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Memoirs 1925-1950, by George F. Kennan
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Book, memoir
- Sales Rank: #345176 in Books
- Published on: 1983-08-12
- Released on: 1983-08-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.50" h x 5.25" w x 1.75" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 596 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
History and lessons from US diplomatic relations, 1925-50
By Leonard J. Wilson
George F. Kennan's Memoirs: 1925-1950 provide a fascinating personal and diplomatic history of these years based on his experience at the center of many of the most important events during his quarter century of diplomatic service. This history is interspersed with numerous insights from his philosophy of how US foreign policy should be formulated that are quite applicable today. Finally, Kennan's Memoirs provide a rich background that is useful in digesting his numerous books on diplomatic history. As John LeCarre put it, if a writer claims to have written the definitive work on the hill tribes of northern Burma, it would be useful to know that he has at least been south of Minsk. Kennan has definitely been south of Minsk.
Kennan entered the Foreign Service in 1925 fresh out of Princeton and was posted to Berlin. Upon learning that the government paid a premium to officers with skills in exotic languages (pretty much any non-western European language), he enrolled in the Russian graduate program at the University of Berlin. After completing his Russian training, he was posted to Riga, Latvia, which served as the US listening post on Soviet affairs since we did not have diplomatic relations with Moscow until 1933. In 1933, Kennan was selected by the newly appointed ambassador to accompany him (as translator, aide, and country expert) on his first trip to Moscow, to open an embassy, find a suitable building, recruit local staff and so on. After a brief stay in Moscow, the ambassador returned to the US to recruit a diplomatic staff, leaving Kennan, about age 30, to fly solo as the only US diplomat in Russia.
Reassigned to Prague in 1938, Kennan arrived on the same day as the Munich conference that effectively ended Czechoslovakia's existence. He stayed in place as the lone American diplomat in Prague for a year after the fall of Czechoslovakia, reporting on the German occupation. After a year, the Germans insisted that he move to Berlin to maintain his diplomatic status. He remained assigned to the Berlin embassy until Germany declared war on the US in 1941 and was then interned along with the rest of the US diplomatic mission. Throughout the six months that it took the US and Germany to arrange an exchange of diplomatic internees, Kennan was the senior US internee, with responsibilities for the entire staff. Upon arriving in Portugal after the exchange of personnel, he was notified that he and the other internees would not be paid their salaries for the last six months since they had not been working! Not discouraged by this resounding "Welcome Home", Kennan proceeded to negotiate the use of the Portuguese Azores as a refueling stop for US aircraft enroute to Britain, not a small feat since Portugal was under direct pressure from Franco's Spain (at Hitler's direction) to consider the serious impact that providing military bases to the allies would have on Spanish (and German) perceptions of Portugal's neutrality. Somehow, Portugal managed to provide the bases without being dragged into the war.
Late in the war, Kennan returned to Moscow where as early as 1944 he observed that US and Soviet post-war goals were becoming increasingly incompatible. After Stalin's refusal to either assist the Polish uprising against their German occupiers in 1944 or to allow the US to provide assistance from bases in Soviet held territories had resulted in the slaughter of the Poles, Kennan increasingly advocated a distancing of US policy from support to the Soviet Union. In essence, his position was that we should recognize that we could do little of a practical nature to prevent the Red Army from occupying eastern and central Europe; on the other hand, we needed to make clear to the world that we neither supported nor condoned the occupation. Throughout this period, US policy seemed inflexibly wedded to the idea that the Soviet Union was one of our closest allies, despite the fact that Stalin had chosen to ally himself with Hitler rather than Britain and France when he concluded the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact which enabled Hitler to invade Poland without fear of fighting a two front war.
Kennan's trepidation about US-Soviet relations culminated in his "long telegram" from Moscow to the State Department which laid the foundations for the policy of containment. In Kennan's mind, containment was primarily a political and economic, rather than military, policy. His views led to the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe, thereby reducing the appeal communism to Europeans. As Secretary of State, General Marshall invited Kennan to form and lead a Policy Planning Staff with a charter to provide analytic papers and policy proposals directly to the Secretary. When Dean Acheson replaced Marshall as Secretary, he revised Kennan's charter to one of coordinating policy papers among the multitude of Assistant Secretaries (who could seldom agree on where to have lunch). Realizing that his job would become that of a bureaucratic coordinator rather than an independent advisor to the Secretary, Kennan retired from government service to pursue an academic career where he believed he might have more influence on US foreign policy.
