TWENTY-THREE

Prophet of the Apocalypse: 1968–1980

J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER DIED IN PRINCETON, OF THROAT CANCER, on February 18, 1967, at the age of sixty-two. A week later six hundred people crowded into Alexander Hall for the memorial service, at which Kennan delivered the final eulogy. He praised his friend’s scientific mind, “rigorous but humane, fastidious but generous and powerful, uncompromisingly responsible in its relationship to ascertainable truth but never neglectful of the need for elegance and beauty in the statement of it.” He deplored the official injustice inflicted upon Oppenheimer: the government had used his talents to exploit the destructive capabilities of nuclear physics, but denied him the opportunity to explore “the great positive ones he believed that science to possess.” His life cruelly illustrated “the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength.”

Shakespeare’s image of a “universal wolf” as a “universal prey” eating itself up had haunted Kennan ever since he incorporated it into his long but mostly unread January 1950 paper on the “super” bomb. The idea, however, was Oppenheimer’s: it was he who first alerted Kennan to the ecological consequences of the nuclear revolution. “[N]o one paid any attention to us,” Kennan recalled, “but that brought us together.” Oppenheimer gave Kennan an institutional home after he left government. Kennan, in turn, spoke for Oppenheimer after allegations about the beleaguered physicist’s loyalty effectively silenced him. A war fought with modern weapons, Kennan warned in his 1957 Reith lectures, would risk everything: “the kindliness of our natural environment to the human experience, the genetic composition of the race, the possibilities of health and life for future generations.” In bidding Oppenheimer farewell a decade later, Kennan acknowledged that without his help “some of us—most of us, I suppose—would never have been quite where we are today.... [A]ny further progress we now make is in part his achievement.”¹

There were, at the time of Oppenheimer’s death, about forty thousand nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union—three-fourths of them American. Most were thermonuclear warheads, designed for near-instantaneous delivery by land-based and submarine-launched missiles. The least powerful, intended for battlefield use, each approximated the strength of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Kennan lacked access to these numbers, but he didn’t need it to conclude that seeking security by these means was an absurdity.

Since the Cuban missile crisis, there had been fewer explicit threats to use nuclear weapons. Satellite reconnaissance was reducing the risk of surprise attack. Diplomacy had produced a Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, and a Soviet-American agreement, that same year, to begin negotiations on limiting nuclear weapons delivery systems while restricting the deployment of defenses against them. The goal, it appeared, was no longer to win a nuclear arms race but rather to stabilize it by ensuring equal opportunities for destruction. Both superpowers seemed to have embraced Bernard Brodie’s 1946 argument that the best way to avoid war was to make its prospect as horrible as possible.

Kennan did not doubt the proposition but wondered—with Oppenheimer—why it required retaining the capacity to end civilization so many times over. That was why he distrusted détente, which most people understood to mean something he should have favored: the use of diplomacy to secure peace by balancing power. Kennan saw it as applying outdated techniques to a world in which the relationship between war and politics had changed. The nineteenth-century view had been that “you really could win a war and gain something from it.” Now, though, the destructiveness of weaponry had made such calculations meaningless. War and politics, in Kennan’s mind at least, were becoming equally dangerous.

Where, then, did the strategy of “containment,” which was to have bridged the gap between war and politics, fit into all of this? When Kennan described its objective, in 1947, as bringing about peacefully either the breakup or “gradual mellowing” of the Soviet Union, that country had no nuclear capability. By the beginning of the 1960s, its warhead and missile technology was qualitatively approaching that of the United States. By the end of the decade, it was doing so quantitatively. By 1986, when the number of nuclear weapons peaked at around seventy thousand, just under two-thirds belonged to the U.S.S.R.²

So did the risks of attempting to change that state now exceed the benefits? Was the danger to be contained no longer its behavior but nuclear war itself? If so, did that suggest accepting the Soviet Union and its satellites as permanent features of the international landscape? What would that mean for the future of Germany, and of Europe itself? None of these were new questions for Kennan: he had wrestled with all of them prior to Oppenheimer’s death. In the years that followed, though, they took on a renewed urgency. It was as if Kennan felt an obligation to keep Oppenheimer’s prophetic vision alive, whatever that might imply for the original concept of “containment.”

I.

Late in 1967 Kennan was elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Established in 1898, limited to fifty members, and modeled on the much older Académie française, the organization’s mission was to recognize distinction in literature, music, and the fine arts. Kennan had been invited to join five years earlier because of his accomplishments as a writer, sixty-four years after the first George Kennan was similarly honored. The academy’s parent organization, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, had made the second Kennan its president in 1965, just in time for the ill-fated White House Festival of the Arts. He took all of these institutional responsibilities seriously. Kennan’s sense of having been excluded as a young man, Arthur Schlesinger speculated, had left him with a love of ritual as an older man: “He believes strongly that the ceremonies of life are important. It’s an endearing, interesting characteristic.”³

Kennan addressed the academy for the first time in his new capacity on May 28, 1968, three months after the Tet offensive in Vietnam, two months after Johnson’s announcement that he would seek a negotiated settlement of the war but not reelection, seven weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and one week before that of Robert F. Kennedy. “[W]e are meeting,” Kennan acknowledged, “in a very troubled time.” The artist’s duty was not to get involved in politics, which were always “polluted with the passions and the myopia of the moment.” Nor was it to attempt to correct, in any immediate sense, “the manifold follies and stupidities to which man, in his capacity as a political actor, is prone.”

Perhaps it might be, though, to “lend to the comprehension of the human predicament a deeper dimension of insight,” through which “the tragic illusions of power and anger will lose their force.” Had not Cranach and Grünewald painted during peasant rebellions and religious wars? Had not Goethe, Beethoven, and Schiller flourished alongside the upheavals of the Napoleonic era? Most moving of all was Boris Pasternak, “scratching out his poems through the night in that abandoned country house in the Urals during the Russian civil war, while each night the dark shadows of the wolves against the snow came nearer.” It took forty years for his writings to appear, but they were now “an imperishable component of Russian literature.” Much would have been lost if those artists had sacrificed their creativity “in order to throw themselves into political pursuits for which they were ill-prepared and in which, as Pasternak realized, they could do nothing comparable in importance to what they could achieve by the employment of their real talents.”⁴

Kennan’s luxury—but also his burden—was not having to be Pasternak. He spoke wistfully of wanting to detach himself from contemporary events, but no one forced him to do so. That left him resisting temptation, mostly unsuccessfully. It had seemed safe enough that summer, for example, to publish his 1938–40 dispatches from Prague, unearthed while preparing his memoirs. But on August 20–21, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the growing reform movement there. The new Kremlin leadership of Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksey Kosygin had made “a colossal mistake,” Kennan was sure, and The New York Times quickly connected that violation of sovereignty with his reports on another such event three decades earlier. Soon Kennan was calling for an additional hundred thousand American troops to be sent to West Germany as a show of force, to counter what he saw as an increasingly “adventuristic streak” in Soviet behavior.⁵

He was also still thinking, wistfully, about politics. “I think I could have been successful at it,” he wrote Joan a few days before the 1968 presidential election. “I have never found it hard to communicate with people from a platform, and I rather love all the human and intellectual intricacies.” But he could never have afforded to run for office; his views, moreover, were “light years ahead of the current drift of public opinion.” If the next administration were to offer him a position like under secretary of state or ambassador to the United Nations, though, he might take it.⁶

Kennan called the office of Richard M. Nixon two days after his victory at the polls to offer whatever advice the president-elect might want. None was sought, but Nixon’s appointment of Henry A. Kissinger as his national security adviser surprised and pleased Kennan. He had been reading Kissinger since the 1950s and now regarded him as “fully recovered from the militaristic preoccupations of earlier years”—his writings, presumably, on the “limited” use of nuclear weapons. Shortly after learning of his new job, Kissinger in turn assured Kennan of Nixon’s regard for him as “a leading example of people whose possibilities were not being used by the last administration,” the implication being that the new one might find a way to do so.⁷

That conversation took place at a Princeton cocktail party on December 4, 1968. The occasion was the inaugural conference of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, a privately funded reincarnation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, exposed the previous year as having had CIA support. Other attendees included Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, Stanley Hoffmann, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Norman Podhoretz, Marion Dönhoff, and Kennan’s old Moscow friend Lillian Hellman, but also a clamorous contingent of young black power advocates and white New Leftists. Understandably confused, the local Students for a Democratic Society chapter prepared an all-purpose poster: “Down With Racism, Imperialism, Genocide, Corporation Capitalism, Policy Planners, etc.” (A stronger exhortation had been crossed out, at the last moment, on the advice of a university official.) Kennan, improbably, delivered the dinner address. With his “gray suit, silk tie, elegant gold chain across his vest, [and] dignified bearing,” The New York Times reported, he personified a lifestyle “for which the young could muster little sympathy or understanding. He reciprocated completely.”

