George F. Kennan: An American Life

EPILOGUE¹ Greatness

LORD MOUNTBATTEN’S BIOGRAPHER, PHILIP ZIEGLER, BECAME SO enraged with his subject while writing his life that he found it necessary to place a sign on his desk: “Remember, in spite of everything, he was a great man.”² I never felt the need to do that while preparing Kennan’s biography, but the experience did convince me that “greatness” takes multiple forms. There may be as many definitions as there are subjects for biography: my own would be that greatness is one of the things that distinguishes immortality from mortality. It was not, for Kennan, the only thing, or even the most important thing. He was a man of deep faith, and when he spoke of immortality, he generally had in mind the kind God provides. Biographers must aim lower but can perhaps suggest qualities that might make a life, for mortals, memorable.

Begin with grand strategy, by which I mean the discipline of achieving desired ends through the most efficient use of available means. Its most memorable practitioners have attained that status by leaving behind examples—whether through their actions or their writing—of how to do this. These transcend time, space, and circumstance. Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli, the American Founding Fathers, Metternich, Clausewitz, Lincoln, Bismarck, and Isaiah Berlin remain as relevant to the twenty-first century as to their own time. Students of grand strategy will study them well into the future. Will they study Kennan?

Henry Kissinger, himself a plausible subject of such study, made the case that they should when he credited Kennan with having come “as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.”³ Historians, to be sure, debated what that doctrine was, and Kennan more than once disavowed it. With the demise of the Cold War, however, these controversies faded in the light of a more important question: what did “containment” accomplish? More than any other idea, this one appears now to have 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.

This outcome was by no means predetermined. To see why, go back to the moment in February 1946 when Kennan, sick in bed from the rigors of a Moscow winter and irritated as usual at the Department of State, summoned Dorothy Hessman and from his preferred horizontal position dictated a lengthy telegram. The world was not safe then from the scourge of great-power war: how could it have been, when in contrast to the previous world war, it had not even been possible to convene a peace conference? Nor was the world safe from authoritarianism, given the democracies’ recent reliance on one such regime to defeat another. Nor was it safe from economic collapse, in the absence of any assurance that a global depression would not return. The world was certainly not safe from abuses of human rights, with one of the most advanced nations in Europe having just resorted to genocide on an unprecedented scale. Nor was it safe from the fear that in a future war no one would be safe. How could it have been, with atomic weapons now available, and with no guarantee that they would remain under one state’s exclusive control?

What Kennan opened up, on that bleak day in Moscow, was a way out: a path between the appeasement that had failed to prevent World War II and the alternative of a third world war, the devastation from which would have been unimaginable. Might someone else have proposed the path, had Kennan not done so? Probably, in due course, but it’s hard to think of anyone else at the time who could have charted it with greater authority, with such eloquence, or within so grand strategic a framework.

Only Kennan had the credibility to show, at a time when too many Americans still viewed the Soviet Union as a wartime ally, that for reasons rooted in Russian history and Marxist-Leninist ideology, there could never be a normal peacetime relationship with it: Stalin’s regime required external enemies. Only Kennan could have said this so compellingly as to command immediate attention in Washington. And only Kennan foresaw the possibility—Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz would have approved—that the United States and its allies might in time get the Soviet Union to defeat itself.

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. That’s why he had no retirement. And it’s where his posthumous greatness primarily resides: in timeless, transcendent teaching.