In The Silent Woman (1994), her meditation on Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the limits of biography, Janet Malcolm insists on the “epistemological insecurity” that attends every attempt to unlock the story of another person’s life. “We almost never know the truth of what happened,” she writes. “The narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life.” You wouldn’t know this from contemporary reading habits: year after year, colorful and expansive biographies find their way to the best-seller lists, beguiling readers with pattern-seeking accounts of significant individuals that cast their life and work in mutual illumination.
George F. Kennan, the subject of half a dozen biographies, is best known as the architect of America’s grand strategy of “containment” in the cold war against the Soviet Union. He is almost as well known for being the fiercest critic of the way that strategy was overmilitarized by every American administration from Harry Truman through Ronald Reagan, with partial clemency for Richard Nixon and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger because of their pursuit of détente with Moscow.
A renowned architect who eloquently pillories his most famous building offers an intriguing subject for biographers. In Kennan’s case, the enigma is heightened by the contrast between the supreme confidence of his policy prescriptions—“The problem with George is that he writes so damned well that he can convince you of anything,” complained Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson—and the perpetual turbulence of his inner life. The self-proclaimed sober realist turns out to have harbored lifelong fantasies of being someone he wasn’t (a Russian), living in a century other than his own (the eighteenth), achieving erotic intimacy with many women other than his wife, and occupying positions of power in the US government for which he repeatedly sabotaged his chances. Beneath the sovereign intellect, it seems, there was plenty of “disorderly actuality.”
Kennan’s biographers have suffered less “epistemological insecurity” than most of their peers, thanks to the bountiful documentary trails he left behind. There are essentially three: first the hundreds of political analyses he submitted as a junior diplomat in the US embassy in Moscow in the 1930s and as the inaugural director of the Policy Planning Staff (the State Department’s internal think tank) in the late 1940s, along with his published articles, lectures, and congressional testimonies during the second half of the twentieth century, including nearly two dozen that appeared in these pages. Second, Kennan left a series of elegant memoirs. The first of these, Memoirs, 1925–1950, published in 1967 when he was sixty-three, won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Its author could hardly have imagined that he would live for another four decades. Among other things, the memoirs retrospectively illuminate Kennan’s analyses of international relations, especially those that proved prescient, burnishing his reputation as a wise elder statesman who unlike most diplomats was steeped in history and unlike most historians had a keen eye for the next twist in the road.
Over the course of his unusually long life, Kennan generated a third documentary trail, a diary of some eight thousand pages in twenty handwritten volumes spanning nine decades.1 The most private passages, including those detailing his tortuous extramarital affairs, were written in Russian, either to shield them from family members or because he regarded Russian as a language particularly suited for intimacy. He kept a separate diary to record his dreams and yet another to keep track of work on his farm in rural Pennsylvania. Kennan’s writing was driven by a seemingly permanent need, whether at the end of the day (or night) or at a distance of decades, to assess himself and the world. Both were perpetually found wanting.
Kennan’s most consequential statements came early in his career: the “Long Telegram” (sent from Moscow to the State Department in February 1946) and “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (published under the byline “X” in Foreign Affairs in July 1947). Both texts attempted to explain the sudden souring of relations between the US and the USSR, after their cooperation in defeating Nazi Germany, as a function of the Bolsheviks’ peculiar blend of traditional Russian insecurity and Marxist-Leninist messianism. At the same time, Kennan emphasized that the Soviet Union was by far the weaker power, a state that in all likelihood “bears within it the seeds of its own decay.” He was alarmed by both leading schools within the American foreign policy establishment: one naively sought further global collaboration with “Uncle Joe” (Stalin); the other considered a third world war, this time against the USSR, all but inevitable, perhaps even urgent, if Washington wished to make full use of its temporary monopoly on atomic weapons. Kennan’s strategy of containment was designed to steer a course between appeasement and Armageddon, through comprehensive resistance to Soviet expansionism. If his strategy were practiced firmly and patiently, he urged, the Soviet Union would, over time, either abandon the export of revolution or collapse from the weight of its own internal contradictions. As Kissinger put it, “George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.”
His enigmatic status as both the pope and the Martin Luther of the containment doctrine made Kennan a potential hero for a wide variety of American historians of the cold war. Those belonging to the “orthodox” school, which held the USSR solely responsible for the conflict, admired him for exposing the psychopathology of the Soviet system. To be sure, they disagreed about whether the root cause of the cold war was Russia’s imperial tradition, Marxism’s universalist pretensions, Stalin’s paranoid personality, or Bolshevik totalitarianism applied to foreign policy. But it hardly mattered; they treated Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” as oracles. When the Vietnam War shattered the image of Americans as innocents abroad, a new generation of “revisionist” cold war historians criticized Truman’s aggressive stance toward a cautious and defensive Soviet Union and highlighted America’s own global ambitions, driven by its relentless search for overseas markets. They could point to Kennan as an early critic of Washington’s needless militarization of great-power politics (during the cold war, hundreds of US military bases were established in some forty countries) and of its refusal to engage in meaningful negotiations with Moscow over issues of shared concern.
