- George Kennan: A Study in Character by
John Lukacs (Yale -
University Press,
2007). 224 pp.
WALTER M. HUDSON is an attorney in the United
States army. The views expressed here are his own.
For a few years, from 1946 to 1949,
George Frost Kennan was at the center of
world events. He also lived long and wrote
much, and he remains a puzzle to many.
Liberals have admired his public dissent over
the militarization of his containment ideas
(he would have been loath to have called
them a “doctrine”). Yet Kennan was skeptical
about liberalism’s reliance on governmental
solutions. As he said in his fascinating
“personal philosophy,” Around the Cragged
Hill, government “always implies and involves
power.” Quoting Henry Adams, he
further noted that a friend in power is a friend
lost.
While we wait for Kennan’s official biography
from prominent Cold War historian
John Lewis Gaddis, John Lukacs has now
given us the short, penetrating George Kennan:
A Study in Character. Lukacs and Kennan
were correspondents and friends: the former,
Hungarian émigré and professing Catholic;
the latter, Midwesterner of Scottish stock,
professing his own Emersonian heresy. Both,
however, with intellectual elective affinities,
and Kennan meeting Lukacs’ requirement of
a reactionary: one whose character preceded
and transcended his politics. Devotees of
Lukacs and Kennan will receive this book
with enthusiasm and read it with reward.
Lukacs focuses on Kennan the writer, on
Kennan the memoirist, on Kennan’s quest
for clarification and self-awareness, and his
refusal to be ensnared by political ideas and
ideologies. As Kennan wrote in his memoirs,
he had little patience for the grand overarching
“objectives” of politics: they were “normally
vainglorious, unreal, extravagant, even
pathetic…I was never a man for causes.”
Rather than conceptualizing the world
around him, Kennan allowed the world outside
him to shape his ideas, with those ideas
always presupposed by principles. Kennan
was, in Lukacs’ words, “intellectual, without
being an Intellectual.”
Kennan’s own memoirs barely discuss his
childhood: he recognizes that those years are
inherently strange and inaccessible to the
adult mind. Lukacs touches upon them, but
his focus during Kennan’s early life is on his
intellectual formation. A middling, introverted
student at Princeton, Kennan found
his place in the world after entering the
Foreign Service, and more specifically, after
taking the generous opportunity while in
that service to study Russian language and
society. His three years of graduate work
were the furthest thing from the ticket punching
of a fast moving public servant. Those
years of study were, in Lukacs’ words, the
“consequences of the inspirations of his mind,
rather than aspirations for his career.”
More significantly, Lukacs shows us the
sheer importance of self-knowledge and selfexpression
to Kennan. Writing literally helped
him to live; it deepened his understanding
and awareness of the world. He wrote not to
win fame and adulation, but as Lukacs tells us,
to clarify his own thoughts, to sharpen his
own perceptions, and to work out subtle
details in the landscape where others saw only
hazy horizons. Kennan’s entre deux guerres
recollections of European life indeed have a
generosity of detail as well as a lack of
sentimentality and pretension that show them
to be of very high literary order. Lukacs goes
out on a limb, but not very far, in declaring
them better than anything written by an
American about Europe of that day (“including
Hemingway”).
Lukacs notes Kennan’s studies of
Chekhov—he had planned at one point to
write Chekhov’s biography. In particular,
Chekhov’s stories and dramas of ordinary
men and women gave Kennan a grounding
in Russian life, a feeling and perceptiveness
that policy study could not (the name of the
“X Article,” after all, was “The Sources of
Soviet Conduct”). Lukacs clarifies how
Kennan’s inner experiences became very
public ideas—how his literary talent; immersion
in Russian language, literature, and
history (not Sovietology—Kennan studied
little of that); and his own idiosyncratic but
principled character shaped the course of
world history.
Of course, Lukacs recognizes that the
crucial years of Kennan’s public life were
from 1946 to 1950, the years of the Long
Telegram, the “X Article,” the Marshall Plan
and the beginnings of the Cold War. Kennan
is usually thought an architect of Cold War
strategy. “Containment” came to define
American foreign policy (one of Gaddis’
books on Cold War history is, in fact, called
Strategies of Containment). Yet, Kennan’s containment
was subtler than most understood.
Lukacs sums up its origins in a single sentence
Kennan wrote in 1940: “No people is great
enough to establish world hegemony.” Not
Hitler’s supermen, not the new men of the
Soviet Union—and not even the citizens of
the American republic.
Containment was a political expression of
the metaphysical acknowledgement of the
limits of human ability and possibility. It
argued two things at once. First, that Soviet
Marxism was inherently self-defeating and
could therefore be contained. Second, that
the United States could contain (using a
variety of political and economic, and less so,
military, means), but could not itself destroy,
Soviet, much less worldwide, communism.
