George F. Kennan
An American Life
by John Lewis Gaddis
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George F. Kennan
Childhood: 1904– 1921
“The greatest tragedy of human existence,” George F. Kennan told me when we first talked of this biography, “is that we do not all die at the same time as those we love.” It might seem odd to begin a life by invoking death, but in this instance it was appropriate, for the tragedy Kennan saw in death was not the oblivion it brings but the separations it causes: the way it rends relationships without which there can be no life. And death severed the most important relationship in young George’s life just as it began.
Throughout much of his childhood George believed that his mother, Florence James Kennan, had died giving birth to him in Milwaukee on February 16, 1904. She had not. The death occurred on April 19, and the cause was peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, a mishandled but completely separate medical problem. The effect, though, was much the same: the rending of a relationship so brief that it could not even exist in memory. “Whether she nursed him or not, I don’t know,” George’s sister Jeanette recalled eight decades later, “but I suspect she did. What a tragedy.” Florence died at home, painfully and protractedly. The older children were brought in to kiss their mother goodbye, while baby George, held by an aunt in the next room but hearing everything, was “so quiet.”
In his memoirs, written when he was in his sixties, Kennan acknowledged having been “deeply affected, and in a certain sense scarred for life,” by his mother’s death. But he was not then prepared to reveal where the evidence lay, in the realm of visions and dreams:
March 1931. A young diplomat at a Swiss winter resort suddenly finds himself dancing with tears in his eyes, not because the girl he’s with isn’t the one he wants, but because, as he notes bitterly in his diary, he misses someone else: “You had better go out into the open air and realize that Mother is far away and that no one is ever going to understand you and that it is not even very important whether anyone ever does.”3
February 1942. An older Foreign Service officer, married now and a father, writes an unsent letter to his children from internment in Nazi Germany, wondering whether they would remember him were he not to return: “I myself grew up without a mother; and there are so many times that I have wished I had known what she was like— that I could have had at least one conversation with her.”4
January 1959. A middle- aged historian, retired temporarily from diplomacy, dreams for the first time of meeting his mother. “She showed no recognition of me; she was plainly preoccupied with something else; but she accepted with politeness and with an enigmatic smile my own instantaneous gesture of recognition and joy and tenderness. She was, for the moment, the main thing in my existence; I was not the main thing in hers.”5
Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from GEORGE F. KENNAN by John Lewis Gaddis.
Copyright © 2011 by John Lewis Gaddis
George F. Kennan
Diplomat, grand strategist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, antiwar activist: George F. Kennan assumed myriad roles throughout his long and storied life. Best known as a pivotal player in Cold War politics, this remarkable figure came, in Henry Kissinger’s words, “as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.” Drawing on extensive interviews with Kennan and exclusive access to his archives, an eminent scholar of the Cold War delivers a revelatory biography of its troubled mastermind.
In the late 1940s, Kennan wrote two documents, the “Long Telegram” and the “X Article,” which set forward the strategy of containment that would define U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union for the next four decades. This achievement alone would qualify him as the most influential American diplomat of the Cold War era. But he was also an architect of the Marshall Plan, and a prize-winning historian, who would become one of the most outspoken critics of American diplomacy, politics and culture during the last half of the 20th century.
Historian John Lewis Gaddis began this magisterial history almost 30 years ago, interviewing Kennan frequently and gaining complete access to his voluminous diaries and other personal papers. So frank and detailed were these materials that Kennan and Gaddis agreed that the book would not appear until after Kennan’s death. It was well worth the wait: the journals give this book a breathtaking candor and intimacy that match its century-long sweep.
We see Kennan’s insecurity as a Midwesterner among elites at Princeton, his budding dissatisfaction with authority and the status quo, his struggles with depression, his gift for satire, and his sharp insights on the policies and people he encountered. Kennan turned these sharp analytical gifts upon himself, even to the point of regularly recording dreams. The result is a remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy—and always doubted himself.
Kennan exhibited the rare ability to reassess his positions, and he became disillusioned with the policy of containment as it took on a more militaristic stance under the Truman administration. By the mid-1970s, he began to view the United States, not the Soviet Union, as the greatest threat to international stability. But his forward-looking vision—that the Soviet Union would eventually defeat itself—was eventually realized with the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. Ultimately, as Gaddis contends, “Kennan’s strategy…was more robust than his own faith in it.”
This is a landmark work of history and biography that reveals the vast influence and rich inner landscape of a life that both mirrored and shaped the century it spanned.
Hardcover : 800 pages
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) ( November 10, 2011 )
Item #: 13-472965
ISBN: 9781594203121
Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 inches
Product Weight: 42.0 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
February 15, 2012
One of the best researched books I have ever read. Author certainly "brings out" Kenan's remarkable,even poetic, writing ability. Author poses contradictions in Kenan's personality: an absolute genius and a gentleman, yet one tormented by a pessimistic outlook for the world.
Reviewer: David W
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