George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis Page A
Authors: John Lewis Gaddis
Tags: General, Historical, History, Biography & Autobiography, 20th Century, Political Science, Modern, International Relations
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him to “a great office clattering with a dozen typewriters, and with my letter of acceptance lying reproachfully before me, I was put to work to produce some sort of publishable document.”
Only one who has faced many lecture audiences knows . . . that peculiar sense of tension and desperation that can overcome the unprepared lecturer as the hour of the lecture inexorably draws nearer and his mind is whipped by the realization that within so and so many minutes he must get up there and say something , but he does not yet know what he wants to say.
The panic seared itself so deeply into his consciousness, Kennan recalled two decades later, “that I continue even now to relive it as a recurring nightmare.” But a young professor who attended the lectures detected no signs of unease. Kenneth W. Thompson remembered Kennan’s “marvelous melodic flow.” Listening to him was “like an experience on the road to Damascus.” One evening, at a fraternity house, Kennan sat talking with students until the early hours of the morning. It was “an absolutely elevating experience for everyone.” 26
Except Kennan. By April 16—the day his lecture was moved to accommodate the hundreds who wanted to hear it—he had concluded that with his combination of personal and public problems, it would be a miracle if “anything remained for me personally in life.... This will be a time for leadership or for martyrdom or for both. I may as well prepare myself for it.” And on the seventeenth:
Myths and errors are being established in the public mind more rapidly than they can be broken down. The mass media are too much for us. . . . McCarthyism has already won, in the sense of making impossible the conduct of an intelligent foreign policy. The result is that there is no place in public life for an honest and moderate man. . . . I should not have signed up with the Ford Foundation.... I should not have started the enterprise to help Soviet fugitives. Some day we will have to give it up out of sheer embarrassment and humiliation over the conduct of our country.... I should not be speaking out here in Chicago. It will do no good—any of it. I must stop this public speaking, this writing for publication.
Farming would be the only salvation. He would finish his work at the Institute “for consistency’s sake” and to get Joan through school. He would retire from the Foreign Service as soon as his pension was earned “or forfeited”—here he had in mind the plight of his colleague Davies, whose loyalty investigation was still under way. But all of these plans were problematic because war would probably break out within two years: “Except for the little boy, the best thing that could happen would be that I should go with the services and get myself killed.” 27
Kennan never said, explicitly, what lay behind all of this, but diary fragments provide hints:
June 19, 1951: More and more I feel myself becoming a receptacle for the confidence of other people. Am I not deceiving them all? . . . . [They] believe that I am an honest man and are thereby relieved. Have I any right, in these circumstances, to accept their confidence?
August 3, 1951: I was annoyed with myself for my habit of staring after women. What could they give me? Nothing but trouble and disillusionment and dissipation of valuable strength. I must teach myself to remember that I do not really want them: that this habit is a sort of echo of youth, and a very misleading one at that. In this endeavor, . . . I have the best of all possible allies: increasing age.
Undated: Physical desire, in a man my age, is often like the experiment the teachers of psychology used to use as an example: where a finger pressed to the brow for a time is removed, but the sensation, and the illusion of its presence, lingers after.
September 5, 1951: I am ill, of course, with the old malady which is a condition and not a disease. But I am resolved that this time I will not cure it
Only one who has faced many lecture audiences knows . . . that peculiar sense of tension and desperation that can overcome the unprepared lecturer as the hour of the lecture inexorably draws nearer and his mind is whipped by the realization that within so and so many minutes he must get up there and say something , but he does not yet know what he wants to say.
The panic seared itself so deeply into his consciousness, Kennan recalled two decades later, “that I continue even now to relive it as a recurring nightmare.” But a young professor who attended the lectures detected no signs of unease. Kenneth W. Thompson remembered Kennan’s “marvelous melodic flow.” Listening to him was “like an experience on the road to Damascus.” One evening, at a fraternity house, Kennan sat talking with students until the early hours of the morning. It was “an absolutely elevating experience for everyone.” 26
Except Kennan. By April 16—the day his lecture was moved to accommodate the hundreds who wanted to hear it—he had concluded that with his combination of personal and public problems, it would be a miracle if “anything remained for me personally in life.... This will be a time for leadership or for martyrdom or for both. I may as well prepare myself for it.” And on the seventeenth:
Myths and errors are being established in the public mind more rapidly than they can be broken down. The mass media are too much for us. . . . McCarthyism has already won, in the sense of making impossible the conduct of an intelligent foreign policy. The result is that there is no place in public life for an honest and moderate man. . . . I should not have signed up with the Ford Foundation.... I should not have started the enterprise to help Soviet fugitives. Some day we will have to give it up out of sheer embarrassment and humiliation over the conduct of our country.... I should not be speaking out here in Chicago. It will do no good—any of it. I must stop this public speaking, this writing for publication.
Farming would be the only salvation. He would finish his work at the Institute “for consistency’s sake” and to get Joan through school. He would retire from the Foreign Service as soon as his pension was earned “or forfeited”—here he had in mind the plight of his colleague Davies, whose loyalty investigation was still under way. But all of these plans were problematic because war would probably break out within two years: “Except for the little boy, the best thing that could happen would be that I should go with the services and get myself killed.” 27
Kennan never said, explicitly, what lay behind all of this, but diary fragments provide hints:
June 19, 1951: More and more I feel myself becoming a receptacle for the confidence of other people. Am I not deceiving them all? . . . . [They] believe that I am an honest man and are thereby relieved. Have I any right, in these circumstances, to accept their confidence?
August 3, 1951: I was annoyed with myself for my habit of staring after women. What could they give me? Nothing but trouble and disillusionment and dissipation of valuable strength. I must teach myself to remember that I do not really want them: that this habit is a sort of echo of youth, and a very misleading one at that. In this endeavor, . . . I have the best of all possible allies: increasing age.
Undated: Physical desire, in a man my age, is often like the experiment the teachers of psychology used to use as an example: where a finger pressed to the brow for a time is removed, but the sensation, and the illusion of its presence, lingers after.
September 5, 1951: I am ill, of course, with the old malady which is a condition and not a disease. But I am resolved that this time I will not cure it
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