The value of narrative in historical representation

The focus on the contributions by Gaddis and Costigliola should not be taken to mean that Kennan historiography is a recent development or that it consists of nothing else. To the contrary, and showing the futility of Kennan’s efforts to discourage them, scholars of International Relations and US foreign policy have been writing about him for decades, turning him into one of the most thoroughly documented American statesmen ever. A decade ago John Mearsheimer commented about E. H. Carr, often invoked alongside Kennan as one of the fathers of modern realist international thought, that ‘a veritable cottage industry of articles and books about [him] and his ideas’Footnote ⁶ has sprung up thanks to legions of historians and followers. A similar effort has engulfed the figure of Carr’s American counterpart and contemporary: ‘A veritable Kennan industry began in the early 1970s and boomed in the late 1980s and early 90s’,Footnote ⁷ yielding well over two hundred accounts to date.

Given this crowded and fiercely competitive Kennan historiography, one may wonder what new information Gaddis and Costigliola could possibly bring to the table that has not been uncovered before. The answer is simple: precisely the things Kennan kept closest to his chest and out of the hands of preceding researchers, most notably his private diaries. This is the main basis for Gaddis’s and Costigliola’s shared distinction in recent Kennan scholarship: their works utilise previously unavailable evidence. However, they go about presenting it in markedly different ways, with one of them fashioning it into a well-ordered biographical story, the other producing merely a chronological sequence of edited journal entries. It is appropriate, then, to preface the comparison of the two works with a brief reflection on the role and value of narrative in historical representation in order to provide an analytical framework for grasping the implications of their diverging forms.

Scholars who have engaged with the issue of narrative in historical writing are legion.Footnote ⁸ In the English-speaking world, however, the pre-eminent figure has been the American theorist Hayden White, whose work at the intersection of historical and literary studies has revolutionised modern historiography and acted as a major catalyst for the linguistic-discursive turn in humanities since the 1970s. Inspired especially by Barthes, whom he proclaimed ‘the greatest and most inventive critic of the postwar period’,Footnote ⁹ White has dedicated his career to mapping the poetics of composition of historical texts and to fleshing out the silent non-empirical content brought to them by virtue of their narrative structure. The results of White’s efforts have become known as ‘the narrativist theory’Footnote ¹⁰ of historical representation and garnered him widespread influence. Robert Doran did not hesitate to suggest that ‘one would have to return to the nineteenth century to find a thinker who has had a greater impact on the way we think about historical representation, the discipline of history, and on how historiography intersects with other domains of inquiry, particularly literary studies’.Footnote ¹¹

Central to White’s narrativist thesis is the notion that ‘Stories are told or written, not found.’Footnote ¹² They are discursive human fabrications, and as such ‘All stories are fictions.’Footnote ¹³ Insofar as modern historians are required to portray the past in story form, satisfying a criterion of representation that became mandatory in professional historiography in the nineteenth century, their craft necessarily involves the poetic techniques of the novelist: narrative selection, omission, emplotment, figuration, troping, and so on. ‘Historians’ findings’, as White puts it, ‘are arrived at by cognitive operations that have more in common with poetry than … science.’Footnote ¹⁴ The end result – the historical text – amounts to a piece of literary art. In White’s words,

White does not deny that historians compose their stories out of different material than novelists: real, as opposed to imaginary, events. In other words, the narrativist thesis does ‘not … say that a historical discourse is not properly assessed in terms of the truth value of its factual (singular existential) statements taken individually and the logical conjunction of the whole set of such statements taken distributively’.Footnote ¹⁶ But the difference in material is secondary to the identity in process, whereby both historians and novelists engage in narrative composition and storytelling in the first place. For White, it is precisely in and through poetic emplotment that the element of fiction enters into factual accounts of the past, which in order to pass for proper historical accounts must consist of ‘much more than a list of singular existential statements’.Footnote ¹⁷ They must feature narrative structure, and this structure, as Louis Mink was the first to point out, ‘claims truth not merely for each of its individual statements taken distributively, but for the complex form of the narrative itself’.Footnote ¹⁸

Since any given set of factual statements can be emplotted and figured in a number of radically different ways yielding radically different meanings – following Giambattista Vico and Northrop Frye, White identifies four master tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony corresponding to four plot archetypes of romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire – the narrativist thesis has a distinctive relativising thrust.Footnote ¹⁹ Those sympathetic to it, such as literary theorist Linda Hutcheon, have promptly responded by claiming White for postmodernism in historical and literary studies.Footnote ²⁰ Those embarrassed by it, such as traditional empiricist historians exemplified by Gertrude Himmelfarb and Arthur Marwick, have publicly denounced it as a ‘flight from fact’, ‘a menace to serious historical study’, and arrogant ‘shibboleths’ by narcissistic neo-Marxists hell-bent on destroying hard-won objective knowledge of the past with a few metaphysical speculations.Footnote ²¹ Needless to say, neither camp has done White justice. The former downplays White’s respect for facts and ignores his self-identification as a structuralist engaged in a modernist project.Footnote ²² The latter neglects that he does not jettison the notion of historical truth, but merely seeks to move it from the domain of Hempelian deductive logic to the domain of tropologic: ‘[Vichian] “poetic logic”, which informs discourses much more immediately than any version of syllogistic logic.’Footnote ²³

Instead of dwelling on such controversies, however, it is better to point out White’s larger project: delineating the social function of history. According to Dominick LaCapra, White’s chief distinction has been his ‘attempt to make interpretive and explanatory strategies – which remain implicit in traditional historiography practiced as a craft – explicit, self-conscious, and subject to criticism’.Footnote ²⁴ In explicating these strategies and the non-factual content brought by them to story-like accounts of the past, the narrativist thesis serves White to cast modern historiography as a subset of rhetoric and hence of ethics. No matter its conventional empiricist pretensions, the historical enterprise emerges as an ongoing discursive and mimetic performance in and through which humans tell themselves how to live. There is always ‘an irreducible ideological component in every historical account of reality’.Footnote ²⁵ As White elaborated, ‘Every history has its myth. … There is no value-neutral mode of emplotment, explanation, or even description of any field of events. … The very use of language itself implies … a specific posture before the world which is ethical, ideological, or more generally political: not only all interpretation, but also all language is politically contaminated.’Footnote ²⁶