The nation had many problems, Kennan told his audience, not the least of which was “the extremely disturbed and excited state of mind of a good portion of our student youth, floundering around as it is in its own terrifying wilderness of drugs, pornography and political hysteria.” This was not Pasternak-like detachment, and a heated discussion followed. “Since when [are] youth not allowed to be asses?” Hellman demanded, prompting one young activist to announce that he had just fallen in love with an older woman. She was not amused. “He did a very brave thing,” she said in defense of Kennan: “He refused to be a swinger.”⁸

“The new administration must be given a fair opportunity to show what it can do,” Kennan commented that evening. He got no invitation to work for it, though, and this time he didn’t agonize over phones that didn’t ring. He had decided to return to Oxford during the spring of 1969, and he had a new project in mind: he would write the first full English-language history of the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894. The logic of doing so was not immediately obvious, but Kennan’s academy address provided a clue.

Unlike the artists he had cited, he was neither a painter nor a playwright nor a philosopher. His poetry was chiefly whimsical, his musicianship only companionable. But he could write history: his distinction lay in the skill with which he represented the past to the present and future. World War I, Kennan believed, had been the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, having set so many subsequent tragedies in motion. No one in 1914, however, had foreseen any of this. Each belligerent had entered the war optimistically, even enthusiastically. If his new book could explain such miscalculations, perhaps it might dispel illusions out of which new tragedies could grow.

It would have to be thorough, he explained to Joan, for late-nineteenth-century European diplomacy was “a frightfully complicated subject with an enormous existing literature.” It would have to be scholarly, because the Institute for Advanced Study expected that of him. It would take years to complete, and “since no one in this generation will be interested in it,” it would be a lonely enterprise. And why the Franco-Russian alliance? Because it had replaced Bismarck’s system of unilateral restraint, which reconciled Germany’s neighbors to its post-1871 unification, with one of multilateral deterrence, which meant risking war to prevent war. It should have been obvious, even in 1894, that any great-power clash employing modern weaponry would be “a madness from which nobody [could] benefit.” Kennan would be writing a cautionary history of wolves, preparing to eat themselves up.⁹

II.

With Connie Goodman on leave from the Institute to raise a family, Kennan had a new secretary, Janet Smith. She was not shy about questioning his priorities: did he really think he could isolate himself to write history? It was probably unrealistic, he acknowledged from Oxford in March 1969, to suppose “that anyone in my position—i.e., with my past, my reputation, and my connections—would be able to find the time, the privacy, and the peace of mind to do a really major, serious work of historical scholarship.” He was now sixty-five, and demands for commentary on current events had not diminished. He had also come to realize, belatedly, the benefits of inadvertence: the fact that such influence as he had accumulated over the years had more often arisen unexpectedly than from his own plans.

So he must allow for opportunities like the “long telegram,” the “X” article, the Chicago lectures, the disengagement debate, the Fulbright hearings, and the Swarthmore speech, even if such “unwithstandable approaches from the outside” didn’t always produce the results he wanted. However much he might wish to be a prophet, life had burdened him with the role of pundit. “Let me then accept it and be prepared to play it with distinction.”¹⁰

Oxford was friendlier than it had been in 1957–58. The Kennans’ Iffley flat was adequately heated—no need to carry coal this time—and George had an office in All Souls College. He liked having his radio free of commercials, his roads uncluttered by billboards, and telephones that rang rarely “because the English don’t phone—they send notes.” He was dining occasionally with colleagues; even student life struck him as “relatively rich and gay and confused and happy.” But he couldn’t resist controversy. What was wrong with black power anyway? Kennan asked a startled assemblage of dignitaries at a Ditchley Park conference shortly after he arrived: why shouldn’t Americans follow South Africa’s example and give blacks their own state? It had taken that to satisfy the Jews, his friend Richard Crossman helpfully added. Having tossed these grenades, the two took their leave, under a full moon, cheered by the mayhem they had left behind.¹¹

Kennan’s chief task in Oxford was to deliver the Chichele lectures, a less demanding series than the two he had taken on twelve years earlier. He chose to analyze La Russe en 1839, the account of a trip through Russia by Astolphe Louis Léonor, the Marquis de Custine. Like Neill Brown’s dispatches from St. Petersburg in the 1850s, Custine’s book allowed viewing the recent past through a distant past, a perspective Kennan relished. Custine had been unfair to Nicholas I and his contemporaries, Kennan concluded in the published version of the lectures, which appeared in 1971, but he had accurately anticipated the Stalin regime and, to a lesser extent, those that followed. Another of Kennan’s epic sentences specified the analogies:

the absolute power of a single man; his power over thoughts as well as actions; the impermanence and unsubstantiality of all subordinate distinctions of rank and dignity—the instantaneous transition from lofty station to disgrace and oblivion; the indecent association of sycophancy upwards with brutality downwards; the utter disenfranchisement and helplessness of the popular masses; the nervous punishment of innocent people for the offenses they might be considered capable of committing rather than the ones they had committed; the neurotic relationship to the West; the frantic fear of foreign observation; the obsession with espionage; the secrecy; the systematic mystification; the general silence of intimidation; the preoccupation with appearances at the expense of reality; the systematic cultivation of falsehood as a weapon of policy; the tendency to rewrite the past.

These were traits, some active, some latent, the recognition and correction of which would be vital to the Soviet Union’s future: “to its security, above all, not just against those external forces by whose fancied heretical will Russians of all ages have so easily seen themselves threatened, but [also] its security against itself.”¹²

That sounded a lot like the “X” article: how could there be a normal relationship with such a country until its internal configuration—indeed its culture—had changed? But Kennan was writing about Custine in the nuclear era: didn’t that require overlooking such issues? Wasn’t the important thing now to balance power among states, rather than to await—or even to encourage—changes from within? The questions came from the editors of a new journal, Foreign Policy, who had noticed (as those of Foreign Affairs had not) that 1972 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mr. X’s memorable appearance.

Eager “to welcome Professor Kennan to the pages of this magazine,” they published an interview with him in late May, a week before the first American presidential visit to the Soviet Union since Roosevelt had gone to Yalta in 1945. The Nixon-Brezhnev summit promised the greatest progress yet toward strategic arms control: an “interim agreement” limiting land- and sea-based missiles armed with nuclear warheads, and a treaty banning defenses against those that remained. It followed the even more surprising trips that Kissinger and Nixon had already made to the People’s Republic of China. What did Kennan think?

Brezhnev’s state, he acknowledged, was not Stalin’s. It had long since lost ideological authority beyond its borders: “The façade of solidarity can be maintained, today, only by extensive concessions to the real independence of the respective Communist parties.” It had stabilized, but not expanded, its control over half of Europe—perhaps NATO had been of some use, after all. And the Soviet Union now had its own “containment” problem in East Asia, where China posed at least as great a challenge as did the United States. All of this had left Kremlin leaders “no alternatives except isolation or alliance with the capitalist countries, which could undermine the legitimacy of their power at home.” The geopolitical balance was obviously preferable to that of 1947.

The military balance, however, was another matter. Always ahead in manpower and conventional armaments, the U.S.S.R. now had such formidable nuclear strength that American concerns no longer focused on who was to dominate Eurasia but rather on a “fantasy world” of weaponry.

It has no foundation in real interests—no foundation, in fact, but in fear, and in an essentially irrational fear at that. It is carried not by any reason to believe that the other side would, but only by a hypnotic fascination with the fact that it could. It is simply an institutionalized force of habit. If someone could suddenly make the two sides realize that it has no purpose and if they were then to desist, the world would presumably go on, in all important respects, just as it is going on today.

How might that happen? Not through the intricate agreements to be signed in Moscow, for these would only clarify the rules in a continuing contest. What was needed instead were “reciprocal unilateral steps of restraint.” If one could, by such means, shrink armed establishments to more reasonable dimensions, then the Soviet Union would pose no greater threat than had prerevolutionary Russia—even if it retained vestiges of the society Custine had described.

