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‘X’ ten years on: The fictions of George F. Kennan’s recent factual representations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 April 2015
Abstract
George F. Kennan belongs among the most revered American foreign policy thinkers of the last one hundred years. He was also very protective of his future legacy, going to extraordinary measures to control it. These included authorising a single historian, John Lewis Gaddis, to write his biography, George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011). Is Gaddis’s account definitive? On the tenth anniversary of Kennan’s death, this article investigates this question as part of a broader critical reflection on methods and presuppositions governing traditional historiography. It answers in the negative by illuminating the various fictions of Gaddis’s ostensibly factual representation. These surface especially in contrast to The Kennan Diaries (2014), whose minimalist chronological structure makes the non-empirical content brought by Gaddis to his image of Kennan by virtue of narrativising it all the more visible. The larger implications of this finding are significant, particularly in the present geopolitical context of Russia’s renewed expansionism. Should the US foreign policy community (re)turn to Kennan for guidance in its attempts to understand and respond to Moscow’s current behaviour, what kind of diagnosis and prescriptions he has to offer depends on which Kennan one chooses to consult, giving historians behind his representations genuine political power.
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Footnotes
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I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the journal’s editors and three anonymous referees, whose critical feedback comments – well-taken, thorough, and returned in a timely manner – pushed me to rethink several portions of the argument as well as its overall structure. Whatever shortcomings remain are, of course, mine to answer for.
References
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