The relevance of the narrativist thesis for the purposes of this article springs from the fact that it locates the ethical, ideological, and political dimension of historical representation precisely in the structural features distinguishing Gaddis’s George F. Kennan from Costigliola’s Kennan Diaries. Both texts work with the same set of factual statements that can be evaluated as to their fidelity: Kennan’s previously undisclosed private diary entries. But only one of the volumes narrativises them and hence contains the additional ‘poetic and rhetorical elements by which what would otherwise be a list of facts is transformed into a story’.Footnote ²⁷ Setting the two works side by side thus makes it possible to isolate these elements and thereby lay bare the fictions of Gaddis’s factual representation of the statesman. This is no mean feat given that the stamp of Kennan’s approval tends to signal that Gaddis has authored the definitive account of his life, and moreover given that Gaddis has done it so masterfully as to virtually disappear from the reader’s view, generating an impression of such transparency and immediate access to Kennan that one reviewer remarked that ‘Gaddis functions as much as amanuensis as he does as biographer.’Footnote ²⁸

Kennan on American political culture: ‘I hate the “peepul”’

The focus on the poetic form of Gaddis’s biography should not be read as in any way downplaying the importance of the book’s substantive content. Indeed, even in the densely populated Kennan historiography, the depth and breadth of documentary evidence amassed by Gaddis place his work in a league of its own. In the early 1980s, Kennan granted the Yale scholar exclusive access to a whole treasure trove of private records, including not only the 20,000-page personal diary, but also over 300 boxes of various other papers including a special dream diary. Other historians often wondered what sort of material Kennan was keeping away from them: ‘I imagine’, Anders Stephanson speculated in the 1980s, ‘that [he] … maintains a collection of more private papers, letters, and diaries outside [his publicly available] collection’.Footnote ²⁹ Meanwhile, Gaddis was busy stuffing his car with stacks of binders at Kennan’s Princeton home and hauling them off to his residence in New Haven, Connecticut.Footnote ³⁰

For the next three decades, until Kennan’s death, the two men carried on a lively conversation, with Kennan frequently taking the initiative to send Gaddis fresh material; their correspondence alone fills three manuscript boxes. Gaddis was also allowed to read family papers held by Kennan’s daughter and consult extensively with his wife, Annelise Sørensen. Even card-carrying Kennanologists are consequently treated to exciting discoveries in George F. Kennan, such as Kennan’s poetry. They learn that Kennan’s famous Long Telegram does not, contrary to common wisdom, contain 8,000 words, but only about 5,000 (Gaddis has counted them by hand), and that Kennan’s 1952 expulsion from the Soviet Union after he publicly compared Stalin’s Moscow to a Nazi prison camp was truly historic: the only time an American ambassador suffered such a fate in 240 years of US-Russia relations.

To engage with Gaddis’s storytelling abilities and the poetic structure of his work, however, the best point of departure lies elsewhere: in a brief episode toward the end of the volume. Having traced Kennan’s life from his birth on 16 February 1904, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, through his meteoric rise to and fall from prominence in the State Department in the late 1940s, all the way to his long retirement at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Gaddis relates the following occurrence, which took place at the Soviet Embassy in Washington on 8 December 1987: attending a reception on the occasion of Mikhail Gorbachev’s first visit to the United States, Kennan found himself seated at a table with, as he wrote in his diary, ‘a lady of most striking appearance, who chain-smoked Danish cigars and appeared to be rather bored by the whole performance. … I was later told that I should have recognized her – as the widow of a famous rock star’.Footnote ³¹ Kennan had no idea who she or her deceased husband was. The only impression that stuck with him was that the musician’s name sounded, strangely, somewhat like ‘Lenin’.

The episode may seem trivial, surrounded as it is by a myriad of other, weightier events out of which Gaddis weaves the account of Kennan’s life: his early loss of his mother, 73 years of marriage to Annelise, diplomatic postings in various European countries, or, of course, the Long Telegram and subsequent ‘X’ article proposing containment of the Soviet Union. On a second thought, however, the paragraph-long anecdote is deeply revealing of the form of Gaddis’s book. This is because Gaddis successfully communicates the identities of the widow and the dead rock star without ever revealing them explicitly at all. Neither the name of Yoko Ono nor that of John Lennon appears anywhere in the book or its twenty-page index, but not a shade of doubt exists in the reader’s mind that it was they Kennan had stumbled upon at the reception. So well crafted is Gaddis’s narrative that it can occasionally dispense with concrete data and rely solely on its figurative power, which continues to transmit substantive content even where Gaddis actually leaves it out. This allows him to be not only funny, as when relating the Soviet Embassy episode, but also discreet, as when keeping the reader from entering those areas of Kennan’s life where strangers arguably have no business trespassing, such as his extramarital affairs. Like Yoko Ono and John Lennon, Kennan’s numerous dalliances, too, are present in Gaddis’s biography without being there at all.

