George F. Kennan: An American Life

I recently finished the Kennan biography by John Lewis Gaddis, and an still mulling it over in my mind.  Only after finishing it did I see that it won the 2012 Puliter Prize for biography.  I can understand why.

There is some interesting background to the book.  Gaddis first sought out Kennan about writing his biography when Kennan was about 78 years old.  Kennan liked what he knew of Gaddis's work, and he gave his permission, but the two of them agreed that the book would not be published until after Kennan's death and, also I believe, that Kennan would never read a word of it.  Kennan then proceeded to live for another 23 years, dying in 2005 at the age of 101.  Then it took Gaddis another 6 years to finish writing the book and get it published.

Kennan was such an interestingly complex man, a diplomat who was more of a scholar and a poet, a naturally gifted writer who himself won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, the Bancroft Prize, and probably others.  I remember how much I enjoyed the first volume of his memoirs, which he published in 1967.  He was the originator of the Marshall Plan, the man who coined the term and the concept of "containment" of the USSR (although he came to disagree strongly with the overly-militaristic way in which it was interpreted), the author of the most famous diplomatic dispatch in U.S. history, the "long telegram" of 5500 words from Moscow in 1946, a man who spoke fluent German and Russian, who could talk with both Stalin and Gorbachev without an interpreter. Or could have, if Stalin would have met with him.  He is still the only US ambassador to the USSR who was declared persona non grata and booted out of the country. He was the number two man in the German embassy when Hitler declared war on the US, and was interned for 5 months.  He was hated by the many on the American left at the beginning of the Cold War, and by the those on the right when it was in full swing.

The despised (in this blog, at least) Henry Kissinger supposedly observed in 1979 that "George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history."

The reason the book deserves the Pulitzer is because it shows us the man in all of his many contradictions, a man both humble and petulant, scholarly and petty, an independent thinker who needed praise, a lifelong student of history and policy planner for the future who was extremely negative and pessimistic about the present...and his "present" lasted a long time.

Here are some isolated quotes from the book, most of which are taken from Kennan's diaries and letters (Sorry for the weird spacing.  I'm having lots of formatting issues.):

And what was the task of a university, "after all, if not to ready its students for "their prejudices, not to impregnate them with its own?"

Princton history courses had allowed stretching a little knowledge into a lot of opinions.

It seems to me that this country (the U.S.) doesn't want government....It will suffer unlimited injustices and infringements on liberty from irresponsible private groups, but none from a responsible governing agency. Its people would rather go down individually, with quixotic courage, before the destructive agencies of uncontrolled industrialism--like Ethiopian tribesmen before Italian gas attacks--than submit to the discipline necessary for any effective resistance.

"You speak off-the-record...and worry for weeks about the resulting leaks. Speak publicly and it is as secure as a safe. No one knows what you said."

"....with a sense of deep gratitude and of happy acceptance of this American world, marked as it is by the mediocrity of all that is exalted, and the excellence of all that which is without pretense."

There was no room, in the modern world, for moral indignation, "unless it be indignation with ourselves for failing to be what we know we could and should have been."

Written during the 1950s (even though it sounds like 2012)

"The tone of political life has become sharper; the words have become meaner; the attempt is often made today to bring people to distrust other Americans--not on the grounds that they are dumb or selfish or short-sighted (that sort of thing has always gone on in our political life) but on the grounds that they are disloyal, that they are connected with hostile outside forces, that they are enemies to their own people."

"I could leave it without a pang: the endless streams of cars, the bored, set faces behind the windshields, the chrome, the asphalt, the advertising, the television sets, the filling-stations, the hot-dog stands, the barren business centers, the suburban brick boxes, the country-clubs, the bars-and-grills, the empty activity, the competitiveness, the lack of spontaneity, the sameness, the drug-stores, the over-heated apartment houses, the bus terminals, the crowded campuses, the unyouthful youth and the immature middle-aged--all of this I could see recede behind the smoke of the Jersey flats without turning a hair."

 Of a writing obligation he took on late in life:

It was a "publish before perishing" obligation.

"...Saint Augustine, whose Confessions had taken up far too much of God's time"

Regarding the acquisition of wisdom with age:

"....as one to whom these imputations would presumably be applicable, I am bound to say that this theory is at best complicated, and at worst questionable.

"Remember your humanity, and forget the rest."