Kennan was by no means a Cold War “revisionist”:
he recognized the Soviet system for
what it was—cruel, wasteful, and foolish. But
as Lukacs writes, Kennan “did not believe
that the United States was a Chosen Nation
of God, that its people were a Chosen People,
or even the Last Best Hope of Mankind.”
To Kennan, America’s self-proclaimed
role in the Cold War arose from this very
univeralist impulse. Grandiose, self-important
proclamations poured forth. Hence the
Truman Doctrine that, instead of carefully
distinguishing Greece from Turkey, instantly
shifted into triumphalist high gear and cast its
rhetoric out to all “free peoples” around the
globe. Hence the hollow (as Hungary proved)
“liberation” speeches of John Foster Dulles.
Hence the “massive retaliation” talk of Dulles
and others that, in Kennan’s words, they
“had no intention on inflicting on anybody.”
The history of the Cold War became a
regretful one for Kennan. After conceiving
the European Recovery Plan under
Marshall—something, he stressed, limited in
application only to Europe itself—his public
career became unimportant. (It is interesting
that Kennan had a much more appreciative
and astute superior in the army general than
in Acheson the career diplomat.) His appointment
as ambassador to the Soviet Union
in the spring of 1952 actually furthered his
marginalization. By then Kennan was not
much listened to in the circles of power in
Washington—and he was in Moscow for
barely a few months anyway, becoming
persona non grata after making impolitic
remarks comparing his sequestered life there
to his years of internment in Nazi Germany.
He was not cut out to be a great diplomat.
Indeed, he became, in the opinion of
certain Wise Men such as Acheson, very
dangerous. Kennan regretted calling for the
creation of the CIA. He argued against the
expansion of NATO. He recognized that
there were Communist agents in the United
States government and that their influence
was not inconsiderable. He nonetheless detested
McCarthyism and the craven obeisance
to it by both political parties. He
loathed the policy underpinnings of nuclear
strategy, finding it deeply unchristian that it
contemplated the destruction of millions of
innocent human beings—his last essay on the
subject, as Lukacs points out, was titled “A
Christian’s View of the Arms Race.”
Yet Kennan’s later years did not devolve
into bitterness and waste. Lukacs spends as
much time on Kennan the historian and elder
statesmen during this (very) long autumn of
his life and career as he does on Kennan the
public servant. It was during these years that
Kennan did what most men, in the end, do
not do: live a fuller, more meaningful and
developed inner life. Kennan studied, thought,
wrote, and articulated his convictions to a
sometimes grateful, sometimes puzzled world.
His books on American diplomacy, his studies
of Russian history, and of course his own
personal writings, most famously his two
volumes of memoirs, garnered acclaim for
their literary excellence. No public servant of
the last century save Churchill has written in
English with the skill and lucidity of Kennan.
And his mind remained remarkably adept,
even towards the end of his life. Even approaching
ninety, Kennan could write something
as unique and principled as Around the
Cragged Hill. Lukacs dislikes the book, but
whatever its flaws, it is nonetheless remarkable.
Who else but Kennan could so powerfully
and elegantly make the argument that
the United States is, simply, too big, that it
would be better broken up into a “dozen
constituent republics, absorbing not only the
powers of the existing states, but a considerable
part of the present federal establishment…”?
A utopian plea for a non-utopia?
Who but Kennan could have articulated it?
It is true that Kennan was not always wise.
Or as Lukacs points out, he could be a “wise
man too soon.” For all of Kennan’s famed
realism, there was a streak of naïveté in some
of his views, a curious, not always consistent
quest for purity by state actors that smacked
of a political Donatism. He argued against
participating at Yalta or Potsdam, saying
that to discuss blithely the democratic future
of peoples that Roosevelt and others full well
knew would be under Communist rule was
doubletalk and deceit. He thought that the
allowance of Soviet judges, themselves
presiders over mass murder, turned
Nuremberg into an unprincipled sham. Certain
of his ideas to “Finlandize” the Cold
War in Europe got nowhere and strike us
today as slightly credulous: will not state
power abhor a vacuum; would the Soviets
have allowed its satrapies to have slipped so
readily from their sphere of influence?
Ultimately, though, Lukacs convinces us
that Kennan’s life is one of triumph, or better
said, after a tragic era, a comedy. In physical
terms he defeated the terrible twentieth century
by outliving it. He died not merely an
honored man, but a justified one. His insight
—that Soviet communism carried within
itself the seeds of its own destruction—was
vindicated. We would be right therefore to
heed Kennan, a man whom Lukacs deemed
a conscience of America. Kennan came to
this public role, however, through developing
an inner life of both mind and conscience.
Together, they formed his character.
As Lukacs has written in his own superb
memoir, Confessions of an Original Sinner,
what makes us so different from the rest of
nature is that “God allows us to live and to
know that we live while we live.” God allows
us to seek to know ourselves. Kennan pursued
this quest, and as Lukacs reveals to us, in so
doing, brought honor to his nation and
bettered the world.