JOLLY DAYS

George Kennan

In this article about George Kennan you can see how baggy human frailties create deep ambiguities of character. Kennan was Mr. Containment, creating a policy that served as the West's model in dealing with the Soviet Union.

Kennan had little hope by predisposition but his depressive personality sometimes did fit the circumstances — like paranoids who sometimes do have real enemies. But Kennan never seemed as large as the issues, his coagulated personality unable to fill the surrounding space.

The predicament of ordinary people seems not to have moved [Kennan] much. Lukacs quotes Kennan’s own memoirs to the effect that when the Wehrmacht marched into Prague, Kennan, then serving as a high-ranking diplomat, turned away the desperate Americans, “including a Jewish acquaintance,” who came to the American legation. Lukacs characterizes this nonchalance as “cold,” not “callous.” Is there a difference?

The reviewer says about Kennan something that is suggestive of the current strains of unexamined isolationism and exhausted retreat in the air:

After all, a low opinion of mankind, or a plain lack of sympathy for the mass of men, makes it easier to counsel restraint in the face of gross injustice. Similarly, a deeply ingrained pessimism makes inaction look wiser than action. Darfur? Best not. Kennan was fond of John Quincy Adams’s observation that Americans “do not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” But sometimes we do; and the force that impels us to do so (the situation in Iraq notwithstanding) is not an ignoble one. We do, of course, need to do a better job of picking our monsters.

Sometimes though, the monsters pick us.