There is much in Kennan's Memoirs: 1925-1950 of continuing significance for American foreign policy. Some of his key observations include:
* Regrettably, both the American people and their governments tend to seek universals in foreign policy, trying to apply the same policies to all countries despite their differences. We seem to have a similar naiveté in viewing all nations as either close friends of implacable foes, with no middle ground.
* US foreign policy is too often based on domestic political concerns, particularly in thee next election. Our national leaders seem to have had a universal urge to claim that their diplomatic policies have been great successes. In reality, diplomacy is a two party relationship where success depends on both parties actions and on the existence of common goals. Pretending otherwise results in short sighted and inconsistent policies. Throughout WWII and the early post war years, our national leaders sought to collect domestic political capital by emphasizing how well they were getting along with Stalin.
* The Anglo-American alliance won WWII but was not strong enough to win it without allying with one of our enemies (the USSR) and in the process we failed to make clear to ourselves and our people that this alliance was one of convenience and not one of shared values, principles, or goals. In reality, the only goal we shared was the defeat of Hitler.
* Following the end of WWII, Soviet aggressive action against European countries not already overrun by the advance of the Red Army proceeded largely by means of Soviet recruitment, supply and encouragement of indigenous communist stooges, rather than by direct Soviet military action. The antidote for this threat, in Kennan's mind, was the economic redevelopment of Europe via the Marshall Plan, of which Kennan was a major conceptual contributor, not by direct US military involvement. Since the communist threat came from indigenous elements, rather that Soviet forces, direct US military involvement would have placed us in the position of the outside force opposing local political and military forces. Direct military involvement would have acted to our detriment and to the benefit of the local and Russian communists.
* Kennan harkens back to George Washington's caution against entangling alliances. In his view, forming alliances is fraught with difficulties of inclusion and exclusion. There is a natural tendency toward inclusive alliances, which stems from the desire to make the alliance appear both broadly supported and formidable. However, not every country that might seek to join an alliance is a desirable candidate. Some may be geographically remote from the core of he alliance and, therefore, hard to protect. Some may not share the alliance's core values. Alliances are almost always directed against some actual, potential, or perceived threat, such as the many US led alliances against the Soviet Union. Expanding an alliance in a manner that encircles the adversary may provoke a more aggressive response than would have been forthcoming had the alliance been less encircling. On the other hand, one would not want to create the impression that a country was outside the alliance's area of interest by excluding it from alliance membership, unless, of course, it really was and we were prepared to see it overrun or its government overthrown.
Sadly, Kennan's Memoirs: 1925-1950 are out of print. They deserve wider attention in both academia and government.
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
A Fascinating Life, a Penetrating Look
By James R. Mccall
"Experience had convinced us that far more could be learned by careful, scholarly analysis of information legitimately available concerning any great nation than by the fanciest arrangements of clandestine intelligence."(p48)
"In the face of this knowledge, [of the inevitable Russion domination of Poland] I could only feel that there was something frivolous about our whole action in this Polish question. I reflected on the lightheartedness with which great powers offer advice to smaller ones in matters affecting the vital interests of the latter. I was sorry to find myself, for the moment, a part of this. And I wished that instead of mumbling words of official optimism we had had the judgment and the good taste to bow our heads in silence before the tragedy of a people who have been our allies, whom we have helped to save from our enemies, and whom we cannot save from our friends."(pp209/10)
"The strength of the Kremlin lies largely in the fact that it knows how to wait. But the strength of the Russian people lies in the fact that they know how to wait longer."(p511)
[On the German war crime trials] "I have already mentioned my aversion to our proceeding jointly with the Russians in matters of this nature. I should not like to be misunderstood on this subject. The crimes of the Nazi leaders were immeasurable. These men had placed themselves in a position where a further personal existence on this earth could have had no positive meaning for them or for anyone else. I personally considered that it would have been best if the Allied commanders had had standing instructions that if any of these men fell into the hands of Allied forces they should, once their identity had been established beyond doubt, be executed forthwith.