Besides showcasing Gaddis’s extraordinary literary skills, the Soviet Embassy episode also, above all, captures the essence of his story’s main protagonist: Gaddis casts Kennan as an elitist who, apparently, had never heard of the Beatles – the only feat more difficult to accomplish in the West in the 1960s and 1970s than containment of the Soviets. If Michael Joseph Smith remarked in his assessment of Kennan that ‘No fair-minded person can fail to admire [his] … sheer culture’,Footnote ³² that ‘sheer culture’ clearly did not include popular culture. Kennan wrote sophisticated verse and could recite Dostoevsky and Chekhov from memory, but he had hardly any idea about the daily lives, preoccupations, goals, fears, and general self-understanding of ordinary Americans. According to Louis Menand, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and close Kennan observer, this was Kennan’s most peculiar characteristic: ‘he had little love for, or even curiosity about, the country whose fortunes he devoted his life to safeguarding’.Footnote ³³

Gaddis is far from alone in stressing Kennan’s patrician attitudes; these are a staple of practically all Kennan historiography. Daniel F. Rice has recently summarised them with the blunt remark that ‘Ideally, if Kennan were to have his way, the modern world would return to an earlier time in which an aristocratic fraternity of world leaders could speak with one another independently from the people they represented.’Footnote ³⁴ Kennan gave the most notorious expression to his anti-majoritarian sentiments in an unpublished 1938 draft essay ‘The Prerequisites’, calling for an authoritarian state restricting suffrage to white males and denying it to immigrants, non-professional women, and blacks. In the context of American mass democracy, such views made Kennan scandalously un-American – and render Gaddis’s subtitle, An American Life, a rather odd choice. When in the 1970s C. Ben Wright dug out ‘The Prerequisites’ from the archives, in addition to suggesting that Kennan’s original conception of containment had a much more substantial military dimension than the statesman had indicated in his memoirs, Kennan rushed to do damage control by removing the essay from his collected papers, denouncing Wright as an amateur, and driving him out of the historical profession.Footnote ³⁵

Most of the time, however, Kennan did not hide his contempt for average Americans at all. ‘I hate democracy; I hate the press; … I hate the “peepul”’, he wrote his sister Jeanette in a 1935 letter discovered by Gaddis in the archives.Footnote ³⁶ Such antipathies toward liberal democracy were not uncommon in the interwar era, but Kennan continued to evince them even after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, America’s victory in the Second World War, the onset of the Cold War, and into his old age. He was as candid and unapologetic in 1975 as in the 1930s:

What Kennan loathed about American society was the rampant materialism, consumerism, and mass culture destroying its fabric and ‘spirit of fellowship’. The rise of the automobile, symbolising all these debilitating trends, caused him special angst, and he railed against the American obsession with cars and highway travel relentlessly.

Where did Kennan’s animosity toward his compatriots come from? At least some of his alienation can be traced to his undergraduate years at Princeton, where his Midwestern middle-class origins set him apart from the sons and daughters of the East Coast bluebloods and turned him into an outsider. The main source of his estrangement, however, was his experience of the world beyond America’s borders, specifically of the Soviet Union, during his first decade in the Foreign Service. Scathing of Russia’s rulers and their Marxist ideology, which he regarded merely as a fig leaf disguising traditional Russian paranoia and despotism, Kennan nonetheless fell in love with the Russian people, whose soul, stoicism, sturdiness, and deep sense of community made American society appear hopelessly shallow and artificial by comparison.

The same therefore may be said about Kennan as Jonathan Haslam has said about E. H. Carr, who similarly spent part of the interwar era as a junior diplomat in Riga, Latvia, where he became exposed to Russian writers such as Dostoevsky: ‘intellectually [he] had stepped out into a parallel universe’.Footnote ³⁸ The encounter with Russian culture was no less transformative for Kennan and, just as in Carr’s case, fuelled his disenchantment with Western liberalism. In consequence, Gaddis remarks, ‘[Kennan] understood the Soviet Union far better than he did the United States’.Footnote ³⁹ Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Kennan’s boss in Moscow in the mid-1940s, had already concluded as much.

Kennan on International Relations: ‘Particularism’ as an ethic of global diversity

Kennan’s alienation from ordinary Americans did not, however, yield only retrograde anti-majoritarian inclinations, which in ‘The Prerequisites’ came dangerously close to the sort of paternalism used in the antebellum South to justify slavery. It simultaneously freed him from traditional popular preconceptions about America’s role in the world, thereby enabling him to formulate the innovative foreign policy ideas for which he would become revered.

Since the founding of the United States, and building upon the myths of divine election and millennial progress articulated by their seventeenth-century Puritan forebears, Americans have viewed themselves as a chosen people with a manifest destiny to redeem humanity to liberty. Nobody diagnosed this national self-worship more astutely than Reinhold Niebuhr, who, as Rice points out in his study of the theologian, saw American democracy as a type of secular religion: ‘[Americans] extol its virtues, are apprehensive about the perils to which it is exposed, pour maledictions upon its foes, rededicate themselves periodically to its purposes, and claim unconditional validity for its ideals.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Kennan was in his teens when, during and immediately after the First World War, this national religion reached its highest pitch in Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to make the world safe for democracy.Footnote ⁴¹ Presupposing an underlying universal harmony of interests, Wilsonian liberal internationalism sought to attain it through the application of American democratic principles and institutions to individual states and the international order as a whole.

From Kennan’s vantage, as from that of Niebuhr and other classical realists such as Hans Morgenthau, this traditional popular interpretation of America’s special messianic identity and historical purpose was sheer nonsense, not to mention sacrilege. It wildly exaggerated the moral worth of American democracy. Kennan vehemently ‘reject[ed] … the image of ourselves [Americans] as teachers and redeemers to the rest of humanity, … the illusions of unique and superior virtue on our part, the prattle about Manifest Destiny or the ʻAmerican Century.’… We are, for the love of God, only human beings, … the bearers … of all the usual human frailties. … [N]o divine hand has ever reached down to … elevate us … over the remainder of mankind.’Footnote ⁴² Furthermore, the secular religion of American democracy, especially its liberal internationalist manifestation, failed to grasp the plurality and diversity of peoples and interests around the world – something Kennan, in contrast, was powerfully aware of thanks to his years spent living abroad. From within the ‘parallel universe’ of the Russian soul, which had absorbed him, the assumption that American values were universal appeared grotesquely naïve: an expression of American ignorance and provincialism.

