The Cold War Veteran Was Secretly Anti-American

Never has a telegram affected world history for such a long time as the 5,500-word-long cable that was sent from Moscow by young American diplomat George Frost Kennan in 1947. Even today, the document remains surprising and demonstrates Kennan’s clear-sightedness at the time.

It concerned the difficult question of how to deal with the Soviet Union in the future, since it was still close to being an American ally. George F. Kennan had no qualms regarding the aggressive power the Soviet Union had (he called it neurotic), but that does not mean that one should instantly wage a war.

The Russian power could be contained — firstly via economic help for western Europe, secondly with the support from liberal anti-communist parties and trade unions (the social democrats), and only thirdly (and only in a state of emergency) with military power.

The “Marshall Plan” that helped the German Federal Republic in 1945 could have also been named the “Kennan Plan.” It was his idea: One supports the former enemy economically and benefits from a worthy ally.

Kennan Was Often Right

Kennan was a very sophisticated anti-communist. He regarded Joseph McCarthy as a full-blown idiot, especially as the senator from Wisconsin believed that the State Department and the army were infiltrated by communists. He opposed the Vietnam War from the beginning. But George F. Kennan did endorse the Korean War: South Korea had to be supported and the northern aggression needed to be contained in order to make it clear to the Stalinist Soviet Union and Maoist China that the Americans would not be pushed away.

In other words, Kennan was often right in his lifetime and, with a very long telegram, helped justify a policy that ended up safeguarding western Europe from a terrible fate.

However, his diaries have now been published in America. These diaries confirm the rumors that were circulating among biographers: This clever diplomat had an ugly side to him.

Kennan lived very long: from 1904 to 2005. Hence, his diaries are very long too — over 700 pages.

He Raved about Eugenics

The first shock comes from an article from Die Zeit, when Kennan was still a young student at Princeton: A fellow student nearly convinced Kennan of his belief that inferior human beings should be exterminated. “We have a group of more or less inferior races … No amount of education and discipline can effectively improve conditions as long as we allow the unfit to breed copiously and preserve their young.”

One could say that such ideas could only emanate from a young man that just hit puberty, and that he would have learned as he grew older. But as an 80-year-old, George F. Kennan continued to entertain ideas of eugenic measures.

So which races, whose continued breeding Kennan deemed to be displeasing, qualify as being inferior? Obviously the Jews. But in his diaries he also makes snide remarks about Italians (“ignorant”), Iraqis (“dirty”), Lithuanians (“fools”), Georgians (“lazy”) and black people.

In 1978, he asked himself in his diaries whether the fate of humanity were to merge into a “polyglot mass,” where only Jews, Chinese and “Negroes” would be left and would dominate the rest: … “the Chinese by their combination of intelligence, ruthlessness and ant-like industriousness; the Jews by their sheer determination to survive as a culture; the Negroes by their ineradicable bitterness and hatred of the whites.”

He Also Regarded Women and Homosexuals as Inferiors

Of course, Kennan also regarded women as inferior, and the fact that gay people showed less embarrassment in public as a sign of Western decadence.

More than Jews, Chinese and black people, George F. Kennan actually despised his countrymen: “These damned American tourists,” he thought quietly when touring Europe, “with their lousy clothes, their jeans and tennis shoes: Why do they have to be here in the Zurich airport?”

The diplomat was deeply convinced that America was doomed: “With every effort to surpass pessimistic and dramatic formulations — I see no escape for the U.S.: whether in connection with its foreign relations or regarding its domestic issues.”

This note was written in 1978. Afterward, the American anti-American who hated television and cars frequently dreamed of moving to a solitary farm, whether it was in Vermont, New Hampshire, Alaska, Norway or the Antarctic. Obviously, he never took that step.

The Reactionary Diplomat Was Incapable of Being Optimistic

Oscar Wilde once observed that watching someone counterfeit bills does not necessarily prove that he cannot play the violin. It does not refute the foreign policy reflections of George F. Kennan that he, when alone in front of his diary, portrayed himself as a boring, reactionary person.

Still, taking into account what we know about him, one should rethink his vaunted foreign policy realism. His policy on containment was only justified when he understood how important it was to stop communism without waging a war.

What Kennan could not imagine was that the people he deemed to be inferior would establish civil rights organizations, universities and trade unions behind the Iron Curtain. In short, he had no idea that they would organize a civil society. And, of course, he was oblivious to the beneficial and revolutionary impact of rock music (Václav Havel was a life-long fan of the band Velvet Underground).

Today, George F. Kennan would probably not belong to those people who would find friendly words to describe Vladimir Putin. But he would also underestimate the Ukrainians. Kennan only saw well with his left eye, which only allowed him to see malice and decline. With his right eye, the optimistic one, he remained blind.