GEORGE F. KENNAN An American Life John Lewis Gaddis New York: The Penguin Press, 2011. 784pp. $46.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-59420-312-1A full-scale biography of George F. Kennan is doubly justified, since few American diplomats have wielded such influence as either policymaker or critic as he did in both roles. As minister-counselor at the American embassy in Moscow, he wrote the 1946 long telegram interpreting Soviet behaviour and, under the pseudonym X, published 1947 article in Foreign Affairs outlining an American strategy to contain Soviet expansion. As the first head of the State Department's policy planning staff from 1947 to 1949, he played role in implementing that strategy, making him perhaps the most significant American policymaker never to rise above ambassadorial rank. But his influence was on the wane by 1950, and he left government to return only for short stints as ambassador to the USSR and later Yugoslavia. From the mid-i940s on, he commented on Soviet affairs and American foreign policy from perch at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. His combination of experience, literary talent, and sheer longevity (he died in 2005 at 1 01) made him consequential public intellectual.John Gaddis's 1982 book Strategies of Containment was biography of Kennan's principal idea, and, at the youthful age of 78, Kennan designated Gaddis as his own official biographer. His subject's longevity gave Gaddis the opportunity to mine Kennan's papers and interview many of his contemporaries, while the fact that Kennan outlived the Cold War allowed Gaddis to situate him in the conflict's overall arc. Gaddis's mastery of his sources and immersion in Kennan's world have resulted in scrupulously researched and elegantly written biography, though there are important questions that he does not fully address. He uses Kennan's diaries and letters to trace Kennan's emergence from motherless home in Milwaukee's tonier precincts, his outsider status at Princeton, the febrile nervosity that saw him fall ill at almost every crucial moment of his life, and his affinity with Russian culture and life sparked by the great-uncle and namesake who explored and wrote about that country. Kennan's 1930s musings in favour of restricting the franchise to white males with deep roots in America and his notion of council of Platonic guardians who would make national policy without regard to electoral whims show, as Gaddis writes, that Kennan was ambivalent at best about democracy and understood the Soviet Union far better than he did the United States (117). They also point to an essentialism that could sometimes play Kennan false - as when he doubted the relevance of democracy where it was not deeply entrenched - but that also underpinned his confidence that the Soviet Union could not last.While Kennan doubted the possibility of lasting modus vivendi with the Soviet regime, he saw Marxist ideology as counting for less than traditional Russian nationalism and the need for foreign enemy to justify totalitarianism at home. He believed that the Soviet bloc would ultimately fragment because its subject populations differed ethnically and linguistically from their Russian overlords, not only because their national interests diverged. From his wartime reading of Gibbon (whom Gaddis convincingly identifies as seminal influence) and his experience of Europe under Nazi occupation, Kennan concluded that the forcible maintenance of an extensive, heterogeneous empire was impossible over time.Kennan's strategy of creating positions of strength that would check Soviet expansion pending the regime's mellowing and an eventual settlement of the Cold War was widely accepted because, Gaddis writes, it offered a path between the appeasement that had failed to prevent World War II and the alternative of third world war (694). Since elements of Kennan's analysis were already in the air, his main contribution was to rationalize and clarify the assumptions behind the actions toward which policymakers were already leaning. …