Instead of Wilsonian universalism, and drawing on his detachment from American political culture, Kennan proposed a dramatically different approach to national security: a ‘particularistic’ one. ‘For him’, as Gaddis stressed elsewhere, ‘the most notable characteristic of the international environment was its diversity, not its uniformity.’Footnote ⁴³ Rather than gloss over this diversity and vainly try to eliminate it by converting everyone to American principles, it was imperative to recognise it and work with it: maintain the conflicting interests within the international system in equilibrium so that no one country, or group of countries, would rise to dominate the rest. As Kennan put it in 1948, at the apex of his influence as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, ‘Our safety depends on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile … forces of the world: To put them … one against the other; to see that they spend in conflict with each other … the intolerance and violence and fanaticism which might otherwise be directed against us, that they are thus compelled to cancel each other out.’Footnote ⁴⁴

Kennan’s famous recommendations concerning America’s post-Second World War strategy reflected this particularistic worldview. With Western Europe and Japan lying in ruin, only one country combined ideological hostility toward the United States with sufficient military-industrial capability to act upon it: the Soviet Union. Should Stalin fill the power vacuums in Europe and Asia, many in the US foreign policy establishment feared that Moscow’s preponderance in the global distribution of power would become irreversible and impossible to counterbalance; American sovereignty would come under an existential threat at that point. It was in this geopolitical setting that Kennan composed his ‘X’ article, described by Henry Kissinger as ‘stand[ing] in a class by itself … No other Foreign Service officer ever shaped American foreign policy so decisively…’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the article, Kennan instructed American statesmen to abandon the fiction that American and Soviet postwar interests coincided, frankly admit their differences with the Soviets, and engage in ‘a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies … designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The ultimate goal was to gradually dissuade the Soviets from trying to convert the world to Marxism-Leninism – without trying to convert them, or anyone else, to American liberalism. Containment in this sense served as a continual reminder to both Washington and Moscow that neither knew what was best for others around the globe. It represented a means to peaceful US-Soviet coexistence in the context of a well-balanced pluralistic international order, with each power pursuing friendly associations with other countries rather than attempts to conquer them.

Unfortunately, from the moment Kennan introduced the concept, containment began morphing into policies quite different from what he had envisioned. President Truman quickly turned it into a sweeping commitment to support free people wherever dictators threatened to subjugate them, including in instances where such subjugation did not in any way enhance Soviet power. Worse, whereas Kennan imagined containment principally in terms of economic and political assistance (such as the Marshall Plan) to Germany and other countries trying to stave off Soviet pressures while recovering from the Second World War, already in 1950, under the new directorship of Paul Nitze, the Policy Planning Staff redefined it in military terms: in order to negotiate with Moscow from a position of strength, all efforts shifted toward achieving strategic superiority, in effect postponing negotiations and prolonging the conflict indefinitely. Instead of serving as a means to a diplomatic settlement of US-Soviet differences, containment became an end in itself.

By the 1960s, things had gotten worse: containment was now being invoked to justify aggressive democracy promotion around the world, most notoriously in Vietnam but also, more covertly, in various parts of Latin America. ‘The defense of diversity in … a dangerous world’, Gaddis observed in Strategies of Containment, ‘had produced most of the costs, strains, and self-defeating consequences of indiscriminate globalism.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Under the weight of America’s traditional political culture and messianic self-understanding, the concept of containment collapsed into a code word for militant liberal internationalism: exactly the opposite of what Kennan had intended.

Kennan looked on with dismay. After quitting the State Department in 1950 over policy disagreements, his status shrank to that of an outside observer. He made the most of his new role; as Kissinger remarked, ‘Kennan had [not only] fashioned the concept of containment … [but] also expressed some of the most trenchant criticism of the way his own theory was being implemented.’Footnote ⁴⁸ He abhorred the creation of NATO and the division of Germany. He voiced vehement opposition to the arms build-up, repeatedly denounced the absurdity of predicating the stability of US-Soviet relations on nuclear weapons, warned against the apocalyptic human and ecological consequences of atomic warfare, and implored leaders in both Washington and Moscow to ‘cease this madness … You are mortal men. You are capable of error. You have no right to hold in your hands – there is no one wise enough … to hold in his hands – destructive powers sufficient to put an end to civilized life on … our planet.’Footnote ⁴⁹

His opposition to the Vietnam War, joining Niebuhr’s and Morgenthau’s vocal criticisms, was no less spirited. His 10 February 1966, testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staged a devastating assault on America’s grand strategy, imperial pretentions, and sense of invincibility. Televised nationwide, the hearing marked a watershed event in public perceptions of the conflict. In the 1968 presidential campaign, Kennan repeated the scathing assessment as part of his endorsement of Senator Eugene McCarthy, running on an explicitly anti-Vietnam War platform.

The flagrant perversions of Kennan’s original idea of containment, paired with his ongoing lack of control over its implementation, filled him with frustration for the remainder of his long life. In Gaddis’s telling, ‘after 1947 he could never regard the doctrine with which he was credited as his own. That produced a dejection extending over dozens of … birthdays to come.’Footnote ⁵⁰ During his fifty years of retirement at the Institute for Advanced Study, distinctions of the highest order were bestowed upon Kennan, including two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, the Bancroft Prize, the Pour le Mérite Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and almost thirty honorary degrees. Despite such widespread acclaim, however, Kennan considered himself a failure. The trauma of losing his mother without getting a chance to form so much as a single faint memory of her – he was only two months old when she passed – surely played a major role, but the inability or refusal by America’s Cold War leaders to understand his foreign policy vision added to his self-doubt.

