience.

4. I do not see any way in which I can use any of my own past in approaching the problems of the future. That has all got to die on the vine: the languages, the intellectual interests, the acquaintances. It makes no whole. It is a museum of odds and ends and left-overs—and whatever value it had is declining day by day in geometric progression.

5. Intellectual life is barred for me, partly by the way of life forced upon me by the family whenever we are with other people, partly by the fact that intellectual exertion comes, with me, only from outside stimulus and constitutes a nervous and psychic strain; yet I have no means of relaxing from it and preserving the balance of life.

I could leave it without a pang: the endless streams of cars, the bored, set faces behind the windshields, the chrome, the asphalt, the advertising, the television sets, the filling-stations, the hot-dog stands, the barren business centers, the suburban brick boxes, the country-clubs, the bars-and-grills, the empty activity, the competitiveness, the lack of spontaneity, the sameness, the drug-stores, the over-heated apartment houses, the bus terminals, the crowded campuses, the unyouthful youth and the immature middle-aged—all of this I could see recede behind the smoke of the Jersey flats without turning a hair.

Why history? The immediate reason, of course, was that Kennan had promised Oppenheimer scholarship, and American Diplomacy—his first venture into the field—had not delivered it. Kennan was determined to do better. But history had always been a lodestone, attracting him when opportunities arose. He liked working as a research assistant for Professor Karl Stählin at the University of Berlin in 1930: his assignment had been a Kremlin librarian during Napoleon’s invasion. He gleefully excavated Neill Brown’s dispatches from the era of Nicholas I for Bullitt to resend to Washington. He exhausted the State Department with his exhaustive study of the Alaska Purchase. He lectured on Russian history while interned at Bad Nauheim. He discovered Gibbon while in flight during the war. And even if his own past might not be useful in solving the problems of the future, he had long believed that the study of the past could be: that was a recurring theme in Kennan’s National War College lectures.

Now, thanks to the Institute, he could concentrate on history. His first impulse had been to survey all of Soviet-American relations, but “I immediately realized that the archival resources had never been properly touched, that anything I might say after reading what few memoirs there were would be superficial and maybe not even accurate. So I happily went to the sources.” That meant immersion in the intricacies of the Bolshevik Revolution, a topic recent enough for there to be living—if unreliable—witnesses, close enough to Kennan’s experience for him to use his linguistic and diplomatic skills, distant enough that he had not been personally involved. Would the world be different “when I have finished”? he wondered aloud in a talk he gave at the National Archives in the fall of 1954. Not much, he conceded, but “a few people may have been helped to understand some of our failures and failings today.” At the top of his speaking notes, he wrote a single word: “Loneliness.”⁴⁹

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”?

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.”

They seemed to say: we have reached a reality beyond all your strivings and sufferings; on your terms it is neither good nor bad; you cannot conceive of it; you cannot help us now, any more than we can help you; but we are serene and timeless and you are not; we have our secret, infinitely sad to your mind, no doubt, but in tune with Nature; we have known all the suffering you now know, and then some; we are beyond your sympathy, as you are beyond our pity; Look: we give you the breath of peacefulness—we are a part of the long afternoon of life; take the hint, go your way as best you can; do not ask too many questions; it will not be long before you join us.⁵¹

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