For the generation of historians of American diplomacy who were in graduate school in the 1980s and the 1990s, Gaddis was the most influential scholar in our historiographical patch. A celebrated diplomatic historian himself in later years, it is not surprising that Kennan would choose (almost more than 30 years ago) as his official biographer the man whom I and perhaps many others regard as the dean of 20th–century American diplomatic history. It was, of course, during the first portion of Kennan’s official career, that he first achieved (and to his subsequent regret never quite managed to live down) public renown as the ‘architect’ of the American policy of ‘containment’, the diplomatic strategy which some (but never Kennan himself) claimed resulted in the eventual downfall of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe and of the Soviet Union itself.Īt the time that Bundy made his exclamation to us (in the fall of 1988), the first of the two mysteries relating to Kennan was well on its way to being answered, and the man who has provided most of it is none other than the author of this official biography, John Lewis Gaddis. (1) Which, from a non-American perspective, might strike some as odd, given the fact that, as a diplomat and public servant, Kennan can only be said to have occupied a position of the first rank for a little over ten years: 1944––3. To give a pertinent example: more scholarly monographs and studies have been devoted to the life and career of Kennan then to any American Secretary of State in the 20th century, with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger. First, what exactly were the policies that Kennan truly wished to advocate during his years in power at the American State Department in the mid to late 1940s? The second mystery consists of the amount of scholarly attention devoted to this at times brilliant but highly irascible (and indeed almost eccentric) man. I say ‘mystery’ deliberately, as both at the time and later, there was indeed something distinctly odd about two aspects of the life and career of the one-time scholar-diplomat. ‘No one knows what George Kennan really meant !’ So did the late McGeorge Bundy, my then professor, initiate me and a half a dozen other graduate students into mystery of George Frost Kennan.

American Diplomacy by George F. Kennan