I hate discontinuities of all kinds,” Isaiah Berlin wrote his friend the novelist and poet Stephen Spender in 1936. “[W]hich is only another way of saying that I am a slow starter & hate to be uprooted . . . , consequently I passionately defend all small societies, fixed disciplines etc. which merely rationalizes my love of the womb I expect (a womb with a view, a womb of one’s own etc.)”1 When the war broke out three years later, though, Berlin’s Oxford became claustrophobic even for him. Unfit for military service owing to an arm injured at birth, excluded from intelligence work by his Latvian and Russian origins, he admitted after the fall of France that “the private world has cracked in numerous places. I should terribly like to help in the great historical process in some way.”2
That letter went to Marion Frankfurter, the wife of Felix, the former Harvard law professor and continuing close adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who’d recently appointed him to the Supreme Court: Berlin knew the Frankfurters from a year they’d spent at Oxford.3 But his habitual rootedness—perhaps also his finances—had so far kept him from seeing America. When he finally got there, in the summer of 1940 and at the age of thirty-two, it was, like Columbus, by way of a perilous voyage and a miscalculated landfall.
Yet another acquaintance, Guy Burgess of the Foreign Office, claimed to have found Berlin a job at the British embassy in Moscow. Fluent in Russian, desperate to be of use, he’d seized the opportunity, and by mid-July the two were on a ship, zigzagging across the Atlantic to avoid U-boats, bound for Quebec: after a brief stop in New York, they’d planned to proceed by way of Japan and Siberia. But the unreliable Burgess, known then to be a drunkard and exposed later as a Soviet spy,4 hadn’t cleared Berlin’s position with Sir Stafford Cripps, the British ambassador to the USSR. When told they were on their way, he refused to accept either of them. Burgess’s superiors ordered him back to London, leaving Berlin, “who is not in the employ of His Majesty’s Government,” stranded in America, free to do “what he thinks best.”5
“I must obviously create my own job,” he wrote a friend. “I can’t say how bad at this I probably am.”6 So he began networking, at which he was very good. He started with the Frankfurters, where he coaxed a houseguest, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, into writing Cripps to ask him to change his mind. Berlin then secured Washington lodging through Oxford friends, and soon talked his way into lunch with the Soviet ambassador: why, he asked his host, had Stalin recently annexed Latvia? “New Deal” for Baltics, that dignitary mumbled, while authorizing the visa Berlin had come for.7 Which he turned out not to need because Cripps didn’t budge—and because a job Berlin hadn’t sought found him.
“I had never met, nor . . . even heard of Isaiah before,” John Wheeler-Bennett of the British embassy staff later admitted. But “as we sat on the garden-patio with our drinks, I fell at once under the spell of his brilliant intellect.” Despite having been in the United States for only a few days, Berlin conveyed the sense of “a lifetime of acquaintance with that country.”
[H]e never seemed to stop talking, though he never bored us, even if we did sometimes have difficulty in understanding him. . . . He sparkled and scintillated, yet not one of us who listened to him felt that we were being overwhelmed or left out. One of Isaiah’s most priceless attributes is that he evokes genius in others . . . , giving them the impression that they are really more coruscating and witty than they would otherwise believe themselves to be.
Knowing that their new prime minister had, after Dunkirk, revived an old prophecy—that “in God’s good time the New World with all its power and might” would seek “the rescue and liberation of the Old”8—Wheeler-Bennett and his colleagues conspired to keep Berlin on their side of the ocean: he was, for them, an “answer to prayer.”9
His job, they decided, would be explaining the “new world” to the “old.” By the time of Pearl Harbor, Berlin was preparing “weekly political summaries,” each hundreds of words in length, focusing on, but not limited to, what was happening in Washington. Pouched to London and when necessary cabled, these confidential reports filled the gap between top-secret communications and open news.10 They provided much-needed context, while making the most of Berlin’s social skills. For he could now, in good conscience and as his contribution to victory, go to as many parties as he liked.
I.