No one should expect such a state not to behave as its predecessor had done. It would want to preserve, and where possible expand, its spheres of influence. It might well build a blue-water navy. It would not, in its culture or politics, become a democracy. Why, then, should “the peace of the world [depend] on the ability of the rest of us to prevent the Soviet Union indefinitely from acting like a great power?” The priority now should be to reduce or even eliminate nuclear weapons, not simply to tinker, as Kennan had put it earlier in his diary, with “the wretched ABMs and MRVs and MIRVs and SALTs and what not.”¹³

Kennan’s reasoning reflected his thinking on the origins of World War I. For then, as now, great-power rivalries had existed. So too had diplomacy as a means of managing them. Nixon and Kissinger were following Bismarck’s example by balancing power, a considerable improvement over Johnson’s practice of expending it where no vital interests were at stake. But like the Europeans who came after Bismarck, the United States and the Soviet Union were simultaneously accumulating arms of such strength that any use of them would destroy what they were meant to defend. It had taken the belligerents of 1914–18 four years to accomplish this. In the nuclear age, it would take about forty minutes.

III.

“I could not be more pleased than I am by this appointment,” Kennan wrote Kissinger on September 19, 1973, shortly after the beleaguered Nixon, now deeply enmeshed in the Watergate scandal, had nominated his national security adviser also to become secretary of state. Kennan’s congratulations came, however, only in the last two lines of a long letter criticizing the novelist-historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union’s closest contemporary equivalent to Tolstoy himself, and the nuclear physicist Andrey Sakharov, whose anguish over the bombs he had built paralleled Oppenheimer’s. Both were “behaving very unwisely” by provoking a showdown over their alleged official mistreatment. Even worse, they were trying to enlist Americans in support of their cause. The United States could not sacrifice its entire relationship with the U.S.S.R. to satisfy “the grievances of these people.”¹⁴

It was a surprisingly harsh tone for the self-regarded heir of the other Kennan, the most prominent nineteenth-century defender of Russian dissidents, and for George F. Kennan as well. He had made his reputation in 1946–47, after all, by blurring the distinction between domestic and foreign policy in the Soviet Union. He had worked for years afterward to help settle refugees from Stalin’s regime in the United States, right down through the arrival, in 1967, of the most famous of them all, the dead dictator’s daughter. He had gone out of his way to honor Pasternak in his May 1968 American Academy presidential address. “I wouldn’t trust any so-called détente,” he had told The New York Times after the invasion of Czechoslovakia three months later, “if it is not supported by free contacts between governments and peoples.” And six months after his letter to Kissinger, Kennan publicly praised Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.” Why, then, was Kennan becoming less sympathetic to the Kremlin’s domestic critics as the attention they attracted, during the early 1970s, began to grow?¹⁵

One reason was that he was becoming more sympathetic to the conduct of American foreign policy. By the time Nixon relinquished the presidency to Gerald Ford in August 1974, his administration had reached agreements with the Soviet Union to limit strategic arms, brought China out of its long diplomatic isolation, negotiated an end to the war in Vietnam, contained an unexpected Arab-Israeli war, and endorsed the concept of a multipolar world that resembled in principle, if not in all its details, Kennan’s thinking while on the Policy Planning Staff a quarter-century earlier. Kissinger “understands my views better than anyone at State ever has,” Kennan acknowledged. It was a relief to know that he would stay on: “Henry’s a fine person, and I think very highly of him,” but at the same time “he scares me.” For “with opportunists like Scoop Jackson around, he could go at any moment.”¹⁶

“Scoop” was Senator Henry M. Jackson, a long-serving Washington State Democrat who, in the aftermath of the 1972 Nixon-Brezhnev summit, had taken it upon himself to dismantle détente. He wanted to return the Democratic Party—whose presidential nominee that year was the haplessly dovish George McGovern—to the tough foreign policy traditions of Truman and Acheson. Nixon and Kissinger, Jackson claimed, had ceded superiority in strategic weaponry to the Soviet Union through ill-conceived arms control agreements, while failing to condemn that country’s growing harassment of dissidents and potential emigrants, chiefly Jews. Jackson would use his considerable influence in the Senate to demand numerical parity in any new strategic arms treaties. He would also withhold “most-favored nation” status and Export-Import Bank credits—both promised by Nixon in Moscow—until the U.S.S.R. relaxed its restrictions on emigration. Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, as Kennan saw it, were cheering him on.

The intricacies of arms control mattered little to Kennan. With both sides possessing the capacity for “fantastic overkills,” he had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee several years earlier, all calculations of advantage and disadvantage were meaningless. Human rights, though, were a trickier issue. Like John Quincy Adams, Kennan doubted the feasibility of trying to right wrongs committed by foreign governments against their own citizens. He still hoped for change within the Soviet Union but had lost faith in the ability of American leaders to bring this about. He had long deplored the ease with which domestic politics could derail foreign policy—Scoop Jackson was hardly the first example—but now the stakes were higher: with weapons of mass destruction available in such numbers, even a slight miscalculation could produce universal destruction. What gave Soviet dissidents the right, then, even if they were the figurative descendants of the Russians the elder Kennan had tried to help, to place détente at risk?¹⁷

They would have replied, with good reason, that the Soviet leaders were using détente to suppress dissent. Following the crushing of the “Prague spring” in 1968, Brezhnev had proposed an international conference to confirm post–World War II boundaries throughout Europe, with a view to regaining, through diplomacy, the legitimacy his own and other Eastern European regimes had lost. For if the United States and its allies formally recognized the status quo, what basis would domestic dissidents have for challenging communist party rule? The persistence with which Moscow pressed this plan gave the Western Europeans and the Canadians—Washington, in this instance, paid little attention—the opportunity to attach a Jackson-like condition of their own: that all parties to any such agreement acknowledge “the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Brezhnev, equally inattentively, accepted the compromise. So on July 31, 1975, thirty-five heads of government from the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, and all European states except Albania gathered in Helsinki to sign, on the next day, the “Final Act” of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.¹⁸

It was “a lot of nonsense,” Kennan wrote privately, “two years of wrangling over language, most of it of a general nature, none of it committing anyone specifically to anything.” The Americans and their allies had lost nothing, since none intended to reunify Europe—particularly Germany—in the first place. The Soviets had made some significant verbal concessions, subscribing to language that appeared to proscribe, in the future, what they had done to Czechoslovakia, but hardly anyone in the United States understood this. Nixon, Ford, and even Kissinger had promised too much, and now—with allegations from hard-line Democrats and right-wing Republicans that the United States had again, as at Yalta, sold out Eastern Europe—the reaction was setting in. As far as Kennan could see, Americans were “right back where we were in Mr. Dulles’s time.” If anyone should devise “really sound and brilliant diplomacy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the country at large would not recognize it and would call with great acclaim for its abandonment.”¹⁹

Despite the Helsinki agreements, Kennan wrote in a bicentennial history of Soviet-American relations published in the July 1976 issue of Foreign Affairs, the Nixon-Kissinger approach to détente had, on the whole, improved them. President Ford, however, was finding it impossible to say so, having barely survived a challenge for the Republican nomination from a Kissinger critic, Ronald Reagan, and now facing another, the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter. “[N]ot unnaturally,” Kennan noted, after lunching with Kissinger in late August, he was “somewhat dispirited, believing that he had failed in his effort to instill into American diplomacy some depth of concept and some subtlety of technique.... He is a wise, learned and agreeable man.” His memoirs would be “worth the enormous price the publishers will offer for them.”

And what of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and the first Kennan’s legacy? The second Kennan made no mention of them in Foreign Affairs, noting only that “[t]he Soviet authorities will no doubt continue to adhere to internal practices of a repressive nature that will continue to offend large sections of American opinion.” But in an interview that summer, with unusual asperity, he did:

[M]y namesake, George Kennan the elder, was busy for many years trying to whip up sympathy for the Russian revolutionaries, admittedly not the Bolsheviks but their moderate predecessors the Populists. The assumption behind all this was that if one could only overthrow the old Czarist autocracy, something much better would follow. Have we learned anything from this lesson?

He had “the greatest misgivings about any of us, Americans or West Europeans, taking upon ourselves the responsibility for trying to overthrow this, or any other, government in Russia.” Kennan’s attitude earned him a stinging rebuke from a sensitive source. She found it pitiful, Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote him, “that of all people . . . it is George Kennan who surrendered, and forgot his own words, [which] he said in 1952. It is still true, George—even though Stalin [is] 20 years [sic] in grave, they are all—still—no better than Nazis. And you know this better than I do.”²⁰

Containment, as Kennan had conceived it, never required action from the outside to change the internal character of the Soviet system: that was to happen from within, in response to external circumstances the West should have wished to create in any event. Reforms would require visionaries—dissidents, if you will—who would sense these new circumstances and would have the courage to respond to them. Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and their allies met that standard. But by the time they did, Kennan, fearing that disruptions of any kind could lead to nuclear war, had come to regard them as dangerous enemies.

