Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} George F. Kennan An American Life by George F Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis - review. I t is no exaggeration to say that, in the eyes of the great majority, George Kennan was the most famous Russianist of our time; certainly in the United States. But he was far more than that, being the author of "containment": the doctrine that guided US foreign policy in the neutralisation of Soviet power from 1946. It is no accident that the unofficial authority on containment, the historian of American foreign policy John Gaddis of Yale, is also Kennan's official biographer; though it is deeply ironic that an overt admirer of George W Bush should have been asked to write a life of his bitterest critic. Kennan's effortless arrogance, his dry aloofness, his perfect manners, his eloquent prose and his regal habit of pronouncing on policy suggest a blue blood or at least a Boston Brahmin. Yet his humble origins in modest Milwaukee in a house stricken by the depression were a good deal more prosaic. What's more, the death of his mother a few months after childbirth left him emotionally insecure. A man of strong and seemingly unalterable opinions, Kennan was also deeply shy, surprisingly fragile, given to glooming and bouts of illness that led to hospitalisation, and burdened with Presbyterian guilt after compulsive philandering (not least with nurses). To his own surprise, no doubt, as a man of deeply conservative convictions, Kennan became a darling of the intellectual left. To the end a great admirer of that first American academic realist Hans Morgenthau, he turned into something of a sentimentalist on Soviet Russia after the death of Stalin, giving successors such as Khrushchev and Brezhnev the benefit of the doubt in foreign policy where previously he would have scrutinised their expressions of good will with the deepest suspicion. In large part this is to be explained by his casual indifference, if not hostility, to any and every doctrine. To Kennan, the notion that politicians could be practising Marxist-Leninists by conviction was highly improbable. In advocating the containment of the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1946, he saw the challenge as that of stemming traditional Russian expansionist ambitions pressed by a leader who was unusual not in his ideology but in his ruthlessness. It is here that Kennan soon parted company with his compatriots in and out of government, who came to embrace the cold war as an ideological crusade in which the mobilisation of public opinion not infrequently threatened to remove control of foreign policy from the elite that Kennan epitomised. Embracing and explaining the paradoxes that made Kennan has been Gaddis's uneasy task. The accomplished, Pulitzer-winning result tells us a good deal about postwar America. For the leaders of western Europe, the question after 1945 was how to get the Americans to heave to alongside in order to offset the Soviet threat, but not to make landfall on the continent. In that Kennan concurred. Indeed the reason why he was sidelined as a policy adviser so early on in the cold war was because he firmly believed the US commitment to the balance of power in Europe should remain conditional, offshore and serving strictly American reasons of state. Yet arguably the entire history of the cold war demonstrated that the US could only conduct its foreign policy with the consent of the people, and that could be mustered only by handing over the reins of power to those Kennan believed to be unsuitable, if not, at times, grossly irresponsible. "Myths and errors are being established in the public mind more rapidly than they can be broken down," Kennan confided to his diary in 1951. "The mass media are too much for us," he concluded. That was his reaction to McCarthyism, but it was equally his reaction to the hawkish George Bush and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Banished from Washington under Dwight Eisenhower and Foster Dulles after the Republicans took office in January 1952, Kennan was thrown back on his own resources, stricken with the need to atone for the unexpected turn of events for which, in fact, he was not as responsible as he believed. He had suddenly shot into the firmament under Truman and Acheson; and then, like a comet, with equal speed he disappeared off into the outer darkness. Immured in a Venetian style tower, a four-storey study atop 146 Hodge Road in the heart of white-picket-fenced Princeton, he had instead to content himself writing memoirs, reflections and lucid essays while waiting in vain for the "call" that would summon him back to the White House. He certainly missed the "real intoxication of the spirit simply from being in physical proximity of persons of high office". But to his undying frustration, instead of statesmen he was besieged by academics, seeking insights or patronage, sometimes both. "Let's have lunch sometime," was invariably the polite if unconvincing defence against such intruders visiting the Institute for Advanced Study. This unique institution of learning took him in against the advice of professional historians such as Gordon Craig and Joseph Strayer in 1956, but with enthusiastic support from Isaiah Berlin and Theodore Mommsen, and kept him on the payroll even after retirement as one of its most illustrious figures. George F. Kennan: An American Life. An admiring Henry Kissinger noted in 1979 that “George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.” The origins of what became known as America’s