Envoy Extraordinaire
By Don Oberdorfer
Sunday, February 25, 1996
In the spring of 1953 a new and ideologically oriented secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, ousted from government the best-known career diplomat of the day, George F. Kennan. Dulles's act, which was roundly criticized, was a blessing in disguise. Deprived of his original profession, Kennan ventured forth on one of the most prolific and distinguished literary careers of our time.
At Century's End is the most recent of Kennan's score of books. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for history as well as the National Book Award and countless other accolades. He has also written many articles and reviews and has kept an extensive personal diary, which was the basis for his 1989 volume, Sketches From a Life.
The current work is a collection of previously published articles and reviews from 1982 to 1995 plus unpublished speeches, a personal letter and a prophetic diary entry from December 1992, which forecast the failure of the U.S. intervention in Somalia as it was just beginning. This is not Kennan's most coherent or important book, being by nature fragmentary and consisting of, as he writes in his foreword, "responses to particular circumstances of the moment." Nonetheless, there is much to be learned here about Kennan's principal subject, the former Soviet Union and the Russia it inhabited, and about Kennan himself.
A former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and (as he relates) the sole survivor on either side of the establishment of Soviet-American relations in 1933, Kennan writes with clarity and insight about the Russians whom he has known so long and well. When the U.S. government in the early Reagan years jumped to dire conclusions about the imminent threat posed by Soviet power, Kennan objected strenuously. One of his most notable speeches, reprinted here--a May 1983 Washington address--described a government report exaggerating Soviet strength as "inexcusably childish." I was in the audience that day and well recall the riveting sense of concern on hearing Kennan declare that, in part because of American misperceptions, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be on "a march toward war." Tension mounted even higher that fall but diminished with a revised U.S. policy and new Soviet leader at the turn of the year, and later declined sharply in the Gorbachev era.
As Kennan acknowledges with chagrin at several places in this collection, his own eloquence 50 years ago was in part responsible for U.S. policies he eventually opposed. The perception of Soviet menace to the United States in the early post-World War II years was greatly advanced by his famous Long Telegram from Moscow in February 1946. In the current volume Kennan regrets that his powerful 8,000-word response to a simple question about economics from Washington aroused "a strain of emotional and self-righteous anti-Sovietism that in later years I wish I had not aroused." The impact of the Long Telegram was exceeded by that of his 1946 memorandum to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, eventually published as an anonymous contribution to Foreign Affairs: the famous "X article" that was the first to advocate "containment" of the Soviet Union. Kennan watched in horror over the years as his words became the touchstone of a policy of military confrontation that he disapproved. Kennan once compared his reaction to "containment" to watching helplessly as a large boulder that he had inadvertently loosened from the top of a cliff crashed down to wreak destruction below.
As this history suggests, Kennan is likely to be remembered more as a man of the pen than as a diplomat or policymaker. He himself has observed that writing, whether as a Foreign Service officer, historian or commentator, has constituted "the backbone of my professional life." If any further evidence is needed, the current collection attests to his articulateness and narrative skill on a broad range of subjects.
Despite its title and its intention to illuminate the final decades of the 20th century, Kennan's latest work also displays an old world civility and felicity of expression more appropriate to the 19th century than the e-mail era. Who else, for example, would take the time to write a 3,000-word personal letter to a friend (the historian Robert Tucker) commenting on an idea contained in that friend's recently published book?
Kennan's well-known nostalgia for a world that is past is explicit in his foreword, in which he declares that the Western world today is ending a "sad century," crippled by self-inflicted wars and confronted with emerging global problems. At age 92, it may be natural to look backward more than to look ahead. Yet Kennan, as his latest book proves, continues to be a commentator on the great events of the present day.
Don Oberdorfer, a former Washington Post diplomatic correspondent, is journalist-in-residence at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
© 1996 The Washington Post Co.
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