Memoirs (1925-1950)

George F. Kennan's Memoirs is that rare thing, a statesman's autobiography that is also a work of literature, and it may be the best book ever written from inside the American foreign service. Kennan tells the story of his first quarter century as a diplomat: the Milwaukee boyhood, the training as one of the government's first Russian specialists, the postings in the Baltic states and in Stalin's Moscow during the purges, internment in Germany after Pearl Harbor while serving in the Berlin embassy, and then the extraordinary years after the war when he briefly became the most influential official in Washington. Here, told from the inside, is the famous sequence: the Long Telegram of 1946, five thousand words from Moscow that reframed American policy overnight; the X article in Foreign Affairs that named the doctrine of containment; the founding directorship of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff and a hand in the Marshall Plan. The memoir's central drama is Kennan's dissent from his own creation. Containment, as he insists he meant it, was political and economic, not primarily military, and he watches Washington harden it into the armed confrontation he spent the rest of his career criticizing. The self portrait is unsparing: an outsider's temperament in an insider's career, prone to melancholy, often at odds with the government he served. The prose is the wonder, precise, ironic, and elegiac, and the honors matched it: the book won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 1968 National Book Award in History and Biography. A second volume, covering 1950 to 1963, followed in 1972.