George F. Kennan

He had long known, or thought he knew, the day on which he would die. It would be May 9, 1983, at which point he would have lived precisely seventy-nine years, two months, and twenty-three days. That was how old the first George Kennan had been when he died in 1924. Had both not been born on February 16, in 1845 and 1904? Had their lives not corresponded in too many ways for coincidence to explain? The fateful day, however, passed uneventfully: Kennan spent it in his Institute office preparing a speech, receiving visitors, and reading a set of conference papers by historians Michael Howard (“excellent”), Adam Ulam (“good in many ways”), and John Gaddis (no comment). That evening, at home with his family, there was “much animation”—although not, presumably, because he had alerted them to the significance of the day.²

Having survived it, he could see that what lay ahead was a kind of petrification: Kennan the public intellectual would become Kennan the public monument. The process would resemble death, because while people on pedestals tend to be respected, even venerated, they’re also beyond being listened to, or argued with—or invited to share lunch. He was eating alone regularly now, he noticed, in the Institute for Advanced Study cafeteria. Younger colleagues vigorously debated this or that at surrounding tables, but the great man was left to himself. None was any more inclined to intrude upon his privacy than Kennan had been upon Einstein’s, decades earlier: “I am caught, like a fly in the spider web, in the golden filigrees of my wretched image; and there is no use flapping the wings too violently—it will not help.”³

In Washington one evening a few months after the day his death did not occur, Kennan again dined alone and walked back to DACOR House, the F Street lodging for retired diplomats, accompanied only by a breeze, which swept indifferently over the White House and “its insignificant occupant.” He had spent the day “weak, shaky, unstrung, devoid of composure, the voice high, hoarse, and cracking.” Never had he played his part less well. “I despise the George Kennan that appears before other people—despise him not for being what he is, but for not appearing to be what he ought to appear to be. They should hire an actor in my place.”⁴

They could not for his eightieth birthday party, held in Princeton a day late, on February 17, 1984. Nitze’s was the most memorable toast: Kennan had long been for him “a teacher and an example,” although “George has, no doubt, often doubted the aptness of his pupil.” Kennan graciously declined the opportunity to agree. Dick Ullman was not alone, among those present, in wondering how two men who had disagreed about so much over so many years could retain such respect for one another: “This was really the Establishment rallying around, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”⁵

As on his seventieth birthday, Kennan read a poem—not his own, this time, but his translation of one by Hermann Hesse. It portrayed a man who had returned from a long trip, found a stack of mail from admirers waiting, and burned the lot in the fireplace. Noting furrowed brows, Kennan explained that only a saint or a mystic could, from within, keep the flame of life fluttering. For anyone else, this required “the respect, affection, support, forbearance, and even forgiveness of those around him.” Whose letters, unanswered, had just gone up in smoke. The poem meant something to him, Kennan wrote, a bit defensively, in his diary. “Whether to anyone else, I could not tell.”⁶

Something else had happened on his and the first George Kennan’s real birthday, though, that meant much more. For on February 16, 1984, the second Kennan’s youngest daughter, Wendy, now the wife of a Swiss businessman, Claude Pfaeffli, gave birth to a son. “There was no way,” his uncle Christopher recalled, “that that kid was not going to be named George Kennan Pfaeffli.” And so, three weeks later in Geneva, George Frost Kennan held his own and his namesake’s namesake in his arms and gave him a silent blessing, “persuaded, almost superstitiously, that his preoccupations will some day have some strange connection with my own.”⁷

He could offer his country little, Kennan believed, because those who ran it would not listen. He was living in a country—indeed a civilization—that was well on its way to catastrophe. His own and Annelise’s physical decline lay ahead, as did anguish for their children, all of whom had faced, or were likely to face, disappointments greater than anything their parents had experienced. At the same time, his name evoked respect among thousands of people. He must not let his pessimism drive them to despair. He disliked the term “role model,” but he had become one. So what to do?