“We must . . . always base ourselves on the assumption that Americans are foreigners to us and we to them,” Berlin wrote in one of his first reports, early in 1942. Whereas Britain had suspended politics—it held no general election between 1935 and 1945—the United States “to a considerable degree continued as before.” Roosevelt still appointed multiple people to similar jobs. Congress busied itself, as always, with logrolling. Local issues and machine loyalties influenced elections at least as much as the outside world: even after Pearl Harbor it was no disgrace to have been an isolationist, because “half [of those voting] have done same or worse and other half have never heard of such a thing.”11
Meanwhile, “the sheer productive effort of this continent is still gathering strength and speed and effects of this can be felt in the sense of its own power on the part of the American people.” Who now acknowledged that “to get into one war may have been bad luck but to have got into two looks like something wrong with the system.” How to fix it, though, wasn’t yet clear. Would Americans follow “country-bred liberal reformers” like their vice president, Henry A. Wallace, toward a global New Deal without boundaries of nationality, race, and class? Or would they embrace the “economic imperialism” of the publisher Henry Luce, who’d already proclaimed the century to be “American”? Either way, Roosevelt would lead “with infinitely greater political skill, though less compelling moral force, than Mr Wilson.”12
Not least because he, unlike Wilson, would have to deal with the Soviet Union. “Stalin might well be the devil of the coming peace,” Berlin reported, but “the United States thought it possessed a long enough spoon to sup with him.” It would, of course, try to avoid extremes: that the Russians “sweep all before them in Europe and establish Communism everywhere,” or that they “stop at their own frontiers and make a peace with Germans.” But neither these nor compromises between them would leave much room “for small nations upon whom Russia’s demands may fall heavily.”13
The price of victory, therefore, would be the denial of justice, because the price of justice could be the denial of victory. Berlin confirmed this with chilling gossip:
The Greek ambassador is reliably reported to have said that at his last interview with the President the latter had told him that no fuss would be made by the United States Government about the incorporation of the Baltic States by Soviet Russia. . . . The Greek Ambassador then inquired about Poland. According to our informant, the President made gestures of mock despair and said that he was thoroughly tired of the Polish problem, and had told the Polish Ambassador so in clear language, and warned him personally about the effects of continued Polish agitation.
[The] general sentiment, discernible in the press and in conversation of young ‘tough-minded’ Washington and other executives . . . , is that Russia is doing [the] only sensible thing for a rising great continental power, that America’s resources enable her to act likewise, [and] that on a hard and unsentimental basis the two countries will be able to agree after some hard pokerplay without [the] intermediary of Britain or any other ‘old’ power whose day is passing. They do not deny that . . . Wilsonian ideals are going by the board but since Russians wish it so, this is perhaps way world is inevitably going and it would be a foolish luxury to continue to wag a warning figure at Russia in name of ideals which United States knows it does not propose to implement by force.
Governor [Alf] Landon [defeated Republican candidate for president in 1936] is said to have telephoned [Secretary of State Cordell] Hull recently to enquire why no guarantees for Poland were obtained at the [October 1943] Moscow Conference. Hull is said to have suggested that [Landon] go to Moscow himself and plead the Poles’ cause with Marshal Stalin in the name of the great Middle West; Landon asked whether Hull really thought this might save the Poles. Hull begged him on no account to forget to take a specific commitment from the Republican Party to go to immediate war for the integrity of Poland, should the Russians prove obdurate, and a clear promise from the United States Army and Navy to lend them assistance in that event. Landon, who began by taking Hull’s words seriously, is said to be much wounded by this irony and to be sulking in Kansas.14
Lest his reports seem too depressing, Berlin did what he could to brighten them:
A Democrat departing from the Washington [birthday] dinner was heard to observe [that] ‘on Lincoln’s birthday he [Roosevelt] thought he was Lincoln. Today he thought he was Washington. What will he say on Christmas Day?’
Colonel [Robert] McCormick [isolationist publisher of the Chicago Tribune] . . . intends to [urge] incorporation [into] the United States of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Scotland, Wales, etc. Entertainment value of this campaign should be considerable since we are assured that Colonel is in deadly earnest.
[Wallace’s] passionate desire to secure renomination for the Vice-Presidency [in 1944] is unique in United States history: this odd spectacle is observed with pain or enjoyment according to the sympathies of the observer.
