I used to like George Kennan. Then I read his diaries

George Kennan, the career diplomat and historian best known for his sensible suggestion that the United States try to resist the Soviet Union ‘without recourse to any general military conflict’, is much in vogue these days, at least in Washington, where Senator Rand Paul is presenting Kennan’s theory of ‘containment’ as an alternative to George W. Bush’s disastrous, and disastrously expensive, ‘war on terror’. Now, after two recent biographies and a volume of correspondence, comes a selection of Kennan’s diaries: 684 pages (not including notes) out of some 8,000 extant, covering a span of 87 years — the longest chronological period of any published diary of which I am aware.

The longest, chronologically, and probably the most boring diary I have ever read. Unlike the great diarists — Greville, Nicolson, Lees-Milne — Kennan writes very little about others. His diary is a record of himself, a Domesday book of the acres and perches he has surveyed in his own head: a wide range of ambitions, complaints, masturbatory fantasies, unpublished literary criticism, amateurish verse (‘Beauty is but a rank, eternal lie! / A flower which, only sought, will fade and die’).

Above all it is a collection of cocksure opinions. And what opinions they are! From America (‘an accumulation of millions of individual philistines’) to Zionism (‘nothing to be gained by starting in that direction’) we now know what Kennan thought about nearly everything. The main thing I have taken away from his opinions is that he was very tedious and even more unpleasant. How unpleasant? Here he is writing from Latvia in July 1932, a month before the Nazis won their first general election:

Nothing good can come out of modern civilisation, in the broad sense. We have only a group of more or less inferior races, incapable of coping adequately with the environment which technical progress has created.