27 January 1981
Anders Stephanson
532 W 111th St., Apt 65
New York, ny 10025
Dear Professor Kennan,
I imagine that the heralding of yet another doctoral dissertation on your personal contribution to the formulation of American foreign policy will bring mixed feelings on your part. The formal reason for my missive here is to inquire about the precise regulations concerning citation and quotation from your papers at Princeton, but after much deliberation I have decided to use this occasion to explain in some detail who I am, whence I stem, and what I intend to do (for which purpose I enclose my dissertation prospectus, or, more precisely, a version of it intended to show the relevance of ethics for my project), so as to possibly allay some of the apprehensions you may justifiably harbour. I am, in other words, quite aware that many previous efforts in this vein, that is, by well-meaning but inexperienced (sometimes sloppy) doctoral students, give ample cause for unease about such fundamental aspects as correct quoting, not to mention interpretation in general.
A biographical note, then, is in order here. Let it be said, first, that I am Swedish. My interest in American history goes back to the early 1960s when I took a childish delight in learning the names of foreign ministers and nourished a strong admiration for J. F. Kennedy. It was as a liberal 16-year-old that I went to the United States in 1966 to study at a High School for a year. I disliked this intensely for about 6 months, as I had been placed in a small, conservative (culturally) city in the upper parts of Michigan—it was called Cadillac, after the explorer not the car—and that milieu was vastly different from the free-flowing Europe of 1966. I was enclosed by what I thought was an enormously oppressive conformity in every sphere of human life. But after a while I and my surroundings managed to establish a modus vivendi to everyone’s mutual satisfaction. In retrospect, I have always considered this experience, although painful in many ways (having one’s hair cut at that age, especially in 1966, was in fact immensely painful), a very valuable one: it gave me what I think is an accurate sense of how the average American thinks and feels, something which the European normally lacks and cannot acquire by going to New York or Los Angeles. I also learned to accept a healthy measure of discipline, although unwillingly. Perhaps I should qualify that: I learned the limits of pubescent revolt for the adolescent tends naturally to exaggerate the importance of exteriority.
Intellectually, this year was also a continuous struggle. It was hard to have, as I did, a critical view of the American position in Vietnam and still be accepted. To no little degree I succeeded in this by being unabashedly enthusiastic about school sports and by earning a letter in tennis. However, having argued heatedly for a year I came back as a socialist and during the following critical years of the 1960s this stance developed along lines which now seem almost a caricature. By way of anarchism, and the fascination Western Europeans always felt for the utopian element in the Cultural Revolution in China, I ended up as a non-Communist Marxist around 1970. In a way I still consider myself that although now, a decade later, it is with discomfort and reservations that I do so. The sort of Marxism I finally came to accept in 1970 was primarily influenced by French structuralism (Louis Althusser) and based on what really was a drastic rearranging of the central themes in Marx’s work. It was directed against orthodoxy in that it stressed the necessity for a scientific, as opposed to ideological, Marxism. Moreover, it emphasized that a given society contains spheres which are relatively autonomous from one another, and in which the economy only determines in the last instance. This ended the traditional Marxist deflation of every phenomenon into economic terms.
Since then, to make a long story quite short, several other shortcomings of traditional Marxism have become more than apparent to me. Marx himself, who surpassed by a wide margin his descendants in prescience and depth, nonetheless wrote in the mental universe of 19th-century teleology, not entirely removed from the Romantic bourgeois vision of man’s conquest of nature and the final end of history. Through the German social democrats and later their stepchildren in Russia, Marxism became a rigid theory of historical stages centred on the productive apparatus, which assumed the character of an independent machine, developing through time completely on its own. Marxism became a teleological economism. The terminus here is of course Russian Communism with its supreme reliance on production and technorationalism, the idea of socialism as a well-run and planned version of ‘mature’ capitalism. With this I have no sympathy at all.
Nor do I support the concomitant claims of Marxism/Communism as regards truth—or for that matter politics. Marxism is in every way an unfinished business as a theory, only now subjected to proper debates outside the narrow confines of political allegiances. Perhaps we will witness the emergence of a new theoretical understanding of Western man as a result of these discussions. Possibly it will also bring some urgently needed remedies for our present maladies. But it shan’t be Marxism as we have known it till now. Above all, it must be liberated from the prison house of Leninist ideas of avant-garde parties and commissars.
What I reveal here is the well-known fact that it is difficult to be a Western European Marxist, especially if one does not belong to the Communist Party. As a Swede I have always thought the Soviet Union an ominous shadow. On the other hand, along with my fellow Scandinavians, I have a deep affinity with Western culture and liberalism (and I come, typically, from an Anglophile middle-class family). To stake out a decent political and economic order, with guaranteed liberties as we know them today in the West (often, of course, the result of working-class efforts and social-democratic parties), in the present geopolitical climate is, then, at once the task and the harrowing despair of Western Marxists. I am not a social democrat because I think that, in their own way, these parties are products of the same technicism/economism as Communism; today they have run out of ideas, having found out that accumulating material wealth for distribution to the lower classes is, if based on ordinary capitalist norms of waste and brutality in the economic sphere, just as hollow in the end as the forthright capitalist society as such. Welfare capitalism, after all, is not a particularly elevating sight today. Economic security, relatively speaking, but boring jobs and an alienated existence is what we have got in Sweden.
