George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Kennan came to this last conclusion through an improbable convergence of ideas. One source was Gibbon, on the Romans’ difficulties in attempting to hold, indefinitely and against their will, conquered provinces. Another was the great Russian writers—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov—who had shown their country’s resistance, however subtle, to revolutionary redesign. A third was Kennan’s sense that, being human, not even Soviet leaders could withstand repeated frustration; that if confronted with it consistently, they would eventually discover an interest in joining, rather than seeking to overthrow, the existing international order. Finally, Kennan’s strategy reflected faith in the United States: if it remained true to its founding principles, it would provide a more attractive example for the rest of the world than the Soviet Union, which might itself not be immune. All that would be required was “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” Anyone could have written that sentence. Only Kennan could have made it believable.

  Others determined, to be sure, what “containment” required; hence Kennan’s disillusionment with that strategy from the moment he ceased to make those determinations. By the mid-1970s, his dismay had grown to the point of seeing his own country, not the Soviet Union, as the principal threat to international stability; that shortsightedness in turn blinded Kennan to the extent to which Reagan’s policies returned to his own. Kennan’s ideas turned out to be transferable to an American leader so different from himself that he could never quite bring himself to believe what had happened.

  Kennan’s strategy, then, was more robust than his own faith in it. “Containment’s” goal was not to achieve perfection but to distinguish lesser from greater evils. Its components—even those Kennan did not design—for the most part complemented the whole. It proved to be sustainable because it generally deployed strengths against weaknesses and, when it did not, corrected the error. With the help Kennan had predicted the Kremlin would provide, the world saw something worse, during most of the Cold War, than the wielding of American power. And Kennan’s strategy aligned his country’s interests, far more successfully than did his counterparts in Moscow, with long-term historical forces. For Kennan understood that in order to look forward you have to look back: that the only way you can know anything at all about the future is to know as much as you can about the past.

  This brings up a second, if less striking, qualification for greatness, which is Kennan’s career as a historian. He never trained formally for this profession—perhaps that’s why he was good at it—but the study of history was at the center of his preparation for diplomacy and strategy in several ways: first, through his understanding of European and American history, acquired as a Princeton undergraduate; second, through his immersion in the history and culture of Russia as a young Foreign Service officer; and finally, through his crash reading in the classics of grand strategy while organizing the curriculum at the National War College in 1946–47.

  Despite two National Book Awards, two Pulitzers, and a Bancroft Prize for his historical and autobiographical writing, Kennan was for years more widely thought of as a theorist of international relations—indeed, with Lippmann, Niebuhr, and Morgenthau, as a founding father of post–World War II realism. But Kennan disliked theory and never regarded himself as practicing that dark art. What he did believe in was the capacity of those who have studied the past to know themselves better for having done so. The “mechanical and scientific creations of modern man,” he once wrote, “tend to conceal from him the nature of his own humanity and to encourage him in all sorts of Promethean ambitions and illusions.” Reminders were needed, therefore, “of the limitations that rest on him, of the essential elements, both tragic and helpful, of his own condition. It is these reminders that history, and history alone, can give.”4

  Kennan’s life as a historian, in turn, evokes a third quality for which he is likely to be remembered, which is his skill as a writer. Not the least of the reasons Kennan succeeded as a strategist and a historian is that he used words well. There was passion, luminosity, vigor, and originality in almost all of his prose, so much so that its vividness at times obscured the meanings he meant for it to convey. Had it not been for that—had Kennan written as most other Foreign Service officers did—the world might never have heard of him, and his readers would not have retained the phrases, sentences, and sometimes whole paragraphs he so indelibly imprinted upon them.

