Princetonian ideals embodied in Kennan

George F. Kennan, '25 died on Thursday. He was a great Princetonian, a great American, a great world citizen. He was a true statesman. He was a writer of rare power and precision. How many telegrams deserve a place of honor in an anthology of English prose? He understood the unique roles of education, educational institutions and scholarship in the furtherance of peace and understanding in a world in which, in Arnold's increasingly prophetic line, "ignorant armies clash by night." George Kennan was, in short, a great man. The aspirations of our potentially pompous motto — "Princeton in the nation's service, and in the service of all nations" — find their rare fulfillment in such a life.

Kennan was a Princetonian in more than one sense. An alumnus, he also spent many influential years as a senior scholar of the Institute for Advanced Study. He lived in this town for many decades, and he died here. The 'Prince' editors, rightly recognizing an occasion of unusual "local" importance, decided to postpone the column for which I had already submitted copy. I am a professional expert neither in foreign relations nor in Sovietology, and I hope the paper will have secured appropriate commentary from relevant experts. I feel authorized to offer some opinion, however, since I did know Mr. Kennan personally, if slightly, in a context to which I shall return, and since I am an intelligent American citizen gratefully aware of having survived the Cold War thanks, in no small measure, to Kennan's sagacity.

Former President Ronald Reagan earned the scorn of many of my colleagues for calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire." I wonder just which half of that expression they failed to understand. Was it the "imperial" part — the brutal, forcible domination of vast geographical areas and large numbers of national and linguistic populations? Or was it the "evil" part — including, but by no means exhausted by, the murder by bullet, starvation, hypothermia, slave labor or simple governmental incompetence of 20 or 30 million Soviet citizens?

The "short 20th century" (1917-1991) is defined by the successive criminal regimes in power in Soviet Russia under the leadership of Lenin, Stalin, and their lesser epigones — all of them men, in the words of the great Russian patriot and humanist Alexander Yakovlev, "by every norm of international law, posthumously indictable for crimes against humanity."

We came out of WWII largely unprepared to face the reality of the Soviet menace. That Franklin Roosevelt could blithely send Harry Hopkins (a "political illiterate" in the apt phrase of Sidney Hook) to come to a gentleman's agreement with Joseph Stalin attests to the pitiful naiveté of our leaders' grasp of the realities of Communist ambitions. Sobering experience in eastern Europe and the "Kennan doctrine" — the doctrine of the "long telegram" and the famous "X" article — awakened us to reality none too soon.

Mr. Kennan was an American patriot, but by no means an American triumphalist. He though that America could best lead not by offering extension courses in democracy but "by keeping our own house in order" and by offering enviable examples to be emulated rather than theories to be hawked. He loved Russia and its long-suffering citizenry, and he never confused the victim and the victimizer. It must have given him great pleasure to live to see at least the labor pains if not the actual birth of Russian liberty.

The context in which I knew him slightly two decades ago or more was that of fellow worshippers at Trinity Church in Princeton. He favored the early service, which I rarely attended, so our paths seldom crossed. But we did have occasional conversations, and though he shunned any public congregational role, he led at least one educational forum for our congregants. It is perhaps worth remembering one important aspect of the man revealed in that circumstance, of which there is no hint in the long obituary in "The New York Times." Mr. Kennan said that the consistent inspiration of his life's vocation were the fundamental principles of the Gospels. He also believed that those same principles, despite six decades of relentless state-sponsored atheism and cruelly fomented "class war," had in the Russian soil and in the Russian soul a subterranean and tuberous vitality that might again one day flourish in vine and flower. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.