In tune but out of time
Michael Howard GEORGE KENNAN: A STUDY IN CHARACTER by John Lukacs Yale, f16.99, pp. 224, ISBN 97803001221213 © £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 George Kerman died on 17 March 2005, aged 100 plus one year, one month and one day. The last half of his life he had spent in semi-retirement at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, but for a few years, between 1946 and 1952, he had been one of the most influential people in the world, and, most unusually, an influence for good. But for him the world today might be in an even worse state than it actually is.
As John Lukacs shows in this affectionate eulogy, Kerman was both typically and highly atypically American. He was typical as a poor boy from the Midwest who made good; hardworking, frugal, high-minded, rather solemn. Whereas others of his stamp amassed money, he amassed learning and, more unusually, wisdom. He was atypical in that he was shamelessly elitist, with little respect for democracy and none whatever for the way it was practised in his own country, for whose culture he had little affection. He felt himself as he once put it, to be an expatriate; not in place, but in time. The world in which he felt at home had long since disappeared. Lukacs compares him with Henry Adams, but an even closer analogy might be with Alexis de Tocqueville, of whom Kerman himself wrote a shrewd study. All three were men who felt themselves born out of their own time; who briefly and rather unsuccessfully enjoyed public office but spent most of their lives ruminating about the world into which they had rather unhappily survived.
Kerman was a trained and dedicated public servant, outstanding for his expertise on Russia and, to a slightly lesser extent, Germany; both countries with which he had, perhaps, rather greater empathy than he had with his own. For a dozen years he occupied positions that gave him unrivalled opportunities to observe, if not to influence, the unfolding tragedy of the second world war. He was in Prague from September 1938 till March 1939; in Berlin from 1939 until December 1941; in Lisbon, that focus for world espionage, from 1942 until 1944; and in Moscow from 1944 till 1946, where his firm but moderate reports about the problematic nature of Stalin's Russia (he never used the emotive term 'Soviet Threat') led to his recall to Washington by George Catlin Marshall (perhaps the last great American secretary of state) to advise the government and to educate the American public.
This was Kennan's moment of greatness. To Americans rapidly swinging from emotional love for the Great Soviet Ally to the hysterical global anti-communism that was to distort their policy for the next decade, he taught that their adversaries were not demons but Russians: a people with their own history, their own fears and their own ambitions; ruled, as they had been so often in the past, by a tsar who, though ruthless, was no fool, and one who presided over a social system that, given time, would collapse under its own contradictions. The hostility of the Soviet Union was ineluctable, but its power could be held in check — contained — by means short of war. This doctrine of 'containment' gradually became accepted thinking in the West, and might have had more lasting impact on American opinion had it not been for the invasion of South Korea a few years later. The hysteria which that event unleashed left Kennan as odd man out in Washington. Even Dean Acheson had to bow to it, while John Foster Dulles gave it full rein. Acheson sent him back to Moscow, out of harm's way, as ambassador; but there, at the height of the Cold War, poor Kennan found himself even more unpopular than he had been in Washington. He complained publicly that he was being worse treated than he had been in Nazi Germany ten years earlier. Not surprisingly the Russian government then demanded his recall.
It must be admitted that at this stage Kennan cut a slightly absurd figure. Other diplomats in Moscow adjusted themselves to the freezing atmosphere with professional resignation and made rather a joke of it. But Kennan felt personally hurt. He did not mix even with his own staff but shut himself up to write home long, sad, perceptive memoranda, though doubting, with some reason, whether anyone in Washington would ever read them. On his return he found refuge from the rude winds of politics at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, a kind of super-All Souls, from which his rare forays into public life were not always happy. In 1957 he came to England to deliver the Reith Lectures, in which he espoused a then fashionable but quite unrealistic proposal for the neutralisation of Germany. I had just written a book on the subject, and at a private dinner meeting criticised him with some vehemence. I received in return a look so hurt, so wretched, so deeply unhappy that I can hardly bear to remember it. He was not one to stand the heat of the Washington kitchen during the Cold War, or perhaps any other time.
Kennan did not even quite fit into the convivial atmosphere of the Institute, happy though he was there. In Washington he had been regarded as a thinker (by some as a rather dangerous one) out of place in public life. At Princeton he was seen as a public man not entirely at ease among scholars. Lukacs describes the figure he cut there as 'a solitary patrician among groups of successful middle class'; a description I would have found unkind if I did not have my own memories of him, dressed in an immaculate three-piece tweed suit, sitting at a table by himself reading a book in the hurly-burly of the Institute cafeteria. But while there he wrote some splendid books: among others a classic on American diplomacy, a definitive account of Russo-American relations in 1917, and an equally definitive, if rather self-indulgent, study of the making of the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1890.
But these were only the tip of the iceberg. From early youth until almost the day of his death he poured out his thoughts and impressions with Mozartian facility in a flood of writing that was never less than mellifluous and often of classic wisdom and beauty. We can gain some impression of it from the brief extracts that he published in 1989 in his Sketches from a Life; enough to make us long for more. But as Lukacs warns us, there was almost too much. One day perhaps some university press will render mankind a service by providing us with a multi-volume edition of the writings of this sad, wise, civilised, deeply unhappy man. There are all too few of his kind left.
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