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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