Memoirs
by George F. Kennan
Summary
George Kennan's Memoirs is his own account of the twenty five years, 1925 to 1950, that took him from a young Foreign Service officer to the diplomat most associated with shaping how the United States would understand and respond to the Soviet Union for the rest of the Cold War. Kennan tells of his 1925 entry into the newly professionalized Foreign Service after Princeton, his language training at the University of Berlin, and his posting to Moscow in 1933 under Ambassador William Bullitt, where he became one of the small number of Americans in the embassy who actually spoke Russian and where he witnessed, from close enough to be genuinely marked by it, the paranoia and violence of Stalin's Great Purge.
The memoir's central chapters cover the February 1946 cable that made Kennan's career, the so called Long Telegram he sent from Moscow explaining Soviet behavior as rooted in a deep, inherited Russian insecurity rather than in Marxist ideology alone, and his 1947 elaboration of that argument in Foreign Affairs, published under the signature X, which gave the coming decades of American policy its defining word, containment. Kennan describes his subsequent two years directing the State Department's new Policy Planning Staff under George Marshall, where he helped design the Marshall Plan for European recovery, and his growing, increasingly public disagreement with Secretary of State Dean Acheson over whether containment should be understood in Kennan's own political and economic terms or in the more purely military terms Acheson favored. He recounts resigning from the Policy Planning Staff in December 1949 and leaving the department the following June, a departure he narrates with real ambivalence, proud of what containment had accomplished and troubled by how differently it had come to be applied once it left his hands.
Kennan writes throughout as a man revisiting his own most consequential years with the benefit, and the discomfort, of watching a phrase he coined take on a life and a military weight he had never intended for it.
Historical Context & Significance
Little, Brown published Memoirs: 1925 to 1950 in 1967, and it won both the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the 1968 National Book Award in History and Biography, an unusual double honor for a memoir rather than a biography written about someone else. Kennan followed it in 1972 with a second volume, Memoirs: 1950 to 1963, covering his later, briefer service as ambassador to the Soviet Union and then Yugoslavia.
The book remains a source for historians of early Cold War policy precisely because Kennan wrote it as a participant correcting the record, insisting throughout that his own containment doctrine had been conceived as political and economic pressure rather than the military buildup successive administrations built in its name, an argument he continued making publicly for decades after the memoir's publication.