Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} George F. Kennan An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis 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 Princeton University, “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.