IV.

Kennan published the second volume of his own memoirs in 1972. “I don’t think it is my best work,” he wrote after finishing it. This time he was right—his first volume had set a high standard. Covering the years 1950 through 1963, the new one focused on the Korean War, the Moscow ambassadorship and its aftermath, Kennan’s unsuccessful efforts to save the Foreign Service career of his former subordinate John Paton Davies, the Reith lectures controversy, and service under Kennedy in Yugoslavia. It was oddly uneven, treating these episodes in detail while ignoring most of what Kennan was otherwise doing, notably writing history. “I don’t see how a memoir could be better,” John Kenneth Galbraith observed in The New York Times, before proceeding to show how it might have been. What the book did reveal, he concluded accurately enough, was that Kennan “derives no special pleasure—as I always do—from the feeling that everyone else is wrong.”²¹

He certainly took no pleasure in the latest crisis at the Institute for Advanced Study. After the ailing Oppenheimer resigned as director in 1966, the board of trustees appointed an economist, Carl Kaysen, to that position. A skillful fundraiser, Kaysen upgraded the Institute’s physical facilities but lacked Oppenheimer’s tact in managing its prickly personalities. After he overruled a majority of the Institute’s permanent professors to offer that status to a sociologist, Robert Bellah, in 1972, they demanded Kaysen’s resignation. Soon both sides were attacking one another in The New York Times, which did not normally cover academic politics in such gruesome detail. “I am very, very much distressed about the dispute,” Kennan himself told the Times. “A lot of it has been sheer misunderstanding of a tragic nature.”

That was part of the problem, but the larger issue was one of governance: did authority reside with the trustees, the tenured faculty, or the director, and if all three, in what proportion? Diplomacy, Kennan ruefully recalled, had been much easier than trying to answer this question. For the most part, he avoided taking sides: the trustees even approached him, at one point, about becoming interim director if Kaysen was forced to step down. To Kennan’s great relief, that didn’t happen. Bellah decided to go elsewhere, and Kaysen stayed on until 1976, when he yielded the directorship to a historian of science, Harry Woolf. But the furor robbed Kennan of the calm the Institute had once provided him. “As far as I can see,” he wrote one friend, “just about everybody here who has had any responsibility in this matter has done, with remarkable consistency, the wrong thing.” And, to another: “What fools these mortals be.”²²

Kennan was hard at work, in the meantime, establishing an institute of his own, as a way of repaying “something of the debt I owe to those who once taught and inspired me.” One was his Foreign Service mentor, Robert Kelley, who had insisted that the best way to understand the Soviet Union was to study Russian history and culture. Kennan’s book on Custine reflected that principle, but there was no American center for Russian research independent of major universities. Kennan wanted one, to be located in Washington. “Of the necessity,” he wrote his former Moscow boss (and later New York governor) W. Averell Harriman, “there can, in my opinion, be no doubt whatsoever.” Only Harriman had “the position, the authority, and the institutional detachment”—Kennan was too tactful to mention the cash—“to carry things forward.”²³

Richard Ullman, now a Princeton professor for whom Kennan had been a mentor, found it fascinating that he still deferred to Harriman: “I’d never seen [Kennan] with anybody else with whom he had that junior relationship.” Ullman watched it crack, briefly but revealingly, at a dinner Kaysen arranged shortly after Alliluyeva’s arrival. Harriman had been eager to meet her, but she found his questions about her father intimidating and refused to say much. Richard Holbrooke, Harriman’s feisty young aide, came gallantly to her rescue: “Governor, you are the most impossible man to work with I have ever encountered.” “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve said that,” Kennan burst out. “I’ve always felt that. Averell, you really were impossible!”²⁴

Now, though, he needed Harriman’s help, and the old man had not mellowed. “I always distrust statements [like] ‘of the necessity . . . there can be no doubt whatsoever,’ ” he grumbled to his secretary after reading Kennan’s letter about the new institute. Why not expand existing centers at Harvard or Columbia? If a Washington site really was necessary, he advised Kennan, then “[t]he School of Advanced International Studies, started by Paul Nitze and associated with Johns Hopkins, might be a good home.” But Kennan did not like this idea. “I am naturally disappointed,” he responded to Harriman. The need for a Washington program that would not be an adjunct to something else was clear to “all the leading authorities in our country. I know that to find the money for it is not going to be an easy task.”²⁵

That proved to be correct, but with the help of two energetic young historians, James Billington (later Librarian of Congress) and S. Frederick Starr (later president of Oberlin College), Kennan was able to get a small “Institute for Advanced Russian Studies” established at the new Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a congressionally mandated memorial to the former president, housed in the old Smithsonian building on the Washington Mall. “[A]s you will see from this stationery,” Kennan wrote Harriman again at the end of 1975, the new institute “bears, at the insistence of my younger colleagues, my own name and that of my great-uncle—the one who did all the travel in Siberia and wrote the book on your father.” The Kennan Institute still needed help: might Harriman purchase a “modest” building nearby, to be known as “Harriman House,” at which it could accommodate visiting scholars?²⁶

Harriman did make a contribution, but the idea of a modest house named for him within the Kennan Institute carried no greater appeal than the idea of putting the latter in Nitze’s school had carried for Kennan. He approached Harriman once more in 1978, asking for help in raising a $3–5 million endowment, but this time got a flat rejection: “My prior commitments are such that I cannot give the substantial sum that you speak of in your letter to your Institute.” Kennan should approach the industrialist Armand Hammer, taking care to “give his name [sufficient] recognition to excite his interest.” Four years later Harriman announced that he and his family were giving Columbia University $11.5 million to endow its Russian Institute, which would henceforth be the “W. Averell Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.”²⁷

Knowing Harriman’s ego, Kennan might have expected this. Having one of his own, he did not. Despite the two Kennans for whom his institute was named, the younger one had hoped through it, he later admitted, “to ‘institutionalize’ myself”—and had been bold enough to seek Harriman’s help. Harriman liked the concept, but thought that a different person deserved the distinction. It was a contest of the vanities Kennan could not win. If he had been willing to name his institute for Harriman, the Princeton historian Cy Black speculated, “he might have gotten the money. But a man like Harriman doesn’t give it to Kennan’s institute.”²⁸

Kennan wondered, on getting the bad news, whether he should recommend liquidating his institute altogether, “the shattering of one more dream.” In the end, though, he agreed to go on the Harriman Institute’s advisory board, Harriman’s wife Pamela went on his, and the Kennan Institute became the primary Washington center for research on Russia, as well as on the non-Russian territories of the former Soviet Union. Fund-raising was always difficult, though, and so it was never able to separate itself, as Kennan had hoped it might, from the Wilson Center. His institute remained “beautiful, valuable, full of promise, but, like a young lovely Victorian governess without fortune or family, at the mercy of the one who gives her meals, a roof, and a pittance of salary.”²⁹

V.

The Kennans celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary on September 11, 1971. Their children surprised them with a dinner followed by a ball, featuring engraved invitations, guests brought in from all over, and an orchestra playing George’s Dixieland favorites. “They organized it all by themselves, without a word to us. . . . All Princeton was impressed.” Mortality, however, was intimating itself more regularly now. Chip Bohlen died after a long illness on the first day of January 1974. He was “closest to me in professional experience and interest,” George wrote his widow, Avis. “I find it quite impossible to believe that he, who was so much a part of my world, is really gone. Perhaps, in one way, he is not.”³⁰

Six weeks later Kennan turned seventy, thereby becoming, in line with Institute for Advanced Study procedure, a professor-emeritus. To mark the occasion, he composed a poem, which he read aloud at his birthday dinner. It sounded playful, but it was not casual: he reworked it several times before he was satisfied, and then ensured its survival by saving it in several locations. As if to humiliate future biographers, he compressed much of himself within just fifteen stanzas.

