The Kennan Diaries by George F. Kennan (review)

George Kennan’s stature as a Cold War diplomat can obscure his long and varied career as prizewinning historian, autobiographer, and cultural critic. Indeed, Kennan often complained that even his diverse diplomatic career had been reduced to a textbook caricature of him as chief architect of U.S. containment policy and global anticommunism.

Publication of these well-chosen selections from Kennan’s diaries helps restore the man’s range and complexity, supplementing his two-volume Memoirs (1967 and 1972), his previously published diary entries in Sketches From a Life (1989), and the recent authorized biography by historian John Lewis Gaddis. Along the way, these diaries reaffirm Kennan’s continuing relevance in American life as a critic of foreign policy idealism and the expansion of nato toward Russia’s borders in the 1990s.

The diaries begin in 1916 with Kennan’s childhood on Cambridge Avenue in Milwaukee. These fragments set the stage for Kennan’s lifelong inner dialogue about the Midwest and the significance of his Wisconsin family and community to his identity. In January 1916, Kennan was a precocious eleven-year-old excited about Woodrow Wilson’s visit to Milwaukee on the President’s swing through the Midwest to drum up support for “preparedness.” Surprisingly, Kennan debuts in these pages as a budding interventionist, thrilled to hear Wilson speak at the downtown Auditorium to a crowd of eight thousand, and “very much pleased” by his pastor’s sermon on preparedness preached at a special Sunday evening “patriotic service.” The Reverend Paul Burrill Jenkins of Immanuel Presbyterian Church was a Princeton graduate and tireless booster of war preparedness. He took young men from his Milwaukee congregation to the military training camp at Plattsburg, New York, and later served as a hospital chaplain in France. In April, the young Kennan attended meetings of the local chapter of the Junior National Security League and drilled with a naval officer.

But in May 1916, the diary ended as suddenly as it had begun. Kennan left no record of his years as a cadet at St. John’s Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin, other than a gloomy recollection of “a quick two mile march” through the “cold and bleak” winter landscape and back to the “still bleaker” barracks. Only in 1924 does Kennan reappear, now as a sophisticated Princeton undergraduate about to embark on a career that would take him to Switzerland, Germany, the Baltic, the Soviet Union, England, and back to Princeton.

Three encounters with his Wisconsin roots stand out as especially poignant: a long section entitled “Homecoming” about a bicycle trip in 1938; a visit to his parents’ graves in 1955; and a lecture at Ripon College in 1965. He wrote in the summer of 1938 of being pained by the stark contrast between memory and experience, between the Wisconsin he recollected from his childhood and “the urban façade of American life with which he was now confronted.” He blamed the twin impact of rail and auto for the decline of rural communities and their absorption into the bland uniformity of modern consumerism. Connected by lonely highways for the convenience of tourists, the small towns and farms of Wisconsin were being undone by urbanism and extremes of privacy and individualism. Kennan’s analysis can feel too self-consciously intellectual and literary at times, but his pain was real and personal because this was the world of his ancestors, the place where his paternal grandfather farmed the land he acquired after serving in the Union army, and the home where his father had grown up.

In the summer of 1955, he stood looking with his sister Jeanette at his parents’ gravestones, “sturdy” Victorian markers, “uncompromisingly legible and specific.” His mother had died when he was a baby. “We have all held you in a sort of awe adoration,” he wrote of her: “our ever-young dead mother, beautiful, unworldly, full only of love and grace for us, like a saint.” And then of his father: “awkward, shy almost to...