George F. Kennan: An American Life

John Lewis Gaddis follows George Kennan from a Milwaukee childhood into a Foreign Service career that placed him inside almost every hinge point of the Cold War he did more than anyone else to define. The book traces Kennan's Princeton education, his advanced training in Russian language and history in Berlin beginning in 1929, and the diplomatic postings that carried him toward Moscow, where in February 1946 he sent the Long Telegram warning Washington that Stalin's government needed a hostile outside world to justify its own rule. Gaddis follows the argument into print the next year, when Kennan published the pseudonymous X article in Foreign Affairs and gave American policy the word it would use for the rest of the century, containment.

The book stays with Kennan through the Policy Planning Staff he ran for Secretary of State George Marshall, where his memos helped shape the Marshall Plan, and through two brief ambassadorships, five months in Moscow in 1952 and two years in Yugoslavia in the early 1960s. Gaddis gives real space to the second half of Kennan's life, the nearly five decades he spent at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study after 1956, writing history and growing steadily more alarmed at how thoroughly his own containment doctrine had been turned into the militarized policy he insisted he never intended it to become.

Gaddis wrote the book under an unusual arrangement: Kennan asked him to be his biographer in 1981 and opened his papers on the condition that nothing appear in his lifetime, so the finished book carries decades of interviews and a genuine intimacy with its subject's private doubts alongside its Cold War history. Reading it means following a scholar who had thirty years to get his subject right, and it suits a reader who wants the diplomat behind containment understood as a genuinely conflicted man, brilliant, aloof and repeatedly frustrated by how little control he kept over what his own words became.