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PHOTOGRAPH BY HERMAN LANDSHOFF/COURTESY OF THE ARCHIVES OF THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY
G E O R G E F. K E N N A N
16 february 1904 . 17 march 2005
PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
VOL. 151, NO. 2, JUNE 2007
biographical memoirs
W
HEN GEORGE KENNAN DIED, just after his 101st
birthday in February 2005, the United States lost one of its
most prominent diplomats, historians, and public philosophers. Following his retirement from the American Foreign Service in
1953, he was frequently critical of American foreign policy, but lived to
see much of his advice adopted (though without attribution) and one
of his most striking—and long ignored—predictions come to pass: the
collapse of the Soviet Union as the result of internal tensions and contradictions, not external pressure.
George Kennan was born in 1904 and grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a descendant of Scottish and English forebears, in Kennan’s words
“a straight line of pioneer farmers, digressing occasionally into the other
free professions.” He came east for the first time to study at Princeton
University, where he was, by his own recollection, something of a loner,
with few close friends. Upon graduation from Princeton, not desiring
to return to his native Wisconsin and the life to be anticipated there, he
applied for appointment to the American Foreign Service, the professional diplomatic and consular service established by legislation the
year before his graduation. To his surprise, he passed the entry examination. After initial tours of duty in Geneva and Hamburg, now fluent
in both German and French, he applied for a program of in-service
training in Russian.
Kennan’s interest in Russia was sparked in part by the work of a
relative, a cousin of his grandfather, also named George Kennan. The
younger man had little personal contact with his older namesake, but
was attracted by the elder’s accounts of his experiences in Russia, especially his two-volume study of the Siberian exile system.
After studying Russian for several years, mainly in Riga and Tallinn—
the United States having no diplomatic representation in the Soviet
Union at that time—Kennan was sent to Moscow in 1933 to arrange
for the opening of an American embassy. He personally selected the
buildings to be used as the chancery and the ambassador’s residence.
He was posted to the American embassy in Moscow during much of
the 1930s and returned to Moscow during World War II as Ambassador Averell Harriman’s deputy.
The three roles Kennan played in American intellectual and public
life, as a diplomat, historian, and public philosopher, of course overlapped. His diplomatic reports were infused with an acute sense of history; his policy recommendations rested on the philosophical principles
that gave shape to his perceptions; and his historical research was enriched by his experience in the public arena. Nevertheless, to understand
the full scope of Kennan’s achievement, his roles may best be considered
separately.
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The Diplomat
As a diplomat, Kennan achieved what many of his colleagues dream
of but precious few attain: decisive influence on his country’s policies in
matters critical to the country’s security and prosperity, and indeed to its
survival. Kennan’s “long telegram” from the American embassy in Moscow, dispatched on 22 February 1946, when Ambassador Averell Harriman had left him in temporary charge of the mission, reached Washington decision makers when earlier dreams of U.S.-Soviet collaboration
following the war had been undermined by repeated instances of Soviet
obstinacy. In blunt prose, Kennan warned not to expect a cooperative
Soviet Union in the postwar world: “We have here [in the USSR] a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can
be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that
the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of
life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if
Soviet power is to be secure.”1
That did not mean, however, that war between the United States
and the Soviet Union was inevitable. Far from it. Despite Soviet attitudes that made genuine cooperation impossible, the Soviet Union was
far weaker than the United States, Stalin was more circumspect than
Hitler (in Kennan’s words, “more sensitive to the logic of force”), and
the Soviet state was beset with a host of internal problems, not the least
being a loss of revolutionary élan among the population as a whole. In
sum, the United States should act to contain any Soviet expansion,
which might seem to validate its false ideological premises, but had no
need to use or threaten force to remove the Communist regime.
Kennan’s suggested policy of containment remained the bedrock
foundation of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union throughout the entire postwar period, up until at least 1989, when it was apparent that
Mikhail Gorbachev was altering the very nature of Soviet rule. Periodically the concept was challenged in American political campaigns, especially in 1952 with the Republican slogan “roll back the Curtain,”
but in practice containment remained the order of the day.
Kennan himself came close to disowning the containment doctrine
when he was out of the government, feeling that American administrations relied too much on military force to maintain it. But every postwar administration in fact followed a policy of containment, as opposed
to “liberation,” in dealing with the Soviet Union, and this approach
ultimately brought about the result Kennan had predicted as early as
1 Quoted
in George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 557.
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the 1930s when, as a junior diplomat in Moscow, he observed that
Communist rule would ultimately succumb to the internal contradictions it had engendered.
Kennan’s second historic achievement as a diplomat was conceiving and helping design the Marshall Plan to assist the reconstruction of
Europe following World War II. This policy represented a radical shift
from normal Great Power politics following wars. It was designed to
restore the economic vitality of European countries following the war’s
devastation and it treated the defeated and the victors alike. It was also
designed to encourage European economic and political cooperation to
avoid the sort of intra-European struggles that had plunged the continent into repeated wars in the past.
