May 15, 2024
George Kennan: A Life Between Worlds
Frank Costigliola
Professor of History, University of Connecticut, author
George Kennan: A Life Between Worlds
Frank Costigliola
Professor of History, University of Connecticut, author
George Bustin, introducer, and Frank Costigliola, speaker
Minutes of the 30th Meeting of the 82nd Year
John Cotton presided over the meeting. Frances Slade led the invocation. Sarah Ringer read her minutes of the preceding week’s session. Nine members were accompanied by guests: Jeffrey Lipkowitz brought Scott Elder; Marlaine Lockheed brought Richard Sack; Peter Epstein brought Lynn Aylward; Lynne Durkee brought Norma Smith; Ricardo Fernandez brought Dr. Anders Boss; Julie Elward-Berry brought Peter Reczek; Herbert Kaufmann brought Lloyd Gardner; Jules Richter brought Manny Amendo; and Tony Glockler brought Maxine Lampert.
Membership Chair Teri Lemischka read the names of ten applicants for membership. The assembled members voted their approval of the new additions to the Old Guard rolls by unanimous acclimation, with no nays or abstentions. One hundred twenty members and guests attended the session.
George Bustin introduced our speaker, Frank Costigliola, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. The professor treated Old Guard members to a highly engrossing, recap of his biography entitled George F. Kennan: A Life between Worlds.
Costigliola began his presentation by noting that today’s talk was especially pertinent in respect to both time and place. In respect to place: Kennan was a Princeton alumnus, he had a 50-year association with the Institute for Advanced Study, 330 boxes of his papers are on deposit at Firestone Library.
In respect to time: May 9th marked the 79th anniversary of Victory Day in Russia—a celebratory occasion during which Stalin’s secret police lifted the restrictions on contacts between foreigners and ordinary Russian citizens. Kennan always remembered this interlude as having provided a tantalizing taste of what more normalized relations between East and West could have entailed.
Kennan loved the people and culture of Russia, especially that of the pre-revolutionary era. But in the late 1930s he had witnessed, with repulsion, the horrors of Stalin’s purges and show trials. This repulsion, amplified by the Soviet’s post-war repression of Eastern Europe, prompted the policy initiatives that made his reputation.
On Washington’s birthday, 1946, Kennan received a State Department request to report on what was transpiring in Moscow. In response, he dictated a 5,500-word reply, famously the longest telegram ever sent to the dignitaries of Foggy Bottom. In this Long Telegram he portrayed the Soviet regime as an existential threat to the U.S. government and to the American Way of Life.
A year later, his briefly anonymous, Mr. X article appeared in Foreign Affairs. The article reiterated this dire picture, and, in response to Soviet expansion, advocated for a strategy of containment as a way out of the then widely perceived dilemma of having to choose between appeasement and war as the only viable, policy options. Costigliola noted that, taken together, the Long Telegram and the Mr. X article, illustrate Kennan’s singular talent for deploying heated prose in the service of a cool realism.
Within just one year, the publicity received by these two manifestos catapulted Kennan from obscurity into appointment as the State Department’s first director of policy planning, and, for a brief, three-year period, he enjoyed an influence that he never recovered over the balance of his long lifetime.
Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles and the other cold warriors of the time interpreted “containment” as necessitating a military build-up as needed to prevail in an open-ended Cold War that would ultimately conclude in Moscow’s unconditional surrender. Kennan, by contrast, never lost faith in the prospect of a negotiated outcome. Thus began what the professor characterized as Kennan’s “persistent, poignant” advocacy over four decades for serious diplomacy to ease Cold War tensions. In this effort, Kennan came to regard the Mr. X article as an albatross around his neck and to regret having ever depicted the Soviet military threat in such ominous terms.
Thus, paradoxically, Kennan was at once the celebrated author of post-war containment, and its most persistent critic as it came to be practiced—a venerated figure within the foreign policy establishment whose advice it chose to completely ignore.
Costigliola provided several striking examples of Kennan’s prescience from today’s perspective. For example, as early as 1948, Kennan observed that, should the Soviet Union eventually be dissolved, the Baltic States could safely be granted sovereignty, but that no Russian government would ever accept an independent Ukraine.
Professor Costigliola’s talk left his audience with the intriguing, counterfactual historical questions of whether having heeded Kennan’s advice would have accelerated or have protracted the end of the Cold War and would have avoided the renewed confrontation between East and West that we are witnessing on our TV screens today.
