This book begins with an original idea and a striking opinion that promises to shed much light on George Kennan, the diplomat most favored by American scholars of the twentieth century. A career foreign service officer and later a member of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Kennan was the celebrated and cerebral author of the containment doctrine of the early Cold War. While not disputing that Kennan had a crucial effect on diplomacy, Lee Congdon wants to place Kennan's years in his professional calling in the context of a far longer life as a man of letters. For Congdon, Kennan was secondarily a national security analyst. He was more truly engaged in a long inward struggle to express his outlook on a world that he felt was moving in a direction opposed to the values his writing constructed. The part-time diplomat is more accurately seen as an aspiring litterateur, and the form, coherence, and elegance of his writing equal in importance its substance; certainly, as a type of self-cultivation, the writing had a greater significance for Kennan than his actions as a policymaker.

One can find much with which to argue in this dimension of the book. I think Congdon overvalues Kennan's abilities as a writer. Congdon highly estimates Kennan's ornate, old-fashioned English, but I believe it is a way of elevating romance and evading reality, and it is intensely centered on Kennan's belletristic self in a way I find solipsistic. Kennan's writing is fuzzy at the core. Moreover, Congdon is not at his best in integrating appraisals and analyses of the writing with claims about the themes of the writing.

Nonetheless, the novel insight that Congdon simply sets out is worth a great deal. Suddenly, it becomes clear why Kennan's prescriptions on national security issues all embody the vision of a fastidious observer. This private and passive man was not a policymaker at all, but an introverted and introspective essayist and correspondent. Moreover, one's desire to dispute aspects of Congdon's appreciation measures his perceptiveness and the truth in his argument.

Unfortunately, as hard as it is to say it, George Kennan: A Writing Life falls apart and loses control over its subject matter. I can identify two problems. First is a failing of organization and a loss of focus. Repetitions in the text of both phrasing and information are a telltale sign of this failing. The book is supposed to be about Kennan the writer, but in addition to taking up at length the interstices of Kennan's realism in foreign policy, Congdon, even in his short volume, has long digressions on the Russian history about which Kennan wrote and even on other historical questions to which Kennan may have alluded. The author here does not propose to shed light on Kennan's style or his presuppositions. Congdon has merely gotten caught up on ancillary topics of interest to him. Similarly, he includes a number of potted biographies of other intellectuals of the era who crossed paths, however briefly, with Kennan—Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Morgenthau, and Reinhold Niebuhr.

The lack of a center to the work is underscored by a principle of order that can only be described as free association. There are many ways to set up a book. A chronological account of Kennan's literary priorities and the development of his concerns would have served Congdon well. In any event, some order is desired. Instead, the author begins with a credible narrative of Kennan's career from his growing up in Milwaukee to his rise in the State Department through 1950. But this relatively brief story breaks down when Congdon gets Kennan to Princeton's Institute. Congdon then begins various disconnected reflections, back and forth in time, on various topics that have attracted his curiosity. The topics, however, are often not linked up to Kennan's writing or even to Kennan at all, nor do they have any organizational clarity.

The second problem, related to this first one, displays even more the author's intellectual limitations. Kennan is a complicated man, and he demands of a biographer some detachment and impartiality. Instead, Congdon brings to his study not the dispassionate aims of the historian but the commitments of a cultural critic who fancies himself of the same mind-set as Kennan. That is, Congdon self-consciously writes as an authoritarian conservative with ties to central Europe, and he lovingly identifies with a standpoint that he takes for granted is the same as Kennan's. This identification means that much of the complexity and tension in Kennan's stance toward existence are unexamined, for the author does not see Kennan's views as views at all, but as truth. The identification additionally pushes Kennan in ways that he might not have been willing to go. Finally, as a scholar of Europe, Congdon has not done his homework in U.S. history. The milieu in which Kennan lived his life is almost embarrassedly reduced to often simple prejudices that Congdon has, say, about American foreign policy, the early twentieth-century Midwest (where Kennan was raised), or urban life in the United States (of which Kennan despaired).

This volume is a missed opportunity.