Posted on 03/28/2005 2:01:03 PM PST by RWR8189
AGAINST GEORGE F. KENNAN, who died last week at the age of 101, "there was no official complaint, / And all the reports on his conduct agree / That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint." He was not just "the nearest thing to a legend that this country's diplomatic service has ever produced" (Ronald Steel), but "a phenomenon in international affairs" (the New York Times), as well as "our greatest diplomat" (Richard Holbrooke). Even in an age of casual superlatives, this is high praise indeed. And not least among Kennan's long list of distinguished admirers was Kennan himself. In the late 1980s, after he had publicly complained that the United States government had not adequately honored him for his service, President George H.W. Bush dutifully awarded him the Medal of Freedom.
The interested observer might reasonably ask, how came this to be? For while Kennan was certainly a talented Foreign Service officer, shrewd analyst of the Russian character, and, in his later years, a prolific historian, he was in fact a singularly unsuccessful diplomat. While it is faithfully recorded that he was a member of the first American delegation to the Soviet Union, in 1933, it is also true that he was part of a squad that included two equally talented career men (Charles Bohlen, Loy Henderson) coached by a brilliant ambassador, William C. Bullitt. Kennan later flourished in wartime Moscow under the tutelage of Averell Harriman, but his own brief ambassadorships (to Moscow and Belgrade) both ended in failure.
Which, it might be said, furnishes one key to understanding George F. Kennan. For his supreme gift was not for diplomacy, but for self-dramatization. He was susceptible, at moments of crisis, to timely illness: It was from a Moscow sickbed that he drafted the famous 1946 Long Telegram which explained the roots of Soviet behavior--"impervious to the logic of reason . . . highly sensitive to the logic of force"--to an inquiring Truman administration. He had a habit of resigning from the diplomatic service, rejoining its ranks, and resigning again. As John F. Kennedy's ambassador to Yugoslavia, in the early 1960s, he quickly managed to entangle himself in a needless controversy with the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Wilbur Mills--which led him, not for the first time, to quit in despair.
Such passive-aggressive conduct served him well. In the late 1940s Secretary of State George C. Marshall, eager to reward his temperamental theorist of the early Cold War, granted Kennan his fondest wish: a policy planning staff, within the Department of State, created for the sole purpose of furnishing Kennan, and some handpicked associates, office space to think about the world and advise the government. But this, too, led to conflict and frustration. While Kennan was serving as counselor to Dean Acheson, arguments over stationing U.S. troops in Japan (Kennan was against it) and the conduct of the Korean war prompted him to leave the department and repair to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, more or less for good. Kennan was a lifelong student of Russian-American relations, a graceful writer, and a natural oracle and armchair strategist. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize, granted audiences to scholars and acolytes in Princeton, and was offered all the privileges of a visiting head of state by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Two themes emerged in Kennan's long life. The first was an obvious psychic conflict between the desire to participate in public affairs and an equal horror at its personal cost. In his memoirs he recalled the pleasure he derived from his notoriety after the Long Telegram and the 1947 article in Foreign Affairs that propounded his theory of containment of Soviet expansion: "My reputation was made," he wrote. "My voice now carried." But such satisfaction came at a price Kennan could not, or would not, pay.
General Marshall's gift of the policy planning staff, which might have provided a lifetime sinecure to a different sort of diplomat, was torture for Kennan. Barely six months into his tenure as ambassador to the Soviet Union, in 1953, he gave an interview in West Germany in which he compared daily life in Moscow to his internment by the Nazis in wartime Berlin. Stalin, with some reason, took offense, and Kennan was declared persona non grata. It was an indiscretion of such monumental size, a blunder of such startling magnitude, that it could only have been prompted by some irresistible, self-destructive impulse. But like the food fight with Wilbur Mills, it relieved him of the dread responsibilities of state and enabled him to retreat to Princeton.
Bringing us to the other theme. In contemporary histories Kennan was often roped together with the "wise men" who guided U.S. foreign policy in the postwar era. But Kennan bore little resemblance to, say, Acheson, or Bohlen, or Harriman: He was a middle-class product of Milwaukee, worked his way through Princeton, and considered that his doctrine of containment had been horribly disfigured by those charged with carrying it out. In the last half-century of his life he affected a disdain for the exercise of American power, a revulsion for the vulgar practice of democracy, and in his 90th year advocated the establishment of an appointive "council of state"--drawn, in the words of the New York Times, "from the country's best brains to advise all branches of government in long-term policies."
It is not difficult to guess who he had in mind as chairman, and how many months might have passed before he resigned, once again, in sorrow.
Philip Terzian is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard.
There was a great editorial in the Chicago Tribune a week or two ago where Kennan was posited as a conservative in the 18th century sense of the term...which is why most of today's conservatives didn't see eye to eye with him.
Its a tossup if Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson were our greatest diplomats.
John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Charles Francis Adams, and Robert R. Livingston all rank well ahead of Kennan, as well.
Agreed.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.