Memoirs 1925-1950

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 p

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 pr

In a very different period of time, I have travelled to (or lived in) almost all the places described in these memoirs. Furthermore, I have confronted - a generation or so removed - many similar anecdotes, characters and bureaucratic missteps. This book has a ring of authenticity that is striking. It describes the ordinary and then shifts smoothly to the momentous. I have not found anything else quite like it. (Leigh White's 'The Long Balkan Night' has this similar feature, but it's the story of a journalist).With all of that said, I was nonetheless struck by Kennan's essential desire to survive by avoiding any personal risk. He was a successful bureaucrat. During his life, he derived his status entirely from his position, or membership in an organization, and not from any personal endeavour.How many today would naively do as Kennan and, during a whole career, derive status from membership? There are too many other things on offer. And the bureaucracy now is, well, too bureaucratic. Thank God.

It is extremely rare that the memoirs of someone who played a truly significant role in his country's history are also beautifully and sensitively written. They candidly reveal the shy and introspective man who also happen to have been a critical player in the U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union from the 1940s through the 1980s (from the late 1920s thorugh the 1950s in his governmental role and as historian and critic since then). Kennan is candid, brilliant, critical, and happens to have a wonderful writing style. This is personal history at its best. If you've read this one (which won the Pulitzer Prize), be sure to read the sequel.

"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.