Perhaps attempt to look “like what people believe me to be—to encourage them in the illusion that there really is such a person—and, by doing this, to try to add, just a little bit, to their hope and strength and confidence in life.” Results were irrelevant, for these might be “burned in the rubble of a nuclear war.” The important thing was to hold up his end of his reputation, whatever the consequences or the costs: “Duty, then, as a dedication—as a means of redemption in the final years—yes. But no hope; no fear; and, to the extent [that] the line is firmly and consistently pursued, no apologies.”⁹

That was, of course, easier to write than to accomplish. Demands on his time were as great as ever: “Come here; come there; speak here; write these; attend this conference; receive this visitor.” Under no circumstances sit quietly, or read a book, or “try to learn something.” Kennan’s body, however, was approaching the point at which reading was one of the few things it would permit. “I feel like hell,” he complained, in one of hundreds of such diary entries. “How hard it is to pace one’s self at this age. One is too old to try to win, too young to give up.”¹⁰

His illnesses had long since earned him the right to hypochondria: appendicitis and scarlet fever in his youth, amoebic dysentery followed by several hospital-strength bouts with ulcers as a young man, a kidney stone that accompanied him through much of his later life, periodic herpes zoster outbreaks, prostate difficulties, jaundice, arthritis, and beginning in his mid-eighties, debilitating heart irregularities. Treatments often provoked new problems. Drug reactions were frequent; lithotripsy broke up the kidney stone but at the cost of uremic poisoning in 1984, and by 1992 Kennan’s heart problems had become serious enough to require a pacemaker. His relationship with it was not amicable: “Mine is a body, I suspect, that should be dead; but the pacemaker won’t allow it to be.”¹¹

He was “a tough old bird,” though, Annelise rightly observed. It upset George when, at seventy-eight, protesting knees forced him to improvise a walking stick at the farm. He was still, in his eighties, riding a one-speed bicycle around Princeton, pushing it up hills when he came to them. He was cutting his own firewood in the Institute’s forest, hauling it to the Hodge Road house, and stashing it in a woodshed he had recently built. He remained agile on and around his Norwegian sailboat, and he took literally Goethe’s admonition that, when beset by old age, one should “take a spade and dig.” He tested poet, proposition, and pacemaker one day in Kristiansand by trying, at eighty-eight, to uproot yet another dead tree. For the first time in many such excavations, the tree won: “this, I clearly understand, is the beginning of my real and final old age.”¹²

Kennan hated how he now looked. He hardly recognized “this strange, tall, scrawny-necked apparition of an old man, clutching the marble of the lectern, swaying back and forth like a bush in the wind, bending down occasionally to peer through his glasses at the manuscript below,” he wrote, after seeing himself on television in 1982. He must never again appear before any group larger than could “grace a drawing-room.” But he continued to do so because duty demanded it. And in the eyes of others—as in his 1989 triumph before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—he conveyed an antique gravity almost extinct in the modern age. A new generation had suddenly discovered his existence, Kennan concluded. That accounted for their enthusiasm. There was, after all, “not much competition.”¹³

Clinton had another honor in mind for Kennan, however, which had to do with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Would Kennan accompany him to the ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery and then—taking advantage of the fact that the Soviet Union had declared the war over a day later than its allies in 1945—fly with him to Moscow to celebrate the event there? Moved by the invitation, Kennan wanted to accept: “I was, after all, the senior American official present in Moscow on that memorable day.” He would welcome returning “as an honored and friendly guest,” not as “the dangerous enemy that I was always supposed to be.”