Senator [Hiram] Johnson [of California] was obliquely supported in milder terms by Senator [Walter] George [of Georgia] speaking in his native Georgian.
His [Roosevelt’s] light touch, so often a method of getting out of a tight corner, sometimes seems to put too great a strain upon the earnestness of his own followers.15
But not Berlin’s on that of his London readers, for whom his lightness provided relief, if only momentary, from the somber realities of rescue and liberation.
One reader’s gratitude occasioned the war’s most famous case of confused identity. On February 9, 1944, Winston Churchill invited the author of the weekly summaries, “I. Berlin,” to lunch at 10 Downing Street. Where the prime minister found himself seated, baffled, next to an equally bewildered guest of honor, the composer of “White Christmas.” The story spread, making Isaiah Berlin, in the words of his biographer Michael Ignatieff, “a minor celebrity by mistake.”16
II.
Berlin’s summaries catapulted him from the cramped conversations of Oxford into the far more capacious ones of a vast republic fighting a total war, with his eagle eye and fluid tongue facilitating the leap. “Who would have thought,” he wrote his parents, that “I should become avidly interested in American politics?” Perhaps America was Oxford on an enormous scale: in both, institutions meant less than individual relationships, “the pattern of which . . . has, of course, always fascinated me.” Whatever the explanation, Berlin would remember his years in Washington as a “last oasis . . . after which youth is finally over & ordinary life begins.”17
He finally made it to Moscow in September 1945, having secured Foreign Office approval, this time, for the trip: it hoped, Berlin told friends, for a “lapidary” dispatch from him that would “guide British policy for ever and ever.”18 But he found that he couldn’t function there as in the United States. The secret police followed him everywhere, inhibiting movements, monitoring conversations, appearing at times even to detect thoughts. His knowledge of Russian only magnified their suspicions.19
Berlin was, then, for the first time, tongue-tied. He could understand what people were saying, but didn’t dare speak to them for fear of getting them into trouble. Relatives had to whisper what they’d endured over a decade of purges and war. Poets, playwrights, artists, filmmakers, and novelists who should have embodied contemporary Russian culture seemed instead to have emerged from the belly of Jonah’s whale: bleached, exhausted, alive but drained of life.20 Gossip, no longer innocent, was a deadly weapon. Survival itself required apologies.
Silences in Stalin’s Russia—predictably for someone so rarely silent—affected Berlin at least as much as cacophonies in America. He’d hardly heard of Anna Akhmatova when he wandered into a Leningrad bookstore one afternoon in November, picked up a volume of her poems, and asked casually if she was still alive. She was, he was told, and lived nearby: would he like to meet her? Of course he would, so a phone call was made, she invited him up, and they talked through the night and the next morning.21 He’d remember the experience as the most important of his life.22
Known in the West as a prerevolutionary poet, Akhmatova hadn’t been allowed significant publication since 1925. Her first husband had been executed under Lenin, her second and their son had spent years in the gulag, and she’d survived the Leningrad siege only because Stalin wouldn’t let her starve. Back now from the evacuation he’d ordered, she was living alone in the single bare room of a walk-up apartment, with little reason to expect her obscurity ever to end.
Berlin found her defiant, looking and moving “like a tragic queen.” She’d met only one other foreigner, she admitted, since the First World War. Berlin, twenty years younger, scrambled to satisfy her curiosity without revealing that he hadn’t read her poetry. Each saw the other as from an inaccessible world: he from the Europe from which she’d been cut off; she from the Russia he’d had to leave as a child. What he heard, he recalled years later, “went beyond anything which anyone had ever described to me in spoken words.”23 She, in a poem, wrote him into the future:
He will not be a beloved husband to me
But what we accomplish, he and I,
Will disturb the Twentieth Century.24
Machiavelli might have said, of that night, that they were sketching: seeking at least shapes of things they’d have no time to know. Clausewitz would have seen coups d’oeil—“inward eyes” grasping truths ordinarily requiring long reflection. But only Tolstoy could have portrayed such a pivoting of lives on a single point: a real and not imaginary hare, at Tarutino.
