Worldmaking (41 page)

Resignation letters are often prescriptive; rarely are they so farsighted. The ideas presented in the letter, born of deep frustration at the author's marginality, mostly became policy over the next five years.

Kennan was so far ahead of the curve, however, that he was virtually out of sight. While Bohlen appealed successfully to Kennan's sense of duty in convincing him to remain in his post, his substantive response to his letter was broadly skeptical, observing that “foreign policy of [your] kind cannot be made in a democracy. Only totalitarian states can make and carry out such policies.”
7
Still hopeful that the ends-focused wartime alliance with Stalin could survive the peace, Bohlen believed Kennan was temperamentally inclined to envision the worst-case scenario, discounting the possibility of collaboration with Moscow much too readily. When the worst case became unchallenged fact a year later, however, the force and logic of Kennan's counsel swept all before it. “We should gather together at once,” he wrote, “all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full value.”
8
Through 1946 and 1947, Kennan would play a great hand devising “containment”: America's central strategy toward a divided Europe until the collapse of the Soviet Union. But a different kind of geostrategic game materialized as the Cold War assumed larger dimensions, one that was scarred by zero-sum mentalities on both sides. And at that point Kennan would walk from the table.

*   *   *

The original Kennans were named McKennan and had arrived from Scotland or Northern Ireland in the late eighteenth century.
9
George Frost Kennan was born on February 16, 1904, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Tragically, his mother died of a burst appendix just two months later. According to his older sister, Jeanette, the absence of his natural mother instilled in George a deep melancholy. He was team raised by a collection of mostly indifferent substitutes: several aunts and a stepmother who conformed to the fairy-tale rendering. His father Kossuth “Kent” Kennan was a placid, laconic tax attorney, fifty-two years old when his wife died. His advanced age and solitary nature ensured that no significant bond developed between father and son. Through his early childhood, George was quiet, dreamy, and lonely in his pursuits. He retreated to the attic of the family home to devour books and contemplate the unhappy course of his life. An aunt once chastised him with a counterintuitive demand: “George, stop thinking.”
10

Kennan's preference for his own company hampered his socialization but it also made him a dedicated student. He attended the Fourth Street School in Milwaukee, where swift progress allowed him to skip eighth grade. He was next dispatched to St. John's Military Academy because Kent hoped the experience might compel his son to shed his retiring, poetic disposition in favor of something more masculine. The result was predictable: George was bullied relentlessly, which failed to bring him out of his shell. He just about survived the experience—although two escape attempts suggest it was a close-run thing—and applied to Princeton with an unconventional rationale. One of Kennan's favorite contemporary novels—for he generally preferred the greater historical and philosophical ambition of nineteenth-century Russian writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—was F. Scott Fitzgerald's
This Side of Paradise
. The book's main character is an ambitious young midwesterner, Amory Blaine, who abandons his provincial roots to attend Princeton, with naïve hopes of societal acceptance and wider success. Blaine was a thinly disguised Fitzgerald, and Kennan, in turn, was happy to become either. The full course of Blaine's journey—he ends the book penniless and exhausted, observing that “I know myself, but that is all”—appeared not to have given the young romantic pause.

Princeton proved to be a challenging adjustment for Kennan, just as it was for his literary models. Woodrow Wilson's reformist platform had not survived his departure—dining-club snobbery still reigned, and the intellectual environment remained unexacting for the brightest students. Only one academic truly commanded Kennan's attention, Professor Joseph Green, who taught that climate and geography had an unalterable impact on the formation of nations and peoples. This insight stayed with Kennan and would shape his skeptical views on the utility of sending foreign aid to poorer nations—and of the developing world's tangential connection to American security. Nations shed geopolitical significance, Kennan came to believe, the closer they were to the equator. Beyond that Kennan skipped lectures and read widely in history, philosophy, and literature, gaining much from Oswald Spengler's
The Decline of the West
, which identified through history an inexorable process through which civilizations rise and fall.
11
Spengler observed that the “West”—by which he meant Europe and North America—was approaching a civilizational “winter” and that something more ominous was primed to take its place. He instilled in Kennan's diplomatic thought a preference for the minor key. That Kennan read
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
in the original German testifies to an impressive linguistic talent; he learned the basics of the language of Goethe, for example, during a six-month family residence in Kassel, Germany, in 1912.
12

Kennan's analytical abilities grew sharper at college, and his range of reading grew wider—although his development was only vaguely connected to the education provided by Princeton itself. Kennan later observed that “Princeton had prepared my mind for further growth. It had not stimulated in that mind any great latitude of curiosity.” The institution's stifling social hierarchies did not exactly encourage the life of the mind. Kennan joined a dining club but resigned soon after as he found its showboating, pride in family connections, and witty sophistry crass. He was an elitist who believed instinctively in meritocracy. It was only when Kennan had become surer of his literary and diplomatic gifts that he accepted Princeton as an appropriate home for someone of his delicate sensibilities—he lived there, primarily, from 1950 until his death in 2004. Socially, Kennan recalled of his undergraduate years, “I was hopelessly and crudely Midwestern. I had no idea how to approach boys from the East. I could never find the casual tone. My behavior knew only two moods: awkward aloofness and bubbling enthusiasm.”
13
Something had to give, because adjusting to the company of “boys from the East” was sine qua non for his preferred career.

Kennan read and admired Fitzgerald but disapproved of his flamboyant and feckless lifestyle. It typified the materialism that poisoned American life in the Roaring Twenties. Departing Princeton in 1925 for a career in investment banking, say, was unappealing to Kennan, who believed in such a thing as a “calling” and did not covet the accumulation of wealth. Status born of lucre bestowed no particular distinction, he believed. He felt no great attachment to home comforts, abhorred flag-waving patriotism, and wanted to develop his observational antennae through living in other countries. A diplomatic career was thus a logical option for an aspiring cosmopolitan, although securing even entry-level acceptance to the Foreign Service was notoriously difficult. It was as true a meritocracy as existed at that time—which was part of its appeal.