In his old age, exhausted by his quixotic quest against the massive inertia of America’s longstanding exceptionalist political culture, Kennan ended up feeling sorry for merely keeping alive. ‘I think it’s fair to say that [he] holds some kind of record for despair’, Gaddis remarked in an NPR News interview accompanying the release of the statesman’s authorised biography; ‘I would repeatedly, in the last twenty years or so, get phone calls in which he would apologize profusely for living.’Footnote ⁵¹

The fictions of Kennan’s factual representations

Is Gaddis’s representation of Kennan definitive? Does it achieve what Kennan had hoped it would when he handpicked the Yale historian as his biographer and gave him unrestricted access? Should all other prospective Kennan scholars view George F. Kennan: An American Life as the alpha and omega of Kennan historiography: a work that automatically relegates all other accounts, including the as yet unwritten future ones, to the minor leagues?

On initial thought, it is hard not to answer in the affirmative, and not just because of Gaddis’s painstaking research and exclusive primary sources. It is also because of the book’s exquisitely crafted narrative arc, whose structure resembles a Bildungsroman and makes the biography difficult to put down: the main hero survives a difficult ‘Childhood’, engages with the world surrounding him, ‘Rediscovers America’, receives ‘A Grand Strategic Education’, rises to prominence as ‘Policy Planner’ in the world’s most powerful country, suffers defeat, undergoes ‘Disengagement’, descends into ‘Private Doubts’ interrupted by only a ‘Rare Possibility of Usefulness’, turns against society as a ‘Counter-Cultural Critic’, and slowly re-emerges out of the depths of his downfall as a ‘Prophet’ who ends up achieving ‘Precarious Vindication’ and eventually ‘Greatness’, as the sequence of Gaddis’s chapter titles traces the stations of Kennan’s life. Above all else, the biography bears the seal of Kennan’s personal endorsement. ‘From the beginning’, Gaddis let it be known, ‘Kennan’s willingness to entrust me with a biography … was … an extraordinary expression of confidence.’Footnote ⁵²

But initial appearances can be deceiving, even when supported by such claims to authenticity. On more sustained reflection they often melt away and yield to a far more ambiguous and complicated reality. This turns out to be precisely the case with Gaddis’s work when one revisits it armed with, on the one hand, the analytical tools of White’s narrativist thesis and, on the other, the most recent addition to Kennan historiography: The Kennan Diaries edited by Frank Costigliola, a fellow diplomatic historian.

As the title indicates, this book is neither a biography nor any other kind of history proper but a collection of a particular type of primary documents: Kennan’s journal entries. Aside from Costigliola’s short opening essay and intermittent commentary introducing different time periods, it features no plot line and displays no narrative structure other than bare chronology. This makes its representation of Kennan far less coherent and unified than Gaddis’s portrait: the individual captured within its pages is scattered and fragmented, often to the point that without the title on the cover one would find it impossible to tell whether the entries come from a single person or many different ones.

But if the image of Kennan in The Kennan Diaries is much less intelligible than in Gaddis’s biography, it is also, by the very same token, much more descriptively accurate, for reality – even where it bears the name of a discrete human being – does not come ready-made in well-ordered and easily understandable stories. Rather, it is messy, confusing, chaotic, and full of contradictions: ‘enthymemic’, in White’s terminology.Footnote ⁵³ ‘Reality is highly complex’, White elaborates; ‘You can’t tell a simple story about it. … [T]he more information you get, the less comprehension you can have of a situation.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Description and explanation are inversely related; the latter requires and emerges through simplification, figuration, and emplotment – poetics, in short. Gaddis tacitly admitted as much when he prefaced his rendition of Kennan by saying that ‘I’ve left out a lot. I’ve done so … because … character emerges more clearly from the choices biographers make than from the comprehensiveness they attempt… .’Footnote ⁵⁵ Not that Costigliola was any less selective; turning the 20,000 pages of Kennan’s journal entries into the comparatively slim 700-page Kennan Diaries necessarily entailed excluding a lot of information, such as Kennan’s daily log of sailing in Scandinavian waters aboard his two boats, the 32-foot Nagawicka and the bigger, more serious Northwind.Footnote ⁵⁶ But whereas Gaddis, using various literary techniques and poetic-figurative devices, additionally crafted the selected data into a meaningful and captivating story, a sort of diplomatic history’s equivalent of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, Costigliola merely arranged them in a chronological sequence, whose parts are in principle interchangeable, do not convey any discernible narrative relating the rise, fall, and resurrection of a heroic individual, and do not conclude so much as simply terminate.

It is precisely on account of this structural aspect that The Kennan Diaries represent an excellent yardstick for assessing narrativised historical representations of Kennan: ‘the chronological sequence’, White has pointed out, ‘[may be] regarded as a kind of zero degree against which … [to] measure emplotment’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Because Costigliola’s volume features only minimal form – one stripped down to the bare ticking of the clock – it correspondingly possesses little-to-no ‘content of the form’, as White calls it: the unacknowledged ethical-political baggage brought by historians to their accounts of the past by virtue of rendering them as stories.Footnote ⁵⁸ This enables The Kennan Diaries to function as a sort of light table against whose background the otherwise hidden ‘content of the form’ of Kennan’s other (narrativised) historical images gains crisp contours. Superimposing George F. Kennan: An American Life over this light table allows one to illuminate Gaddis’s presence in the text, bring him out of the shadow of his hero, and expose the fictions of his factual representation of Kennan. What does one find?

First of all, and as is common among biographers, Gaddis believes that the person at the center of his narrative truly mattered. The dubious nature of this assumption emerges from the relative coverages given by the two volumes to different phases of Kennan’s career, specifically the phase spanning 1946 and 1949: Kennan’s peak influence as the author of the Long Telegram, Mr ‘X’ behind the concept of containment, key adviser to Secretary of State George C. Marshall, and director of the Policy Planning Staff. Whereas Gaddis accords this phase a full fifth of his biography, The Kennan Diaries all but skip it. Kennan kept no regular diary in 1946 and in 1947 added only one entry: a short poem.Footnote ⁵⁹ Only in 1949, with his marginalisation and decline in official policymaking circles, did he resume his copious private ruminations. In other words, it appears that Kennan’s diaries tended to serve him as a relief valve to vent anger and frustration with being out of power.