For Akhmatova, the night ensured another decade of isolation, the unseen presence in the room having been Stalin himself, whose agents kept him well informed. For Berlin, it upended the moral equivalence with which he’d previously viewed the coming Cold War: two great powers doing what great powers had always done. America and Russia differed, he could now see, not just in geographies, histories, cultures, and capabilities, but also, critically, in necessary ecologies. One thrived on cacophony. The other demanded silence.
III.
“What is happening [in the Soviet Union] is . . . unspeakably sordid and detestable,” Berlin wrote a friend in November 1946: “[T]he slow humiliation of poets and musicians is more awful in a way than outright shooting.”25 But hadn’t Russian artists always suffered under authoritarians? Yes, he’d later concede, but in trying to suppress creativity the tsars had focused it: Russia became, under them, a hothouse for ideas, which “were taken more seriously, and played a greater and more peculiar role [there] than anywhere else.”26 Haunted by the contrast between the history he knew and the present he’d seen, Berlin set out to relate nineteenth-century Russia “to the modern world, [and] to the human condition in general.”27
The link would be twentieth-century Marxism, as much the offspring of Russian revolutionaries as of Marx himself. Traditional approaches to critical judgment, enlightened or not, had at least evaluated situations on their merits rather than from preconceptions “to which no factual discoveries can . . . make any difference.” But Marxists claimed “to know in advance whether a man’s views are correct . . . simply by finding out his social or economic background or condition.” They assumed “the irrefutability of [their] own theory.”28 Berlin soon broadened his argument to include fascism, “the culmination and bankruptcy” of the “mystical patriotism” that inflamed Europe’s nineteenth-century nationalists. This made the two great disruptions of his era—World War II and the Cold War—the results of “totalitarian” determinations to remove contradictions “by means other than thought and argument.”29
Rationalists had long seen contradictions as carrying within themselves seeds of their own resolution. Conservatives found these in the flow of time, which diminished old controversies by embedding them in new circumstances: Bismarck and Salisbury embodied this tradition. Liberals sought them in structures agreeable to opposing sides: Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” attempted that. Both shared the belief—“too obviously to be clearly realized”—that problems could be solved through “the conscious application of truths upon which all men endowed with adequate mental powers could agree.”30
But what if time flowed too slowly? What if no “truths” existed? What if they did, but were impossible to detect? These were the subversions with which nineteenth-century Russian radicals infected the twentieth century: “[I]f the revolution demanded it,” then “everything—democracy, liberty, the rights of the individual—must be sacrificed to it.” Marx, Berlin wanted to believe, had been “too European” to go this far. Lenin had no such qualms:
The masses were too stupid and too blind to be allowed to proceed in the direction of their own choosing. . . . [T]hey could only be saved by being ruthlessly ordered by leaders who had acquired a capacity for knowing how to organize the liberated slaves into a rational planned system.
Hence the “enormities” that, as Berlin put it in his 1953 lecture on Machiavelli, “freeze the blood of ordinary men.” And where had the “capacity” come from? From what Marx had wholeheartedly contributed: a theory of history that gave those privy to it the self-confidence never to fear the future.31
IV.
That, though, is what Berlin would also say, in 1955, of Franklin D. Roosevelt—without the slightest suggestion that the late president had even glanced at the chapter on “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” in Stalin’s History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course, published in 1938. FDR wasn’t a Bismarckian conservative, or a Wilsonian liberal, or a Marxist-Leninist, or a Nazi. He was, however, supremely sure of himself:
In a despondent world which appeared divided between wicked and fatally efficient fanatics marching to destroy, and bewildered populations on the run, unenthusiastic martyrs in a cause they could not define, he believed in his own ability, so long as he was at the controls, to stem this terrible tide.
That made Roosevelt, for Berlin, “the greatest leader of democracy, the greatest champion of social progress in the twentieth century.”32 So where did his self-confidence come from?
