Kennan, Character and Country
Mini Teaser: John Lukacs offers an intimate portrait of one of America's great strategists in George Kennan.
John Lukacs, George Kennan: A Study of Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 207 pp., $26.00.
En route to Moscow to serve as Ambassador Averell Harriman's minister-counselor in June 1944, George F. Kennan spent two miserable days in Baghdad. Musing on America potentially supplanting Britain as the dominant Western power in the region, he wrote in his diary:
"Are we willing to bear this responsibility? I know-and every realistic American knows-that we are not. Our government is technically incapable of conceiving and promulgating a long-term consistent policy toward areas remote from its own territory."[1]
Over sixty years later, Kennan is enjoying a renaissance, as academics (Ian Shapiro), think tankers (John Hulsman and Anatol Lieven) and pundits (Peter Beinart) reflect on his legacy and see important lessons for our present trials and tribulations in Iraq and beyond. Almost six years after 9/11, the Bush Administration's approach to the War on Terror has generated popular frustration, and thus a look back at the origins of another ideological conflict-the Cold War-and the ideas of a man who history proved clairvoyant despite his earlier marginalization, makes sense.
Most studies of Kennan emphasize his contributions to Cold War strategy from 1944-1950, a miniscule portion of his lengthy life. Unfortunately, his inaccessibility as an individual has, in some cases, facilitated the misappropriation of his strategic legacy, and so to truly grasp Kennan's impact, we need a broader and more personal examination, which is exactly what historian John Lukacs provides in George Kennan: A Study of Character.
Chronicling Kennan's character is no easy task. Many commentators have neglected analyzing the man in favor of the strategist. But his character is inextricably bound to his place in history; each informs the other and cannot stand alone. Kennan's fellow Scotsman Thomas Carlyle said over 160 years ago: "Could we see them [great men] well, we should get some glimpses into the very marrow of the world's history." Lukacs sees Kennan and provides a glimpse into the marrow of America and the world's experience in the twentieth century. George Kennan is not a biography because it does not feign objectivity. It is a panegyric, Kennan's friend's deeply personal appeal to a country that insufficiently appreciates one of its great sons.
His strategic brilliance, his foresight and his accomplishments as an historian alone do not sufficiently elucidate Kennan's character and its importance. We must understand what drove Kennan to such great heights. The intellectual rigor and honesty with which he approached international relations, his incessant study of history and its relation to the United States, and his capacity to look beyond the horizon helped precipitate America's postwar ascent. Lukacs does not seek to canonize Kennan-he had faults, he was wrong at times, and many readers may find his disinterest in international human rights and democracy unpalatable-but in an era when so many Americans feel their country has gone astray, a man who relied on his character to clearly and thoughtfully articulate his vision for the United States is enlivening. And so with a literary style reminiscent of a deferential, omniscient narrator, Lukacs tells Kennan's story.
Ascent and Departure
At the beginning, Lukacs introduces the reader to a reserved, lonely and humble 18-year-old Princeton student. "I see myself, emotionally and personally, as a rather ordinary youth, assailed by very ordinary weaknesses and passions", Kennan reflected. (This humility is much like that of a young Henry Adams, with whom Lukacs compares Kennan favorably-more on this later.) The young collegian maintained a separation between himself and the elite sons of Princeton, a gulf that would define his social relations with such men for much of his life. Surprisingly, the young Kennan flirted with former-Princeton President Woodrow Wilson's liberal internationalism, but its appeal soon faded, and Kennan joined the Foreign Service following graduation.
After posts in Europe, Kennan sought advanced studies and resigned from the Foreign Service. Fortunately, the chance intervention of a senior officer dissuaded Kennan from quitting, and he studied Russia through the State Department in Berlin.
During these years, Kennan achieved a respite from his chronic isolation through marriage, which, like much of his persona, was evocative of a previous epoch. He wed a Norwegian woman, Annelise, in 1929. Lukacs does not hide his own affection for Annelise, who provided her husband with love and support through professional ups and downs-of which there were many-for 76 years.
After completing his studies, Kennan had achieved, among Foreign Service Officers, an unparalleled understanding of Russia; its language, culture and history. In 1933 he moved to Moscow to serve under William Bullit, America's first ambassador to the Soviet Union. In the shadow of the Kremlin, over a decade before the Long Telegram, the young, then-pedestrian diplomat put his indefatigable intellect to work, starting on a path that would lead to the highest echelons of American government.