Despite these remarkable successes, Kennan’s preferences for U.S.
policy began to diverge from the judgment of his political superiors,
particularly when Dean Acheson replaced George Marshall as U.S. secretary of state. Kennan objected to a NATO alliance that would have
required the permanent stationing of American troops in Europe, opposed the rearmament of Germany, and favored an attempt to offer the
Soviet Union a neutral Germany if it would agree to an independent,
united Germany. At that time Soviet military strength seemed to be growing and its grip on the East European countries it had occupied during
the war was tightening; it is easy to see why Kennan’s ideas found scant
public support.
While Kennan was attentive to the traditions and political conditions in the major countries with which the United States dealt, he refused, as a matter of principle, to take into consideration political conditions in the United States itself. In his view, public and congressional
opinion should not be allowed to control foreign policy decisions.
By the early 1950s, Kennan’s advice seemed to Secretary of State
Acheson increasingly unrealistic, and he was allowed to leave the State
Department temporarily to think about policy issues in the unconstrained but stimulating intellectual environment of the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Late in 1951, however, President Truman asked him to return to Moscow as U.S. ambassador to
the USSR, and he agreed. The appointment was destined to last for
only a few months and proved to be one of the most trying and disappointing periods of Kennan’s long life.
Among Kennan’s virtues as a diplomat were his intelligence, his deep
insight into other cultures, his integrity, and his mastery of persuasive
rhetoric. (It has been said that Secretary of State Acheson sometimes
requested translations of Kennan’s memoranda into normal State Department bureaucratic language, so that he could assess the recommendations on their merits, absent the emotion aroused by Kennan’s elo-
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quence.) Along with these unquestioned virtues, however, he sometimes
expected too much—of himself, of his own government, and indeed of
the Stalinist Soviet Union.
When he went to Moscow in 1952, Kennan seems to have expected
the impossible. When he received no instructions to conduct even unofficial soundings and found, upon arrival in Moscow, that he and the
embassy were totally cut off from normal contact with Soviet citizens,
even the sort of controlled access that had been possible during his previous tours, he went into a period of deep despair. A less ambitious
diplomat might have become reconciled to making the best of the situation, interpreting Soviet developments as well as one could, training
the junior diplomats in the embassy to deal with the many peculiarities
life in the Soviet Union presented for a foreigner, preparing himself and
the embassy, and, to the degree possible, his own government for the
sort of changes that might be possible following Stalin’s death.
Kennan had little interest in such surrogates for policy making. He
was miserable, and, on a trip out of the Soviet Union, made the unguarded comment to a journalist that life in Moscow reminded him of
life in Hitler’s Berlin, where he was interned at the beginning of the
war. This was just what Stalin, already aware of Kennan’s opinion of
his rule, needed as a pretext to rid his capital of one he considered an
obnoxious interloper. Kennan was immediately declared persona non
grata and not allowed to return to Moscow, even to accompany members of his family in their departure. He was not allowed to enter the
Soviet Union again, even as a private citizen, for more than twenty years.
Kennan recognized that making this comment reflected a gross lapse
of judgment. His distress at the frozen antagonism that stalled any
movement in U.S.-Soviet relations in 1952 had overcome his prudence.
Nevertheless, given that Kennan’s advice on key issues was not welcome in political Washington, it was probably for the best that his professional career in the American Foreign Service essentially ended with
his exclusion from Moscow. Subsequently, President John F. Kennedy
sent him to Belgrade as ambassador, but Kennan had retired from the
U.S. Foreign Service by that time. With the exception of the two-year
interlude in Yugoslavia in the early 1960s, he spent the rest of his life in
the academic environment of the Institute for Advanced Study.
The Historian
As a historian, Kennan produced two volumes of memoirs, which quickly
became modern classics, two volumes on U.S.-Russian relations during
the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War, and two volumes on
European diplomacy leading up to World War I, as well as books and
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many articles on Russian history, Soviet and U.S. foreign policy, and
his personal philosophy. In these works, Kennan followed an approach
completely out of harmony with the attempts of many historians of his
generation to discover long-term patterns, even “laws,” of historical
development. The history he wrote was replete with personalities, always placed in the context of circumstances prevailing in their time.
Through Kennan’s prose, one can virtually re-live the times, gaining insight not only into what happened but also and most importantly into
the reasons decisions were taken and into their immediate and longerterm consequences. He was not a historian who wrote of impersonal
forces and their cumulative effects over centuries, nor did he force his
evidence into neat categories to fit a particular theoretical pattern.
