IV.
The youngest of the Kennan scholars impressed him most. Barton Gellman was a twenty-two-year-old Rhodes scholar in 1983 when Kennan got around to reading his Princeton senior thesis, completed the previous year under Dick Ullman’s supervision. Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power was an attempt, Gellman explained in the book the thesis quickly became, to “cut and paste” Kennan into coherence, a project for which “the man himself has never had any taste.” Yet shouldn’t a person given to displaying his thinking in “bits and pieces” provide a more complete picture?24
Kennan had been asking himself the same question. He had always distrusted philosophical systems: they were too gray, he believed, to reflect the colors of life, much less to guide one through their complexities. But he feared having his ideas whisked into oblivion, “like a paper-handkerchief carried away by the wind from the deck of an ocean-liner.” His diaries, usually written late at night, tended to bury what was worth saving beneath long stretches of “sleep-dulled humdrum.” Unwilling to rely on some future editor’s excavations, he felt the need “to clarify, to organize, and to state my general philosophy, before it becomes too late to do so.”25
Gellman showed him that it could be done, while convincing Kennan that he could do it better. “I don’t in the least mind the critical reflections,” he wrote the astonished young man. “I am grateful to you for having put forward such a brilliant effort to make sense out of my scattered and so often cryptic utterances, and congratulate you most heartily on the success of that formidable effort.” But Gellman had “cheerfully mingled” things said decades apart, Kennan admonished me, as though circumstances had not changed. He would not respond directly, but he would try “to set forth, more systematically than I have done in the past, my views, as of this stage of my life, on some of the questions he raised.”26
Around the Cragged Hilclass="underline" A Personal and Political Philosophy appeared in 1993, a rare example of a book inspired by a critic a fourth its author’s age. The title came from a passage in John Donne’s third Satyre, a Kennan favorite:
As political philosophy, the book contained little Kennan had not said elsewhere. There were predictable condemnations of advertising, automobiles, Congress, consumerism, domestic politics, environmental degradation, juvenile delinquency, nuclear weapons, pornography, television, and even demands for unconditional surrender in World War II. Kennan proposed yet another revival of the Policy Planning Staff, this time as a “Council of State,” a presidentially appointed body of senior notables like himself who, freed from the lures of personal gain or political ambition, would determine long-term national interests. If philosophy at all, these portions of Cragged Hill were a Platonic contemplation of ideal forms, not an Aristotelian adaptation to practicality.27
But as personal philosophy, the book was something new: it was Kennan’s first full public profession of private faith. It began, unexpectedly, with sex, a characteristic shared with the “lowest and least attractive” of mammals and reptiles. In addition to progeny, sex produced great happiness, great art, and great trouble, for “people’s physical needs change even when their deeper affections do not.” The results included “jealousies, suspicions, conflicting loyalties, wounded pride, and tragic unhappiness.” That these were trouble, however, reflected a higher aspect of human nature, which was the soul, the capacity “to perceive and to hold in mind the distinctions between right and wrong.” How had only one species developed this?
Not by way of Original Sin, Kennan was sure: sex had preceded people, and some Primary Cause—neither benevolent nor malevolent but indifferent—had preceded both. Where, then, did the soul come from? Of that, Kennan was unsure, but of the soul’s existence, indeed its immortality, he had no doubt. For bodily needs alone could not explain love or self-sacrifice. Those qualities constituted, then, another Deity, neither omnipotent nor omniscient but sympathetic, from whence came the strength, in the face of adversity, to endure, if not to prevail.
Each person’s Deity was his own, but there were compelling examples to emulate. By far the greatest, for Kennan, was Christ, but not as the Son of a benevolent God: there was too much evil in the world for such a Father to exist. Kennan even suspected—he refrained from saying so in the book—that it was Christ who conceived God, rather than the other way around. If so, it didn’t matter: Kennan’s faith in Christ was unshaken.
Organized religion reinforced it but was not its source. Faith lay in an inner voice that promised help, but only to the extent that one helped one’s self. For Kennan, that was Christ, but it was also the voices of the great poets, playwrights, and novelists, who mingled their brilliance with responsibility for others. It was the voices of dead parents and departed friends, which Kennan still sometimes heard in his dreams. But it was also the voice of his own conscience, as he walked the tightrope between selfishness and selflessness, beset by “little demons” at every step of the way. One could not simply brush them away. One could, however, deny them the satisfaction of having their existence acknowledged.
Salvation lay in forgiveness, a theme Kennan developed more clearly in his diary than in his book. Why, other Christians might ask, could he not more easily accept his inadequacies? “Your God is supposed, by virtue of Christ’s intercession, to be a forgiving God. Confess your sins and rely on His forgiveness.”
My answer to that would be: “Yes, I can, no doubt, rely on his forgiveness. But that does not mean that I should light-heartedly forgive myself. Is it not possible that He will forgive me only precisely in the measure that I decline to forgive myself in those things I find unworthy of my own forgiveness?”
And so, with John Donne, Kennan went about, and around, and up and down his hill, in an uneasy soul’s acknowledgment that it soon must rest, “for none can work in that night.”28
V.
He dreamed again about death one night in 1995, this time horribly. His dread, though, came not from what afflicted or awaited him but from a vision of Annelise bidding him farewell outside a large dark Victorian house, entering it, putting on a black gown, and disappearing behind a closing door. She was a widow, she would be alone, and “I could not stand it.” Should he not rush up, ring the doorbell, and ask for reconsideration: “Why don’t we disregard all the circumstances of our lives that have led to this dénouement and start all over again?” But this, he knew, was not possible, and even if it had been, it might have frightened her more than the loneliness she now faced. So he had no choice but to wake up, “still shattered by what had happened, and desperate.”29