  So might Kennan also be remembered as one of the great American writers of the twentieth century? He hoped for this in his youth, but as an essayist, perhaps a novelist, and certainly as Chekhov’s (if not the first George Kennan’s) biographer. Those things never happened: he attracted his readers, instead, through his official dispatches, then through his lectures and articles, then through his books, and finally through the selections he published from his letters and diaries. These last, however, are fragments. Kennan’s unpublished letters rival those of distinguished literary contemporaries, and his diaries, which run, with gaps, from 1916 to 2003, are arguably the most remarkable work of sustained self-analysis—and certainly self-criticism—since The Education of Henry Adams.5

  One reason for the diaries’ importance is that they document yet another career for which Kennan should be remembered: that of philosopher. We usually understand this term to mean someone who has thought deeply about living a worthwhile life. Kennan did not attempt, until in his late eighties, to publish his conclusions (hence Around the Cragged Hill), but he had always used his diary to agonize over obligations to civilization, country, community, family, and himself. Not surprisingly, these were rarely compatible. And so, as the need to balance objectives and capabilities gave rise to a grand strategy at the level of geopolitics, in Kennan’s diaries it produced, over many decades, a personal strategy for survival.

  Its most distinctive feature was Kennan’s detestation of the culture—at first American, but later European as well—that surrounded him. He claimed from time to time that he would have been happier living in the eighteenth century, an assertion to be taken with a large grain of salt; but he was always an outsider in his own time. His attempts to explain why have had less influence than his other writings, chiefly because he never found the right balance between careful criticism, of which there was some, and repetitive rants, of which there were many.

  Something serious lay behind both, though: it was a profound uneasiness with complacency, or, to put it another way, a strong conviction that we—whoever “we” were at the time—ought to be able to do better than this—whatever “this” might turn out to be. That’s why Kennan was never satisfied with the way “containment” was implemented during the Cold War. It’s why the end of that struggle, the most thorough vindication imaginable of his strategy, gave him so little satisfaction. It’s why he was so at odds with post–Cold War policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations. And it’s why, had he been able to respond to the tributes that poured in on his one hundredth birthday, he would have taken himself to task for his failures.

  All of which is why his self-composed obituary from nine years earlier makes a great deal of sense. When asked unexpectedly to sum up and connect the various careers of George Kennan, he placed them all under the heading of teacher: on understanding Russia; on shaping a strategy for dealing with that country; on the danger that in pursuing that strategy too aggressively, the United States could endanger itself; on what the past suggested about societies that had done just this; on how to study history; on how to write; on how to live.

  It’s a paradox, given all this teaching, that so little of it took place in conventional classrooms. I asked him about this once. Kennan’s answer was that when he had tried it, he worried so much over assigning grades that he had given it up, because there wouldn’t have been time for anything else. George Kennan was granted far more time to teach in unconventional classrooms than he could ever have imagined. He never wasted a moment; nor did he shrink from assessment, not least of himself. Th
at’s why he had no retirement. And it’s where his posthumous greatness primarily resides: in timeless, transcendent teaching.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book has taken so long to finish that the debts I’ve incurred remind me of the national deficit. I’m sure that I’ve missed some of these in what follows, so let me begin with apologies to all not mentioned to whom I owe thanks.

  My greatest debt, of course, is to George and Annelise Kennan, for the help they gave, the trust they showed, and the patience they maintained over so many years. I also owe much to my other interviewees—almost fifty of them—whose memories took me beyond what the documents showed. The younger Kennans, Grace, Joan, Christopher, and Wendy, have also in recent years assisted me with this project: I am particularly grateful to Joan for the family correspondence, photographs, and reminiscences she has provided, and to Christopher for his visits with my Yale undergraduate seminar on “The Art of Biography” when it focused on his father. Other members of the extended Kennan family shared stories, sources, and time, especially Eugene and James Hotchkiss, Douglas James, Ted Vogel, and—certainly not least—George’s secretaries over more than half a century, Dorothy Hessman, Constance Goodman, Janet Smith, Elizabeth Stenard, Terrie Bramley, and Betsy Barrett.

