George F. Kennan: An American Life
By John Lewis Gaddis
(Penguin Press, 784 pages, $39.95)
One of the more poignant moments in the massive new
biography of George F. Kennan describes him leaving the State
Department in Washington for good. There was no place for him in
the Eisenhower government. A receptionist held back tears as he
passed by on his way to the elevator.
Biographer John Lewis Gaddis calls it an “inglorious
conclusion to an illustrious career. For no Foreign Service officer
had … more significantly shaped grand strategy at the highest
levels of government. None had created, if inadvertently, a
‘school’ of international relations theory. And yet Kennan walked
out of the State Department on June 23, 1953, with hardly anyone
noticing. He was not prepared to reflect … on how this had
happened.”
Gaddis, a distinguished professor of history and strategy
at Yale University, explains in painstaking detail how the
headstrong young Kennan had risen so fast, accomplished so much,
then lost his way in the labyrinth of the international relations
bureaucracy.
The book dissects a man who was part prophet, part poet,
part visionary — but no diplomat in the true sense of the
emotional detachment required to report on events abroad. He proved
too volatile for the ambassador’s chair in Moscow and ended up
expelled, probably on Stalin’s direct orders.
Kennan had a taste for the long-form memo, so exhaustive
that his languid prose often was not read by the
addressee.
But he was finally noticed when his secret “long telegram”
on Soviet strategy hit Washington in 1946 during his earlier
posting to Moscow under Ambassador Averell Harriman. Gaddis devotes
a chapter to this seminal event under the title “A Very Long
Telegram.” This one did get read and distributed, and led to
decades of “containment” policies to confront the expansionist aims
of the Soviet Union. Kennan soon objected to the perversion of his
vision, however, as “containment” came to mean many things and to
have a military basis.
But it was his penchant for fine writing rather than data
that ultimately helped bring his Foreign Service career to a
premature close.
Under Secretary of State David Bruce told biographer
Gaddis he reached a point where he no longer read Kennan’s memos
“because they were so long-winded and so blatantly seeking to be
literary rather than provide information.”
Even Harriman found many of his judgments “too impractical
to be acted upon” and when the two men disagreed, Harriman recalled
that he ignored Kennan’s point of view. “I simply didn’t bother to
waste time to argue. It didn’t amuse me to do so.” Elsewhere,
Harriman said Kennan understood Russia but not the United
States.
George Frost Kennan was born in a
modest family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and graduated from Princeton
University in 1925. He joined the U.S. Foreign Service fresh out of
school and began a series of low-level postings, first in Geneva,
then Hamburg, then Riga. President Franklin Roosevelt established
diplomatic relations in 1933 with the Soviets and Kennan found
himself in Moscow working for the first U.S. ambassador, William
Bullitt. Gaddis describes their fruitful partnership in some
detail. Kennan’s Russian was sufficient to allow him to act as
embassy interpreter. He moved on to Prague in 1938, then to Berlin
as Germany began to march. When the United States entered the war,
Kennan was interned in Germany with other U.S. diplomats for nine
months.
Although he grew impatient with the Foreign Service for
ignoring his counsel, he was pleased to be back in Moscow working
for Harriman in 1944. Two years later, in response to a request
from Washington, he sent his 5,500-word telegram – the longest on
Foreign Service history – to the State Department. The following
year, President Truman was quoting from it in Congress to support
his pledge in the Truman Doctrine to protect Greece and Turkey
militarily in the event of Soviet aggression there. Thus Kennan was
thrust into the origins of the Cold War and the Marshall
Plan.
Gaddis describes Kennan’s influence in Washington in
1947-48 as the peak of his official career when he was chosen to
establish what is now known as the Policy Planning Staff. But
tensions with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles became
intolerable. Dulles had described Kennan as a “dangerous
man” when they clashed over China’s admission to the
United Nations and again over the decision to send MacArthur’s
forces across the 38th parallel in the Korean War, and
they never worked well together subsequently.
Kennan fulfilled a series of Washington missions in the
1950s, served briefly as ambassador to Moscow, then was chosen by
President John Kennedy to become ambassador to Yugoslavia in 1961.
