The Kennan Diaries

November 25, 2013
The legendary diplomat and architect of America’s containment policy toward the Soviet Union fights the Cold War and his own tortured soul in these brooding journal entries. The diaries, spanning 90 of Kennan’s 101 years, are frustratingly silent during crucial periods—the year 1947, when Kennan’s writings remade American foreign policy, merits a single poem—but contain lengthy discussions of Kennan’s ideas on limiting Soviet power while avoiding World War III through a blend of military firmness and political engagement (he also describes his anguish at escalating confrontations between the U.S. and Soviet Union that he felt powerless to stop). Many entries paint a lurid picture of Kennan’s dark, fragile, misanthropic psyche, expressing his narcissistic hunger for influence and accolades and self-loathing over failures; his love-hate attitude toward Russia’s barbarian vitality, which he felt would win out over the decadent West; his disdain for what he considers to be lesser races and lower orders; his distaste for monogamy and the “boredom, boredom, boredom!” of bourgeois life. Kennan’s Spenglerian gloom and depressive funks can drag—“I have nothing to live for, yet fear death,” he mourned, with 50 years to go—but he was a talented writer who penned vivid travelogues, shrewd profiles, and intricate scenes of diplomatic fencing. The result is an engrossing, novelistic record of Kennan’s long twilight struggle in geo-politics and in life. Photos.

January 1, 2014
One of 20th-century America's most significant diplomats offers a window into his inner life and private concerns, fears and dreams. With an eye to posterity, Kennan (1904-2005) assiduously kept a diary for nearly 90 years, compiling thousands of pages on everything from his impressions of Soviet leaders to notes on wave patterns in the North Atlantic. Costigliola (History/Univ. of Connecticut; Roosevelt's Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War, 2011, etc.) has selected the most representative and revealing passages for this dauntingly thick but eminently readable volume. In this age of ubiquitous social networking and oversharing, it seems remarkable that Kennan could write so much, about so many topics, without being dull or self-absorbed, but nearly every entry contains a perspicacious observation or insight. His dry wit is evident from the earliest years: At Princeton, he complained of an assigned book, "[i]t is really a great aid in the allopathic treatment I am taking this spring to cure my imaginative tendency, because it takes real assiduous mental concentration to dope a sentence out of it." Displaying a tendency toward self-doubt that he hid in his confident public pronouncements and publications, Kennan's diary entries evince an enduring belief that he could never quite live up to the goals he had set for himself. As early as 1959, he fretted that "[t]he Western world, at least, must today be populated in very great party [sic] by people like myself who have outlived their own intellectual and emotional environment." Inexorably drawn again to Russia and endowed with an aesthetic and humanist imagination much broader than the State Department could contain, Kennan's life's work was, more than any political squabble, a searching for the "answer to the universal question of this wistful, waiting Russian countryside." Students of modern history will take great interest in this work, which ably straddles the frontiers of the personal, political and philosophical.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from January 1, 2014
Few American diplomats and historians were as prominent and as honored as George Kennan, whose posthumous profile remains high due to the 2011 biography by John Lewis Gaddis and now this edition of diaries Kennan kept during his longlifetime. They reveal, among other things, that he was anything but satisfied by the outward-appearing success of his life and career(s); a querulous tone about the courses of both permeates his private writing. If complaint is one characteristic of the entries, melancholy is another as Kennan confesses unhappiness with many things, from sexuality to American society and democracy to the U.S. Department of State. Perhaps psychic candor motivated his diary-keeping (though Kennan writes quite guardedly about his probable infidelities), but as important an impulse was his desire that his ideas, philosophical and political, be published. Kennan, of course, did this in a best-selling book (Around the Cragged Hill, 1993), but in this format his ideas appear in unrefined though typically trenchant form. Readers familiar with Kennan's place in the hardheaded arena of international relations may be surprised to meet the fragile and often despairing personality in these diaries but will respect the searching honesty with which he examined his experiences of witnessing the turbulent twentieth century.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 1, 2014

Kennan, whose "Long Telegram" of 1946 and "X" article of 1947 articulated the West's postwar containment strategy against the U.S.S.R. and who then became an architect of the Marshall Plan, was among the most prominent creators of 20th-century U.S. foreign policy. He was also among its most famed critics, speaking out against what he saw as the militarization of American Cold War policy and the senselessness of its nuclear buildup. In addition, for 88 years of his 101-year life (1904-2005), he was a diarist. Editor Costigliola (history, Univ. of Connecticut) here abridges those 20,000 pages of self-examination. As accomplished as he was, Kennan rarely measured up in his own reckoning, agonizing over what he saw as failures in both his public and personal lives. Neither did he feel that the country he served so well for so long measured up, as in private he frequently condemned its commercialization, mechanization, and environmental degradation. VERDICT As Kennan notes, his diary tends toward the "personally plaintive." John Lewis Gaddis's authorized George F. Kennan, or Kennan's own rich memoirs will be better entrees for readers new to the writer. Scholars and others familiar with Kennan, however, will relish these reflections and all will respect the light editing by Costigliola, who allows Kennan to speak for himself. [See Prepub Alert, 8/19/13.]--Robert Nardini, Niagara Falls, NY

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2013

Culled from 8,000 pages' worth of diary entries from Kennan, U.S. Cold War diplomat extraordinaire, this volume soars over 90 years of U.S. history (Kennan lived to be 101) and includes personal memoir and political observation, philosophy, poetry, and ethics.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.