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‘X’ ten years on: The fictions of George F. Kennan’s recent factual representations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2015

MILAN BABÍK
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Abstract

George F. Kennan belongs among the most revered American foreign policy thinkers of the last one hundred years. He was also very protective of his future legacy, going to extraordinary measures to control it. These included authorising a single historian, John Lewis Gaddis, to write his biography, George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011). Is Gaddis’s account definitive? On the tenth anniversary of Kennan’s death, this article investigates this question as part of a broader critical reflection on methods and presuppositions governing traditional historiography. It answers in the negative by illuminating the various fictions of Gaddis’s ostensibly factual representation. These surface especially in contrast to The Kennan Diaries (2014), whose minimalist chronological structure makes the non-empirical content brought by Gaddis to his image of Kennan by virtue of narrativising it all the more visible. The larger implications of this finding are significant, particularly in the present geopolitical context of Russia’s renewed expansionism. Should the US foreign policy community (re)turn to Kennan for guidance in its attempts to understand and respond to Moscow’s current behaviour, what kind of diagnosis and prescriptions he has to offer depends on which Kennan one chooses to consult, giving historians behind his representations genuine political power.

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Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 74 - 94
Copyright
© 2015 British International Studies Association 

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Footnotes

*

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the journal’s editors and three anonymous referees, whose critical feedback comments – well-taken, thorough, and returned in a timely manner – pushed me to rethink several portions of the argument as well as its overall structure. Whatever shortcomings remain are, of course, mine to answer for.

References

1 C. Ben Wright found out the hard way in the 1970s. Furious with Wright’s contention that his idea of containment had a military – not just political and economic – aspect to it, Kennan publicly excoriated the historian. See Wright, C. Ben, ‘Mr. “X” and containment’, Slavic Review, 35:1 (1976), pp. 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kennan’s scathing reply in the same volume.

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7 Engerman, , ‘Kennan Industry’, p. 15Google Scholar. A full-length survey of the secondary literature would require a separate essay or indeed a book. Early works include Wright, C. Ben, ‘George F. Kennan, scholar-diplomat: 1926–1946’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1972)Google Scholar; and Wright, C. Ben and Bland, Larry I., ‘Scholar-diplomat: The diplomatic career of George F. Kennan’, unpublished manuscript, n.d. Other important academic treatments of Kennan’s legacy comprise, chronologically, John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Gellman, Barton D., Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power (New York: Praeger, 1984)Google Scholar; Smith, Michael J., Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Mayers, David, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Hixson, Walter L., George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Stephanson, Anders, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Miscamble, Wilson D., George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Lukacs, John, George Kennan: A Study of Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Congdon, Lee, George Kennan: A Writing Life (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008)Google Scholar; and Rice, Daniel F., Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)Google Scholar. For journalistic contributions intended for general audience and of limited value to professional historians, see Isaacson, Walter and Thomas, Evan, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986)Google Scholar, and Thompson, Nicholas, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (New York: Henry Holt, 2009)Google Scholar. The number of doctoral dissertations on Kennan is staggering, although they usually lack in thoroughness and analytical sophistication; C. Ben Wright’s above-mentioned example is one of the few exceptions. Other notable pieces include Powers, Richard James, ‘Kennan against himself? From containment to disengagement’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Claremont Graduate School and University Center, 1967)Google Scholar; Green, James Frederick, ‘The political thought of George F. Kennan’ (unpublished PhD thesis, American University, 1972)Google Scholar; and Miscamble, Wilson D., ‘George F. Kennan: The policy planning staff and American foreign policy, 1947–1950’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1980)Google Scholar.

8 In the last fifty years alone, they include such notable and diverse names as Roland Barthes, Fernand Braudel, Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, Paul Ricoeur, Arthur Danto, Louis Mink, Dominick LaCapra, and Frank Ankersmit.

9 White quoted in Domańska, ‘Human Face’, p. 14.

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22 He makes this self-understanding explicit in Domańska, ‘Human face of scientific mind’, p. 14.

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