George Kennan

I'm roughly half-way through the second volume of George Kennan's memoirs at the moment. It's not a tell-all, heart-on-sleeve memoir. A bit of the opposite, in fact. It is necessarily selective, written in a formal, slightly stilted style of someone who, while a good writer, is not really trying to produce pleasurable reading and, written as it was long before the age of celebrity fetish and the public's insatiable appetite for dirt, noticeably reticent. It is nevertheless a fascinating read, and for reasons that might not be one's initial guess.

All the expected foreign policy stuff is interesting, to be sure. His account of his short tour as US Ambassador to the Soviet Union is one of the best summaries ever published of the impact of the Soviet police state on foreigners, the state which, while somewhat streamlined since Stalin's time, has not changed fundamentally until after the end of that regime, and is now showing signs of resurrection. What clinches the deal for me, though, are his observations about ordinary things. Here is a man who is intelligent, observant and perceptive enough to think about his daily experiences and their implications, and motivated enough to write them down. Write them down not because he is getting paid to do so (he is not), or to achieve notoriety (he had already done that with his foreign policy work), but because he cares about them, and sees wider implications in them. Traveling to California, he expresses astonishment, and more than a bit of alarm, at the California lifestyle's complete dependence on the car, and therefore on the supply of oil, as well as the precarious state of water availability and the population's insistence on going on with their lives as if everything is fine. What's more, he perceives the essentially irreversible nature of this trend and surmises that California is not unique, it is simply fifteen years ahead of the rest of the country. This in 1951, and, as far as I can tell, completely unprompted! And what are we talking about today, more than a half-century later, if not our dependence on oil and water rights disputes in the Western states?

Here also is a man for whom his work and his chosen field of endeavor is without exception the most important aspect of his life. He works hard, and thinks hard about work all the time, not because he is forced to, or because he is afraid of losing his job if he doesn't, or because he wants to make a pile of money. He does it but because he feels a genuine passion for what he does, he is completely convinced that the questions he contemplates as part of his work have far-reaching consequences for society as a whole, and he is deeply interested in the intellectual problems before him and does not feel like a complete human being unless he makes his best effort to address them. This is the definition of commitment. The kind of commitment I will never have, nor will most people I know. J. comes closest. I suppose this is why he gets to write a memoir and I don't.