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Reflections on George F. Kennan: Scholar and PolicymakerConference Proceedings

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Reflections on George F. Kennan:Scholar and Policymaker

Conference ProceedingsEdited by F. Joseph Dresen

Washington, D.C.

O C C A S I O N A L P A P E R # 3 0 0

PANELIST BIOGRAPHIES

OPENING REMARKS

PANEL 1: GEORGE F. KENNAN THE POLICYMAKERJack F. Matlock, Jr., former George F. Kennan Professor, Institute for AdvancedStudy, and former U.S. Ambassador to the USSR

Angela Stent, Professor of Government and Director, Center for Eurasian,Russian, and East European Studies, Georgetown University

PANEL 2: GEORGE F. KENNAN THE SCHOLARDavid C. Engerman, Associate Professor, History Department, Brandeis University,and former Title VIII-Supported Short-Term Scholar, Kennan Institute

Allen Lynch, Professor, Department of Politics, University of Virginia

KEYNOTE ADDRESSJohn Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of History, Yale University

Reflections on George F. Kennan: Scholar and PolicymakerWoodrow Wilson International Center for ScholarsKennan InstituteFebruary 8, 20079:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.Washington, D.C.

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Panelist Biographies

REFLECTIONS ON GEORGE F. KENNAN

David C. Engerman is Associate Professor ofHistory at Brandeis University, where he hastaught since receiving his Ph.D. from theUniversity of California-Berkeley in 1998. HisBerkeley dissertation, revised, appeared asModernization from the Other Shore: AmericanIntellectuals and the Romance of RussianDevelopment (Harvard, 2003); it won the StuartBernath and Akira Iriye Prizes and was named aChoice Outstanding Academic Title.

He also edited and introduced a new editionof The God That Failed (Columbia, 2001), andco-edited Staging Growth: Modernization,Development, and the Global Cold War (also con-tributing an article, “East Meets West: TheCenter for International Studies and IndianEconomic Development”). Other articles haveappeared in American Historical Review, Cahiers duMonde russe, Diplomatic History, Journal of ColdWar Studies, Kritika, Modern Intellectual History,and other journals.

His current project, “Know Your Enemy:America’s Russia Experts and the Making of theCold War,” has been supported by fellowshipsfrom the National Endowment for theHumanities and the Radcliffe Institute, as wellas research grants from the Gilder-LehrmanInstitute of American History, the KennanInstitute, and the Rockefeller Archive Center.

John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. LovettProfessor of Military and Naval History andDistinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy, joinedthe Yale faculty in 1997. He currently directs theBrady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy atYale, and has also served as Acting Director ofInternational Security Studies and as Chair of theInternational Affairs Council at the MacMillanCenter for International and Area Studies. Hismost recent books are The Landscape of History:How Historians Map the Past (2002); Surprise,Security and the American Experience (2004);Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal ofAmerican National Security Policy during the ColdWar (revised and updated edition, 2005); and TheCold War: A New History (2005). He is currentlyworking on a biography of George F. Kennan.Professor Gaddis teaches Cold War history, biog-

raphy, and grand strategy at Yale. He was the2003 recipient of the William Clyde DeVaneaward for undergraduate teaching, and in 2005was awarded the National Humanities Medal byPresident George W. Bush.

Allen Lynch is the Hugh S. & Winifred B.Cumming Memorial Chair in InternationalAffairs and Director of the Center for Russianand East European Studies at the University ofVirginia. His current research interests includeRussian foreign policy, Russian politics in com-parative perspective, and relationships betweeninternational order and political development. In2006, he received an All-University TeachingAward. His books include: How Russia Is—Not—Ruled: Reflections on Russian Political Development(UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); DoesRussia Have a Democratic Future? (New York:Foreign Policy Association, 1997); Europe from theBalkans to the Urals: the Disintegration of Yugoslaviaand the USSR and International Politics (UK:Oxford University Press, 1996) (with ReneoLukic); The Cold War Is Over —Again (Boulder:Westview Press, 1992); The Soviet Breakup andU.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Foreign PolicyAssociation, 1992); and The Soviet Study ofInternational Relations (UK: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987, 1989), which receivedthe Marshall D. Shulman Award of the AmericanAssociation for the Advancement of SlavicStudies. His articles have appeared in ForeignAffairs, Foreign Policy, Europe-Asia Studies, andother international and U.S. journals. He has helda number of visiting appointments at Europeaninstitutions including: the Ecole des HautesEtudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; FreeUniversity of Berlin; Deutsche Gesellschaft fuerAuswaertige Politik, Berlin; the Radio FreeEurope/Radio Liberty Research Institute,Munich; and the Institut des Hautes EtudesInternationales, Geneva. He is an HonoraryFellow of the Foreign Policy Association.

Jack F. Matlock, Jr., a retired diplomat, hasheld the following academic posts since 1991:Adjunct Professor of International Relations atColumbia University from 2007, Sol Linowitz

Professor of International Relations, HamiltonCollege, 2006; visiting professor and lecturer inpublic and international affairs at PrincetonUniversity, 2001–2004; George F. KennanProfessor at the Institute for Advanced Study,1996–2001; Senior Research Fellow and thenKathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor inthe Practice of International Diplomacy atColumbia University, 1991 to 1996.

During his 35 years in the American ForeignService (1956–1991) he served as Ambassador tothe Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, SpecialAssistant to the President for National SecurityAffairs and Senior Director for European andSoviet Affairs on the National Security CouncilStaff from 1983 until 1986, and Ambassador toCzechoslovakia from 1981 to 1983.

Before his appointment to Moscow asAmbassador, Mr. Matlock served three tours atthe American Embassy in the Soviet Union, asVice Consul and Third Secretary (1961–63),Minister Counselor and Deputy Chief of Mission(1974–1978), and Chargé d’Affaires ad interim in1981. His other Foreign Service assignments werein Vienna, Munich, Accra, Zanzibar and Dar esSalaam, in addition to tours in Washington asDirector of Soviet Affairs in the State Department(1971–74) and as Deputy Director of the ForeignService Institute (1979–80). Before entering theForeign Service Mr. Matlock was Instructor inRussian Language and Literature at DartmouthCollege (1953–56). During the 1978–79 academ-ic year he was Visiting Professor of PoliticalScience at Vanderbilt University.

He is the author of Reagan and Gorbachev: Howthe Cold War Ended (Random House, 2004,paperback edition 2005); Autopsy on an Empire:The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse ofthe Soviet Union (Random House, 1995); and ahandbook to the thirteen-volume Russian edi-tion of Stalin’s Collected Works (Washington, D.C.1955, 2nd edition, New York, 1971).

Mr. Matlock was born in Greensboro, NorthCarolina, on October 1, 1929, and was educatedat Duke University (AB, summa cum laude, 1950)and at Columbia University (MA and Certificateof the Russian Institute, 1952). He has beenawarded honorary doctorates by four institutions.In addition to the books noted, he is the author ofnumerous articles on foreign policy, internationalrelations, and Russian literature and history.

Angela Stent is Director of the Center forEurasian, Russian and East European Studies inthe Georgetown School of Foreign Service andProfessor of Government and Foreign Serviceat Georgetown University. She is also a SeniorFellow (non-resident) at the BrookingsInstitution. From 2004–2006 she served asNational Intelligence Officer for Russia andEurasia at the National Intelligence Council.From 1999 to 2001, she served in the Office ofPolicy Planning at the U.S. Department ofState. An expert on Russian and Soviet politicsand foreign policy, and on German foreign pol-icy, she has published widely on: Soviet rela-tions with Europe and the United States;Russian foreign policy; West and East Germanforeign policy; and East-West trade and tech-nology transfer. Her publications include:Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, TheSoviet Collapse and The New Europe (PrincetonUniversity Pres, 1999); From Embargo toOstpolitik:The Political Economy of West German-Soviet Relations, 1955–1980 (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1981); “America and Russia:Paradoxes of Partnership” in Russia’sEngagement with the West (M.E. Sharpe, 2005);“Russia: Farewell to Empire?” in World PolicyJournal , and “America, Russia and Europe: ARealignment?” in Survival. She has been a con-sultant to the U.S. Congress’ Office ofTechnology Assessment, is a member of theCouncil on Foreign Relations and has servedon their Committee on Studies. She has partic-ipated in various task forces of the Council onForeign Relations, including those on U.S.-Russian Relations, Transatlantic Relations andon NATO Enlargement. She is on the editori-al boards of the Journal of Cold War Studies,World Policy Journal and Internationale Politik.She is on the International Advisory Board ofRussia Profile. She is on the Executive Board ofthe U.S.-Russia Business Forum and is a mem-ber of the Advisory Boards of Women inInternational Security and of Supporters ofCivil Society in Russia. She is on the AcademicAdvisory Board of the American Institute forContemporary German Studies. Dr. Stentreceived her B.A. from Cambridge University,her MSc. from the London School ofEconomics and Political Science and her M.A.and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

2 KENNAN INSTITUTE OCCASIONAL PAPER #300

REFLECTIONS ON GEORGE F. KENNAN 3

Opening Remarks

Blair Ruble: This is a very special event forus, and we are pleased that all of you havebeen able to join us. I want to thank thespeakers and members of the Kennan family. Ialso want to thank all the members of theaudience. We are approaching what wouldhave been George F. Kennan’s 103rd birthdayon February 16 and the second anniversary ofhis death on March 17, 2005.

He shared a birthday with the gentlemanafter which he and our institute are named,George Kennan the Elder. Taken together, thestory of both Kennans encompasses aboutthree-quarters of the two centuries ofU.S.–Russian official diplomatic relations.They were both remarkable human beings,and they had a remarkable impact over a verylong period of time on how Americans thinkabout Russia. It is difficult to think of anoth-er example of two people who shaped theAmerican understanding of another countrythe way George Frost Kennan (GeorgeKennan the Younger) and George Kennan theElder did.

George Frost Kennan is one of the mostinfluential men of the 20th century. Hebecame what every Washington policy wonkreally wants to be. He shaped American poli-cy for half a century by writing a telegram,and I think that there must be generations ofForeign Service officers who dream of writingsuch a telegram. Over the last decade, we haveseen people muse about who will be the nextGeorge Kennan. There is only one GeorgeKennan, of course, and one of the reasons forthat is that the depth that went into thattelegram came out of a lifetime of being ascholar. He represents, in my view, the mostproductive interaction between scholarshipand policy. I often think of him when we havediscussions in Washington about how policyand scholarly institutions need to demonstratemeasurable results in addressing the policyissues of the day. If you look at the career ofGeorge Kennan, he was only able to have theimpact he had because he was both a scholar

and a policymaker. We wanted this conferenceto reflect his contributions in both capacities.

I also want to say that I think he is perhapsleast appreciated as a great person of Americanletters in the 20th century. He won twoPulitzers and a National Book Award. I thinkanybody who has tried to write understandswhat a beautiful writer he is. While I thinkthis may be the most overlooked part ofKennan’s legacy, what may be the most lastingpart are just simply his words on paper.

I once remember hearing MarshallShulman at, I believe, the Council on ForeignRelations’ celebration of Professor Kennan’s90th birthday. He paraphrased Mark Twain onWagner, saying: “I have to tell all my studentsbefore they read Kennan that he sounds betterthan he really is.” That is the mark of a greatwriter.

As we approach these anniversaries, wethought it would be time to step back a bit andreflect on this remarkable human being, theperson who founded our particular institution.We are very fortunate to have a remarkablelineup of speakers. Before we begin, I wouldlike to acknowledge the contribution of JohnHardt in suggesting and encouraging theorganization of this conference.

The first panel will feature Ambassador JackF. Matlock, Jr. He is a former George F.Kennan Professor at the Institute for AdvancedStudy in Princeton, and former U.S. ambassa-dor to the USSR.

He will be followed by Angela Stent, pro-fessor of government and director of theCenter for Eurasian, Russian and EastEuropean Studies at Georgetown University.

I also want to say that Jack Matlock was astalwart member of the Kennan InstituteAdvisory Council. It probably is not too muchof an exaggeration to say that given some ofthe challenges we faced at the time, we likelywould not have a Kennan Institute today if itwere not for a lot of the actions that Jack tookin concert with Professor Kennan, so it isalways a pleasure to welcome Jack.

Jack F. Matlock, Jr.: Thank you very much.It is a real honor to be here and to share somethoughts about George Kennan. When I was ayoung Foreign Service officer specializing inRussia for many years, he served as a rolemodel in respect to what one could achieve bylearning about the country and understandingit, and then having the opportunity to havethat knowledge actually reflected in Americanpolicy. This was true even though we did notaccept his judgment regarding all the issues ofthe day. His example served as a challenge forall of us, and I think that virtually all ForeignService officers of my generation were verymuch immersed in Kennan’s writings. I was arather senior Foreign Service officer before Imet him personally, but I later got to knowhim very well.

Now in commenting on him as a policy-maker and diplomat, I hope you will forgive meif I draw very heavily on an article I wrote for aFrench publication last year. I doubt if manypeople read it, especially in the United States.The publication is called La Politique Américaine,and I will draw on some of the remarks I madethere and amplify them.

As Blair indicated, one of Kennan’s mostnotable achievements was his concept of con-tainment. A diplomat in Moscow at the time, hesent his famous “Long Telegram” on February22, 1946, less than a year after World War IIended. At that time the United States was stilluncertain about what the future relationshipwith the Soviet Union would be. We had awartime alliance which had frayed, particularlyin the latter years of the war. But there were stillthose in Washington who had a dream thatsomehow Stalin’s Soviet Union could be a part-ner in the reconstruction of Europe and in theconstruction of a new world order, though itwas not called that at the time.

Ambassador Harriman had left Kennan intemporary charge of the American embassy inMoscow, and Kennan used a query from theDepartment of the Treasury as to why theSoviets were not more enthusiastic about sup-porting the Bretton Woods concept of mone-

tary reform, as an excuse to explain the reali-ties of dealing with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Inessence, he explained why Stalin would notand could not cooperate with the UnitedStates. In his words, “we have here a politicalforce committed fanatically to the belief thatwith [the] U.S. there can be no permanentmodus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessarythat the internal harmony of our society bedisrupted, our traditional way of life bedestroyed, the international authority of ourstate be broken, if Soviet power is to besecure.” In other words, the Soviet regime notonly would not cooperate, it had to act as anenemy to the United States in order to pre-serve its power. This was a profound insight.

Kennan went on to say that this did notmean that war between the United States andthe Soviet Union was inevitable—far from it.Despite Soviet attitudes that made genuinecooperation impossible, the Soviet Union wasfar weaker than the United States. Stalin wasmore circumspect than Hitler. In Kennan’swords, he was “more sensitive to the logic offorce.” And the Soviet state was beset with a hostof internal problems, not the least being the lossof revolutionary élan among the population as awhole. In sum, the United States should act tocontain Soviet expansionism, which might seemto validate its false ideological premises, but hadno need to use or threaten force to remove thecommunist regime.

Kennan’s suggested policy of containmentremained the foundation of U.S. policy towardsthe Soviet Union throughout the entire postwarperiod—at least until 1989, when it was appar-ent that Mikhail Gorbachev was altering thevery nature of Soviet rule. Periodically, the con-cept was challenged in American political cam-paigns, especially in 1952 with the Republicanslogan of “roll back the curtain,” but in practice,containment remained the order of the day.When a revolt in Hungary threatened to takethat country out of the Warsaw Pact in 1956,the Republican administration, which—by theway—had rejected Kennan, did nothing con-cretely to assist the Hungarian rebels.


Panel 1: George F. Kennan the Policymaker

Kennan himself came close to disowning thecontainment doctrine when he was out of thegovernment, feeling that American administra-tions had relied too much on military force. Butevery postwar administration in fact followed apolicy of containment, as opposed to liberation,in dealing with the Soviet Union. This approachultimately brought about the result Kennan hadpredicted as early as the 1930s, when as a juniordiplomat in Moscow he observed that commu-nist rule would ultimately succumb to the inter-nal contradictions it had engendered.

Kennan’s second historic achievement as adiplomat was conceiving and helping design theMarshall Plan to assist the reconstruction ofEurope following World War II. This policy rep-resented a radical shift from normal great powerpolitics following wars. It was designed to helpput the countries of Europe back on their feetfollowing the war’s devastation, and it treated thedefeated and victors alike. It was also designed toencourage European economic and politicalcooperation to avoid the sort of intra-Europeanstruggles that had plunged the continent intorepeated wars in the past. It was not designed toexclude the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.In fact, Kennan advised explicitly that it must beoffered to all the victors. It was Stalin whodecided that the Soviet Union would turn itdown. (I’m sure that was no surprise whatever toKennan, but it was important that the offer bemade.) Stalin also forced the Poles and theCzechs, who were originally inclined to acceptit, to refuse it. This again demonstrated the wis-dom of Kennan’s earlier comment that Stalinhad to establish a hostile relationship with theUnited States to preserve his own power.