Annelise was willing as long as she could go too. George’s family thought it a fine idea, as did his doctors, who could find nothing wrong with him “except for the failing heart and arthritic knees.” But every morning, when he got up, his body was telling him: “Never, never.” He would be a burden to others, while making “a pathetic exhibit of myself.” Clinton wanted him, he suspected, as a portable public monument. And he was not quite ready to give up being a public intellectual.¹⁵

The Clinton administration, since 1993, had been exploring the idea of expanding NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, against the wishes of the Russians. Kennan wondered why the alliance should even survive the end of the Cold War, much less grow. He kept his doubts to himself, though, until October 1996, when he heard Talbott make the case for expansion in a talk at Columbia’s Harriman Institute. Kennan spoke first at the dinner that followed, denouncing the idea as a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” With one exception, everyone else present agreed with him.

It was a “cold shower,” Talbott remembered in his memoir, published six years later. In his diary five days later, Kennan expressed surprise that what he said had made “such a fuss,” but he no longer worried “about the opinions of others concerning my conduct.” Then in February 1997 he went public. Expanding NATO, he wrote in The New York Times, would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” The op-ed was on Clinton’s desk the next morning. “Why isn’t Kennan right?” he asked Talbott. “Isn’t he a kind of guru of yours going back to when we were at Oxford?” He was, Talbott acknowledged, but Kennan had opposed NATO since its creation. The Russians would go along with expansion, whatever he thought. “Just checking, Strobe,” Clinton chuckled. “Just checking.”¹⁶

For Kennan, the episode evoked Shakespeare’s dying John of Gaunt: “Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain, / For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain. . . . Though Richard my life’s counsel would not hear, / My death’s sad tale may yet undeaf his ear.” Not very likely, though, Kennan had to admit. His words would have no more effect on Clinton and his advisers than had Gaunt’s on “the foolish Richard II.”¹⁷

He was, Kennan had written a few years earlier, “the most elaborately-honored non-political and non-governmental person in the country, yet totally without influence where it counts.”¹⁸ What else could a disembodied spirit approaching his tenth decade expect, though, even if yearnings for lost causes did persist? Kennan had already disengaged from the writing of history—at least diplomatic history—so detachment from the making of history did not really surprise him, however much it frustrated him. Now, though, he faced a new problem, which was that history was attaching itself to him: he had lived long enough to become its subject. Adjusting to that process was not easy.

He accelerated it, without foreseeing the consequences, by opening his papers early. Most donors prohibit access while they are alive, but as Kennan finished each volume of his memoirs, he transferred the materials he had used to Princeton University, in the hope that “mature” scholars might also find them useful. He failed to review the files carefully, though; there was confusion about which portions were to be opened when; and determining “maturity” proved to be impractical. So rather than close the collection altogether, Kennan resigned himself to living uncomfortably alongside it—the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library was only about a mile from his house—without control over who would go through his papers, what they would find, or how they might employ it. All he did was to forbid photocopying, by then a standard archival procedure. Kennan researchers took notes laboriously in longhand or on portable typewriters, therefore, while envying those working nearby on the duplicatable dead.¹⁹

When the dissertations, articles, and eventually books began to appear, their authors tended to be young. They were the most in need of fresh topics, and they had the stamina to survive the photocopying ban. Several, however, were also of the “student left” generation Kennan had so vociferously condemned. They generally respected, even admired him: he had, after all, opposed the Vietnam War. But their scholarship reflected revisionist historiography of the origins of the Cold War, of which Kennan strongly disapproved. Nor did they hesitate to highlight documents from his papers that he now found embarrassing. Some, like his 1938 “Prerequisites” essay, he had simply forgotten. Others he had deliberately passed over in his memoirs. Still others succumbed to political correctness: words unexceptional when written could shock when published half a century later.