Cold War policy of “containment” began with Kennan’s “long telegram” from the U.S. embassy in Moscow in February 1946 to his superiors in Washington. A much larger audience read his essay dealing with the same subject, in which the author was identified only as “Mr. X,” in the June 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs . The 5,000-word telegram was provoked by a speech by Josef Stalin. The Soviet dictator congratulated his army, party, government, nation and, by implication, himself, on winning World War II. He only briefly mentioned his British and American allies and talked of increasing industrial production in his country because of capitalism’s tendency to produce conflict, as, he said, it had in 1914 and 1939. Kennan, officially second in command at the embassy, was temporarily in charge as Ambassador Averell Harriman had departed and a new ambassador had not yet arrived. A keen observer of events in the U.S.S.R., steeped in Russian history and literature, as well as Marxist-Leninist ideology, Kennan’s telegram contained a brilliant analysis of where the U.S.S.R. government stood and what strategy could be devised to combat it peacefully. What came to be known as the “containment” policy was interpreted in different ways by others over the years. In his memoirs Kennan lamented that it had been applied to “situations to which it has, and can have, no proper relevance.” The telegram was only one aspect of an incredibly long and productive life. Among other achievements, Kennan played a key role in the formation of the Marshall Plan and later served as U.S. ambassador to both the U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia. As a policy strategist at the highest levels of government, he often disagreed with his colleagues. Later, as what we would today call a public intellectual, he was often critical of U.S. foreign policy and American culture. One of the lingering paradoxes of Kennan’s life was that he understood the Soviet Union better than he did the United States. With such a distinguished career as a diplomat it may come as a surprise that, at least as early as 1934, Kennan wanted to become a writer. As noted Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis points out in his outstanding and surely definitive biography, George F. Kennan: An American Life , when Kennan was a student at , “Literature, inside and outside of class, sparked [his] greatest interest, especially contemporary American novels.” Just as he was graduating, The Great Gatsby was published and, Kennan said later, “it went right into me and became part of me.” Kennan did go on to become an acclaimed author with two volumes of memoirs and works of history such as Russia Leaves the War . He received two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards and the Bancroft Prize for his literary works. Gaddis began working on this book almost 30 years ago. He conducted many interviews with Kennan, who lived to be 101 and died in 2005, members of his family and former colleagues. He was given access to Kennan’s papers, including his diaries, even a diary of Kennan’s dreams. Poetry by Kennan is included. Kennan understood that the book would not be published until after his death. Kennan was a complex personality, and Gaddis does a masterful job of sifting through diaries and letters and recollections of those around him to establish what his true feelings may have been at any particular time. The biographer singles out three aspects of Kennan’s character which began to take shape when he was a young diplomat and would be retained for the rest of his life. One was his professionalism, both as a diplomat and as a historian. Secondly, there was a cultural pessimism (could what he regarded as “Western civilization” survive the challenges to it from outside forces and its own internal contradictions?). Thirdly, there was personal anguish and self-doubt. Gaddis also discusses his subject’s personal religious faith and is very good at showing what a stabilizing force Kennan’s wife, Annelise, was in his sometimes tumultuous life. This excellent work brings us as close as we are likely to get to the life of an important American foreign policy strategist and historian. George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis. “an epic work—probing, engrossing, occasionally revelatory—but also a well-timed one” – The Times. “bids fair to be as close to the final word as possible on one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants” – Henry Kissinger. “a rare example of a diplomat who changed history through the power of his ideas and the clarity of his writing” – The Financial Times. Born in Southern Texas on the 2nd of April 1941, John Lewis Gaddis is an American historian and renowned scholar of the Cold War. Gaddis is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th-century American statesman George F. Kennan. George F. Kennan: An American Life , his biography of Kennan, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Graduating with a PhD in History in 1968, he joined the Ohio University as an assistant professor. His career has included teaching at Princeton, Yale and Oxford Universities as well as the Naval War college, and writing numerous books and historical studies specialising in the Cold War. His great interest lies in how history affects current events and the process by which current events become history. An occasional advisor to former president George W Bush, Gaddis has made a name for himself in USA academic and policy circles. In the 70’s he founded and directed the