Despite these remarkable successes,Kennan’s preferences for U.S. policy began todiverge from the judgment of his politicalsuperiors, particularly when Dean Achesonreplaced George Marshall as U.S. Secretary ofState. Kennan objected to a NATO alliancethat would have required the permanent sta-tioning of American troops in Europe. Heopposed the rearmament of Germany, and hefavored an attempt to offer the Soviet Union aneutral Germany if it would agree to an inde-pendent united Germany. At a time whenSoviet military strength seemed to be growing,and its grip on those East European countries ithad occupied during the war was tightening, itis easy to see that Kennan’s ideas would have

found scant support in the United States or, forthat matter, in those European countries thathad been allied with the United States andGreat Britain during that war.

This brings us to one of the defects inKennan’s record as a diplomat and policymaker.At least, it is a defect in my view. While he wasmost attentive to the traditions and political con-ditions of the major countries with which theUnited States dealt, he refused as a matter ofprinciple to take into consideration politicalconditions in the United States itself. Hedefended this attitude in his most self-reflectivebook Around the Cragged Hill, which was pub-lished in 1993. He wrote:

“In the days of my directorship at the StateDepartment Policy Planning Staff, I wassometimes urged to take into account inour recommendations to the Secretary ofState the domestic political aspects of therecommendation in question. ‘Should younot warn the Secretary,’ it was asked of me,‘of the domestic political problems thisrecommendation would present and makesuggestions as to how they might be met?’I resisted firmly all such pressures. Ourduty, I insisted, was to tell the Presidentand the Secretary what in our view was inthe national interest. It was their duty, ifthey accepted the force of our recommen-dations, to see how far these could be rec-onciled with domestic political realities.This was a duty that they were far betterfitted to perform than we were.”

I find this attitude questionable on at leasttwo accounts. First, it assumes that there issome precise concept of the “national interest”that reasonable and well-informed officials canreach without reference to political realities.Second, it places too great a burden on thepresident and secretary of state to have themshoulder the entire responsibility of convincingthe legislature and public at large of the wis-dom of a given policy. By the way, I am surethat George Kennan would never have hesitat-ed to testify in favor of policies to Congress.That was not his point. His point was that for-eign policy advisors should not take these mat-ters into account when giving advice.

Nevertheless, the constitution does requirethe president to seek the advice and consent of



the Senate, and it requires a president to obtainfunding for any policies that require it, and mostdo, from the House of Representatives and theSenate. Without some communication with thepublic at large, it would be very difficult tocarry the day in Congress itself. It is true thatthe president and secretary of state must lead theeffort in selling a policy to the public and theCongress, but they do deserve the full supportof their staffs in doing so. Indeed, while Kennanis right that one should not simply base recom-mendations on the basis of partisan politics, oreven perhaps let partisan politics enter into it, ifone does not take into consideration what ispolitically possible or take into considerationsteps that must be taken to prepare the publicand the Congress for a change in policy, thenthe policy is going to seem very unrealistic topolitical superiors.

In fact, Kennan’s advice by the early 1950sseemed to Secretary of State Acheson increas-ingly unrealistic, and Kennan was allowed toleave the State Department temporarily to thinkabout policy issues in the unconstrained butstimulating intellectual environment at theInstitute for Advanced Study at Princeton.Except for a two-year stint as ambassador toYugoslavia in the Kennedy administration,George Kennan spent the rest of his life at theInstitute, and his work there is going to be thesubject of the next panel.

Blair has already referred to Kennan’s elo-quence and style and how important this was,and I think this is absolutely true. Actually, apersuasive style in a bureaucracy can almostbecome a liability. It is said, and maybe withsome factual basis, that Acheson sometimeswould ask staffers to translate Kennan’s recom-mendations into bureaucratese so that he couldweigh them properly against other recommen-dations, because Kennan could be so persuasivein an emotional way. Yet that trait also led himat times to go overboard and exaggerate certainfactors in order to make a point.

I think one of the most difficult periods ofKennan’s life as a diplomat and policymaker washis ambassadorship in Moscow. He was calledback, despite his problems with Acheson, andsent out by President Truman and Acheson tobe ambassador to Moscow. One can tell from hismemoirs, and also from the accounts of juniordiplomats who were there at the time, that itwas a miserable time for him. He found himself

cut off from Soviet society and bereft of any realinstructions from an administration that hadgiven up on dealing with Stalin. I think this ledhim to a sense of despair, and also led him tomake a statement to a correspondent whileattending a meeting outside the Soviet Unionsaying that life in Moscow at that time remind-ed him of life in Hitler’s Germany when the warbegan. This of course was just the pretext Stalinneeded to get rid of him. According toAlexander Bessmertnykh, who was brieflySoviet Foreign Minister under Gorbachev, theSoviets had broken our cypher at that point andhad read the Long Telegram. Stalin was wellaware of Kennan’s views and considered him anenemy, and was in fact looking for some pretextto expel him.

From then on, it seemed to many people whoread Kennan’s works that he was almost always atodds with most foreign policy stances of bothDemocratic and Republican administrations. Butif we review his statements and then look at themin comparison as to what the policy was, we dis-cover something of a paradox. Those of us in thegovernment who knew the Soviet Union anddealt with its government recognized how pro-foundly correct much of Kennan’s analysis was.Nevertheless, we disagreed with many of theconclusions he drew regarding American policyat the time. He was the author of containment,but by the early 1960s he began to disown hisown intellectual offspring.

The problem was that our policymakers con-cluded that containment of the Soviet Unionrequired a greater measure of military pressurethan Kennan thought necessary. The disagree-ment therefore was not over whether the SovietUnion should be contained, as opposed to lib-erated, but over the methods used to achievethis end. American officials thought they weredoing what was necessary to contain the SovietUnion and to avoid direct conflict that wouldhave risked igniting a nuclear war. GeorgeKennan believed that political pressures couldprovide adequate containment, but there werepowerful reasons to question that judgment. Forthis reason, from the early 1950s through the1970s, whether we had a Democratic orRepublican administration, it seemed to mostobservers that Kennan’s views were completelyout of step with American policy.

The disagreements became particularly acutewhen Ronald Reagan was elected president in

1980. Kennan detested the rhetoric that impliedthat America had a leadership role in the “freeworld” (I put it in quotes because it is a term thatI do not believe Kennan used very much, if atall), and he considered the increased Americandefense budgets as intended to equip the UnitedStates to fight a senseless and suicidal war. Hefeared that the United States and the SovietUnion were on a collision course.

This, in fact, was not the case. Reagan’s mil-itary buildup was actually started by his prede-cessor, and was intended to give the presidentthe strength to negotiate the sort of agreementsthat Kennan favored. Nevertheless, the rhetoricthat offended Kennan’s sensibilities blinded himto the real substance of American policy and todevelopments in the Soviet Union that increasedthe probability that American policy wouldeventually achieve its aims.

Toward the end of 1983, President Reagandecided to deliver a major address with his ideasfor dealing with the Soviet Union. He wanted tostress the possibilities of cooperation and to makepractical suggestions for approaching the keyproblems that divided the United States and theUSSR. He proposed searching for ways to reducetensions, to reduce weaponry, to withdraw frommilitary competition in third countries, and tocooperate to improve people’s lives in both coun-tries. Though drafted in December 1983, thespeech was delivered on January 16, 1984.

At that time, I was responsible for Sovietaffairs on the National Security Council staff,and I took the initiative to telephone Kennanseveral days before the speech was delivered tobrief him on its content and to solicit his reac-tion. He was delighted. Before our conversationended he said, almost wistfully, “You know,you’re the first government official who has evercalled me to consult on any policy matter sinceI left the Foreign Service.” I do not knowwhether this was literally true, but if there hadbeen other consultations he had forgotten them.He was enthusiastic about the approach the pres-ident’s speech set forth.

After that, there were fewer occasions whenhe saw fit to speak out in opposition to currentAmerican policy. He approved of most of thethings we were doing when he understoodthem. And this suggests that if there had beenmore communication between Kennan and thepolicymakers, Kennan’s views might have beenmoderated. I think his views would not have

been basically changed, but perhaps some of thestatements that seemed more extreme than thesituation required could have been avoided.

Another question is whether Kennan’s viewswere in fact so much out of tune with govern-ment policy during the Cold War as it seemed atthe time. He obviously came to conclusions thatdiffered from official policy on many issues.Nevertheless, if we look beyond the specificissues, we will find that Kennan’s analysis of asituation was consistent with the assumptionsthat the U.S. government usually made in form-ing its Soviet policy, and particularly with thosethat President Reagan came to espouse. Thatwill seem paradoxical to some people. It wouldbe the last thing many people would think, yetlet’s look at some of the basics.

First, as Kennan wrote repeatedly, one mustengage one’s adversaries. He fully favored diplo-macy to prevent dangerous confrontations. Thiswas precisely where President Reagan normallycame down, even in the face of advice fromsome of his most trusted advisors who thoughtthat the Soviet Union had to change before theUnited States could deal with its leaders effec-tively. Reagan rejected the proposition that wehad to force the Soviet Union to change beforewe talked. He understood, as did GeorgeKennan, that military pressure alone was unlike-ly to bring about the internal changes the SovietUnion needed.

Second, there was a shared view regardingarms reduction. Kennan observed in his memoirs:

“Armaments are a function and not acause of political tensions, and no limita-tion of armaments on a multilateral scalecan be effective so long as the politicalproblems are not tackled and regulated insome realistic way.”

President Reagan did not have the eloquenceof Kennan’s prose but he often said, “Nations donot fear each other because they are armed.They are armed because they fear each other.”Perhaps that is not always true, but it is the samethought Kennan had expressed. Both felt that weneeded to get at the political problems if wewere to reduce armaments. It was not just a mat-ter of finding some magical formula for stability,which so many of our arms control expertsworked at and worked at very sincerely. You hadto go beyond that. Just before Reagan went to


his first meeting with Gorbachev in November1985, he wrote a memorandum in which hemade it clear that one of his principal goals wasto establish a basis of trust that would permit therapid and radical reduction of nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, both Kennan and Reaganmade a sharp distinction between the SovietUnion and the communist system on the onehand and Russia on the other. Not all of ourpolitical leaders have understood the difference.Kennan never forgot that communism had beenimposed upon Russia: understanding the differ-ence between the communist system andRussian character was important.

President Reagan showed his understandingof this point during his visit to Moscow in 1988when he was asked, “Do you still think this is anevil empire?” And he replied, “No, that wasanother time, another era,” and went on toendorse Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. Theproblem was not Russia, the problem was com-munism. This was something both Kennan andReagan understood.

Their ideas were also very close when itcame to nuclear weapons. Kennan wrote atgreat length on nuclear weapons, stressing theirdangers. Still, he could not have hated them anymore than Ronald Reagan. They came to dif-ferent conclusions at times. Reagan’s conclusionwas to seek a defense so we could abolish theweapons; Kennan did not agree with that proj-ect. But the conviction that we must find a wayto put the world on a path toward eliminatingnuclear weapons was common to both.

Finally, among the similarities that come tomind, both men objected to what Kennancalled liberationist slogans, which had been usedparticularly in 1952 to attack his containmentpolicy. Reagan also refused to play the national-ity card—attempts to stir up the non-Russianpopulation of the Soviet Union. While hethought that the independence of the Balticcountries should be restored, he did not set outto bring the Soviet Union down, despite theclaims of some of his more enthusiastic sup-porters after the fact. Reagan tried to use U.S.strength to convince the Soviet leaders theycould not win an arms race and would not beallowed to dominate other countries by militaryforce. He tried to change Soviet behavior, notto destroy the Soviet Union.

Kennan’s view and the official view tended toconverge as Mikhail Gorbachev responded posi-

tively to the policies Reagan articulated. At themost fundamental level, the idea that the SovietUnion faced serious internal tensions and wouldnot last forever suggested that it was unwise andunnecessary to threaten the Soviet state.Opposing Soviet attempts to gain advantage out-side its borders by using or sponsoring militaryforce is one thing; threatening the Soviet Unionitself was something else, something the UnitedStates carefully avoided.

George Kennan’s disagreements with specificU.S. policies should not blind us to the fact thatoverall American policy was in fact more consis-tent with Kennan’s analysis than Kennan himselfrecognized. The attitudes and assumptions at thefoundation of Kennan’s ideas were shared by keygovernment officials who advised the president,and they struck a responsive chord with PresidentReagan in particular. I would not say that Reaganlearned from Kennan directly but rather that hecame to share many of Kennan’s perceptions.

George Kennan wrote in 1951, “If it shouldturn out to be the will of fate that freedomshould come to Russia by an erosion from des-potism rather than by the violent upthrust ofliberty, let us be able to say that our policy wassuch as to favor it, and that we did not hamperit by preconception or impatience or despair.” Ithink that advice would be very useful to us tothink of today, particularly after reading anoth-er Russia-bashing editorial in the WashingtonPost this morning.

Forty years after that was written officials ofthe Reagan and first Bush administration couldhonestly say that American policy had met thestandard Kennan had set. Communist rule endedin the Soviet Union precisely as George Kennanhad predicted, almost sixty years earlier, as a resultof internal contradictions and not because ofpressure from the outside.

Angela Stent: Thank you, Blair, for invitingme to this symposium. I must say one of thegreat pleasures when I was preparing for mypaper was rereading Kennan’s memoirs andsome of his other writings—he was indeed sucha gifted writer.

Twenty years ago, I took part in a confer-ence, which John Gaddis and Terry Deibelorganized, at the National Defense Universityin honor of George Kennan. He himselfattended it, and it later resulted in a book titledContainment: Concept and Policy, so I am very



glad that we are holding another conferencetwenty years later. John and I were recallinghow it was a very interesting conference. Butsome of the people, particularly the more con-servative political participants who came to thatconference, attacked George Kennan personal-ly. That was perhaps not anticipated, but he wasand remains a controversial figure.

I realize that the Kennan Institute had todivide the symposium into panels, but I think it isvery difficult to separate Kennan the policymakerfrom Kennan the scholar and the historian,because his deep insights into Russian historyinformed very much his views on Russia policy,as did, of course, his views of the United States.

I worked on the State Department’s PolicyPlanning Staff for two years, from 1999 to 2001,and I remember how I always liked to look atthe picture of the first head of Policy Planning,George Kennan, sitting there with his staff. Ithink there were only five of them on the PolicyPlanning staff in the beginning. You look atthese photos and the staff is depicted as thought-ful gentlemen discussing issues with the compo-sure of people who have leisure. Maybe it is anillusion, but that is what it looked like. And thenI think about the harried denizens of the currentPolicy Planning Staff, and I think it must havebeen much better in the late 1940s.

I am going to talk about containment today,and there will be some overlap with what JackMatlock said, but hopefully not too much. I amalso going to focus on economic containment,which is something I looked at when I took partin the conference on containment twenty yearsago. Then I am going to say something aboutKennan’s views about American policy, verymuch following what Jack has said. Finally, I willcome back to a question with which I think wehave to grapple today when we look at Putin’sRussia, and that is how much of the problem indealing with Russia was the communist system,and how much of the problem lay in traditionalRussian political culture. In other words, wasRussia difficult because it was communist orbecause it was Russia? Here I think I am goingto somewhat disagree with Jack, because whileKennan blamed communism, he also under-stood there were historical traits in the Russiancharacter and in Russian history that madeRussia, irrespective of whether or not it wascommunist, difficult to deal with and shapedhow it dealt with the outside world.

I want to go back to Riga, and begin withhow George Kennan developed his views ofRussia that led him to come up with the theo-ry of containment. What is the intellectual his-tory of the theory? He was chosen to be trainedas a Russia expert, as we have heard, and he wassent first to Berlin and then to Riga to studyRussia and to learn the language. Of course, theBaltic States had just recently become inde-pendent. He joined the U.S. Legation in Riga in1921, and he describes Riga in those days as alively cosmopolitan city, a cultural mélange ofLatvian, German, Russian, Yiddish, and otherdifferent influences that made it such a livelycity. His teachers in this Paris on the Baltic werehighly cultivated Russian émigrés. They werewell-educated intellectuals from the pre-revolu-tionary era, but their lives had been destroyedby the Russian revolution. Obviously, that iswhere he came to form some of his early viewsabout the destructive nature of the Bolshevikrevolution.