"But to hold these Nazi leader for public trial was another matter. This procedure could not expiate or undo the crimes they had committed. It could have been justified only as a means for conveying to the world public the repudiation, by the conscience of those peoples and governments conducting the trial, of mass crimes of every sort. To admit to such a procedure a Soviet judge as the representative of a regime which had on its conscience not only the vast cruelties of the Russian Revolution,of collectivization, and of the Russian purges of the 1930s, as well as the manifold brutalities and atrocities perpetrated against the Poles and the peoples of the Baltic countries during the wartime period, was to make a mockery of the only purpose the trials could conceivably serve, and to assume, by association, a share of the responsibility for these Stalinist crimes themselves."(pp260/1)
This is a great book. It shows the progress of a fine mind possessed of a practical scholarship and a moral voice in what were often excrutiatingly ambiguous circumstances.
Kennan was in Moscow in 1935 when Stalin began the purges; he was in Prague in 1938 when Germany invaded the Sudetenland; he was in Berlin when Germany declared war on the U.S.; he was the chief architect of the Marshall plan. Of course, he is associated with our Cold War policy of "containment" of the Soviet Union, an association that he regrets, since very little of it reflects his thinking. The book is a fascinating look at modern power politics from a bemused, but acute, inside observer.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
History and lessons from US diplomatic relations, 1925-50
By Leonard J. Wilson
George F. Kennan's Memoirs: 1925-1950 provide a fascinating personal and diplomatic history of these years based on his experience at the center of many of the most important events during his quarter century of diplomatic service. This history is interspersed with numerous insights from his philosophy of how US foreign policy should be formulated that are quite applicable today. Finally, Kennan's Memoirs provide a rich background that is useful in digesting his numerous books on diplomatic history. As John LeCarre put it, if a writer claims to have written the definitive work on the hill tribes of northern Burma, it would be useful to know that he has at least been south of Minsk. Kennan has definitely been east of Minsk.
Kennan entered the Foreign Service in 1925 fresh out of Princeton and was posted to Berlin. Upon learning that the government paid a premium to officers with skills in exotic languages (pretty much any non-western European language), he enrolled in the Russian graduate program at the University of Berlin. After completing his Russian training, he was posted to Riga, Latvia, which served as the US listening post on Soviet affairs since we did not have diplomatic relations with Moscow until 1933. In 1933, Kennan was selected by the newly appointed ambassador to accompany him (as translator, aide, and country expert) on his first trip to Moscow, to open an embassy, find a suitable building, recruit local staff and so on. After a brief stay in Moscow, the ambassador returned to the US to recruit a diplomatic staff, leaving Kennan, about age 30, to fly solo as the only US diplomat in Russia.
Reassigned to Prague in 1938, Kennan arrived on the same day as the Munich conference that effectively ended Czechoslovakia's existence. He stayed in place as the lone American diplomat in Prague for a year after the fall of Czechoslovakia, reporting on the German occupation. After a year, the Germans insisted that he move to Berlin to maintain his diplomatic status. He remained assigned to the Berlin embassy until Germany declared war on the US in 1941 and was then interned along with the rest of the US diplomatic mission. Throughout the six months that it took the US and Germany to arrange an exchange of diplomatic internees, Kennan was the senior US internee, with responsibilities for the entire staff. Upon arriving in Portugal after the exchange of personnel, he was notified that he and the other internees would not be paid their salaries for the last six months since they had not been working! Not discouraged by this resounding "Welcome Home", Kennan proceeded to negotiate the use of the Portuguese Azores as a refueling stop for US aircraft enroute to Britain, not a small feat since Portugal was under direct pressure from Franco's Spain (at Hitler's direction) to consider the serious impact that providing military bases to the allies would have on Spanish (and German) perceptions of Portugal's neutrality. Somehow, Portugal managed to provide the bases without being dragged into the war.