Contemporary History Institute in Ohio. Over the years he has been Visiting Professor to many Universities and Colleges and sees his university work as especially important and loves to see his students’ interest spark in his topic of interest. Gaddis received a Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2012 for his official biography on the American Cold War figure George Kennan: George F. Kenna: An American Life. The story of an American diplomat whose writings in the late 1940s helped define the strategies of US policy toward the Soviet Union for the next 40 years and who has been named as the most influential American diplomats in the Cold War era. As well as the Pulitzer, Gaddis has received numerous awards including two for undergraduate teaching at Yale as well as the National Humanities Medal. He has been hailed as the “Dean of Cold War Historians” by . In his earlier works Gaddis maintained that the United States and the Soviet Union were both equally responsible for starting the Cold War. However, he revised this view in the late 1990s when the Soviet, Chinese and East European archives became available, and he wrote We now know: Rethinking Cold Ward History where he declared that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin played a greater role in instigating the Cold War. In this he argued that it was the personality and role in history of the Stalin that constituted one of the most important causes of the Cold War. One of his most famous works is the highly influential Strategies of Containment (1982; rev. 2005), which analyses in detail the theory and practice of containment that was employed against the Soviet Union by Cold War American presidents. George F. Kennan: An American Life (2012) Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. George F. Kennan: An American Life I learned a lot from this authorized biography, the author was given "unrestricted access" to Kennan's journals, writings, and personal friends with the understanding that this book would be published after his death. Kennan's thoughts and work have much to offer 2014 as we see an inter-Slavic conflict in Ukraine as well as the U.S. battling Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria. Kennan would have understood very well Former Secretary of State Clinton's criticisms of the President for not having a coherent, consistent foreign policy. But he would also have been sympathetic to FDR's struggle with a hostile congress just as he was with JFK's struggles with Congress. After the breakup of the USSR, Kennan had argued for its non-alignment with NATO and criticized NATO expansion to Eastern Europe in the 1990s as unnecessarily provocative. He would probably see the current conflict as inevitable given the tensions that had built up. He would also see Putin's strongarm tactics as continuation of Russian history. Kennan was one of the first to recognize that the USSR was just the latest face on the flow of Russian history, led by strong autocrats with empirical ambitions and deep phobias about the Western world. He noted that dispatches written by diplomat Neal Brown from Russia in the 1850s could have just as easily been written in the 1950s, very little had changed. But Kennan always quoted John Adams on foreign policy: Don't go abroad looking for monsters to destroy. The U.S. should be strong and set a definitive alternative vision for the world in contrast to Soviets, Islamic extremists, etc. Fight for freedom and democracy where feasible, but not every monster was a Hitler and some conflicts (like Vietnam, which he was fervently against) are best left avoided. Military strategy should be made concordant with political policy, and this is a theme I saw echoed in Robert Gates' recent memoir. Kennan essentially had three fathers: His own, George Kennan (one of the first Americans to widely travel Russia and the Caucasus) who was Kennan's grandfather's cousin but shared both his birthday, name, and affinity for Russia, and Chekov. Every man has suffered a wound that shaped his development, Kennan's came from the loss of his mother in his infancy and rejection by family members-- including the above George Kennan's wife who made sure her husband had nothing to do with him (a shame, really). Nonetheless he was a "happy child" and a "normal boy" who got his first taste of overseas life (and learned fluent German) when his family lived in Germany for a time. From that he developed an appreciation of foreign culture and a wanderlust. After a military high school, Kennan barely makes it into Princeton and wrote mix feelings about it, mainly finding it "homogenous" and remarks on the lack of foreigners or broader world view. He begins writing letters to his sister while at school, a lifelong endeavor that would be the source for many of his memories in this book. He got passport, took a boat to Europe one summer and fell upon the mercy of the U.S. consulate in Italy. After returning, he graduated from Princeton in 1925 and joins the newly-formed Foreign Service. After passing his exams, he is posted to Geneva, then Hamburg. Not enamored with complaints and lives of expats, he fell in love with a girl, and wanted to resign and also pursue graduate studies. Kennan as bored, frustrated, physically exhausted, and cynical is a recurring theme. He often grows whimsical about doing other things, like farming, writing, or teaching. He is usually given a way out and a new chapter begins. This time, the FS sent to US for 6 months of leave where he elected to join a new program to train in critical languages-- he chose