He also was annoyed by the fact that theSoviet regime assumed that all of the Americansin the legation in Riga were spies. He thoughtthat was wrong. So he came away from thatexperience in Riga believing very strongly thatthe Soviets were only capable of viewing theworld through a dialectical lens, and that the out-side world would always be their enemy, and Ithink this was a very important influence on him.He realized that these views were also part of ahistorical cycle of fear of insecurity, that theUSSR had a fundamentally dialectical and hostileview of the outside world. He wrote in his mem-oirs that as a result of his time in Riga, “Neverdid I consider the Soviet Union a fit ally or asso-ciate, actual or potential, for this country.”

Of course, Kennan was a very complex per-son. He liked to depict himself as a realist, but Ithink he was very much an idealist as well. Hewas critical of the cynical and repressive mani-festations of Soviet power. But he did developan affinity for the Russian people and their cul-ture. I agree with Jack that he had tremendousadmiration for the Russian people for their abil-ity to withstand suffering, for their great litera-ture, and for their language. He very muchadmired and respected all of that, and he feltgreat sympathy for the intellectuals who taughthim, whose lives had been destroyed by theBolsheviks. He wrote, “The Russian peoplewere a great and appealing people.”

Then he arrived at the newly opened U.S.Embassy in Moscow. He lived in the HotelNational, which was not the luxurious hotel thatit is today. It was astonishing when I read this inhis memoirs, because I am familiar with theorganization of the U.S. Embassy in Moscownow, but then there were few security measures.This was in the early 1930s at the U.S. embassy,and I quote, “No codes, no safes, no couriers, nosecurity officers and regular telegraphs were usedfor communication with Washington.” He alsorealized that in Stalin’s Russia, his Soviet inter-locutors assumed that every foreigner was a spy.

Once the war in Europe had broken out, hewas serving in Berlin. We heard this from JackMatlock, but he stressed that his experiences inNazi Germany had a profound effect on hisunderstanding of the USSR and its imperialpolicies in the postwar world. So he did see asimilarity between the two systems, and weknow that got him into tremendous trouble inthe end when he was at the Moscow embassy.

By the time he came to write the LongTelegram, he had more than fifteen years ofRussian experience. He was also keenly aware ofthe short attention span of U.S. policymakersand of members of Congress. There is one won-derful vignette in his memoirs where hedescribes a gullible member of Congress meet-ing with Stalin and admiring him uncritically.Kennan was really troubled, and we have heardabout this from Jack, by the naiveté, as he saw it,of U.S. policymakers who looked forward to thepostwar collaboration with the Soviet Union.That is when he produced this rather stark set ofrecommendations for dealing with the Sovietsthat were part of the Long Telegram, which ofcourse made his reputation. He warned U.S. pol-icymakers not to assume a commonality of aimswith the Soviets that did not exist, not to actchummy with them, and not to make requests ofthem unless we would take measures of them ifthey did not fulfill the request. In other words,he wanted U.S. policymakers to be consistentand to respond in kind if the Soviets did notrespond to what they were supposed to do. Weshould insist, he argued, that they take responsi-bility for their actions, and not shy away frompublic confrontation with them. But he con-cluded that we should also expand our represen-tation in the Soviet Union.

In his Mr. X article, which I know you have allread, Kennan emphasized the symbiosis between

an ideology that teaches Russians that the outsideworld is hostile—that is a key element of Russiantradition as he saw it—and Marxism-Leninism,or, more precisely, the Russian adaptation of it. Itwas a mixture of ideology and what he called, andI quote, “the powerful hand of Russian historythat sustains them in this feeling.”This is what ledhim to advocate this long-term, patient, but firmand vigilant, containment of Russian expansivetendencies as the only way to check the inevitableexpansionist drive of Soviet Russia.

Let us turn now to the containment doc-trine. Rarely does one idea have such a majorresonance on policy. Rarely do policy plannerssucceed in having such a lasting imprint onAmerican policy. Most policy planners andheads of policy planning do not have that kindof imprint.

Kennan’s idea was so powerful and enduringpartly because of the timing. He managed toexplain Soviet behavior, to predict their futurepolicies, and to prescribe a policy for the UnitedStates at a time when the United States faced thetwin challenges of coping with an increasinglytruculent Kremlin and a weak and exhaustedWestern Europe that seemed at risk of falling preyto communism and increased Soviet influence.

Kennan later expressed astonishment that thistelegram and the Mr. X article had been elevatedto a doctrine. He was quite modest in later yearsabout what he thought he had done. He did lateradmit that he had failed to make clear, and againwe heard this from Jack Matlock, that he was rec-ommending political containment of a politicalthreat, not military containment of a militarythreat. He also said later on that he had nevermeant that containment should be a global policy,but that it should really only apply to WesternEurope. Hence his criticism of the TrumanDoctrine, which he felt was indiscriminately all-encompassing in its scope.

In his memoirs he reiterated that his majorconcern after the war was that the U.S. hadnaively made a series of unilateral concessions tothe Soviet Union during and after the war thathad enabled it to establish its power in EasternEurope. He was very critical, it would seem, ofwhat had happened after Yalta; and the purposeof his article, he said, was not to perpetuate thestatus quo, but to show tough resolve and waituntil it was possible to discuss with the Russianschanging the status quo in a peaceful way. Again,I refer you to an article that John Gaddis pub-

11REFLECTIONS ON GEORGE F. KENNAN

lished in Foreign Affairs in July of 1977, where helooks retrospectively at Kennan’s views.

With the hindsight of sixty years, we cannow say that containment was a successful strat-egy. Of course, it depends on how you definecontainment. If we take containment to meanwhat Kennan intended at the time, which wasthe need to counter Soviet expansionist inten-tions in Europe and protect Western Europefrom any Soviet takeover, then containmentsurely succeeded. Soviet power did stop at theElbe, and the Marshall Plan enabled WesternEurope to recover.

I know we have historians in the room, peo-ple from the Cold War International HistoryProject, who have done a lot of work in theSoviet archives. But it is my impression that themore we know from the Soviet archives, themore we understand that there were those in theSoviet body politic who did not want to stop atthe Elbe. I know there used to be more dis-agreement about this, but certainly Kennan’sideas are cast in a new light when you look atwhat we now know from the Soviet archives.

Kennan himself later pointed out on that fol-lowing Tito’s excommunication in 1948 and theSino-Soviet split, the international communistmovement was no longer monolithic, and there-fore the need for the kind of containment thathe had written about was no longer there.Kennan himself understood that the dialectic ofinternational communism, if we can paraphraseMarx, contained within itself the seeds of itsown destruction, as demonstrated by these war-ring camps divided by ideology and politics.

I do not think you can credit the West for theSino-Soviet split. Its roots obviously predate theBolshevik Revolution. It is also fair to say thatthe West took a long time to recognize the Sino-Soviet split. In 1968 during the presidential cam-paign, Richard Nixon could still talk about theSino-Soviet bloc, even though, as we know,once he had won he and his secretary of statewere able to take advantage of the split ratherskillfully to the benefit of the United States.

What about containment in the third world?Once the Cold War spread from Europe to theperiphery with decolonization, it opened up awhole new area for containing Soviet power.The Kremlin did not initially intend to extendSoviet power to places where Russia had neverhad any influence before, but of course we nowknow that it was precisely the Soviet over-exten-

sion and imperial over-reach in the third world,culminating in the war in Afghanistan, that has-tened the Soviet Union’s demise.

If we agree that containment as originallyconceived did succeed, I think we can also agreewith Kennan that the problem was that theintended follow-up to what he advocated in1947 never happened. That is to say, havingchecked Soviet expansion in Europe, he wantedthe United States to embark on a series of nego-tiations with the Soviet Union to deal with theirproblems. I refer you to John Gaddis’ article;maybe the very success of the initial contain-ment policy made that impossible.

I want to say a few words about economiccontainment, and I thank John Hardt for some ofthe things he sent me, because I think Kennanhad rather strong views on that. Kennan under-stood very well when he looked at the Sovieteconomy that it was one of intensive militaryindustrialization, maximum development ofarmed force, and party dominance of economicpolicy in management. He realized that the SovietUnion had returned to this unwieldy commandeconomy in full force in 1945, and that it wasnow extending it to its East European satellites. Aswe heard, Kennan wanted Marshall Plan assis-tance to be offered to these countries, but theyobviously could not accept it. He believed thatthe Soviet economic system per se did not repre-sent a threat to Western market economies as longas the Western market economies were healthy—hence the importance of the Marshall Plan. Hedoubted that the Soviet Union would everembrace Western market principles as long as thecommunists were in power.

The economic arm of U.S. containmentpolicy essentially focused on denying the SovietUnion the wherewithal to become a more for-midable opponent by restricting its ability toacquire Western technology. At the end of thewar, Ambassador Harriman favored offeringeconomic aid to the Soviets. Kennan disagreed.He argued that economic concessions to theSoviet Union would not elicit political conces-sions. He thought that the Soviets would useU.S. trade in credits to build up their militaryindustrial infrastructure to the detriment ofU.S. national security. This was the economicaspect of the political argument that was skep-tical of the value of engaging with the Soviets,which Kennan certainly was at that time. Headvocated a long-term strategy of economic


denial to the Soviets on security grounds. In1949 he again criticized some U.S. officials,and I am quoting here, who had the idea “thatif you can only lure the Russians into someform of flexible free trade system you willthereby put salt on the feathers of the Russiantail and the bird will appear to be much moretame and amenable.”

These debates kept recurring throughout theperiod of the Cold War—whether you coulduse economic incentives to change either Sovietdomestic behavior or foreign policy. The origi-nal idea of detente as conceived by Nixon andKissinger was that foreign economic relationsand foreign policy should be linked. TheJackson-Vanik Amendment, which, contrary tothe Nixon-Kissinger approach, linked domesticpolitical and foreign policy behavior, and whichremains on the books today, is another exampleof linkage strategy, but Kennan himself wasskeptical that this kind of linkage would work.

Until the Kennedy era, when we began toexport grain to the Soviet Union, economicwarfare characterized U.S. policy. I will quoteone of George Kennan’s successors as head ofPolicy Planning, Walt Rostow. He wrote in theearly 1960s:

“U.S. trade restrictions have primarily apolitical impact on the Soviets. They serveas a symbol of U.S. unwillingness to grantthe Soviet Union full respectability as anequal in the postwar world order. Tradedenial has also come to be an importantsymbol of our Cold War resolve and pur-pose, and of our moral disapproval at theUSSR.”

Between the Kennedy administration and thecollapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. policy com-bined long-term technology embargos withepisodic periods of trade inducements. We canthink of grain sales under President Reagan, andthe establishment of the first Pepsi Cola factoriesin the Soviet Union. Of course, our Europeanand Japanese allies became increasingly adverse toeconomic containment once detente had begun.

I do believe that the strategic embargo didhave an impact on Soviet economic develop-ment. I think we would all agree that one of thereasons why the Soviet Union collapsed wasbecause of the internal contradictions of itsown economic system, hastened, of course, by

the fact that oil prices plummeted underMikhail Gorbachev. Real problems were intrin-sic to the command economy, but certainly theU.S. strategic embargo, something whichKennan did favor at the beginning, forced theSoviets to come to terms with the problems ofthe command economy.

Let me say a few more words about U.S. for-eign policy now, and then I will come back tothe question of whether the problem was Russiaor communism. As we have already heard fromJack Matlock, Kennan bristled at having to takeinto account domestic constituents in U.S. for-eign policy. He much preferred classicRealpolitik, where you did not have to pay atten-tion to domestic interests. I think it is somethingthat everyone who works in the StateDepartment has to struggle with—and there is abig bureau there now that just deals with theCongress—because we are a democracy and wehave these constituents.

Kennan wrote in his memoirs that he disliked“the incurable traits of American statesmanship,including the tendency to make statements andtake actions with regard not to their effect on theinternational scene, but rather to congressionalopinion to which these statesmen are anxious toappeal.” For Kennan, having to deal withCongress and having to tailor what one did toCongress really limited the United States’ roomto maneuver.

Kennan wrote in a 1976 article in ForeignAffairs that he regretted that one of the weak-nesses of the U.S. system is “its inability to acceptand experience military involvement withoutbeing seriously disoriented by it, and withoutpermitting it to distort judgments and questionsof policy.” I throw that quote out as we sit in themiddle of a debate on Iraq.

He also criticized the tendency of Americanpolicy toward Russia to swing from oneextreme to the other—either it was love or itwas unrequited love, and that unrequited lovehad turned only too easily to unreasonablehatred. He was also very critical ofMcCarthyism and the swing from naiveté aboutthe Soviet Union to demonization of theSoviet Union. He later criticized the UnitedStates for failing to understand the changes thatwere happening in the Soviet Union after Stalindied. He said that U.S. policymakers’ views ofthe Soviet Union were frozen in the Stalinistsystem long after it had changed.


As he grew older, he grew more dismayed bywhat he saw happening in the United States, andwe may hear about that from some of the otherspeakers. His view of the Soviet Union becamemore favorable as his view of the United Statesbecame darker. After the collapse of the SovietUnion, he supported a robust U.S. engagementwith Russia. He was passionately against NATOenlargement. I just went back and reread his op-ed “A Fateful Error” in the New York Times, andhe said that NATO enlargement would “inflamethe nationalistic anti-Western and militaristic ten-dencies in Russian opinion.”

One wonders how he would view the cur-rent U.S.–Russian relationship today. I think hewould have cautioned against exaggerated disap-pointments after the perhaps exaggerated hopesof the 1990s.

This brings me to my final point, and that ishow much of the Soviet system was a product ofcommunist ideology, and how much was it aproduct of Russian political culture and Russianhistory. Consequently, another question that onehas to then ask is, will these traits endure ten,twenty, or thirty years after the Soviet system itselfhas faded? We grapple with these questions todayas we seek to understand Putin’s Russia and itsfuture trajectory. Underneath the legacy of theSoviet Union lies a millennium of Russian tradi-tions, which Kennan I think very well under-stood: a patrimonial state with no rule of law, noproperty rights, and a collectivist view of the rela-tionship of the state to the individual. But whatdid Kennan have to say about these questions? Hecertainly had great respect for Russian culture andadmiration for the Russian people, as we havesaid. He understood that Russia’s history,throughout which the state has always had to dealwith hostile neighbors while lacking natural fron-tiers, induced Russian leaders and policymakersto operate with what he called secretiveness,wariness, and deceit in order to survive, and thatthis was ingrained in the way that Russia viewedthe outside world. He argued that the Russiansbelieved that all foreigners were potential ene-mies. Hence, he said that Russia would continueto cultivate and maintain armed forces on a scalefar greater than any visible threat to their securitywould seem to warrant, and he predicted that thatwould continue well after the end of the war.

On the other hand, he did recognize, as wehave heard from Jack Matlock, the impact thatcommunist ideology had on exacerbating those

tendencies in Russian history towards suspi-ciousness and confrontation. The hope was onceyou take the ideology away, some of that secre-tiveness and suspicion would also diminish.

I think you have to conclude from his writ-ings that part of the U.S. difficulty with Russiais a product of Russian history and culture andtradition, and that some of these things haveoutlasted the Soviet Union. But, and this is myfinal point, a large part of the problem inU.S.–Russian relations, as Kennan saw it, lies inWashington.

The final interview that I want to cite is onethat George Kennan did with Richard Ullman inThe New York Review of Books in 1999. He reiter-ated his criticism that the U.S. had over-personal-ized relations with Russia, and that the U.S. gov-ernment should cease its public advocacy ofdemocracy and human rights in Russia anddetach itself from domestic affairs. He said weshould not be involved in the business of trying toinfluence what is happening domestically inRussia. In a phrase that I am afraid to say resonatesvery much in today’s debates, Kennan said: “Thiswhole tendency to see ourselves as the center ofpolitical enlightenment and as teachers to a greatpart of the rest of the world strikes me asunthought-through, vainglorious, and undesir-able.” He concluded that “the best thing theUnited States could do is not to preach but toinfluence countries by the force of our example.”

To sum this up in one sentence, Kennanwould have been very critical of a congressionalhearing that is supposed to be held this year indealing with Russia bearing the working title:“The New Russia: Resurgent, Recalcitrant andRepressive.” There is no question mark there. Ithink that, rather than sign on to that kind oflanguage, George Kennan would advocate todaya long-term, patient, but firm and vigilantengagement with Russia without illusions.