This was a spontaneous digression, which, on reflection, I let stand as it is, because it sheds some light on my present concerns, disorderly as they are. But I must return to chronology now. I studied history, economics and politics at Gothenburg University and majored in American history, a major I created myself. I sought an answer to the time-honoured question why there was no socialist pole in the United States, and in that pursuit I wrote a couple of monumental surveys over the history of the American working class and what not. Looking back at them, I can only say that they were necessary stepping stones. I planned to write a dissertation on the Communist Party in the 1930s as I envisaged this period as the last one in which a Socialist politics of any kind could have made inroads in this country. I graduated in 1975 and through fortuitous circumstances I commenced graduate studies at Oxford that year (New College). I read for the B. Phil in American history which I received in 1977. This was not a thesis-oriented degree. It gave me a splendid possibility to read copious amounts of American history and discuss it with competent professors and tutors, something which I had sorely lacked before (as this field is underdeveloped in Sweden). I also enjoyed Oxford immensely, perhaps on account of my Anglophile background. I was especially impressed by the extraordinary tolerance that my tutors displayed towards me and my sometimes silly views; despite disagreements they appeared to like what I said. It is also possible that they were so stunned by the spectacle of a Swede reading American history at Oxford that they did not have the heart to demolish my intellectual claims.
Another set of circumstances, mainly a scholarship, brought me to Columbia’s history department and its PhD programme. I had written a minor thesis at Oxford on the cpusa and the Rooseveltian State (a somewhat pompous way of saying the New Deal, which I probably thought was a suspect term). My plan was to see how they analysed this peculiar formation and how their strategy followed from it. I anticipated that this project would reveal if there was a dissertation to be written about the Left in general during the 1930s. Quite frankly, I got so enormously bored reading a decade’s worth of the Daily Worker that I quickly resolved not to pursue this any further. A thesis did follow, however, causing raised eyebrows on the part of some dons, and later an article I wrote for the Radical History Review. This American journal planned (and just published) an issue on Communism. My contribution was rejected after 14 months of controversy, the reason being, I am reasonably certain, that it was too critical of the old comrades and especially of the Popular Front period which seems to hold considerable sway over today’s radical Americans. Oddly, my piece was understood by non-Marxist historians and Marxist non-historians but not by any radical historians. My chief claim was that the Marxism of the Comintern and the ussr, if indeed it was a Marxism, inhibited and ruined all attempts to understand the New Deal, and that the most interesting aspect about the cpusa at the time was precisely how the Stalinism of the Comintern thwarted its conceptual development. But today the governing idea is to look for ‘polycentrist’ roots to differences between various Communist parties, a kind of grandiose sociology of Communism. This may be a worthy project but it is not interesting to me.
The upshot of this endeavour was that I had to look for another area for my dissertation. After the customary two and a half years of graduate course work, I began searching seriously in the spring of 1978. My initial inspiration came from reading your Memoirs. It served to reawaken my old interest in foreign policy, but, more specifically, it put into sharp focus the conceptual problems of formulating policy in this country, given its peculiar composition. I was particularly struck by the remarks about Scandinavia and neutrality. It seemed silly to me to subject Social Democratic governments to pressure so as to make them adhere to an American-led alliance, assuming that the prevention of Russian expansionism was the underlying concept: these regimes would be far better equipped to do this on their own if we accept the improbability of a Russian march to the Atlantic. However, this field of inquiry was already occupied by Geir Lundestad, whose work I have since reviewed for a leading Swedish daily in a favourable way. I then tried to find any coherent grouping in the State Department arguing support for what later became known as ‘the Non-Communist Left’, as a means of stopping Russian expansionism and the collapse of American influence, i.e., to avoid identification with compromised forces on the Right. I found, indeed, that Bohlen, and to some extent, Harriman, espoused this position at various points but never that forcefully. Nor did it appear to have been supported by any distinct group within the Department. By this stage of my inquiries I had come to the conclusion that the most interesting memoranda came from your pen, although I did not always agree with them, and that if I were to sustain interest in the dissertation for another three or four years I would have to write with your work as the focus. I am being very serious when I say this.
Since then I have worked my way through the National Archives, the disappointing Truman library and your papers at Princeton. I have waited with this letter for a long time as I wished to be quite sure about what I was doing before I bothered you. Much of what I intend to cover is explained in my prospectus. It was, however, written mainly for a bigger audience of American historians, some of whom would perhaps take a stern view of dissertations projected to deal with something as ephemeral and abstract as ‘concepts’. In other words: it might have sounded a bit too philosophical in tone if I included any precise discussion of methodology. Some additional remarks on this subject are therefore in order here.
