What Kennan opened up, on that bleak day in Moscow, was a way out: a path between the appeasement that had failed to prevent World War II and the alternative of a third world war, the devastation from which would have been unimaginable. Might someone else have proposed the path, had Kennan not done so? Probably, in due course, but it’s hard to think of anyone else at the time who could have charted it with greater authority, with such eloquence, or within so grand strategic a framework.
Only Kennan had the credibility to show, at a time when too many Americans still viewed the Soviet Union as a wartime ally, that for reasons rooted in Russian history and Marxist-Leninist ideology, there could never be a normal peacetime relationship with it: Stalin’s regime required external enemies. Only Kennan could have said this so compellingly as to command immediate attention in Washington. And only Kennan foresaw the possibility—Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz would have approved—that the United States and its allies might in time get the Soviet Union to defeat itself.
Kennan came to this last conclusion through an improbable convergence of ideas. One source was Gibbon, on the Romans’ difficulties in attempting to hold, indefinitely and against their will, conquered provinces. Another was the great Russian writers—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov—who had shown their country’s resistance, however subtle, to revolutionary redesign. A third was Kennan’s sense that, being human, not even Soviet leaders could withstand repeated frustration; that if confronted with it consistently, they would eventually discover an interest in joining, rather than seeking to overthrow, the existing international order. Finally, Kennan’s strategy reflected faith in the United States: if it remained true to its founding principles, it would provide a more attractive example for the rest of the world than the Soviet Union, which might itself not be immune. All that would be required was “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” Anyone could have written that sentence. Only Kennan could have made it believable.
Others determined, to be sure, what “containment” required; hence Kennan’s disillusionment with that strategy from the moment he ceased to make those determinations. By the mid-1970s, his dismay had grown to the point of seeing his own country, not the Soviet Union, as the principal threat to international stability; that shortsightedness in turn blinded Kennan to the extent to which Reagan’s policies returned to his own. Kennan’s ideas turned out to be transferable to an American leader so different from himself that he could never quite bring himself to believe what had happened.
Kennan’s strategy, then, was more robust than his own faith in it. “Containment’s” goal was not to achieve perfection but to distinguish lesser from greater evils. Its components—even those Kennan did not design—for the most part complemented the whole. It proved to be sustainable because it generally deployed strengths against weaknesses and, when it did not, corrected the error. With the help Kennan had predicted the Kremlin would provide, the world saw something worse, during most of the Cold War, than the wielding of American power. And Kennan’s strategy aligned his country’s interests, far more successfully than did his counterparts in Moscow, with long-term historical forces. For Kennan understood that in order to look forward you have to look back: that the only way you can know anything at all about the future is to know as much as you can about the past.
This brings up a second, if less striking, qualification for greatness, which is Kennan’s career as a historian. He never trained formally for this profession—perhaps that’s why he was good at it—but the study of history was at the center of his preparation for diplomacy and strategy in several ways: first, through his understanding of European and American history, acquired as a Princeton undergraduate; second, through his immersion in the history and culture of Russia as a young Foreign Service officer; and finally, through his crash reading in the classics of grand strategy while organizing the curriculum at the National War College in 1946–47.
Despite two National Book Awards, two Pulitzers, and a Bancroft Prize for his historical and autobiographical writing, Kennan was for years more widely thought of as a theorist of international relations—indeed, with Lippmann, Niebuhr, and Morgenthau, as a founding father of post–World War II realism. But Kennan disliked theory and never regarded himself as practicing that dark art. What he did believe in was the capacity of those who have studied the past to know themselves better for having done so. The “mechanical and scientific creations of modern man,” he once wrote, “tend to conceal from him the nature of his own humanity and to encourage him in all sorts of Promethean ambitions and illusions.” Reminders were needed, therefore, “of the limitations that rest on him, of the essential elements, both tragic and helpful, of his own condition. It is these reminders that history, and history alone, can give.”4
Kennan’s life as a historian, in turn, evokes a third quality for which he is likely to be remembered, which is his skill as a writer. Not the least of the reasons Kennan succeeded as a strategist and a historian is that he used words well. There was passion, luminosity, vigor, and originality in almost all of his prose, so much so that its vividness at times obscured the meanings he meant for it to convey. Had it not been for that—had Kennan written as most other Foreign Service officers did—the world might never have heard of him, and his readers would not have retained the phrases, sentences, and sometimes whole paragraphs he so indelibly imprinted upon them.
So might Kennan also be remembered as one of the great American writers of the twentieth century? He hoped for this in his youth, but as an essayist, perhaps a novelist, and certainly as Chekhov’s (if not the first George Kennan’s) biographer. Those things never happened: he attracted his readers, instead, through his official dispatches, then through his lectures and articles, then through his books, and finally through the selections he published from his letters and diaries. These last, however, are fragments. Kennan’s unpublished letters rival those of distinguished literary contemporaries, and his diaries, which run, with gaps, from 1916 to 2003, are arguably the most remarkable work of sustained self-analysis—and certainly self-criticism—since The Education of Henry Adams.5
One reason for the diaries’ importance is that they document yet another career for which Kennan should be remembered: that of philosopher. We usually understand this term to mean someone who has thought deeply about living a worthwhile life. Kennan did not attempt, until in his late eighties, to publish his conclusions (hence Around the Cragged Hill), but he had always used his diary to agonize over obligations to civilization, country, community, family, and himself. Not surprisingly, these were rarely compatible. And so, as the need to balance objectives and capabilities gave rise to a grand strategy at the level of geopolitics, in Kennan’s diaries it produced, over many decades, a personal strategy for survival.