Kennan
A Life between Worlds
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
A definitive biography of the U.S. diplomat and prize-winning historian George F. Kennan
The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904–2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy—and one of its most complex. Drawing on many previously untapped sources, Frank Costigliola’s authoritative biography offers a new picture of a man of extraordinary ability and ambition whose idea of containing the Soviet Union helped ignite the Cold War but who spent the next half century trying to extinguish it. Always prescient, Kennan in the 1990s warned that the eastward expansion of NATO would spur a new cold war with Russia.
Even as Kennan championed rational realism in foreign policy, his personal and professional lives were marked by turmoil. And though he was widely respected and honored by presidents and the public, he judged his career a failure because he had been dropped as a pilot of U.S. foreign policy. Impossible to classify, Kennan was a sui generis thinker, a trenchant critic of both communism and capitalism, and a pioneering environmentalist. Living between Russia and the United States, he witnessed firsthand Stalin’s tightening grip on the Soviet Union, the collapse of Europe during World War II, and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.
An absorbing portrait of an eloquent, insightful, and sometimes blinkered iconoclast whose ideas are still powerfully relevant, Kennan invites us to imagine a world that Kennan fought for but was unable to bring about—one not of confrontations and crises but of dialogue and diplomacy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Costigliola (Roosevelt's Lost Alliances) paints a complex portrait of diplomat George F. Kennan (1904–2005) in this intimate biography. Drawing on interviews with family, friends, and rivals, as well as State Department archives and Kennan's own diaries, Costigliola presents a man of contradictions: prescient in his environmentalism and his criticism of NATO expansion, Kennan was also alarmingly prejudiced and often sought solace in "mystical" sentimentality. In 1947, Kennan came to national attention when he published a revised version of the "long telegram" he had dictated while stationed in Moscow as a diplomat. The "X" article, as it came to be known, urged the containment of communism and was quickly adopted by the Washington, D.C., political and military elite. To Kennan's dismay, however, the document became the basis for arms races, alarming foreign interventions, and anti-Russian paranoia. Contending that most commentators "focus on the inflammatory manifestos... that helped ignite the Cold War" and "underplay pivot in the opposite direction soon thereafter," Costigliola finds plenty of evidence that Kennan believed "seemingly intractable conflicts may be more susceptible to settlement than it may first appear." Even more insightful are Costigliola's inquiries into how Kennan's interest in Freud's theories informed his worldview. Nuanced and well-reasoned, this is a consequential reconsideration of an oft-misunderstood historical figure.
