George F. Kennan : an American life Read online

  George F. Kennan : an American life

  John Lewis Gaddis

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Part I

  ONE - Childhood: 1904–1921

  TWO - Princeton: 1921–1925

  THREE - The Foreign Service: 1925–1931

  FOUR - Marriage—and Moscow: 1931–1933

  Part II

  FIVE - The Origins of Soviet-American Relations: 1933–1936

  SIX - Rediscovering America: 1936–1938

  SEVEN - Czechoslovakia and Germany: 1938–1941

  EIGHT - The United States at War: 1941–1944

  NINE - Back in the U.S.S.R.: 1944–1945

  TEN - A Very Long Telegram: 1945–1946

  Part III

  ELEVEN - A Grand Strategic Education: 1946

  TWELVE - Mr. X: 1947

  THIRTEEN - Policy Planner: 1947–1948

  FOURTEEN - Policy Dissenter: 1948

  FIFTEEN - Reprieve: 1949

  SIXTEEN - Disengagement: 1950

  Part IV

  SEVENTEEN - Public Figure, Private Doubts: 1950–1951

  EIGHTEEN - Mr. Ambassador: 1952

  NINETEEN - Finding a Niche: 1953–1955

  TWENTY - A Rare Possibility of Usefulness: 1955–1958

  TWENTY-ONE - Kennedy and Yugoslavia: 1958–1963

  Part V

  TWENTY-TWO - Counter-Cultural Critic: 1963–1968

  TWENTY-THREE - Prophet of the Apocalypse: 1968–1980

  TWENTY-FOUR - A Precarious Vindication: 1980–1990

  TWENTY-FIVE - Last Things: 1991–2005

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  ABBREVIATIONS TO NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ALSO BY JOHN LEWIS GADDIS

  ALSO BY JOHN LEWIS GADDIS

  The Cold War: A New History

  Surprise, Security, and the American Experience

  The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

  We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History

  The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations

  The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War

  Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security

  Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History

  The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2011 by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © John Lewis Gaddis, 2011

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Gaddis, John Lewis.

  George F. Kennan : an American life / John Lewis Gaddis.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54810-3

  1. Kennan, George F. (George Frost), 1904–2005. 2. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1989. 3. World

  politics—1945–1989. 4. United States—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. 5. Soviet Union—Foreign

  relations—United States. 6. Cold war—Diplomatic history. 7. Diplomats—United States—

  Biography. 8. Ambassadors—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  E748.K374G34 2011

  327.730092—dc23

  [B] 2011021786

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  In memory of

  Annelise Sørensen Kennan

  1910–2008

  without whom it would not have been possible

  PREFACE

  “I HAVE SOMETIMES WONDERED WHETHER YOU WOULD BE ABLE TO see your way to going through with it,” George Kennan wrote me in 1995, fourteen years after I became his biographer, sixteen years before the book would appear. “But,” he added, “I comfort myself with the reflection that I have, after all, deservedly or otherwise, become something closer to a national figure in recent years.... I do not expect to live to see the results of your efforts; and I am not sure that I ought to see them, even if I lived to do it. But write them, if you will, on the confident assumption that no account need be taken of my own reaction to them, either in this world or the next.”1

  Kennan had, of course, already secured an international reputation as a diplomat, grand strategist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, and antiwar activist when, in 1981 at the age of seventy-eight, he agreed to cooperate in the writing of this biography. We both assumed that it would appear a few years after his death. Neither of us foresaw how far into the future that would be: Kennan would not die until March 17, 2005, at the age of a hundred and one. Characteristically, he blamed himself for the delay.

  He saw no signs that the biography was in progress, Kennan wrote in his diary after I paid him a visit in 1997, but “I don’t find this surprising. [Gaddis] would no doubt have preferred to write it when I am dead, as I should, in the natural order of things, long since have been.” Perhaps “I should do him the favor of dying immediately.” His failure to do so did not diminish the guilt he felt. “My unnatural longevity is now becoming a serious burden to others,” he lamented in 2003. “Poor John Gaddis has seen his undertaking being put off for years while he waits for me to make way for it.”2

  I assured Kennan, on many occasions, that I didn’t mind, that I had other things to keep me occupied, and that I would make the biography my chief priority
, apart from teaching, after his death. Our strange relationship went on long enough, though, for my students—who tend to see anyone over forty as having a foot in the grave—to begin speculating somberly about which of us might go first.

