Old age, and the fall of the Soviet Union, released Nitze’s inner liberal. In January 1991, ten days before America began bombing Iraq, he said that the United States could contain that country with a blockade and sanctions; war was not necessary. He also joined the board of the Environmental Defense Fund, focusing on acid rain because he thought it a narrow enough issue that he could master it in the time he had remaining. He worked for an international treaty to ban land mines, and another to ban chemical weapons.
His new political endeavors solidified the position in the Washington establishment that his many years of public service had already earned him. At his ninetieth birthday party, a grand fete in Washington’s Metropolitan Club, Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor read some verses she had written that summed up the way many people there felt.
Paul Nitze—a name we all know
A man whose life leaves us aglow
Aglow with amazement that he,
In only 90 years, could be
A scholar, investor, author
Diplomat and aristocrat,
Navy Secretary, pundit.
All matters he met with true grit.
There is more to tell than space permits.
The traits we most admire—it fits
Husband, father, skier, dancer
Horse man, donor, and romancer,
At tennis and bridge he stars too.
He surpasses us all—so what’s new?
Paul, we salute you, entreat you,
To see that just ninety’s too few.
In October 1999, Nitze invited his friend Jurek Martin of the Financial Times over for coffee and declared that after years of quiet contemplation he had decided that we should eliminate our entire nuclear arsenal. Martin went home, typed up Nitze’s argument as he remembered it, read it back for approval over the telephone, and then sent it to the New York Times op-ed page.
In Nitze’s prime, the piece would never have met his standards for rigorous thinking. The argument was composed of blunt assertion, and it passed over the complicated attendant questions, such as how to deal with future blackmailers. “Why would someone who spent so many years negotiating with the Soviet Union about the size of our nuclear arsenal now say we no longer need it?” Nitze asked in the piece.
I know that the simplest and most direct answer to the problem of nuclear weapons has always been their complete elimination. My “walk in the woods” in 1982 with the Soviet arms negotiator Yuli Kvitsinsky at least addressed this possibility on a bilateral basis. Destruction of the arms did not prove feasible then, but there is no good reason why it should not be carried out now.
But if the piece was simple, it came from an honest and sound heart. Five years before, Nitze had written that the country needed to place much less reliance on such armaments. In a study group the year after that, he had joined in concluding that the country should start to move toward nuclear renunciation.
Nitze was touched by the warm letter that Kennan wrote in response to his op-ed, with the author noting how pleasant it was to find them finally in agreement after their half century of contrasting views. But Nitze’s conversion was based on the facts at the time; he certainly did not think his past judgment had been in error. Not long afterward, talking with the journalist James Srodes, he said: “[Kennan] always thought that I hijacked our Cold War policy of containment away from him.” He paused and then chuckled: “And I did, of course.”
THE END OF THE COLD WAR gave George Kennan a chance to reflect in a way he had never done before. He published a book of political philosophy—one that showed him to be a true conservative, in that he did not want significant changes in either the environment or the culture. He followed that with a work about the hard-laboring agrarian past of the Kennan line, An American Family. It was published when he was ninety-six years old; he labored to find the strength to depress the keys on his typewriter while working on it. And then came the last intellectual project of his life: a deep analysis of his religious faith.
Kennan had rarely discussed the subject publicly, but he had long pondered it. Raised a Presbyterian, Kennan maintained a certain distance from formal religion for most of his adult life. But age and a sense of his own mortality had pulled him closer to Christianity. In October 2002, he sent a twenty-page letter to his children.
The beginning was personal. He avowed his deep feelings of connection to Helmuth von Moltke and observed that the barrenness of secular Soviet ceremonies made him yearn for Christian ones. But most of the letter was didactic. He wrote, for example, how he had taken a skeptical historian’s eye to the Gospels. Not only were they based on hearsay, but by focusing so intently on miracles, they emphasized merely the authors’ own shallowness, and not the greatness of their subject. St. Paul, he wrote, was a courageous man and a great leader. But Kennan disliked him for distorting the historical record. And Paul, he argued, had clearly overstated his personal intimacy with Jesus.
But the letter’s most compelling passages involved his vision of the human spirit and his answer to the fundamental question surrounding Christianity: if God is all-powerful, why is there evil in the world?
To Kennan, the answer was one provided by a small but passionate group of spiritual thinkers through history: God is not all-powerful. “I can see this whole range of human predicament as something beyond divine motive or control—rather as a limitation, if you will, on the almightiness of the divine power. But this, to my mind, is no reason for the abandonment of what we call faith.”
It was classic Kennan. He did not explain away evil or pain; after all, he had spent his life brooding on them. And he even seemed to be bringing his realism to religion. One nation cannot control others; and one all-powerful God does not control us. As with so much else that he wrote, Kennan’s words were profound and moving:
At no time in my life have I ever been devoid of the awareness that I was accompanied, surrounded, and penetrated by some sort of tremendous spirit—the Holy Spirit, if one wishes to call it that, and one that stood in some intimate essentially benevolent if critical relationship to all that I was doing or experiencing. Without that awareness, life would have lost all hope and meaning.
IN LATE SEPTEMBER 2001, I visited my grandfather in his home in Georgetown. As he often did, he sat in his study, leaning back deeply in an oversized easy chair. A cane rested by his side. Books were stacked on the side table next to a small silver bowl of nuts and a glass of red wine. He moved slowly and had grown a light, scratchy beard. He talked infrequently and with great effort, and I would often come just to sit near him and keep him company. Sometimes I would read to him.
This day, he started by saying how shaken he had been by the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. I nodded, and told him I agreed. After waiting for a bit, I decided to ask a question. Looking over his bookshelf, I noticed the complete works of Conrad, each conspicuously worn. I was a little taken aback. “How, Gramps,” I asked, “did you have time to read all of these books when you were negotiating all the arms treaties?”
“Missiles are boring,” he replied deliberately. “Conrad is interesting.” He then began to reflect a bit over his life. Again he paused for a second. “Sometimes I think I have had so much more luck than I deserve.” That evening, I wrote down another nugget of wisdom he passed on that day: “I keep going because I still find it interesting.”
Three years later, in the summer of 2004, we had our last conversation. I came by to tell him of my engagement and plans for a wedding that I knew he was far too frail to attend. “Is she kind?” he asked. Yes, I replied. He came back with the last sentence he ever said to me. “Tell me about her.”
On October 19, 2004, he let go his grip on life.
KENNAN GAVE ONE final public interview, in 2002, when he was ninety-eight, warning that the United States should not rush into Iraq. “War has a momentum of its own, and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.”
His body was frail, though, and he knew it was time to tie up his most important loose end. One day he put on his coat and tie and told his nurse, Betsy Barrett, that he wanted to pray for his mother, who, he said, had died knowing that she would never know her son. He went to his church and spent fifteen minutes on his knees. He never mentioned her again.
Kennan was determined to be alert for his hundredth birthday. As the day neared, he tried to stay sharp by folding little pieces of paper and trying to keep track of them. But he knew he was losing control of his mind, just as his wife of more than seventy years had. Annelise was of sound body, but she could no longer remember what she had done during the day.
One of the last things Barrett remembers is Kennan tenderly looking at Annelise, who he knew could no longer understand him. He wished, he said, that “we could go down the steps and out through the door together.”
He died, at age 101, on March 17, 2005, just 149 days after the death of his lifelong rival and friend.