DISCUSSION

Question: Thank you, Jack and Angela, forwonderful presentations. I have a question forJack. You mentioned Kennan’s growing opposi-tion to the militarization of American foreignpolicy and his proposals for the neutralization ofGermany, which are of course a sort of recur-ring theme. It seems to me that one weakness inhis view of U.S. policy and in his prescriptionsconcerned an actual policy stemming from our


strategy of containment, and that is building upthe institutions of Western Europe—NATOand the EU. You can argue whether so muchmilitary buildup was necessary, but certainlyNATO as an institution was very important. Henever seemed to attach much importance to thatside of our policy, which was arguably a neces-sary condition for the success of containment.In particular, I think the neutralization ofGermany in view of German history, when youconsider the historical German obsession withbeing singled out that we all have run into asdiplomats, would have been a disaster.

Matlock: Yes, I agree. Kennan told me severaltimes when we would meet late in his life thathe really resented the fact that his advice onGermany was never really taken. He said: “Afterall, I know Germany as well as Russia and theSoviet Union, and yet my views on Germanywere never given much weight.” At one pointhe reacted to a mention of Secretary Achesonvery vigorously saying, “The man understoodnothing” and “he was totally ignorant ofEuropean affairs.” I think that reflected his fric-tion with Acheson, or his memory of it.

I agree with your point. I think that a unit-ed, neutralized Germany, that might have beennegotiable with the Soviet Union, was notgoing to happen. Stalin was not going to allowthat, and I do not think that policy was everdoable.

Second, one of the things I believe Kennannever recognized was that NATO had threepurposes. It was put very bluntly by the firstSecretary General: to keep the Russians out, tokeep the Americans in, and to keep theGermans down. Kennan really did not want theUnited States to be playing a military role inEurope following World War II, at least not aprominent one. He was against that aspect. I donot think he gave sufficient thought to howGermany might evolve if it was not tied into theNATO alliance; and it was that consideration,by the way, that finally convinced Gorbachevthat he should agree that a united Germanycould stay in NATO. The argument was that ifyou do not have at least some American troopsin Europe, and if you do not have the restric-tions of the NATO alliance, who knows, givenGermany’s demonstrated past capacity forgrowth, what some future generation might doif Germany should go nuclear or whatnot.

Could there be a revival of German aggressive-ness, a German attempt to dominate Europeonce more? Of course, anyone who knowsabout World War I and went through WorldWar II is going to worry about those things.

I think Kennan did not give sufficient weightto that prospect. I really believe that if morepeople in the government had debated theseideas privately with him, he might not haveagreed with them, but I think some of his ownviews would have been moderated. And I thinkbecause he was left cut off, first in Stalin’s Russiawhen he was ambassador, and then by theadministration, particularly by [Secretary ofState John Foster] Dulles, who as far as Kennanwas concerned was even worse than Acheson,he began to develop views which really weremore extreme than they needed to be.

But I agree with you that his attitudestowards Germany, in my view, would not haveworked.

Question: Obviously it is easier to praiseGeorge Kennan, and I have done so in print onhis centennial. But like any human being, hehad his blind spots, and one that has beenreferred to here is his tendency to see the dem-ocratic institutions of the American republic asa weakness, whereas I would say manifestly theyare part of our depth, our strength. After all,who won the Cold War?

But I would like to ask the panelists if theywish to address what seems to me to be anoth-er one of his blind spots, which were his atti-tudes toward the world outside of Europe. Thepolicymakers that he worked for in the late1940s were dealing with global policies. Afterall, our war had been as much a war of Asia andthe Pacific as of Europe. The issues we facedafter the war were very much those of Asia andsoon to become those of the decolonization ofthe third world, particularly in the Middle East.The United States faced an enormous numberof issues that in Kennan’s writings at the timeand in his memoirs played very little role. Infact, when he does comment on the worldbeyond Europe, it is often in terms which, toput it mildly, are condescending. I wonder ifyou would comment on his role as a policyadvisor to secretaries of state and presidents whohad to face a much broader global set of issues,when his own mind-set was, it seems to me,quite Eurocentric.


Stent: You are quite right. If you read what hewrote, he thought he would focus on theUnited States and the Soviet Union and Europe,and he was much less interested in Asia. Thetime when he was most active as a diplomat wasbefore decolonization. He had a veryEurocentric view of the world, and I thinkmaybe we will hear more about this. I think forhim large parts of what we call today the thirdworld were not important and would notbecome players in the global system. But I alsothink it is true that if you look at when he wasmost active in advising presidents, it was beforethose issues became so important.

Matlock: I think he did not feel any greatempathy during his brief excursions to theseareas. He did not like the heat and so on whenhe stopped in countries that were tropical. Hetook some interest in Asian affairs, of course.He was very much against letting [GeneralDouglas] MacArthur cross the 38th Parallel inKorea. But when the tide turned and thePentagon was panicking and saying we had topull out of Korea, he made a point of going toWashington, talking to Acheson, and sayingthat we cannot let this happen. Once we areengaged we cannot simply pull out. He wasnot one who said we should not use forceunder any circumstances. I think he did paysome attention to the great power politics inAsia, but he did not take a great interest in thedeveloping world as has been said. The bigissues at that time before decolonization werethese European and Asian issues.

And you are probably right that he might nothave been sympathetic to presidents and otherswho had to take broader matters into account.But I think that was not the basic problem,because actually up until at least Kennedy, ourpresidents also did not pay much attention tothese areas. You did have Truman’s “Point FourProgram” [to extend economic aid to poorcountries], but that had not been very well vet-ted at the time and not much came of it. But asa rule, from the end of World War II for adecade or so, the politics were those of Europeand the revolution in China, the occupation ofJapan, and the results of World War II. That wasa preoccupation not just of Kennan, but I thinkof our government as a whole.

Kennedy was the first president who beganto give a little emphasis to Africa. I was one of

the first young diplomats sent to Africa as decol-onization began, and it was very apparent at thattime that before then the United States govern-ment had paid very little attention to thoseissues. So this was not just Kennan, it was alsothe thrust of American policy at the time.

Comment: It seems to me that there was avery great difference between the GeorgeKennan of 1946 and certainly by the time ofGorbachev. Most of that period, Kennan wasoutside of the government but he was veryactive in public life. The dimension ofAmerican foreign policy, which he felt verydeeply about at the end of his life, certainly inthe last twenty years of his life, was not simplythe government—it was the nature of theAmerican polity. He was very deeply engaged,as you all know, in congressional testimony,educating the Congress and the public, engag-ing the academic world in discussions, andspeaking and writing publicly.

I think it is a great mistake to narrowKennan’s vision to his performance in govern-ment. The last quote about how the strengthof the American polity should be the basis ofour foreign policy is something Kennan dis-cussed very strongly at various periods.Remember that George Kennan was in chargeof covert action in 1946 for the United States,and he discussed this very deeply in the inves-tigations of the intelligence community in1975. He spoke to the basis of the dictum thatcovert action should only be used in extremecircumstances when no other means will do—the so-called “Vance stand.” He could changehis mind and did. He was remarkable, I think,in understanding that there was a moment ofchange when he became an active member ofan organization called The AmericanCommittee on U.S.–Soviet Relations. He saidGorbachev was different, that there was achange going on, and that it was time to makean effort to engage seriously with Russia andbreak out of the Cold War. I think we shouldpay more attention to that aspect of Kennan’sdimension.

Comment: My sixty year retrospective is in asense a mea culpa. I reviewed my recollection ofhis words, as many of you have, and rememberGeorge Kennan presenting his views to ourgraduating class at the Russian Institute, and not


accepting them for the fullness of the basic prin-ciples that he was enunciating. First, the plannedeconomy had to be dominated by the party asthe key decision-making organ. And second,the economy had to be militarized. Now thereason why I go back to those is that he nevertalked in economic terms.

All during this time period, up to the timeyou were in Moscow, we made forecasts. Theforecasts at the end of the 1980s for the SovietUnion and/or the East European countries said,in effect, if the baseline forecast goes forwardthen there will be increasing economic problems.The optimistic forecast had to be occasioned byan elimination of the Communist Party, and thatwas a critical element, and also that militarizationhad to be reduced from absolute priority. Anadditional element not mentioned was what EdHewitt identified in his forecast, namely the Jeffect. With the J effect, the Soviet economywould get worse if they did try this. There was astrong continuity in lots of our publications onthe economy that dealt with the prospects ofreform and change and joining and whatever. ButKennan was right. We should have gone to thefundamental principles of party dominance andmilitarization. Those elements, and other endur-ing works, were major contributions of Kennanwhich we under-utilized.

Question: George Kennan came up with aconstruct for dealing with the greatest threat theUnited States faced in the 20th century. Sincewe do not have another George Kennan presenttoday, I am going to ask you to speculate howhe would deal with the greatest threat we facein the 21st century, realizing it is a non-stateactor, radical Islam.

John Lewis Gaddis: I wanted to pick up onthe third world question, because I think mostpeople thinking about George Kennan’s recom-mendations with respect to the third world, par-ticularly his first major recommendation fromhis report on his Latin American trip in 1950,would have said “hopeless, utterly hopeless.” Itwould seem that he had no clue when it cameto the third world. I think that is how these rec-ommendations were generally treated in thepolicy community.

But I would like to make two amendmentsto that view, because it seems to me that in onearea, China, he was extraordinarily shrewd. I

have been going through his War College lec-tures from 1946 and 1947, and even at thatpoint he anticipated that if the communistscame to power in China, it would be muchmore difficult for the Russians than it would befor us. Now, he never approved of the Chinese,and long after Nixon had gone to China, therewas still a profound skepticism on George’s partabout dealing with the Chinese. But he certain-ly did foresee the Sino-Soviet split.

The other third world area where he was ontarget was Vietnam. I do not think he knew muchabout Vietnam, but he certainly had a sense of theproblems that we were getting into there, and heraised the alarm on this in a highly public andeffective way ahead of most other people.

Matlock: Let me address the question of howKennan might have considered the threat of ter-rorism. I gather that is the essence of what youwere asking. Of course, we can only speculate inpart. He was still with us at 9/11, and I can saythat at that time I think he felt that the militaryaction taken in Afghanistan was justified and nec-essary. He thought that invading Iraq was an utterfolly, and that it was a very, very great mistake. Ithink he would have viewed, and now I am spec-ulating, that terrorism is indeed a threat, but it issomething that should be within our capacity todeal with collectively by using essentially policemethods, unless you have a very clear situation oftraining grounds and so on, such as we had inAfghanistan—then you use military action. Butto consider it a “war on terror,” no—I think hewould have found that totally offensive and actu-ally a mischaracterization of what the threat was.He might have in this case minimized the threat,but I think he probably would have pointed outthat during the Cold War we contained theSoviet Union when the threat was really that ofannihilation, perhaps not only of ourselves, butof civilization, if it got out of hand.

As grievous as any damage that terrorists cando to us, it comes nowhere near that. Of course,the methods of dealing with terrorism cannotbe precisely the same as those of dealing withother states. I do not think he would have beenin favor of negotiating with the terrorists.

On the other hand, he certainly would havesaid we should keep lines of communicationopen with all states, and that we get increasingdifficulties if we go in for regime change.Essentially, containment was about not going


for regime change. You contain something until,if it is irrational, it brings itself down. I thinkthat his attitudes are certainly relevant today. Ithink that he would have approved of very fewof the measures that we have taken, particularlythose domestically that limit freedom and whatwe really stand for internationally.

It is quite right that he made a lot of com-ments on these issues. If we did not deal withthem in greater detail, as was pointed out, itwas that this particular panel was on his role asa policymaker. In my own writings, I have dis-tinguished his role as a policymaker, as a schol-ar and historian, and as a public philosopher.They were all three important. They were

interconnected. If I gave short shrift, or wegave short shrift, to some of the public philos-ophy aspects, it was because that might betreated in another panel.

Stent: I really do not have anything to add tothat. He was against invading another countryand deposing a leader the way it was done inIraq. To get back to your question, you thenhave to ask how you contain terrorism, and itobviously requires different instruments thancontaining the Soviet Union. That is somethingthat should be taken up, and you have to begina different dialogue than the one we have had upuntil now.


David C. Engerman: I will start with twoapologies. First, I apologize in advance becausealthough there were a number of comments inthe previous discussion about Kennan’s veryinteresting role as a public intellectual on philo-sophical matters and on matters of contempo-rary foreign policy, I am afraid these importantdetails will somewhat fall between the cracks, asAllen Lynch and I see it, in our discussion.

The second apology is that we are not hereto discuss the most compelling and controversialaspects of Kennan’s career. We are here to talkabout his career as a scholar and as a historian—poor cousins, perhaps, at an event like this.

Yet I can think of at least two rebuttals to thislast concern that the examination of Kennan asa scholar is of any less significance than examin-ing his diplomatic career. The first is that it isnot really true. As Angela Stent noted at the endof her remarks about Kennan’s ideas and policiestoward Russia, Kennan’s views of Russia’s past,his love of the Russian music he learned in hisundergraduate career at Princeton, and hisgraduate studies on Russia while with the StateDepartment in Berlin were of central impor-tance. I think his view of the Russian past real-ly shaped his view of foreign policy towardRussia. He went so deep in his view and under-standing of the Russian past that it almost wentbeyond history.

During the one chance I had to meetAmbassador Kennan, I asked him about hisideas about Russia and where they came from.He spoke of Realien, using a term from hisBerlin professors, by which he meant not justthe present reality, but also the literal ground,the topography and geography of national life.He was so deeply rooted in understanding thepast to understand the Russian present, andRussian present future, it almost went beyondthe historical.

A second reason why I do not think the“Kennan as scholar” topic leaves us as poorcousins here is that he himself would have beenreally pleased, I think, to see his record as a pol-icymaker and as a scholar treated with equalweight. He recounted with great pride, forinstance, that in his final audience with Tito as

ambassador to Yugoslavia, Tito referred to himas a nauchnik, as a scholar.

This moment with Tito was an interruption,as we have already heard, from his career as ascholar, which long outlasted his career as adiplomat. More or less from the time he arrivedat Princeton in the early 1950s, he maintainedhis ties to Institute for Advanced Study andworked on a wide variety of historical scholarlyprojects. I would not say that he was entirely andpermanently committed to being only a schol-ar. I get the sense that every four years, just aftera presidential election, he checked his mail withparticular nervous anticipation in the hopes ofsomething; and then, usually by February of thefollowing year, he would have a renewed senseof how little the ideas of experienced diplomatsmattered in today’s world. This was a fairly con-sistent and bipartisan neglect from about 1956through 1968, and perhaps to 1972 and beyond.Yet once he dived into his career as a scholar, itwas deeply, deeply important to him.

He did have a bit of ambivalence in his careeras a historian. In preparing for this talk, I wentto look again at some of the papers he left inPrinceton. He gave a talk back at his alma materin 1964 with the portentous title, “The Role ofthe Teacher of History in Modern Society,” andconfessed his concern about the life of a schol-ar: “There was nothing more excruciating,” herecalled, “than to sit next to an open window inspring, let us say, and hear birds singing and allthe sounds of life pulsating outside and at thesame time to try to concentrate on the writtenrecord of what obscure people or bodies of peo-ple, with whom there is nothing to associate butthe name they go by, did long ago.” He con-cluded that there were two kinds of people whobecame historians: “History is for those whohave no personal life at all, like people in prison,or alternatively for those whose personal lifeoutside the hours of reading is so absorbing andso wearing that they are glad to escape into thelibraries and archives.” We will leave it up fordiscussion into what category he put himself.

He definitely considered himself a historian.He made what a long-time critic WilliamAppleman Williams called a “pilgrimage to


Panel 2: George F. Kennan the Scholar

Clio,” [the Greek muse of history] and this pil-grimage started as soon as he left the PolicyPlanning Staff. His first book, AmericanDiplomacy (1951), worked through some of thehistory of 20th century diplomacy. His works ofthe mid-1950s include the best known and, tomy mind, the best works of historical scholar-ship: Russia Leaves the War and Decision toIntervene; a number of historical articles in jour-nals including Journal of Modern History; and abroader book based on lectures given at variousuniversities, including Harvard, published in1960 under the title Russia and the West UnderLenin and Stalin.

After returning from Belgrade in 1963, hetook on other historical projects. He wrote anice paper that he presented at Harvard onStalin’s work as a police informer in imperialRussia, which I do not think was ever published,and then took on an analysis of Marquis deCustine’s Russia in 1839. Finally, in his retire-ment from retirement, he produced two morebooks on Franco-Russian-European relations inthe late 19th and early 20th centuries, which Ithink Allen Lynch will talk about in more depth.

One could also count his book An AmericanFamily, which appeared in 2001. It was moreunusual and ranges further from what historiansusually do, but it is a deep inquiry into the past.

