George kennan was an inescapable presence in post-war American foreign relations, intellectually as well as politically. Having been identified early on, invariably, as the father (alternatively ‘architect’) of ‘containmentʼ, master signifier of what the us was supposedly about in the Cold War, he became in the last half of the twentieth century a sharp critic of this very same Cold War, a public intellectual, a communitarian conservative, opponent of nuclear weapons and the arms race, critic of the us war in Vietnam, and advocate of better relations with the Soviet Union. Every undergraduate with even a superficial grounding in the field would know ‘containment’, as would of course any halfway serious policymaker. Kennan as the erstwhile promulgator and Kennan as the later dissenter: the historical and discursive potential here for any discussion of ‘the us in the world’, whether in the academy or the realm of public affairs, was obvious. The immediate background of my initiating correspondence with him in 1981 had indeed to do with a PhD project devoted precisely to the analysis of this peculiar trajectory and its ‘breaks’, seen perhaps in a more conceptual manner than was customary in the historical field.
I had hesitated for some time before writing to him to get his permission to work in his papers at Princeton and, most crucially, to quote his unpublished letters and writings. In April 1981, I ventured to do so.footnote1 It was, as he hinted in his generally favourable response, altogether too long an epistle from an unknown person. I was apt to agree. The unusual format, however, was a result of my having put off again and again the necessary task of settling the issue of permissions, which in turn raised the question of the right tone and approach. My dithering ended when I resolved the matter counterintuitively by writing in a single sitting, as it turned out, a very personal account of the why and the wherefore, the politics and the history, of my dissertation project on him. I figured he might respond to the quirky pitch, even though it was a breach of etiquette and he was particular about etiquette, especially if it assumed a non-existing intimacy—and ‘intimacy’ was a key concept in his outlook, pertaining to power relations between states as well as social and personal relations.footnote2
My hunch, luckily, proved right. Kennan, overlooking etiquette, gave me the requisite sanction—which was a relief, as by then I had in fact already done quite a lot of research and the project was built on very precise textual analysis. There was a proviso: ‘Kindly regard me, for purposes of your study, as largely dead.’ I could see the sense in that. On the one hand, an injunction not to bother him with endless queries and requests for comments; on the other, conveying a sense that his was a done deal historically, that he was a series of documents from the past, a finished archive in effect. He was seventy-seven, after all. As it turned out, the ‘largely dead’ proved remarkably alive and active, speaking and writing pretty much through to his centenary. He was born, one should recall, in the first administration of Theodore Roosevelt (1904) and died (2005) in the second administration of George W. Bush, a life spanning the twentieth century. In 2002, I was not surprised to see him, at 98, offering a blistering criticism of weak-kneed congressional Democratic support for what would become the invasion of Iraq the following year. It was hard to keep up with him.
The reason for my erstwhile trepidation, probably misplaced, had to do with Kennan’s incensed reaction to an earlier article by C. Ben Wright, coming out of a dissertation, which showed Kennan’s claim to have been misunderstood on the nature of ‘containment’ to be dubious.footnote3 Containment was always portrayed in Kennan’s standard retrospective account as a political strategy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, rather than a military one. In practice it was largely the latter, with America’s post-war expansion underpinned by us-led military alliances (Kennan was never keen on nato). Wright, however, pointed out instances, admittedly few, where Kennan had actually advocated military containment. Kennan responded by questioning the author’s empirical credentials. That criticism was then reinforced by John Lewis Gaddis (action which in turn, down the line, led to Gaddis, though an ardent nato man, becoming Kennan’s authorized biographer). In fact, each side was both right and wrong: containment, depending on the circumstances, could be either political or military; but if executed judiciously, it was supposed to keep general war at bay. The distinction, then, was fluid. Meanwhile, the ‘political’ here also featured, to Kennan’s later regret, the institution of ‘political warfare’—dirty tricks, not to put too fine a point on it, under the auspices of the newly created cia and coordinated with espionage and counterespionage.