The historian John Lewis Gaddis, whom Kennan selected in 1981 as his authorized biographer, with full access to his papers, was perhaps the most enthusiastic of all, lionizing his subject as a master of grand strategy—“the discipline of achieving desired ends through the most efficient use of available means.” Although he styled himself a “post-revisionist” who synthesized and transcended previous scholarship on the cold war, Gaddis arrived at an interpretation not unlike that of the orthodox school. “Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile,” he argued, quoting Kennan, “because this provided the only excuse ‘for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule.’” Gaddis’s magisterial biography George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011), which won a Pulitzer, concludes with an epilogue titled “Greatness,” lauding the father of containment as a visionary who “foresaw the possibility…that the United States and its allies might in time get the Soviet Union to defeat itself.” Kennan
illuminated the path by which the international system found its way from the trajectory of self-destruction it was on during the first half of the twentieth century to one that had, by the end of the second half, removed the danger of great-power war, revived democracy and capitalism, and thereby enhanced the prospects for liberty beyond what they ever before had been.
The problem with this encomium is not just that it hasn’t aged well. It was already doubtful when Gaddis published it in 2011. The danger of great-power war has not been removed, democracy is on the defensive, and an undeniably dynamic capitalism has spawned inequalities that threaten to erode trust in democratic institutions and sharpen social unrest. Moreover, as Frank Costigliola shows in his probing biography, Kennan: A Life Between Worlds, Kennan himself doubted not just Gaddis’s rosy assessment of containment’s legacy but whether that legacy was worth striving for in the first place.
More than any previous biographer, Costigliola mines Kennan’s work for its profound ambivalence toward both democracy and capitalism, if by the latter we understand rampant industrialization and the preeminence of market forces in modern life. An unabashed elitist, Kennan admired the eighteenth century in no small measure for its freedom from the pathologies of mass politics and technologized culture, or as he put it, from “overpopulation, overproduction, and intellectual collectivization.” “I believe in dictatorship,” he confided to his diary in the 1930s,
but not the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletariat, like a well-brought up child, should be seen and not heard. It should be properly clothed and fed and sheltered, but not crowned with a moral halo, and above all not allowed to have anything to do with government.
A memorandum Kennan wrote in 1949, as director of the Policy Planning Staff, noted:
The evils caused by a laissez-faire attitude toward technological advances have already produced illnesses which can only be cured by a high degree of paternalism. Only some form of a benevolent authoritarianism could manipulate living patterns in a manner adequate to restore a framework for healthy and vigorous citizenship.
Debates about Kennan invariably focus on his fraught relationship with the strategy of containment. After conceiving it in 1946 and helping it become the lodestar of US foreign policy, did he change his mind? If so, why? Or was he in fact consistent over time, forced to spend much of his later career inveighing against Washington’s disastrous misapplication of his idea in cold war Europe, Vietnam, and elsewhere? Costigliola’s biography leaves little doubt that Kennan’s thinking remained remarkably the same and that its most durable elements were precisely his skepticism vis-à-vis industrial capitalism and what he called “the fetish of democracy.” These were not quirks, as they appear to be in Gaddis’s admiring portrait; they were fundaments of his worldview from start to finish.
So too, it seems, were Kennan’s opinions on Blacks, women, and Jews. Costigliola does not flinch from documenting his subject’s patrician prejudices. African Americans, Kennan mused in an unpublished essay in 1938, ought to be deprived of the right to vote, the better to spur their reform by benevolent white leaders. Nonprofessional women should similarly be barred from voting; for their own well-being they should focus on “family picnics, children’s parties, and the church social.” Jews, “an indigestible element for Western countries,” tended to arouse “primitive and exceedingly unlovely” behavior in their neighbors. To forestall such behavior—examples of which he witnessed repeatedly in Europe between the world wars—Kennan thought it wise for the US government to put limits on “Jewish penetration” in the professions, business, and the arts. For the most part, he kept such sentiments out of public view. In his unpublished writings they are tempered by an all-purpose misanthropy. Human beings, he once declared, are “a skin-disease of the earth.” In the 1980s, ever skeptical of democracy, he complained to his diary that “the ‘people’ haven’t the faintest idea what is good for them.” Left to their own devices, they were bound to render the earth uninhabitable sooner (via nuclear apocalypse) or later (by allowing insatiable consumerism to gradually destroy the environment).