Kennan had always lived alongside his own history: self-scrutiny came naturally, even compulsively, to him. Scrutiny by others, however—especially by the youth of the 1960s—was something else again. That became evident in 1976 when C. Ben Wright, a recent University of Wisconsin Ph.D., pointed out in a Slavic Review article that Kennan’s original concept of “containment” had incorporated more of a military component than he had acknowledged in his memoirs. Wright’s dissertation had been the first serious biography of Kennan, based not just on his papers but on careful interviews with contemporaries, even his sister Jeanette. Now, though, Kennan was furious. “I stand, as I see, exposed,” he wrote in a rejoinder the journal published. “Mr. Wright has stripped me of my own pretenses and revealed me as the disguised militarist he considers me to be.” The attack was so devastating that Wright abandoned history altogether, and Kennan gained the reputation of devouring young scholars at dinner.²⁰

It was not a sustainable situation. Kennan couldn’t respond in print to every objectionable thing historians might write. But neither could he guide each one individually through his archives, providing context and commentary along the way: there were too many, and they would have insisted, entirely properly, on reaching their own conclusions. So Kennan’s solution, in the end, was to authorize a biographer whose biography he would never read.

He had mostly approved of my Strategies of Containment, an analytical study based partly on the Kennan papers that appeared (at the cost of a worn-out portable typewriter) late in 1981. I wanted to continue working on Kennan but had no desire to repeat Wright’s experience. Might there be the possibility, I gingerly asked Kennan, of a full biography, prepared with his cooperation and with access to all of his papers (including photocopying privileges), on the understanding that it would not appear for another ten to fifteen years? Kennan, seventy-eight at the time, replied—wholly implausibly—that he had never thought about a biography but would now do so. Delicate negotiations followed, in which neither he nor I used the term “posthumous,” even though we both had it in mind. For me, the advantage would be access with independence. For Kennan, it was that designating one biographer would deter others. How did he know that I would treat him fairly? He didn’t. We hardly knew each other. But Kennan did believe strongly in placing faith above reason.²¹

Despite the arrangement, the other biographers did not back off. Kennan at first found this irritating. “I ought really to be dead,” he grumbled about a particularly persistent one, “it would all then be much easier.” He could not resist reading what they wrote, though, and some of it he even liked. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’s The Wise Men (1986), a collective biography of himself, Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Lovett, and McCloy, was “a caricature gleaned from hasty oral interviews” but “not devoid of a certain amount of truth.” Although relentlessly critical, Anders Stephanson’s Kennan and the Art of American Foreign Policy (1989) was “truly a great work,” addressed “to a subject unworthy of so impressive an effort.” Wilson D. Miscamble’s careful study of the Policy Planning Staff years, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950 (1992), left its subject sobered “by the number and extent of my failures”; nonetheless “I would rate it as the best thing that has been written about me in published book form.”²²

He did, however, despise inaccuracy. A prominent offender was Nitze, whose brief essay on Kennan in his 1993 book, Tension Between Opposites, contained so many errors “that I suspect Paul, although we view each other as friends, really knows very little about me.” Even worse were attempts to impose the present upon the past. He was appalled to find himself criticized for publishing diary entries from the late 1930s and early 1940s that had not anticipated the Holocaust. Efforts to link his CIA involvement with the lenient treatment of German war criminals provoked lengthy, if unpublished, rebuttals: “I never knew I had such enemies.” And when, in 1997, the Journal of American History ran an article entitled “ ‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” its ninety-three-year-old target wondered why previous scholarship had been so slow to discover his “true sexual and ‘binary’ nature,” all of it permeated, whether he knew it or not, “with concealed desires to violate, to rape, and thus to dominate. Of such terrible motives the purer and more innocent spirit of [the author] was happily unbesmirched.”²³

Kennan had been asking himself the same question. He had always distrusted philosophical systems: they were too gray, he believed, to reflect the colors of life, much less to guide one through their complexities. But he feared having his ideas whisked into oblivion, “like a paper-handkerchief carried away by the wind from the deck of an ocean-liner.” His diaries, usually written late at night, tended to bury what was worth saving beneath long stretches of “sleep-dulled humdrum.” Unwilling to rely on some future editor’s excavations, he felt the need “to clarify, to organize, and to state my general philosophy, before it becomes too late to do so.”²⁵

