Kennan: A Life between Worlds

by Frank Costigliola

Overview

A definitive biography of the U.S. diplomat and prize-winning historian George F. Kennan

The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904–2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy—and one of its most complex. Drawing on many previously untapped sources, Frank Costigliola’s authoritative biography offers a new picture of a man of extraordinary ability and ambition whose idea of containing the Soviet Union helped ignite the Cold War but who spent the next half century trying to extinguish it. Always prescient, Kennan in the 1990s warned that the eastward expansion of NATO would spur a new cold war with Russia.

Even as Kennan championed rational realism in foreign policy, his personal and professional lives were marked by turmoil. And though he was widely respected and honored by presidents and the public, he judged his career a failure because he had been dropped as a pilot of U.S. foreign policy. Impossible to classify, Kennan was a sui generis thinker, a trenchant critic of both communism and capitalism, and a pioneering environmentalist. Living between Russia and the United States, he witnessed firsthand Stalin’s tightening grip on the Soviet Union, the collapse of Europe during World War II, and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.

An absorbing portrait of an eloquent, insightful, and sometimes blinkered iconoclast whose ideas are still powerfully relevant, Kennan invites us to imagine a world that Kennan fought for but was unable to bring about—one not of confrontations and crises but of dialogue and diplomacy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691165400
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/17/2023
Pages:	648
Sales rank:	143,548
Product dimensions:	9.40(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Frank Costigliola is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. His books include The Kennan Diaries and Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances (Princeton). He raises grass-fed beef cattle in Storrs, Connecticut.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The first biography of George Kennan to take full advantage of his diaries, this book couldn’t be more timely as we deal with the tragic results of ignoring Kennan’s warning against expanding NATO.”—Jack F. Matlock, Jr., author of Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray—and How to Return to Reality

“As diplomat, historian, and public intellectual, George Kennan was a towering figure, arguably the most interesting American of his time, which spanned the twentieth century. In this magnificent biography, Frank Costigliola presents the man in full: gifted, prophetic, prickly, prejudiced, patriotic, alienated from modernity, and steadfast in his devotion to principle. A remarkable biography of a remarkable individual.”—Andrew Bacevich, author of After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed

“This fascinating biography analyzes, with depth, nuance, and insight, both the inner world and public life of Cold War architect turned Cold War critic, George F. Kennan. The Kennan who emerges from these pages is a man of riveting contradictions: an intuitive expert torn between propriety and philandering, authoritarianism and democracy, the containment policies he launched and the Russophilic longings that he could never satisfy. This is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand how hot-blooded emotions shaped the seemingly cold-blooded realism that has guided grand strategy.”—Kristin Hoganson, author of The Heartland: An American History

“George Kennan was a founder of the ‘realist’ school of American foreign policy now receiving renewed public attention. Frank Costigliola has produced the most thorough, biographically grounded, and beautifully written assessment of this enigmatic diplomat’s frequently heterodox views on the Cold War and the post–Cold War conduct of national security policy.”—Eric S. Edelman, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Finland

“A stunning achievement. Costigliola brilliantly illuminates Kennan’s thinking, anxieties, ambitions, and career. Meticulously researched, Costigliola’s empathetic yet critical narrative compels us to re-examine the legacy of the architect of containment. An indispensable book for understanding the man and his times.”—Melvyn P. Leffler, author of For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War

Editorial Reviews

10/24/2022

Historian Costigliola (Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances) paints a complex portrait of diplomat George F. Kennan (1904–2005) in this intimate biography. Drawing on interviews with family, friends, and rivals, as well as State Department archives and Kennan’s own diaries, Costigliola presents a man of contradictions: prescient in his environmentalism and his criticism of NATO expansion, Kennan was also alarmingly prejudiced and often sought solace in “mystical” sentimentality. In 1947, Kennan came to national attention when he published a revised version of the “long telegram” he had dictated while stationed in Moscow as a diplomat. The “X” article, as it came to be known, urged the containment of communism and was quickly adopted by the Washington, D.C., political and military elite. To Kennan’s dismay, however, the document became the basis for arms races, alarming foreign interventions, and anti-Russian paranoia. Contending that most commentators “focus on the inflammatory manifestos... that helped ignite the Cold War” and “underplay pivot in the opposite direction soon thereafter,” Costigliola finds plenty of evidence that Kennan believed “seemingly intractable conflicts may be more susceptible to settlement than it may first appear.” Even more insightful are Costigliola’s inquiries into how Kennan’s interest in Freud’s theories informed his worldview. Nuanced and well-reasoned, this is a consequential reconsideration of an oft-misunderstood historical figure. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] provocative study of a complex icon of American Diplomacy."

Choice

A Spectator Book of the Year

From the Publisher

11/01/2022

Costigliola's (history, Univ. of Connecticut; America in the World) biography of George Kennan—the historian and diplomat once known as the United States' preeminent Russian strategist—could not be more timely. Kennan was a towering public figure, who spent his latter decades taking exception to the Cold War containment policy that he believed was unfairly attributed to him. For him, containment meant negotiation with Moscow and mutual disengagement from Europe, not a nuclear arms race and proxy wars. A sophisticated intellect and a man of many prejudices and impulses, he won numerous awards for historical scholarship, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was the ambassador to the Soviet Union and later Yugoslavia, and served as the head of the Policy Planning Staff in the U.S. State Department. The author weaves the personal and the professional to account for how Kennan's ideas and impatience about diplomacy were influenced by his mother's death; nostalgia for a time before industrialization, urbanization, environmental degradation, and rampant commercialism; and internal struggles that pit Kennan's Freudian belief in Eros against his commitment to civilization. VERDICT Meant as an analytical counterweight to John Lukacs's celebrated 2009 Kennan biography, Costigliola's book offers a respectful and critical portrayal of Kennan's life.—Robert Beauregard

Library Journal

2022-08-23
A critical biography of a principal architect of the Cold War.

George F. Kennan (1904-2005), a scholar at heart who had a significant role in the Foreign Service, grew up a passionate admirer of all things Russian—other than the government of the Soviet Union. Historian Costigliola, who edited The Kennan Diaries, shows how Kennan’s politics verged on fascist as he was formulating many of his views on global affairs. One of his most admired friends was the far-right German nobleman Ferdinand von Bredow, who was later murdered as a rival of Hitler’s. As for Kennan, “though neither a jingoist nor a militarist, he did favor an ethnically homogeneous United States and an end to immigration.” During his rise through the diplomatic hierarchy, Kennan reported closely on developments in the Soviet Union but ran afoul of Franklin Roosevelt at a time when Franklin was seeking closer relations with the Stalin regime in the alliance against Hitler. When World War II ended, Costigliola writes, Kennan advocated a policy of containment, which posited that an independent Europe, led by a united Germany, would serve as a counterbalance to both American and Soviet power. Instead, that policy of containment was militarized, which Kennan opposed to the extent that he became a critic of it in his later years. “In the post–World War II era,” writes the author, “Kennan would never accept the Cold War order as permanent.” Still, even as he challenged the idea that America police the world, the lectures and articles he wrote served to build official American consensus about the Cold War, which had terrible consequences in a doctrine that put American troops on the ground in Vietnam. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Kennan warned sharply against extending NATO into Eastern Europe, which he feared would antagonize Russia—which it did, and as a result, Russia invaded Ukraine.

A valuable resource for students of 20th-century geopolitics.

Kirkus Reviews