When I was younger and precociously interested in politics (I subscribed to National Review and looked forward to Firing Line every Sunday), I knew who George Kennan was.  He was the brilliant author of the Containment Doctrine who had later gone soft on communism and become a liberal.  If someone had told me, “No, it is Kennan who is the real conservative—Buckley is a mere Cold Warrior,” I would have been incredulous.  Yet such would have been the truth.

From 1947 through 1989, American anticommunism not only drove our foreign policy but warped our domestic politics as well.  To be conservative was to be anticommunist; to be anticommunist was to be conservative.  And everything was to be subordinated to that crusade.  I have several times asked members of the generation before mine (I’m a late boomer—too young for Vietnam) why the government essentially threw out our immigration laws in 1965.  One said it was revenge for 1924, but of course such a motive could not be avowed.  Another suggested it was linked to the civil-rights legislation of the previous year.  A third, who writes for this magazine, told me that it was a Cold War measure, that we were told that, as we were competing with the Russians for Third World allies, we could not afford to maintain immigration quotas that discriminated against the non-Western peoples we were trying to win over.  If true, then anticommunism has proved to have been a fatal obsession.  For multiculturalism and political correctness appeared as a full-blown, repressive ideology only in the latter 1980’s.  Thus, it was not the cause of our demographic transformation, but rather its consequence.

Kennan publicly warned his countrymen of the consequences of mass nonwhite immigration as early as 1968, yet his warnings went unheeded, as did his foreign-policy advice for the last 50 years of his life.  Kennan was aware of his role as Cassandra from the mid-1950’s, yet, like a tragic hero of old, he played it well and dutifully.  That is why the charge of frustrated ambition (“what Kennan sought above all was power”) made by Col. Andrew Bacevich in Harper’s Magazine is so wrongheaded and unjust to the man.  Had George Kennan been ambitious, he would have trimmed his sails, held his tongue, and told the powerbrokers what they wanted to hear.  That is how you succeed in Washington.

Kennan did something else sure to sully his reputation in the eyes of the establishment: saying, repeatedly, in his diaries, which he clearly intended to be read, “I told you so.”  It would actually be tedious to recount all the examples of where he perceived  foreign-policy issues plainly, and those making decisions against his advice have been proved wrong.  Even the unfriendly reviewers are willing to concede that he was right on Vietnam (of no strategic importance) and Iraq (don’t go there), but not one that I read was willing to admit that he correctly opposed the first war in the Persian Gulf, led by Poppy Bush, whom Kennan (on December 16, 1990) faulted for entangling the Armed Forces of his country in a “dreadful” conflict “to which no favorable outcome is visible or even imaginable.”

Kennan believed that strategic errors of the greatest magnitude with regard to what he preferred to call the Near East dated from the 1950’s, when the West surrendered control of the oil fields and the Suez Canal to the resident Muslims.  In a long diary entry from January 1952, he argued against foreign aid, which with brilliant psychological insight he pointed out would engender not gratitude but contempt.  He also warned against believing that “the fanatical local chauvinisms of the Middle East” can be controlled or moderated by America.  On the contrary, these movements driven by Islam and ethnic resentments “will breed bloodshed, horror, hatred, and political oppression worse than anything we see today.”  Instead of attempting to curry favor with local despots, the United States and the Europeans should retain military control of the Suez Canal, Abadan, and the Arabian and Persian oil fields—strategic choke points and resources that would not exist without Western technology, engineering, and capital.  Four years later, he urged the Eisenhower administration to support its British and French allies when they mounted a brilliant naval and airborne operation to recapture Suez, which had been nationalized by Nasser.  Ike, seeking to appease Arab nationalism, forced them to withdraw.  In 1986, Kennan reflected on the past “follies” of

involving ourselves with the Israelis and tolerating the nationalization of the oil fields [and] giving the status of sovereignty to the various sheikdoms, and then permitting ourselves and our allies to become dependent on their oil.

Almost 30 years later, those mistakes appear to have been greater still.

Kennan opposed NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe in the 1990’s, correctly predicting that it would reignite the Cold War.  Yet as early as 1958, he realized that the alliance had “become an end in itself” rather than “a means to the negotiation of a European settlement.”  He believed at the time that such a settlement was possible, that the Russians might be willing to agree to a mutual withdrawal of forces from the center of Europe for a reunified but neutral Germany.  He argued for this proposal in his Reith Lectures at Oxford in 1957.  The lectures were not well received in Washington or London, and ran afoul of powerful vested interests as well as of three pathologies that Kennan believed had largely shaped U.S. foreign policies since World War II: “the Manichaean view of international relations,” “a militarized view of its external relationships,” and the domestic political lobbying of “ethnic minorities.”

Kennan’s unfashionable opinions in respect of ethnicity and America have engendered the most virulent reaction to his diaries.  Having read the reviews before I opened the book, I expected real fireworks on Kennan’s part, some combination of Lothrop Stoddard and David Duke.

Instead, I found a fair-minded and decent man who simply objected that his people (whites of European ancestry who settled and built this country) were being turned into a minority in their own land, and who did not see any benefits arising from the transformation.  Massive immigration, Kennan feared, was causing overcrowding, the degradation of education and culture, social disintegration, and political paralysis.  He warned of these consequences in Around the Cragged Hill, published in 1993, but, like virtually everything else he wrote or said in the past half-century, it went unnoticed, undiscussed, and unheeded.

Kennan complained frequently of the low quality of book reviewing in this country, and the reaction to his diaries offers abundant confirmation of the accuracy of his perception.  One reviewer claimed to have “liked” Kennan until he read the diaries, yet there is nothing in them that is not to be found in his beautifully written memoirs, or in Cragged Hill.  The name-calling (“morally obtuse,” “bigoted crank,” “conventional racist,” a “misanthropic anti-Semite”), deplorable in itself, reveals the breadth of the gulf that has opened between the ruling class and what remains of rooted America; or, to say the same thing in a different way, between the present and the past.  In these diaries you will read passages that could have been written by Henry Adams, Mark Twain, Irving Babbitt, Robinson Jeffers, Russell Kirk, Edward Abbey, or Wendell Berry.  Like them, Kennan hated the commodification of his country and despised its increasingly megalomaniacal empire.

What real American doesn’t?

 

[The Kennan Diaries, edited by Frank Costigliola (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.) 712 pp., $39.95]