Russian in part out of family affiliation, even though the elder Kennan would have little to do with him. He was then stationed in Talinn, Estonia. While studying in Germany, Kennan passes his Russian exam and marries a Swedish girl (Anna Sorensen). The Depression hits, bankrupting his parents, and Kennan begins to write very pessimistically about civilization. This would continue throughout his life. While professional and stable at home and the office, Kennan is crankily pessimistic, insecure, and often depressed. From 1931-1936, Kennan would be a part of the first U.S. diplomatic mission to Moscow after FDR officially normalized relations with the USSR in 1932. Kennan became one of State Department's most respected Russian experts. When FDR negotiated diplomatic recognition of Moscow in 1932, Kennan warned that Russians would break any agreements signed. This would also be a recurring theme of 20th century history. While Kennan made a decent salary, he was often physically ill, could not stand working for political appointee ambassadors, and received a transfer to Jerusalem only to later be sent back to Moscow when the State Department reorganized its affairs. The depth at which the Soviets had penetrated the State Department and other branches of government during this time was truly remarkable and disturbing. Kennan was definitely anti-McCarthy but recognized areas where he saw Soviet influence. Kennan is the ultimate expatriate, who knows one can never truly go home again. While he loves America, he also loathes its bad characteristics increasingly on every home visit. Kennan was fluent in Russian and well-versed in its history but remarkably ignorant of U.S. history. In 1938 he writes of how America needs a stronger central government led by elites with women and blacks kept from voting. It echoes the "Gentleman" concept of the late 1700s and the Founding Fathers but the author doesn't mention this; Kennan was just ignorant of previous American thought. Kennan later softens after seeing the brutality of fascism, Stalin's purges, and other acts of brutality by non-democratic governments. But he hopes America can rebuild from the Depression in such a way that the proletariat doesn't take the reigns as they did under Hitler in Germany. His journal writings come across as fairly anti-semitic, but he did work to get Jews out of Eastern Europe and Germany before America entered World War II, something he did not get much credit for. Kennan is stationed in Prague during early days of the war and witnesses Nazi occupation. His wife's father was tortured by Germans when they took over Norway. Kennan Meets Germans in Prague who are against Hitler, but little anyone can do. He found the hypocrisy of the German army toward the Jews detestable. Kennan had missed the Soviet-Nazi pact, didn't forsee it. He is transferred to Berlin where he is later interred with other Americans after Pearl Harbor. While in Berlin, Kennan had affairs, which led his wife to leave kids with sister in U.S. and return to Europe. The details of Kennan's affairs are always a mystery but he has a roving eye his entire life, despite loving his wife. After being released, Kennan is stationed in Portugal where he negotiates on behalf of FDR for the use of Portugese land and bases. Eventually, he returns to Moscow under Ambassador Harriman. He is disturbed by the Roosevelt administration's lack of concern with human rights, especially with how FDR quashed talk of Polish mistreatment by Russia for election purposes. Kennan called Russia correctly, writing that they cared/talked only of international cooperation when they needed Western assistance, otherwise it was about grabbing power. Kennan warned various administrations not to let atomic knowledge fall into hands of Soviets for this reason. Kennan again grows frustrated and weary. He tried again to resign in 1945 but was discouraged by his superiors because of his expertise and value. After Stalin's 1946 speech denouncing rest of the world, Kennan wrote "the long telegram," and 8,000 word document that essentially explained Soviet policy and established U.S. policy in addressing it. This made Kennan famous in Washington and then England and USSR compelled own ambassadors to write similar reports. It essentially launched Kennan's modern career. However, in 1947 he again wanted to resign again from foreign service, felt he could only do so much as diplomat. He had traveled Russia, Siberia (for his namesake) and seen more of the country and read more of its literature than any other American. Eventually, he was given an appointment at the newly-established War College in D.C., being paid well and able to teach/lecture to Army, Navy, and FSOs. Was making $15,000, a decent sum for the time. An article penned anonymously by him appeared in the July 1947 edition of Foreign Affairs that outlined a policy of containment, which essentially became the Truman Doctrine. Kennan, more than any other diplomat before or since, had shaped U.S. foreign policy for the century. Kennan worked Worked under Sec. of State Marshall, and I enjoyed that this book gave me a different chapter on Marshall after reading Thomas Ricks' The Generals which focused much on Marshall's leadership and management style. Kennan helped craft the Marshall Plan, basically saying that U.S. policy should be to confront Russia on every front politically, even clandestinely. His recommendations in regards to Yugoslavia and China were also accepted-- China was to be left alone. Kennan was even sent to Japan and did brilliant end-run around McArthur