310
PARTISAN REVIEW
End of an Era
A T A C ENTURY'S ENDING: REFLECTIONS
1982- 1995 . By
Geor ge
F.
Kennan. WW Norton. $27.50
The ideas and personali ty of George
f
Kennan have long exercised a
curious fascination for me. I have been impressed by intimations of wis–
dom, a quality of integrity, thoughtfulness, and depth, but I also found
some of his ideas idiosyncratic and he seemed unaccountably harsh on his
own society and strangely non-judgmental about its major adversary, the
former Soviet Union.
Kennan's ideas have not been easy to fit into any available mold or pat–
tern. His presence in American public and intellectual life has combined,
at various times, the roles of diplomat, scholar, social critic, and doomsday
prophet. He is the rare critic of American institutions and foreign policy
who has not been tempted to idealize other social-political systems, past or
contemporary, nor has he been inclined to join the more recent "multi–
culturalist" critiques of America and the West. If anything he has been
critical of the U.S. for not living up to the best ideals and ideas of Western
culture.
Kennan moved from advocating the containment of what he clearly
saw at the time as an evil empire, (never mind the terminology) to lament–
ing Western military and political movements to stem the tide of Soviet
expansionism and to advocating renewed efforts to understand and respect
the all too human rulers of the Soviet Union (" ... flesh and blood people
like us-misguided if you will but no more guilty than we are of circum–
stances into which we all were born-and they, like us, are simply trying
to make the best of it.") He used to be highly
critical
of the perception of
the Soviet leaders as "a group of men...dominating and misruling a large
part of the world" and of the idea that their "thirst for power" played an
important part in their motivation and behavior. Admittedly Kennan's
shifts of opinion were accompanied by subs tantial internal changes in the
Soviet Union, though not in its foreign policies, or if there were, not nec–
essarily for the better from the Western point of view. Kennan repeatedly
warned that an overly
critical
stance toward the Soviet Union increased the
risk of nuclear war: "democratization must wait; world peace cannot," he
wrote in 1983.
It is strange to read a book that revolves largely around Soviet affairs
and which, for the most part, was written before the disintegration of the
