The Contradictions of George Kennan.

• Author: Layne, Christopher
• Position: George F. Kennan: An American Life - Book review

The Contradictions of George Kennan

John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011), 800 pp., $39.95.

George F. Kennan--diplomat, foreign-policy analyst, historian, social critic, memoirist--has been the focus of much scholarly attention. But it seems safe to say that Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis's comprehensive biography comes as close as any book ever will to being the final word on Kennan. Based in part on extensive interviews with his subject over a quarter century, George F. Kennan: An American Life provides a rich, warts-and-all (and warts there were) portrait of a man widely regarded as the author of America's grand strategy of containment at the dawn of the Cold War. Meticulously researched and wonderfully written, Gaddis's opus works on two levels: it penetrates Kennan's complex psychology and personality with deep insight, and it offers up an intellectual history of the Cold War, seen through the prism of how Kennan's views influenced, and failed to influence, American foreign policy during that tension-filled epoch.

There are poignant elements in the Kennan story. One is that while he understood perhaps better than anyone in Washington the Soviet regime's inherent fragility, his two most influential writings--the famous February 1946 diplomatic cable known as the "Long Telegram" and the July 1947 "X" article in Foreign Affairs--led many to overstate the Soviet threat. Others in Washington, lacking Kennan's intellectual suppleness and acuity, seized on his sometimes hyperbolic language to undergird their expansive postwar ambitions. Further, Kennan's own contribution to U.S. actions with respect to the Marshall Plan had the effect, intended or not, of raising Kremlin fears about America's European ambitions, thereby contributing to Cold War tensions.

The irony of Kennan's story is that for all the attention showered upon him over the past sixty years, his government career was remarkably brief. During the two years after his "Long Telegram" in early 1946, Kennan's star was in ascendancy in Washington. But then, as Gaddis notes, in early 1948 Kennan lost his footing and never really regained it. He ascribes this fall from grace to a complex--often contradictory--personality, which puzzled even his closest friends. Kennan was brilliant and ambitious but could be self-absorbed, insecure, moody, sensitive and prone to recurrent bouts of depression. In the Foreign Service and later, Kennan fretted that his voice did not carry the weight he thought it deserved and that his ideas weren't taken as seriously as he thought appropriate. He didn't take criticism well.

Gaddis writes that frustration was Kennan's "normal state" and that he had trouble keeping his emotions apart from his strategies. The biographer hones in on the complexities of the Kennan persona when he notes that the diplomat "had the intuitions and insights--but also the volatility--of a poet." For a life such as Kennan's, this was both a strength and a weakness.

On the one hand, this temperament provided a rare gift of deep understanding, letting him see the structural interconnections of international politics and the possibilities for rearranging them in favorable ways. He was capable, writes Gaddis, of "projecting policy much further into the future" than his peers. On the other hand, this poetic nature led some--particularly the lawyerly and ever-practical Dean Acheson--to view Kennan as mystical, visionary, prophetic and a champion of wholly impractical policies. Kennan failed in the big policy debates of 1948 and 1949, so Gaddis suggests, because he could not translate his vision into recommendations for practical solutions.

Still, while Kennan's tendency toward prophecy and dissent may have undercut his influence as a policy maker, it proved invaluable during his long "second act" as a thinker, writer and analyst based at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. During these years, he distinguished himself by warning of the dangers of Washington's Cold War nuclear posture, advocating superpower disengagement as a means to ending the U.S.-Soviet face-off on the Elbe and emerging as one of the leading voices in the first generation of American foreign-policy realists. In each of these areas, he built his career upon ideas formed during government service.

During his foreign-service career, Kennan was right about the big things. He saw correctly that after World War II, the United States was far stronger than the Soviet Union. Hence, he believed, Washington should be cautious and patient, taking care not to overreact to Soviet policies. But others in Washington, focusing on "Long Telegram" and "X" article passages that depicted the Soviet Union in dark and menacing terms, hijacked Kennan's own words to implement policies of which he did not approve. Gaddis writes, citing Henry Kissinger, that Kennan came "closer than anyone else to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era." But, Gaddis notes, "after 1947 he could never regard the doctrine with which he was credited as his own."

The "Long Telegram" and "X" article painted a frightening--even lurid--picture of Moscow's intentions. The United States, said Kennan, faced a

political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. Moreover, in pursuit of these ambitions, the Soviet Union had the "power of disposition over energies of one of [the] world's greatest peoples and resources of [the] world's richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism." As Kennan put it, the Soviet challenge was "undoubtedly [the] greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably [the] greatest it will ever have to face."

Although Kennan believed the Soviet Union aimed to "destroy" the American way of life and "break" the United States' global power, he also believed the Soviets would be hard-pressed to achieve those goals. He saw the Soviet Union as gravely weakened by the sacrifices of World War II. And he never viewed Stalin as a risk-taking adventurer such as Hitler. While the Kremlin might be "impervious to logic of reason," he observed in the "Long Telegram," "it is highly sensitive to logic of force." Thus, Kennan said, "it can easily withdraw--and usually does--when strong resistance is encountered at any point." Finally, unlike most U.S. policy makers at the time, Kennan understood that the Soviet Union was fragile and riddled with internal contradictions that threatened its long-term existence. Hence, its "internal soundness and permanence of movement need not yet be regarded as assured." For these reasons, Kennan argued, the United States could "approach calmly and with good heart [the] problem of how to deal with Russia." In a famous--and, he subsequently would claim, misconstrued--passage, Kennan concluded that:

Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western world is something that can be contained by the...