and his "psychophants." He recommended independence for Japan along with aid, like Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan took Stalin by surprise. However, in 1948 Kennan began a "great reversal," going back on previous recommendations after becoming alarmed by the U.S.'s increasingly militarized response to Soviet aggression and fear of a third World War. Kennan had recommended pushing for a unified, neutral Germany and wanted to formulate an end of the Cold War rather than it go on indefinitely. He was Director of Policy Planning-- and the book shows importance of this role in light of today. In 1949 Dean Acheson replaces Marshall as Secretary of State. Kennan advocates separating Communism from Russian Emperialism, which would help isolate Kremlin from places like Tito's Yugoslavia. He also recommends supporting Tito's communism as affront to Kremlin. However, many in Congress do not distinguish "good communists" from "bad communists" and Kennan's views are out-of-step again. He comes to loathe McCarthyism and the far right-wing of the Republican party. Sec. Acheson viewed Russian threat as primarily military and disregarded much of Kennan's policy advice. Kennan believed the Russian people would eventually "come around," and generally wanted peace, but was pessimistic that a peaceful outcome would be reached by the powers. Kennan befriends Robert Oppenheimer and worked for the Institute for Advanced Study, writing and lecturing. Both Kennan and Oppenheimer publicly opposed developing a hydrogen bomb, convinced they would be used if they were ever made. He got onto the Princeton faculty with some considerable controversy and eventually his published books are acclaimed enough to justify his position there. Kennan also sponsored Russian dissident organizations, helping exiles get incorporated into American life. He published book, a "realist" view of foreign policy based on his surprisingly very popular lectures at U. of Chicago. Kennan's works would win a couple Pulitzer prizes. While lecturing at Princeton, he advises the State Dept. to negotiate an end to the Korean War. Kennan ends up being the conduit the Soviets choose to send the message--the Russians told him in a private meeting that they urged N. Korea & China to accept American truce proposal. This earned Kennan more favor with the Truman Administration, and Kennan is appointed Ambassador to the USSR in 1951. Kennan found life in Moscow harder, like being in prison. He was lonely and isolated. At one point he requested the CIA provide him with suicide pills ostensibly because he thought war was inevitable, didn't want to be tortured and put in solitary. He also possibly had an affair and feared the news leaking. His wife eventually was able to come and didn't find it so intolerable. Kennan took everything personally, thought Stalin was out for him; indeed he was given a test by a fake dissident proposing assassination. Like a later Ambassador McFaul, Kennan made statements that enraged Kremlin and was banned. Kennan said his ambassadorship reminded him of his internment in Berlin (said while in Berlin). This comparison with the Nazis engraged the Kremlin and it Seems Stalin himself made the call to banish him. Kennan eventually retired in 1953. He was succeeded in Moscow by Charles Bohlen, who was a long-time colleague and intellectual adversary that was also seen as too much of an "appeaser." Bohlen was later demoted, forced out in 1957, and Kennan had to defend him and others from accusations of collaboration with the Communists. Kennan lives the life of an expatriate and scholar. He becomes critical, almost spiteful, of his own country and its faults. "I didn't leave my country. It left me." After Kennedy's election, Kennan is consulted for advice by JFK, who would meet with him 14 times in his Administration and exchange many letters. JFK gives Kennan the choice of ambassodorships, Poland or Yugoslavia, and Kennan chooses Yugoslavia. JFK pushes a crucial Trade Act through Congress, but the conservatives strip provisions in the bill that would maintain Poland and Yugoslavia's most favored nation status, something that would be a brutal blow to those countries. JFK gave promises about aid to Poland, Yugoslavia, but reneges. Kennan himself had lobbied Congress in person and made calls from Yugoslavia. JFK even promises to criticize while signing, and further reneges. Oddly, Kennan did not fault the President for not keeping his word, or the political situation. Domestic politics wins, and JFK wanted to look tough on communism. JFK later meets with Tito and apologizes while Kennan resigns his post. Kennan writes an article for Foreign Affairs on how the lack JFK's foreign policy is actually the fault of a paralyzing Congress eager to block the President at all turns (sounds familiar). LBJ is mentioned only briefly and comes across as distant, brooding. The Kennans became world travelers while George lectured and wrote his memoirs. He also cultivated "friendships" with various ladies, including Stalin's daughter who defected in India. He became increasingly concerned about policy toward Southeast Asia and testifies before Congress (on national television) against intervention in Vietnam, which polls showed actually swayed public opinion. Kissinger spoke highly of Kennan and Kennan had apparently tracked Kissinger's intellectual progress. Kennan was initially critical of detante but supported the idea of greater dialogue. Natan Sharansky (whose Case for Democracy I remember) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn later