George F. Kennan Quotes

“His months of teaching experience were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within "neat, geometric patterns" that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was "like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experienced it."

There was, however, an analogy that might help. "I have a largish farm in Pennsylvania."...it had 235 acres, on each of which things were happening. Weekends, in theory, were days of rest. But farms defied theory:

Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbor comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven't kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children's pet kittens. In burying the kitten you look up and notice a whole section of the barn roof has been blown off and needs instant repair. Somebody shouts from the bathroom window that the pump has stopped working, and there's no water in the house. At that moment, a truck arrives with five tons of stone for the lane. And as you stand there hopelessly, wondering which of these crises to attend to first, you notice the farmer's little boy standing silently before you with that maddening smile, which is halfway a leer, on his face, and when you ask him what's up, he says triumphantly 'The bull's busted out and he's eating the strawberry bed'.

Policy planning was like that. You might anticipate a problem three or four months into the future, but by the time you'd got your ideas down on paper, the months had shrunk to three to four weeks. Getting the paper approved took still more time, which left perhaps three or four days. And by the time others had translated those ideas into action, "the thing you were planning for took place the day before yesterday, and everyone wants to know why in the hell you didn't foresee it a long time ago." Meanwhile, 234 other problems were following similar trajectories, causing throngs of people to stand around trying to get your attention: "Say, do you know that the bull is out there in the strawberry patch again?”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“When the step becomes slow, and the wit becomes slower,
And memory fails, and the hearing declines;
When skies become clouded, and clouds become lower,
And you find yourself talking poetical lines;”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“Even more exasperating was “young Kennedy” whose father, the American ambassador in London and another of Roosevelt’s political appointees, had sent him on a “fact-finding” mission. The kid was “obviously an upstart and an ignoramus,” so with the “polite but weary punctiliousness that characterizes diplomatic officials required to busy themselves with pesky compatriots,” Kennan got him to Prague through German lines and back out again. It was a shock when the memory suddenly returned while Kennan was ambassador to Yugoslavia in the early 1960s, the kid having appointed him to that position. “By just such blows, usually much too late . . . , is the ego gradually cut down to size.”7”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“I got up alone the next morning in the darkness, and kissed my children good-by as they lay asleep in their beds.... [F]or the first time there was brought home to me a tiny part of that vast human misery summed up under the term of war-time separations. During the next four years, I was destined to see my children only on rare and brief occasions; and it was a loss which no victories, no reparations, no acquisitions of power could ever make good.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“So Kennan came back to America “glowing inwardly at everything which . . . is sound and right and refreshing, and wincing at everything which offends a taste rendered more discriminate than the average by its ability to draw comparisons.” His sensitivity was that of a musical instrument, vibrating to the “most minute phenomena,”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“Kennan’s view of the United States lacked a sense of proportion: displacement failed to produce the detachment that characterized the perspectives of foreign interpreters like Alexis de Tocqueville, James Bryce, and Alistair Cooke.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“They also reflect, at this relatively early stage in Kennan’s career, one of his most persistent paradoxes: that he understood the Soviet Union far better than he did the United States.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“The task of government was to provide its people with adequate living standards, to ensure their humane behavior toward one another, and to give them a sense of contributing toward the general improvement of their society. Beyond that, objectives need not be specified: “We leave to the communists the detailed description of distant millenniums.” But what kind of government—if neither democracy nor dictatorship as generally understood—could best achieve these objectives?”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“The farm, unlike the highway, was a community, with the only intimation that it might not survive coming in the arrival of a college-educated daughter, “smart, well-dressed, confident, blooming with health and energy, . . . a breath of air from another world.” It seemed unlikely that she would wind up on the farm: the city, “at once so menacing and so promising,” had claimed her for its own. George saw the future himself when he spent the next night in a college town where the streets were empty except for automobiles, each containing a couple or two “bent on pleasure—usually vicarious pleasure—in the form of a movie or a dance or a petting party.” Anyone unlucky enough not to be among these “private, mathematically correct companies” would be alone. “There was no place where strangers would come together freely—as in a Bavarian beer hall or a Russian amusement park—for the mere purpose of being together and enjoying new acquaintances. Even the saloons were nearly empty.” All of this convinced George that the technology industrialization had made possible—automobiles, movies, radio, mass-circulation magazines, the advertising that paid for them—was creating an exaggerated desire for privacy. It was making an English upper-class evil a vice of American society. This was the sad climax of individualism, the blind-alley of a generation which had forgotten how to think or live collectively, of a people whose private lives were so brittle, so insecure that they dared not subject them to the slightest social contact with the casual stranger, of people who felt neither curiosity nor responsibility for the mass of those who shared their community life and their community problems. Americans”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“October 25: A day of despair, in the middle of such a horribly senseless city, and of wondering whether there were not still—somewhere in America—a place where a gravel lane, wet from the rains, led up a hill, between the yellow trees and past occasional vistas of a valley full of quiet farms and woodlands, to a house where candles and a warm hearth defied the early darkness and dampness of autumn and where human warmth and simplicity and graciousness defied the encroachments of a diseased world and of people drugged and debilitated by automobiles and advertisements and radios and moving pictures.