I felt impelled to write the long essay that follows after discovering Frank Costigliola’s acclaimed new biography of George Kennan. The initial topic is “the most extreme display of public effrontery I have ever encountered” — Kennan excoriating my fellow students at Swarthmore College in 1967, then refusing to take questions. My eventual topic is today’s students, whom I compare unfavorably with my sixties generation. I conclude: “Pace Kennan, at Swarthmore we ‘rebels’ never disrupted classroom instruction with chants. When I hear ‘From the River to the Sea!’, when Zionism is equated with colonialism, I become Kennan and Allan Bloom both. French Indochina was an example of colonialism. Israel – whatever one makes of its implementation or of its sorry fate today – was created in the wake of the holocaust, a logical beneficiary of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire. What, exactly, does today’s chant of the moment signify? ”
The most extreme display of public effrontery I have ever encountered was on December 9, 1967 — the day George Kennan came to Swarthmore College. The entire student body was required to attend. We duly proceeded to Clothier Hall to hear him anathematize us as lazy and stupid. When that was over, he took no questions and was whisked off campus while we gaped and shouted on the sidelines. Then approximately one-third of the student body (the total enrollment was only 1,200) converged on the administration building. The campus engineer appeared and said that if we did not vacate the second floor common room, the floor might collapse. As this was not a ruse, we left in a rage.
Not until the publication of Frank Costigliola’s new biography – Kennan: A Life between Worlds – did I realize that the Swarthmore speech of America’s most famous and influential Cold War foreign affairs officer was subsequently published in the New York Times Magazine. Or that a book ensued – Democracy and the Student Left – reproducing the speech in tandem with two addenda: 39 letters written in response, mainly by students and teachers from 21 institutions of higher education (not including Swarthmore), and a 100-page essay, “Mr. Kennan Replies.”
Re-encountering Kennan’s address, now titled “Rebels Without a Program,” I find it even more obnoxious than I remembered. But the greater surprise is Kennan’s “reply” — his discontents with America and with Americans, I discover, were substantially more profound than ours had been during the years of Vietnam and Watergate. And these anxieties and misgivings – he clearly foresaw the depredations of contaminated air and water, of media and social media, of politics and government — were prescient, even prophetic.
As I now appreciate, that “Rebels Without a Program” misdescribed his Swarthmore audience mattered not in the least to Kennan. His ostensible topic was a smokescreen. Neither then nor afterwards did he seriously attempt to ascertain who we were or what we thought. He had received a timely invitation to help celebrate the opening of the new Swarthmore College library. And his agenda was already set.
It’s a truism that each generation debunks the next as callow. Kennan subscribed to that axiom in 1967. And so do I in 2025. I cannot help it.
***
With “Rebels” at hand, I can succinctly document its contents.
We violated a university ideal: “the association of the process of learning with a certain remoteness from the contemporary scene.” In place of self-possession, we manifested “screaming tantrums and brawling in the streets.” We brandished “banners and epithets and obscenities and virtually meaningless slogans.” Our eyes were “glazed with anger and passion, too often dimmed as well by artificial abuse of the psychic structure that lies behind them.” We were “full of hatred and intolerance and often quite prepared to embrace violence as a source of change.” We threw stones, broke windows, overturned cars. As for those of us who were “hippies” and “flower people,” Kennan expressed “pity . . . not unmixed, in some instances, with horror.” Whereas we indulged in “certain sorts of stimuli” provoked by “chemical agencies,” only “through effort, through doing, through action – never through passive experience – [could] man grow creatively.” Kennan even disavowed “civil disobedience” as an instrument of protest in democratic societies. He concluded: “I know that behind all the extremisms – all the philosophical errors, all the egocentricities and all the oddities of dress and deportment – we have to do here with troubled and often pathetically appealing people, acting, however wisely or unwisely, out of sincerity and idealism.”
Of this list of attributes, the only ones recognizably pertinent to Kennan’s Swarthmore audience, I would say, were the widespread use of “chemical agencies” and the prevalence of “oddities of dress” – neither of which interfered with a regime stressing reading, writing, and talking. In fact, never since have I encountered a community as fundamentally benign as my Swarthmore classmates.
In his “reply” to the 39 letters, Kennan added his own reminiscence of his Swarthmore visit: “I came away from the podium . . . feeling that I had done my best to speak honestly about matters that might be presumed to be on the minds of other people present. But no sooner had I emerged from the stage door of the College’s auditorium that I was made aware – by the presence there of a group of angry young men, mostly bearded, who hissed their disagreement and resentment at me like a flock of truculent village geese – that I had stepped on some tender nerves.”