To this extent, although Gaddis parades them as the trophy source lending his portrait of the putative architect of US Cold War strategy authoritative status, the diaries paradoxically constitute an index of Kennan’s insignificance – lack of real policymaking power as sustained and vast as the journal itself. As Andrew Bacevich has recently written, ‘Kennan was to statecraft what James Dean was to acting or Sylvia Plath was to poetry. Once “discovered”, he burned brightly, but burned out quickly.’Footnote ⁶⁰ One of the unarticulated myths of Gaddis’s ostensibly factual representation, then, is his overly favorable view of Kennan’s historical agency. ‘To explain actual outcomes … in terms of what some individual achieved or might have achieved if given the authority to act’, Bacevich added, ‘is … to misunderstand the workings of history’.Footnote ⁶¹ Even had Kennan remained in charge of the Policy Planning Staff for another decade, larger forces – social, cultural, economic – need to be taken into account. ‘As an explanation for why the United States does what it does in the world, the original sin of American exceptionalism or the machinations of the national-security state offer a closer approximation … than do the scribblings of wise men … .’Footnote ⁶² For proponents of neorealism and neoliberalism, two leading schools of mainstream IR theory today, the real motive force of International Relations is larger still: neither individuals like Kennan nor state-level characteristics such as America’s exceptionalist culture, but the anarchical structure of the international system as a whole.Footnote ⁶³

Gaddis is too charitable not only with respect to Kennan’s actual impact, but also with respect to his political views and the content of his character. This is the second illusion of Gaddis’s representation brought out by The Kennan Diaries: Kennan’s elitism was far uglier, at least by today’s standards, than his authorised biography divulges. Much like Gaddis’s narrative, Costigliola’s volume reveals Kennan’s notorious pessimism and despair: ‘Beware of enough gloomy prognostications to give the book of Revelation a run for its money’,Footnote ⁶⁴ a reviewer has commented about the edited diaries. But unlike Gaddis or, earlier, John Lukacs and Michael Joseph Smith, all of whom portray Kennan as a highly cultured conservative, the relentless bigotry toward other races, nations, religious and ethnic groups, immigrants, women, and homosexuals pervading Costigliola’s chronicle makes even the most loyal Kennan fan blush, cringe, and finally turn away in disgust. ‘The diaries establish beyond any doubt that Kennan was given to gross and derogatory generalizations about virtually all foreign peoples.’Footnote ⁶⁵ They also make it crystal-clear that Kennan had a life-long fear of racial and ethnic interbreeding, which on one occasion led him to recommend compulsory sterilisation for all men who had spawned two children. One would have never guessed this from Gaddis’s telling; although a ‘morbid interest in the ethics of reproduction seems to have been with Kennan for most of his life, … the word “eugenics” does not appear once in … Gaddis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning authorized biography …’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Despite his best efforts to maintain emotional distance from Kennan, Gaddis appears to have wound up sufficiently awestruck by the diplomat to have produced a sort of hagiography, failing – much as Smith and Lukacs before him – to engage with Kennan as a peer.

This brings up the third and, for students of US foreign policy, the most intriguing fiction of Gaddis’s factual representation of Kennan: perhaps because of his deeply treasured self-perception as Kennan’s sole chosen apostle, Gaddis does not disclose that part of Kennan’s legendary frustrations and despair may have stemmed from Gaddis’s own work, specifically from his (mis)understanding of Kennan’s legacy. When Kennan selected Gaddis to write the biography in the early 1980s, he did it because the Yale historian seemed to comprehend containment the way Kennan had intended, without any of its subsequent distortions and misapplications; if America’s Cold Warriors from Truman and Acheson on could not grasp Kennan’s strategic vision, Gaddis would at least preserve it for posterity. It was Gaddis’s implicit thesis in Strategies of Containment, a book Kennan approved of, that whenever American statesmen strayed from Kennan’s original formulation of containment, it got the United States into trouble.

Soon, however, Mr ‘X’ grew uncertain, not least due to Gaddis’s favourable estimation of Reagan’s massive arms build-up and fiery rhetoric promising to ‘roll back’ the influence of Moscow’s ‘evil empire’, exactly the sort of hardline reading of containment Kennan despised. By the year 2000, in an eye-opening journal entry missing from Gaddis’s book but present in The Kennan Diaries and pointed out by Costigliola even before their publication, Kennan could no longer avoid venting:

A couple years later, as the United States invaded Iraq in the context of a foreign policy defined in terms of US primacy, unilateral interventionism, democratisation, and pre-emptive war, the gap between the two men widened further. In keeping with his particularistic philosophy, Kennan denounced any pretensions of America’s special status as the redeemer of other peoples: ‘This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers of a great part of the rest of the world’, he stated already in 1999, ‘strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesirable.’Footnote ⁶⁸ By contrast, Gaddis became one of the leading academic apologists for – and darlings of – the neoconservative Bush administration, whose 2002 National Security Strategy, according to one prominent observer, amounted to Wilsonian universalism on steroids: ‘the most Wilsonian statement any president has made since Wilson himself, echoing his pledge to use American power to create a “universal dominion of right”’.Footnote ⁶⁹ As a consultant to the administration, Gaddis suggested including the idea of ending tyranny around the world in Bush’s second inaugural address.Footnote ⁷⁰ In his account of Kennan’s life, he duly noted Kennan’s condemnations of American exceptionalism and crusading spirit but only to brush them aside as ‘repetitive rants’.Footnote ⁷¹