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“His diary recorded a mixture of moods: October 17: Out to Mount Vernon. . . . Bracing cool air; cloudless sky; warm autumn sunshine. Shapeless, droopy people—stuffy from Sunday morning waffles and funny papers, tired from not walking—staggered out of shiny automobiles and dragged themselves around the grounds of the old mansion.... Grasshoppers flicked themselves around before us. An occasional late bird sang from the hard, many-colored foliage. The corn was stacked in the fields.... It was very nice and encouraging, but in the distance the roar of the Sunday traffic on the big turnpike was never lost, and it was never clearer that man is a skin-disease of the earth.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“The Kennans sailed for Europe in mid-July 1936, sharing the SS Manhattan with the “gum-chewing supermen” and “hefty amazons” who would represent the United States at the Berlin Olympics. Upon arrival in Hamburg, [t]he athletes lined the rail of the ship and light-heartedly shouted their locker-room banter at the people on shore. It did not occur to them that these people would not be apt to understand much of it. They failed to notice that the country before their eyes was a country different—excitingly, provocatively different—from their own. To myself, for whom these transitions from one world to another had never ceased to be momentous, awe-compelling experiences, . . . this was a little sad.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“I would not be a part of my country, although what it had once been would remain a part of me.” Allegiance would be “a loyalty despite, not a loyalty because, a loyalty of principle, not of identification.”5”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“Once home, however, his optimism began to fade. He acknowledged the high living standard, the political liberties, the freedom of expression. But there was also chaotic municipal growth, an increasingly spoiled countryside, and an absence of public regulation, all of which left “little for the future but retrogression.” It seems to me that this country doesn’t want government.... It will suffer unlimited injustices and infringements on liberty from irresponsible private groups, but none from a responsible governing agency. Its people would rather go down individually, with quixotic courage, before the destructive agencies of uncontrolled industrialism—like Ethiopian tribesmen before Italian gas attacks—than submit to the discipline necessary for any effective resistance.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“The journey home, Kennan reported, had been a reintroduction to capitalism, of which he had seen little recently except Norway and Austria, which had been too idyllic and too depressing, respectively, to be representative. Germany, as he passed through it, had been a “great garden, well-kept and blooming, . . . populated by clean and healthy people.” London had been full of business activity but striking for its social stability: he had forgotten that such a thing existed. So “I got back to this country almost a complete convert to the horrors of capitalism, ready to forgive even radio advertising, . . . and the Saturday Evening Post.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“There is no weapon so disarming and effective in relations with the communists as sheer honesty. They know very little about it.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Kennan saw in them the need to regard Bolshevism, “with all its hullabaloo about revolution,” not as a turning point in history, but as only another milepost in Russia’s “wasteful, painful progress from an obscure origin to an obscure destiny.” Nothing in Brown’s dispatches or in Kennan’s training, however, anticipated the horrors of Stalinism. If”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“Diplomacy in most places required a facile tongue, unhampered by any sincerity; you must have a great capacity for quiet, boring dissipation: not great brawls, but continual rich food, irregular meals, enervating liqueurs and lack of sleep; you must have a deep interest . . . in golf and bridge, in clothes and other people’s business; you must have an utter lack of conscience for the injustices of the world about you and not the faintest intention of ever doing anything about them; you must, in fact, be able to rid yourself of every last impulse to distinguish between right and wrong.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“There is only responsibility and self-sacrifice; all else is meaningless, all else is vanity, all else is not even interesting; adventure, mystery, even justice do not exist. Learn it, repeat it, comprehend it, wrestle with it, embrace it, cling to it.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“If one is fed, housed, and healthy, then debts, pride, conscience, standards, dignity, and what you will, will have to be laughed off....”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“If only Americans “could have their toys taken away from them, be spanked, educated and made to grow up, it might be worthwhile to act as a guardian for their foreign interests in the meantime. But when one can do none of these things?” So he would stick with the Foreign Service for another two or three years, then become a student again and eventually “a pedagogue.” Professors could survive almost anywhere: even the Bolsheviks had killed only a few. He would do Russian history seriously, writing something “so dull and so specialized that no one will ever dare to try to read it and everyone who sees it will be convinced that I know something about it.” George”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“If only Americans “could have their toys taken away from them, be spanked, educated and made to grow up, it might be worthwhile to act as a guardian for their foreign interests in the meantime. But when one can do none of these things?” So”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“The United States had no foreign policy, only the reflections of domestic politics internationally. There was no satisfaction in representing that. The country was succumbing to a consumerism in which people equated charm with the absence of halitosis, balanced competing claims about toothpaste, and fretted about whether their refrigerators ejected ice cubes or required an ice pick.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“I shall never be completely happy at it, for I shall never be able to do much thinking myself—and I have been just clever enough, in my youth, to mistrust everyone who tries to think for me.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“Kennan brooded about Europe’s fragility and his own superficiality. “Americanism, like Bolshevism, is a disease which gains footing only in a weakened body,” he concluded with youthful certainty.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“The danger for Americans lay less in another Pearl Harbor than in what they might do to themselves because they feared one. For confronting totalitarians required, in many respects, emulating them. The leader who would attempt this “must learn to regiment his people, to husband his resources, to guard against hostile agents in his midst, to maintain formidable armed forces in peacetime, to preserve secrecy about governmental decisions, to wield the weapons of bluff and surprise, to wage war in peacetime—and peace in wartime. Can these things be done without the selling of the national soul?” That”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life

“But when Christopher mentioned that he and Talbott had been trying to package post-Cold War policy in a single phrase, Kennan said they shouldn't. "Containment" had been a misleading oversimplification; strategy could not be made to fit a "bumper sticker." The president laughed when Talbott told him what had happened: "that's why Kennan's a great diplomat and scholar but not a politician.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life