When the step becomes slow, and the wit becomes slower,
And memory fails, and the hearing declines;
When skies become clouded, and clouds become lower,
And you find yourself talking poetical lines;

 

When the path that you tread becomes steeper and darker;
And the question seems no longer whether, but when—
Then, my friend, you should look for the biblical marker,
The sign by the road that reads: Three Score and Ten;

 

At this point you’ll observe, if you care to look closely,
You’re no longer alone on the highway of life;
For there trudges behind you, and glowers morosely,
A bearded old man with a curious knife;

 

At first you defy this absurd apparition
(For it’s old Father Time, with his glass and his scythe);
You swear you were never in better condition—
The body more jaunty, the spirit more blythe;

 

And you laugh in his face, and you tell the old joker:
“You must be mistaken; I’m feeling just fine,”
But the wretched old scarecrow just picks up his poker
And gives you a jab and says: “Get back in line”;

 

So you swallow your pride, and you march with your brothers;
You do all the things you’re instructed to do;
But you’re sure this compulsion, just right for the others,
Could not have been really intended for you;

 

And you turn to the thought of your erstwhile successes—
How brilliant, how charming, how worthy of fame;
’Til a small voice protests and the conscience confesses
What an ass you once were and how empty the claim;

 

Then the ghosts of the past find you out in your sadness,
And gather about, and point fingers of shame—
The ghosts of stupidities spawned by your madness—
The ghosts of injustices done in your name;

 

And you grieve with remorse for the sins you’ve committed:
The fingers that roamed and the tongue that betrayed;
But you grieve even more for the ones you omitted:
The nectar untasted, the record unplayed.

 

But the cut most unkind, and the cruelest teacher,
Is the feeling you have when, as sometimes occurs,
The wandering eye of some heavenly creature
Encounters your own, and your own catches hers;

 

And you conjure up dreams too delightful to mention,
And you primp and you pose, ’til it’s suddenly seen
That the actual object of all her attention—
This burning, voluptuous female attention—
Is a fellow behind you who’s all of nineteen.

 

So you swallow your pride, and you scurry for cover
In the solaces characteristic of age:
You tell the same anecdotes over and over,
Forget the same names, and reread the same page;

 

And at length you concede, though with dim satisfaction,
That it’s not on yourself that your peace now depends—
That for this you must look to a different reaction:
To the weary indulgence of children and friends.

 

Yet, if given the chance to retread, as you’ve known it,
The ladder of life—to begin at the spot
Where the story picked up, and before you had blown it,
Would you take it, dear friends?
I suspect you would not;

 

So let us take heart; we are none of us friendless;
And fill up your glasses, and raise them again
To the chance that an interval, seemingly endless,
Will ensue

Before you

Become Three Score and Ten.

Kennan also resolved, with posterity in mind, to keep his diary more conscientiously: “An occasional hour of intimate reflection will be no less useful—and have no smaller chances of usefulness—than anything else I might be doing,” he wrote on the first day of January 1975. “And there is so little time left in which the real ‘me,’ as distinct from the mind alone or the various things I seem to mean to other people, can be expressed.”³¹

A week later he was sitting under the great vault in Washington’s National Cathedral—where his own memorial service would be held thirty years later—thinking “highly egoistic and improper, but very human thoughts” while the late Walter Lippmann’s friends eulogized him. Why had Lippmann had more influence than he? Kennan’s own education had been “broader, if less deep,” his mind “no less powerful,” his stylistic ability “fully as great,” his insights “bolder, more penetrating and more prophetic,” but his impact on American public life was “undetectable.” So why not give up punditry altogether and concentrate on history? “Will it make any difference, several decades later, whether what I wrote about . . . was my own dreary time or the period of the 1880s?”³²

Kennan spent the spring and summer of 1975 researching the Franco-Russian alliance in European archives. “I feel detached,” he wrote late in April, just prior to the final collapse of South Vietnam. “I have done what little I could.” He seemed strangely connected, however, to the departed. Walt Butterworth, another Foreign Service colleague and, in recent years, a Princeton neighbor, had also recently died. But Kennan dreamed, one night in Vienna, of a “visitation” from Butterworth, who

embraced me affectionately, we both being fully aware of the fact of his deadness, and allowed himself to be assured by me in the absurd, stammering language of dreams (for we were both much moved) of our continued companionship of the spirit, death notwithstanding. What to make of this I know not.... But that there was something in it more than just what is of this world—was clear.

Two weeks later, on a visit to Hermann Hatzfeldt’s Crottorf, Kennan was left to work alone, as was his preference, in the castle’s great library.

[I]t is of course haunted—not in a particularly sinister sense, although it does have a whiff of death about it, in all its loveliness. One is somehow aware of a recent, lingering, still significant presence. But then, I thought to myself, perhaps I, who work here and love the place and respond to its atmosphere, will join the company of spirits (or is it one, alone?) who inhabit it.

Until then, he needed “to quiet down, grow up, act my age, gather my strength,” and it struck him that if he made the effort, “God will help me.” Even God, though, would find it difficult “to teach this old dog new tricks.” For as soon as he joined the company of others, “the old fool—Kennan the enthusiast—Kennan the entertainer—takes over before I can control him, and we are off again.”³³

While in Bonn early in May, Kennan walked through a hotel lounge, found the movie version of South Pacific—dubbed into German—playing on television, and was “suddenly obliged—to my own amazement and amusement—to repress tears.” It was a relic from a lost civilization: “these fresh, boyish images of American sailors, the harmless inanities of the plot, the heroine’s belief in a happy future.” He could not say, with Oppenheimer, “Dammit, I happen to love this country,” but “I can say that I loved, and love in memory, something of what the country once was.... [T]he young will never know it.”³⁴

Kennan was in Helsinki in July 1975, on the eve of the great thirty-five-nation conference, but his mind was on the archival remains of a late-nineteenth-century world a lifetime removed from his own: “Yet all of this has now faded into the shadows.” Empires had disappeared. Names once “mountain-high in grandeur” were now known “only to a handful of historians like myself.” Stepping out onto the streets, where preparations were under way to welcome the notables of his era, Kennan could see that within another lifetime they too would be “carried off with the wind into the obscurity of time.” The present could only be captured “as in some old photograph, never to be recaptured as a living reality. Such is the dizziness, with relation to time, that can, on occasion, seize the historian.”³⁵

God had not yet induced in Kennan the habit—also once recommended by Acheson—of “taciturnity.” That became clear in an interview Kennan granted to the writer and broadcaster George Urban, which, when published in the September 1976 issue of the journal Encounter, filled thirty-three of its pages. “[T]ried to read it,” Kennan admitted on the day his copy arrived, but “found it much too long, and so boring that I went to sleep, literally, before I could finish it.” As with other Kennan pronouncements over the years, however, his critics found this one anything but boring.

He began with a bicentennial prediction for the United States: “This country is destined to succumb to failures which cannot be other than tragic and enormous in their scope.” They would arise from the familiar evils of industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, secularization, and environmental degradation. The only remedy would be “a much simpler form of life, a much smaller population, a society in which the agrarian component is far greater in relation to the urban component.... In this sense I am, I suppose, an 18th-century person.” Short of coercion, there was no way a nation the size of the United States could manage its affairs without never-ending compromises among self-centered constituencies. But if that was the only way the country could govern itself, then “this places certain limitations on what it can hope to do in the field of foreign affairs.” Its policy should be “a very restrained one.”

Had Kennan become, then, an isolationist? Not if that meant abruptly curtailing existing commitments. It should be possible, though, to reduce these gradually, with a view to “leaving other people alone and expect[ing] largely to be left alone by them.” Would that not consign European allies to Soviet domination? Perhaps they deserved it, Kennan replied: they had grown far too self-indulgent under American protection. While recently cruising in the Baltic, he had happened upon a Danish youth festival “swarming with hippies—motorbikes, girlfriends, drugs, pornography, drunkenness, noise—it was all there. I looked at this mob and thought how one company of robust Russian infantry would drive it out of town.”

But with an ideology “at least 70–80 years out of date,” Kremlin leaders would not know what to do with Western Europe if they were to take it over. And if the moderate socialists of the region ever summoned the resolve to end their countries’ dependence on the United States, the Soviet Union would have no plausible justification for continuing to control Eastern Europe. Disarray, therefore, “cuts both ways.”

Kennan’s most startling comments were on nuclear weapons. People would always find excuses to fight one another, so they had to be prevented “from playing with the worst kind of toys.”

This is why I feel that the great weapons of mass-destruction—and nuclear arms are not the only conceivable ones—should never be in human hands, that it would be much better to go back, symbolically speaking, to bows and arrows which at least do not destroy nature. I have no sympathy with the man who demands an eye for an eye in a nuclear conflict.