Late in the war, Kennan returned to Moscow where as early as 1944 he observed that US and Soviet post-war goals were becoming increasingly incompatible. After Stalin's refusal to either assist the Polish uprising against their German occupiers in 1944 or to allow the US to provide assistance from bases in Soviet held territories had resulted in the slaughter of the Poles, Kennan increasingly advocated a distancing of US policy from support to the Soviet Union. In essence, his position was that we should recognize that we could do little of a practical nature to prevent the Red Army from occupying eastern and central Europe; on the other hand, we needed to make clear to the world that we neither supported nor condoned the occupation. Throughout this period, US policy seemed inflexibly wedded to the idea that the Soviet Union was one of our closest allies, despite the fact that Stalin had chosen to ally himself with Hitler rather than Britain and France when he concluded the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact which enabled Hitler to invade Poland without fear of fighting a two front war.
Kennan's trepidation about US-Soviet relations culminated in his "long telegram" from Moscow to the State Department which laid the foundations for the policy of containment. In Kennan's mind, containment was primarily a political and economic, rather than military, policy. His views led to the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe, thereby reducing the appeal communism to Europeans. As Secretary of State, General Marshall invited Kennan to form and lead a Policy Planning Staff with a charter to provide analytic papers and policy proposals directly to the Secretary. When Dean Acheson replaced Marshall as Secretary, he revised Kennan's charter to one of coordinating policy papers among the multitude of Assistant Secretaries (who could seldom agree on where to have lunch). Realizing that his job would become that of a bureaucratic coordinator rather than an independent advisor to the Secretary, Kennan retired from government service to pursue an academic career where he believed he might have more influence on US foreign policy.
There is much in Kennan's Memoirs: 1925-1950 of continuing significance for American foreign policy. Some of his key observations include:
* Regrettably, both the American people and their governments tend to seek universals in foreign policy, trying to apply the same policies to all countries despite their differences. We seem to have a similar naiveté in viewing all nations as either close friends of implacable foes, with no middle ground.
* US foreign policy is too often based on domestic political concerns, particularly in thee next election. Our national leaders seem to have had a universal urge to claim that their diplomatic policies have been great successes. In reality, diplomacy is a two party relationship where success depends on both parties actions and on the existence of common goals. Pretending otherwise results in short sighted and inconsistent policies. Throughout WWII and the early post war years, our national leaders sought to collect domestic political capital by emphasizing how well they were getting along with Stalin.
* The Anglo-American alliance won WWII but was not strong enough to win it without allying with one of our enemies (the USSR) and in the process we failed to make clear to ourselves and our people that this alliance was one of convenience and not one of shared values, principles, or goals. In reality, the only goal we shared was the defeat of Hitler.
* Following the end of WWII, Soviet aggressive action against European countries not already overrun by the advance of the Red Army proceeded largely by means of Soviet recruitment, supply and encouragement of indigenous communist stooges, rather than by direct Soviet military action. The antidote for this threat, in Kennan's mind, was the economic redevelopment of Europe via the Marshall Plan, of which Kennan was a major conceptual contributor, not by direct US military involvement. Since the communist threat came from indigenous elements, rather that Soviet forces, direct US military involvement would have placed us in the position of the outside force opposing local political and military forces. Direct military involvement would have acted to our detriment and to the benefit of the local and Russian communists.
* Kennan harkens back to George Washington's caution against entangling alliances. In his view, forming alliances is fraught with difficulties of inclusion and exclusion. There is a natural tendency toward inclusive alliances, which stems from the desire to make the alliance appear both broadly supported and formidable. However, not every country that might seek to join an alliance is a desirable candidate. Some may be geographically remote from the core of he alliance and, therefore, hard to protect. Some may not share the alliance's core values. Alliances are almost always directed against some actual, potential, or perceived threat, such as the many US led alliances against the Soviet Union. Expanding an alliance in a manner that encircles the adversary may provoke a more aggressive response than would have been forthcoming had the alliance been less encircling. On the other hand, one would not want to create the impression that a country was outside the alliance's area of interest by excluding it from alliance membership, unless, of course, it really was and we were prepared to see it overrun or its government overthrown.
Sadly, Kennan's Memoirs: 1925-1950 are out of print. They deserve wider attention in both academia and government.
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