In looking at and celebrating his broad career,though, I want to call attention to two ironies inKennan’s contributions to scholarship, and espe-cially to historical scholarship.The first is that eventhough he wrote these history books as a histori-an, they were usually treated as the works of adiplomat. This is reflected, among other ways, inhis deep ambivalence about attending AmericanHistorical Association meetings in the 1960s. (Iactually feel no such ambivalence—in fact, I couldstay away entirely.) Kennan really wanted to beincluded among the community of historians, andyet he felt that every time he spoke, his commen-tary on his historical projects was taken as com-mentary and criticism on contemporary foreignpolicy. It took a lot of convincing to get him to beamong his fellow historians.

The second irony in Kennan’s career as a schol-ar is that while he appreciated academia for its soli-tary work, as we heard in his lecture, “The Roleof the History Teacher in Modern Society,” hemade some of his most interesting and importantcontributions to scholarship as an organizationman. I will take up these two issues—reception to

Kennan and to his writing, and Kennan’s organi-zational contributions—in turn.

Even if George Kennan saw himself, espe-cially in the 1950s and beyond, first and fore-most as a historian, professional historians werenot quite ready to welcome him into our rari-fied ranks. For instance, his first book, AmericanDiplomacy, was reviewed by a diplomatic histori-an, Dexter Perkins, who lavished praise on thebook as beautiful written and undeniably sug-gestive. Yet, Perkins concluded, “It may bemany things, but it is certainly not history.”Perkins distinguished between writing historyand writing about the past, and called AmericanDiplomacy “criticisms from the land of mighthave been.” Furthermore, Perkins drew as muchattention to the author as to the text, as was thecase in most reviews of Kennan’s work in the1950s and beyond. It starts with acknowledgingKennan, in Perkin’s words, “as one of the mostdistinguished and disinterested of our profes-sional diplomats.”

This would be a pattern in scholarly respons-es to Kennan’s writing. They all welcomed hisstyle and his grace. One historian said, “Surelymore Americans would read history if only wehistorians had Kennan’s great ability in writing.”And yet they questioned whether he was truly ahistorian. Take the previous quote, “if only wehistorians had Kennan’s great ability in writing.”There is the group of “we historians,” and thenthere is “Kennan.”This is a common thread run-ning through the reception of Kennan’s signifi-cant contributions to scholarship.

When scholars evaluated Kennan’s history,they stressed his diplomatic career perhaps morethan he himself would have wanted. Even praisefor his scholarship would come with referencesto his government service. Frederick Barghoornfrom Yale, in reviewing Russia Leaves the War,praised it as “a diplomat’s diplomatic history.”When Decision to Intervene was reviewed byRichard Ullman, who had become a colleague,interlocutor, and friend of Kennan’s, it was notreviewed by itself, but alongside one of Kennan’sworks as a public intellectual, Russia, the Atomand the West. It was as if what really matteredwere Kennan’s views about the Cold War, andhis books on Russian history could be read onlythrough that lens.

In his later works, this was a little bit less true.By the time he wrote his book on Marquis deCustine in 1971, the X Article was a generation


old. He had been out of government for eightyears with little prospect of returning. He wasno longer checking the mail, I think, every fouryears after the election.

On the other hand, by the time he returnedto the profession with his works from the 1970sand 1980s, his ideas seemed increasingly out ofstep in the profession. The Custine book, forinstance, was reviewed in only one major schol-arly journal, where it was criticized for beingahistorical. The reviewer wrote that Kennan waslooking for Stalin in Old Russia, but ended upfinding it in Custine’s Russia. By the time hewrote those remarkable diplomatic histories inthe 1980s, The Decline and Fall of Bismarck’sEuropean Order and The Fateful Alliance, hisapproach to diplomatic history was definitelyout of the mainstream. In fact, at the timediplomatic history itself it was falling out ofmainstream history.

Diplomatic history was under threat by agroup of social historians who told history fromthe bottom up, which really held no place fordiplomats. A new generation of scholars of for-eign policy, led for instance by the Germanscholar Hans-Ulrich Wehler, emphasized struc-tures over the individual. While Kennan’s ver-sion of imperial German foreign policy cen-tered on Bismarck and his circle quite narrowly,Wehler explained it without much reference toBismarck at all, by emphasizing social and eco-nomic structures that created policy imperatives,leaving somewhat unexplained how socialimperatives became policy.

Paul Kennedy, in reviewing Fateful Alliance,predicted that Kennan’s works would be betterreceived outside the academy than within it. Ithink this was true of just about all of Kennan’swork, including American Diplomacy, whichobviously got very wide attention, and Soviet-American Relations, which won major prizesbeyond the profession and respectful reviewswithin it.

This reception I think was in many waysunfortunate and even unfair. In the Russian tra-dition of samokritika [self-criticism], as a histori-an I can say that even if his work never reallychanged the way that the field thought aboutmethods or topics, they were definitely withinthe mainstream of historical understanding. Iespecially think this is true of his two volumeson Soviet-American relations in the 1950s,which were intricately detailed, focused on the

actions of those, primarily diplomats, in power,and had a kind of implicit realism against whichpolicies were measured. I think this was a com-mon outlook among scholars working in for-eign relations in the 1950s—sometimes a veryexplicit realism; at other times, as in Kennan’swork, slightly more implicit.

In the 1950s, when Kennan wrote his besthistorical works, he was closest to his time inpower. The idea that he would return to anambassadorship or some advisory role were cer-tainly present, and I think it was not justKennan who hoped for and expected that. Buthis work was seen as that of a former diplomatwriting about the past, rather than the works ofa diplomatic historian. To reiterate, when hereturned in the 1980s to these historical mono-graphs, he was continuing in a mode of analysisthat was undergoing significant criticism. Notsurprisingly, Kennan refused to engage in thewarfare between historians, and this I think isvery much to his credit. On the other hand, itdid not help immerse him in the world of pro-fessional historians.

Fair or not, I think he was always treated as adiplomat writing diplomatic history, and notindeed as a diplomatic historian or a historian atall. One diplomatic historian, Robert Divine,wrote that Kennan was “unable to transcend thelimits of his own career.” It is an odd statement,because I am not actually sure to which careerof Kennan’s Divine is referring. In fact, I thinkDivine’s comment might be more aptly put tothose historians who are unable to transcend thelimits of professional historical discourse to wel-come and embrace works of such interest, suchdepth, and such literary qualities as Kennan’s.

I want to turn to the second irony ofKennan’s contributions to scholarship. He prid-ed himself, and was widely seen, as an individ-ual intellect rather than a group leader. We cansee this in his reflections on his time in govern-ment service. And yet some of his most impor-tant contributions to scholarship were not in theform of books or articles. They were contribu-tions to the scholarly enterprise writ large,through organization building. The one that ismost familiar to us all, of course, is the KennanInstitute, established in 1974 in honor ofGeorge Kennan the Elder, his great uncle.George F. Kennan played a key role in planningand agitating for the Institute, and in promotingand in many cases in helping fund the Kennan


Institute. He held a strong and well-deservedsense of ownership about the Institute throughthe decades after its founding.

I think the Institute came at a particularlyimportant time in the field of Russian Studies,which was in both a fiscal and intellectual crisisfrom the late 1960s through the early 1970s.Some of the most important Russian Studiescenters, even Harvard’s, contemplated closingup shop because they could not support them-selves with grants. For the Kennan Institute tocome in at that point was important not just forhow it helped those who came here and for thescholarship it promoted, but also as a strong voteof confidence from Washington in the center ofthings. It represented a commitment to a newgeneration and a new kind of Russian Studies,and I want to acknowledge that as a significantcontribution in its own right.

But this was not the first time Kennan hadbeen involved organizationally. Indeed, evenwhile in government he was actively involved inpromoting Soviet Studies in the 1940s and 1950s.Sovietologists treated Kennan as something of asaint in this regard. Even those who had knownhim quite well and intimately, people like PhilipMosely during World War II, treated him assomething of a saint in the late 1940s. When I saythey treated him like a saint, I mean that theywould invoke him and they would occasionallyeven offer prayers to him, but they did not neces-sarily follow his ideas or obey him.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Harvardwas constantly trying to bring him to the uni-versity on a permanent basis, on a visiting basis,or for whatever duration and under whateverauspices they could muster. They were willingto have him as a visiting scholar at full professorsalary, they noted many times. They wanted tohave him as director of the Russian ResearchCenter, as someone who would only work withgraduate students and not undergraduates.These efforts continually failed. What was moststriking to me is that even though they contin-ually failed, the Harvard faculty was not dis-suaded. Even very different generations ofHarvard faculty, with very different kinds ofconcerns and views about Russian Studies, allcontinued this great effort to bring Kennan toHarvard. I should note that they did succeed inbringing him to Harvard as a university fellow,at what salary it is unclear, in 1966 for the bet-ter part of a semester.

Harvard was not the only place trying toattract him. Columbia made a number of effortsas well. What could be called the executive com-mittee of Sovietology in the early years, the so-called Joint Committee on Slavic Studies, triedto recruit him or, in Merle Fainsod’s quaintphrase, to co-opt him to join this committee inview of his great experience and interest in theSlavic field and in light of his continuing free-dom from official duties.

Kennan’s contributions to Soviet Studieswere more important than his long twenty-yearcourtship with Harvard. He was constantlycalled upon to assist scholars in doing theirwork, and so in some ways the invocation of asaint may work the other way. I often think ofhim as a patron saint, or perhaps even just apatron. He was the Sovietologists’ man inWashington in the early Cold War. MerleFainsod tried to spend the summer of 1948 inthe Soviet Embassy. At that time it was impossi-ble for American scholars to get into theembassy, and they turned to Kennan for help.Kennan could not actually pull off that one.When Roman Jakobson needed to get U.S. cit-izenship to protect himself from loyalty con-cerns, Kennan did succeed in fast tracking theprocess and making sure that his citizenshipcame through. When Bill Langer and EverettGleason were working on their books on WorldWar II in 1949, it was Kennan who helpeddeclassify materials. So he was frequently, ifinformally, making very important contributionsto the scholarly world. He served on advisorycommittees as well, both classified and non-clas-sified. He served on the Soviet VulnerabilityStudy, which was a classified CIA-funded proj-ect and was split between Harvard and MIT inthe early 1950s. A decade later, he served on thevisiting committee for Harvard’s Department ofSlavic Language and Literature. Again, we seethis role as an eminence in the field. He wentfrom being counselor for the secretary of state tobecoming counselor for the field as a whole.

All of the excitement about having him cometo Harvard, and his role working with SovietStudies, is especially striking given that mostSovietologists had fundamentally different aimsthan Kennan did. This is particularly expressedmost notably in Harvard’s approach to SovietStudies as a celebration of social scientificprowess, and not in terms of the erudition andknowledge of Russian culture.


As Kennan acknowledged, he had no truckwith the social sciences in this regard. His mainworry here was that the social scientific theorieswould replace the field:

For people who think as I do [that] thejudgment and instinct of a single wise andexperienced man, whose knowledge ofthe world rests on the experience of per-sonal and emotional intellectual participa-tion in the wide cross section of humaneffort, are something we hope to be morevaluable than the most elaborate syntheticstructure of demonstrable fact and logicaldeduction… [We] need not new tech-niques of inquiry [but] simply people—people with the perception, the experi-ence, the courage, the physical stamina,perhaps even the ruthlessness, to takewhat is already known and available andwrap it up in the form of action con-ducive to the interests of our country.

This demonstrates a sharp divide betweenwhat the field is doing and the way he sees whatit meant to be a Russia expert, and it revealedhow in this, as in many other ways, he was outof step with the intellectual orientation of theearly Cold War.

But in spite of that distance with theSovietological mainstream, or perhaps evenbecause of it, Kennan devoted a great deal oftime in the early Cold War to working withRussian émigrés. He saw this as something thatwas worthy of pursuit for three reasons: forintelligence purposes, for intellectual purposes,and essentially for social welfare purposes. Thegroup of Russian émigré scholars was having ahard time sustaining themselves, let aloneengaging in work similar to what they haddone before. He first tried to do this in theState Department with a program to employSoviet émigré scholars, which eventuallybecame the Munich Institute, or the Institutefor the Study of the History and Institutions ofthe USSR. It also happened in the major FordFoundation project that he worked with, whichwas originally called the Free Russia Fund buteventually received the more neutral name EastEuropean Fund. This organization hired Sovietémigrés to write monographs and recollections.These efforts, I think, had much less impactthan he had desired.

One of the other things he supported thathad a major impact was the Chekhov PublishingHouse, which produced primarily Russian lan-guage books. Many of these books made theirway into the Soviet Union, and others primari-ly served the community of Russian émigrés.For émigrés in the West, Chekhov House pro-duced classics of nineteenth-century Russianliterature, as well as works on the United Statestranslated into Russian. But ChekhovPublishing House’s real specialty was tamizdat—publishing literature not available in the USSRby luminaries including Boris Pasternak andAnna Akhmatova.

He also worked through a group called theCommittee for the Promotion of AdvancedSlavic Cultural Studies, which again shows thathis emphasis was Slavic, not Soviet; it was cul-ture, not social science or society. He promotedthis informal organization, and through it pro-moted a number of publication projects by émi-gré scholars and by a handful of Americans. Inall of these, Kennan was more interested in pro-moting Slavic culture than in Slavic Studies, andof course this is where Kennan’s long-standingand sophisticated appreciation of Russian cul-ture shone most significantly. He also sawRussian culture and especially the ChekhovHouse as something that would help serveAmerican interests in the Cold War.

I have described two ironies. One is a diplo-matic historian who is always seen as a diplomat“hyphen” historian rather than as a real histori-an. The second is that of an individualist wholeft his lasting legacy through works of groupsand organizations. These are part and parcel ofthe complexities of Kennan, and are what makehim such an interesting figure of the 20th cen-tury. He sought to appreciate Russian culturewhile rejecting its government. He was definite-ly a man with a scholar’s habits, but who con-sistently refused the scholar’s gowns. He was aman highly sought after by scholars for his wis-dom, and yet all of his books were treated war-ily by scholars.

Kennan’s contributions to scholarship, andnot just through his own work, were deeplymarked by his own erudition and his ownmind-set. Clearly Sherman Kent, the historian-turned-CIA analyst, was right in recommend-ing Kennan to Harvard with a summation of hisrecommendation letter: “There is only oneKennan.” Thank you.


Allen Lynch: I have tried to organize my com-ments as if Kennan were the respondent. Afterall, agreement is necessary on ideas and premis-es in order to disagree, if we are going to dis-agree, in an intellectually meaningful way. I amespecially humbled by the realization that it ismost unlikely that any colloquium of my ownscholarship would be organized after my owneventual demise. This is no doubt in confirma-tion of Kennan’s thesis in his third memoir aboutthe incompatibility of menial household laborwith truly creative intellectual endeavor.

First, let me spell out some general character-istics of Kennan as a scholar from my standpoint.As has been noted, Kennan made a remarkabletransition from civil servant to public intellectu-al to scholar, and he made signal contributionsin all three personae. Indeed, he won twoPulitzer Prizes, one for his history and one forthe first volume of his memoirs.

My assignment, to anticipate later questions,was to reflect on Kennan the scholar, and withspecific reference to international relations anddiplomacy. Kennan’s scholarship is characterizedby, among other things, a consistently deep andemphatic reading of the sources. He displayed aninspiring commitment to multilingual archivalresearch which is integrated with an impressive,although, it must be said, not always exhaustive,reading of the secondary sources.

Kennan is also a consistent Rankean—onewho, as the Germans say, aspires to write histo-ry as it really happened. In the process he recre-ated the Zeitgeist—the feel of the times, per-sonalities, and mores in the era under investiga-tion. But Kennan is also a Tolstoyan, not somuch because he was always a graceful and pow-erful writer, which he was, but rather becausehis histories were driven by individuals scarcelyconscious of the powerful sociological forcesshaping their choices and leading them, theirclass, and their nations or their civilizations tocrisis and even doom.

His histories are also, as we have already dis-cussed, powerfully informed by concerns of thepresent, without for the most part being crip-plingly presentist. As David Kaiser wrote at thetime, “Kennan’s scholarship is infused with adeep preoccupation with man’s fate and thefuture of international politics.” Even where thathistory has been too much forced for pedagogi-cal reasons, which I think is the case with his lasthistory, A Fateful Alliance, it nevertheless always

brings us back into an empathetic engagementwith the past. Respect for that past on its ownterms runs throughout Kennan’s scholarship, asbefits a proper historian and conservative.

