The Kennan Diaries

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. (Feb.)