I was one of those. What trampled our nerves was less his speech than his refusal to engage in the very “process of learning” he had preached. Had he done so, he might have absorbed from our testimony that, notwithstanding its reputation of as the nation’s pre-eminent liberal arts institution, Swarthmore in 1969 was languishing in a state of advanced obsolescence. In my four years of study (notwithstanding my beard, I graduated in 1970 with Highest Honors), I did not have a single teacher who was not a white male. Though I majored in American History, there was no mention of Fredrick Douglass or W. E. B. Du Bois or Crazy Horse. Though my interests were broad, no interdisciplinary majors were permitted. Though I minored in Music, played the piano, and sang in the chorus, no academic credit was allowed for creative pursuits. As of 1967, neither the Political Science nor the Philosophy Department offered courses in Hegel or Marx. The Sociology/Anthropology Department was new and weakly staffed. The Frankfurt School did not penetrate the curriculum. So far as I could ascertain, the college’s major asset was its student body. The biggest personalities on campus were not the professors.
The administration was not insensitive to the challenges at hand. In 1966, it had convened a Commission on Educational Policy (C. E. P.) with a mandate to recommend specific proposals for change. But implementation proved slow and obtuse. I remember being interviewed about the “intellectual content” of playing a musical instrument. That the arts contribute to character and personality, to emotional and psychological well-being, was deemed irrelevant. Though the C. E. P. determined that “artistic activity is intelligent activity,” dance and film were exempted from this finding, and credit for work in the creative arts was only sanctioned on a limited basis. In 1969, two years after Kennan’s speech, Swarthmore African-American Students Society (SASS) lost patience and occupied the admissions office to demand that the college enroll more Black students (there were 47), Black teachers (where was one), and Black administrators (there were none). This was a considered act of civil disobedience, sans violence or threats, fortified by extensive discussion and negotiation.
Spring 1970 was a time of nation-wide student strikes and teach-ins. At Swarthmore, a new hire in the Philosophy Department took charge. He was a Socratic Hegelian – and Hegelian epistemology, rejecting Anglo-American empiricism, proved a Swarthmore intellectual epiphany (I still treasure my densely marked copy of his Philosophy of History). A handful of students dropped out and migrated to the militant far left. On campus, the only individual who advocated violence was an outsider doubtless in the employ of the US Government. Though many skipped final exams, the Kennan critique remained mostly irrelevant – our political arousal was also formidably intellectual. The chairman of the Sociology Department counselled that we return to the classroom, oblivious to the absorbing sociological phenomenon of a popular uprising at hand. I was myself delegated to propose to the Political Science Department that a course in Marxism be offered. I was informed by a sneering Associate Professor that a mini-course for one-quarter credit might be considered – and expanded if there was anything left over to teach. Notwithstanding a Thermidor during which dissident faculty members were purged, the students ultimately prevailed. A 1986 history of the college painstakingly concluded that “it is generally agreed that Swarthmore had not . . . done enough” – that SASS, in retrospect, was an agent of necessary change.
***
Looking back, were we “Rebels without a Program”? We were right about Vietnam and right about Richard Nixon. But we were also undeniably callow: we lacked a long view. This was George Kennan’s calling card: his signature as a foreign policy analyst steeped in historical learning and philosophical repose. When he wasn’t being short-sighted and presumptuous, he became reflective and wise. It’s all in Democracy and the Student Left.
Pondering the 39 letters, Kennan at first remained maddeningly supercilious. As if the letters – in fact, a miscellany of self-appointed responses – furnished empirical corroboration, he redoubled his ostensible observations. “Today’s radical student” is “anxious, angry, humorless, . . . over-excited and unreflective . . . His nostrils fairly quiver for the scent of some injustice he can sally forth to remedy.” The writers at hand manifested “the lack of interest in the creation of any real style and distinction of personal life [which] enters into manners, tidiness . . and even personal hygiene.” Their avowal of civil disobedience furnished further evidence of immaturity: “I am affected, I must admit, by an inability to follow the logic of pacifism and nonviolence as the bases for a political philosophy.” With astounding presumption, Kennan even inferred: “The politics, like what one suspects to be the love life of many of these young people, is tense, anxious, defiant and joyless.” In sum, the Rebels Without a Program did not belong in any place of learning. “If the respect for intellectual detachment . . . is really as small as it would seem to be from these letters . . . , then the contemporary campus is no place for the odd man who might like to devote himself to the acquisition and furtherance of knowledge.” Addressing the rebels directly, he inquired: “What in the hell – if we might be so bold as to ask – are you doing on a university campus?” What is more: “They jump to the conclusion that they ought to run the place.”
