Reviewed by Paul Robinson
Kennan: A Life between Worlds. Frank Costigliola. Princeton, 2024.
AMERICAN DIPLOMAT George F. Kennan (1904-2005) is famous for two contradictory things. The first is for devising the Cold War era policy of containment. The second is for being a decades-long critic of the policy. Frank Costigliola’s biography provides valuable insight into how both versions of Kennan came into being and enlightens readers about Kennan as an individual, one of the best known foreign policy thinkers of the 20th century.
The first sources of Kennan’s fame were his 1946 “long telegram,” sent to colleagues in the State Department, and an article published in 1947 in Foreign Affairs under the byline “X” (sometimes referred to as “Mr. X”). In these, Kennan excoriated the Soviet Union as hellbent on expansion and impervious to the logic of reason, and urged Americans not to make concessions but rather to contain it. As Costigliola comments, the diplomat thereby “helped militarize the Cold War” (p. 289).
The second source of Kennan’s fame was almost the opposite of the first. In 1952, after a short stint as US ambassador in Moscow, Kennan’s diplomatic career came to an ignominious end when the Soviets declared him persona non grata after he told the press that the Soviets’ treatment of Western diplomats was worse than that he experienced at the hands of the Nazis when he was interned in Germany after Pearl Harbour.
Thereafter, Kennan made a new career as a public intellectual, earning numerous prizes for books on diplomatic history, delivering the prestigious Reith Lectures on the BBC (1957), and giving televised testimony to the U.S. Senate in the midst of the Vietnam War. In this period, he turned his back on containment, urged disengagement from Europe, argued in favour of talking with the Soviets (whom he now portrayed as rational and amenable to negotiation), and spoke in support of unifying Germany as a neutral country. He also sought to persuade US leaders to adopt a policy of non-first-use of nuclear weapons and opposed the war in Vietnam. Then, following the end of the Cold War, he opposed the invasion of Iraq and NATO expansion into eastern Europe, the latter of which he described as “the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold-War-era” (p. 512).
In short, there is Kennan the hawk and Kennan the dove. Of the two, Costigliola admires the latter much more than the former. But it was Kennan’s unhappy fate that those in power in his own country viewed things the other way around, admiring the Kennan who had laid the groundwork for what was eventually seen as America’s triumph in the Cold War, but dismissing the later version of Kennan as overly idealistic if not weirdly eccentric. Since the dovish phase of Kennan’s career lasted much longer than the hawkish one (he lived over 100 years, half of them after his diplomatic career had ended), Kennan regarded his life as a failure. The only time that his peers had listened to him, they had, he felt, misunderstood him. Thereafter they had showered him with praise and honours but ignored everything he said.
The subtitle of Costigliola’s biography describes Kennan as having lived a “life between worlds.” This description has a number of meanings. In the first place, it reflects the tension in Kennan’s life between his service to the United States and his fascination with Russia. Beyond that, it refers also to what Costigliola considers a fundamental polarity in Kennan’s thinking. According to Costigliola, Kennan was a great admirer of Freud and in particular of the idea of a division between Civilization and Eros. Costigliola uses this distinction to provide a psychological explanation of the diplomat’s life: he was on the one hand a rational promoter of foreign policy realism, but on the other his viewpoints were often highly emotional in foundation. He yearned for the order provided by a strong state and family, but longed to shake up American society and was guilty of multiple marital infidelities. The swings in his logic — sometimes pro-Russian, sometimes anti-, sometimes rejecting negotiations, other times demanding them, and so on — reflected this split personality.
AS THIS analysis suggests, Costigliola’s portrait is psychological. Kennan’s work has been examined in depth many times before, but Costigliola seeks to provide a new understanding of Kennan the man and what made him tick. He provides a huge amount of revealing detail about his subject’s life, much of which is not very appealing. The Kennan who emerges from this biography is ultra-conservative, racist, sexist, arrogant, prone to flights of fancy, and not obviously right about very much, even the topic on which he was supposed to be an expert, namely Russia. Costigliola admits that “Much of his analysis of the Kremlin or the Russian people rested not on observation, but rather on hunches — informed conjuncture [sic], but guesses nonetheless” (p. 537). It’s not obvious from this biography why one should consider Kennan a great thinker.