He resigned two years later over differences in policy and returned
to the United States in 1963. At this point, he permanently joined
the Institute for Advanced Study, where he pursued his true
vocation as historian and writer. He produced 17 books, twice
winning the Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award.
This Gaddis biography has stirred the foreign affairs
establishment to a high pitch for its account of the crucial
debates and decisions in American foreign policy during the period
leading up to World War II and ending with the collapse of the
Soviet Union. Kennan, who died in 2005 at the age of 101, saw it
all, commented on it all, and was a participant in much of
it.
Heavyweights have lined up to read and judge the book and
the man, sometimes harshly, sometimes kindly, sometimes with
ambivalence.
Henry Kissinger,
Louis Menand,
Frank Costigliola, and
David C. Engerman have all had their say.
Kissinger called Kennan “one of the most important,
complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public
servants.” He was “endlessly introspective and ultimately remote,”
Kissinger wrote in the New York Times.
A curious thread in these thoughtful Kennan commentaries
is the question of his haughty attitude toward the American common
man. In American Diplomacy, the first of his 20 books, he
went so far as to question the usefulness of American democracy. He
saw democracy as a “monster the size of this room with a brain the
size of a pin.”
His candid comments in his diaries leave no doubt about
his antipathy for the average citizen. In a long diary entry, he
wrote: “I should never be able to hide my intellectual despair,
above all — my despair with U.S. society.”
He added that he could leave the United States “without a
pang, the endless stream of cars, the bored, set faces behind the
windshields, the chrome, the asphalt, the advertising, the
television sets, the filling stations, the hot dog stands, the
barren business centers, the suburban brick boxes, the
country-clubs, the bars-and-grills.… All of this I could see recede
behind the smoke of the Jersey flats without turning a
hair.”
Menand, a former Princeton professor and close observer of
Kennan’s career, believes Kennan had “little love for, or even
curiosity about, the country whose fortunes he devoted his life to
safeguarding.” Kennan judged his compatriots as “shallow,
materialistic and self-centered,” Menand observed.
Of course he had and still has a lot of company in these
attitudes, including this reviewer. Any returning expatriate
suffers similar shockwaves.
Some of the most vivid passages in the book deal with the
paranoid treatment of foreigners in Moscow during his
ambassadorship (1951-1952). These descriptions ring true with me,
having endured another period of Soviet paranoia as a correspondent
there during the Vietnam War. Contact with locals was strictly
constrained and access to the political class was non-existent,
very much as it was in the early 1950s.
Kennan became so fed up being followed around and isolated
from ordinary Russians that he casually observed in public that
Stalin’s Moscow reminded him of his internment under the Nazis in
the early days of World War II. That remark, in the context of
Russia still trying to recover from the horrors of the Nazi
invasion, was a step too far. It led to his expulsion, the only
such case, Gaddis points out, in 240 years of U.S.-Russia
relations. Worse, the incident cost him much of his credibility
among the more buttoned-down diplomats of the Foreign
Service.
Later in life, Kennan seemed to shrug it off. “I couldn’t
be the sort of smooth, self-contained type of Foreign Service
officer who advanced because he’d made no waves. It’s a wonder to
me that I got along as well as I did.”
Gaddis gives us a warts-and-all authorized portrait of
Kennan based on many long conversations with Kennan and his aging
colleagues, and a study of Kennan’s voluminous writings. These
source materials included 20,000 pages of diaries and more than 300
boxes of writings held by Princeton University. The diaries and
letters show a new Kennan — by turns brutally honest, clever,
lyrical and yet silent on some key issues. He even insisted that
Gaddis study a separate diary in which he recorded his dreams. He
obviously wanted to leave a substantial legacy for scholars to pore
over.
Gaddis has produced a seamless narrative of Kennan the
quixotic intellectual interwoven with the momentous events of war,
aggression, Cold War, nuclear weapons, and U.S. foreign military
interventions that featured in his life.
Small wonder, then, that the man who emerges is
articulate, frustrated, contradictory, sometimes morose, and yet
deeply concerned about the unstable era in which he lived. Frank
Costigliola, professor at the University of Connecticut, is at work
on a 700-page selection of diary entries due out in
2014.
