MEMOIRS: 1925-1950 by George F. Kennan. 583 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $10.
To many Americans under 30, the cold war seems like a scare story concocted by the older generation. But it was all too real, and no one knows it better than George Kennan. He also knows that the issues underlying the conflict have not disappeared, despite the fact that the Communist monolith has splintered into a "Humpty Dumpty" that "will not and cannot be reassembled." For the U.S., the continuing problem is how to face Communism without being either fatuously optimistic about coexistence or excessively belligerent in opposition. In dealing with that problem, Kennan has often been out of step with his superiors at the State Department. By hindsight, it is evident that he was right more often than wrong.
In this dry, dispassionate account, Kennan, now a member of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, makes clear the irony of his career: he was in official disfavor first for being "too harsh" toward Russia, then for being "too soft." He was burned in effigy by Communist-led mobs in Rio de Janeiro during a Latin American tour in 1950, and burned figuratively by right-wing critics in the U.S. during the decade that followed.
Containment by "X." Few diplomats have ever drawn on so rich a background in international affairs. From the time he joined the Foreign Service, after graduating from Princeton in 1925, Kennan shuttled from one sensitive crisis point to another. In 1933, he helped reopen the American embassy in Moscow, stayed on through the savage purges that soon followed and thus received, as he writes, "a liberal education in the horrors of Stalinism." He arrived in Prague on Sept. 29, 1938, the day of the Munich Conference. He was in Berlin from 1939 until Pearl Harbor, when the Nazis interned him and 130 other Americans for 51 dreary months near Frankfurt. (After his release, Kennan recalls sarcastically, he was told that "none of us were to be paid for the months we had been in confinement: we had not, you see, been working.") He returned to Moscow in 1944, just when Stalin was rolling up his sleeves and getting ready to take over Eastern Europe. He arrived in Washington in time to outline the policy of "containment" against an expansionist Russia in the famous 1947 Foreign Affairs article signed "X."
Unlike many U.S. liberals, Kennan never went through a Marxist phase. Before and during World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted an accommodation with Moscow, but Kennan remained in opposition until the "movement of the pendulum of official thinking from left to right would bring [U.S. policy] close to my own outlook in the years 1946 to 1948, only to carry it away once more in the other direction, with the oversimplified and highly militarized view of the Russian problem that came to prevail after 1949."