George F. Kennan just died after 101 productive years
of life that spanned the 20th Century and helped to define the Cold War
and its angst during the last half—yet he always
struck me as a man who would have been more at home in the Congress of Berlin
[DNI Editor's note: 1878] than the catacombs of Foggy Bottom. He seemed
to yearn for the 19th Century.
George F. Kennan, 1904-2005
By Werther*
* Werther is the pen name of a Northern
Virginia-based defense analyst.
George Orwell once wrote that every man's life viewed
from the inside is a failure. We are tempted to believe that George
Kennan, who has died at 101, may have rendered a similar judgment on
himself when he left this conscious life. The architect of America's
cold war doctrine of containment came long ago to repudiate the poisoned
fruits of his inspiration—a divided world,
a militarized and cheapened culture, and $12 trillion flushed down the
drain. [1]
Quite apart from recoiling at the consequences of
his broad geopolitical conception, he came to regret the concrete outcomes
of specific initiatives he once championed. Political warfare against
the Soviet Union through covert operations was no brain wave of the
plodding Truman, nor of flunkies like Clark Clifford; it was Kennan
who proposed "the inauguration of political warfare" against the Soviet
Union in a 1948 memorandum that remained top secret for almost five
decades. "The time is now fully ripe for the creation of a covert political
warfare operations directorate within the government," he concluded.
This conception of Kennan's left a slug-like residue
through the decades of the cold war: Mossadegh, Arbenz, Lumumba, Diem,
Allende. Some are convinced its backwash encompassed Dallas and Watergate.
The most profound moment of the hearings of the Select Committee on
Assassinations in 1975 was not Nelson Rockefeller's theatrical brandishing
of the James Bond-like poison dart gun, but rather Kennan's melancholy
admission that his political warfare idea was "the greatest mistake
I ever made." [2]
But it is best to move on with the observation of
the old Romans, de mortuis nil nisi bonum [3],
and not merely for sentimental reasons, but on evidentiary grounds.
As a sensitive and reflective man, he was capable of learning. Although
he was the archetypal cold warrior at the beginning, very early on he
saw that intervention in Indochina was a losing proposition. By the
early 1950s, he surmised that the French mission civilisatrice
in Vietnam was failing; if the United States intervened, it would be
defeated in turn. His memoranda were disregarded by John Foster Dulles
and the rest of the American Century crowd. [4]
Above all, Kennan was a realist and a cultural pessimist,
a combination absent from the cloud-cuckooland that is present day Washington.
Oddly for the architect of the cold war, "USA Number One" was not in
his vocabulary: In 1999, he concluded that "this whole tendency to see
ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to
a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through,
vainglorious, and undesirable." The Washington Post's obituary
asserts that he deplored the automobile, computers, commercialism, environmental
degradation, and other manifestations of modern life, and that "[h]e
loathed popular American culture."
Was Kennan's dyspeptic Weltanschauung appropriate?
He made his mark in public life when America's position in the world
was so far above that of other nations as to be unchallengeable. The
rest of the world had nothing remotely like the Willow Run plant or
Henry Kaiser's shipyards. America's moral prestige, from 1945 through
the joyous mob scene of President Kennedy's Berlin speech, was like
the Second Coming. [5]
But he saw, as the censorious guardian of an older
tradition, that the nascent empire was antithetical to the old republic.
A conservative of a type rarely seen these days, he believed in stewardship
of the earth, and believed the country was "exhausting and depleting
the very sources of its own abundance."
As the United States stands at the brink of the
Peak Oil phenomenon, that observation begins to sound like wisdom. The
country is now Number One only in military spending, debt, and cultural
frivolity. China and India each graduate three times the number of engineers
Americans do. The United States now ranks 28 out of 40 countries in
mathematical literacy. [6] China sits atop $610 billion
dollars of U.S. debt. [7]
Most intellectuals are fated to molder away in cow
state colleges, second hand book shops, and third rate think tanks.
Like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and a handful of other bona fide thinkers,
George Kennan made an outsized imprint on the world. His tragedy was
that he came to regret his handiwork.
[1] The cost of military spending
in the cold war in constant 2005 dollars; calculated from figures in
Historical Tables, Office of Management and Budget.
[2] "George F. Kennan Dies at
101; Leading Strategist of the Cold War," The New York Times,
18 March 2005.
[3] "Speak no ill of the dead."
[4] The Best and the Brightest,
by David Halberstam, 1973.
[5] Within a week of "the end
of major combat" in the European Theater in 1945, a delegation of U.S.
Senators rode through the rubble of German towns in open phaetons with
no obvious security; a similar scene in 2005 in Fallujah or Ramadi,
two full years after the putative conquest of Iraq, is unthinkable.
One may also contrast President Kennedy in Berlin in 1963 with President
Bush in the deserted and locked-down Mainz of 2005. Why have all the
foreigners grown so threatening?
[6] "U.S. Students Fare Badly
in International Survey of Math Skills," The New York Times,
7 December 2004.
[7] "Coming to Terms with China,"
by Tom Engelhardt and Chalmers Johnson,
http://www.lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt56.html
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