Remembering a Giant

In March 1952, George F. Kennan reached the pinnacle of his diplomatic career. America’s leading authority on Russia, he was appointed Ambassador to the Soviet Union. But it turned out Kennan hated the job, was disgusted with the name-calling of US-Soviet relations, and felt that his Soviet hosts loathed him.

Not surprisingly, two months later Kennan made a diplomatic gaffe. When a reporter asked what conditions were like in the USSR, Kennan said the oppressiveness reminded him of when he was interned by the Nazis. Needless to say, the Soviets were loath to be compared to the Nazis in any way; Kennan was declared persona non grata.

George Kennan, who passed away in March at the age of 95, had a knack for stating uncomfortable truths. On the eve of the current war in Iraq, he commented pithily that “War seldom ever leads to good results.”

For half a century, Kennan struggled to reverse a reputation that has become his epitaph: that he was the Architect of US Policy in the Cold War.

It began in 1946, when Kennan gave a lucid diagnosis of the pathology of Soviet power. In his famous Long Telegram from Moscow (later edited and published in Foreign Affairs under the “Mister X” byline) he prescribed a policy of containment – instead of either appeasement or aggression – to counter the centuries-old “Russian sense of insecurity,” now combined with a “fanatical” Soviet belief that there could be no normal, stable relations with the U.S. Given time, he wrote, a hemmed-in Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of its contradictions.

Containment became a central feature of U.S. Foreign Policy, but it took on a militaristic turn that Kennan hated and that he spent a lifetime disavowing.

Russian obituaries in March called Kennan the Architect of the Cold War and NATO. But nothing could be further from the truth. Kennan, who was the architect of the Marshall Plan, opposed the formation of NATO, argued against the infamous NSC 68 policy directive – which militarized containment – and thought we should never have developed the hydrogen bomb.

Kennan was never “soft on communism;” he was vehemently anti-Soviet, yet pro-Russian. He called the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after WWII “one of the most terrible and inexcusable injustices of the modern age.” Yet he also said the Russians were “indubitably one of the world’s greatest peoples: a talented, responsive people, capable of absorbing and enriching all forms of human experience.”

Kennan was an inspiring voice for sanity and pragmatism in foreign policy, for a balanced approach to understanding the Russians. His writings had a major influence on me and, consequently, the editorial direction of this magazine. And so, while researching this column, it was more than a little eery to discover that Kennan had deep Vermont roots. His thrice-great grandfather settled in Waterbury, Vermont (just 10 miles from where Russian Life is now published) in the 1790s and served five terms in the Vermont legislature.

Kennan’s writings span most of the Soviet era, and they combine first-hand experience with a rare literary eloquence. As if that were not enough, Kennan could well be said to have the gift of prophecy.

In one important work, Kennan explained how the West, preoccupied with fighting WWI, misread the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

“There is,” he wrote, “...nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision on everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue. The contest comes to be viewed as having a final, apocalyptic quality. If we lose, all is lost; life will no longer be worth living; there will be nothing to be salvaged. If we win, then everything will be possible; all problems will become soluble; the one great source of evil – our enemy – will have been crushed; the forces of good will then sweep forward unimpeded; all worthy aspirations will be satisfied.”

George Kennan wrote this in 1960.