The Legacy of George F. Kennan
The first book to complicate the reputation of George Kennan came out in 1967. It was 600 pages long, and the cover would show a forlorn young man staring right at you. The tale was of an awkward boy from the Midwest who never quite fits in. He gains knowledge in the Foreign Service and becomes the United States' wisest Soviet analyst. Then, for a brief -- but crucial -- moment, he serves as the head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff under President Harry Truman, helping remake the world after World War II. Along the way, he writes the "Long Telegram" and the "X" article, which laid out a strategy forever known as containment, and he plays a central role in designing the Marshall Plan. He writes beautiful memos that anticipate the dangers of keeping Germany divided and starting an arms race. But soon he grows irritated with Washington, and Washington grows irritated with him. He becomes as bitter as he is brilliant, as frustrated as he is farsighted. The story ends with him out of power, despairing for the republic. The book hints that its subject might be anti-Semitic, depressed, and professionally inept.
The author of that book, Memoirs 1925-1950, was Kennan himself, as self-critical and personally reflective an autobiographer as his century had seen. More books followed (including one by the author of this review), peeling back the onion further and further. Each new round of discovered documents and diaries has reinforced what was known before. And now there is John Lewis Gaddis' magisterial, authorized account, George F. Kennan: An American Life. It is based on intimate interviews with Kennan and access to all of his diaries, including the one in which he jotted down his dreams.
The Kennan who comes through in this new book is very much like the hero of Memoirs 1925-1950, only more so. He is wiser, and he broods more deeply. Kennan foresaw the arc of every major war of his lifetime. In 1940, he accurately predicted when the United States would engage Germany and how long it would take for his country to win; in the summer of 1950, he warned of giving too much power to General Douglas MacArthur in Korea; in 1966, he diagnosed the dangers of fighting in Vietnam and urged a dignified withdrawal. All the while, he wrote utterly scathing, and self-flagellating, notes to himself. Here is just one of several dozen diary entries that Gaddis cites: "There are times when I see myself as a spineless, somewhat infantile, futile little man." Brilliance and self-contempt always interlock with Kennan. In early 1949, at the height of his influence, Kennan, considering whether to resign, wrote to Secretary of State Dean Acheson that he had no enthusiasm for "the wretched consolation of having been particularly prominent among the parasites on the body of a dying social order, in the hours of its final agony." The same attitude manifested itself through the last 40 years of his life, when he was mainly a historian, essayist, and polemicist, declaiming against the folly of nuclear weapons.
