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An American For All Seasons

George Kennan: A Study of Character, John Lukacs, Yale University Press, 207 pages

George F. Kennan (1904-2005) was and remains best known for the doctrine of containment. He was the man of the hour in 1947, when Foreign Affairs published “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” under the byline “X.” His authorship of the essay, which heralded a sea change in America’s posture toward the Soviet Union, didn’t remain secret for long. He had become, in what is now his almost inescapable epithet, “the architect of the Cold War.” Four years later, Truman crowned Kennan’s career by naming him ambassador to the USSR.

Well before this, Kennan had a distinguished record in the Foreign Service: he had been part of the first staff at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the ’30s and served as deputy head of mission there from 1944-46. In the interim, he had been assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, where he was interned for six months after Germany declared war on the United States; in that crisis, he became de facto leader of the detained American diplomats. His “Long Telegram” from Moscow in 1946, which became the basis for “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” laid the cornerstone for America’s Cold War strategy. After his return to the States in 1947, he became head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, with a hand in (among other things) the crafting the Marshall Plan. All this, and still more than half his life lay ahead of him.

In the 42 years between his last diplomatic post, as ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1961-63, and his death, Kennan traveled, lectured, studied, and wrote—he wrote millions of words, in fact, for the public, for friends, and for himself: essays, books, letters, diaries. And his output had been hardly less prodigious during his years of government service. So copious are his literary remains, warns John Lukacs, that any future biographer will be overwhelmed. In his Study of Character, Lukacs himself has not attempted to give us a complete lexicon of Kennan’s life; instead he has provided in this short book a Rosetta Stone with which to decipher the true character of the man and his thought amid the litter of slogans and hype that muddies public discourse.


We can’t fail to have a better understanding of Kennan’s thinking in years to come—if only because he is so widely misunderstood today. Containment, for example, was never meant to be a military doctrine, still less a game of nuclear brinksmanship. “This readiness to use nuclear arms,” he wrote with uncharacteristic vehemence in “A Christian’s View of the Arms Race,” “is nothing less than a presumption, a blasphemy, an indignity—an indignity of monstrous dimensions—offered to God!” Nor was Kennan himself a right-wing Cold Warrior turned lefty peacenik. He recognized the distinct evils of communism and Russian nationalism from the beginning. But he didn’t let those evils blind him to the danger of overreaction at home: “I tremble when I see this attempt to make a semi-religious cult out of emotional-political currents of the moment,” he said of anticommunism in an address at the University of Notre Dame in 1953.

That appeal to reason at the height of the McCarthy era was, in Lukacs’s estimation, one of Kennan’s greatest moments; indeed, Lukacs reprints the entirety of that speech as an appendix to this book. Like Kennan, Lukacs was an anti-anticommunist yet not at all a man of the Left. A Hungarian refugee from communism, Lukacs has nonetheless always lambasted the nationalist fevers of the American Right. He is an able and sympathetic expositor of Kennan, a friend with whom he corresponded for some 50 years. (A decade ago, Lukacs published a collection of their letters dealing with the dawn of the Cold War as George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment 1944-1946: The Kennan-Lukacs Correspondence.)

Their few points of disagreement should sharpen readers’ appreciation of both men’s thoughts: Lukacs agrees with Kennan that Truman’s hardened stance against the Soviet Union was, if anything, late rather than premature, but nonetheless believes that the U.S. had to make a close ally of Stalin during World War II. Kennan, by contrast, held that the U.S. was right to help the USSR against Germany militarily, but should not have extended anything like moral friendship. (What’s the difference? Think of T.S. Eliot, no leftist, scotching the British publication of George Orwell’s Animal Farm by Faber and Faber in 1944 lest Uncle Joe take offense—not that Lukacs would have behaved so shabbily.) And Kennan, unlike Lukacs, would not have advised the U.S. to get involved in the European war before Germany declared war on it, though he later acknowledged that the Holocaust would have been reason enough to intervene. Kennan’s example belies the impression to which Lukacs’s writing sometimes gives rise—that all opponents of the war were strident Anglophobic nationalists who afterwards became staunch anticommunists.

