George F. Kennan: An American Life

John Lewis Gaddis obtained from the great man much time and personal access, and was granted privileges to Kennan’s archives. Gaddis has produced a very profound, insightful work on George Kennan‘s Grand Strategy. Kennan promulgated this strategy through the Long Telegram, his famous writing as author „X“ in the journal, Foreign Affairs, and in position papers of the Policy Planning Staff under George Marshall and Dean Acheson. The reader walks with Kennan through the 1920‘s when, under the Rogers Act, the man in his young 20‘s enters the very first generation of a newly established class of professional, career officers of America‘s foreign service. The reader, with the young Kennan, learns to love Russian culture and history as the State Department sponsors his immersive graduate studies in Russian language and history combined with work-study programs in consulate offices. Kennan, like Dean Acheson, was present at the creation. Kennan underestimated his own power of influence, both at the end of World War II, the outset of the Cold War, and over the seventy years remaining in his life when a grateful nation kept seeking his counsel despite his seeking of scholarly refuge from the empyrean heights of the Advanced Institute at Princeton University. Kennan’s greatness emerged in strategic vision promulgated with force of language shaped by Shakespeare, John Donne and Edward Gibbon. A very inward, reflective, even spiritual man, Kennan always felt responsible towards children and posterity; he always took other persons very seriously in their humanity. These spiritual qualities combined with poetic powers that found new forms of strategic expression patterned for new world situations as they arose — his foresight as early as the 1940’s of Communism’s ultimate fall under its own weight due to the unwieldiness of the Soviet Union’s far-flung empire; his opposition to the Vietnam War as well as the bombing of Hanoi; as well as his proposal in the 1980‘s of strategic arms reduction (to replace arms limitation) with an ultimate goal to eliminate weapons of mass destruction overall. Gaddis does not shrink from candid review of Kennan’s considerable limitations and faults. Gaddis’ work is well-balanced. My first contact with George Kennan came 50 years ago as a college junior in international relations, having been assigned Kennan‘s concise „Lenin and the West.“ Kennan‘s vision struck that college junior forever, and Gaddis‘ biography is one of the few expressions that measures up to the great man‘s legacy. This work should be read in conjunction with the very profound work of Robert Beisner, „Dean Acheson and the Cold War“.

It would be next to impossible to read about the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union without George Kennan's name appearing. The man's containment argument carried the day in Washington D.C., helped our nation avoid war with the U.S.S.R., and, therefore, prevented needless deaths on both sides. For about three decades, I've always wondered why this guy? Sure, Mr. Kennan was acknowledged as a very smart person when it came to Russian history, but it's difficult to believe he was the only big brain kicking around D.C. that had a firm grasp of the Russian mindset as well as Bolshevism.Mr. Gaddis does an excellent job in, not only explaining Mr. Kennan's importance and how he became indispensable, but also the full measure of the man. Warts and all. The author rightly had concerns about taking on a biography about such a thin-skinned man while the dude was still alive. Mr. Gaddis explains the conditions which were put in place for him to attempt the biography. His intimate access to Mr. Kennan's boatloads of written arguments; the man's family, friends and foes; and most importantly exclusive use of Mr. Kennan's life-long personal diary culminates into not a gushy lovefest but a very balanced, absorbing biography. Mr. Gaddis's book certainly deserved the Pulitzer Prize. Like everyone else, Kennan had qualities that were admirable and other aspects of his personality that were either annoying or made him a good candidate for being hit on the side of the head with an iron skillet.The story is about a brilliant wonk whose ability to right cogent, poetic assessments that influenced policy makers is what separated him from the other bright bureaucrats. Man oh man, the guy rubbed elbows with the big guys; Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Bush 41, and Clinton as well as General MacArthur, Secretary of States George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and George Shultz. Then there's Robert Oppenheimer, Mikhail Gorbachev... look, my fingers are getting tired in listing all the power brokers. You get the picture. Also, his love of Russian history and culture and ability to speak perfect Russian made him a cut above the rest. At his core, Mr. Kennan had an oddly wonkish heart and the unstable emotions of your stereotypical artist. The man was completely, laughably clueless about contemporary American culture.In the week I was reading "George F. Kennan," not one person who asked me had any idea who he was. That's a shame. Mr. Kennan strongly believed that style was as important as substance. He joined the two and made himself into a valuable asset. Mr. Gaddis seems to have taken the same attitude while writing his Kennan biography and the result is an outstanding work which deserves a wide readership.