Compared to the ecological and demographic consequences of a nuclear conflagration, Soviet domination of Western Europe would be only “a minor catastrophe.”

After all, people do live in the Soviet Union. For the mass of people there, life is not intolerable. The same is true in East Germany; the same is true in Hungary. It is not what these people would like; but, still, it is a way of living, and it does not mean the end of the experiment of human civilisation; it leaves the way open for further developments.

Because there could be no recovery from a war fought with nuclear weapons, the United States should be “much bolder” in seeking their elimination, if necessary unilaterally. Was Kennan advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament? “Not all at once,” he replied, “or not without reciprocation, but if no one takes the lead in imposing self-restraint in the development of these weapons, we are never going to get any reduction of them by negotiation.”

Did this mean that Western civilization was no longer worth defending? “Of course not,” Kennan retorted, but defense had to begin at home:

Show me first an America which has successfully coped with the problems of crime, drugs, deteriorating educational standards, urban decay, pornography, and decadence of one sort or another—show me an America that has pulled itself together and is what it ought to be, then I will tell you how we are going to defend ourselves from the Russians. But as things are, I can see very little merit in organising ourselves to defend from the Russians the porno-shops in central Washington.

This and much else in the interview was self-indulgent nonsense. It was Kennan’s confirmation of Parkinson’s Law: given space, he would fill it, wisely or not. Kennan the enthusiast, Kennan the entertainer, Kennan the old fool, had taken over yet again.

But so had Kennan the prophet. We do not demand, of such seers, that they be logical, proportional, or brief. It’s their function to detect big dangers in little ones, to sense doom around each corner, to inflate admonitions, like balloons, to the bursting point. It’s also their lot to be derided, and in that respect Kennan’s bicentennial jeremiad could not have been better timed.³⁶

VI.

“He’s on their side,” Paul Nitze wrote angrily on his copy of the Encounter interview, where Kennan had imagined the Red Army dispersing the Danish hippies. Meanwhile Kennan had taken on Nitze—without naming him—in his Foreign Affairs article: people like him required the image of an implacable adversary, to be displayed repeatedly like a ventriloquist’s dummy, until to question its reality seemed frivolous or treasonous. Nitze was “a very good friend,” Kennan later acknowledged, but he believed in “a fictitious and inhuman Soviet elite, whereas I am dealing with what I suspect to be, and think is likely to be, the real one.” “George and I have always been good friends,” Nitze confirmed. They had known each other since serving together on the Policy Planning Staff in the late 1940s and had never differed “except on matters of substance.” Each was convinced, their joint biographer has written, “that the other’s desired policies could lead the United States to the ultimate catastrophe.”³⁷

A week after Jimmy Carter’s election in November 1976, Nitze and a bipartisan group of fellow détente critics announced the formation of a new Committee on the Present Danger—an earlier one, in 1950, had rallied support for increases in defense spending after the Korean War broke out. Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger, they insisted, had underestimated the threat posed by the Soviet military buildup over the past decade. Carter had made it clear that he would not seek to reverse the trend. The committee would therefore, as loudly as possible, sound the alarm.³⁸

Kennan decided, that same week, to sound one of his own. He put aside his research on the Franco-Russian alliance and began writing a new book, to be called The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy. The title left no doubt about its purpose: it would be a critique of Nitze and the movement he had started. With Connie Goodman’s help—she had come back to work for Kennan in 1975—he finished it in three months. He dedicated it “[t]o my wife Annelise, whose lack of enthusiasm for this and my other excursions into public affairs has never detracted from the loyalty with which she supported these endeavors.”³⁹

The book was “a big disappointment,” Goodman acknowledged. The New York Times thought it insufficiently newsworthy even to review. Philip Geyelin, who did review it for The Washington Post, found Kennan to have a “lamentably loose grip” on policy practicalities. Could the United States really restrain its military-industrial complex and achieve energy independence and correct the corruptions that afflicted its culture? Reduce its global commitments to the defense of Western Europe, Japan, and—in a rare Kennan bow to domestic politics—Israel? Abandon “obsolescent and nonessential” positions in Panama, the Philippines, and South Korea? Refrain from involving itself elsewhere in the “third world,” especially southern Africa? Sympathize with Soviet dissidents while trusting the Soviet government? Acknowledge, with respect to nuclear weapons, that there was “simply no need for all this overkill,” that both sides could “give up four fifths of it tomorrow,” and that a unilateral reduction of 10 percent, “immediately and as an act of good faith,” would hurt neither of them?

Each of these might be goals worth considering, but to propose them all without explaining how to achieve them—in what order, on what time scale, with what trade-offs—was to compile a catalog, not to suggest a strategy. The Cloud of Danger in this respect paralleled its author’s complaints, to the New York Times columnist James Reston, about Carter’s initial approaches to Moscow: that by pushing for deep cuts in strategic weaponry while simultaneously pressing the issue of human rights, his administration had already made “just about every mistake it could make.” Kennan’s mistake, in this hurriedly composed book, was to expand into 234 pages of large type what he had taken too many pages of small type to say in Encounter, without adding anything new. Meanwhile he was living with the frustration “of having no influence on the conduct of foreign policy and, at the same time, being invited and expected to talk about it on every conceivable occasion.”⁴⁰

One he could hardly avoid was the “X” article’s thirtieth anniversary. Not wanting to be caught off guard, as the Foreign Affairs editors had been five years earlier, the Council on Foreign Relations invited Kennan to reflect on the event—he appeared somewhat belatedly in November 1977—at the organization’s recently established Washington headquarters. Little was now left of Stalinism, he insisted: Brezhnev was a moderate, even conservative figure, “confidently regarded by all who know him as a man of peace.” That made it hard to see why détente had become so controversial in the United States. Without specifying Nitze and the Committee on the Present Danger, Kennan blamed those who “lose themselves in the fantastic reaches of what I might call military mathematics—the mathematics of possible mutual destruction in an age of explosively burgeoning weapons technology.”⁴¹

Nitze had been a banker, Kennan later explained. He liked statistics: “He was happier when he could take a blank sheet and do calculations than he was [with] the imponderables.” Because an adversary’s intentions could never be quantified, Nitze dismissed them as irrelevant. Capabilities did count, because they could be counted. Kennan had characterized him correctly, Nitze acknowledged. “When people say ‘more,’ I want to know how much ‘more’? I can understand it a hell of a lot better if you can put it into numbers or calculus or something like that. Then you can be precise as to what you’re talking about.”⁴²

Kennan was being imprecise, in Nitze’s view, when he called Brezhnev a “man of peace.” How did Kennan know this? What if he turned out to be wrong? Even if he was right, what did Brezhnev mean by “peace” in the first place? Why, if his intentions were peaceful, was his military so compulsively acquiring weaponry? Kennan had always found it difficult to answer questions like these, because he relied so heavily on his intuitive sense that the Russians were not going to start a war. When an interviewer for The New York Times Magazine asked him in May 1978 whether he accepted the principle “better red than dead,” Kennan unwisely admitted that he did, although “I don’t think there’s any need for us to be red, because I don’t think that war is the way the Russians would like to expand their power.”

That was just the point, Nitze retorted, in an article the Times ran alongside Kennan’s interview. Soviet leaders did not want a war, but they did want the “strategic nuclear preponderance,” upon which “all other levers of pressure and influence depend.” If allowed to achieve it, they would indeed expand their power, while containing that of the United States and its allies. Their goal was a world in which they would be “the unchallenged hegemonic leaders.” It had been “little short of bizarre,” Kennan complained, that the Times had felt obliged to balance him with “a good dose of hard-line conventional wisdom from Nitze.” He could not understand why so many friends were now criticizing him “in this way.”⁴³

It got worse the following month when an enemy joined the chorus. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, expelled from the Soviet Union four years earlier, attacked Kennan in a widely publicized Harvard commencement address for having denied the applicability of morality in politics: “On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well-planned world strategy.” With Kennan calling for “unilateral disarmament,” even the youngest of Kremlin officials were laughing “at your political wizards.” Kennan heard of this only when his mail caught up with his sailboat, appropriately enough, in a Danish port. “Abruptly yanked back . . . from the harsh but simple realities of the sea,” he wandered disconsolately among a forest of “indifferent masts,” but as the evening wore on, “the annoyances of life ashore, about which for the moment one could do so little, faded from consciousness. This, I suppose, is the therapeutic quality of cruising in small sailing craft.”⁴⁴

Kennan had criticized the Committee on the Present Danger “at length and with care,” Eugene V. Rostow, one of the organization’s cofounders and close friend of Nitze, wrote in The Yale Law Journal that summer. But as Kennan’s Memoirs had shown, he had long suffered inner conflicts “about himself, his dream world, his work, his goals, and his relationship to the American nature and culture.” These had brought him “perilously close to preaching that we don’t really need a foreign and defense policy at all.” He had, in this way, outdone the Old Testament prophets, for however sharply they scolded the ancient Israelites, “not even Jeremiah despaired of their survival.” Kennan had no sense of what it would take to ensure that of the West, because his mind had “never moved along mathematical lines, and never will.” He was “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”⁴⁵

Having been called many things but never before an extraterrestrial, Kennan wrestled in his diary with how to respond. “Blast the stupidities? Expend, in this way, such authority as I possess?” In the end he wrote a long letter, typed it himself, and sent it off late in November 1978 to Reston. “I shall soon be 75 years of age,” he pointed out. “[M]y means and energies are obviously limited. For me to try to involve myself in public disputes with Paul Nitze and others would merely mean to get myself chewed up in controversy, and I would soon lose what little value I may have as a force in public opinion.”

