Free George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis

move from a sphere in which I have occasionally . . . accomplish[ed] things despite a great number of diversions to one where I keep the diversions and dispense with the accomplishment.” 2
    Kennan and Oppenheimer had first met at the National War College in the fall of 1946. “He shuffled diffidently and almost apologetically out to the podium,” Kennan remembered,
    a frail, stooped figure in a heavy brown tweed suit with trousers that were baggy and too long, big feet that turned outward, and a small head and face that caused him, at times, to look strangely like a young student. He then proceeded to speak for nearly an hour, without the use of notes—but with such startling lucidity and precision of expression that when he had finished, no one dared ask a question—everyone was sure that somehow or other he had answered every possible point. I say “somehow or other,” because, curiously enough, no one could remember exactly what he said.
    They then become consultants to one another. Oppenheimer advised Kennan on European federation—not very successfully—when the Policy Planning Staff considered that issue in the summer of 1949. Kennan advised Oppenheimer, in turn, on what the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission should recommend with respect to the “super” bomb: Oppenheimer chaired its General Advisory Committee. Despite his reservations about Acheson’s suggested moratorium, Oppenheimer found the new weapon as abhorrent as Kennan did, and strongly opposed building it. Kennan’s long January 1950 report, Oppenheimer’s biographers have observed, might as well have been coauthored with him. 3
    “Could there be,” Kennan wrote of Oppenheimer after his death, “anyone harder to describe than he? . . . [P]art scientist, part poet; sometimes proud, sometimes humble; in some ways formidably competent in practical matters, in other ways woefully helpless: he was a bundle of marvelous contradictions.” To many, he seemed abrasive.
    The shattering quickness and critical power of his own mind made him, no doubt, impatient of the ponderous, the obvious, and the platitudinous, in the discourse of others. But underneath this edgy impatience there lay one of the most sentimental of natures, an enormous thirst for friendship and affection, and a touching belief—such as I have never observed in anyone else—in what he thought should be the fraternity of advanced scholarship.
    Thanks to Oppenheimer, the Institute for Advanced Study became Kennan’s professional and intellectual home for the next half century: he would spend twice as many years there as he did in the Foreign Service. Oppenheimer saw in Kennan—as Kennan saw in Oppenheimer—something of himself.

I.
    The Kennans arrived in Princeton on Sunday, September 10, 1950, unpacked their belongings in the house they had rented, and stashed young Christopher in a playpen. There he stood, George recalled, “leaning his head idyllically on his arm (belying, in this peaceful pose, . . . the more frantic tendencies of later years).” Outside, mists rose on the meadows, while crickets soothed with their dreamlike drone. On Monday Kennan spent his first day at the Institute. A gentle rain was falling, “an English sort of rain,” as though deferring “to the quiet green of the place.”
    Oppenheimer welcomed him with two pieces of advice. One was not to try to write anything immediately, but rather to use his first months at the Institute for unsystematic reading, to broaden what Kennan knew to be “an intense but narrow educational experience.” The other was to learn “that there is nothing harder in life than to have nothing before you but the blank page and nothing to do but your best.” Savoring the suggestion, impressed by the admonition, “I installed myself in my new office, with windows looking out over the fields to the woods, and had a sense of peace and happiness such as I have not had for a long time.” 4
    Kennan promised Acheson that he would