Yet if Kennan wishes to instruct us and,indeed, to warn us of the dangers of power poli-tics in the era of the masses, his masterful portraitsof political and diplomatic maneuvering are notalways matched by comparable attention to theformative dynamics of a civilization of the mass-es—economically, socially, culturally, and evenpolitically. Of course, he deplores mass sensibilityand the technological modernity that has accom-panied and reinforced it. And true, he frequentlynotes in passing the deleterious effects of nation-alism, technological dynamism, and the stupen-dous effects of the “great transformation” fromtraditional to urban mass industrial society. Still,Kennan’s scholarship tends to assert rather than toanalyze these structural elements that impingeupon his chosen histories. This is in a way curi-ous, because Kennan himself implicitly concedesthat these larger forces add an element of almostAristotelian tragedy to his work. The lesson that Ithink Kennan would have us derive from his firstattempt, American Diplomacy, is that Americanerrors follow from Americans behaving likeAmericans.

Still, having said that, I would rather haveKennan as he is than an artificial structural analy-sis, as noted by Professor Engerman, that tends toreduce politics and diplomacy, not to mention theart of war, to artifacts of socio-economic causeswhere it does not indeed admit them altogether.

Since I am focusing on Kennan’s historicalscholarship proper, I am excluding a series ofworks that involve Kennan primarily as a publicintellectual. This, in my judgment, includesAmerican Diplomacy, which, although it is by farthe best-selling tract on American foreign policyever written, nevertheless remains a kind oflawyer’s brief for certain American approachestowards the external world, rather than a work ofhistorical scholarship in its own right. I am alsoexcluding his memoirs and, I regret to say, evensuch works as Democracy and the Student Left,which is actually one of my favorite books. Butthese involve his persona as a public intellectual.

What I want to do now is talk about a few ofhis works in detail as a scholar and a historianproperly understood. Those contributions fallinto two broad categories—a series of works thatcame out between 1956 and 1960 on the early


period of Soviet-American relations after theRussian Revolution, as well as Russia and the WestUnder Lenin and Stalin; and then a later set of vol-umes that came out in the late 1970s and 80s onthe sort of antechamber of the collapse ofEuropean national order in the quarter centurybefore 1914. I think that it is primarily on his ear-lier scholarship from the 1950s that Kennan’s rep-utation as a historian properly rests.

From the two volume series Soviet-AmericanRelations 1917–1920, the first volume, RussiaLeaves the War, won the Pulitzer Prize, BancroftPrize, Paraffin Prize, National Book Award, andothers. All those accolades were properlydeserved. This was the first serious comprehen-sive study of the American side of the American-Russian relationship following the RussianRevolution. It is a remarkable and even magiste-rial accomplishment, owing especially to theextreme fragmentation of efforts on theAmerican side, which becomes part of Kennan’sstory itself. He underscores the urgent primacy ofthe military logic of the campaign againstGermany in France in shaping American percep-tions of and reactions to the Russian Revolution,which contributed mightily to a wide gulf ofmutual incomprehension between the Bolsheviksand the Americans. The work is an admirablereconstruction of the human texture of thediplomatic process underscoring, as he writes,the considerable confusion and lack of clarity andconsistency on the American side.

In the process, Kennan refutes the mythalmost before the fact that the United States waspreparing an anti-socialist crusade against revolu-tionary Russia and demonstrates convincinglythat the Soviets would always have chosen forpeace so long as the Germans would give it tothem. The allies were no more than insuranceagainst ultimate German intransigence. Thisbook remains to this day an outstanding literaryaccomplishment and a major contribution to his-torical scholarship.

Moreover, it has survived a generation ofrevisionist assault, as a recent historiographicalessay by Eugene Trani and Donald Davis intheir book, The First Cold War, makes clear.Indeed, among scholars who still take interna-tional politics and diplomacy seriously,Kennan’s volume is still regarded as indispensa-ble intellectual socialization for their students,as even a casual perusal of contemporary polit-ical science, although not history, reveals.

The second volume, The Decision to Intervene,follows on the first volume. Again, Kennandemonstrates that President Wilson tended toact on the Russia question without seeking sys-tematic advice or information, and thatAmerican and, more generally, Allied policywas characterized by day-to-day indecision,poor communications, poor intelligence, as wellas disunity amongst the allies and even amongstAmerican officialdom in Russia and inWashington itself. His conclusion once againstresses the primacy of military considerations inthe initial decision for intervention, as well asthe general futility of the intervention itself.That intervention was out of phase, as it turnedout, with the actual course of events on theWestern front, where by August of 1918Germany was effectively on the way to defeatand the Allied intervention too late to mattermilitarily. It aroused anti-Bolshevism, encour-aged the advent of the terror and civil war, andserved further to antagonize the Bolshevikswithout gain.

As with the first volume, this is a valuableand indispensable history reflecting Kennan’simpressive dedication to the historian’s vocation.Yet as with a fine wine that is best consumedwith a fine corresponding meal, this workshould be read in correspondence with RichardUllman’s multi-volume history, which stressesthe British side, which was by far the mostimportant side of this period of time, as well asBetty Underberger’s later histories on theSiberian intervention stressing, as did Lenin bythe way at the time, Wilson’s realism in usingAmerican forces to constrain the Japaneseattempt to set up their own hegemonic spherein Northeast Asia.

We might add to this Kennan’s historio-graphical essay in the American Historical Reviewin 1961 on Soviet histories and interpretationsof American policy at this time, which in a wayprefigured much of the later revisionist critiquethat would be launched at him, beginning withWilliam Appleman Williams in 1962. I shouldalso note that more recent Russian historiogra-phy has tended to support Kennan’s interpreta-tion, as did the very earliest Soviet Marxist his-toriography of Pokrovsky in the early 1920s.

In the last in this triad of early works, Russiaand the West under Lenin and Stalin, Kennanreworked some of the material from the earliervolumes for a more general audience and


encompassed the broader panorama of Sovietrelations with the Western world until the deathof Stalin in 1953. Beyond the early 1920s, sec-ondary rather than primary sources tend to pre-vail. Much of this work, especially on the earli-er period, remains a defensible interpretation ofSoviet policy, although, curiously, the FarEastern sections tend to hold up better nowthan many of the European sections of hisdiplomatic history. For example, the chapterson Stalin’s China policy in the mid-1920stowards the communists in Shanghai hold upextremely well; as does his insistence on notunderestimating the importance of the Japanesefactor in Soviet calculations. Recent archival-based history by David Stone, for example, hasshown in detail just how the structure, priori-ties, and pacing of the five-year plans changedfollowing the Japanese intervention inManchuria in 1931.

Kennan’s general conclusion regarding theirreconcilability of Soviet objectives with a sta-ble understanding with either Nazi Germany orthe West has not been contradicted by subse-quent archival or memoir revelations.

I think it is fair to criticize Kennan on twopoints of importance. First, he was mistaken inattributing the trigger for Hitler’s decision toattack the Soviet Union to aggressive Sovietdiplomacy in Berlin in November 1940. Heeven states that this was the real turning point ofWorld War II. While it is true the operationalplanning for the planning of Barbarossa tookplace a month later in December of 1940, thestrategic decision to wage war on Russia soonerrather than later was taken by the Nazi leader-ship in July of 1940. Curiously, Kennan did notseem to have taken into account the availablescholarship of Gerhard Weinberger on thispoint, or, for that matter, Mein Kampf.

The second point was discussed in the firstpanel. At the very end of the book, thereemerged an apparent tension and even contradic-tion between Kennan’s analysis of totalitariandiplomacy and his policy conclusions thatAmerican relations with Soviet Russia are to beunderstood in the same league as those of rela-tions with any other state. He even goes so far asto state that the differences between dealing withSoviet Russia and its imperial predecessor, oreven by implication with NATO allies likeBritain and France (keeping in mind the Suezcrisis of 1956) were differences of degree and not

differences of kind. The Cold War was, in effect,not a wholly new and unprecedented situation.

Kennan may have been right on this. I aminclined to think he was wrong, and so, evi-dently, was Mikhail Gorbachev. But Kennan wasin effect asking his readers to take him on faith,given the overwhelming evidence to the con-trary that he had just presented in the body ofthe book. Ironically, it was Kennan himself whoin his 1952 article “America and the RussiaFuture” established the criteria for a normalAmerican relationship with Russia: that it mustrelinquish totalitarianism, that it must relinquishmessianic ideology, and that it must relinquishempire. Yet Kennan was too much the honestscholar to allow his obvious policy preferences tomake him a revisionist in the presentation of thehistorical evidence. In this respect, he wasindeed a highly professional historian. In conse-quence, the evidence sustains the thesis of a pre-dominant revolutionary imperial paradigm thatVladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshekovdeveloped in the 1990s.

I will now move on to Kennan’s book on thedecline of the European order in the late 1880s,The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order, pub-lished in 1979. Karl Marx wrote in 1870 duringthe Prussia-Franco War, “If Alsace and Lorraineare taken, then France will later make war onGermany in conjunction with Russia. It isunnecessary to go into the unholy conse-quences.” Kennan was fascinated by the unholyconsequences of the taking of Alsace andLorraine. Yet rather than a broader study ofEuropean diplomatic history, the book is rather aremarkable portrait mainly of late-19th centuryRussian cabinet politics and diplomacy. Bismarckis given peripheral treatment in the story. FritzStern, a friendly reviewer, understood the bookto be “sui generis, an independently argued histo-ry [with the stamp] of the author on every page.”Others less charitably called it “diplomatic histo-ry with a vengeance.” The core of the book, andits contribution to historical scholarship, isundoubtedly the 120-odd pages devoted to theBulgarian-Russian imbroglio in the middle ofthe 1880s following Russia’s setback at theCongress of Berlin in 1878. In the process,Kennan relates with his customary graceful flu-ency the fateful tension between two wings ofRussian diplomacy: the Asiatic Department ofthe Foreign Office, driven by expansionist andpan-Slavic tendencies, and the Chancery under


the guidance of Kennan’s real political hero,Nicholas de Giers, whose reputation Kennandoes much to rehabilitate.

His conclusions on the structural factorsleading to Russia’s decline and eventual collapseare eloquent and insightful, although curiouslyhe did not note that Soviet Russia was at thetime of his writing suffering from a comparabledebility.

As to his broader purpose, which was toestablish the foundation for the chain of eventsleading to 1914, here I think the best we can sayis that his case is not proven. At heart, theRussian-French factor is too much isolated fromthe broader European situation, and he con-cludes the study a full quarter of a centurybefore the onset of the First World War. I think,however, we can happily frame the work asGordon Wright did at the time as “a remarkablyrich and sensitive portrayal of two czars and themen who served them.”

The subsequent volume, The Fateful Alliance:France, Russia and the Coming of the First WorldWar, will, I fear, be regarded as flawed scholar-ship. The book retains Kennan’s “distinctiveindividual voice.” Fritz Stern again saw it as aseries of portraits and morality tales, a “mostdefinitely personal book.” Paul Kennedy, whilewelcoming Kennan’s micro historical recon-struction of diplomatic history, neverthelessfound his methods “curious and oblique,” char-acterized by a less than exhaustive use ofsources, debatable selection of case studies, andhistorical determinism.

In effect, Kennan wants to make the Franco-Russian military convention of 1894 the masterkey to understand the road to war and the col-lapse of European civilization between 1914 and1918. I am not going to go into all of the evi-dence here, except to note that, as WilliamFuller shows throughout the whole 1890s, theRussian general staff took no steps to begin togive actual military life to the implications ofthat convention. During the Fashoda Incidentof 1898, the alliance proved of no help toFrance. In 1905 it proved of no help to Russiain the war with Japan. In 1908 the French stat-ed that they would not support Russia in con-nection with the Balkan War, whereas in 1912they did. In other words, the explanation needsto be located. An earlier Kennan would have, Ithink, admitted this in the circumstances of thedecisions of the actors of the time.

The last point on this is that in the bookKennan understands Germany to be a satisfiedpower. However true this may be of Germanyunder Bismarck (remember Moltke in 1879:“Russia has no money and Germany needs noland,”) this was less and less true of WilhamineGermany. Even Count Lamsdorf, one ofKennan’s heroes for opposing the break withGermany in 1890, would, by the early 20th cen-tury, be grateful for the French alliance in theface of rising German power and ambitions.There is inexplicably no reference in the worksto the vast literature in German and English thatthe scholarship of both Fritz Fischer and V.R.Berghahn gave rise to beginning in the early1960s on the sources and nature of German for-eign policy ambitions. As a result Kennan’s the-sis is simply overburdened by its explanatoryambitions. Too much of the book is a moralitytale for the Cold War and the “cloud of nucleardanger,” as distinct from a work of proper histor-ical scholarship.

In conclusion, having reviewed Kennan’sscholarship, I would like to close with somemore wholesale observations on reading Kennanas a scholar. We continue to read Kennan, evensome of the debatable scholarship, because itgives us endless pause for reflection on man’sfate, much in the way that we continue to readJacob Burckhardt on The Civilization of theRenaissance in Italy in spite of an endless pro-gression of monographs in the meantime. Thisis especially true because in many ways, Kennanwas in contemporary American civilization butnot of it, and this seems to become more andmore the case over time and in direct relation-ship to his remove from official responsibilities.It has been said in Kennan’s defense against thecharge that his was an archaic 19th century sen-sibility, that in fact he was a man of the 18thcentury. His history, if not his life, tends to sus-tain this interpretation.

But I am increasingly persuaded that there wassomething else here, something of the Confucianin Kennan. Consider these remarks from 1954: “Idoubt that even for individuals there are any uni-versally applicable standards of morality beyondthose obvious rules of prudence, common tomost of mankind, that flow from the necessity ofthe preservation of the family structure and themaintenance of good order in a society.”

What, then, is Kennan’s Confucian sensibili-ty with respect to diplomacy and international


relations? In my judgment, it includes the fol-lowing elements: that the sources of internation-al tension are always specific, never general; thatnothing is final and friendship, enmity, and val-ues are not absolutes; that international situa-tions are always devoid of exact precedents orparallels; that consequently international rela-tions are inherently unpredictable; that power,while a central fact of international life, shouldnot be confused with a kind of “powerism”—the ability to destroy says nothing in and of itselfabout the ability to construct and to govern;that, relatedly, every victory is itself a responsi-bility and that there should be limits to theresponsibilities that we should voluntarily agreeto assume. Most importantly, and why I contin-ue to teach Kennan to my students:

“We must be gardeners and not mechan-ics in our approach to world affairs. Wemust come to think of the developmentof international life as an organic and nota mechanical process. We must realizethat we did not create the forces bywhich this process operates. We mustlearn to take these forces for what theyare and to induce them to work with usand for us, influencing the environmen-tal stimuli to which they are subjected,but to do this gently and patiently, withunderstanding and sympathy, not tryingto force growth by mechanical means,not tearing the plants up by the rootswhen they fail to behave as we wish themto. The forces of nature will generally beon the side of him who understandsthem best and respects them mostscrupulously.”

In sum and in ending, Kennan was what oneGerman intelligence officer said of GeorgePatton, that he was a “magnificent anachro-nism.” Would that there were more like him.

DISCUSSION

Ruble: One of the themes in this panel is a con-tinuation of a theme that came up in the begin-ning, and that is Kennan’s relationship to theworld around him where he is in it, but not ofit. I think one can see that in his relationshipwith the policy community. One can see thatfrom Allen Lynch’s presentation.

In another way, one could see that in some ofKennan’s organizational work and certainly inthe relationship of professional historians toKennan. I wonder if this leads to a broader issuewhich Allen raised about Kennan’s work givingpause for reflection on man’s fate or on thehuman condition. Our appreciation of theimportance of that reflection is what makes himspecial as a foreign policy thinker, as a diplomat,and as a historian, and it is that characteristic ofKennan that separates him from so many peoplearound him.

During the 25th anniversary dinner of theKennan Institute, which was a really remarkableevening, he dominated the event with his charm.It was an incredible performance. He brought theevening to a close by speaking about whyAmericans should be interested in Russia. It hadnothing to do with politics and weaponry; it hadto do with the fact that in his mind, Russians hadoffered tremendous insights on the human con-dition. It seems to me that is what makes him ananachronism—perhaps a person of the 18th cen-tury and not the 19th century. I wonder if youcould reflect a bit on that characteristic and drawit out a little bit more.

Engerman: Kennan himself said at one pointthat he was “an exile in time if not in place.” It’scertainly true that some of the most profoundcommentary about a culture is made by thosefrom outside it, whether geographically orchronologically. Tocqueville’s American jour-neys are one example. And Kennan is, in a dif-ferent way, another example—his distance fromboth Russian and American cultures gave himspecial insights and perspectives.