Gellman showed him that it could be done, while convincing Kennan that he could do it better. “I don’t in the least mind the critical reflections,” he wrote the astonished young man. “I am grateful to you for having put forward such a brilliant effort to make sense out of my scattered and so often cryptic utterances, and congratulate you most heartily on the success of that formidable effort.” But Gellman had “cheerfully mingled” things said decades apart, Kennan admonished me, as though circumstances had not changed. He would not respond directly, but he would try “to set forth, more systematically than I have done in the past, my views, as of this stage of my life, on some of the questions he raised.”²⁶

Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy appeared in 1993, a rare example of a book inspired by a critic a fourth its author’s age. The title came from a passage in John Donne’s third Satyre, a Kennan favorite:

On a huge hill,

Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe;
And what the hills suddenness resists, winne so;
Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight,
Thy Soule rest, for none can work in that night.

As political philosophy, the book contained little Kennan had not said elsewhere. There were predictable condemnations of advertising, automobiles, Congress, consumerism, domestic politics, environmental degradation, juvenile delinquency, nuclear weapons, pornography, television, and even demands for unconditional surrender in World War II. Kennan proposed yet another revival of the Policy Planning Staff, this time as a “Council of State,” a presidentially appointed body of senior notables like himself who, freed from the lures of personal gain or political ambition, would determine long-term national interests. If philosophy at all, these portions of Cragged Hill were a Platonic contemplation of ideal forms, not an Aristotelian adaptation to practicality.²⁷

But as personal philosophy, the book was something new: it was Kennan’s first full public profession of private faith. It began, unexpectedly, with sex, a characteristic shared with the “lowest and least attractive” of mammals and reptiles. In addition to progeny, sex produced great happiness, great art, and great trouble, for “people’s physical needs change even when their deeper affections do not.” The results included “jealousies, suspicions, conflicting loyalties, wounded pride, and tragic unhappiness.” That these were trouble, however, reflected a higher aspect of human nature, which was the soul, the capacity “to perceive and to hold in mind the distinctions between right and wrong.” How had only one species developed this?

Not by way of Original Sin, Kennan was sure: sex had preceded people, and some Primary Cause—neither benevolent nor malevolent but indifferent—had preceded both. Where, then, did the soul come from? Of that, Kennan was unsure, but of the soul’s existence, indeed its immortality, he had no doubt. For bodily needs alone could not explain love or self-sacrifice. Those qualities constituted, then, another Deity, neither omnipotent nor omniscient but sympathetic, from whence came the strength, in the face of adversity, to endure, if not to prevail.

Each person’s Deity was his own, but there were compelling examples to emulate. By far the greatest, for Kennan, was Christ, but not as the Son of a benevolent God: there was too much evil in the world for such a Father to exist. Kennan even suspected—he refrained from saying so in the book—that it was Christ who conceived God, rather than the other way around. If so, it didn’t matter: Kennan’s faith in Christ was unshaken.

Organized religion reinforced it but was not its source. Faith lay in an inner voice that promised help, but only to the extent that one helped one’s self. For Kennan, that was Christ, but it was also the voices of the great poets, playwrights, and novelists, who mingled their brilliance with responsibility for others. It was the voices of dead parents and departed friends, which Kennan still sometimes heard in his dreams. But it was also the voice of his own conscience, as he walked the tightrope between selfishness and selflessness, beset by “little demons” at every step of the way. One could not simply brush them away. One could, however, deny them the satisfaction of having their existence acknowledged.

Salvation lay in forgiveness, a theme Kennan developed more clearly in his diary than in his book. Why, other Christians might ask, could he not more easily accept his inadequacies? “Your God is supposed, by virtue of Christ’s intercession, to be a forgiving God. Confess your sins and rely on His forgiveness.”

My answer to that would be: “Yes, I can, no doubt, rely on his forgiveness. But that does not mean that I should light-heartedly forgive myself. Is it not possible that He will forgive me only precisely in the measure that I decline to forgive myself in those things I find unworthy of my own forgiveness?”

