But he thought that even under Communism Russians cultivated a resilience of character that was disappearing in the West. He despised the whole Soviet apparat-in part because its minions prevented him from associating with ordinary Russians when he was stationed in Moscow. He had no sympathy for, or much interest in, Marxism, and he had no illusions about Stalin. ![]() In the second volume of the “Memoirs,” published in 1972, he proposed that one of the few times American diplomacy had been conducted with integrity, and without political pandering, was the period from 1945 to 1949-which happened to be the years of his own greatest influence. He believed that a nation’s form of government has little to do with the quality of life, and he admired conservative autocracies such as prewar Austria and Portugal under António Salazar. Many people gave up on liberal democracy in the nineteen-thirties, but Kennan, even after the war, and in his most widely read books-“American Diplomacy,” published in 1951, and the first volume of his “Memoirs,” which came out in 1967 and won a Pulitzer Prize-was blunt about his estrangement from American life and his antipathy to democracy. ![]() I hate the ‘peepul’ I have become clearly un-American.” In the draft of an unfinished book, begun in the nineteen-thirties, he advocated restricting the vote to white males, and other measures designed to create government by an élite. “I hate the rough and tumble of our political life,” he wrote, in 1935, to a sister, Jeanette, to whom he was close. He was firmly anti-majoritarian, not only in foreign affairs, where he considered public opinion a menace, but in governmental decision-making generally. “Before us stretches the whole great Pacific Coast,” he wrote in the diary on a plane trip West, “and my only thought, as we approach it, is: throughout the length and breadth of it not one single thing of any importance is being said or done.” “You have despaired of yourself,” he wrote in his diary after a visit to Chicago “now despair of your country!” He had a special distaste for what he called “the Latin-American fringe”-Florida, Texas, and California. Kennan thought that Americans were shallow, materialistic, and self-centered-he had the attitude of a typical mid-century European-and the more he saw of them the less fond of them he grew. The woman he married, in 1931, Annelise Sørensen, was Norwegian, and when he and his family resettled in the United States-where he remained, apart from two prematurely terminated appointments as Ambassador, first to the Soviet Union (1952), and then to Yugoslavia (1961-63)-he spent almost all of his time in the State Department, or at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, or on the secluded farm he owned in Pennsylvania, outside a town it amused some god of geopolitics to have named East Berlin. Kennan: An American Life” (The Penguin Press $39.95), and the most peculiar thing about Kennan, a man not short on peculiarities, is that he had little love for, or even curiosity about, the country whose fortunes he devoted his life to safeguarding.īetween 1926, the year he began his Foreign Service career, in Geneva, and 1946, when he made a heroic return from Moscow as the author of the primal document of Cold War foreign policy, the Long Telegram, Kennan lived mostly abroad. ![]() The one puzzle in John Lewis Gaddis’s first-rate biography of the diplomat George Kennan, which Gaddis began in 1982, when his subject was seventy-eight, and waited nearly thirty years to complete, since Kennan lived to be a hundred and one, is the subtitle. Photograph from AKG Pressebild-ullstein bild / Granger Collection Five months later, he was declared persona non grata by Stalin. Kennan at Tempelhof airport, in Berlin, in 1952, en route to Moscow.
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