Menand Remembers Kennan

George F. Kennan

Pinnacle of Power
1952

Photo: AKG Pressebild-Ullstein Bild/Granger Collection

The New Yorker

Another fascinating article on George Kennan appeared recently, this one in The New Yorker, written by Louis Menand and titled "Getting Real: George F. Kennan's Cold War" (November 14, 2011), and it's even longer than Kissinger's article, or seems longer, and provides a fuller view of Kennan's life. Unlike Kissinger, Menand isn't concerned with defending his own legacy, for he never served in government making policy at the pinnacle of power. He's a Harvard professor of literature, not a political scientist. But he offers an interesting point about Kennan as the author of America's "Containment Policy" -- Kennan resented the attribution despite his seminal "Long Telegram" and his follow-up article, signed "X," published in Foreign Affairs:

Kennan's second major Cold War treatise [the first being the "Long Telegram"] was the 1947 article for Foreign Affairs, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." The essay began as a paper written for Forrestal. In many respects, it was an eloquent re-statement of the Long Telegram, and it is famous for a single sentence: "It is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

This gave a name to American Cold War policy, and, with a few tweaks and many exceptions, what Kennan had called "containment" remained American policy until the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Wherever there was "Communist aggression," the United States pushed back. As long as the Communists remained in their box, the United States did not (except rhetorically) seek to intervene. And, as Gaddis says, even Reagan, despite talk of liberation and "rollback," stayed largely true to containment policy.

The article was signed with an "X" because Kennan did not want it to seem that, as a State Department employee, he was stating policy, but his identity was quickly revealed, and for the rest of his career he was known as the author of containment. He had reasons to resent this.

Menand explains the reasons underlying Kennan's resentment:

[A]s someone who proposed policy rather than administered it, Kennan was susceptible to the standard fate of policy intellectuals. Either he could get credit for providing a rationale for what was already the government's de-facto policy or his recommendations could be harnessed to purposes he did not endorse.

Kennan's fate was to have his idea of containment conflated with the Truman Doctrine's promise in March 1947 of military aid "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." This might sound like containment if the outside pressure were Soviet Russia, but Truman made a general call to arms, and that was apparently not Kennan's intention:

Kennan was appalled when he read the draft of Truman's speech, and for the rest of his life he protested that he had meant containment to be a policy of selective confrontation, and its means to be diplomatic and economic, not military. But he was construed otherwise.

One wonders if Kennan doth protest too much. Knowing Russian history as well as he did and having had personal experience of the Soviets from his time in the diplomatic service in Moscow, did he really believe that diplomatic and economic confrontation alone would contain the Soviet Union? Absent the back-up threat of military confrontation? Diplomacy without strength offers merely a comforting blanket woven of words in a Hobbesian world of naked power, and economic sanctions alone would make a Bolshevik laugh. Kennan must have known these things. Perhaps he would not have pressed military confrontation in places like Vietnam, but one wonders if his resentment had less to do with foreign policy disagreement and more to do with the doors that closed him off from the corridors of power.

Kennan's life was no tragedy, but he did suffer the melancholy consequences of having been at the pinnacle of power and influence relatively early in his career, only to see his personal influence decline as he drifted further and further from the center of power in a long life of protest, like the anonymous voice in T.S. Eliot's poem Prufrock: "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all."

Kennan lived to be 101 and died in 2005.

Kissinger Remembers Kennan . . .

George F. Kennan

1952

Bettmann/Corbis Photo

The New York Times

As part of her English lesson yesterday evening, my soon-to-be-fifteen-year-old daughter and I read a fascinating article by Henry Kissinger in which he analyzes the man George F. Kennan as a foreign policy thinker. Titled "The Age of Kennan" and written for The New York Times (November 10, 2011), it displays Kissinger's own brilliance as much as Kennan's. For instance, at one point in our lesson, Sa-Rah read the following paragraph to me:

[N]o other Foreign Service officer ever shaped American foreign policy so decisively or did so much to define the broader public debate over America's world role. This process began with two documents remembered as the Long Telegram (in 1946) and the X article (in 1947). At this stage, Kennan served a country that had not yet learned the distinction between the conversion and the evolution of an adversary -- if indeed it ever will. Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one comprehensive act or gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a willingness to pursue one's ultimate foreign policy goal in imperfect stages.