Did these views inform Kennan’s strategy of containment? Without reducing that strategy to its author’s antipathies, Costigliola highlights certain links. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” he notes, was also meant to transform American conduct. And not just its foreign policy: Kennan regarded the United States in the late 1930s as a society adrift, “already a matriarchy,” a “passionless democracy” captive to “millions of individual philistinisms.” By casting the Soviet Union as an existential threat that required a disciplined, coordinated, long-term response, he hoped to revive in Americans the lost virtues of manliness, self-restraint, collective purpose, and social order. He felt
a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
It was this domestic mission, Costigliola argues, along with the urge to draw attention to his ideas, that led Kennan to exaggerate the Soviet threat and to insist that the Soviet leadership was in the grip of a “particular brand of fanaticism, unmodified by any of the Anglo-Saxon traditions of compromise,” having learned “to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts or compromises with it.” Insofar as the Kremlin was “impervious to logic of reason and highly sensitive to logic of force,” the policy of containment was “designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”
No wonder, then, that Kennan’s inflammatory rhetoric was read as demanding an enormous projection of American military force around the world. Although he intended containment as a defensive strategy to eventually bring the USSR to the negotiating table—a strategy directed by diplomats (like Kennan) rather than generals—and although he abhorred nuclear weapons and the arms race, that is hardly how the rest of the foreign policy establishment understood his sweeping pronouncements. To his credit, Kennan began protesting almost immediately, in the late 1940s, despite the enormous stature those pronouncements had given him. Only in the 1990s, near the end of his life, did he concede that he bore some of the responsibility for the way his message had been read.
Given the speed, thoroughness, and permanence with which his strategy of containment became far more aggressive and militarized than he intended, one has to wonder whether the cold war was, in the end, driven by forces much larger than George Kennan. Would the cold war have developed differently had there been no George Kennan or had he chosen to keep his ideas about Russia and the Soviet Union to himself? Perhaps the real risk of biography as a genre is the fallacy of placing its protagonist at the center of everything.
The greatest enigma about Kennan was not his relationship to the doctrine of containment but his relationship to Russia. For much of his career he knew more about Russia and spoke better Russian than anyone in the United States government. Despite having no Russian ancestry, he felt that Russia was “in my blood. There was some mysterious affinity which I could not explain even to myself; and nothing could have given me deeper satisfaction than to indulge it.” When he studied Russian as a young Foreign Service officer, it was “as though one had known it in some dead past and as though the learning of it was some sort of rediscovery.” In Russian, “words sounded as they ought to sound.”
Deep immersion in a foreign language and culture has been known to have this effect. In her delightful memoir French Lessons (1993), Alice Kaplan describes how “French got me away from my family and taught me how to talk. Made me an adult.” It gave her “my French persona.” For Kennan, the effect was even more potent. His “Russian self,” he confided to his diary, was “much more genuine than the American one.” He dreamed of searching for his mother (who died two months after Kennan’s birth in Milwaukee) in a crowd of Russian peasants; he dreamed of writing a book about his favorite author, Anton Chekhov. He named his farm in Pennsylvania the Cherry Orchard. Upon visiting Leo Tolstoy’s estate near Tula, he found “a world to which, I always thought, I could really have belonged…much more naturally and wholeheartedly.”
The enduring fantasy of an uninhibited Russian version of himself suggests a certain loathing for the American original. Even before setting foot there for the first time, Kennan powerfully projected onto Russia an imagined identity free of bourgeois pettiness and sexual hypocrisy. He loved the Russia he found in its literature; he loved the Russian people (as opposed to their rulers in the Kremlin) for their “childishness, the laziness, the gregariousness, the love of music and dancing and declaiming, the superstition, the imagination, and the loquaciousness.” For all this psychic investment, he seems not to have had a single close Russian friend.
