George Kennan

Arthur Herman offers a hard critique of George F. Kennan, the great American diplomat and author of the doctrine of containment who died last week at 101. I honestly don't know whether Herman is being selective here, i.e., whether he is purposely focusing on one aspect of Kennan's overall view and arguing that it dominated all the rest of Kennan's thinking, or whether Herman has identified the essential thread that did in fact run through all of Kennan's thinking. I just haven't read enough of or about Kennan to know which is true. But I am sure that Herman is not making up this damning item of Kennan's biography:

The human factor left him unmoved. When he served in the embassy in Berlin in 1940, he complained bitterly about how keeping track of the fate of German Jewish refugees was adding to his workload. He blamed it on "powerful congressional circles at home," who had been spurred into action by Jewish interest groups. In fact, Kennan believed America's foreign policy was far too vulnerable to the demands of "vocal minorities," and he had his solution for it.

Two years earlier, he had begun writing a book about how to guide America "along the road which leads through constitutional change to the authoritarian state." The first step, he argued, was to create an enlightened elite pre-selected "on the basis of individual fitness for authority." The second was to deny the vote to certain segments of American society: to blacks, whom Kennan believed would be happiest becoming wards of the state; to women; and to immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, including presumably Jews from Poland and Russia. After all, Kennan asked, would not the Founding Fathers "turn over in their graves at the mere thought of the democratic principle being applied to a population containing over ten million Negroes and many more millions of southern Europeans to whom the democratic principle is completely strange?"

My sampling of Kennan's writings suggests that he was fortuitously insightful about the Soviets at a time when they were still putatively our allies, at the end of WWII, but that as he drifted out of the elite corps of policy makers he simply became more and more contrarian in his viewpoints. He seemed to me to be more dissatisfied with the craftmanship of policy than he was with any prevailing ideology. Herman's article paints a much different picture, that Kennan for instance had no faith whatsoever in democracy, including American democracy. I'm inclined to take at least some of what Herman says at face value. I'm waiting for reactions to his article from others who have studied Kennan.