American history in this field is of course enormously politicized. Given the great power position of this country, I suppose that this situation is inevitable. From my point of view, it is nonetheless in some ways deplorable. One has to wade through, to be perfectly candid, tremendous amounts of ideological nonsense, from left to right. I should point out, in this context, that I nourish no particular like, intellectually, for the so-called ‘revisionist’ school, and certainly not for the idealist Williams school. In many ways it is in fact the very mirror image of the official type of history it opposes. Williams himself, although probably well-meaning, is a very confused historian theoretically and frequently quite inordinately loose in his method. So are many of his opponents, however, and I think this is product of the aforementioned politicization.
One can discern two aspects of the problem regarding method. There is, first, the normal questions arising out of any historical inquiry, questions of procedure as it were. Who has written this and at what time and under what conditions? Can I be sure that this is so and with what qualifications do I say so? How can I accurately transform a wide set of sources into a comprehensive argument/thesis without wreaking violence on the original? In this field I am fortunate in having been schooled in the admirable Scandinavian tradition of source criticism, a tradition which today is somewhat locked into that concern but nevertheless gave me a certain alertness to these fundamentals.
There is then the more vexing problem of metatheory. In the deepest sense this clearly involves what one defines as the limits of one’s inquiry, in fact its very character. I am not an adherent of empiricist history, which is to say, I do not consider the historian’s task simply one of uncovering what is already given, of revealing that which is buried under dust. Every raw material is to my mind structured according to our ways of reading; reading, that is, history through the texts which after all compose our raw materials. Nothing, in other words, is ever immediately given. The historian must be aware that he is constructing his own problematic (Problematik/ique: I am using this non-English notion because it is more adequate for my needs than ‘problem’), and that it is in the nature of a problematic that it represses and delimits its field of inquiry. My problematic has yet to be properly construed. I am convinced that you establish what one might call a ‘discursive formation’ with your Long Telegram of 1946: until that time you may have spoken the truth, but you did not speak within the truth. To put it differently, a new type of discourse is made possible by your intervention, a discourse based on different concepts and arranged in new ways. But I am further convinced that, once established, a formation like this turns on its origin and develops in directions not intended. It has, so to speak, a dynamic of its own. Its language is expropriated and transformed. In general terms it is this complex of questions I wish to analyse. My remarks, influenced as they undoubtedly are by French structuralist thought, may seem an artificial way of saying something quite simple. But, for better or worse, it is how I think, and it is to convey that process that I write to you.
I undertake this not only because I would be bored with other analyses of the State Department of the epoch in question, but because I am astounded that no one has actually written anything thorough on your intellectual contribution. I obviously imply by saying so that I consider this contribution important not only for its role in producing policy in this historical period, but also for its intrinsic value as a conservative point of view. To a certain extent it is to render clear in my own mind why and how it is possible for me to have very similar views from an entirely different angle, that I wish to write this treatise. And to write this sort of thing is to engage in a silent dialogue with one’s sources.
In rambling form I have tried to give a glimpse of my background, pursuits and approach. I hope you will excuse this procedure which probably borders on the indulgent at times. But it was ultimately the only way I could pose the question, which is a startlingly simply one: on what conditions can I quote your papers?
As to that, I can only say that I have no intention of cutting up your sentences to give the appearance of a quote. I would either summarise in my own words what I take to be your meaning with appropriate references or give entire paragraphs. I would not only be willing to have you strike out any quote you deem misused or inappropriate but would very much appreciate such assistance.
New York as above.
Very Sincerely Yours,
Anders Stephanson
P.S. The enclosed prospectus unduly stresses the question of ethics. It was written for a scholarship fund which requires an explanation why one’s work is relevant to religious or ethical problems. It was rather hastily composed. I am not even certain that the ethical aspect is correctly formulated. But this apart, the paper gives an accurate depiction of the state of affairs. D.S.
P.S. 2. Within the truth: that which is knowledge in a specific epoch, i.e., the accepted limit of knowledge and truth, that which can be spoken of. D.S.
9 February 1981
School of Historical Studies
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
Dear Mr Stephanson:
Although I must confess that I don’t often read a stranger’s letter as long as yours, I recognized it as a thoughtful and serious one—and did.
First, as to the central question: you are of course at liberty to work in the Kennan papers here. I appreciated what you say about your method of quoting. This is quite important, and I am reassured by what you say. I would indeed appreciate it if you would, in quoting individual sentences or groups of them, look carefully at the context to make sure that the quotation in isolation does not give a misimpression. There have been many instances in which my statements have been reproduced in quite a different way.
Now, one or two observations about your project:
You say that ‘once established, a formation like this turns on its origin and develops in directions not intended’. This is not only very true, but it has deep implications for the way a significant body of thought, coming to public attention, becomes transmuted, oversimplified or distorted, and in the end used for purposes quite other than those it was originally intended to serve.
