Kennan's Boswell?: A Review Essay

Journalist/diplomat Strobe Talbott characterizes John Lewis Gaddis's biography of George F. Kennan as "one of the great biographies of all time, on a par with Boswell's JOHNSON." Back-jacket blurbs, of course, are prone to hyperbole—sometimes worse—so I read Talbott's with more than a little skepticism. Although an admirer of Gaddis's work over a career extending back to the early 1970s, I was aware that this was his first effort at biography and that his in some ways intimate relationship with his subject and immediate family over more than three decades put at risk the detachment of even an accomplished historian.¹

Yet after reading the nearly 700 pages of Gaddis's text and examining a recent critical introduction to James Boswell's Life of Johnson as well as segments of the classic work itself, I find little to dissent from in Talbott's claim.² Indeed, while strict comparisons of works separated by more than two centuries are inherently ahistorical, Gaddis's book consistently surpasses the earlier masterpiece—in research, in analysis, and in artistry—and it compares favorably to the best biographies I have read during a long career in academe, including numerous Pulitzer Prize winners.

Gaddis's biggest advantage over Boswell and most other biographers, past and present, rests in sources. Whereas Samuel Johnson had but one sibling, who died at age twenty-five long before Boswell met his subject, Kennan had three sisters, all of whom Gaddis interviewed. Jeanette, the youngest, often played the role of surrogate mother, as she was two years older than George and their own mother passed away only months after his birth in 1904. With the possible exception for most of his adulthood of Annelise, George's devoted wife for seventy-three years, Jeanette was closer to her brother than anyone. Her correspondence with her brother and Gaddis's interviews with her provide rich material on Kennan's early life and adult personality. Moreover, from age eleven George kept an extraordinarily revealing diary, intermittently to be sure, but more often than not. Kennan also wrote two volumes of memoirs, the first a tour de force, the second "not his best work" but valuable nonetheless. Finally, as a diplomat during his years of greatest influence, Kennan accumulated many professional acquaintances, both American and otherwise. Gaddis has both interviewed a number of the most important ones and tracked down a significant body of their official correspondence pertinent to his subject, especially in the archives of the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. Gaddis never traveled or virtually lived with Kennan as Boswell did with Johnson over the last eight years of his subject's life, but overall Gaddis's sources are superior as the basis for a full biography.

And Gaddis has not wasted his opportunity. He establishes critical distance from his subject early on. After quoting a passage from Kennan's first volume of memoirs declaring the total disconnect between people in the later stages of life and "the childhood figures with whom our identity links us," Gaddis remarks with customary wit that "a biographer can, perhaps, be pardoned for not believing everything that the subject of his biography says" (5). He goes on to show, in part from Kennan's other writings, the connections between the paternal side of the family and his subject's "mystical self-awareness," shyness, and sentimentality (13). Fortunately, Gaddis remarks, the maternal side lacked the last quality, "a good thing because the Kennans had too much of it" (14). Throughout the book Gaddis describes and documents Kennan's complex personality in ways that may be traced back to his forbears and childhood and do not always reflect well on his subject. Gaddis also argues persuasively, contrary to Kennan's memoirs, that on balance the future diplomat enjoyed a normal, happy upbringing in Wisconsin.

From at least his undergraduate years at Princeton University onward, however, Gaddis demonstrates that Kennan, in important ways, was temperamentally an outsider and that that quality significantly impacted his career as a...