"Norwegians don't enjoy, they endure." So replied a woman of Norwegian background when I asked her if she had enjoyed the experience she was describing to me.
George F. Kennan was Scots-Irish in ancestry, but he married a Norwegian, spent holidays in Norway, and might as well have been Norwegian. As told by his biographer, John Lewis Gaddis, Kennan merely endured his 101 years of diplomatic service, historical scholarship, world travel, consultations with presidents and secretaries of state, reputation as perhaps the foremost American expert on Soviet affairs, and fame as the originator of America's post-war policy of Soviet "containment." Besides his professional activities, he was an amateur poet, a sailor, a man who thought deeply about religion, a devotee of Russian literature, and a hands-on Pennsylvania farmer. He lived a life that causes most of us to gasp with admiration.
But his life, from childhood to death, was troubled with feelings of guilt, inferiority, self-consciousness, and rejection. He served America nobly, but didn't really like Americans. Although he called himself a Christian, he doubted almost everything (and was perhaps unique among Christians in believing deeply in Christ, but not being so sure about the existence of God the Father). And he had no hopes for the future -- not his own future, not America's, and not that of mankind.
He was not a happy man, and his life might have been unendurable except for the continuous support of his Norwegian wife, Annelise, to whom he was married for 73 years -- despite occasional strayings on his part.
Some books one swallows happily in one sitting. Gaddis's biography,1 at 698 pages, is not one of them. I began reading it last November, shortly after writing my blog post based on book reviews of the biography, and I finished it today. It was a wine made for sipping, not chugging.
Gaddis is a distinguished Yale professor, but he had close ties with the first President Bush, and has had kind words to say about the foreign policy of the Reagan administration -- a president whom Kennan himself loathed. Much of the latter part of the biography attempts to show that President Reagan effectively put Keenan's views on "containment" into practice, thus giving both Reagan and Kennan credit for the ultimate dissolution of the Soviet Union.
It is Kennan's half-century influence, and often unfortunate lack of influence, on American foreign policy that will attract many readers. But some will also be attracted by the tragedy of a great but flawed human being, a public figure of great reputation who nonetheless never felt that he'd received the respect from either the government or the public that he deserved. Gaddis's portrait, if we assume its accuracy, shows a thinker who perhaps thought too much, an analyst whose analyses were too often affected by his emotions, and a diplomat with a deep understanding of nations and peoples who often failed to understand both the legitimate concerns and the selfish egos of individuals.
He was, as he concluded near the end of his life, a teacher, but not a politician.
When asked unexpectedly to sum up and connect the various careers of George Kennan, he laced them all under the heading of teacher: on understanding Russia; on shaping a strategy for dealing with that country; on the danger that in pursuing that strategy too aggressively, the United States could endanger itself; on what the past suggested about societies that had done just this; on how to study history; on how to write; on how to live.
George F. Kennan's life was, perhaps from his point of view, tragic. But his life serves as a model to others who follow -- a model of one man's making the maximum use of his talents, of achieving power and influence without losing his humility and sense of proportion, of maintaining his curiosity and love of learning throughout a long and active life. And also, perhaps, a cautionary story of a man's asking too much of himself, of driving himself daily to the point that he cannot sit back and simply enjoy his accomplishments, his family, and the world about him.
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1John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press 2011).
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