Kennan : a life between worlds /

Costigliola (Univ. of Connecticut) offers a provocative study of a complex icon of American diplomacy. Drawing heavily from his meticulous work as editor of George Kennan's voluminous diaries, Costigliola offers a corrective, as he sees it, to the profile presented in John Lewis Gaddis's prize-winning, authorized biography, George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011). Costigliola characterizes Gaddis's Kennan as trapped in amber, the architect of American Cold War containment policy with too little attention paid to other facets of his private and public life. This revision, by contrast, depicts Kennan as more introspective, emotional, iconoclastic, contradictory, and "outside his time" (p. 539). Caught between many worlds, Kennan was old-fashioned yet prophetic, an elitist cosmopolitan and frugal agrarian, one who embodied the "Freudian dilemma of Eros versus Civilization" (p. 140). In international affairs, he was a self-proclaimed Russophile who nevertheless served as an establishment bureaucrat, famously warning of Soviet expansionism in the late 1940s. Yet, as zealous cold warriors globalized Kennan's limited view of containment and (mis-)applied it to other contexts, Kennan morphed into a scholar and public figure who devoted the rest of his life to criticizing the excesses of Red Scare hysteria, nuclear brinkmanship, and the war in Vietnam, and to urging negotiation and compromise. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers. --Andrew J. Falk, Christopher Newport University

Historian Costigliola (Roosevelt's Lost Alliances) paints a complex portrait of diplomat George F. Kennan (1904--2005) in this intimate biography. Drawing on interviews with family, friends, and rivals, as well as State Department archives and Kennan's own diaries, Costigliola presents a man of contradictions: prescient in his environmentalism and his criticism of NATO expansion, Kennan was also alarmingly prejudiced and often sought solace in "mystical" sentimentality. In 1947, Kennan came to national attention when he published a revised version of the "long telegram" he had dictated while stationed in Moscow as a diplomat. The "X" article, as it came to be known, urged the containment of communism and was quickly adopted by the Washington, D.C., political and military elite. To Kennan's dismay, however, the document became the basis for arms races, alarming foreign interventions, and anti-Russian paranoia. Contending that most commentators "focus on the inflammatory manifestos... that helped ignite the Cold War" and "underplay pivot in the opposite direction soon thereafter," Costigliola finds plenty of evidence that Kennan believed "seemingly intractable conflicts may be more susceptible to settlement than it may first appear." Even more insightful are Costigliola's inquiries into how Kennan's interest in Freud's theories informed his worldview. Nuanced and well-reasoned, this is a consequential reconsideration of an oft-misunderstood historical figure. (Jan.)

Costigliola's (history, Univ. of Connecticut; America in the World) biography of George Kennan--the historian and diplomat once known as the United States' preeminent Russian strategist--could not be more timely. Kennan was a towering public figure, who spent his latter decades taking exception to the Cold War containment policy that he believed was unfairly attributed to him. For him, containment meant negotiation with Moscow and mutual disengagement from Europe, not a nuclear arms race and proxy wars. A sophisticated intellect and a man of many prejudices and impulses, he won numerous awards for historical scholarship, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was the ambassador to the Soviet Union and later Yugoslavia, and served as the head of the Policy Planning Staff in the U.S. State Department. The author weaves the personal and the professional to account for how Kennan's ideas and impatience about diplomacy were influenced by his mother's death; nostalgia for a time before industrialization, urbanization, environmental degradation, and rampant commercialism; and internal struggles that pit Kennan's Freudian belief in Eros against his commitment to civilization. VERDICT Meant as an analytical counterweight to John Lukacs's celebrated 2009 Kennan biography, Costigliola's book offers a respectful and critical portrayal of Kennan's life.--Robert Beauregard

A critical biography of a principal architect of the Cold War. George F. Kennan (1904-2005), a scholar at heart who had a significant role in the Foreign Service, grew up a passionate admirer of all things Russian--other than the government of the Soviet Union. Historian Costigliola, who edited The Kennan Diaries, shows how Kennan's politics verged on fascist as he was formulating many of his views on global affairs. One of his most admired friends was the far-right German nobleman Ferdinand von Bredow, who was later murdered as a rival of Hitler's. As for Kennan, "though neither a jingoist nor a militarist, he did favor an ethnically homogeneous United States and an end to immigration." During his rise through the diplomatic hierarchy, Kennan reported closely on developments in the Soviet Union but ran afoul of Franklin Roosevelt at a time when Franklin was seeking closer relations with the Stalin regime in the alliance against Hitler. When World War II ended, Costigliola writes, Kennan advocated a policy of containment, which posited that an independent Europe, led by a united Germany, would serve as a counterbalance to both American and Soviet power. Instead, that policy of containment was militarized, which Kennan opposed to the extent that he became a critic of it in his later years. "In the post--World War II era," writes the author, "Kennan would never accept the Cold War order as permanent." Still, even as he challenged the idea that America police the world, the lectures and articles he wrote served to build official American consensus about the Cold War, which had terrible consequences in a doctrine that put American troops on the ground in Vietnam. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Kennan warned sharply against extending NATO into Eastern Europe, which he feared would antagonize Russia--which it did, and as a result, Russia invaded Ukraine. A valuable resource for students of 20th-century geopolitics. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.