George Kennan and Henry Kissinger had much in common. They served their country as diplomats and policy formulators — Kennan as a foreign service officer and director of the State Department’s policy planning staff; Kissinger as national security adviser and secretary of state. Both served in diplomatic/national security posts when the United States was at war — Kennan in World War II and Korea; Kissinger during the Vietnam War. Both wrote great works of history — Kennan’s The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order, The Fateful Alliance, The Decision to Intervene, and Russia Leaves the War; Kissinger’s A World Restored and Diplomacy. Both were members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations and contributed important essays to the Council’s premier journal, Foreign Affairs. Both wrote magnificent memoirs (Kennan in two volumes, Kissinger in three). Both were consulted by presidents and policymakers of both major U.S. political parties. Both contributed to America’s foreign policy debate long after they officially retired from government service (Kennan died at age 101, Kissinger at age 100). And both were foreign policy realists who thought about the world in Bismarckian realpolitik fashion.
Kissinger was a great admirer of Kennan. In the first volume of his memoirs, Kissinger applauded Kennan for coming “as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history,” referring to the containment doctrine that Kennan advocated in his famous “X” article in Foreign Affairs in July 1947 and that helped shape U.S. foreign policy throughout the Cold War. Kissinger wrote that Kennan’s thought “suffused American foreign policy on both sides of the intellectual and ideological dividing lines for nearly half a century.” Kennan, Kissinger opined, was both a “brilliant analyst” and a “singularly gifted prose stylist.” “No other foreign service officer,” Kissinger noted, “ever shaped American foreign policy so decisively or did so much to define the broader public debate over America’s world role.”
But what did Kennan think of Kissinger? Kennan’s best biographer, John Lewis Gaddis, wrote that Kennan once remarked that Kissinger “understands my views better than anyone at State ever has.” David Mayers in his study of Kennan noted that both Kennan and Kissinger prized “international stability far more than reforming the world in America’s image.” Lee Congdon notes that Kennan considered that detente with the Soviet Union showed Kissinger’s “measure of imagination, boldness of approach, and sophistication of understanding.”
The best source for Kennan’s views on Kissinger, however, are The Kennan Diaries. Kissinger is mentioned on 12 pages of the diaries, beginning in 1966, when Kennan writes briefly about having lunch with Kissinger, “who is now fully recovered from the militaristic preoccupations of earlier years.” Kennan may have been referring to Kissinger’s book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which argued the feasibility of “limited nuclear war” and advocated a conventional weapons build-up in the face of the Soviet challenge. Kennan noted that Kissinger believed that the U.S. policy toward Germany was “alienating everyone else in Europe and recreating the France-Russian alliance.” The Franco-Russian alliance of the late 19th to early 20th century was the subject of Kennan’s book The Fateful Alliance, an alliance that he believed help bring about the First World War — a war that Kennan considered the “seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century.
When Kissinger became national security adviser and later secretary of state, Kennan occasionally traveled to Washington at Kissinger’s request for lunches and consultations. Kennan would send Kissinger copies of remarks or speeches he planned to make and in one instance sought Kissinger’s advice on where to publish such remarks. At some of these lunches, Kennan and Kissinger discussed both contemporary events and history, including their mutual admiration for Bismarck.
In late May 1990, Kennan was invited to a state dinner at the White House for then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. He noted in the diaries that “Henry Kissinger greeted me with real warmth, which moved me.” The last entry mentioning Kissinger is dated March 24, 1994, in which Kennan notes that he received a copy of Kissinger’s new book, Diplomacy. Kennan noted that Kissinger’s office called and wanted to arrange a lunch meeting. Kissinger’s Diplomacy resembled in tone and philosophy Kennan’s 1951 book American Diplomacy.
Kennan and Kissinger were both members of the American foreign policy establishment, which is reviled by some on the ideological right and others on the ideological left. Kennan, like Kissinger, deplored the anti-war movement in the streets of America in the 1960s, even as he argued for withdrawal from Vietnam. Unlike many of Kissinger’s colleagues in academia, Kennan never condemned Kissinger for attempting to end the war in Vietnam with honor. Kennan saw the wisdom of the Nixon–Kissinger policy of detente with the Soviet Union — a policy Kennan had been advocating since the 1950s. Kennan, like Kissinger, understood that there were no permanent solutions in the foreign policy arena. He also understood, with Kissinger, that the United States, to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, has no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.
Unlike Kennan, Kissinger never became alienated from American society; nor did he, like Kennan did, allow the fear of nuclear war to cloud his geopolitical judgment. Kennan, as the great historian Richard Pipes noted, developed a “distaste for democracy” and “came to believe that democracies were incapable of conducting a long-range foreign policy.” Kennan’s fear of nuclear war in the 1980s nearly turned him into a Soviet apologist. That never happened to Kissinger, who rightly viewed nuclear weapons in the context of the larger geopolitical struggle with the Soviets. Kennan was the more introspective of the two, while Kissinger was more at ease in the public spotlight. In the end, our country was fortunate to have two such scholar-statesmen to counsel our leaders in times of great peril.
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Henry Kissinger: Eight Decades of Service to American National Security