Costigliola’s approach has its advantages. One is an excellent sense of Kennan’s not altogether likeable personality. The psychological emphasis does, however, lead to occasional gaps as the author skips over things in a somewhat curious way. Thus Chapter 1 ends with Kennan at Princeton University, but Chapter 2 begins with him already in the diplomatic service, with no explanation of how he got there. Later, despite having told readers that Kennan’s testimony to the Senate in 1966 helped to legitimize opposition to the Vietnam War, Costigliola skips that stage of Kennan’s life entirely, telling us nothing about what Kennan actually told the Senate. One is left wondering what happened.
Even more striking is the lack of discussion of the long telegram and the article signed “X.” Given their centrality to Kennan’s legacy, one might expect a lengthy description of their contents. Instead, the attention is almost entirely on what inspired Kennan to write them and the impact they had. We are told almost nothing about what they said. It is a strange omission.
That said, Costigliola provides readers with a wealth of information about Kennan’s mode of thought. Above all it portrays a man who was deeply conservative. Kennan railed repeatedly against modernity in all its forms, such as machinery, industrialization, and democracy. Domestically, he seemed to desire a return to an Anglo-Saxon dominated America of small farming communities run by an elite of intellectuals such as himself, while internationally his preference was for a world dominated by great powers who stayed out of each others’ affairs. Add to this an outsized ego, and much of what he said and did begins to make sense.
Kennan’s dislike of modernity made him highly critical of American society. Costigliola notes (p. 206) that in an unpublished document entitled The Prerequisites, Kennan “argued for transforming the United States into a frankly authoritarian state run by selfless young patriots such as himself” and also “for taking away the right to vote of naturalized citizens, nonprofessional women, and ‘the negroes.’” Kennan was “xenophobic, misogynistic, and racist,” we are told, “not to mention naively unrealistic and nearly fascist.”
Indeed, Kennan felt more at home in Nazi Germany than he ever did in his various stints in the Soviet Union. Passing through Germany in the late 1930s he described it as “a garden country, green, fresh and well-ordered. Trains were incredibly fast … people incredibly neatly dressed” (p. 169). It is noticeable that towards the end of the Second World War, Kennan was outraged by alleged atrocities committed by the advancing Soviet Army. But he seems to have expressed rather less indignation about German atrocities. A photograph shows a relaxed and smiling Kennan in a swimsuit while sailing on a lake in Berlin in 1940 or 1941 — the contrast with the stress-induced illnesses that he repeatedly suffered in Moscow could not be more striking.
This does not mean that Kennan was a fascist. He was far too conservative for that. As Costigliola comments, although Kennan was thoroughly elitist, “he despised such core aspects of fascism as demagogy, militarism, and jingoistic nationalism” (p. 119). He did, however, have what one might call conservative authoritarian inclinations. Serving in Lisbon during the war, he came to admire Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliviera Salazar. According to Costigliola (p. 250), “Kennan told his friend Isaiah Berlin that of all the leaders he had ever met, Salazar was his favorite statesman.”
Kennan’s attitude to Russia was often contradictory. He tended to orientalize it, viewing it as some mystical “other.” He was also often highly critical of it, calling Russia (p. 113) a “filthy, sordid country, full of vermin, mud, stench, and disease.” But he also on occasion idealized the country. Costigliola comments (p. 151) that “Disgusted with America, he idealized Russia as a more plastic society in which creative young people such as himself were, despite Stalinist repression, forging a better order.” He wrote of his “hope that somewhere in that Russian world … things could be found which would help us in solving the problems of our own country.” (p. 196)
In Kennan’s eyes, therefore, Russia was the source of some mystical knowledge that would help America overcome its own malaise, if only politicians on both sides would allow a rapprochement. His experiences in Moscow during the Great Terror of 1937-8, however, and later in his brief stint as ambassador, indicated to him that the communist authorities would not allow such a rapprochement. Instead, the Soviet authorities cut Western diplomats off from all contact with Soviet citizens and barraged Soviet society with virulent anti-Western propaganda. Kennan took this as a personal insult. Embittered by the experience, he turned vehemently against the Soviet regime.
In Costigliola’s telling of the story, it was this sense of personal injury more than anything else that led to the long telegram and X article.