How valuable was my own contribution, historically viewed, is not for me to say. I see it myself as something erected on a relatively primitive provincial educational basis, and erected not on the basis of any systematic deductive reasoning, and not even in any orderly manner at all, but by a series of occasional intuitive insights—many of them stimulated by things others said, the force of which suddenly became apparent to me, but all of them leading, in their entirety, to a very old-fashioned view of what American policy might be and ought to be. It was a view quite similar to that of some of the founding fathers of this country, as for example: John Quincy Adams. It was basically an isolationist view, based on the principles of shaping our foreign policies to the needs of the qualitative development of our own society, of a recognition of the uniqueness of our society and its professed ideals, of the irrelevance of our national experience for the problems of others, and hence of a rigid abstention from self-idealization and a belief in influencing others (if at all) by example rather than by precept.
Much of what I wrote about problems of foreign policy was written, of course, from the standpoint of an American official charged with perceiving what could be done to assure the security of this country and recommending appropriate policies. The containment policy fell within this framework. It was simply a rather elementary concept of the desirable strategy for us to follow at a given juncture in world affairs. It consisted, as you probably know, of several very simple propositions: the military outcome of the Second World War, by placing the Russians in control of half of Europe, had seriously disbalanced the power relationships in Europe to our disadvantage and had opened up possibilities for further expansion of their power by means of political intrigue and intimidation. There was need for a realistic accommodation with them about the future of Europe, but until they could be shown that the situation had been stabilized, in the sense that further expansion of their power by non-military means was not feasible, it would be impossible to deal with them effectively. The first requirement therefore was to contain their expansionist tendencies in the crucial areas of Western Europe and Japan. Once this had been done, the day for negotiations would be at hand.
This, regardless of the intrinsic soundness of its premises, seems to me to have been a relatively simple and logical bit of reasoning. How, then, was it so poorly understood? Why, then, was it regarded as something little short of heresy and treason when, both before and after the Korean War, I tried to suggest (particularly in the Reith lectures) that the time of negotiation was at hand? How did it come about that in the 1970s this concept was held up to me as the rationale for a total militarization of policy on the Western side with universal implications?—and that I, by continuing to plead for some sort of realistic communication with the Soviet leadership in the interests of world peace, was perpetrating an act of betrayal with relation to the very concept I had enunciated? How, in other words, did the understanding of what I had said get carried so far away from what I had meant by it? To what extent did this distortion arise from deficiencies in the way I had expressed my own case, and to what extent from a tendency of historically-developing opinion to perform an act of distortion on any widely noted system of political thought?
These, it seems to me, are questions which still need examination; and to the extent you can clarify them I, for one, will think you have done an important service. Your greatest danger will be sheer boredom with the great mass of material, with the inevitable repetitions, with the monotony of style unavoidable in a great many statements made by the same man for a great many different occasions. I would prefer to be involved as little as possible with the process of your inquiry and with the conclusions. Kindly regard me, for purposes of your study, as largely dead. So much has flowed over the dam since many of these things were written that this would not be wholly unjustified. But beyond that, my subjective reactions should not be permitted to pollute anyone else’s objective exploration of what I have said and written.
Good luck.
Very sincerely,
George Kennan
7 November 1985
532 West 111th Street
New York, ny 10025
Dear Professor Kennan,
I am enclosing parts of a dissertation, the character of which I sketched very briefly to you some years ago. It has taken much longer than I anticipated, which I suppose is often the case with these things. As it stands, I have another section of approximately 50–75 pages to write; but I wanted to convey some of it to you in advance of that part. In responding to my initial query—or announcement is perhaps more accurate—you expressed interest and encouragement but wished not to be concerned with the work in any capacity. I thought that a sensible position and still do. The reason I am transmitting this embryonic tome is thus not really to try to involve you in any substantial way. It is, rather, to ask if there are any egregious errors of fact, things which have nothing to do with the argument or arguments but which would seriously detract from the scientific (in the sense of Wissenschaft) value of the thesis. I realize that this is asking a lot in view of your limited time and wide-ranging interests, and I will understand you completely if you choose not to look at the brick in question. I have not included the first two chapters on the Soviet problematic since I now find them too polemical and much in need of revision. The rest, however, gives a fair representation of my present views, with some incidental exaggeration in the direction of polemical excess. I am sure you will disagree with much of it; but hope you will take it for what it is, namely, a serious attempt to engage with a body of historical materials.
Many regards,
Anders Stephanson
P.S. There are still typos and some obvious linguistic errors, for which apologies and so on. D.S.
P.S. 2. Needless to say, this is a draft and not for circulation though I doubt anyone would be terribly interested at this early stage. D.S.
15 November 1985
Dear Mr Stephanson:
I received only two days ago the typescript of what I take to be the body of your dissertation. Obviously, I have not been able to read it, in this short time, with the care that it deserves but I have perused it with great interest, and feel moved to give you what may be taken to serve as an interim reaction. When and if I can give the material a more careful reading, I may or may not wish to write further, depending on how helpful I think it might be.
