In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Kennan’s Century
  • Anders Stephanson (bio)
George F. Kennan. At a Century’s Ending: Reflections 1982–1995. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. 351 pp. $27.50.

George F. Kennan was born during the first administration of Teddy Roosevelt, so the title of these essays, addresses, and other interventions he has written since the beginning of the 1980s is not to be taken lightly. In longevity and prominence, Kennan has indeed few equals among American public intellectuals in this century. John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Walter Lippmann come to mind. It is now, in any event, precisely half a century since Kennan, while still a diplomat in the State Department, became a figure of note and notoriety, with the appearance of the “X-Article” in Foreign Affairs. By 1950, however, he had been marginalized within the Truman administration and his career as an influential policymaker was over, sporadic ambassadorial stints later notwithstanding. Thus, at the age of forty-six, he began his second life as a man of letters and constant interlocutor in civic debates. And what an illustrious and energetic life it has been. As an octogenarian, Kennan published (among many other things) a major diplomatic history of the Franco-Russian alliance and a best-selling book of personal philosophy. It is, to say the least, a commanding record.

Ever the pessimist, Kennan finds this twentieth century, his century, “a tragic one” (p. 7) in the annals of Western civilization—his standard navigational point of reference in history. The whole period, in his view, has been overdetermined by that “orgy of carnage known as the First World War” (p. 17). This conflagration, a sort of civil war within the West, produced the Russian Revolution and the roots of fascism, thus by extension also World War II and the ensuing Cold War. Kennan’s life and our century alike have thus been shaped by that initial collapse of Western sanity. The pieces collected in the present volume, then, cover the moment when his nasty century comes to a historical (if not chronological) end, with the collapse of the Soviet Union—and so also the postwar order formed around the American-Soviet polarity. Herein lies a good deal of the interest of the book. Kennan, after all, became a “Sovietologist” in the 1920s and has remained centrally concerned with the field ever since. [End Page 341]

Longevity of service tends to beget a certain reverence and it is easy to forget that Kennan, both in and out of government, has often been a controversial figure, sharply critical of the orthodoxies of officialdom. One is reminded of this upon rereading his impassioned critique of the nuclear escapades and hackneyed ideologizing of the Reagan administration in the early 1980s. “Inexcusably childish” (p. 86) is one of his epithets. Kennan’s horror was, again, governed by his “civilizational” outlook. It is not for us, he seemed to say, to play around with the fate of the earth through any reckless nuclear abandon. Nor, for that matter, do we have the right to degrade the environment as we do.

What is otherwise striking now about these pieces from the time of the Reagan rearmament is his insistence that the Soviet Union, far from being a world-conquering, evil empire on the move, was suffering from a “slowly developing but serious crisis,” its insecurities resulting from “weaknesses” (p. 73) at home and abroad. Crumbling hegemony in Eastern Europe aside, Kennan pinpointed the widening technological gap with the West and the impossibility of closing it within existing sociopolitical conditions as the most serious problem for the Soviet regime. Military build-up coupled with rhetorical excess in this situation was not only intrinsically wrong on the part of the Reagan administration but potentially to push the other regime into catastrophic desperation. Hostile to nationalism, and with a certain nostalgia for the virtues of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Kennan came to take a fairly restrained view of the virtues of the eventual break-up of the Soviet Union, recognizing the need for independence in the case of the Baltic countries but generally wishing that existing arrangements not be wholly destroyed. His affinities were always with Gorbachev, much less so...

Share