Lukacs crucially emphasizes that Kennan's anti-communism was not akin to that of so many Americans, especially Joseph McCarthy's vicious and hysterical brand (Kennan reviled this paranoia and fanaticism, and Lukacs describes him as an anti-anti-communist). In other words, it was not superficial or political: it had an intellectual and historical depth. Kennan believed that Marx was wrong: class struggles did not drive history-nations and states did. (He also had his reservations about democracy, particularly the potential for domestic influences to supercede national interests in foreign policy.) And this applied in Soviet Russia, where it was not dialectical materialism, but, as Lukacs writes, "an age-old Russian, here and there even Byzantine, element in the politics of Stalin and his cohorts: an ancestral suspicion and fear of human differences and of the outside world that explained almost everything of the brutalities and dishonesties of that regime." As a witness to the domestic repression in the USSR throughout the 1930s, Kennan knew that Marxism was playing second fiddle to old-fashioned Russian nationalism.
Today, such arguments might be derided as racist (or right on the money in some circles). Cultural sensitivity towards non-European cultures, to couch it in diplomatic language, was not Kennan's forte. (He had especially bigoted words for Iraqis during his 1944 visit, writing: "What of the possibilities of service in Baghdad? A country in which man's selfishness and stupidity have ruined almost all natural productivity.") His intolerance aside, Kennan's experiences in Moscow laid the foundation for what would become containment. He expressed these ideas and others in his legendary Long Telegram of 1946. "George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history", Henry Kissinger later observed. But as Kennan further refined these ideas, they eventually put him at odds with much of the foreign policy establishment after he returned to Washington to lecture and, in 1947, head George Marshall's Policy Planning Staff.
But Kennan's vision of containment was hardly instructive in concrete policy matters-it was no roadmap. As Yale historian and Kennan's official biographer John Lewis Gaddis writes, "The very act of transforming expertise into policy guidelines distorted that expertise, Kennan believed."[2] Policy guidelines would strip America of the flexibility associated with classical diplomacy, but guidelines and directives were what policy implementers needed, and even Kennan recognized the challenge of selling a strategy resting on "the unfirm substance of the imponderables." Dean Acheson bluntly recalled: "[Kennan's] recommendations . . . were of no help; his historical analysis might or might not have been sound, but his predictions and warnings could not have been better."[3] Containment existed in the abstract, and Kennan's conscious decision to preserve its amorphousness contributed to his own fading influence.
Paul Nitze succeeded Kennan at policy planning and Nitze's authorship of NSC-68 in April 1950 and its Manichaean language exemplified the vast divide separating Kennan and most of the Truman Administration, which might come as a surprise to those self-proclaimed heirs to both strategic legacies. "The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatical faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world", NSC-68 read. To Kennan, there was nothing new or unprecedented in Russia's actions and thus he sought to divide the communist world along nationalist lines, anticipating Tito's split with Stalin in 1948 (though it occurred sooner than he expected) and the Sino-Soviet split years later. (On Sino-Soviet issues, to his death, contrary to the policies of American presidents since Nixon, Kennan saw greater value in a relationship with Russia than with China, Lukacs reminds us.)
By 1953, Kennan's diplomatic career was all but over. In his final days in Foggy Bottom, Lukacs writes, "He occupied a desk somewhere on the lower levels of the State Department building, where he worked and read and wrote. There, too, he was now alone." Solitude remained a common thread throughout the life of Kennan, who knew the role of outsider better than most.
In Kennan's case, however, "outsider" did not carry a negative connotation-quite the opposite, for it reflected immunity to groupthink and commitment to his principles. But did Kennan embrace the role of outsider and contrarian to his own detriment? It is a worthwhile question Lukacs does not adequately explore.
In Search of Contemporaries
"[A]cross the Baltic from the safe battlements of Stockholm, Russia looked more portentous than from the Kremlin. The image was that of a retreating ice-cap-a wall of archaic glacier, as fixed, as ancient, as eternal, as the wall of archaic ice that blocked the ocean a few hundred miles to the northward, and more likely to advance."[4]
This passage, with its fluid prose and prescience, could easily have come from Kennan, but it did not. Henry Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of American presidents and an accomplished man of letters, penned them in 1904, the year of Kennan's birth.
A significant obstacle Kennan biographers face is putting Kennan in context because of his remoteness from his contemporaries. As Lukacs observes, a man of his character would have been more at home in a previous era, and so to illuminate some of his defining characteristics, a comparison with another American admittedly out of place among his own generation is helpful. Although Adams symbolized the New England-bred American aristocracy Kennan neither could nor wanted to join, he is a valuable foil.
Kennan, much like Adams, coupled self-doubt and criticism with "self-esteem-or, rather, a rueful but strong assertion of his own mind", Lukacs writes. Adams' self-doubt, manifested in incessant educational growth, combined with strong convictions to inspire critiques of the powerful men of his day, such as Theodore Roosevelt. Kennan was much the same; an aloof, impassioned and confident policy advocate, yet also possessing a "superb modesty", self-critical of his professional performance and sensitive about his failures. Both men questioned democracy's empowerment of the masses. Kennan sympathized with authoritarians, such as Mussolini and Salazar, and at one point began work on a book arguing against universal suffrage. Adams, in an 1894 letter, wrote: "The Working-man is so brilliant a political failure. . . . We are under a sort of terror before them."