Costigliola has an answer to this puzzle too. Kennan’s formative study of Russia took place at the University of Berlin from 1929 to 1931, at a time when few American universities had Slavic departments. (The cold war soon changed that.) In Germany he absorbed an Orientalist perspective on Russia as the primitive East, untamed but also uncorrupted by bourgeois civilization, now thanks to the Bolsheviks. It was a perspective going back at least to Nietzsche, who in 1888 praised imperial Russia as “the only power today that possesses an enduring body…the antithesis of the pitiful European small-state mentality and nervousness.” To this interpretive base, Kennan added another layer of European thought: Freud’s notion of our psychic lives—individual and collective—as shaped by the conflict between raw libidinal desire and the forces of order and constraint. Gaddis’s biography, shunning what he called, in a letter to Kennan, “irresponsible psycho-historical analysis,” barely mentions Freud (or Kennan’s well-documented dream life). Costigliola’s Kennan, by contrast, is a “believer” who makes deepest sense of himself and the world in Freudian terms. As does Costigliola: the driving force in Kennan’s life, he argues, was the tension between Eros and Civilization, a pairing that appears dozens of times in his biography, complete with Germanic capitalization. Russia, in this scheme, stood for Eros writ large, while Civilization signified the industrialized, rule-bound, nature-destroying, soul-crushing world in which Kennan felt himself trapped.
Costigliola’s wholesale adoption of Kennan’s categories of self-analysis yields mixed results. Repetition does not make the Eros/Civilization binary more persuasive. To be sure, Costigliola usefully highlights the degree to which Kennan absorbed the psychological lingo of postwar social thought and cast foreign policy largely as a matter of managing unruly emotions. The strategy of containment, after all, demanded a capacity for patience and resolve, neither of which Kennan was confident America had. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” announced itself as a “psychological analysis” of “the political personality of Soviet power.” It treated Marxism-Leninism as “a highly convenient rationalization for [the Bolsheviks’] instinctive desires.” The “Long Telegram” warned of “the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs.”
Containment of emotion, however, was part of what Kennan hated about the world in which he grew up and from which he imagined his “Russian self” would be free. If one follows Costigliola’s improbable line of thought, the father of containment advocated a strategy of applying the repressive force of civilization against a country whose people and culture he idolized precisely for their unconstrained, authentic emotion and collective life. The contest between Eros and Civilization cannot therefore fully account for Kennan’s attitude toward Russia or geopolitics. Nor does it suffice as an explanation of the “disorderly actuality” of Kennan’s inner life. It injects a false pathos into what he himself came to regard as his sordid extramarital affairs.
Whatever the sources of Kennan’s mysterious affinity for Russia, it never left him. It has little in common with contemporary manifestations of Russophilia by right-wing populists such as Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump, whose attraction seems to be mostly to Vladimir Putin, with his cult of illiberalism and unconstrained state power. Kennan, ever suspicious of Western-style globalization, regretted the dissolution of the Soviet Union. (He thought the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I was a bad idea too.) He castigated “foolish Lithuanians” for demanding independence from Russia and cast aspersions on the idea of Ukraine as a sovereign state. Many people who like to cite Kennan’s opposition to the eastward expansion of NATO after the Soviet collapse seem unaware that he criticized virtually every expansion of NATO over the preceding half-century and indeed was skeptical of the military alliance when it was founded in 1949.2 He opposed admitting Greece and Turkey in 1952 and West Germany in 1955; in 1990 he doubted whether a reunified Germany could be successfully integrated into NATO and Europe.
Toward the end of Kennan: A Life Between Worlds, whose subtitle subtly pushes back against the misplaced patriotism of Gaddis’s George F. Kennan: An American Life, Costigliola turns to the battle of biographers. Gaddis enters the story as the resented authorized biographer to whom Kennan granted exclusive access to his personal papers and to whom he looked, in the final decades of his life, to keep “revisionists” such as Costigliola at bay. In Costigliola’s telling, Kennan made a Faustian bargain with Gaddis, who lavished praise on the architect of the grand strategy that won the cold war (and kept it mostly cold) but largely ignored Kennan’s anguished opposition to the way containment was put into practice, not to mention his disdain for the kind of society generated by the victors. Kennan wrote in his diary in 2000 that Gaddis “had no idea of what was really at stake” in the
lone battle I was waging…against the almost total militarization of Western policy toward Russia—one which, had my efforts been successful, would have, or could have, obviated the vast expenses, dangers, and distortions of outlook of the ensuing Cold War.
Neither biographer, the one authorized, the other kept at arm’s length while Kennan was still alive, can claim to have captured their elusive subject in full. Perhaps that is too much to ask of any biography. Kennan himself may have come closest in his introduction to the memoir of another patrician observer of Russia, the Marquis de Custine. “In spirit and style,” Kennan wrote,
Custine was in the deepest sense a romantic…. It was the image of the noble, misunderstood individual, the unappreciated hero, that commanded the imagination and inspired the posture. He…ensconced himself figuratively in his own lonely pinnacle of pride and estrangement, hugging to his breast sensibilities which, you were permitted to feel, were too exquisite to stand full exposure to the gaze of an unfeeling world.3
English (US) · 