Wonderfully written, superbly detailed and authoritative given the biographer spent 30 years amassing information through first hand interviews as well as background research on his subject. Has described Keenan in the full light of day - little is hidden of his faults and indeed achievements. One wonders how many figures in history could have achieved so much in such varied disciplines (diplomacy, the person Stalin's daughter sought when she chose to defect, member of the Advanced Studies Institute alongside Oppenheimer, President of the American Arts Society and Pulitzer prize winner).Well worth reading and highly approachable - surprised his name isn't more widely recognised given his involvement in the shaping of world order post WWII

Kennan was an extraordinary US foreign diplomat. This book gives one a good idea of his talents, let alone telegram X and containment of the then USSR. Something to be reviewed with the rise of China???

Good, thanks

Brings to mind the supreme use of logic as having the ability to convert the unknown into the known. Also in doing the right thing through unconditional love, which binds without capturing and supports without limiting, a power of performance available to our ‘now’ moments.Life exists because love existed before it, therefore life is love in action. Knowing what love is and what it isn’t will solve this mystery. The particles of infinity have memory and retain experience. A synapses won’t fire without it.

The subtitle of this book, 'An American Life', invites comment, since its subject, George Kennan, spent a considerable proportion of his adult life outside of the USA and married a foreigner, considered himself an '18th century man' (a product of the European, not the American tradition), and remained a trenchant critic of American culture and society. And yet, as a very public public servant and academic, he never ceased trying to influence the America of his particular century (he lived to the age of 101), and in so doing grappled desperately with the phenomenon of America (what it wanted, what it stood for, what would survive its efforts to attain its goals) when and where the stakes were highest: in the intellectual deep-freeze of the Cold War.This biography - 30 years in the making and approved by Kennan (although he did not live to read it) - is a major achievement: beautifully written, even-handed and comfortably grounded in the complexities of events that span many decades. Kennan is not glorified, but he is sympathetically understood. Intellectually, the challenge of understanding Kennan is more formidable than might occur to some who associate him with just one idea: the policy of 'containment' to check the power of the Soviet Union after 1945. As Gaddis makes clear, Kennan was as often as not a dissenter from his own foreign policy formulae. Despite his image as a conservative theorist (his social values were consistently ultra-conservative) in international relations, Kennan opposed the American involvement in Vietnam and was an early advocate of nuclear disarmament. During the Reagan years, he saw more danger in American actions than those of the Soviet leadership (for instance, he regarded the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a defensive measure). Little wonder that almost every President, from Roosevelt to Bush Sr, and their Secretaries of State, were at some point driven to distraction by Kennan's goadings. Exceptions were Kennedy (who never failed to stroke Kennan's ego) and Marshall (his first great mentor).Kennan agonised throughout his career over his apparent lack of influence on policy making and yet, in his old age, he had a sufficiently grand sense of self-importance to declare an end to his efforts to 'save civilization'. In summing up Kennan's importance to future generations, Gaddis gives as much weight to his literary talents as an historian and diarist as he does to his policy insights. Kennan was a consistently elegant writer, not a consistently elegant thinker. Lack of consistency, lack of theory, however, is not something Gaddis wishes to hold against him. If anything, it is regarded as an intellectual and personal strength, allowing Kennan to be right EVENTUALLY on the most important issues. Time, of course, is the enemy of politics - hence the limited usefulness of such an individual to a system driven by news cycles, election cycles, provincialism and the catch-all political slogan. Kennan, more than once in his career, wished for an America free of all these constraints - a (more) totalitarian or elitist system of government - although he also understood the risks inherent in using the same methods against the enemy that he was using against you. He was, by temperament, pessimistic. He could not imagine a successful black majority government in South Africa; he could not imagine the full participation of African Americans in the life of his own nation; he could not imagine the Holocaust; he could not, despite having urged its adoption as a policy objective in the 1940s, welcome the successful reunification of Germany in the 1990s. His lack of imagination on the issue of race and on how to respond to the desire of other peoples for 'American' prosperity in a sense confirms Kennan's fascinating story to be, with all its flaws and genius, 'an American life'.One caveat in regard to the quality of the book's analysis must, I think, be mentioned. Kennan (and Gaddis essentially endorses this judgment) considered his policy advice following a trip to Japan in 1948 was instrumental in bringing about the so-called 'reverse course' in the way the Allied occupation was conducted (by reviving the economy and allowing some purged former leaders back into public life). The evidence, however, suggests this change of direction was already underway before Kennan's visit. Certainly, his observations gave them added momentum - but they did not bring them about.