In these circumstances, I do not want to pass any final critical judgement on what you have done (I am indeed not the proper one to do so); but I do feel obliged to tell you that this appears to me to be a most impressive work reflecting not only an immense amount of focused reading for the particular purpose at hand but also a most unusual erudition in many fields of political theory and philosophy. It must, of course, be published at some time and in some way; and I will welcome its appearance.
Because the work is so extensively analytical rather than narrative or descriptive, there was very little room in it for ‘egregious errors of fact’ or for things that ‘would seriously detract’ from its scientific value. The only points I have noted in this cursory reading are mostly trivial ones—so trivial that I hesitate to mention them in this letter and am doing so only on the attached sheet of paper. There may be more of such trivia when I read the work more carefully.
As for general observations, the ones I would have to make at this point are partly ones already made in the letter I wrote in 1981, but they may be worth re-stating and amplifying here.
I have no doubt that the great bulk of your critical observations on my multitudinous utterances or writings (particularly in Part I) are well taken, and this causes me no pain or indignation. There were, of course, the limitations of my education and intellectual training to which I referred in my 1981 letter. There was also a tendency on my part (or so it seems to me) to overstate for the sake of persuasiveness. And there was the fact that a great many of these documents on which you have drawn were speeches or lectures not the result of my own initiative but provoked out of me by the demands or needlings of others, responsive only to immediate situations, and obviously not put forward as integral components of any coherent structure of thought. Very often, their inspiration was primarily a negative one: the desire to refute a view on the part of others which I took to be erroneous and misleading. In these instances the very enthusiasm for the refutation caused me to rise to rhetorical heights which I recognize today as excessive. Finally, I see (your observations have brought this home to me with even greater clarity) that I was indeed seriously confused in my views about Germany before, during, and just after the war. The course of events in Western Germany in the immediate post-hostilities period, and later, did not at all correspond with my earlier expectations. This is certainly a sign that I had not looked sufficiently deeply or perhaps had overrated not only my own ability but that of anyone else to make sense out of the bewildering phenomena I was then brought to observe. It might be remembered that in the two and a half (not two) years I had spent in the Berlin embassy during the war my duties were exclusively of an administrative nature. I was never asked to do any reporting; and any qualities I might have had as an observer and student of the German scene were not used or given possibilities for development—this despite the fact that I had a more extensive background of life in Germany, and a better command of the German language, than any of my colleagues. I was never asked nor permitted to give to German affairs the systematic and schooled attention I had given, for many years, to Russian ones; and the erraticism of my reactions during the war and in the post-hostilities period may have had something to do with this. But those reactions were also coloured by the intense repugnance I felt for the great fat American occupational establishment, with its silly comforts and privileges, and my desire to see it disappear from the scene at the earliest possible moment.
As for the apparent conflict between early dreams of German dismemberment and later plans for German unification within the framework of Soviet-American disengagement: it was plain, by 1949, (a) that the other Western governments were not to be had for the sort of federalism into which the component parts of a dismembered Germany could have been fitted, and without which dismemberment would have made little sense; whereas (b) to re-arm Western Germany and take it into nato would intensify the division of Europe and render it irremovable for decades into the future. This last prospect was one I deplored, not only for the reason you mention (that this division left no place for the eastern European countries to move to, if ever they should feel that they could weaken their ties to the ussr) but also because it left no room for a solution of the Berlin problem. I had lived five years of my life in Berlin; I attached high importance to the continuing vitality of that city as a factor in German life and as a potential connecting link between East and West.
In the light of your perceptive critical observations I see my own greatest usefulness of earlier years not (with certain exceptions) in the direct influencing of foreign policy, and certainly not in producing anything like a systematic political philosophy or doctrine of American foreign policy, but rather in challenging and stimulating the thinking of my superiors and colleagues, or my successors, in government. But I am afraid that in trying to do this I was, in many instances, overrating their capacity to react to what I had to offer. These were estimable people; and I do not mean to imply that they were themselves fools, but they remind me in some respects of the fools of whom Goethe’s Mephistopheles said: ‘Wenn sie den Stein der Weisen hatten, der Weise fehlte dann dem Stein.’footnote1
Two afterthoughts:
Concerning the designation ‘totalitarianism’: I have long considered that the most significant distinction between totalitarianism (a term that I have used primarily only with respect to Hitler’s regime in Germany and Stalin’s in Russia) was that under totalitarianism people were punished and killed on a massive scale not for any offense they had committed but for irrelevant and despicable reasons: for the offenses they were thought capable or desirous of committing (but hadn’t), for their membership in categories of people it was thought desirable to destroy en masse, etc.—whereas under normal authoritarian regimes people were normally persecuted only for violating established norms limiting the extent to which they might go in opposing the regime.
You will find in the Winter issue of Foreign Affairs an article from my pen that will, I hope, clarify some of my ideas on the relationship of morality to foreign policy.
Very sincerely,
George Kennan
Minor comments on Mr Stephanson’s typescript
Part 1. Page 75—mid-page. I actually returned to the Soviet Union for the first time, after the 1952 debacle, in 1964.