To be sure, not all deaths were devastating. What everyone understood to be the last reunion of George and his siblings—Frances, Constance, Jeanette, and Kent—had taken place at the farm on a brilliant fall day in 1982. Frances, the oldest, thought it extraordinary that all were alive, even ambulatory: “Nobody had to be wheeled in!” But this final reunion was their first in six decades. They had long since ceased relying on each other to fend off loneliness, and so when they did occur—in 1984, 1991, 1994, and 2003, respectively—these deaths did not drive George, the last to survive, into the despair he feared Annelise would face when he was gone.³⁰

She did all she could to keep him going. After a protracted visit from a tedious friend, George made a point of acknowledging, in his diary, “the sweetness of my wife and of the loyalty with which she, still enjoying a relative robustness, looked after both of us tottering, shambling and tiresome old men.” She, in turn, made her own point by acknowledging his infirmities as little as possible, a habit that at times exasperated him but that balanced the fretting with which he filled his diary:

July 1983: I stand now, presumably, within a year or two of my death.

May 1985: Would that . . . the young could cast us out and be done with us, as the animals do.

January 1988: I had [hoped] that the end of my life would precede the final filling up of the [tax] ledger, so that I would not have to buy another.

April 1994: I feel myself moving closer to the abyss; but everyone says: “Oh, you look so well.”

April 1996: If I die in Norway? . . . What to do with the damned body?

He practiced death there once, when Annelise wasn’t looking: “I simply collapsed on the stony path near the boathouse, lay on my back staring at the oak leaves silhouetted against a cloudy Norwegian sky, and thought to myself: this would not be a bad time and place to die. But Fate (which, as Donne wrote, God fashioned ‘but doth not controul’) decided otherwise.”³¹

So did George’s hyperactivity, which countered his hypochondria. His mostly handwritten diaries—carefully recording each ailment and its attendant indignities—were as voluminous and legible as ever. He published a new book of “reflections” in 1996, chiefly his lectures and articles since 1982. He was driving himself and Annelise over much of New England researching a long-planned history of the Kennan family: even she thought this to be too much. He was compulsively reading, or rereading, and taking notes: on Shakespeare, whose plays suggested experiences with women—some presumably painful—that had left him “with high respect” for them; on Saint Augustine, whose Confessions had taken up far too much of God’s time; on Macaulay, who had made English “the most felicitous” of all languages for expressing “the higher ranges of thought and feeling”; on Saint Paul, whom Kennan found to be, disconcertingly, a Dostoyevskian “extremist.” And he had wisely come to relish the great naval history novels of Patrick O’Brian.³²

Major birthdays, now major events, also encouraged survival: it would have been irresponsible to die before the festivities had taken place. The Council on Foreign Relations celebration of his ninetieth in New York in February 1994 left Kennan, he claimed, “not only overwhelmed but unable to think of any even appropriately adequate response.” In fact he spoke vigorously, regretting how much had been made of a certain talk on “containment” given there in 1947, cautioning against any comparable oversimplification of post–Cold War foreign policy. Shortly after returning to Princeton, he had a minor stroke and spent a few days in the hospital, but within a week of his release was rigging a sump pump in the basement and driving himself, alone, to the office.³³

The Kennans were still traveling frequently, if to familiar destinations: Kristiansand for part of the summer, but also now regularly the island community of North Haven, Maine; Hermann Hatzfeldt’s castle at Crottorf for Pour le Mérite meetings in the fall; Captiva Island in Florida for winter visits with the naturalists Bill and Laura Riley—George left behind, on one such occasion, a set of poems, addressed in stately formality to the resident birds. His research trips were over by the late 1990s, but their results appeared in his last book, An American Family: The Kennans; The First Three Generations, published when he was ninety-six. He had made his ancestors, one reviewer observed, into what he wanted them to be; but at that age, perhaps he had earned that right.³⁴

