George F. Kennan is
known as a realist, and has an honored place in the canon, but he is clearly a
realist of a different kind. His sensibility toward the use and abuse of power
was vastly different from that of Machiavelli; Kennan winced at the methods Machiavelli approved.
How Kennan went from
being one of the hardest of the hardliners to being king of the doves is a
fascinating story in the history of American foreign policy, especially so considering the fact that he didn't change all that much in his basic convictions. You can begin to
trace the complicated evolution of Kennan's thought, and reflect on the meaning of realism, in the first
volume of his memoirs, an extract of which appears below.
We find Kennan in the
summer of 1944 describing his return to the Moscow embassy and feeling great
oppression over the restrictions on his contact with ordinary Russians. Kennan,
like all foreign diplomats, was “viewed with suspicion and held at arm’s length
from Soviet citizens” by the secret police, but he got about town by pretending
he was nobody. He reports an extended dialogue with a Soviet acquaintance in
which Kennan implores, fruitlessly, for a less maniacally closed society. The Russian
parts with a warning: (886 words)
“We are being very successful these
days, “he said. “The more successful we are, the less we care about foreign
opinion. This is something you should bear in mind about the Russian. The
better things go for him, the more arrogant he is. That applies to all of us,
in the government and out of it. It is only when we are having hard sledding
that we are meek and mild and conciliatory. When we are successful, keep out of
our way.”
* * *
* * *
On another Sunday morning in that
same summer of 1944 I had the unpleasant experience of standing at the curb on
one of the great boulevards near Spaso House [the ambassador’s residence] and
watching the passage of some fifty thousand German prisoners in process of
being marched several miles across town from one railway station to another.
The object of the operation was plainly to make a spectacle of the men before
the population of the city.
It was a hot day. The rays of the
sun were already dancing over the vast expanse of asphalt which the boulevard
presented. The men, presumably just out of freight cars, were obviously
exhausted and — I have no doubt — hungry. They were marched, purposely, at a
fast clip. Now and then, mounted Soviet guards — members, apparently, of the
border and internal guard units of the police establishment — rode their horses
brutally into the rear ranks of the densely arranged units, forcing the men to
stumble about and to run on the double quick. Occasionally, one or another of
them fainted and was hauled off to the gutter, to be picked up afterward.
It was not a very great brutality,
as brutalities of war go. The Germans, God knows, had done many times worse,
and on a scale far greater, with the Russian prisoners taken in the first
summer of the war, permitting hundreds of thousands if not millions to die of
hunger and exposure in the stockades, and then mistreating the survivors in a
thousand different ways. Even compared to the fate that awaited these same
German prisoners when they arrived at their unknown destinations, for hard
labor or confinement, the ordeal they were now undergoing on the boulevard was,
I suspect, a minor one.
Still, I came away from the sight
shaken, saddened, and unsatisfied. These prisoners were young men — many of
them no older, surely, than our college students. Five years ago, when the war
began, they had been mere boys. Each had a home and a mother somewhere; and not
even the strongest revulsion to the Nazi system could let one forget that many
of these homes must have been decent ones, marked by affection, tenderness, and
a genuine political helplessness, if not innocence. How these young men would
have behaved had they grown older and achieved personal power and
responsibility, no one could tell. But surely they had never been consulted
about the great issues of this war, still less about the abominations of the
Nazi system. Their presence at the front was not their doing. As front line
fighting men, it was not to be assumed that they had been prominently involved
in the beastliness perpetrated by the Gestapo, the SS, and the punitive police
detachments in the rear of the German lines. Was it right, then, I asked
myself, to punish them all for the acts of a government to whose power their
fathers had consigned them already as children and whose policies they had
never had the faintest opportunity to oppose? Was brutality ever sanctioned, or
sanctionable, as a measure of revenge? If one fought against an enemy
ostensibly because of his methods, and permitted oneself to be impelled by the
heat of the struggle to adopt those same methods, who, then, could be said to
have won? Who was it, in this situation, who had imposed his methods on the
other? Whose outlook could be said to have triumphed?
I recognized, at that moment, that
I stood temperamentally outside the passions of war — and always would. I had
my moments of indignation, many of them; the days, in fact, were seldom without
them. Wherever I lived — in Berlin, in Moscow, in Washington —the evidences in
the daily prints of hypocrisy, of deliberate falsehood, of vindictiveness and
pettiness of spirit, had never failed, and never would fail in the future, to
send me into elaborate physical heavings, and mutterings of outraged sentiment.
The family came to know these unfailing symptoms. But it was primarily against
people's methods rather than against their objectives that indignation mounted
in such moments. Objectives were normally vainglorious, unreal, extravagant,
even pathetic — little likely to be realized, scarcely to be taken seriously.
People had to have them, or to believe they had them. It was part of their
weakness as human beings. But methods were another matter. These were real. It
was out of their immediate effects that the quality of life was really molded.
In war as in peace I found myself concerned less with what people thought they
were striving for than with the manner in which they strove for it. Whatever
such an outlook implied — whether weakness of character or qualities less
reprehensible (and on this question there will never, I am sure, be wide
agreement) — I was never a man for causes.