  From my perspective (assuming survival), the relationship could not have been better. Kennan granted me unrestricted access to himself, his papers, and his mostly handwritten diaries, which alone fill twelve of the 330 boxes of Kennan materials now open for research at Princeton University’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library. With Kennan’s encouragement, many of his friends and most of his family talked with me soon after I began this project—fortunately, as it happened, because he outlived almost all of them. I saw him for interviews, and later less formal visits, about once a year for a quarter of a century: he found it a relief, he once told me, that “you’re not always around and under foot.”

  Kennan also gave me, from the outset, the greatest gift an authorized biographer can receive, which was the complete freedom to say what I pleased. The only portion of this book he ever read is a single paragraph in the Epilogue, drawn from a talk I delivered when Princeton opened its centennial exhibition on his life in November 2003. Would it be all right, he asked me that morning, if he afterward saw a copy of what I was going to say? Of course, I replied, I would send it to him. He thanked me, but added that I shouldn’t do so if I felt this to be in any way an attempt to “influence” the biography.3

  He and I originally thought of the book as more political than personal, but when we explained this to George’s wife, Annelise, she strongly objected. His writings, she reminded us, were full of gloom and doom: I must get to know him well enough to see that he was not always this way. That, in turn, allowed me to glimpse the stabilizing role she played in his life. It first became clear to me one evening in Princeton in 1983. The Kennans were just back from Norway, and when I asked how it had been, George started complaining about dissolute youth hanging around the docks. Annelise put an end to that: “George, you’re always worrying about docks!” All docks everywhere had dissolute youth. That, along with tying up boats, was what they were for. And then, turning to me: “He worries too much about the docks.”4

  Annelise had her way with this book, and that’s why I have dedicated it to her memory. It’s by no means the first, though, about George Kennan. I’ve learned from, and respect the work of, my predecessors, especially C. Ben Wright, Barton Gellman, Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, David Mayers, Walter Hixson, Anders Stephan-son, Wilson D. Miscamble C.S.C., John Lamberton Harper, Richard L. Russell, John Lukacs, Lee Congdon, Nicholas Thompson, and Frank Costigliola, who will now be editing the Kennan diaries. But I’ve made no systematic effort to compare their conclusions—or even some of my own previous ones—with what this book contains. I want it to be a fresh look at Kennan himself, not at the scholarship he has inspired.

  This is also, despite its length, a selective life. I’ve given more attention to some episodes than to others, and I’ve left out a lot. I’ve done so partly because I think that character emerges more clearly from the choices biographers make than from the comprehensiveness they attempt; partly also out of compassion for my readers. Kennan once recommended to me, as a model, Leon Edel’s monumental biography of Henry James. He had in mind, though, Edel’s psychological insights, not the five volumes required to convey them.

  Finally, a note on names. First ones are necessary when writing about family, as an older sister of George’s pointed out when I began an early interview with the question: “What was Professor Kennan like as a baby?” At the same time it seemed inappropriate to write, in later chapters, of “George’s” long telegram, or his “X” article. So I have used “George” within the context of family, and “Kennan” elsewhere. I have also, following the custom of Kennan and his generation, occasionally used the term “Russians” when discussing the inhabitants of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I am fully aware that a substantial minority were not Russians, but I also know how cumbersome it would be to have to remind readers repeatedly of this fact. I ask their indulgence in being reminded here.

  George Kennan’s willingness to entrust me with a biography he would never read was, from the beginning, an extraordinary expression of confidence. How much so came through all over again in 2002, on one of the last visits my wife Toni and I paid to the Kennans at their Princeton home. George showed me a stack of loose-leaf binders containing the only copy of his diary from 1970 until that moment. “They go with you,” he said, to my astonishment. “But I guess you wouldn’t be interested in this,” he added, indicating a single smaller volume. “What is it?” “Oh, just my dream diary.” “Take it too,” Annelise insisted. I didn’t argue. Never have I driven more carefully back to New Haven.

