The Kennan Diaries

Abstract

George Frost Kennan kept a diary from 1924 to 2004 — a life in writing that most people would happily call a life. These eighty years were amongst the bloodiest in world history and Kennan’s career in the diplomatic service allowed him to observe Europe’s darkest hours from Prague in 1938, Berlin in 1939, Paris in 1940, and Moscow in 1944. The diary is replete with prescient geopolitical analysis and unsentimental reflections on the human frailties that lead to conflict. Some days Kennan wrote entries that ran to multiple pages; for weeks he would write nothing at all. Some days he wrote poetry that was conventional in form; at other points he painted cityscapes that were almost Joycean in their freeform lyricism. Kennan’s diary is a document of sustained literary quality and historical importance. It is neither as indiscreet as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Journals nor as unrevealing as many a stock political memoir.¹ It is generous to friends and enemies — Joseph McCarthy and John Foster Dulles excepted — and erudite and candid in content. The processing of the series was complete in 2009 and scholars who travel to the Seeley-Mudd Library in Princeton can now revisit the history of the twentieth century from the viewpoint of one of America’s most perceptive thinkers. The experience is both exhilarating and bracing.