Part 1. Page 92. In your footnote, number 51, I wonder whether you should not make a distinction between the respective motivations of the French and British and the Americans for the intervention in Russia. Wilson was adamantly opposed to any sort of interference in Russian internal affairs and would never have consented to see American forces used for the overthrow of Soviet power, had the other allies been candid in the demands they made so insistently for the dispatch of American troops to that country. Even in the case of the French and British, considerations of the defeat of Germany weighed more heavily on the initiation of the intervention than did any desire to overthrow communist rule. In giving a contrary impression, are you not associating yourself with the usual Soviet distortion of this historical episode?
Part 1. Page 93–94. Footnote 59. The pps papers have now been published in three volumes by Garland Publishing Inc. New York and London, 1983. I have never seen the volumes reviewed or noted in the press.
Part 2. Page 2. The pps consisted of 3 and a half people only at the very outset. It soon grew to a staff of about 9 officers and 2 clerical helpers.
Part 2. Page 24. At the end of this page you refer to Moscow’s decision, in 1947–48, to clamp down on Czechoslovakia. You might wish to note that in a resumé of the world situation (pps/13) submitted to General Marshall on November 6, 1947 it was unambiguously predicted that if the political trend in Europe began to turn against the communist side, the Kremlin would have no choice but to clamp down completely on Czechoslovakia.
Part 2. Page 54. Line 9 from the bottom. Although I have occasionally lectured to academic audiences in Germany, I never ‘taught’ there. For two years, from 1929 through 1931, I studied in Berlin at the Seminary for Oriental Languages at the University of Berlin, taking the diploma of the Seminary, in Russian language and other studies, in 1930.
Chapter 6. Page 20. I question the reference, at the bottom of the page, to Tito’s ‘nationalism’. I do not know what is meant by this. It was often said in Yugoslavia that Tito, who was personally a curious mixture of Croat, Slovene and Hungarian, was the only real ‘Yugoslav’, the rest being all Serbians or Croats or Macedonians or what have you. Do you mean by the reference to his nationalism, his resistance to domination by Moscow? That was quite another thing.
One more observation. I cannot point to the page numbers, but I come away from the reading with the impression that I had said the Soviet Union would always expand. What I thought and, I believe, tried to say was that the Soviet leaders would always have a tendency to expand the area of their power or influence; whether or not they would succeed would depend on the degree of resistance they encountered.
27 November 1985
532 West 111th Street
New York, ny 10025
Dear Professor Kennan,
I was much gratified by your kind comments on my no doubt rough draft/typescript; certainly, it was a most welcome surprise to receive such an extensive reply within such a short period of time. Your corrections are very helpful, and I was particularly interested to learn of the Berlin aspect which had entirely escaped my attention. I think I mention somewhere, however, that pps 13 was indeed prescient in pointing out the likelihood of a Czech clamp-down. Tito’s ‘nationalism’ is undoubtedly a somewhat dubious term in view of the multi-national character of his country. On the other hand, I still think it valid if seen, as you rightly suggest, in relation to his resistance to the Soviet attempts at encroachment. Finally, the notion that the Soviet Union would always expand is one which I do not wish to ascribe to you in truth, as it were: it is an inference, merely, that a contemporary reader could have drawn from certain metaphorical passages in some of your analyses and from the way in which you sometimes argued the opposite case (ironically), namely, that the Soviet Union would in fact not be able to expand. Judging from the contemporary reactions to your position, the image of an inherently ever-expanding essence of some kind was indeed always a most attractive one for the audience. This, of course, despite your clearly stated distinction between Moscow and Berlin (in its 1939 version).
Once again, my very warmest thanks for your comments!
Truly Yours
Anders Stephanson
P.S. I shall send you the third part—whenever it sees the light of day—which will deal with culture, country and critique from the margins of a fragmented society. D.S.
14 November 1986
532 W 111th St, #65
ny, ny 10025
Dear Professor Kennan,
I am sending to you, under separate cover, the version of my thesis I just submitted, at long last, to the history department here at Columbia. It is entitled ‘Kennan: Art and Foreign Policy’, of which you have already seen a partial and early version.
The introduction was written under severe time pressure and is certainly below par; the Soviet section is too long and detailed, in addition to which the basic argument about expansionism is somewhat muddled; and the final part about the cultural critique is scattered in structure, lacking a unifying thesis. That said, the work as a whole is not without virtues, and although it is not exactly what I once had in mind, it certainly bears a resemblance to the opus intended. I have tried to incorporate the added information and viewpoints you provided me with earlier; and I should be delighted, if you have the time and inclination, to get comments of a similar kind on the dissertation in its present form.