Lukacs sketches his subject’s life and career succinctly and effectively; his book serves as a marvelous introduction to Kennan. But that is not its objective: this volume really is a study in character, “and by ‘character,’” writes Lukacs, “I mean [Kennan’s] conscious decisions, choices, acts and words, but nothing of his—so-called—subconscious; that is, no attributions of psychoanalytic categories, no ham-handed projections or propositions of secret or hidden motives.” The author wants to communicate as much as possible the demonstrated essence of this man who, he writes, “not only represented but incarnated some of the best and finest traits of American character” and to teach us not only that we ought to read Kennan but, more importantly, how to read him. As Lukacs is (a bit too) fond of saying—does he advert to this quote from Burckhardt in each of his 28 books? —bisogna saper leggere, “You must know how to read.”


That lesson begins with what we know of Kennan’s childhood, his “Lonely Youth” as Lukacs calls it, in Wisconsin, followed by his hardly gregarious college days at Princeton. He remained a steady, sober youth even after joining the Foreign Service in 1925. In life as in his writing, he had from the start a “curious combination of serious restraint and nervous energy.” The latter showed through, at intervals, in the frustration he expressed at seeing his advice go unheeded, his memos to superiors unread or un-followed. Lukacs gives several examples of policy essays almost as significant as his “Long Telegram” (although Lukacs may be exaggerating here) that met with neglect. Kennan himself wrote in his memoirs that he thought most of these memoranda ultimately did have an effect—albeit after a delay of two years or so.

His frustration boiled over one day in 1952, five months after he had become ambassador to the USSR, when a London reporter asked him how much contact American diplomats had with the Russian people. Kennan, reports Lukacs, “said that his isolation enforced in Moscow was comparable to how he was interned in Nazi Germany in 1941-42 after the declaration of war.” It was the end of his ambassadorship—the Soviets declared him persona non grata and did not even allow him to return to Russia to pick up his family, who were left to vacate the diplomatic residence without him.

Kennan had a devoted wife, three daughters, and a son, but in discussing Kennan’s private life, Lukacs returns to the theme of loneliness—not of the anti-social or maladjusted kind but rather the solitude that comes from a pensive nature and a “self-imposed separateness” from the din of 20th-century society. It was “a symptom of his character: but it could impress others as unduly rigid.” He did not suffer fools, particularly congressmen, gladly. Of the political fray, he wrote in his Memoirs: 1950-1963, “Where others saw a stage on which momentous issues were being dramatically resolved, I saw only a sordid, never-ending Donnybrook among pampered and inflated egos.” Likewise the manufactured sentimentality of popular culture grated on him even as a young man in the 1930s; after hearing in a Swiss casino a soppy pop tune with the lyrics “I’m dancing with tears in my eyes / for the girl in my arms isn’t you,” he wrote in his diary, “Don’t you think, really, there is something unnatural, something positively abnormal about a young man dancing around with tears in his eyes for such a reason?”

He had what all too many of his countrymen lacked, then and now: restraint, both in his personal life and in his public philosophy. Still—although Lukacs draws attention to the symbolism of his middle name, Frost—Kennan was not a cold man: his restraint clothed a deep humanity. Lukacs cites (but does not quote: quoting a writer as elegant as Kennan is dangerous stuff—where to stop?) Kennan’s unselfconscious account, found in his travel memoir Sketches From a Life, of the flood of emotion he felt upon discovering his parents’ graves for the first time, relieved to find his mother (who died shortly after he was born) and father in adjoining plots. Lukacs writes a passage almost as poignant when he recounts his last meeting with the aged George and Annelise Kennan in 2004:


On a darkening winter afternoon I came to see them in their upstairs bedroom. His head, resting on a pillow, now had a kind of skeletal beauty; he could speak only little, forcing out a few words with increasing difficulty; near the foot of his bed she sat huddled in a wheelchair at a table, uttering a few sensible words, not many. I went out, crushed with sadness; and then Pamela, my wife-to-become, soothed me quietly: ‘They were together for so long; they are together now; in the same room; aware of each other; still alive.’

There is a memento mori here, a grim reminder that even great men are humbled before death—but there is also here a capsule of the human things that endure: loyalty, love, and memory.

Lukacs fears that for all his accomplishments, Kennan is little known or appreciated today. Perhaps so, but like Alexis de Tocqueville—to whose Souvenirs Lukacs compares Kennan’s Sketches From a Life, with much justice—Kennan may yet be more honored in death than in life. Lukacs’s marvelous book bids fair to make it so, and this volume is only the first flowering of what promises to be a wealth of posthumous Kennan scholarship. He will be written about for years to come, his writings collected and edited, reissued and reappraised. Ironically, for a man who lived so long, and who so often felt out of step with the machine age of the 20th century, George Kennan may yet belong to the future.

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Daniel McCarthy is senior editor at ISI Books.

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