THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 19, 1996 TAG: 9605200211
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JOHN A. FAHEY
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
AT A CENTURY'S ENDING
Reflections 1982-1995
GEORGE F. KENNAN
W.W. Norton & Co. 351 pp. $27.50.
In At A Century's Ending, former Foreign Service officer George F. Kennan, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, offers an anthology of 16 speeches and 20 of his articles, book forewords and reviews from the past 13 years. Kennan's impeccable reputation as a diplomat reaches back to the Stalin days.
In 1946 while stationed in Moscow, Kennan wrote an 8,000-word dispatch, famous since as the Long Telegraph, recommending that the West deal with the Soviet Union ``with firmness through containment.'' The next year, under the pseudonym ``Mr. X,'' he authored an article urging the West to confront Russians everywhere that they encroach upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.
Now Kennan views containment in entirely different terms, applying his doctrine to the West as well as to Russia. He sees a need to eliminate environmental destructiveness, to curb tendencies to live beyond means, to stop immigration of masses of people of different cultural and political traditions, and to halt the conventional, as well as the nuclear, weapons race.
Alarm about the failure of the United States and Russia to disarm looms redundantly throughout At A Century's Ending. This is not surprising. Fearing a power shift in 1957 when the Russians launched sputnik, Kennan called for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Europe and for no NATO missiles.
Always a severe critic of inappropriate U.S. government action, especially when dealing with the Soviet Union, the 92-year-old retired diplomat spews his venom on the military for its conduct of intelligence activities in U.S. embassies and for unwelcome initiatives into the foreign affairs area. In Kennan's view an embassy should be used only as a base for the State Department's diplomatic and political ventures.
In a 1982 address delivered at the New York Union Theological Seminary, Kennan frets about a nuclear weapons race between the Soviet Union and the United States that is ``effectively out of control.'' He argues against using military weapons as a serviceable instrument of national policy. He views the frame of mind of the two powers in military matters as doing ``more than any else to make war inevitable.''
Projecting his own opinion of how Soviet leaders viewed the Reagan Administration, Kennan says ``. . . they have concluded that they have nothing to expect at its hands except a total blind, and almost deadly hostility . . . '' Kennan's gloomy outlook throughout the 1980s and early 1990s failed to foresee the dramatic changes rapidly approaching.
Writing in 1987 about the future of the West, Kennan states, ``This is also not the time to consider schemes for German reunification or any extensive modification of the political boundaries now subsisting across the continent.'' About NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Kennan remarks, ``The best example of this danger is found in the loose talk that has marked the discussions of recent days about German reunification. Many people talk about this as if it were something that would or could readily and naturally flow from any extensive liberalization of conditions in East Germany.''
Kennan saw the Russian army with its nuclear as well as conventional weapons as being an impossible obstacle to reunification. Kennan did not foresee West Germany's willingness to buy the army's removal from East Germany by building housing for Russian forces in Russia.
In his 1990 review of Gordon Ash's The Uses of Adversity on the Fate of Central Europe Kennan criticizes the author for a narrowness of perspective that inevitably attends the description of very recent events. He quotes the warning of Sir Walter Raleigh, ``who-so-ever in writing a modern Historic, shall follow the truth too neare the heels, it may happily strike out his teeth.''
Reading At A Century's Ending, one might wonder if Kennan has any teeth left. His work is stuffed with warnings and dire forecasts that failed to jell. Unable to keep pace with the rapid changes in central Europe, Kennan and his reflections also succumb to Sir Walter Raleigh's prophecy. MEMO: John A. Fahey is an associate professor emeritus of foreign languages
and literatures at Old Dominion University. by CNB