Other assertions are simply counter-factual. Though opposed to the war in Vietnam, Kennan inferred that “the alternative to our effort there would be the subjection of the South Vietnamese people” to a “dictatorship ruthless, bloody and vindictive.” Is that what Vietnam became? And Kennan loftily asserted: “It is not an exaggeration to say that an abandonment of the draft would alone cure a large part of the troubles of the present generation of students.” At Swarthmore, we did not greatly fear being drafted – we knew there were ways out.
Then Kennan asked himself whether there were further, underlying maladies at hand. This inference of “some inner distress and discontent” at first seems patronizing. But 216 pages into Democracy and the Student Left, it ultimately powers an authentic inquiry so impressive as to practically redeem the book. Adopting a different tone – virtually a different persona – he extrapolates five “dangers within ourselves, within our civilization, that cast . . . a cloud over the future of our society.”
The first is “the question of what is happening, physically, to the natural environment necessary not only to sustain life in this country to but to give it healthfulness and meaning. . . . As the world’s greatest industrial nation, as the possessor of the largest single component of its industrial machinery, also as its most wasteful and industrially dirty society, and finally as the world’s foremost nuclear power and one which has yet to give any very satisfactory explanation of the manner in which it disposes of its nuclear wastes, we have a very special responsibility here.” This 1968 warning also references the destruction of topsoils, the slashing of forests, the exhaustion of fresh water, the poisoning of ocean beds, and the destruction of the ecology of plant and inset life.
Second on Kennan’s list is the extent to which advertising has permeated “the entire process of public communication in our country.” Mass communication, he writes, is made “trivial” and “inane.” “We will not, I think, have a healthy intellectual climate in this country, a successful system of education, a sound press, or a proper vitality of artistic and recreational life, until advertising is rigorously separated from every form of legitimate cultural and intellectual communication – until advertisements are removed from every printed page containing material that has claim to intellectual or artistic integrity and from every television or radio program that has these same pretensions.” He advocates “a revolution in the financing and control of the process of communication generally” – even if that means “bringing in the government.”
The third danger is the private automobile. “It is a dirty, noisy, wasteful, and lonely means of travel. It pollutes the air [and] ruins the safety and sociability of the street. . . . It has already spelled the end of our cities as real cultural and sical communities. . . . Together with the airplane, it has crowded out other, more civilized and more convenient means of transport.” And it creates a problematic dependency on oil.
Fourth: “the state of the American Negro,” the nation’s “greatest social and political problem.” “I see the possibilities for progress . . . much less in the concepts of integration – much less in the possibility of creating a homogenized society – than in some sort of a voluntary segregation and autonomy for large parts of the Negro community.” He is surprised to find common cause with advocates of “black power” whose “methods and spirit” he otherwise abhors.
Finally, addressing the American political system, Kennan decries “the bloated monstrosity and impersonality of the federal government” and the related decay of state governments. He favors “new regional organs of government.” He wants to reduce the cost of running for public office. He deplores “the tone and rhetoric of American public life.” He wishes for a third national political party that would be content to remain a minority, and “place ideas and convictions ahead of electoral success.”
The totality of Kennan’s prescriptions for America could readily be dismissed as the pipedream of a disenfranchised aristocrat. Not only is he a man in love with the past; the past he idealizes is European or Russian. He identifies not with Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, but with Tolstoy and Chekhov. His diagnoses are more impressive than his proposed solutions. Even so, the timeliness of this culminating jeremiad is stunning. An America weakened in spirit, shallow in feeling, Kennan warns, is an America at risk. “I fear the loss of our liberties through a descent into fascism in strict accordance with law far more than I fear the protesting ‘lawlessness’ of our youth. . . . Majorities are not to be trusted. They are apt to resign their powers to the tyrant.”
As for today’s collegiate youth, are they not victims of the fundamental conditions that Kennan extrapolated in 1967? When – setting aside pompous complaints about rebellious attire and deportment, violence and drugs — he decries a “world of gadgetry” that captivates the young, when he paradoxically finds them “more childlike than students of an earlier and simpler age,” when he worries that they are manipulable, adrift from cultural memory, crippled by shallow pleasures, I discover myself morphing into George Kennan. And I am further reminded of Allan Bloom, whose Closing of the American Mind aggravated my generational loyalties in 1987 – but now seems prescient. Subtitled How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Bloom’s polemic was a national sensation, a trigger-point for debate over the legacy of the sixties and its “counter-culture.”