  Archivists and staff at Princeton’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library have facilitated my work on Kennan since the mid-1970s. Hence my gratitude to that admirable institution and its directors, Nancy Bressler, Ben Primer, and most recently Daniel Linke, who organized the recataloging of George’s papers after his death. Adriane Hanson, who prepared an excellent new finding aid, helped me reconcile old with new box and folder numbers, and locate photographs. Jean Holliday, the Mudd Library’s receptionist and reading room supervisor for many years, made sure that we researchers got to know one another: I owe to her several friendships that I still cherish. For their responses to particular queries, I also should like to thank Tad Bennicoff, of the Mudd Library staff; Christine Di Bella and Erica Mosner, of the Institute for Advanced Study Archives; Michael Devine and Samuel Rushay, of the Harry S. Truman Library; Susan K. Lemke, of the National War College Archives; Gary Richert, director of alumni relations at St. John’s Northwestern Military Academy; Tim Ericson, of the Wisconsin State Historical Society; Craig Wright, of the Herbert Hoover Library; and of course Judith Schiff, Diane Kaplan, William Massa, and their colleagues at Sterling Library Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.

  A generation of research assistants has, at one time or another, worked with me on this book. They include Anne Louise Antonoff, Ryan Floyd, Michael Gaddis, Victor Kaufman, Matthew Kennedy, Victor McFarland, Ned Mitchell, Michael Schmidt, and Andrew Scott: all have extended the biography beyond what it otherwise would have been. Igor Biryukov, Andrey Ivanov, Jeffrey Mankoff, and Adam Tooze have helped with translations, and I am also grateful to Rene Bystrom, Kimberly Chow, Jack Cunningham, Robert English, Barton Gellman, John Lamberton Harper, Mark Lawrence, Melvyn P. Leffler, Geir Lundestad, Douglas McCabe, Philip Nash, Christian Ostermann, Thomas Schöttli, Strobe Talbott, and Nicholas Thompson for passing along Kennan information obtained in their own research.

  Institutional support has come, over the years, from the Guggenheim Foundation, Oxford University, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, as well as my “home” universities, Ohio and Yale. Fred Greenstein and Richard Ullman arranged a semester for me at Princeton University in 1987, where I was able to complete much of the early research for this book. Others have helped in more specific ways: Avis Bohlen spent a morning talking with me about her father; Mark Bradley showed me Milwaukee sites that I would write about; Mimi Bull sent me her correspondence with Kennan while she was working as his research assistant; Patricia Woolf shared reminiscences about the Institute for Advanced Study; and S. Frederick Starr, while president of Oberlin College, arranged for me to join the second George Kennan on a memorable visit to the house, in Norwalk, Ohio, where the first George Kennan had grown up.

  Teaching, I discovered long ago, is how I learn, so the students I’ve had in my classes—especially my Yale biography seminar—have been my collaborators, whether they realize it or not. For his role in the early placement of this book, I should like to thank Gerald McCauley, then more recently Andrew Wylie, of The Wylie Agency, to whom I am grateful not just for his help with this book, but also for his willingness to support the scholarship of several of my younger colleagues and graduate students. Eamon Dolan, my editor at Penguin, gave the manuscript the bracingly critical final reading that it badly needed, while Emily Graff has carefully but tactfully overseen the production process, with the valuable assistance of Janet Biehl, Barbara Campo, Roland Ottewell, and Don Homolka. Scott Moyers, first at Penguin, then at Wylie, and now back at Penguin, has in every way made this project his own, and I am deeply grateful.

  Friends and family sustain projects like this in ways less tangible but no less important. So my special gratitude, for contributions the nature of which they will understand, goes to Paul Kennedy and Cynthia Farrar, Charles Hill and Norma Thompson, Gaddis and Barclay Smith, Charles Ellis and Linda Lorimer, Sam and Sherry Wells, Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Susan Ferber, Vladimir Pechatnov, Bill Miscamble C.S.C., Nancy Stratton, Jack and Rebecca Matlock, Roger Hertog, Barbara Gaddis, Michael and Tina Gaddis, David Gaddis, Eliza Shaw Valk, and—it would take another book of this size even to begin to explain how much—Toni Dorfman.

  —J. L. G.