In conclusion, and somewhat parenthetically, Kennan was prominent among a group of foreign policy elders popularly known as “The Wise Men.” I don’t know about other members of the Old Guard, but my ultimate fantasy as a geezer would be to be recognized in my dotage as a publicly certified Wise Man, but, somehow, I doubt that my children would ever buy into it. I can’t help but wonder about Kennan’s.
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Epstein
Membership Chair Teri Lemischka read the names of ten applicants for membership. The assembled members voted their approval of the new additions to the Old Guard rolls by unanimous acclimation, with no nays or abstentions. One hundred twenty members and guests attended the session.
George Bustin introduced our speaker, Frank Costigliola, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. The professor treated Old Guard members to a highly engrossing, recap of his biography entitled George F. Kennan: A Life between Worlds.
Costigliola began his presentation by noting that today’s talk was especially pertinent in respect to both time and place. In respect to place: Kennan was a Princeton alumnus, he had a 50-year association with the Institute for Advanced Study, 330 boxes of his papers are on deposit at Firestone Library.
In respect to time: May 9th marked the 79th anniversary of Victory Day in Russia—a celebratory occasion during which Stalin’s secret police lifted the restrictions on contacts between foreigners and ordinary Russian citizens. Kennan always remembered this interlude as having provided a tantalizing taste of what more normalized relations between East and West could have entailed.
Kennan loved the people and culture of Russia, especially that of the pre-revolutionary era. But in the late 1930s he had witnessed, with repulsion, the horrors of Stalin’s purges and show trials. This repulsion, amplified by the Soviet’s post-war repression of Eastern Europe, prompted the policy initiatives that made his reputation.
On Washington’s birthday, 1946, Kennan received a State Department request to report on what was transpiring in Moscow. In response, he dictated a 5,500-word reply, famously the longest telegram ever sent to the dignitaries of Foggy Bottom. In this Long Telegram he portrayed the Soviet regime as an existential threat to the U.S. government and to the American Way of Life.
A year later, his briefly anonymous, Mr. X article appeared in Foreign Affairs. The article reiterated this dire picture, and, in response to Soviet expansion, advocated for a strategy of containment as a way out of the then widely perceived dilemma of having to choose between appeasement and war as the only viable, policy options. Costigliola noted that, taken together, the Long Telegram and the Mr. X article, illustrate Kennan’s singular talent for deploying heated prose in the service of a cool realism.
Within just one year, the publicity received by these two manifestos catapulted Kennan from obscurity into appointment as the State Department’s first director of policy planning, and, for a brief, three-year period, he enjoyed an influence that he never recovered over the balance of his long lifetime.
Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles and the other cold warriors of the time interpreted “containment” as necessitating a military build-up as needed to prevail in an open-ended Cold War that would ultimately conclude in Moscow’s unconditional surrender. Kennan, by contrast, never lost faith in the prospect of a negotiated outcome. Thus began what the professor characterized as Kennan’s “persistent, poignant” advocacy over four decades for serious diplomacy to ease Cold War tensions. In this effort, Kennan came to regard the Mr. X article as an albatross around his neck and to regret having ever depicted the Soviet military threat in such ominous terms.
Thus, paradoxically, Kennan was at once the celebrated author of post-war containment, and its most persistent critic as it came to be practiced—a venerated figure within the foreign policy establishment whose advice it chose to completely ignore.
Costigliola provided several striking examples of Kennan’s prescience from today’s perspective. For example, as early as 1948, Kennan observed that, should the Soviet Union eventually be dissolved, the Baltic States could safely be granted sovereignty, but that no Russian government would ever accept an independent Ukraine.
Professor Costigliola’s talk left his audience with the intriguing, counterfactual historical questions of whether having heeded Kennan’s advice would have accelerated or have protracted the end of the Cold War and would have avoided the renewed confrontation between East and West that we are witnessing on our TV screens today.
In conclusion, and somewhat parenthetically, Kennan was prominent among a group of foreign policy elders popularly known as “The Wise Men.” I don’t know about other members of the Old Guard, but my ultimate fantasy as a geezer would be to be recognized in my dotage as a publicly certified Wise Man, but, somehow, I doubt that my children would ever buy into it. I can’t help but wonder about Kennan’s.
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Epstein