Gaddis’s biography is therefore a seminal achievement. Kennan emerges as a brilliant and sophisticated thinker keenly aware of the limits of human knowledge, including and especially any self-proclaimed absolute doctrines – whether American liberalism or Soviet Marxism-Leninism. But it would be entirely wrong to conclude that Gaddis’s biography is also definitive, for there are other, equally plausible Kennan’s waiting to be discovered, as The Kennan Diaries show. E. H. Carr’s famous exhortation to ‘study the historian before you begin to study the facts’Footnote ⁷² has lost none of its lustre and should be applied twice as vigorously to all Kennan historians who, unlike the exceptional example of Anders Stephanson, conceal their ideological interpretive standpoint and fail to openly admit that ‘Historiography on American foreign relations tends to be a politicized art.’Footnote ⁷³

Gaddis belongs among such historians even as his neoconservative commitments shape his whole narrative, yielding a representation of Kennan that is ‘ultimately clipped and flattened’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Kennan’s opposition to the militarisation of containment and America’s self-idolisation as a crusader for democracy is portrayed as more or less confused, a strategic blunder, and key events revealing the full extent of this opposition are either marginalised or, as in the case of Kennan’s support for McCarthy’s 1968 presidential bid and anti-Vietnam platform, entirely omitted. Kennan was no William Appleman Williams and had little time for the sort of New Left revisionism exemplified by the latter. But he was far more alienated from the United States, in love with the Russian people, and convinced that the Cold War persisted (if not originated) due to American aggressiveness than Gaddis is prepared to admit.

In light of such elisions and bowdlerisation, Gaddis’s work furnishes not so much the final word on Mr ‘X’ as merely yet another fine specimen of historiography in the traditional mold: a text that claims to be both art (a captivating story) and science (a story of facts) without nonetheless considering itself bound by the standards and strictures of either. Unlike stories told by novelists, it refuses to acknowledge its origin in its author’s poetic imagination and to submit to esthetic and moral criteria of assessment. And unlike accounts produced by scientists, it refuses to restrict itself to making only singular existential statements, insisting instead on encoding them in narrative form, never mind that this form, to recall Mink’s and White’s argument, features a truth-value over and above that of each of its individual statements taken distributively. To this extent, George F. Kennan: An American Life is bad art and bad science: myth, in a word, fiction rendered factual via its displacement and relocation in illo tempore, the primordial dawn of time at the beginning of the Cold War out of which the United States, thanks to miracles of analysis and perspicacity performed by Kennan and a few other illuminated ‘wise men’, emerged victorious into its present geopolitical glory.

The politics of Kennan historiography

When all is said and done, however, do the divergences among Kennan’s representations truly matter? One could easily argue that they are purely academic, amounting to little more than an effort by Kennan historians to stay in business, find yet another excuse to organise yet another conference behind the walls of their ivory towers, and generally give themselves something to talk about – mainly to clear their throats of mothballs inhaled in archives. Is it not the case that, as much as they might excite and preoccupy the relatively small community of Kennanologists, the different readings of Kennan’s legacy have practically zero public or policy relevance?

Far from it: such an impression would be yet another manifestation of the pervasive myth that Kennan historiography – and the historiography of American diplomacy an statecraft more generally – is exempt from the influence of its surrounding social, political, and economic context and that it does not shape this context in turn. Kennan historians themselves rather belie both of these claims: the former by failing to agree on a single definitive account of Kennan wie er eigentlich gewesen ist, and the latter by participating vocally in policy debates in an attempt to shape actual decisions. Gaddis’s role as a consultant to the Bush administration offers one example of such involvement. Another illustration may be found in Costigliola’s recent New York Times op-ed piece arguing that ‘Kennan’s diary and other writings offer timely advice about balancing United States policy in the era after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars’ and that ‘[President Obama], and we [Americans] as a nation, … need … Kennan now, as much as at the dawn of the Cold War.’Footnote ⁷⁵

Costigliola used his column to flesh out what Kennan would have said about current US policy toward Iran. But given that Kennan became famous chiefly for analysing Soviet expansionism and spelling out America’s strategy of response to it, his foreign policy ideas – insofar as they are applicable to current affairs at all – are even more directly germane to contemporary US-Russia relations, especially in the context of Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea and ongoing pressures on other parts of Ukraine. How would Kennan explain these developments? What would he emphasise as the mainsprings of Russia’s current behaviour on the international stage, and what sort of foreign policy response would he recommend to American statesmen? It depends on which Kennan one chooses to consult: different representations of his legacy have profound implications for both his hypothetical diagnosis of Russia’s current behaviour and his prescriptions for how to deal with it.

One set of lessons may be derived from Kennan the State Department official, policy planner, and author of the Long Telegram and ‘X’ article – elements of his bequest emphasised by Gaddis, whose biography’s coverage is heavily skewed toward Kennan’s government career. This Kennan might suggest that today as in the late 1940s, Moscow’s appetite for additional territory springs from internal factors. It is ‘not based on any objective analysis of situation beyond Russia’s borders … [but] arises … from basic inner-Russian necessities’,Footnote ⁷⁶ specifically from ‘traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This insecurity predates Putin’s Russia as much as the Soviet Union, transcends their ideological differences, and goes all the way back to Russia’s earliest agricultural settlers. In modern times, it has been amplified by Russia’s absolutist leaders: in order to retain power and legitimise their backward regimes, they demonise the external world and foster a siege mentality among ordinary Russians, who respond by rallying around them and eagerly following them – their messianic saviours – into conquests of perceived hostile neighbors. In this sense, ‘The stress laid in Moscow on the menace confronting Soviet society from the world outside its borders’, as Kennan summarised the dynamic, ‘is founded … in the necessity of explaining away the maintenance of dictatorial authority at home’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Putin, like the Soviet elite before him and the tsars earlier still, may be understood ‘as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced [the] country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Another, different set of lessons may be derived from Kennan the State Department outcast, US foreign policy opponent, and scathing critic of American exceptionalism and liberal universalism – elements of his legacy abundantly on display in The Kennan Diaries, which cover predominantly the decades after his government career. While this Kennan would not leave internal factors out of the picture when explaining Russia’s current international behaviour, he would place relatively more emphasis on external causes, notably the militarisation of Western policy toward Russia from NSC-68 onward and the creation and expansion of NATO, all of which he repeatedly decried as counterproductive to the peaceful resolution of the Cold War. On this reading, Russia’s recent actions in Crimea and other areas of Ukraine are at least partially rooted in the long history of aggressive American and Western statecraft, which did not abate in 1989–1991, has come to threaten Russia’s core strategic interests, and ultimately prompted Moscow to respond. John Mearsheimer’s recent analysis of the roots of the crisis would likely earn a nod of approval from Kennan represented in this manner:

