The cover photo of George Kennan on the paperback edition of John Lewis Gaddis’ biography shows a man of ease and erudition – an approachable professor. By contrast, the initial hardcover edition shows an expressionless man in hat and overcoat, stoic and still as a bronze statue. Gaddis writes a life of Kennan that illuminates these two distinct sides of his character. The leading Cold War historian provides detailed context for the achievements that made Kennan’s reputation, principally spearheading the policy of ‘containment” that became the foundation for U.S. Cold War strategy. He also demonstrates the continuing value of Kennan’s legacy in some unexpected ways.
Kennan recognized the vagaries of the foreign policy world while weighing a career in the diplomatic service. In 1931, “The United States had no foreign policy,” Gaddis writes, “only the reflections of domestic politics internationally.” Nearly two decades later, as the first director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Kennan was surprised to find himself in a job aimed at developing that policy.
“Nothing had prepared him for the possibility that his country might devise and carry out a coherent strategy, much less one based on his own thinking,” Gaddis tells us. That Kennan would pioneer the planning role with such reservations about its utility is telling, and his experience as head of policy planning would bear out his skepticism. Despite the backing of a powerful Secretary of State in George C. Marshall, Kennan quickly determined that “grand strategy” was nearly impossible to sustain in the face of ever-shifting events. It was nevertheless important to work through a long-view planning process – as generals make war plans – to inform approaches to ongoing issues and so that when crisis hit policy makers were not engaging a region or issue that had received no prior analytical attention. Policy planners today may identify with the frustrations of working in a context of perpetual hypotheticals. They may also, however, acknowledge the value of prior long-term analysis in establishing context for dealing with what develops as the issue of the day.
Gaddis relates another under-reported aspect of the Kennan legacy: inventing, or at least conceptualizing, the foreign policy think tank. While at the Institute for Advanced Study – itself one of the prototype think tanks, with faculty specializing in mathematics and the sciences –Kennan’s wanted to set up a staff modeled on State’s Policy Planning group that would advise government on policy. Kennan’s group, Gaddis writes, would “’suggest a rationale for foreign policy and a set of premises and principles by which we could all be guided in our thinking on this subject.’ It would be a Policy Planning Staff operating independently of the State Department.” Kennan saw the potential in establishing a “shadow government” to inform policy making, and his mandate to “guide thinking” articulates of the mission statement of many prominent Washington think tanks today. Kennan’s shadow planning staff never convened, and his think tank visions were likely not the only ones (the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, had already been in existence for decades.) Kennan, however, was ahead of the curve in seeing the value of a vibrant NGO sector to shape policy making.
Finally, given Gaddis’ description of Kennan’s shifting but largely skeptical views of Congress throughout his lifetime – including a brief flirtation with running for office himself – one wonders at his possible views of today’s Congress. Kennan was prone to elitism. His unpublished works contain controversial arguments against democracy and in favor of the centralized decision-making possible in more authoritarian forms of government. Gaddis relates Kennan’s closest experience with lobbying – an effort to prevent Congress from restraining aid to Yugoslavia during his ambassadorship there. It’s as good an example as any of foreign policy in practice; not grand strategy but glad-handing and legwork. Gaddis’ portrays Kennan as both a less interested in and less able at the day-to-day politics of policymaking. He could be criticized as removed and more comfortable with speech-making than retail politics. This charge is frequently leveled at President Obama, and it’s easy to think Kennan might relate. It’s doubtful, however, that he would have approved of Obama’s recent overture to Congress on Syria, having both favored strong executive leadership and doubted in any outside a self-selected “elite” could or should actualize policy.
Gaddis draws so heavily on diaries, personal correspondence, and Kennan’s own poetry that his subjects’ awareness of his own insecurities and limitations emerges clearly. It balances the intellectual achievement and reputation that otherwise threatens to put Kennan on a pedestal, and presents a figure who could be affable as well as admirable. While he pursued foreign policy planning with an academic’s rigor, he maintained a healthy skepticism about the human capacity to shape events. Late in Kennan’s diplomatic career, John Lennon wrote: “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” Upon finishing Gaddis’ book, one feels that Kennan – the planner as well as the poet – would like that line.