I quote you extensively and for two reasons. In the first place, it seems a dubious practice to paraphrase things which you often express with greater force and succinctness yourself. Second, I think it gives a better picture of what is actually being argued and thus makes less room for distortion. I realize, however, that this procedure occasionally might come close to improper appropriation. I also realise that there could be material I quote verbatim here that you might find objectionable for publication, likely for the example to be misunderstood in the present form (although I have tried throughout to minimize that possibility). I should be very grateful to hear your views on this question since the work would probably lend itself to publication in due course.
Sincerely Yours
Anders Stephanson
P.S. Dissertation defence will probably take place some time in mid-December.
25 November 1986
Dear Mr Stephanson:
I have your letter of the 14th, and have gone through (partly perused, partly read with greater care) some 400 pages of your thesis. If I write now, instead of waiting until I complete the reading, this is because the schedule for the next few days will scarcely permit that completion; yet I expect that with your defence of the thesis coming up in the near future, you would like to have my reaction at an early date.
Generally speaking, I am greatly impressed by the work you have produced here. Never have my views, published or unpublished, been treated to anything approaching the critical scrutiny you have addressed to them. I am indebted to you for the kindness, the seriousness and the discrimination with which you have treated them, as also for your readiness to treat my views on their merits, abstaining from criticism of the person, and consenting, by implication, to believe, or to assume, as Pasternak said of Stalin, that for me, too, the leading of a life was not like walking across a field. I consider, in short, that what you have produced here is a remarkable work, in a class by itself as a treatise on the chosen subject. So impressive are both the quantity and the quality of the labour that must have gone into it that I find myself doubting that the subject—my own casually evolved, groping, and frequently confused views on many subjects—could have been worth the effort. I hope that as you go on from this point you will find, at some juncture, a greater object for critical study and judgement.
As for the many quotations from my writings: the only ones I could question would of course be those that are taken from personal letters I wrote to friends and others over the course of the years or from unpublished fragments (primarily from the 1930s) of things I wrote, so to speak, ‘for the drawer’, a great many years ago, and in several instances never even intended for publication. Some of these materials ought probably never to have been left among those of my papers that were made available to inquirers at the Mudd Library; but if so, no one is to blame for the oversight but myself. They have now been mined and exploited, for purposes far less creditable than your own, by several people. I cannot object to your using them, and using them in a manner which gives a much fairer picture of them than they have received elsewhere. It seems to me, however, that every young man is entitled to a few odd flights of fancy, especially if he keeps them to himself and does not offer them for publication; so if you publish your thesis (as you certainly ought to do), I would be grateful if you would point out that these fanciful explorations ought not to be taken as evidence of what my thoughts might be half a century later, in a different epoch and against the background of an incomparably greater experience. They could be seen, at best, as symptomatic of the growth of an outlook, not responsibly expressive of it.
I can understand, from the reading of your work, how confusing my writings must appear to anyone who looks at them as seriously as you. They were actually written, as you will have seen, by several different persons: by one ‘inside’ and another ‘outside’ the confines of governmental responsibility; by one speaking to younger people (mostly students) and feeling himself obliged to give them a more affirmative and hopeful view of things than he really took, by another one speaking primarily to himself or to good friends and thus at liberty to recognize the full profundity and gravity of these problems as well as his own helplessness in the face of them. Beyond which there was, of course, my tendency to overstate my case for the sake of argument, or to oversimplify the thought for the sake of brevity in what were very often lectures or articles of restricted length.
You must remember that I was in many ways poorly educated, and in the field of political philosophy not at all. My thoughts were largely induced by encounters with the practical problems of work as a diplomat. They grew like topsy in response to the various positions and responsibilities and experiences this status brought with it. It is no wonder to me that they included many inconsistencies and contradictions. Also—I have never made any serious attempt to sort them out and to present them in a systematic coherent form. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, I believe, that he was unable to express in any pure theoretical form his philosophy of the law: he could express it only in a series of opinions, often dissenting ones, on individual court cases. I am in somewhat the same position. That these reactions might, if systematized, disciplined, and expressed in compact form, represent one way of looking at least at America’s foreign political problems, is possible. That pattern might be of value at least as a contrast to much of the current ‘conventional wisdom’; but it would be much too far from that ‘wisdom’ to have, I fear, much influence on the thinking of the generation now alive, and even less on official policy.
I shall be interested to know of the further fate of your thesis at the hands both of the examiners and, assuming that it will be published, of the publishers.
Very sincerely,
George Kennan
30 October 1991
Department of History
Columbia University in the City of New York
New York, ny 10027
Dear Professor Kennan,
While at a conference at Madison wi the other week—my first time in Wisconsin, incidentally, and I found Madison a very charming place—I had occasion to chat with a Soviet historian Vlad Zubok, now semi-permanently in the us. One of his projects is a large number of oral histories with Soviet policymakers, past and present. This is a particularly important task since, apparently so much of the decision-making took place off the books, as it were. In the course of one of these interviews, he was told that in 1944–45 Stalin warned his foreign policy staff explicitly about you: an ‘able and dangerous fellow that should be kept under close supervision’ or words to that effect. The interviewee overheard this remark personally, so it wasn’t hearsay. I tried to find out whether this was before or after the famous ‘balcony appearance’, but Zubok didn’t know.