  Whether I have merited the trust both Kennans placed in me I do not know. They were my companions, though, through a considerable portion of my life, and that, for me, was a great privilege. Now that we have reached, with the completion of this book, the point of parting, I can see how much I will miss them.

  John Lewis Gaddis

  New Haven, Connecticut

  July 2011

  Part I

  ONE

  Childhood: 1904–1921

  “ THE GREATEST TRAGEDY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE,” GEORGE F. KENNAN told me when we first talked of this biography, “is that we do not all die at the same time as those we love.” It might seem odd to begin a life by invoking death, but in this instance it was appropriate, for the tragedy Kennan saw in death was not the oblivion it brings but the separations it causes: the way it rends relationships without which there can be no life. And death severed the most important relationship in young George’s life just as it began.

  Throughout much of his childhood George believed that his mother, Florence James Kennan, had died giving birth to him in Milwaukee on February 16, 1904. She had not. The death occurred on April 19, and the cause was peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, a mishandled but completely separate medical problem. The effect, though, was much the same: the rending of a relationship so brief that it could not even exist in memory. “Whether she nursed him or not, I don’t know,” George’s sister Jeanette recalled eight decades later, “but I suspect she did. What a tragedy.” Florence died at home, painfully and protractedly. The older children were brought in to kiss their mother goodbye, while baby George, held by an aunt in the next room but hearing everything, was “so quiet .”1

  In his memoirs, written when he was in his sixties, Kennan acknowledged having been “deeply affected, and in a certain sense scarred for life,” by his mother’s death.2 But he was not then prepared to reveal where the evidence lay, in the realm of visions and dreams:

  March 1931. A young diplomat at a Swiss winter resort suddenly finds himself dancing with tears in his eyes, not because the girl he’s with isn’t the one he wants, but because, as he notes bitterly in his diary, he misses someone else: “You had better go out into the open air and realize that Mother is far away and that no one is ever going to understand you and that it is not even very important whether anyone ever does.”3

  February 1942. An older Foreign Service officer, married now and a father, writes an unsent letter to his children from internment in Nazi Germany, wondering whether they would remember him were he not to return: “I myself grew up without a mother; and there are so many times that I have wished I had known what she was like—that I could have had at least one conversation with her.”4

  January 1959. A middle-aged historian, retired temporarily from diplomacy, dreams for the first time of meeting his mother. “She showed no recognition of me; she was plainly preoccupied with something else; but she accepted with politeness and with an enigmatic smile my own instantaneous gesture of recognition and joy and tenderness. She was, for the moment, the main thing in my existence; I was not the main thing in hers.”5

  July 1984. An aging brother, now eighty, writes his surviving sisters on the day he learns that their eldest has died: �
��I think of what desperation our mother must have felt as she faced death with the realization that she was being torn away relentlessly from four small children and abandoning them to a wildly uncertain future. And I think, of course, of the crushing blow this must have been to our poor father—who, God knows, had enough blows in this life without this crowning one.”6

  June 1999. A distinguished elder statesman, at ninety-five failing physically but fully in command mentally, suddenly sheds tears as he recalls Anton Chekhov’s haunting story “The Steppe,” about a boy of nine traveling with a group of peasants across a vast Russian landscape. The boy misses his mother, “understanding neither where he was going nor why,” trying to grasp the meaning of stars at night, only to find that they “oppress your spirits with their silence,” hinting at “that solitariness awaiting us all in the grave, and life’s essence seems to be despair and horror.”7

  How to weigh the pain of loss when it occurs so early in life that one lacks the words, even the concepts, to know what is happening? When one accepts such pain at first as the normal condition of human existence, only to learn—yet another loss—that it is not? George Kennan provided an answer of sort in his memoirs: “We are, toward the end of our lives, such different people, so far removed from the childhood figures with whom our identity links us, that the bond to those figures, like that of nations to their obscure prehistoric origins, is almost irrelevant.” 8 But a biographer can, perhaps, be pardoned for not believing everything that the subject of his biography says.