No less than Kennan in 1967, Bloom in 1987 caricatured my generation. His disparagement of listeners to rock music (“it artificially induces the exaltation naturally attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors”) and devotees of recreatinal drugs (“their energy has been sapped and they do not expect their life’s activity to produce anything but a living”) were instantly notorious. He maintained that a generation out of touch with great music, great literature, great traditions of philosophic thought – all unabashedly Western – was a generation afflicted with “closed minds” and “impoverished souls.” Swarthmore in the late 1960s was nothing like that.
But no less than Kennan, Bloom – read today — extrapolated fatal longterm trends – unwanted, unanticipated consequences of “rebellion” at hand. Debunking “cultural relativism,” Bloom fingered what we now call identity politics and a linked discourse stigmatizing “cultural appropriation” – a discourse that, to many my age, seems more impoverishing than nourishing for students’ souls. He discerned that a mounting failure to appreciate Western traditions was eviscerating the academy. He deplored a tendency to ecumenically equalize all cultural endeavor, old and new, East and West. He foresaw an exaggerated regard for the other and otherness fracturing democratic community. Even Saul Bellow’s introduction to The Closing of the American Mind reads as if written yesterday: “The heat of dispute between Left and Right has grown so fierce in the last decade that the habits of civilized discourse have suffered a scorching. Antagonists seem no longer to listen to one another.”
My own writing and research, these many decades, has concentrated on the institutional history of classical music in the United States – asking the question: what went wrong? I long ago foresaw the marginalization of orchestras, once essential civic bellwethers in American communities large and small. I eventually absorbed, to my surprise, that the story I was tracking peaked in the closing decades of the nineteenth century – decades of elevated public discourse and immense entrepreneurial achievement. And my findings, I have discovered, are buttressed by others who study cultural and intellectual history. Nineteenth century Americans were gluttons for ideas and ideals. Books, magazines, and newspapers proliferated, and the spoken discourse, judged by what was being written and read, was both vigorous and ambitious. By the late Gilded Age, these frontier energies underwent refinement – but remained energized. Here – one specimen among many – is the philosopher Josiah Royce in 1899:
When foreigners accuse us of extraordinary love for gain, and of practical materialism, they fail to see how largely we are a nation of idealists. . . . Wherever you go, you find the typical American sensitive to ideas, curious about doctrines, concerned for his soul’s salvation, still more concerned for the higher welfare of his children, willing to hear about great topics, dissatisfied with merely material objects, seeking even wealth rather with a view to more ideal uses than with a mere desire for its sensuous gratifications, disposed to plan great things or his country and for his community, proud of both, jealous for their honor, and discontented with the life that now is. . . . He encourages science and learning. He pauses in the midst of the rush of business to discuss religion, or education, or psychical research, or mental healing, or socialism.
The subsequent democratization of culture during the interwar decades – crucially, a commercial enterprise, superintended in music by David Sarnoff’s NBC and RCA — thinned substance and degraded discourse; here, Kennan’s impatience with “advertising” is overwhelmingly pertinent. In our twenty-first century, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa uses the term “social acceleration” to describe an “unbridled rush” of accelerating technological and societal transformation. The juggernaut of accelerating change knows no answer, no countervailing force. It breeds a condition of pastlessness and shortness of attention. My colleagues in music tell me that it is no longer possible to teach sonata form – this basic ingredient of musical structure depends upon remembering what has gone before. And student listeners today do not feel the pull of harmonic trajectory; mainly, they attune to rhythm.
Pace Kennan, at Swarthmore we “rebels” never disrupted classroom instruction with chants. When I hear “From the River to the Sea!”, when Zionism is equated with colonialism, I become Kennan and Bloom both. French Indochina was an example of colonialism. Israel – whatever one makes of its implementation or of its sorry fate today – was created in the wake of the holocaust, a logical beneficiary of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire. What, exactly, does today’s chant of the moment signify?
***
That George Kennan was an enigma is the starting point of many an attempted portrait. A shrewdly knowledgeable and far-signed diplomat, he is equally a study in the undiplomatic. His personal turbulence was such that even in old age he retained the prejudices of another era. He mistrusted Jews. He disparaged homosexuality. He retained notions of racial purity.
The petulant spectacle of Kennan at Swarthmore College in 1967 remains a bewilderment. The most influential foreign policy strategist of his generation, a man of high purpose and complex erudition, he succumbed to the perversity of his many demons. We shared his aroused concern for the fate of the nation. We were not immune to the worldliness of his Russian heroes Tolstoy and Chekhov– we knew and read them, all of us. We were susceptible to intellectual instruction. He could readily have sought common cause.
He delivered the wrong speech.
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