To escape Washington, Kennan frequented his farm in southeastern Pennsylvania, where he indulged in simple pleasures. The Yankee higher-ups at the State Department encountered unpretentious accommodations at the Kennan farm and may not have enjoyed assisting him in the garden and house, which Kennan expected of them. This rural refuge, as opposed to the hustle and bustle of Washington, mirrors Adams' own juxtaposition of Boston with Quincy, the home of his presidential forbearers.
In The Education of Henry Adams, Quincy acts as a foil to cosmopolitan Boston, espousing "liberty, diversity, outlawry, the endless light of mere sense impressions given by nature for nothing, and breathed by boys knowing it."[5] Like Kennan in Pennsylvania, in Quincy, Adams found a gratifying landscape reminiscent of a simpler order, one Old Europe embodied.
Adams and Kennan's shared frustration with America's cultural decline fueled their affinity for Old Europe. In May 1953 Kennan spoke of this decline in an address at Notre Dame University (which Lukacs includes as an appendix), alluding to McCarthyism, he said:
The people in question seem to feel either that cultural values are not important at all or that America has reached the apex of cultural achievement and no longer needs in any serious way the stimulus of normal contact with other peoples in the field of arts and letters. They look with suspicion both on the sources of intellectual and artistic activity in this country and on impulses of this nature coming to us from abroad.
Adams also found meaning in America's European roots. Following his wife's suicide in 1885, his travels through northern France inspired Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. France's cathedrals embodied order and the unified spirituality of man lacking in America. "One looks back on it all as a picture; a symbol of unity; an assertion of God and Man in a bolder, stronger, closer union than ever was expressed by other art", he wrote.[6]
Europe's cultural roots in the humanities and spirituality contrasted the increasing urbanization and mechanization of American society, alarming both Kennan and Adams. When Adams returned to the United States at the turn of the century, he criticized New York City, expressing skepticism of technology as panacea for man's trials in modern, urban society.
Kennan was equally skeptical of technology and its impact on American society. In 1936 he returned to the Midwest, and again, "He felt sad and alone. What he saw (or at least what he thought he saw) was no longer a world of his", Lukacs writes. Technology was the catalyst for this great transformation and, in this instance, Kennan blamed the automobile, Lukacs reveals. This skepticism (even disdain) persisted throughout his life. For the landmark CNN documentary series on the Cold War in the 1990s, convincing Kennan to sit for a television interview was no easy task-he never owned a television and reviled the medium and its impact on American society.
Whether Kennan or Adams liked it or not, technology advanced, increasingly impacting American society throughout the twentieth century. Both turned to the past, and Kennan began an accomplished career as an historian, publishing groundbreaking studies of American-Soviet relations, American foreign policy and European politics in the decades approaching World War I. "The studying and writing of history is a relatively lonely occupation", he once said, shedding light on his attraction to the vocation.
Kennan and Country
Despite the gap separating Kennan from an increasingly tech-based society, Lukacs contests that Kennan (who had an illustrious career at Princeton)-through his histories, his lectures and his public stances (specifically his opposition to the Vietnam War)-was "the conscience of a nation." But can a man be such a conscience without the nation acknowledging it? Can Kennan be the conscience of a nation, of which he might not approve? If Kennan were such a conscience, this book would be less important. Even Lukacs hints that his claim is exaggerated in the book's final pages.
In these closing pages, where the author abandons any shred of objectivity, he writes, "Save for these last sentences this is not the memoir of a friend but the work of a historian." But the whole work is clearly that of a friend, and it would be unfulfilling without a friend's insight. There is no shame in that, though Lukacs goes too far in his concluding sentence, comparing Kennan to Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps, through the diligence of historians like Lukacs, Kennan may yet achieve his rightful place in the pantheon of American statesmen, but Mount Rushmore will not be undergoing renovations anytime soon.
In American Diplomacy, 1900-1950, Kennan wrote: "I would like to say a word about the concept of the six lectures. The concept stems from no abstract interest in history for history's sake. It stems from a preoccupation with the problems of foreign policy we have before us today." George Kennan is not history for history's sake. It is a study of character that portrays a man whose own contribution to history inspires vigorous contemplation of "the problems of foreign policy before us today." It will serve as an excellent primer for the more detailed and objective biographies bound to follow it.
Sean R. Singer is an apprentice editor at The National Interest.
[1] George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), pp. 184-185.
[2] John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, Revised and Expanded ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 50.
[3] Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1969), pp. 151.
[4] Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, First Mariner Books ed. (Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society, 1918), pp. 411.
[5] Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, First Mariner Books ed. (Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society, 1918), pp. 8.
[6] Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-MichelandChartres, 17th ed. (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1904), pp. 45.