Velociworld

Kennan

John Lewis Gaddis has written a new biography of George F. Kennan which I eagerly anticipate from Amazon. Kennan was the rather low-level State Department functionary who, as ambassador to the USSR in 1947, outlined our Cold War strategy of Containment first in the so-called Long Telegraph from Moscow, then in an anomymous missive in Foreign Affairs known as the X Article.

I used to plunder a wonderful old bookstore in Virginia-Highlands when I lived in Atlanta. Around 1980 I ran across the first volume of Kennan's autobiography. I'd never heard of the guy. What a read.

The Long Telegraph was in response to a State Department query along the lines of, "Aren't the Soviets quite happy sharing the world with us?" Kennan's response was, essentially, "Are you fucking crazy?" He posited it was an ideological struggle with religious overtones. They expected world domination, and were quite prepared to achieve it. His remarks were eventually fed back to the Kremlin, and he was asked to leave. The only American ambassador ever to be declared persona non grata by the Soviets.

The X Article was a policy thing. Kennan was quite fearful of nuclear Armageddon, and therefore detailed a policy of "containing" the Soviets whenever and wherever they exhibited expansionist tendencies, up to and including military action, covert and overt.

Truman bought into containment, but Kennan was then appalled when containment morphed into appeasement. He gets a bad rap now for containment, but his idea was to engage in small hot wars where applicable, funding resistance and unrest, that sort of thing. I believe selected assassinations would have passed his muster.

At any rate, I am told Gaddis's book is the definitive Kennan tome, and a wonderful read. As an aside, Kennan died in 2005 at the age of 101. He was railing at that point against the Hispanization of America, and the dire consequences resulting from that failure to assimilate. So that's kind of a cool footnote.