I think he also exhibited some sense of nos-talgia for times and places which he neverknew. I do think his being a man of the 18thcentury is an apt characterization. His vision ofa cultured Russia, if it ever existed in the wayhe imagined it, no longer existed by the timehe was learning about it from Russian émigrésin Riga and in Berlin. I think that adds in somesense to the power of his reflection. It alsoexplains why he was so interested in workingwith Russian émigrés. The causes for reflec-tion and what they have to offer is a worldwhich he sees as marginalized as time goes by.My only concern is whether that world actu-ally existed in precisely that sense, although itis clear that for many of the Russian émigrés


themselves it did exist. He drew that culture inso deeply that he may have taken on some oftheir nostalgia, and I think that definitelyshaped his view of émigré scholars and ofRussian culture more broadly.

Lynch: I think Kennan would probably notreply to your question immediately because itwould require too much thought. But not beingKennan, I am reminded of a passage in his firstmemoir where he makes an automobile trip inCalifornia. What is interesting is the combina-tion of extreme perspicacity about sociologicalobservation, because he sees in California theimprint of the burgeoning mass consumeristAmerican society fundamentally organizedaround the automobile. He has this very keensociological insight which probably derives fromthe capacity he has as the outsider to establishcritical distance. Yet at the same time he is hor-rified, because he correctly understands that it isalso inevitable.

There is always this outsider’s sensibility. Tosome extent, it is a sensibility that unifies himwith someone like a Solzhenitsyn. If you recallhis Harvard speech from 1976 or ’77,Solzhenitsyn was trying to defend a kind ofimaginary Western civilization that he saw underassault since the 1960s, or maybe since the arrivalof the automobile in mass consumer culture.

It is this insistence on the relativity of values,the relativity of aesthetics, and the relativity ofhistorical circumstances that to me is the unify-ing field theory for understanding Kennan’s sen-sibility. It makes him less American, but it alsomakes him more human in that respect.

Again, I continue to teach him not justbecause of his historiographical contribution,but also because all of his work compels you tocome to terms with the historicity of humanlife, political life, and international life.Anything that helps us to establish critical dis-tance is to be encouraged and is a precious thingin a society which, for all of its other attributesand commendable traits, does not usually workin that direction.

John Lewis Gaddis: I have a couple of com-ments to supplement what Allen Lynch saidabout Kennan the historian. One thing that hasstruck me is that he wrote extraordinarily wellon historical method as well as history itself. Acouple of his essays from the late 1950s and the

early 1960s written just as he was beginning hisprofession as a historian still hold up as very use-ful to give to students to describe what it is thathistorians do. There are a couple of themes thatcome out of these essays. One, quite character-istically for Kennan, is loneliness—but it is theloneliness of the historian. He talks about thefeeling that he had when he first began to dohistory—a feeling of wandering through a waxmuseum in which there were these charactersdelineated in great detail. They actually spoke.They had little comic book balloons above theirheads and he could read what they were saying.But they paid no attention to him and he couldnot ask them questions. He was just stuck withthe little comic book balloons, and had to workwith those to reconstruct their lives. This imageof the loneliness of the historian wanderingthrough the wax museum is very Kennanesqueand characteristic of other things and othertimes that he wrote about.

He was extraordinarily conscientious as a his-torian, and this is partly because of the criti-cisms he got for American Diplomacy. When hereally set to writing what he regarded as serioushistory, he called in professional historians suchas Dick Leopold, Arthur Link, and others tocounsel him on how to do history right.

When he won the awards for Russia Leavesthe War, he gave a couple of talks on it. One ofthe talks described a scene in which Americandiplomats are on the train leaving for Helsinki.They cross the border, and at the border there isa bridge over a small stream. There is snow.Kennan describes this scene from 1918 in veryclose, literary, almost novelistic detail, adding“There was a goat on the hillside.” How did heknow this?

“Well,” he said, “I crossed the same bridge in1946. I know that it snows at that time of theyear. I am not absolutely sure that there was agoat there in 1918, but there was a goat there in1946, and there has always been a goat in everycomparable scene or Russian landscape that Ihave ever seen. Therefore, I felt justified inincluding the goat.”

Comment: I have a couple of comments. Onefrom my own experience is in regards to howGeorge Kennan is viewed in continentalEurope, particularly in Germany and in France,where he is often seen as playing a kind of rolethat is common in those societies but not in


ours—that of the public intellectual. If GeorgeKennan had been French rather than anAmerican, he would have gotten phone callsfrom the Quai d’Orsay all the time. He wouldhave been invited to lunch at the Elysee by pres-idents of different political complexions. Thatwould have been normal. In a sense, many ofthe contradictions that have been addressed heretoday are contradictions only because he was inthe Anglo-American tradition. You do not havethis tradition of the public intellectual verymuch in Britain, and perhaps even less so in thiscountry. But I think if there was a colloquiumbeing held about a German or French GeorgeKennan, or with most any other continentalEuropean identity, these would not have beenseen as contradictions, and many of his roles as awriter of history would not have been seen ascontradictions. I think it is Kennan in the con-text of America which is important.

The other comment, and this is coming fromsomebody as a veteran of U.S. government deal-ing with Russian affairs, is how Kennan oncetalked about being worried that there were somany specialists on Soviet affairs in the UnitedStates and in the government who had readevery issue of Pravda, but who had never hadRussian mud on their shoes or stood in aRussian line. I must say, in my years in the StateDepartment, I found increasingly that internaldebates within the U.S. government often divid-ed on precisely that point—had you ever hadRussian mud on your shoes? I particularlyremember a big conference on civil defense,back when this was a big deal in the very earlyReagan years that my boss attended in whichthere were forty or fifty people in the room. Itturned out that my boss was the only person inthat room who had ever set foot in the SovietUnion. The way in which people tend to viewa society is so much driven by that idea fromKennan’s quote—Cand I wish I could find it soI could cite it correctly. This worry about nothaving had Russian mud on your shoes was, Ithink, a critical distinction between how manypeople in government and out of governmentthen and still do deal with Russia.

Question: Regarding the comment that weshould be interested in Russia because it teachesus much about human nature—did it mean thatthe communists, in trying to establish commu-nism in Russia, overlooked human nature and

failed to take it into consideration as they triedto impose it? Would that be a correct explana-tion of what was said?

Ruble: No. This comment was in the contextof why one should read Tolstoy and engage inRussian culture. The broader point was that weshould engage in Russia, even now that theSoviet Union is gone, because Russians havetheir own particular understanding of thehuman condition and we can learn from that. Itwas very much in that context.

Comment: I would agree with that, but I alsothink that part of the reason for the failure ofcommunism was its lack of trying to understandand take into consideration human nature. Thatwas my point of view.

Ruble: Before I give each of the panelists achance to speak, I want to take issue with whatis emerging here of an image of Kennan as thiskind of 18th century throwback. He wasuncomfortable in the United States, and yetwhen I think of George Kennan I also think ofMilwaukee and the Midwest. I think of an out-sider, but as the outsider who comes from mid-dle class background in the Midwest suddenlyfinding himself in Princeton. It is a veryAmerican story, and by lifting him out of theAmerican context, I think we lose somethingabout what he was about as a human being, as ascholar, and as a diplomat.

Engerman: On your last point, I think in thememoirs he says that both his interest in goingto Princeton and his experience there wasshaped by another Midwesterner that went toPrinceton, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In some sense, his discomfort with 20th cen-tury America that we have been talking about isevident in many of his writings. That is whataccounts for his great strength and understand-ing the world around us, but it also has somelimits. In An American Family he recounts thestory of the rise of the first industrial loom orsomething, I do not recall exactly, in 1830, afterwhich the world goes to pot. It has a real senseof tragedy about the modern industrial world—not that it can be halted, but that it leads to anumber of things that he finds dissatisfying. Ithink that also shapes his attitudes towards differ-ent individuals or groups of individuals in the


world. We were talking about his ideas about thethird world. They were also shaped by a visionof a world order that is closer to the 18th cen-tury than to the late 20th century.

This is why he is always such a compellingfigure. It is why John’s biography of Kennan isfar from the first—once you start them, andwho doesn’t read them, it is really hard to stop.Kennan is just so appealing. What makes him sointeresting is also what makes him so accurateand what makes him so frustrating and so dis-tant—it is all of one piece. That is why, amongmany others, I look forward to the biographywhich will actually sort out all of these contra-dictions that so many of us who read his workand study his life have found.

Lynch: Blair’s point about Kennan’sAmericanism is correct. What you can pick outfrom so many of his writings is the pre-urbanAmerica and the pre-industrial America. It isthis America that he constantly reaches backto, and constantly regrets the passing of, evenwhile recognizing its inevitability when writ-ing in California.

By the way, that is the theme that echoesthroughout his Democracy and the Student Left.These students were raised in cities. They werecut off from the countryside, from animal hus-bandry, and from all of the organic byways oflife that instill a deep humility and respect forthe force of life. That was the sensibility, quiteapart from his political analysis. The basic mes-sage is these students were, as the French wouldsay, deracinés [pseudo intellectuals]; and it has todo with the fact that they were cut off from thatmythical 18th century without even realizing it.

I think another point could be made aboutwhy we study or should study Russia. Countriesfacing very different economic, geographical, orinternational circumstances nevertheless candevelop very impressive social, cultural, andeven political accomplishments that have to berespected and taken into account in their prop-er way. That way, you do not risk the hubristicerror of simply translating your own experienceonto the tableau of the outside world. In theRussian case, it has to be said that this is not justa social and cultural affair. It also includes thefact that in 1945, Soviet troops were in Berlin,and in 1918 German troops had severedUkraine from Imperial Russia. This makes iteven more complicated. Kennan himself recog-nized that Stalin was a great man. (He also saidHitler was a great man, in a strictly analyticalkind of way and in another context.)

Regarding “mud on the boots,” I remembera statement that Kennan’s boss, AverellHarriman, once made in his later years when Iwas in my first year in graduate school atColumbia in the late 1970s. It was the same“mud on the boots” routine. He said, “I wasthere in the war. A whole country, the size ofthe United States east of the Mississippi River,had been razed to the ground, and within tenyears they built up all these cities.” A city likeKyiv was built four times as big as it was before.Just knowing that, having been there in the war,seeing the devastation and knowing what it waslike afterwards, excluded probably the majorityof considerations that were going into the dis-cussion of American national security policythroughout much of the Cold War; and it has todo with boots in the mud.


John Lewis Gaddis: This conference so farhas focused on Kennan the policymaker andKennan the scholar, and a lot of interestingthings have been said. I take it as my role to con-nect these aspects of Kennan’s life, policy, andscholarship, and perhaps supplement them withsome other things—such as to talk aboutKennan the man and to take the perspective ofbiography, of the biography that I have beenwriting for a very long time. It struck me theother day that I have been George Kennan’sbiographer longer than most of my studentshave been on this earth. So it’s not surprisingthat they frequently ask me in a tone that sug-gests both curiosity and profound skepticism:

“How’s it going?”“When do you think you are going to be

finished?”“Do you need a research assistant?”There was a particularly humiliating moment

this fall at Yale, when my own editor from theOxford University Press, Susan Ferber, came tospeak to some of our Ph.D. students about howto turn their dissertations into books. She was inthe middle of this presentation when I walkedinto the room. She saw me walk in, and with-out missing a beat she said, “And don’t take aslong as Professor Gaddis has on GeorgeKennan.” The students all nodded their headssomberly.

Why has it taken so long? Part of the reasonof course was, as I think most of you know, thatthis was always meant to be a posthumous biog-raphy. Both George and I wanted it this way. Iwas a little nervous about trying to persuadehim of this, but I did not have to be, because asa historian himself he understood that biogra-phy cannot be any good if the subject of thebiography is looking over the shoulder of thebiographer. So that was the way both of uswanted it. It did not occur to either of us, how-ever, when we made this deal in 1981 andGeorge was 77, that he would live to be 101. Inhis later years, he was graciously apologeticabout this delay in the biography, as if somehowhis longevity had been some grievous personalfailing on his part.

Part of the reason, of course, also involvescertain distractions of my own: the writing ofother books, the move to Yale, which unex-pectedly doubled my teaching load (you wouldthink such a move would constrict your teach-ing load, but it has not), and the temptation topontificate in one form or another on currentevents—a temptation George himself wrestledwith constantly and never quite resolved.

I think part of the reason, also, is that I sim-ply have never felt that this biography should berushed, and there are a couple of reasons forthat. First of all, as this conference has demon-strated, it is not as though George Kennan’s life,career, and accomplishments are exactlyunknown. He did write one of the best autobi-ographies of the 20th century. Large portions ofhis papers have been open at Princeton since theearly 1970s, and there have already been biogra-phies of his public career by David Mayers,Walter Hixson, and Anders Stephanson; as wellas more specialized studies of his career andideas by such authors as Bart Gellman, BillMiscamble, Richard Russell, and now DavidEngerman. There have been chapters onKennan in various biographies from WalterIsaacson and Evan Thomas, John Harper, andBruce Kuklick. Later this spring, John Lukacs’brief book, George Kennan:A Study in Character,will appear. There is a fine article in a recentJournal of Diplomatic History by Joshua Botts,whom I do not even know, which is one of thebest brief pieces that I have seen on Kennananywhere. There are so many other articles—Ph.D. dissertations, M.A. theses, senior essays—that I have long since lost count. It is not asthough George Kennan is exactly an unknownfigure—that is one reason for not rushing.

Secondly, Kennan’s influence on the makingof American foreign policy during the ColdWar is already well documented. At least, I hopeit is well documented, because I spent a gooddeal of time trying to document it some twen-ty-five years ago in a book called Strategies ofContainment, which I have recently updated andrevised. I am really not expecting astoundingnew archival revelations with respect to Kennan


Keynote Address

the policymaker. Barring the possibility, ofcourse, that there might have been some kind ofa secret taping system in General Marshall’soffice, but I rather doubt that that was the case.

Third, Kennan’s role as a scholar, while it isnot as well known as his role as a policymaker,nonetheless is accessible to us, as the last panelindicated. As we also heard, it has for the mostpart stood the test of time. These books are stillread and are still available. So I think there is alegitimate question—what is there left, with allof this, for a biographer to write about in thefirst place? That is a question I wrestle with quitea lot. I happen to think that there is a lot towrite, but I think that what there is does notreally lend itself to hasty composition; not thatanybody has accused me of that lately.

There are aspects to Kennan that are still to bewritten about and should be included in this biog-raphy along with the more familiar aspects ofKennan’s career. Certainly, one aspect is his publicadvocacy and his role as an agitator. He really wasan agitator in many ways in the last half of his lifewith respect to criticisms of foreign policy, thedanger of nuclear weapons, and his concernsabout the environment, in which he was a truepioneer going all the way back to the 1940s.

He was also certainly, as has been said here thismorning, a public intellectual and a cultural crit-ic, protesting the excesses of an automobile-driv-en, television-addicted, materialist society. Someof those criticisms, certainly of the automobile,go all the way back to the 1930s. These thingsneed to be put in perspective. There needs to besome sense of how original these were in thecontext of the times in which they were made. Ihappen to think they were quite original, so thatwill be on the agenda for the biography.

There is George’s importance as a writer.This is something else that has been said heretoday by Blair and others, and John Lukacs men-tions this as well in his forthcoming book.

In the long run, George is likely to beremembered as much for the elegance of hisprose as for the influence of his ideas. He wasone of the great American writers of the 20thcentury. I was thinking about this the othernight, and it occurs to me there really ought tobe a volume in the Library of America onGeorge Kennan. There are now volumes in thisvery distinguished series for Jefferson, Lincoln,Francis Parkman (another historian), JohnSteinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Saul Bellow, and

Edmund Wilson. There is soon to be a volumeon Jack Kerouac, and if there can be a volumeon Jack Kerouac, it seems to me there ought tobe a volume on George Kennan.

George’s success as a teacher not formallywithin the academy needs to be considered inthis biography. I asked him once why he did notaccept all those offers from Princeton. Therewere also some offers from Yale along the wayas well. As he explained to David, it was reallyvery simple—because he hated grading papers.He could never make distinctions in those daysbetween a C and a C+. Of course, today withgrade inflation, he would not have to make suchdistinctions.

But his success as a teacher outside the acad-emy and as a visitor within the academy, and hissuccess as one of the most compelling speakersand lecturers of our time, is an aspect of hiscareer in which in many respects he followed theexample of his famous forebearer, the firstGeorge Kennan. I was particularly struck thismorning in listening to the comments and ques-tions that were raised about to what extentKennan was alienated from America. There weresome ways in which that was true. But I cannothelp but note, in looking in the papers andlooking at his lecture notes, how widely hespoke around the country in the 1940s, ’50s,and ’60s, and how many different kinds of audi-ences he spoke to and how successfully he con-nected with those audiences.

