George F. Kennan: An American Life

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“I HAVE SOMETIMES WONDERED WHETHER YOU WOULD BE ABLE TO see your way to going through with it,” George Kennan wrote me in 1995, fourteen years after I became his biographer, sixteen years before the book would appear. “But,” he added, “I comfort myself with the reflection that I have, after all, deservedly or otherwise, become something closer to a national figure in recent years…. I do not expect to live to see the results of your efforts; and I am not sure that I ought to see them, even if I lived to do it. But write them, if you will, on the confident assumption that no account need be taken of my own reaction to them, either in this world or the next.”1

Kennan had, of course, already secured an international reputation as a diplomat, grand strategist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, and antiwar activist when, in 1981 at the age of seventy-eight, he agreed to cooperate in the writing of this biography. We both assumed that it would appear a few years after his death. Neither of us foresaw how far into the future that would be: Kennan would not die until March 17, 2005, at the age of a hundred and one. Characteristically, he blamed himself for the delay.

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