Not, I’m sure, from any Polonius-like search for certainty in the shapes of passing clouds. But not from reconciling or eradicating contradictions either: FDR was at once too cynical and too humane to pursue either possibility. Perhaps he was, though, one of those leaders who’d “learnt to live,” as Berlin put it, and in the manner of Machiavelli, with “incompatible alternatives in public and private life.”33 “I am a juggler,” Roosevelt himself acknowledged in 1942, and “never let my right hand know what my left hand does.”34
Presidential advisers found this frustrating, even frivolous, and some historians since have agreed.35 But follow the metaphor more closely: how do you keep one hand from knowing what the other is doing without having a head instruct both? “I may be entirely inconsistent,” FDR went on to explain, “if it will help win the war.”36 Consistency in grand strategy, then, was less a matter of logic than of scale: what made no sense to subordinates could make perfect sense to him. For he saw better than anyone relationships of everything to everything else—while sharing what he saw with no one. Instead he radiated an apparently effortless aplomb, despite spending the longest presidency in American history, and the last third of his life, unable, unassisted, to instruct even his own legs and feet.37
It’s the late afternoon of March 8, 1933. A limousine pulls up in front of a Georgetown house. The recently inaugurated president of the United States is helped out, wheeled in, and takes the elevator to the library. The recently retired Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is in his bedroom, napping off the effects of his ninety-second birthday party earlier that day. But Felix Frankfurter—who hasn’t yet met Isaiah Berlin—has arranged a surprise. “Don’t be an idiot, boy,” Holmes snaps at his clerk, who’s awakened him: “He wouldn’t call on me.” There the president is, though, waiting patiently in the library. So this thrice-wounded veteran of Lincoln’s war reassembles himself to greet the Emancipator’s latest successor. The chat that follows is pleasantly unmemorable. Not, however, what Holmes says after Roosevelt leaves: “A second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament!”38
V.
“Any complex activity,” Clausewitz writes, “if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament. If they are outstanding and reveal themselves in exceptional achievements, their possessor is called a ‘genius.’”39 I take this to mean continuing adjustments of “intellect”—which sets courses—to “temperament”—which determines how they’re pursued. For just as no politics can be pure, so no “grand strategy” will remain unaffected by the unforeseen.
Why don’t you ever see tightrope walkers without long poles? It’s because they’re stabilizers, as critical to the reaching of destinations as the steps taken toward them. And yet, the poles work by feel, not thought: focusing on them risks falling. Temperament functions similarly, I think, in strategy. It’s not a compass—that’s intellect. But it is a gyroscope: an inner ear complementing Clausewitz’s “inward eye.” Like poles on tightropes, temperament makes the difference between slips and safe arrivals.
Xerxes couldn’t contain his ambitions while Artabanus couldn’t conquer his fears: both yielded, if in different ways, to intemperance. Pericles shifted from tolerance to repression in a single speech, and Athens soon followed. Octavian rose by teaching himself self-control; Antony sank by forgetting it. Augustine and Machiavelli bequeathed the heavy and light hands with which Philip and Elizabeth shaped different new worlds. Napoleon lost his empire by confusing aspirations with capabilities; Lincoln saved his country by not doing so. Wilson the builder disappointed his generation; Roosevelt the juggler surpassed the expectations of his. To paraphrase a Ronald Reagan story about a pony,40 there’s got to be a pattern in here somewhere.
Perhaps it lies in Philip Tetlock’s suggestion that we’ve survived as a species by combining the habits of Berlin’s animals: foxes adapted more easily to rapid changes, but hedgehogs thrived in stable times.41 Which extends Fitzgerald’s “first-rate intelligence” to holding opposites in behavior as well as in mind. Which circles back to Tetlock’s view of “good judgment” as a “balancing act” that requires “rethinking core assumptions” while “preserving our existing worldview.”42 Or, in simpler terms, but at all altitudes, applying common sense.
VI.
This, though, assumes a morally equivalent tightrope from which the effects of falling would be as unfortunate on either side. But Berlin by the early 1950s had come to see politics as a polarity, with inequivalent concepts of liberty at either end.43
One offered freedom from the need to make choices by yielding them to some higher authority, whether a collective, a party, a state, an ideology, or even a theory. The other preserved the freedom to make such choices. Berlin called the first “positive liberty,” but not as a compliment: that liberty, if carried to extremes, led to tyranny—removing contradictions by silencing them. The second, “negative liberty,” cultivated contradictions, even cacophonies: without a compass, though, it could produce drift, parochialism, and ultimately anarchy.
