George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis

bow before the suggestions that the dream contained—were I to say to the subconscious: you are right, you are unanswerable, I will cut all the fateful knots and follow you—none of it would work out. Ten years ago—it would have; not today. How dangerous a guide, in later age, is then that which is most powerful—or nearly the most powerful (for that remains to be seen)—within us.
    On April 7, he would be leaving for Chicago, where “there will be all the things that are difficult for me”:
    a strange city, a hotel, solitude, boredom, strange women, the sense of time fleeting, of time being wasted, of a life pulsating around me—a life unknown, untasted, full of mystery—and yet not touched by myself. . . . Let us see whether, if I can stand the first day, the next will not be easier. It will be a real test, an opportunity for a real triumph—no—that is an exaggeration—there are no triumphs—an opportunity to inch a tiny bit along the road.
    He had another nightmare before he left, which had to do with concealment: “Unquestionably, there is an abnormality here: a dread of being found out. This can probably be repaired only by making my life such that there is genuinely nothing to conceal and that means making it such that it will no longer, in a sense, be my life at all.” 24
    Kennan opened his lecture series on the afternoon of April 9. It would, he told his audience, examine the record of the past half century in search of lessons “for us , the generation of 1951, pressed and hemmed in as we are by a thousand troubles and dangers.” Before giving it, he had attempted to rest in his hotel room. But
    [w]hen I try, as I did then, to bring the spirit to a state of complete repose, shutting out all effort and all seeking, I become aware of the remnants of anxieties and desires still surging and thrashing around, like waves in a swimming-pool when the last swimmer has left; and I realize in what a turmoil the pool of the soul usually is, and how long it must lie untroubled before the surface becomes clear and one can see to the bottom.
    The newspapers that day were reporting public disagreements between Truman and MacArthur over Korean War strategy, and on the eleventh—the day of Kennan’s second lecture—the president fired the general. Kennan might have been pleased had he received the news within the familiar surroundings of Princeton or Washington, but the reaction in Chicago frightened him.
    For the first time in my life I have become conscious of the existence of powerful forces in the country to which, if they are successful, no democratic adjustment can be made: people . . . who have to be regarded as totalitarian enemies.... [M]y homeland has turned against me. . . . I am now in the truest sense of the word an expatriate.
    He was glad he had not gone to Milwaukee: “I hope never to go there again until McCarthyism has burned itself out there and people are thoroughly ashamed of it.” Even Jeanette and her family, in Highland Park, could offer no refuge. The day would soon come when they “will be afraid and embarrassed to have me in the house, when my presence will bring unpleasantness and danger to them, when—if I came—they would want me to sneak in and out in the middle of the night.” 25
    That was hardly the response, however, of his University of Chicago audience: “Respectable at the start, attendance grew most alarmingly.” By the third lecture, students were sitting on the floor and in the aisles, requiring that the fourth be moved to an auditorium, where Kennan worried that he was only “a remote silhouette and a canned, electrified voice.” But they still kept coming: “I was surprised, delighted, and yet in a sense sobered, by the success of the undertaking.” One cause for concern was that he had not yet written the final lecture, scheduled for April 20. On learning of this that morning, the editors at the university press, which would be publishing the series, summoned