Book Review: Kennan: A Life Between Worlds

An analytical biography of a brilliant thinker, historian, and one of America’s greatest diplomats

In Frank Costigliola's “Kennan: A Life between Worlds”, George F. Kennan is responsible for America’s Containment Policy against the Soviet Union. Public Domain

George F. Kennan was one of the most important U.S. diplomats of the 20th century. His famous telegram—tagged the Long Telegram—sent shortly after the end of World War II was the foundational geopolitical text for what would become known as America’s containment policy against the Soviet Union.

Frank Costigliola has written a new biography on the diplomat and historian, titled “Kennan: A Life between Worlds,” that focuses on the man as an ambitious diplomat, ousted ambassador, brilliant geopolitical strategist, emotionally and sexually frustrated man, and American citizen whose love of country was rivaled only by his love of pre-Soviet Russia.

Eros and Civilization

Costigliola identifies early in his book a loss that would haunt Kennan throughout the rest of his life. His mother died when he was 2 months old. The loss of his mother, with whom he felt a strong bond despite never knowing her, would result in a lifelong search for an emotional opposite-sex intimacy that he would, possibly unwisely, connect through Freudian psychology.