Kennan: A Life Between Worlds
George Kennan, one of America’s most influential diplomats, grew up on Milwaukee’s East Side in the early years of the last century. He was born to the city’s White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite; his family kept Milwaukee’s Germans, Poles and other immigrants at arm’s length. But while some of the prejudices of his formative years stuck, Kennan was gifted with imagination as well as intelligence. His plans for U.S. foreign policy were more nuanced than their application; if he wasn’t always the smartest person in the room, he was often the one with the widest vision.
Kennan’s famous policy of “containment” was designed to prevent further Soviet expansion after Stalin’s forces seized much of Eastern Europe from the Nazis. He hoped to prevent war between the superpowers, not start one. His biographer, Frank Costigliola, professor of history at the University of Connecticut, followed not only the paper trail left by Kennan the diplomat but dove into the boxes of paperwork left by the private person. Kennan kept a diary from adolescence through old age and Costigliola relies on them as he explores the divided consciousness of his subject.
Kennan was well aware that the face he wore to the world, including his own family, represented only one side of his inner profile. He had an artistic, even a mystical sensibility. “It took poetry to really convey what he perceived,” Costigliola writes. He was torn between the conventional and the unconventional and defined his struggle in Freudian terms as a conflict between Civilization and Eros.
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Kennan despised the totalitarianism he witnessed close hand as a Foreign Service officer in Germany and the Soviet Union. Drawn to Russian culture and the Russian people, and intrigued by the country’s Eastern Orthodox religion, he hated the brutality of Stalin’s regime and distrusted Marxism. His influential 1946 and 1947 foreign policy essays, calling for halting Soviet expansion, became the reigning doctrine of U.S. policy, yet, unlike the Cold Warriors around him, Kennan continued to call for negotiation and compromise. In the ‘60s he spoke before Congress, questioning American policy in Vietnam.
Although Kennan lived into the 21st century and left his mark on the 20th, he was essentially a man whose sensibility belonged to an earlier epoch. However, some of his retrospective ideas now seem prescient. “He ranted against the primacy of the automobile, which attenuated community, polluted the environment, and penetrated into nature’s preserves. He hated advertising, which he saw a based on lying,” loathed television as the opiate of the masses and critiqued the alienation of modern life in terms a Marxist could understand (but took his cue from his favorite Russian author, Anton Chekov). In his last years he called for a Europe-wide security agreement that would include Russia, and worried that NATO expansion into Eastern Europe could trigger Russian paranoia and become an excuse for war. Was he right?
