Following last week's review of, "Love and Capital," a book about Karl Marx, this week's column crosses to the other side of the ideological ‘iron curtain' to the life and work of one of the Cold War's greatest figures, the American strategist and statesman George F. Kennan. In Yale Professor John Lewis Gaddis' 700-page masterpiece, "George F. Kennan: An American Life," Kennan emerges as a great thinker, a gifted historian and a visionary, yet one with his own private battles, agonies and conflicts.
Most political science and international relations majors will recognize Kennan as the author of the "Long Telegram," one of the single most important strategic analyses of Soviet leadership. Furthermore, he helped define the containment doctrine that would dominate U.S. policy for the next half century. Born in 1904 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Kennan lost his mother when he was only an infant and grew up with a profound sense of loneliness and isolation that would stay with him throughout his long life. A graduate of Princeton University, he decided to join the U.S. Foreign Service and gradually built a reputation as the government's foremost expert on Russian culture and political history. Though Kennan technically retired from the Foreign Service in 1963 to become a historian, his opinions on a wide array of political and social issues were later eagerly sought by presidents, congressmen and policymakers. Through his fair-minded approach and refusal to be caught up in the jingoistic furor against the USSR, he became one of the few statesmen to be highly respected and valued in both Washington and Moscow.
Professor Gaddis was fortunate to become Kennan's designated biographer. Consequently, over the course of 30 years, Gaddis interviewed Kennan many times and had unrestricted access to his personal diaries, letters and records. Thus, in his book Gaddis provides not only a chronological accounting of Kennan's life, but also a deeply personal portrait of it, one that the intensely intellectual and introspective Kennan would no doubt have approved of. Gaddis highlights Kennan's complex, highly developed and often conflicted inner life and explains how one of the great architects of America's Cold War strategy could in later years become one of its most vociferous critics. Indeed, Kennan often comes through as a contradictory and supremely lonely character.
Born in a younger, more innocent America, he absorbed the values of the era and, thus, watched despairingly as the country he loved seemingly charted a course of cultural and societal dissipation and decline. Kennan, the same strategist that was capable of predicting the fall of the Soviet Empire 40 years prior, was equally prone to morbid pessimism about his own country. He eloquently denounced the injustice of the Vietnam War, but saw the angry protests and unthinking opposition of the student left, though founded in legitimate grievance, as lacking in vision and clear objective. Thus, this far-sighted statesman did not fall prey to the politics of passion that became so common in American political life, and instead strove to chart the middle course, of emotion tempered by careful thought, consideration and self-examination.
It is fitting that the life of a great American strategist be recorded by America's leading scholar of strategy and Cold War history. Professor Gaddis writes with a profound analytical skill matched only by the accessibility of his fluid, gripping narrative. Professor Gaddis' "An American Life" is one of most well written and informative historical biographies I have ever had the pleasure to read. I believe that everyone would learn much from the life of the accomplished American scholar, thinker and strategist, George Kennan.
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James Barasch is a sophomore majoring in History. He can be contacted at James.Barasch@Tufts.edu