During a 1988 lecture accepting a prize for historical writing (ironically, the Toynbee Prize), he challenged Arnold J. Toynbee’s theoretical
approach to history by quoting the American biologist Stephen J. Gould,
who observed that “everything interesting happens only once in its meaningful details,” then, noting the inconspicuous presence of individuals
in Toynbee’s history, added, “Yet, at the bottom of all human experience, there lies, after all, the mystery of the individual personality—its
ultimate autonomy of decision, its interaction with the mass.”2 Kennan
excelled in extracting the personalities from the flow of events and in
demonstrating how their reactions, perceptions, and decisions affected
the nature and course of their countries’ interaction with other nations.
Kennan’s historical writing concentrated on events of the twentieth
century and their roots in the nineteenth. One of his preoccupations
was World War I, which he considered the ultimate folly of the European leaders of that day. He considered it the result of the “morbid
form of nationalism” that developed in the late nineteenth century. In
his words, “. . . the First World War was the great formative catastrophe of the European civilization of this century, not only impoverishing
in the most serious way the societies of the principal participants but
also becoming the true source of the two great totalitarian movements
of mid-century—the Soviet Communist and the Nazi.”3
When to the experience of two world wars was added the creation
of nuclear weapons, Kennan concluded that war no longer had a rational place in any country’s foreign policy. As he put it in an article in the
journal Foreign Affairs in April 1951, “war . . . is a process which of
itself can achieve no positive aims.”4
2 George F. Kennan, At Century’s Ending: Reflections 1982–1995 (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1996), 315–16.
3 Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill , 80.
4 Quoted in George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1950–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 102.
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The Public Philosopher
Even before he left the U.S. government, his examination of American
foreign policy earlier in the century revealed “how much was utopian
in its expectations, legalistic in its concept of methodology, moralistic in
the demands it seemed to place on others, and self-righteous in the degree of high-mindedness and rectitude it imputed to ourselves.” 5 These
were all tendencies of which he disapproved, and when he perceived
them in the political rhetoric of his day it colored his assessment of the
policy itself.
In particular, Kennan rejected the idea, common in American political discourse, that the United States has a special role to fulfill in world
politics. “I am wholly and emphatically rejecting any and all messianic
concepts of America’s role in the world, rejecting, that is, the image of
ourselves as teachers and redeemers to the rest of humanity,” he wrote
in 1993, having frequently expressed the same thought throughout
much of his career.6
Most of Kennan’s public comments on foreign policy related to
dealing with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. When we review
these comments and compare them with actual policy, we discover a
paradox. Most American policy derived from the ideas Kennan had
expressed just after World War II, but Kennan disagreed with the conclusions policy makers drew. He was the author of “containment,” but
by the early sixties he began to disown his intellectual offspring.
The problem was that our policy makers concluded that containment of the Soviet Union required a greater measure of military pressure than Kennan thought necessary. The disagreement, therefore, was
not over whether the Soviet Union should be contained (as opposed to
liberated), but over methods used to achieve that end. American officials thought they were doing what was necessary to contain the Soviet Union and to avoid direct conflict that would have risked igniting
a nuclear war. George Kennan believed that political measures alone
could provide adequate containment. From the early 1950s through
the 1970s Kennan publicly opposed so many features of American policy that he seemed totally out of step with both Democratic and Republican administrations.
The disagreements became particularly acute when Ronald Reagan
was elected president in 1980. Kennan detested the rhetoric that implied that America had a leadership role in the “Free World” and he
5 Comment on lectures published in American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1951); Kennan, Memoirs, 1950–1963, 71.
6 Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill , 182.
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considered the increased American defense budgets as intended to equip
the United States to fight a senseless and suicidal war. He feared that the
United States and the Soviet Union were “on a collision course.” This,
in fact, was not the case; it is an irony that, as it developed, Reagan’s Soviet policy had more in common with Kennan’s thinking than the policy
of any of Reagan’s predecessors. Reagan’s military build-up was intended
to give the president the strength to negotiate the sort of agreements that
Kennan favored. Nevertheless, the rhetoric that offended Kennan’s sensibilities temporarily blinded him to the real substance of American policy.
Toward the end of 1983 President Reagan decided to deliver a major
address presenting his ideas for dealing with the Soviet Union. He wanted
to stress the possibilities of cooperation and to make practical suggestions for approaching the key problems that divided the United States
and the USSR. He proposed searching for ways to reduce tensions, to
reduce weaponry, to withdraw from military competition in third countries, and to cooperate to improve people’s lives in both countries.
At the time, I was responsible for Soviet affairs on the National
Security Council staff, and I took the initiative to telephone Kennan
before the speech was delivered in January 1984, and brief him on it.
He was delighted. Before our conversation ended, he said wistfully, “You
know, you’re the first government official who has ever called me to
consult on any question of policy since I left the Foreign Service.” I
don’t know whether that was literally true, but if there had been other
consultations he had forgotten them. He was enthusiastic about the approach the president’s speech set forth. He approved most of the things
we were doing when he understood them, even as he winced at some of
the public justifications given.
