The enigma of Mr. X.

• Author: Caryl, Christian
• Position: 'The Kennan Diaries' - Book review

George F. Kennan, ed. Frank Costigliola, The Kennan Diaries (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 768 pp., $39.95.

A friend recently described me in an email as "irascible." She meant it in an offhanded, affectionate sort of way--but I have to admit that her choice of adjective gave me a chill. Could it be that, unnoticed to myself, I had slipped into the ranks of the most tiresome group of people in the United States? I refer, of course, to the Grumpy Old White Guys. You know the type. They're the ones who corner you at a party to complain about the use of Spanish in official announcements on the bus, or cut you off in the supermarket parking lot to compensate for early retirement-induced rage. Their public mascot is John McCain, that walking tantrum-in-waiting--but that doesn't mean that all of them are conservative. To the contrary: you can also find plenty of crabby old liberals out there, griping about the collapse of manufacturing or the hopeless egotism of today's materialist youth. (I'm actually pretty sure that cantankerous boomers represent a core demographic for Rolling Stone and the New Yorker.) It's gotten to the point where I automatically steer a wide berth around any portly, bearded over-sixty wearing glasses on a lanyard.

I've tended to think of this as a strictly contemporary phenomenon, along with Duck Dynasty, retiree Pilates and websites for Christian singles. How wrong I was. It turns out that the Grumpy Old White Guys actually have a venerable and quite august pedigree--and among them was one of the most influential American foreign-policy thinkers of the twentieth century. I speak of George F. Kennan (1904-2005), the man who provided the intellectual underpinnings of the Cold War concept of containment, who served as the first head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, and who made vital contributions to the Marshall Plan as well as the design of overall U.S. strategy toward Europe and the Far East in the wake of World War II. He met with everyone from Joseph Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. George H. W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His friend Charles Bohlen, who served as ambassador to Moscow, wrote a fine memoir called Witness to History. But Kennan was truly it.

Few American public-policy intellectuals have been comparably lionized during their lifetimes. But Kennan deserved it. There weren't many in Washington who could compete with his remarkable breadth of learning and experience, which included flawless knowledge of multiple languages, a deep immersion in the life of Central and Eastern Europe, and a silky and ironic prose style, modeled partly on Edward Gibbon, that reflected his intense, private engagement with the great Russian writers. He was a rara avis in Washington, a deeply cultured man who had an intuitive understanding of the European civilization that disappeared in August 1914. He never ceased mourning its disappearance, dedicating his last books to analyzing the diplomatic machinations of Germany, France and Russia preceding the plunge into the abyss.

Upon his graduation from Princeton University in 1925, where he never quite fit in, Kennan entered the State Department, where he was posted to Riga, Latvia. There he learned Russian and absorbed anti-Communist precepts. He never had any illusions about the thugs that surrounded Stalin, and he served as an aide to the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union, William Bullitt, who entered his post sympathetic to Soviet aspirations only to become a virulent anti-Communist after witnessing the depredations of Stalinism. Kennan went on to serve in posts in Berlin and Prague, where he saw the Nazi dictatorship firsthand. It would be difficult to think of anyone who had a clearer understanding of totalitarianism in the past century. Kennan may have been somewhat maladroit as a diplomat--he was banished from the Soviet Union as ambassador after World War II for making the true but impolitic observation that the Soviet Union's methods reminded him of those of the Nazis--but he was a remarkably clear-eyed observer. Indeed, it was his deftness as a writer that helped to magnify the impact of both his "Long Telegram" of February 1946, which warned about malign Soviet intentions and arrived like a thunderbolt in official Washington, and his July 1947 Foreign Affairs article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," which, appearing under the pseudonym of Mr. X, posited that "the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." It neatly summarized the future of Cold War strategy, setting up a lifelong, agonized confrontation between Kennan himself and the policy that he had helped to birth. A national-security state, which engorged itself on massive budgets and perpetual enemies, had emerged, and Kennan viewed it as wholly inimical to true American republican traditions, a trend that was confirmed once neoconservative triumphalism about the end of the Cold War morphed into a global crusade to crush America's real and...