At this point, critics might object that there was probably more to it than this. The international context, and Soviet actions during and after the war surely also played a role in turning Kennan and others against the Soviet Union. Some deeper analysis of this context might be useful. It might also challenge some of Kennan’s later thinking, including his belief that the Cold War could be brought to an end through negotiation — a belief that some historians would dispute. Much depends on one’s view of the Soviet leadership, but this does not appear to be Costigliola’s area of expertise. Indeed, his grasp of Soviet and Russian affairs is perhaps a point of weakness. In one telling moment (p, 227) he mentions Kennan reading “Tolstoy’s Peter the Great,” a statement that would no doubt leave most readers imagining that this was some book by the great Leo Tolstoy. And that indeed is how it is marked in the index. But in fact, the author of Peter the Great, a novel published in two parts in 1929 and 1934, was Alexei Tolstoy, no relation to the author of War and Peace. The confusion raises some questions about the depth of the author’s knowledge of the context of a study of Kennan.
Still, Costigliola’s analysis brings to light some important influences on the origins of containment. He points out that in both the long telegram and the X article Kennan linked the Soviet threat to the need to reform America. Threat inflation, in other words, was a tool for disciplining American society and overcoming its excessive individualism. Kennan was then appalled when America’s leaders took the Soviet threat as an excuse to do something entirely different, namely militarize their political conflict with the Soviet Union. Costigliola convincingly argues that Kennan had never wanted containment to be a long-lasting, militarized affair. Rather he viewed it as a short term policy of refusing concessions while strengthening Europe by means such as the Marshall Plan. Kennan imagined that finding themselves rebuffed, the Soviet leaders would moderate their demands and become amenable to negotiation, at which point the U.S. should leap at the opportunity to bring the Cold War to an end.
WHETHER this was realistic is highly debatable. It was, though, consistent with Kennan’s conservative outlook. He saw the Cold War as destabilizing and dangerous. In particular, he feared escalation into nuclear war. He also never felt any particular need to pay heed to the interests of small nations and was opposed to making human rights an issue in foreign relations. Costigliola notes that living in eastern Europe in the 1930s had bred in Kennan a “skepticism of the smaller nations,” leading him to write that he wondered whether “despite the great fuss which these new countries make over their self-government, they weren’t really considerably better off under the heavy hands of the German or Russian Imperial Governments” (p. 90). Years later, the same attitude led him to oppose the breakup of the Soviet Union and the subsequent expansion of NATO. The conservative realist in Kennan could not see the point of sacrificing America’s relations with a great power such as Russia for the sake of small countries such as the Baltic States.
No doubt if he were still alive he would claim that the war in Ukraine was an inevitable product of NATO expansion and argue that the United States should not jeopardize its relations with the nuclear-armed Russians for the sake of the much less powerful Ukrainians. He would also almost certainly reject the central role that human rights have now acquired in foreign policy rhetoric. In the case of China, he wrote, human rights were “their concern, not ours” (p. 509).
All this puts Kennan very much at odds with the zeitgeist of our time, to the extent that one wonders if there is any point in studying him at all. But if anything it is precisely his contrariness that gives him some value. Throughout his career, Kennan showed himself willing to stand up to superiors and speak truth (as he saw it) to power. He refused to bow to conventional thinking. The older Kennan campaigned for peace, disarmament, and restraint. These were worthy causes. He told the journalist Harrison Salisbury (p. 490), “For goodness sake, talk with them [the Soviets], and see.” This was a worthy sentiment, all too often ignored today in a time of renewed international tension. In the second half of Kennan’s life, outside of the marginalized political left, there were very few people willing to challenge the assertive display of American military power, and even fewer that those in authority were willing to listen to. This is still true today. In that sense at least, we need more Kennans and can learn much from him. Costigliola concludes that “It is Kennan’s oddity, his penchant for thinking otherwise, that renders his voice important” (p. xxii). Indeed. A bit more oddity, and a bit more thinking otherwise would do a world of good.
Paul Robinson is Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. He has an MA from the U. of Toronto and a DPhil from Oxford. He served in the regular British Army Intelligence Corps 1989-94 and as a reserve officer in the Canadian Forces from 1994-96. His books include Russian Liberalism and Russian Conservatism. This review first appeared in the Spring 2025 edition (print) of The Dorchester Review, pp. 17-20.