He then went on to show how the skills of an impressionist or a poet—if not an alien—could be valuable. He did so by imagining himself in the position of Brezhnev and his closest associates, most of whom were approaching Kennan’s age. They might “like to have everything under such perfect control that they could address themselves exclusively to schemes for our early undoing,” as the Committee on the Present Danger had suggested, “but the fact is: they don’t.” Whatever their self-confidence, it had to be vastly overshadowed by their fears

of alarming declines in the rates of increase of national product and labor efficiency; of poor morale, expressing itself in cynicism, absenteeism and drunkenness in great portions of their population; of a developing labor shortage of truly spectacular dimensions; of disturbing demographic changes; of an extremely serious erosion of their moral authority and political position in Eastern Europe; of a Chinese ideological competition that threatens to deprive them of their position of leadership among the Marxist forces of the world; of a Chinese military competition that threatens them with a two-front war (the bête noire of every Russian strategist of all time) in the case of complications with the West; of their virtual isolation among the great advanced nations of the world; of the forthcoming difficulties of succession within their own party.

Now they had something else to worry about: the unexpected election of a Polish pope. To claim, in the light of all this, that the old men in the Kremlin could want anything more than to hang on to what they had was “to distort out of all verisimilitude their nature, their situation, and their interests.”

But, Nitze and his friends would protest, weren’t the Soviets busily exploiting “third world” opportunities? Had they not moved into Angola in the wake of the Portuguese empire’s collapse? What about the “horn of Africa,” where the superpowers were competing for influence in Somalia and Ethiopia? Or Afghanistan, where a Marxist revolution had taken place earlier that year? In fact, Kennan insisted, in each of these situations local Marxists had exploited the Soviet Union, whose leaders knew that if they failed to aid these causes, the Cubans or the Chinese would, and their own credibility would suffer. Far from opportunities, these were liabilities, depleting strengths needed to maintain the status quo.

Kennan was now, he reminded Reston, “the patriarch.” No one else living, not even the Kremlin’s long-serving foreign minister Andrey Gromyko, could draw on his half-century of diplomatic experience. He would not claim, in all respects, to speak for the dead—Bohlen, in particular, had “never encountered a statement of mine to which he could not take some exception”—but his late Foreign Service colleagues would share, he believed, his astonishment at how little respect their kind of professionalism commanded in the face of current frivolities, abuses, and misrepresentations: “There, Scottie, I have chosen you as the object for what I hope will be my last statement on Soviet-American relations. Make what you will of it.”⁴⁶

No one, not even Reston, made much of it at the time. But when Soviet archives opened after the Cold War ended, they showed Kennan’s impression of a frightened, overstretched gerontocracy, desperately trying to regain the initiative lost by its own ineptitude dating back at least as far as the invasion of Czechoslovakia, to be much closer to reality than Nitze’s calculation of a purposefully rising hege-mon. The difference, to oversimplify, was between what and why. Nitze could see what the Brezhnev regime was doing and from this he concluded, inaccurately, that he knew why. Kennan sensed why, and so worried much less about what. Nitze seemed right in the short run, because only the long run could confirm Kennan’s claim. But, with the passage of time, it did.⁴⁷

VII.

“[I]t isn’t easy being George Kennan,” his friend Dick Ullman once observed. “I’ve always thought that that was a heavy weight to bear.” Kennan seemed genuinely reluctant to get into policy debates, but he rarely resisted the opportunity. He appeared to regard himself as “an asset to be treasured,” a historical figure whose life needed to be documented as thoroughly as possible. He was keeping more complete diaries now than ever before, and he had his research assistants—one was Ullman’s wife, Yoma—filling scrapbooks with Kennan-related newspaper clippings in multiple languages from all over the world. “I’ll bet you,” Ullman commented, “that there is no Nitze scrapbook.”⁴⁸

Yoma Ullman was one of several assistants who worked with Kennan on his Franco-Russian alliance book. Connie Goodman, who still handled his correspondence, was another: she helped Kennan devise an elaborate system of color-coded note cards—pink for the French, blue for the Russians—which his color-blindness at times caused him to confuse. Mimi Bull, who had been Goodman’s college roommate, also worked for Kennan in Princeton and later in Austria. “I was in awe and frankly terrified to begin with,” she recalled, but soon “[t]he austere scholar diplomat relaxed and became a gifted raconteur with a delight in the absurd.” She found him, on one occasion in Vienna, sporting an old beret, a new pencil moustache, and a radiant smile, “pleased with the wealth of material he realizes is here.”⁴⁹

In addition to the European and American archives he visited, Kennan returned to the Soviet Union several times during the 1970s to research the foreign policies of the last tsars, a privilege granted to few Western scholars. He learned to request specific documents, identified from previously published histories, whereupon the archivists would please him by producing entire files, with the explanation that they hadn’t had time to find the individual items he had requested: “They can loosen up when they want to.” They mostly did, for with Kennan’s criticisms of dissidents, he was back in favor in the Kremlin. Pravda reviewed The Cloud of Danger even if The New York Times didn’t, pointing out that his views had evolved “in the direction of good sense.”⁵⁰

Kennan’s “retirement” from the Institute for Advanced Study would normally have left him on half salary without the use of an office, but the trustees were well aware, Dick Dilworth recalled, that he had been “infinitely more productive and certainly more prominent” than anyone else there. So they allowed Professor-Emeritus Kennan to continue as a fully active professor in all but name, exempting him only from faculty meetings. To Kennan’s embarrassment, the arrangement required raising the funds needed to support him, but the Institute found them easily enough from sources including Dilworth himself, the Rockefeller family, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and because of his interest in nuclear issues, the legendary Omaha investor Warren Buffett.⁵¹

Continuing to write history, therefore, met his continuing obligation to the Institute, but Kennan still hoped to connect his research, in some way, to contemporary affairs. It was also, his friend Cy Black observed, a kind of hobby: “It is fun for him. It keeps him busy.” Goodman agreed: “He enjoyed this so much more than any other work.” Being Kennan, of course, he could hardly have fun without feeling guilty: his book had become “a pretence,” he told himself as he neared completion of his first volume, “an excuse for existence.” He should have recognized it years ago as “a quixotic undertaking.”⁵²

The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890, came out from the Princeton University Press in the fall of 1979. It was not as meticulously documented as Kennan’s volumes on early Soviet-American relations, but at over four hundred pages it was an impressive performance for a man of seventy-five. Paul Kennedy, a cheeky young historian less than half Kennan’s age, congratulated him in The Washington Post for his “mature, warm, beautifully written book,” although it was “not a little questionable” that Kennan had neglected the French military archives, the Bismarck family papers, and the monographs of Professors Hillgruber and Mueller-Link. Kennedy acknowledged, however, that these were points “about which the general reader will care little.” One with a particular interest in Bismarck confirmed this. “I have enjoyed reading your book,” Kissinger wrote Kennan. “Not that it fails to be depressing. If even Bismarck could not prevent what he clearly foresaw, what chance does the modern period have? That is the real nightmare.”⁵³