widely criticized Kennan. I would agree with them on this point, according to dissidents life got better for them when the U.S. took a harder line; it got worse when it got what it wanted through detant. Kennan was criticized for lack of moral clarity, but Kennan believed the U.S. could have little impact on what USSR did with its citizens. He appears to misjudge the U.S.'s influence on this point. Reagan oddly enough echoed Kennan's writing, speeches, and policy-- negotiating arms reduction with USSR, but Kennan gave him no credit and was constantly critical. The author contrasts this with Kennan's affections for JFK who lied and did nothing, while Reagan actually opened dialogues and reduced the danger. Kennan was simply more cranky and vain in his old age. He probably hated Reagan for being from movies and ads, part of what he hated about America. He still assumed nuclear war inevitable. To understand Kennan's worldview one need read a lot of Russian literature, primarily Chekov, along with Carl Von Clausewitz and Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon's work was instructive in developing Kennan's thoughts on the USSR. He felt that, like Rome, the Soviets had conquered too widely and spread their defenses too thin. Eventually the Soviet bloc territories and sattelites would be too expensive to maintain. One weakness of this book is the lack of mention of hardly anything else in the State Department at this time, and how Kennan's work influenced other Russian/Soviet policy experts who came afterward. I would look for that aspect in another book, this one solely focuses on the man and his immediate impacts. I give this book 4.5 stars and recommend it, especially to those interested in foreign policy vis a vis Russia. ( ) America’s Cold War Sage and His Discontents. This may be the most long-awaited single-volume biography ever. In 1981, the renowned cold war historian John Lewis Gaddis approached the pre-eminent cold war diplomat George F. Kennan about writing his life story. Kennan, who was 78 at the time, turned over mountains of papers, diaries, letters, even dream notebooks, on the condition that the book not be published until after he died. Who knew that he’d live to be 101, or that Mr. Gaddis would take more than a half-decade after his subject’s death to finish writing? Just as well. For “George F. Kennan: An American Life” turns out to be not only an epic work —probing, engrossing, occasionally revelatory — but also a well-timed one. It appears just as its subject has been nearly forgotten and long enough after the 20th century has passed to appreciate his towering significance. The book may not match the sweeping elegance of ’s series on Theodore Roosevelt or Robert Caro’s on Lyndon Johnson (or, for that matter, Kennan’s own 1967 memoir). But Mr. Gaddis is a fine enough writer; the story flows breezily; and several scenes are vivid, even gripping — most notably the accounts of Kennan’s private meetings with Franklin Roosevelt and, much later, his embrace from Mikhail S. Gorbachev, when both Kennan and the cold war, which he had spent much of his life managing, were in their twilights. Kennan made his deepest mark as the author of the containment doctrine, which governed American foreign policy for a half-century, arguably prevented World War III and both predicted, and set the stage for, the crumbling of the Soviet empire. He first outlined the idea in a 5,000-word top-secret missive, the so-called Long Telegram, written in 1946 while he was deputy head of the United States mission in Moscow, then in a 1947 article in Foreign Affairs under the byline “X,” a pseudonym that was pierced within days. At the time no one had devised a framework for how to view the postwar world, with its two emerging superpowers and a devastated Europe in between them. The common assumption was that if Soviet and American diplomats failed to agree on a mutually acceptable plan for peace, war was inevitable. Kennan’s insight was twofold. First, he argued, the notion of such a plan was a pipe dream, as the Kremlin’s masters, by their ideology and their history, viewed the capitalist United States and the Communist Soviet Union as inherently antagonistic. But, second, he offered the assurance that America could peacefully finesse this confrontation through “a policy of firm containment” to check the Soviets’ expansionist tendencies. The West had only to be patient (for the Soviets had no timetable); economically strong (for Communism thrives on “diseased tissue”); and true to its principles (for, at some point, the Eastern European satellites would break free from Soviet domination, and they would need an alternative vision to inspire them). Ever since, in times of crisis or transition, diplomats have dreamed of their own “Kennan moment,” in which they unravel the era’s mysteries and plot a course of triumph. Alas, Mr. Gaddis’s masterly telling of how, in this sense, Kennan became Kennan suggests that we may have seen the last of his kind. Kennan’s training in grand strategy was self-administered and largely a fluke. During World War II he made seven trans-Atlantic trips on diplomatic duty. The voyages took weeks; with nothing else to do, he read literature and histories, especially Gibbon’s chronicle of the decline of the Roman empire, which inspired his thinking about how the Soviet empire might rise and fall. He also wrote voluminous letters to his sister, Jeanette, rehearsing many of the ideas he’d refine later. The seeds of his Long Telegram, for instance, were first planted in such a letter three years earlier.