  ABBREVIATIONS TO NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ASK: Annelise Sørensen Kennan

  CIA: Central Intelligence Agency

  CKB: Constance Kennan Bradt

  DSR-DF: Decimal File, U.S. Department of State Records, Record Group 59, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation

  FKW: Frances Kennan Worobec

  FRUS: U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States

  GFK: George F. Kennan

  GFK Diary: George F. Kennan Diary, Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, filed chronologically in Boxes 230–39 and 325–26

  GFK, Memoirs, I: George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925–1950 (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1967)

  GFK, Memoirs, II: George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1950–1963 (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1972)

  JKH: Jeanette Kennan Hotchkiss

  JEK: Joan Elisabeth Kennan

  JLG: John Lewis Gaddis

  KKK: Kossuth Kent Kennan

  KWK: Kent Wheeler Kennan

  NSC: National Security Council

  OPC: Office of Policy Coordination

  OSP: Office of Special Projects

  OSS: Office of Strategic Services

  PPS Papers: The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, 1947–1949. New York: Garland, 1983.

  PPS Records: U.S. Department of State, Policy Planning Staff Records, Record Group 59, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  NOTES

  PREFACE

  1 GFK to JLG, April 18, 1995, JLG Papers.

  2 GFK Diary, April 15, 1997; GFK to Eugene Hotchkiss, February 14, 2003, copy in JLG Papers.

  3 JLG Diary, November 9, 2003, ibid.

  4 JLG notes, August 24, 1982, and September 5, 1983, ibid.

  ONE • CHILDHOOD: 1904–1921

  1 Unless otherwise noted, the author conducted all interviews. Dates are repeated only for multiple interviews with the same individual. A key to abbreviations is on page 701. JKH interview, December 21, 1982, p. 3; CKB, interview by JEK, undated, p. 1. See also GFK, Memoirs, I, 4, and JKH, “Memoirs for Two.”

  2 GFK, Memoirs, I, 3–4.

  3 GFK Diary, March 8, 1931, quoted in GFK, Sketches from a Life, pp. 20–21.

  4 GFK to “my dear children,” Bad Nauheim, Germany, February 1942, GFK Papers, 140:9. Here and henceforth, for the Kennan papers, the first number is the box, the second the folder. Where no folder is indicated, files are in alphabetical or chronological order.
Locations of all manuscript collections are listed in the Bibliography.

  5 GFK Diary, January 14, 1959. The Kennan diaries, hereafter cited by date only, are in the GFK Papers, boxes 230–39 and 325–26.

  6 GFK to JKH and CKB, July 21, 1984, JKH Papers.

  7 Chekhov, Steppe and Other Stories, pp.1, 47. My wife, Toni, and I witnessed these tears during a visit with GFK in Princeton, N.J., June 26, 1999.

  8 GFK, Memoirs, I, 4.

  9 GFK interview by JEK, undated, CKB interview, November 13, 1982, p. 2, and FKW interview, June 28, 1984, p. 3; also JKH interview, p. 4, and CKB interview by JEK, p. 14.

  10 GFK interview, August 24, 1982, p. 4. See also Sanborn Map Company, Insurance Maps of Milwaukee, I, 61. The house was later renumbered as 309 Cambridge Avenue.

  11 GFK interview by JEK, p. 8; CKB interview, p. 1; JKH interview, p. 2.

  12 KKK handwritten reminiscences, no date but probably 1933, KKK Papers. I am indebted to Tim Ericson for bringing these materials to my attention.

  13 JKH interview, p. 3.

  14 CKB interview, p. 2.

  15 JKH interview, p. 7; JKH, “Memoirs for Two,” p. 8; CKB interview, p. 2.

  16 GFK interview, August 24, 1982, pp. 4, 11–12; JKH interview, p. 4.

  17 JKH interview, December 29, 1982, p. 5; JKH, “Memoirs for Two,” pp. 17, 21; KWK interview, December 29, 1982, p. 1.

  18 FKW interview, p. 3; KKK reminiscences, emphases in original; JKH interview, p. 3. See also GFK’s own portrait of his father in his Memoirs, I, 7–8.

  19 KWK interview, p. 2; GFK, Memoirs, I, 3; JKH interview, p. 23.

  20 GFK interview, August 24, 1982, p. 13; KWK interview, December 29, 1982, pp. 3, 5; JKH interview, pp. 4, 11–12, 25.