U.S. Cold War Policy Was Designed by a Bigot – George Kennan’s diaries reveal just how much he hated America
n a hot, dusty sunday in September 1959, George Frost Kennan welcomed to his Pennsylvania farmhouse a peculiar trio of political intellectuals. Trekking out to see the retired diplomat and renowned Sovietologist on that Labor Day weekend were the German-born psychologist Erich Fromm, the sociologist David Riesman, and Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist Party nominee for president. Their agenda was the creation of a new socialist party for the United States.
“What a strange quartet we were,” Kennan remarked in wonder. The “brilliant, subtle, and hugely imaginative” Riesman, he rightly observed, had never been enchanted “by the waning power of Marx’s magic spell”; but more to the point, Kennan himself “had little sympathy … with the inherent self-pity of the socialist cause.” As Kennan recorded in his diary that day, Burke, Gibbon, and the nineteenth-century Russian novelists shaped his own thinking much more than any left-wing thinkers ever had. “All my Scottish-Protestant antecedents rose in protest against this egalitarianism,” he wrote. “This really wild belief in the general goodness of man, this obliviousness to the existence of original sin … this grievous Marxist oversimplification of the sources of aggressiveness and bad behavior in the individual as in the mass”—it was all too naïve and wooly-minded. Predictably, the attempted meeting of the minds ended in incoherence, thrusting Kennan back into what he called “the organizational isolation where, evidently, I belong.”
This vignette is one of many gems in Kennan’s fascinating and damaging journals, now edited by Frank Costigliola, a skilled historian of American foreign relations, and it highlights a riddle of Kennan’s life: his policy ideas were utterly central to the foreign relations of the United States in the twentieth century, but he had no real home in its political system. Normally a supporter of Democrats—in the diaries, he voices support for the presidential bids of Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, Frank Church (“promptly regretted it deeply”), and Bill Clinton (“without enthusiasm”)—Kennan was nonetheless profoundly conservative in his worldview. This conservatism was neither the belligerent cultural populism bequeathed to today’s Republicans by Richard Nixon nor the happy hawkishness championed by Ronald Reagan (both of whom Kennan abhorred). It partook, rather, of Burke’s chastened view of human nature, and of the declinism of Gibbon, and of the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner—often manifested, in Kennan’s case, in casual and appalling prejudices. Above all, it echoed the brooding anti-modernism and civilizational despair of Henry Adams, to whom, fittingly, Kennan likened himself in the winter of his life. The architect of the policy of containment, it turns out, crafted the policy in defense of a country he never much liked, filled with citizens he by and large despised.
