A facebook exchange on George Kennan (slightly edited)

OK -- first things first: Don't you love these guys' hair partings?

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JB: Kennan was, I would say, rather provincial (i.e.,"non-politically correct" speaking, from the Midwest, from a non-Eastern establishment background). He longed, as you know, to be F. Scott Fitzgerald

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(another Princeton "outsider" from the Midwest), and went to Russia -- I'd argue -- in the same way many American "outsider-intellectuals" fled to Europe, especially at the beginning of the past century (some very familiar names, granted before Kennan became "public": Eliot, Pound, Stein; and of course Fitzgerald himself). Kennan chose Russia, knowing (perhaps) in his all-American way, that that's where he could "make it/his name" by becoming an "expert' in that little-known (to Americans) Eurasian corner of our small planet, with which his family had non-"ethnic" connections.

Image from, with caption George Kennan - photo from 1885

Essentially a conservative, intellectually uncomfortable with modernism, Kennan had profound doubts about Stalinism -- and popular American consumer-culture. Of the two, I would say (that, aside from hyping himself and his own remarkable career) Stalinism fascinated him most, given his suspicion of "democracy." Of course, his ideas have been "misinterpreted" (doubtless by yours truly as well) in part because he was essentially a second-rate, somewhat prepotente scribbler (George, you're no Fitzgerald), and even not a first-rate thinker. But then anyone who is labeled as a "first-rate thinker" (a designation far from historical "truth") must watch out where her real talent comes from.

P.S. On the quite fascinating relationship between the rather "feminine" écrivain manqué Kennan and rather more "masculine" Dean Acheson (who went to the prestigious Eastern establishment Groton boarding school, not Wisconsin's obscure St. John's Northwestern Military Academy as did George) see. Acheson told Kennan that

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The task of a public service officer seeking to explain and gain support for a major policy is not that of a writer of a doctoral thesis. Qualification must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point.

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