You can see this very clearly in the first set ofsustained lectures that he did, which were thefamous National War College lectures in 1946-47, some of which have been published. Part ofthe wonderful thing about those transcripts isthat they are stenographic, so we have the ques-tion and answer periods as well. We can get asense of what it was actually like to go to aGeorge Kennan lecture, and to hear the studentsask questions and hear his response to thosequestions. The stories are that the auditoriumover at the National War College was filled,with people hanging from the rafters. The sameis said of the lectures that he used to give atOxford. There was a quality here of being ableto connect with those kinds of audiences whichwas quite remarkable.

But what I found is that he could connectwith other kinds of audiences as well. The StateDepartment would send him around to talk tobusinessmen in this period, and you can see him


connecting with them. At the farm, he wouldoccasionally go down and talk to the Veterans ofForeign Wars of East Berlin, Pennsylvania, andthere are a couple of sets of notes from that. Hewas trying to persuade them: “Fellows, don’t betaken in by McCarthyism,” and he was connect-ing with them on their level at that point. Thereare lectures to Miss Fine’s School at Princeton,telling the young ladies what they need to knowabout life, with great empathy and sensitivity towho they were and where they were going.

Most interestingly, I came across a lecturejust the other day to a group of Princetonundergraduates. This was about 1953, and youwould think that George Kennan would betalking to this audience about containment orabout American foreign policy or something.No—he was talking to them about sex. He said,“Here is what you need to know,” and they werefascinated, of course. So the ability to adapt toan audience, the ability to be sensitive and tooperate on their level, is one of the mostremarkable aspects of his career. I think it issomething that has been frequently missed byother biographers to date.

Getting back to something that JackMatlock said earlier this morning, I think thatwhen Kennan did this kind of speaking, he wasan extraordinarily effective public advocate. Hemay not have been able to move the govern-ment in the directions that he wanted, but hecertainly was successful in helping to move thecountry to support the Marshall Plan in thelate 1940s with the speeches that he gavearound the country. He certainly moved thecountry on Vietnam in 1966 simply by goingbefore the Fulbright Committee and goingpublic with his criticism. I think he latermoved the country in the 1970s and in theearly 1980s on the nuclear danger issue. So Ithink he was effective in this regard, and Iwould simply put it all under the category of“teaching,” which I think probably comes clos-er to his single most important profession.

I would also want to focus on his contributionsin philanthropy—not in the sense of having hadmuch money of his own, but in the skill withwhich he persuaded others who did have moneyto part with it in pursuit of good causes like theKennan Institute.

I would also bring in something that has notbeen talked about here this morning, and this ishis seriousness about philosophy and faith. By

this, I mean the care that he took to work out forhimself and then write down so that he couldconvey to others ways of living and ways ofbelieving. There is some of this in Around theCragged Hill, which he wrote largely in responseto Bart Gellman’s critique of his philosophy. I donot think Kennan would have ever consideredhimself to be a philosopher or a theologian, buthe was a consumer of philosophy and theology,and was someone who reflected it back in his ownvery inimitable way. This was very important tohim, it seems to me, and should be included in abiography of him.

Now all of these things fall into the categoryof the public George Kennan in one way oranother, because he either wrote or spoke aboutthese things, even if not much has been writtenabout them as yet. There is, however, anotherwhole side to Kennan, and this is the private orthe inner George Kennan. He has given us somepretty vivid glimpses of the inner Kennan in hismemoirs and his other writings, particularly in hisSketches from a Life, but there is much more to besaid. Here I have benefited greatly from some-thing that Annelise Kennan said to both of us. Wewere both sitting there, George and I, andAnnelise, with her characteristic directness andfirmness pronounced:

“This biography should not simply be apublic biography, because when Georgesets pen to paper everything is gloom anddoom, and that is not George. So this has togo beyond what George sets down onpaper. You have to get to know George.”

Both George and I nodded our heads veryrespectfully at this admonition, and it is certain-ly true. Because if I had not had the privilege,which was extraordinary, of knowing Georgeand Annelise over a quarter of a century, Iwould never have picked up his sense of humor,his talent for mimicry, his delight in composingoutrageous doggerel. I would not have seen himat his house at Princeton; or the farm in EastBerlin, Pennsylvania; or on his boat; or at thesummer house in Norway. These are importantplaces for a biographer to have been and to haveseen his subject.

Obviously the family, and Joan andChristopher are here today, would have had cer-tain logistical difficulties in hosting all the peoplewho wished to be George’s biographer at all these


places. So it was a great privilege in being able tobe at these places and to see these places, and thiswill be surely reflected in the biography.

I also would not have had the opportunity tointerview Annelise herself, as well as George’s threeolder sisters and a large number of his contempo-raries like Harriman, Hickerson, Henderson,Nitze, both Bundys, and Isaiah Berlin to get theirrecollections on record. Most of them are nowgone. And I am sure I would not have had accessto that portion of the Kennan papers which is notyet open to researchers, as well as to George’sdiaries which extend all the way back to 1916. Joansent me that one the other day, the original one hekept as a schoolboy in Milwaukee, recordingamong other things the visit of President Wilson ina schoolboy’s penciled hand. So they go that farback. They extend as far forward, although thereare a lot of gaps, as the year 2003.

Among these diaries there is a separate littleblack book that George handed me one day at thehouse about five years ago with a slight smile, say-ing “I guess you wouldn’t be interested in this one.”

I said, “What is it?”He said, “It is my diary of dreams.” It goes back

70 years and they are recorded with extraordinaryvividness and precision. How many other biogra-phers have that to work with?

This brings up another dimension of biography.How do you make the shift from what someonedid—that is, their outward behavior as recorded byothers—and what is recounted by the subject?How do you make the shift from that to who theywere inside—what they thought or felt or loved orfeared; in short, who they thought they were orought to be? It seems to me the line between biog-raphy and fiction blurs here, because we so rarelyhave this kind of documentation of an inner life.You have to wing it. You have to use your imagi-nation. You have to speculate in most cases, but lessso in this case because there is so much on George’sinner life because of these diaries.

The diaries are quite astonishing. They areintensely personal. They are extraordinarily self-critical. Unusually for someone keeping a diary,he has hardly an instance of self-congratulationanywhere in them. Instead, these record a personwho held himself throughout his life to standardshe felt he never reached. I know of no parallel forthis kind of diary other than one—the lifelongand equally self-critical diary of one of Kennan’sgreat heroes, John Quincy Adams, arguably themost influential American grand strategist of the

19th century.Can we now credibly claim that George

Kennan was the most influential America grandstrategist of the 20th century? This has been sug-gested today around the table. I am not suremyself. I think I will reserve judgment on thatuntil I finish this book, but surely there cannotbe more than two or three other people ofwhom we could make such a claim for the 20thcentury. I think it is very interesting that thesetwo hugely influential architects of theAmerican role in the world, John QuincyAdams and George F. Kennan, so constantlypracticed that habit of self-scrutiny and self-crit-icism that is so frequently absent from actualAmerican behavior in the world.

Dealing with all of this is not going to be easy.First of all, I am determined to make it a one-volume biography, because I know of very fewsuccessful multi-volume biographies that any-body actually reads all the way through. But howdo you fit within a single volume somebody wholived more than a century and who had, as hasbeen suggested around this table today, five or sixdifferent professions or careers? How do you doit when that person wrote some of the mostcompelling prose of his age, so that it is painfulnot to quote great chunks of it, as most of hisprevious biographers have done and as Georgehimself could not resist doing in his memoirs? Ido not know the answers to these questions yet,and I am not sure I will know the answers until Ireally start sustained writing—and I do not wantto start that until I stop learning new things fromGeorge’s papers, which I am still doing.

But here are a few concluding observations.One is that biography is the most difficult kind ofhistory to write, and the closer I get to doing thisthe more convinced I am that is the case. I thinkit is very interesting that George, who was sohyper-critical of himself, never wrote a biogra-phy himself, although for decades he wanted toand reproached himself for not doing it. It wouldhave been a biography of Chekhov.

I would also say biography is perhaps betterundertaken, and perhaps this is just self-rationali-zation, toward the end of one’s scholarly careerafter one has accumulated a fair amount of expe-rience in both the writing and teaching of history,as well as, one hopes, certain categories of expe-rience and wisdom. For example, it seems to mevery important for a biographer to have the capac-ity for balance, because biography should be nei-


ther hagiography nor hyper-critical. It must walkthe line somewhere in between.

I think a biographer has got to have a sense ofpatience, because biography, like life, is not a stat-ic process. Your view of your subject is oftengoing to change with time, and your subject alsochanges with time. So not rushing to judgment isvery important in writing a biography.

Surely there is a concern for craftsmanship.There are few excuses ever for bad writing, andthere are no excuses at all for bad writing whenyou are writing the life of an extraordinarily greatwriter.

And finally, it seems to me the biographermust have the ability to empathize—to ask thequestion of yourself, while not suspending crit-ical judgment, as you are writing: “Had I beenin that situation, what would I have done?” Letthat be the point of departure for what youactually say.

But of course, biographies should not take solong that the biographer himself grows old anddies before his book comes out. As George, Ithink, would have said to his War College stu-dents back in the 1940s, “that would be a hell ofa note.”So, just to be on the safe side, I am shoot-ing for the next three or four years to completethe book. There are no other books on my listwaiting to be written; and given the experiencesof the past three or four years, I think it probablywould be just as well for me to refrain from fur-ther commentary on current events. Georgewould surely have agreed with me on that point.

One of my last exchanges with him camewhen he sent me a couple of interviews that hehad done vehemently criticizing the Bushadministration’s policy on Iraq. Most unfortu-nately, just at that point I had published a some-what ambivalent defense of the Bush administra-tion’s policy in Iraq, so I knew that I had to recip-rocate by sending my article back to him. I knewhe was not going to like it. I knew I was in fortrouble. So I thought I would deflect the criticismby also sending along a particularly good under-graduate student paper on China that I hadrecently received.

George’s letter came back within about fivedays. He was 99 at the time. He totally brushedmy article aside in a couple of noncommittallines, but then he added pointedly, and I like tothink that he had some fun writing these lines,“Your student has written one of the most per-ceptive essays of our time.”

DISCUSSION

Ruble: Thank you. We have time for finalquestions, comments, and observations.

Engerman: John, you are talking about himbeing an effective teacher, and it got me think-ing about what Allen Lynch and I have empha-sized—alienation. I do believe that both of thesetraits are true. It strikes me one of the reasonsboth are true is that while I would not call himpatriotic in a conventional sense, he had a verydeep belief in the potential of America.

Gaddis: Absolutely.

Engerman: And what you suggested aboutKennan may also be true for his ideas aboutAmerica’s potential—that he held America tostandards that it could never meet.

Gaddis: Right.

Engerman: In this sense, his alienation is asmuch with modern society—America as it is,not where he hoped it could go. That was insome sense a disappointment. It actually allcomes together. I remember reading in hispapers how in about 1954 he was speaking in anArmy educational film of some sort, and hewraps up his remarks by saying something thatwe talked about in other contexts: that the wayfor America to do best in the world is toimprove ourselves. In fact, he used the phrase“that the best thing America could do is to beall that it could be.” I am not saying that waswhere the advertising slogan came from, but itstrikes me that it brings together the education,the alienation, and the deep belief in Americathat he did feel.

Gaddis: This is of course resonant of JohnQuincy Adams in the famous 1821 Fourth ofJuly address that George loved to quote. GeorgeKennan was mostly highly original, but not onthis point. Whenever he got the excuse, hewould drag in John Quincy Adams and the1821 Fourth of July address in which Adamssaid, “We go not abroad in search of monstersto destroy. We are the champion of libertyeverywhere, but only by example.” What wasimplied in that is the sense of holding yourselfand holding your country to the highest of stan-


dards with the expectation that the very act ofdoing that will move other societies and the restof the world. It is a very American concept. It isalmost a Jeffersonian concept in that way.

The issue comes, it seems to me, when youmove from a society like John Quincy Adams’,which had no power to do anything else but setan example, to the United States as it is in the20th century, when it becomes the most power-ful nation in the world. That changes then thequestion of setting an example. When you haveunchallenged power, it is a real dilemma becausemore people will fear your example because ofyour power; and because you have the power,you will be tempted to use it in pursuit ofspreading the example. It seems to me this wasthe issue that, in many ways, George waswrestling with throughout his career. I am notsure he really ever worked out a completely sat-isfactory answer to this. But I think it is the cen-tral dilemma, and again it has this connectionthat goes back to this history of American for-eign policy and John Quincy Adams.

Question: You mentioned his religious beliefs.Could you talk a little bit more about that, andwhere they sprang from and where they mighthave wound up as his very long life progressed?

Gaddis: My sense is that they are extraordinar-ily American. Based on his histories of theKennan family and what he has told me, butnever published, about the history of his moth-er’s family, the James family, what you realize ishow central faith was to these people back in the18th and the 19th centuries. It was certainly veryimportant to his father, and George had anambivalent relationship with his father. Not aclose relationship when his father was alive, buta lot of regret after his father died that it had notbeen a closer relationship. Faith was part of that,it seems to me. I think it is there, but very qui-etly and not conspicuously.

You can see it expressed elegantly, gracefully,movingly when you go through his papers andyou come across a Sunday morning talk to theMen’s Bible Study Society at the Princeton FirstPresbyterian Church. It is an extraordinary the-ological document. It is not reported how theMen’s Bible Study Society received it, becausethere was no question and answer period, or atleast questions and answers were not recorded.

What is extraordinary is the care with which

he put this together. That is another characteris-tic of his speaking—it does not seem to havemade much difference what the audience was.He would prepare equally carefully, andDorothy Hessman, who was still working forhim at this point, would duly type it. We havethese transcripts, sometimes hand written notes,and suddenly you realize that this one lecture ona Sunday morning to these men in Princeton isa distilling body of thinking and reflection andfaith that has been in his mind all the time. It isreally evocative of his forebearers, and you see itall come together in just this one Sunday morn-ing lecture.

There are a few instances like this. If you lookat the extraordinary second or third chapter ofAround a Cragged Hill, which is the first time thathe wrote about this in a systematic and public way,you will get a very strong sense of this as well.

Matlock: I recall that it must have been aroundeither 1997 or 1998 when I once ran into Georgeas he was coming out of the Institute library. Iasked, “George, what are you working on now inthe library?” Normally, he worked out of hisoffice or home. He said, “You know, I have beenover researching a most remarkable person, SaintPaul. I may even write something about him.”

Now I have not seen anything he wroteabout Saint Paul. I wondered if you found any-thing in the papers; but he certainly did do someresearch on these topics.

Gaddis: No. I have not found anything, to myregret. I do remember him talking about that,but so far, I have not found anything that heactually wrote on this. He wrote quite enough,and that is my problem.

Ruble: One of the things that all the directorsof the Kennan Institute have had in common isthe experience receiving various letters fromKennan sometimes expressing disapproval ofsomething that had happened. Until Johnspoke, I was a little worried that, as we werecoming to the end, the main impression ofGeorge Kennan emerging from the day was ofsomeone that could be a very stern figure. Intruth, if you ever found yourself having donesomething that he disapproved of, he had a wayof making you know it without ever really say-ing anything. Some of that sternness I thinkcame out today.


But there was another side to him, which Ithink is probably the best side to bring out at theend and which John was describing. For me, it iscontained in the wistful little smile he would getand the twinkle in his eyes when he wasbemused by something. Kennan was a man whoobviously had a very stern accounting of life, buthe was a man who embraced life and found itamusing and even thrilling. I think this goes backto the comment about why one should engageRussian culture. He was a man with a twinkle inthe eye even as he would admonish.

Like a lot of people, I want to read the biog-raphy because I think he was a remarkable humanbeing who cannot be captured in any simple turnof phrase. One thing I always appreciated eversince I first met him, right after I got out of grad-

uate school, was that he was somebody whoalways showed me respect—and there is no rea-son why George Kennan had to do that. I thinkhis combination of sternness and respect andhumor and elegance all comes together in a sin-gle package. Maybe George Kennan is the onlyperson who could bring all of that together, butI suspect maybe there is another person who willget some of it right as well. So I want to thankyou, John, for ending the day.

This has been a special morning for theKennan Institute, and I hope for all of you. Iwant to thank you all for coming and partici-pating. Hopefully we at the Kennan Institutewill continue George Kennan’s legacy in somesmall way and carry on what he wanted us todo. Thank you all very much.


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