At any rate, I thought the story might be of some interest to you.
Many regards,
Anders Stephanson
P.S. The conference in question was in honour of William A. Williams, who died last year. It was an exceedingly interesting event. Someone took it upon himself to count throughout the panels the number of references to other individuals than Williams; and indeed the most widely invoked figure was gfk. It occurred to me there and then that the parallels between the two of you are as striking and interesting as the differences. Community and limits are central themes, after all. D.S.
November 8, 1991
Dear Mr Stephanson:
Thank you for your kind letter of October 30th about your meeting with Mr Zubok in Madison. What he told you was of much interest to me.
I have kept very seriously in mind the book you devoted to the consistencies and inconsistencies of my political philosophy. I have it in mind to publish, at some not too far distant date, a small work attempting to clarify some of the questions you found so poorly answered in my writings to date; and, if this hope can be realized, I hope you will find the result interesting and enlightening. Your thoughtful criticisms, after all, were among the main sources of inspiration for such an effort.
Very sincerely,
George Kennan
3 April 1997
School of Historical Studies
Institute for Advanced Study
Olden Lane, Princeton, nj 08540
Dear Mr Stephanson:
Thank you for sending me the two documents enclosed with your note of the 4th of March. I shall not try to comment on the ‘Fourteen Notes’ but I would like to say a word or two about the paper on my ‘Abendland’.
Let me say first that this is an impressive and generally excellent paper. The relation of most of it to my own views and writings is somewhat tenuous; but that does not detract from its quality.
I don’t mind the reference, on p. 2, to the several contradictions or apparent inconsistencies in my views about the interrelationships of the countries of Europe. I would only point out that most of the views you mention were contingent ones—contingent in both space and in time. In space, because they had to take account of what had been done or was about to be done in the reordering of geographic borders. In time: because during the rapid changes marking the entire period of the Second World War, anyone’s views, and especially those of anyone responsibly engaged, as I was from time to time, had to take account of the rapid passage of events and of their effects on Europe’s possible or probable future. The unification of the continent, for example, was quite a different problem in 1946 that it had been several years earlier, simply because new realities had come into existence.
More important, however, were perhaps certain aspects of my own thinking which I have never, I believe, attempted to describe in any direct and coherent way, but which might be of interest to you, because I have the feeling that you have often been searching for such thinking and have been frustrated by the scantiness of the evidence for it. First of all, I have always been wary of attempts to place phenomena in categories. I have, for example, never had thoughts, so far as I can recall, about empires in general. I have always had to ask: which empire, how, and when? Some could be better or worse than others; but even that depended upon the development of surrounding circumstance.
If there are any generalities that could be rightly attributed to my thinking on national and international political problems, I would just say this: When it comes to the spatial dimensions of arrangements for the governing of peoples, i.e., local, state, or ‘sovereign’ governments, my view is usually—not that little is always good or great is bad, but that little tends to be better and greatness worse. I have come to the conclusion that the really great countries, such as China, Russia, ourselves, and perhaps India and Brazil as well, are dangers both to themselves and to others—not because they necessarily have any evil intentions, but because the effort to exert political control over such vast and varied numbers of human beings is too much—too much for democratic processes, too much even for effective despotic authority. That the little community, too, is always to some extent the scene of violence, stupidity, and petty cantankerousness, I fully recognize; but it permits, at the least, a greater degree of intimacy between the ruling and ruled, and that, it seems to me, is normally better than its opposite which is no intimacy at all.
Secondly, I hold the view that when it comes to all forms of popular democracy—of the direct consultation that is, of public opinion on problems confronting a legitimate government—justifiable as may be plebiscitary devices in local government (such as the New England town meeting or the old village council), the larger the area in which governmental power is to be applied, the less useful are such direct consultations of the views of the people, the more necessary it becomes to confine the task of the voter to the election of his representatives, and the less justification there is for calling upon him to participate directly in the solution of public problems. The reasons for this were put forward, as you may recall, in my Around the Cragged Hill (pp. 130–41).
Finally, I could only cite something of which you, I am sure, are fully cognizant: a deep distrust on my part for collective bodies and opinions of all sorts, and a preference for giving responsibility and the power of decision to individuals. This explains, I am sure, the respect I have occasionally shown for individual historical crowned heads or statesmen, and my distaste and wariness when it comes to the voiced opinions and actions of collective gremia. That collective decision-taking cannot always be avoided in a democratic system, I recognize. But I do feel that if the solution of problems by parliamentary action sometimes serves to avoid the worst, it also almost invariably avoids the best; and I find this a frequent source of sadness and discouragement.
So much then for the few positions of principle that I can discover, offhand, in my own thinking. Whether the confession of these inclinations will be of help to you, or otherwise, I cannot judge. But there they are.
Let me again congratulate you on the excellence of the paper you sent. I hope that it will find some suitable form of publication.
Very sincerely,
George Kennan