Were Kennan’s views in fact as much out of tune with government
policy during the Cold War as it seemed at the time? If we look beyond
the specific issues, we will find that Kennan’s analysis of the situation
was consistent with American policy in the 1980s.
First, as Kennan wrote repeatedly, one must engage one’s adversaries. He favored full use of diplomacy to prevent dangerous confrontations. This was precisely where President Reagan normally came down,
even in the face of advice from some of his advisers, who thought that
the Soviet Union had to change before the United States could deal with
its leaders effectively. Reagan rejected the proposition that we had to
force the Soviet Union to change before we talked. He understood, as
did George Kennan, that military pressure alone was unlikely to bring
about the internal changes the Soviet Union needed.
Second, there was a shared view regarding arms reduction. Kennan
observed in his memoirs, “Armaments are a function and not a cause
of political tensions. And no limitation of armaments on a multilateral
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scale can be effected as long as the political problems are not tackled
and regulated in some realistic way.” President Reagan often said,
“Nations do not fear each other because they are armed. They arm because they fear each other.” Both Kennan and Reagan felt that we
needed to get at the political problems if we were to reduce armaments.
Just before Reagan went to his first meeting with Gorbachev in November 1985, he wrote a memorandum in which he made it clear that
one of his principal goals was to establish a basis of trust that would
permit the rapid and radical reduction of nuclear weapons.
Furthermore, both Kennan and Reagan made a sharp distinction
between the Soviet Union and the Communist system, on the one
hand, and Russia on the other. Not all our political leaders have understood the difference. Kennan never forgot that Communism had been
imposed on Russia. Understanding the difference between the Communist system and the Russian character was important.
Kennan’s and Reagan’s ideas were also close when it came to nuclear weapons: Kennan wrote at great length about nuclear weapons,
stressing their dangers. Still, he could not have hated them any more
than did Ronald Reagan. They came to different conclusions at times.
Reagan’s conclusion was to seek a missile defense that would foster
abolition of the offensive weapons. Kennan did not agree with that
project. But the conviction that we must find a way to put the world on
a path toward eliminating nuclear weapons was common to both.
Both men rejected what Kennan called “liberationist slogans,”
those that had been used, particularly in 1952, to attack his containment policy. Reagan also refused to play the “nationality card,” attempts
to stir up the non-Russian population of the Soviet Union. While he
thought that the independence of the Baltic countries should be restored, he did not set out to bring down the Soviet Union. He tried to
change Soviet behavior, not to destroy the Soviet Union.
Kennan’s views and official American policy converged as Mikhail
Gorbachev responded positively to the policies Reagan articulated, and
the Kennans were among the guests at the dinner the State Department
arranged for the Gorbachevs upon their first visit to Washington in 1987.
Throughout the Cold War, American policy owed more to Kennan’s ideas than he believed at the time. Since the Cold War ended,
however, the gap between American policy and Kennan’s advice has
been wider than it was during the Cold War. In 1993 Kennan called for
“a very modest and restrained foreign policy, directed to the curtailment of external undertakings and involvements wherever this is in any
way possible, and to the avoidance of any assumption of new ones.” 7
7 Kennan,
Around the Cragged Hill, 183.
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This appeared to be sage advice to many observers, including those
who had disagreed with Kennan’s policy preferences during the Cold
War. Nevertheless, policy during both the Clinton and George W. Bush
administrations has gone in a different direction, dramatically increasing American military involvement in the world.
Up to the final year of his life, George Kennan stayed intellectually
engaged with the issues of the day. He loved to discuss and debate the
latest news, and even though his opinions were usually emphatic, he
was always a courteous interlocutor, willing to listen to opposing points
of view, and occasionally even consenting to adjust his own opinion in
response.
Whatever one’s view of Kennan’s stand on specific issues, his underlying philosophy contains important principles that today’s policy makers
ignore at our peril. These include advice to assess the facts realistically,
not on the basis of some preconceived theory; to act with modesty and
restraint; to keep lines of communication open; to avoid involvement
in unnecessary wars; to find a means of limiting the threat to mankind
posed by nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction; and to take
more effective steps to preserve the planet’s environment, which—in
his deep if undogmatic religious faith—George Kennan believed had
been bestowed upon mankind by Providence, with the concomitant
duty of acting as responsible stewards rather than despoilers.
Those of us who had the privilege of knowing George are fortunate
that he was allowed to be with us beyond the normal span of human
life, and that he retained his mental lucidity almost to the end. His example and his ideas will continue to inform and inspire public servants,
scholars, and all those with a serious interest in the preservation of civilized society on earth.
Elected 1952
Jack F. Matlock Jr.
Foreign Service Officer, retired
George F. Kennan Professor, 1996–2001
Institute for Advanced Study