After Kennan excelled in his written examination, Undersecretary of State Joseph C. Grew presided over his oral interview: “I was … so petrified by the experience that in my first words … my voice broke into a falsetto on the second syllable of Wisconsin and set the board roaring with laughter.”
14
Kennan overcame his early nerves and was accepted to the service along with just seventeen other exceptional prospects. After seven months intensive study at the Foreign Service School in Washington, D.C., he took his first job, as a temporary vice consul in Geneva, in the spring of 1927. Set on a distinguished service career, Kennan would observe Europe's descent into war and division from Prague in 1938, Berlin in 1939, Paris in 1940, and Moscow in 1944. Kennan was a bona fide intellectual, yet his most enduring ideas did not emerge simply from the vacuum of his study. They were mined from the darkest of coal faces.

After a short stint in Geneva, Kennan moved to Hamburg, which he adored. “Why is that while other cities become empty and boring, Hamburg always sings its multi-sonic, buzzing song in which all hope and all fear of humankind finds its expression?”
15
He moved to Germany's capital in 1929, where the State Department funded his Russian studies at the University of Berlin's
Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen
, an institution founded during the chancellorship of Otto von Bismarck to prepare diplomats for entry to the Foreign Service. Kennan spent two years in Berlin as an engaged and attentive foreign student, and was tutored primarily by Russian émigrés, all of whom were implacably hostile toward the Marxist experiment that had cast them into Teutonic exile. His tutors mourned the passing of the tsarist ancien régime, emphasized the virtues of benevolent authoritarianism, and castigated Marxism-Leninism for destroying the centuries-old values of a cultured and necessarily hierarchical Russia. So began a lifelong fascination with Russian history, culture, and society—and an enduring antipathy toward any form of collectivism. He had read some Marx at Princeton and found it unpersuasive. Hearing from cultured and elegant émigrés about the ideology's grotesque realization under Lenin and Stalin was an important moment in Kennan's career. As he later wrote, echoing Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolution, “I was never able to accept or to condone the stony-hearted fanaticism that was prepared to condemn to the loss of all civil rights, to ignominy, persecution, and ‘liquidation as a class' entire great bodies of people—the ‘bourgeoisie' and large portions of the peasantry, the majority, in fact, of the Russian population—for no other reason than that their members had been born into certain stations in life.”
16

Ironically enough, Kennan's movement toward Burkean conservatism was spurred by reading Charles and Mary Beard's
The Rise of American Civilization
in Berlin in 1930. He was cheered to discover that the Founding Fathers were not the paragons of liberty portrayed by Jeffersonians and Jacksonians but were actively hostile to giving the people too much of a say. Kennan posed a provocative question: If Washington, Madison, and their cohort were hostile to democracy “for a population predominantly white, Protestant and British, faced with relatively simple problems, would they not turn over in their graves at the mere thought of the democratic principle being applied to a population containing over ten million Negroes, and many more millions of southern Europeans, to whom the democratic principle is completely strange and incomprehensible?”
17
This was not the reaction the Beards would have hoped for.

Through the 1930s Kennan continued to ponder the limitations of participatory democracy—particularly in regard to its dismal effect on foreign policymaking—and the nature and intentions of the Soviet Union. Stationed in Moscow from 1934, Kennan amused Ambassador William Bullitt by carrying on his person at all times a well-thumbed copy of Edward Gibbon's
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, from which he would read aloud when the situation demanded. When discussing the challenges confronting Stalin in holding together a vast Soviet Empire, for example, Kennan would quote Gibbon's observation that “there is nothing more contrary to nature than the attempt to hold in obedience distant provinces.” He later rendered this wise injunction in his own words, applicable to all nations consumed by hubris: “No one people is great enough to establish a world hegemony.”
18
For the historian Anders Stephanson, indeed, Gibbon “was perhaps the most important source of guidance in Kennan's life.” Gibbon's view that “under a democratical government the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude” lay at “the heart of my political philosophy,” as Kennan recalled.
19
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
contained enough cautionary tales to last a diplomatic lifetime.

*   *   *

Kennan kept a diary from the beginning of his diplomatic career to the end of his life, gifting a significant resource to scholars when it was finally processed and opened in 2009. The diary is replete with prescient geopolitical analysis, unsentimental reflections on the human frailties that lead to conflict, and some bitter denunciations of modernity, mass media, and multiculturalism. Some days Kennan's entries ran to multiple pages; for weeks he wrote nothing at all. Some days he wrote poetry that was conventional in form; at other points he painted cityscapes that were almost Joycean in their free-form lyricism. In 1935, for example, Kennan recorded the following observations:

Back in Moscow—and extremely unhappy. Boulevards on summer nights. In it and not of. The stark reality of Soviet life compared to the neurotic unreality of our own. The almost theatrical vividness and directness of all things human. Here human flesh lives in one seething intimate mass—far more so, even than in New York. It streams slowly, guilelessly, in thick, full currents, along the boulevards, between the dark trees, under the gleam of the street lights; it is carried—as herded, tired animals are carried, in box-cars—in the long trains of street-cars. And it is human life in the raw, humanity brought down to its fundamentals—good and evil, drunk and sober, loving and quarrelling, laughing and weeping—all that human life is and does anywhere—but all much more simple and direct, and therefore stronger.
20

These are the observational skills of a novelist. Much of Kennan's intellectual identity became vested in the quality of his writing, for it gave him his greatest sustenance. A year later in Moscow, for example, Kennan composed another neo-Burkean view—finished with an Orwellian flourish—on the Russia the revolution had created: