Interviews with George Kennan (review)

As T. Christopher Jespersen rightly contends, George Kennan was one of the most intriguing figures of the Cold War not merely because of the decades-long controversy surrounding the nature of his policy views but also because of the ability of this mid-level Foreign Service Officer to rise to such prominence that he could seriously be considered "America's most famous diplomat" (p. ix). To celebrate Kennan's achievements, Jespersen has compiled an edited volume of nine of Kennan's interviews from 1956 to 1996 on a variety of topics including the nature of U.S.-Soviet relations, the role of Congress in foreign policy, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, Kennan's relationship with John F. Kennedy, and the aftermath of the Cold War.

Jespersen introduces the collection with a brief history of Kennan's rise to prominence in the years following World War II, naturally stressing the origins of the "long telegram," the legendary 1947 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct"—best known for its pseudonym "X"—and the alleged conflict Kennan had with Paul Nitze and the other drafters of NSC 68 over the scope and nature of U.S. containment policies. Kennan's failure to provide a clear articulation of his preferred strategy, Jespersen contends, is what led the Truman administration to eschew the true political-economic basis of containment for a strategy heavily weighted in favor of military action.

It is disappointing that the nine interviews themselves seldom return to this subject. Taken individually, the interviews offer a very interesting and wide-ranging glimpse into Kennan's thoughts. We sense his belief in the eventual demise of the Soviet Union from Joseph Alsop's interview in the aftermath of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, his contempt for Congress's harmful interventions in foreign policy—as in its withdrawal of Yugoslavia's Most-Favored Nation (MFN) status during his tenure as U.S. ambassador in Belgrade during the Kennedy administration—and even his peculiar (if certainly prescient) concern that the automobile would lead to a middle-class exodus from the city to the suburb. In addition, the collection includes a lengthy discussion of Kennan's strained relationship with John Foster Dulles and his surprisingly high regard for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Allen Dulles, as well as a long and wide-ranging interview with Eric Severaid from 1975 that briefly touches on Kennan's views regarding the future of détente, the discrediting of the CIA, and the loss of Indochina to Communism. Although there is little here that one would not know from having read the biographies of Kennan by Anders Stephanson and Walter Hixson, the material presented does provide undergraduate students a useful repository of Kennan's opinions on a large number of topics over a 45-year span.

This collection suffers, however, from an overemphasis on Kennan's role as an expert on the Soviet Union in lieu of a fuller discussion of Kennan as the founder of U.S. postwar national security strategy. Given the prominence that containment plays in Jespersen's introduction, it is odd that he does not include a single interview dedicated solely to examining the implementation of containment. Missing entirely is an in-depth discussion of Kennan's stance during the Vietnam War, a war that critics often blame on Kennan and his containment strategy. An interview or even an op-ed article detailing his beliefs and alternative strategies would have added greatly to the discussion. Instead, nearly half the book (84 of 174 pages) consists of two interviews from 1965 and 1967 addressing Kennan's relationship with the Dulles family, his opinion of John F. Kennedy, and the failure of Congress to ratify MFN trade status for Yugoslavia. Even more surprising is the mere two-page interview from 1996 assessing the collapse of the Soviet Union, the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (a step that Kennan opposed on grounds that look dubious in retrospect), and the future of U.S. foreign policy in the...