In tune but out of time

George Kennan: A Study in Character
by John Lukacs

George Kennan died on 17 March 2005, aged 100 plus one year, one month and one day. The last half of his life he had spent in semi-retirement at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, but for a few years, between 1946 and 1952, he had been one of the most influential people in the world, and, most unusually, an influence for good. But for him the world today might be in an even worse state than it actually is.

As John Lukacs shows in this affectionate eulogy, Kennan was both typically and highly atypically American. He was typical as a poor boy from the Midwest who made good; hard-working, frugal, high-minded, rather solemn. Whereas others of his stamp amassed money, he amassed learning and, more unusually, wisdom. He was atypical in that he was shamelessly elitist, with little respect for democracy and none whatever for the way it was practised in his own country, for whose culture he had little affection. He felt himself, as he once put it, to be an expatriate; not in place, but in time. The world in which he felt at home had long since disappeared. Lukacs compares him with Henry Adams, but an even closer analogy might be with Alexis de Tocqueville, of whom Kennan himself wrote a shrewd study. All three were men who felt themselves born out of their own time; who briefly and rather unsuccessfully enjoyed public office but spent most of their lives ruminating about the world into which they had rather unhappily survived.

Kennan was a trained and dedicated public servant, outstanding for his expertise on Russia and, to a slightly lesser extent, Germany; both countries with which he had, perhaps, rather greater empathy than he had with his own.