George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis Read Free Book Online Page B

though fortuitously,” had avoided such pitfalls and appeared “in all its helpless innocence.” The new piece finally came out in late February 1950, under Kennan’s own name, with the title: “Is War with Russia Inevitable? Five Solid Arguments for Peace.”
    The subtitle answered the question. War was always possible, Kennan argued, but highly unlikely. Soviet imperialism had bitten off more than it could chew. The end of the American atomic monopoly had not significantly shifted the military balance. A strong defense was necessary, but not “a morbid preoccupation with what could possibly happen if.” Americans should avoid “vainglorious schemes for changing human nature,” while cultivating “Christian humility before the enormous complexity of the world in which it has been given to us to live.” For all the effort that went into it, the article fell flat, confirming Kennan’s suspicion that publicity was more a matter of accident—an exasperated telegram, a mysterious pseudonym, a malicious leak—than of design. 40
    Disappointed by this, and by the tepid response to his Milwaukee speech, Kennan hoped to cheer himself up by attending the twenty-fifth reunion of his Princeton class: he had, he wrote Oppenheimer, “succumbed to some very decent and considerate letters from fellow alumni.” On June 8 he, Annelise, and Jeanette drove there from the farm. An undergraduate “checked my name off the list, and coolly asked me for $75.00. I was horrified. I was head over heels in debt. I couldn’t have raised $75.00 by any stretch of the imagination. I fled, and repaired in panic to the Institute.” Oppenheimer offered to cover the cost, but Kennan refused and arranged instead for a telegram to be sent—from his Washington office—conveying regrets that he would not be able to attend after all. The three disheartened celebrants then slipped quietly out of town, driving to Dartmouth where, on the eleventh, George received an honorary degree. Another, from Yale, was awarded on the next day, “as a gesture of respect,” Kennan was told, “for the Department of State in the face of MacCarthy’s [ sic ] attacks.”
    On June 14 he was back in Washington, where Webb wanted to talk about his future. His plan, Kennan told the under secretary of state, was to be away for at least an academic year: what happened after that depended on “what use [the department] could make of me.” If no one else qualified, perhaps ambassador to Great Britain? Webb said he had already spoken with Acheson about that post, which was “so expensive that I would not be able to afford it.” Kennan sat in for Nitze at one last meeting of the Policy Planning Staff, spent a gloomy afternoon griping to Joe Alsop about the hopelessness of conducting coherent policy in a democracy, and then went back to the farm. While he was driving to a nursery a few days later to pick up some trees, inspiration struck, so he pulled over and composed a poem.
    From: G. F. Kennan
To: The Members of the Policy Planning Staff
Subject: Their Peculiar Fate
     
    Friends, teachers, pupils; toilers at the wheels;
Undaunted drones of the official hive,
In deep frustration doomed to strive,
To power and to action uncommitted,
Condemned (disconsolate, in world of steel and glass confined)
     
    To course the foggy bottoms of the mind,
Unaided, unencouraged, to pursue,
The rarer bloom, the deeper hue,
The choicer fragrance—these to glean
And, having gleaned, to synthesize
And long in deepest reticence to hide . . .
Until some distant day—perhaps—permitted,
Anonymous and unidentified,
The Great White Queen
at last
    to fertilize.
    . . . .
     
    Who knows?
Perhaps in moment unforeseen
The Great White Queen,
Made fruitful by your seed,
may yet create
So dazzling and so beauteous a brood
That worlds will marvel, history admire.
And then the scorned, no-longer-wanted sire,
From bondage loosed, from travail freed,
Basking beside the rays these