Russia may very well be inherently neurotic in its perceptions of the outside world, but over the two decades since the end of the Cold War the Western powers led by the United States have hardly allayed Moscow’s fears. On the contrary, by tightly incorporating many members of the former Soviet bloc – whether Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics, or the Baltic countries – in its military, political, and economic structures, the West has fired Kremlin’s insecurity to ever greater heights. For this reason, at least part of the blame for the Ukrainian crisis belongs to the United States.

It goes without saying that the different diagnoses of Russia’s international behaviour yield different, even mutually contradictory, prescriptions for American diplomats and statesmen in search of a policy of response. If Russia’s expansionism in Ukraine emanates from ‘inner-basic necessities’ independent of Western behaviour, then there is not much the United States or the European Union can do to stop it except offer Ukraine economic, political, and perhaps military assistance – much as Kennan instructed President Truman to do in the war-ravaged regions of Europe in order to contain the spread of Soviet influence after 1945. Inviting Ukraine to join NATO or the EU might be sensible from this angle. But if instead Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine is to be understood as a defensive move prompted in large measure by external factors, notably unchecked Western liberal universalism invading Russia’s immediate backyard, such steps would constitute exactly the wrong course of action: like trying to put out fire by pouring gasoline on it, they would exacerbate rather than alleviate the causes of the crisis.

Is any one diagnosis and related set of prescriptions more authentic – closer to the true spirit of Kennan – than the others? Were Kennan still alive, the issue would be easier to adjudicate. But since he is no longer around, the question can be posed only to his various living interpreters, who will answer it consistently with their specific representations of Kennan’s legacy. In the resulting debate on the relative merits of the various explanations of and solutions to the Ukrainian crisis, as in debates on other contemporary international problems, they will therefore tend to produce arguments that are partly circular and self-referential: in order to defend a particular analysis of Kremlin’s international behaviour and a corresponding US foreign policy response recommendation, one will appeal to a particular construction of Kennan, which in turn will reflect one’s current perspective on Russian behaviour, American statecraft, and world affairs at large.

This finding points to what may be the greatest fiction of not only Gaddis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, but all Kennan’s factual representations, and, indeed, all US foreign policy historiography: the underlying assumption that Kennan and other dead ‘legends’ comprising the pantheon of American diplomacy and statecraft are worth remembering, commemorating, discussing in lengthy biographies, and returning to for counsel and advice. If their representations are always and necessarily custom-tailored to the moral and political values, goals, and interests of their contemporary interpreters among foreign policy scholars and practitioners, their function is largely ideological and justificatory: to lend an aura of legitimacy and credibility to ever new policy positions dynamically evolving out of the unpredictable, randomly shifting winds of international politics.

Were American diplomacy and statecraft an exact science like physics, where controlled experiments, shared methods, and agreed goals facilitate testing and progress of knowledge, Kennan’s most famous diplomatic ideas – now seven decades old – could very well be obsolete and forgotten: about as relevant to contemporary US national security and foreign policy design as Ptolemy’s heliocentric model of the universe to latest advances in space exploration. But diplomacy and statecraft are unlike physics already because their objectives, not to mention criteria for evaluating them, are hotly contested, leaving their practitioners deeply insecure not only about what it is they should be doing, but also, even worse, about how to define and measure success and failure.Footnote ⁸¹ In the absence of shared goals and standards of judgment, American diplomatic history – with Kennan as one of its pre-eminent fixtures – steps in as the arbiter, giving those in charge of writing it real political power.

This conclusion should not be read as a demand to dispense with history; despite all his critical unmasking of its ideological-justificatory function, or perhaps precisely because of it, White considers history essential to human freedom insofar as human beings ‘choose who they are by choosing who they were’.Footnote ⁸² Nor should it be read as a demand to somehow deideologise history: ‘History was always ideological. … [I]t is impossible to go beyond ideology in the human sciences.’Footnote ⁸³ But it should be read as an invitation to consider whether the construction of American diplomatic history as a guide to present and future statecraft should be left to a narrow clique of exegetes tendentiously wielding knowledge standards and ‘authorised’ insider information to exclude other voices: not just those of other historians, but also those coming from other areas of intellectual activity such as rhetoric, literature, and art – areas keenly attuned to the poetic, non-factual nature of stories. If representations of the past are fictitious by virtue of their narrative form, incorporating insider information does not make them any less so.

Indeed, it does just the opposite. Professional historiography has long demanded of its practitioners that they ‘get the story straight’, keep to the facts, and avoid imaginative excess.Footnote ⁸⁴ This conventional historical method ‘has resulted in the repression of the conceptual apparatus (without which atomic facts cannot be aggregated into complex macrostructures) and the remission of the poetic moment in historical writing to the interior of the discourse (where it functions as an unacknowledged – and therefore uncriticisable – content of the historical narrative)’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Under the banner of ‘authorised’ inside knowledge, this repression and remission reach new depths. History, instead of liberating, becomes oppressive. For through history we not only manifest our freedom to choose our present by choosing our past. We just as easily and all-too-often divest ourselves of that freedom by pretending that the present we have constructed could not have been otherwise, that what we have chosen was necessary, that, in other words, there was no choice to begin with.Footnote ⁸⁶