October 24, 2022
Historian Costigliola (Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances) paints a complex portrait of diplomat George F. Kennan (1904–2005) in this intimate biography. Drawing on interviews with family, friends, and rivals, as well as State Department archives and Kennan’s own diaries, Costigliola presents a man of contradictions: prescient in his environmentalism and his criticism of NATO expansion, Kennan was also alarmingly prejudiced and often sought solace in “mystical” sentimentality. In 1947, Kennan came to national attention when he published a revised version of the “long telegram” he had dictated while stationed in Moscow as a diplomat. The “X” article, as it came to be known, urged the containment of communism and was quickly adopted by the Washington, D.C., political and military elite. To Kennan’s dismay, however, the document became the basis for arms races, alarming foreign interventions, and anti-Russian paranoia. Contending that most commentators “focus on the inflammatory manifestos... that helped ignite the Cold War” and “underplay pivot in the opposite direction soon thereafter,” Costigliola finds plenty of evidence that Kennan believed “seemingly intractable conflicts may be more susceptible to settlement than it may first appear.” Even more insightful are Costigliola’s inquiries into how Kennan’s interest in Freud’s theories informed his worldview. Nuanced and well-reasoned, this is a consequential reconsideration of an oft-misunderstood historical figure.