When she had finished reading this aloud, I stopped her and pointed out that Kissenger was speaking about himself and his own views as much as he was talking about Kennan and Kennan's views. I added, "When one great man analyzes the work of a great predecessor, you should be alert to signs that he's also defending his own legacy, as is especially the case in this passage." I urged her to keep this in mind, to read with an ear attuned to different levels. Kissinger, I explained, worked with one eye to the distant evolutionary goal and the other eye to the imperfect step to be taken now. He is defending his own method against charges of cynicism and opportunism, I told her.

After we'd finished, I asked her what she'd learned about Kennan, and she replied that he'd formulated the concept of containment in response to what he considered Soviet Communism's intrinsic aggressiveness, a concept that was elaborated in practical U.S. foreign policy as America's strategy during the Cold War.

Not that she used those exact words . . .

Three Curious Intellects: Kennan, Dirac, Drabble

Rarely do I read three excellent newspaper articles in a row, but I did so this weekend in the International Herald Tribune -- though I cite from the New York Times.

'Classified' (not!) photograph of poker-faced "X" -- author of the "X Article":

George F. 'X.' Kennan

(Image from New York Times)

The first article comes from the pen of Mark Atwood Lawrence, "Friends, Not Allies," about George Kennan and Paul H. Nitze in Nicholas Thompson's study, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War. Lawrence channels Thompson to note:

Kennan rose to prominence in 1946, when the Truman administration urgently wanted to understand the reasons for Soviet hostility to the West. The senior United States diplomat at the embassy in Moscow, Kennan offered eloquent and forcefully argued answers. Soviet belligerence sprang from a mix of Marxist ideology and old-fashioned power-­mongering, he said. He then proposed that Washington adopt a policy not of directly confronting Moscow but of frustrating it by opposing Communists wherever they threatened to expand their influence beyond their borders. Over the long term, Kennan predicted, constant frustration would cause the Soviet system to mellow and then collapse.

Kennan had an enormous influence on America's foreign policy of "containment," a strategy that he proposed in his famous cable written from Moscow in 1946, to which he signed "X" rather than his name.

Next, a childhood photograph of an 'angelic' Paul Dirac (replete with wings!) in 1907:

Paul Dirac

(Image from New York Times)

This second article, Louisa Gilder's review -- "Quantum Leap" -- of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, quotes Freeman Dyson:

The great papers of the other quantum pioneers were more ragged, less perfectly formed than Dirac's . . . . [Dirac's discoveries] were like exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky, one after another. He seemed to be able to conjure laws of nature from pure thought.

Dirac is perhaps most famous for the equation named for him, the Dirac equation, which brought together quantum mechanics and special relativity to describe the 'spin' of certain particles (e.g., the electron), and by implication demanded the existence of "antiparticles" . . . not that I understand much about this stuff.

Finally, in 'living color,' Margaret Drabble takes her stand:

Margaret Drabble

(Image from New York Times)

This third article, Daphne Merkin's "Dame of the British Interior," based on an interview with Margaret Drabble, speaks about this literary 'prodigy' in the time soon after her marriage to Clive Swift:

The couple spent the first years of their marriage in Stratford-on-Avon as members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where Drabble understudied actresses like Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench. When she became pregnant with their first child, however, (they had three children together), she gave up on her acting career and turned to writing. As Drabble tells it, the shift to writing sounds suspiciously easy -- she didn't know anyone in Stratford and she was alone most evenings while her husband was out socializing, so presto! she "sat down and wrote a book." It is, I suspect, a tribute to the dauntingly strong will that thrums beneath her overtly uncompetitive self-presentation. "I don't like to be beaten by things," Drabble admitted, almost uneasily. "It's another go, another day."

Drabble is famous for being the younger sister of A. S. Byatt and for coining the expression "acid-reflux anti-Americanism." Just kidding. She's famous for her many novels, as well as for her screenplays, plays, and short stories and her critical studies of other writers, along with various other nonfiction works. In short, prolific.

In each of these individuals, the actual process of analyzing, thinking, and creating was undoubtedly more arduous than described in the NYT articles . . . yet, I'm struck with how easily the three went about their work.

That sort of thing fascinates me, but make of it what you will . . . or willn't.