Positive liberty, in this book, has been hedgehogs trying to herd foxes: the older Pericles, Julius Caesar, Augustine, Philip II, George III, Napoleon, Wilson, and the twentieth-century totalitarians, all of whom knew with such certainty how the world worked that they preferred flattening topographies to functioning within them. That flattened people, allowing only ranges of “freedoms” extending from—at best—disillusionment or dispossession, to—at worst—slavery or extermination.
Negative liberty has been foxes with compasses: the younger Pericles, Octavian Caesar, Machiavelli, Elizabeth I, the American Founders, Lincoln, Salisbury, and especially Roosevelt, all of whom had the humility to be unsure of what lay ahead, the flexibility to adjust to it, and the ingenuity to accept, perhaps even to leverage, inconsistencies. They respected topographies, crafted choices within them, and evaluated these carefully once made.
Both liberties required crossings, and as on tightropes—or on bridges of boats—no crossing is without risks. But positive liberty claimed to have lessened these, or at least to have postponed them: either way, new worlds on the other side would be promised lands. Negative liberty made no such claims: it acknowledged limits, lowered expectations, and preferred proven means in seeking attainable ends. Positive liberty required no proofs beyond what theory provided, for if ends were compatible, means would automatically converge. Negative liberty expected neither compatibility nor convergence, but valued experience, subjecting theory to its corrections.
That required what Berlin called “pluralism”:44 a recognition, for sure, of persisting evils—man’s fallen state, Augustine might have said—but also of the good that can come from balancing them—man’s state, Machiavelli might have replied. Provided we don’t too much sweat living with the contradictions that, as Berlin did say, have “never given men peace since.”45
VII.
The date is February 16, 1962. The place is the University of Indonesia in Jogjakarta. Robert F. Kennedy, the United States attorney general, is responding to a student’s question about the Mexican War: “Some from Texas might disagree, but I think we were unjustified. I do not think we can be proud of that episode.” Many in Texas did disagree, to such an extent that Kennedy had to promise his older brother that he would clear all future observations on that state with the then vice president of the United States.46 Some months later, as a first-year graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin, I watched a videotaped lecture by the Yale diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis, a man of clear views on the past’s relationship to the present. Unable to resist commenting on Kennedy’s claims, Bemis began mildly but concluded memorably: “You wouldn’t want to give it all back, would you?”
Well, no, if we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us wouldn’t, even in this more politically correct age. For satisfying the claims of justice in this instance would not only disrupt the present and future, but also the past: wouldn’t the Mexicans then have to give it all back to the Spanish, and then the Spanish to the indigenous populations they decimated, and then those peoples to the flora and fauna they displaced after crossing the land bridge from Siberia thousands of years earlier? The argument is absurd, but only because it rejects any coexistence of contradictions in time or space: it thereby confirms Berlin’s claim that not all praiseworthy things are simultaneously possible. And that learning to live within that condition—let’s call it history—requires adaptation to incompatibles.
That’s where grand strategy helps. For “in all fair dealings,” Burke reminded his parliamentary colleagues in 1775, “the thing bought must bear some proportion to the purchase paid.”47 Proportionality comes from what grand strategy is: the alignment of potentially infinite aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities. And fairness? I’d say from bending the alignment toward freedom. Or, as Berlin would have put it, toward “negative” liberty.
This is what Clausewitz meant by subordinating “war” to “policy,” for what freedom could come from total violence? It’s what Augustine sought by seeking to make wars “just.” And it’s what Sun Tzu, with uncharacteristic gentleness, acknowledged: that “while an angered man may again be happy, and a resentful man again be pleased, a state that has perished cannot be restored, nor can the dead be brought back to life.”48
The contradiction between the living and the dead is the greatest we’ll ever hold, in mind or in spirit, whatever the “present” within which we function. All at either end of that tightrope—well, almost all—deserve respect.