Kennan: A Life Between Worlds

Costigliola’s (history, Univ. of Connecticut; America in the World) biography of George Kennan—the historian and diplomat once known as the United States’ preeminent Russian strategist—could not be more timely. Kennan was a towering public figure, who spent his latter decades taking exception to the Cold War containment policy that he believed was unfairly attributed to him. For him, containment meant negotiation with Moscow and mutual disengagement from Europe, not a nuclear arms race and proxy wars. A sophisticated intellect and a man of many prejudices and impulses, he won numerous awards for historical scholarship, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was the ambassador to the Soviet Union and later Yugoslavia, and served as the head of the Policy Planning Staff in the U.S. State Department. The author weaves the personal and the professional to account for how Kennan’s ideas and impatience about diplomacy were influenced by his mother’s death; nostalgia for a time before industrialization, urbanization, environmental degradation, and rampant commercialism; and internal struggles that pit Kennan’s Freudian belief in Eros against his commitment to civilization.