Volume 19, Number 7 · November 2, 1972
Man of State
By Alfred Kazin
Memoirs 1950-1963
by George F. Kennan
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 368 pp., $12.50
George Kennan's second and concluding volume of memoirs tells such an unrelieved story of failure as a State Department adviser and ambassador that it is just as well that he has no more 'public' life as a diplomat to describe. There is surely no other American Foreign Service officer of our time, no regular State Department man, whose ambition to influence our policy has been so intense and so well-publicized—and who at the same time blames himself so severely for the 'personal' lapses which he thinks have often been responsible for his failure to redirect the government. At the same time it is impossible to think of any other American so well informed on Russia, so expert and loving on the Russian language, so authoritative on the continuity of Russian political habits, whose deep-seated ambition is so little to be a scholar alone in his study.
Review, 1593 words
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