“Bismarck did all that he could, in his outwardly rough but essentially not inhumane way,” Kennan replied. “What surprises me more is the failure of our own generation, with the warning image of the atom bomb before it, to learn from his example.” This, of course, had been Kennan’s point all along. Had he been born only a few years earlier, he noted in his introduction, he might have been among the millions of young men who fought in World War I. He would have done so, he imagined, with the same “delirious euphoria” most of them had felt: that an era of “self-sacrifice, adventure, valor, and glory” lay ahead. Having had the luck to avoid their experiences, he wanted now to focus in detail on the statesmen of that age, for in them “we can see, not entirely but in larger degree than is generally supposed, ourselves.”⁵⁴

“I don’t think it explains anything,” Black grumbled about The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order, and he had a point. Kennan had enjoyed writing the book too much to make its message clear. He spent months, for example, tracking down information on a relatively minor figure, the French-Russian double agent Elie de Cyon, not because his role was in any way critical to the coming of the war, but because Kennan relished this kind of detective work. It was an all-weather form of recreation: the scholarly equivalent of summer sailing. But it left Kennan with another volume to write if he was even going to get to the alliance of 1894—and that event would still precede, by two decades, the outbreak of the conflict whose origins he had meant to explain, and whose consequences he had hoped to assess.⁵⁵

Kennan had again rambled, as in his Encounter interview and in The Cloud of Danger. He produced, this time, a wonderfully readable history—it could almost be a novel, he thought⁵⁶—but its literary and scholarly strengths made it ineffective as prophecy. Despite the pleasures it held for Kennan, using the past to instruct the future was a Sisyphean task: as his sources proliferated, his energy faded, and the distractions of the present, as always, demanded comment.

VIII.

Détente collapsed completely during the last half of 1979. After years of negotiations, Carter and a visibly enfeebled Brezhnev were able to sign the SALT II arms control treaty in Vienna in June, but a rapid succession of unexpected crises left it languishing in the U.S. Senate. The first occurred in August, when a CIA source leaked the news that the Soviet Union had placed a combat brigade in Cuba. Carter demanded its removal but had to back down after learning that the unit had been there since the missile crisis of 1962. He had never before seen “such dilettantism, amateurism and sheer bungling,” Kennan complained: it had been “an artificially-manufactured domestic-political event if there ever was one.” What he didn’t know was that he knew the manufacturer. Nitze had helped arrange the leak with a view to delaying, perhaps preventing, the treaty’s ratification.⁵⁷

The second crisis broke on November 4, when Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six hostages, with the subsequent approval of the Islamist government that had recently deposed Washington’s longtime ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Furious at this violation of diplomatic immunity, recalling his own five and a half months of internment in Nazi Germany, angry that the Carter administration had let almost four months go by without securing the Americans’ release, Kennan told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 27, 1980, that the United States should simply declare war on Iran. This would allow detaining Iranians within its boundaries, while enlisting the aid of a neutral country in arranging an exchange of internees, as Switzerland had done for the Bad Nauheim “hostages” thirty-eight years earlier.

What made Kennan’s testimony particularly striking, however, was his equally emphatic insistence that the Carter administration had overreacted to the third and most serious crisis that had developed in recent months: the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979. Eleven years earlier Kennan had criticized the Johnson administration’s tepid response to Czechoslovakia’s occupation. Now, though, in the face of Carter’s more vigorous retaliations—withdrawing the SALT II treaty from the Senate, embargoing grain and technology shipments to the U.S.S.R., calling for military draft registration, increasing defense spending, and demanding a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics—Kennan claimed that the president had gone too far. Brezhnev had sent troops into Afghanistan in a desperate effort to save the imperiled Marxist government there, not—as Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had argued—with a view to beginning an offensive aimed at controlling the Persian Gulf. The Soviets would soon see that they had made a mistake, would be looking for a way out, and the United States should help them find one.⁵⁸

There was a compartmentalized logic in Kennan’s positions. Iran had, under a strict interpretation of international law, committed an act of war against the United States. The U.S.S.R. had indeed acted from a position of weakness, not strength, in Afghanistan. But Kennan’s grand strategic logic—the ability to see how contents mix after compartments are opened—eluded him altogether in this instance. What would the implications have been of the first formal declaration of war by anybody since 1945? What was to prevent escalation? How might Kremlin leaders respond to the prospect of American military action in a country bordering their own and Afghanistan? What conspiracies might they see in the rise of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland, the rapturous reception accorded Pope John Paul II on his first visit back after his election, and in the Polish-born Brzezinski’s recent well-publicized trip to the Khyber Pass? It was not at all clear that Kennan’s method of rescuing the hostages would reassure the aging officials in Moscow who now controlled half of the world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Kennan always had trouble keeping his emotions apart from his strategies, but as he grew older, the problem got worse. He commanded, as an elder statesman, increasing respect: there was supposed to be some kind of connection, he knew, between advanced age and wisdom. But “as one to whom these imputations would presumably be applicable, I am bound to say that this theory is at best complicated, and at worst questionable.”⁵⁹ He had fewer contemporaries, now, who could insist that he reconcile his contradictions before publicly displaying them. Bohlen had most frequently played that role, but so too had Acheson, Lippmann, and Harriman—the last still living and selectively donating, but in no condition to set Kennan right, as he used to do in Moscow, on the limits of policy feasibility. Nitze, a personal friend, was a public adversary who delighted in pouncing (or having associates like Eugene Rostow pounce) on Kennan’s lapses. No one had asked, with respect to his Encounter interview, The Cloud of Danger, the Bismarck book, or his remarkable appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “George, how will all of this hang together?”

But in October 1980 one old friend tried. With events in Iran and Afghanistan having produced so much “confusion, bewilderment, and fuzzy thinking,” Elbridge Durbrow wrote, he could not help but recall “how realistic, sound and prophetic” Kennan had been in the “long telegram” and the “X” article. “Practically everything you predicted has transpired,” but hardly anyone in government was even aware of this. So did each new administration have to learn all over again “that the Soviet leaders since Lenin have not fundamentally changed their basic aims, goals, and methods of operation”? It was a polite way of asking, Durbrow later explained, “what the devil is the difference? I see them as still the same enemies we always had. Why does George see [them] differently?”⁶⁰

“Mr. Carter’s performance is only a bit of history,” Kennan replied grimly on November 10, six days after Reagan’s landslide victory. Foreign policy would now be in the hands of Nitze, Scoop Jackson, and other hard-liners. There would be no limits to the arms race, or to preparations for a military showdown. Kennan had tried, since the end of the last war, to find a way of dealing with the Soviet Union that would not require a new war: “[T]oday I have to recognize the final and irreparable failure of this effort.” How all of this could please Durbrow—himself a hard-liner—Kennan could not understand, “but if it does—my congratulations. It is a small consolation to know that even if one cannot, one’s self, see hope in a situation, one has friends who can.”⁶¹

IX.

Kennan was just back from attending the annual meeting of Pour le Mérite, an elite eighteenth-century Prussian military order revived by the West German government to celebrate civilian achievements in the arts and sciences. He had become one of its thirty foreign members in 1976, regarding the honor at least as seriously as his membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The German organization combined his love of ceremony with his affinity for that culture, and despite the fact that attendance required flying across the Atlantic instead of simply slipping into New York, he rarely missed its meetings. The 1980 convocation took place in Regensburg in late September, after which the Kennans went to Garmisch, where, on October 1, George was to give the principal address at the Second World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies.

Characteristically, he had put off finishing it until the last moment, so while waiting for it to be typed, he sat wearily on a park bench in the fading afternoon sunlight, envying other old people around him who seemed free of such weighty responsibilities. Could he ever be like them? Would anything come of it, if he tried, apart from physical and intellectual decay? Thirteen hundred people were present when he rose to address them that evening, and just as he came to the passage of which he was proudest, a woman in the audience let out a piercing shriek, as if to herald what he was about to say—which was what he wished he could say, simultaneously, to leaders in both Washington and Moscow:

For the love of God, of your children, and of the civilization to which you belong, cease this madness. You have a duty not just to the generation of the present—you have a duty to civilization’s past, which you threaten to render meaningless, and to its future, which you threaten to render nonexistent. You are mortal men. You are capable of error. You have no right to hold in your hands—there is no one wise enough and strong enough to hold in his hands—destructive powers sufficient to put an end to civilized life on a great portion of our planet. No one should wish to hold such powers. Thrust them from you. The risks you might thereby assume are not greater—could not be greater—than those which you are now incurring for us all.

The outburst, he later determined, had no connection to the lecture. But the Slavicists, expecting neither a shriek nor a prophet, responded with only polite applause. And so Kennan was left “as uncertain of the suitability (not the truth) of what I had had to say as I had been before saying it.”⁶²