The pace could not continue. “What a doctor!” George wrote with relief, when his primary physician, Dr. Fong Wei, ordered him in the spring of 1998 to stay at home for a week, not answer the phone, and watch whatever animals visited the backyard. George “wasted the time most grandly” and was grateful for having been told to do so. But he was having trouble walking by the time his book came out in 2000, and Annelise, now ninety herself, was becoming frailer. Worst of all, his ancient Royal typewriter broke down one day that fall, “initiating a very similar breakdown in him who does the writing.” He continued the diary entry in a quavering hand, inscribing “the end is nearing.” It almost came out “the near is ending.” It made little difference: “the one, come to think of it, was no less true than the other.”³⁵

The summer of 2001 was the last George was able to spend in Norway. Reduced almost to immobility, he found a typewriter there that worked and so resumed his diary as his extended family came and went. “[C]rippledom,” however, did not lead “to productive brilliance of the mind,” for his thoughts would evaporate while waiting for his limbs to catch up. One of his final afternoons in Kristiansand was spent watching anxiously from the lawn as his young namesake, now seventeen, expertly windsurfed himself across the great sound and safely back. In Princeton that fall, George at last closed the Institute for Advanced Study office that Oppenheimer had given him half a century earlier. The Kennans’ seventieth wedding anniversary fell, unhappily, on September 11, 2001—happily, though, Christopher, Joan, and her husband Kevin Delany had arranged a congratulatory dinner with a few Princeton friends the previous weekend. George and Annelise spent the terrible day quietly at home.³⁶

I found him, a few months later, stretched out on a couch in his living room, his legs covered in a blanket, his hearing aids malfunctioning, his profile still strong from the side, but emaciated head-on. His mind, though, was undiminished: the conversation was a healthy mix of convictions firmly held and curiosity keenly expressed. Why did no one read Toynbee anymore? Because his books dealt with forces, not people: “You could spend your life reading Toynbee, but what would you have at the end of it?” Kennan did not find it necessary to say, as on several previous occasions, that his own life soon would be ending. He was beyond the need for denial, or reassurance.³⁷

By the summer of 2003 Kennan could still read his correspondence but no longer reply: friends received messages, through Barrett, assuring them that silence did not mean negligence, or lack of regard. Meanwhile, preparations were under way for the grandest birthday of them all, George’s hundredth. Princeton University’s Firestone Library opened an exhibit on his life that fall, the centerpiece of which was every page of the “long telegram” displayed in a correspondingly long case. It was diplomacy’s Bayeux Tapestry.

There were three celebrations of the real birthday, in February 2004. One was for family on February 16, when George eased his way downstairs for dinner, blew out an unrecorded number of candles on his cake, and wound up making three speeches. A second, on the eighteenth, was at the Institute for Advanced Study, which George’s family, helpers, and Dr. Wei conspired to have him attend: it had been “a plot,” he muttered. The third was a full-scale “George F. Kennan Centennial Conference” at the university, with the major address given by the secretary of state, Colin Powell. He did so with such respect, George’s grandson Brandon Griggs commented on the way out, that one would never have guessed his grandfather’s detestation of the administration in which Powell served. This enormous event was too much for Kennan to attend, so the secretary of state came to see him afterward, in his own bedroom. Tony Mano had ordered him to stay alive for the great day, George commented, and that had gotten him through it.³⁹

He lived for another thirteen months, but with little life left. He could read newspapers and receive visitors, but his mind was fading. So was Annelise, whose decline seemed synchronous with his own. One of the last outsiders to see them together was George’s old friend the historian John Lukacs: “His head, resting on a pillow, now had a kind of skeletal beauty; he could speak only a little, forcing out a few words with increasing difficulty; near the foot of the bed she sat huddled in a wheelchair at a table, uttering a few sensible words, not many.” They still shared that bed, and one day in March 2005 Betsy Barrett heard George turn to Annelise and ask: “Are you content?” She didn’t hear or perhaps didn’t understand, but he said clearly: “I am content.”⁴⁰

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