De Gaulle: o segundo maior estadista europeu do século XX - biografia por Julian Jackson

Lion of France

A new, and likely definitive, biography of Charles de Gaulle

De Gaulle, by Julian Jackson (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 928 pp., $39.95)

Review by Daniel J. Mahoney

City Journal, July 19, 2019

Charles de Gaulle was perhaps the most thoughtful and impressive statesman of the twentieth century. His only possible rival in this regard is Winston Churchill, another statesman-thinker, though Churchill presided over a longstanding, stable, and free political order in the United Kingdom, something on which de Gaulle could not depend in the French case. De Gaulle has been the subject of fine biographies in the past, among them a somewhat mythologizing three-volume work by Jean Lacouture, a well-researched but less than sympathetic account by Eric Roussel (who clearly prefers the supranationalist Jean Monnet to de Gaulle’s passionate partisanship for the nation), and a more popular and readable account in English by Jonathan Fenby. Added to these now is this superb and equitable portrait by the British historian of twentieth-century France, Julian Jackson. 

Jackson writes with verve, avoiding the turgidity of typical academic prose. He respects, even admires, de Gaulle but never succumbs to hagiography. He allows de Gaulle’s greatness to speak for itself and treats the general’s writings and military, political, and philosophical reflections with the seriousness that they deserve. His judgments on de Gaulle’s thought and action are almost always illuminating and always measured. Jackson’s is likely to be the authoritative biography of de Gaulle.  

Jackson recognizes that, for de Gaulle, “word” and “deed” were inseparable. De Gaulle’s prewar writings, especially The Enemy’s House Divided (1924) and The Edge of the Sword (1932), are important sources for understanding his thought and character. That he came from a dignified, Catholic, bourgeois background—one that was, to cite Jackson, “austere, traditionalist, suspicious of ostentation”—is also relevant. This milieu was nostalgic for monarchy without hating the Republic; wary of revolutionary excess; and open to a middle path between a liberalism that often ignored the needs of the soul and the dehumanizing tyranny that inevitably accompanied socialism. Yet if De Gaulle was influenced by these origins, he was not reducible to them.  

As a young man and officer, de Gaulle read widely, forming what would become his mature view of France, the world, politics, and the soul. From the French Catholic poet and philosopher Charles Péguy (“an author who mattered immensely to de Gaulle”), he learned a generous patriotism that tried to bring together the best of France, before and after 1789. Like Péguy, de Gaulle loathed pacifism and loved France. He drew upon Péguy’s admiration for Joan of Arc, the saint and warrior who loved God and France with almost equal fervor. For de Gaulle, again like Péguy, France had a “mystical vocation” to bring liberty, civilization, and enlightenment to humanity: in his words, it had “an eminent and exceptional destiny.” This Catholic patriot never succumbed to anti-Semitism, any more than he confused the martial virtues, noble within their own sphere, with hatred of other peoples and nations. Totalitarianism of the Left and Right was never a temptation for de Gaulle.

De Gaulle was committed to keeping grandeur and moderation together, to doing full justice to both. In his first book, The Enemy’s House Divided, which he began to research in prison libraries while a prisoner of war in Germany between 1916 and 1918, the future statesman explored the reasons for Wilhelmine Germany’s defeat in World War I. He admired the courage of the enemy but not its Nietzschean disdain for “the limits marked out by human experience, common sense and the law” that had permeated and corrupted German political and military culture before and during the Great War. At the beginning of the book, de Gaulle defended “a sense of balance, of what is possible, of measure” that “alone renders the works of energy durable and fecund.” This was to become his political creed, his animating political philosophy: grandeur must be informed by realism, restraint, and mesure.

In his subsequent interwar writings, de Gaulle expressed a mixed judgment about Napoleon Bonaparte. He admired his courage and military genius but faulted him for leaving “France smaller than he had found her.” Napoleon had little appreciation for restraint, and like the German military elite in World War I, he was undone by “outraged principles,” by the “tragic revenge of measure,” as de Gaulle so eloquently put it in his 1938 book France and Her Army.

The French conservative liberal Raymond Aron once feared “the shadow of Bonapartism,” as he put it in a 1943 article, that surrounded de Gaulle and the Free French movement during their days of wartime English exile. But in 1958, after de Gaulle’s return to power as the founder of the new French Fifth Republic, Aron differentiated the “classic ‘Bonapartist’ conjuncture” that paved the way for the general’s return to power (“a climate of national crisis, the discredit of parliament and politicians, the popularity of a man”) from any suggestion that de Gaulle aimed to be a new Bonaparte. As Aron framed it, Bonaparte was an “adventurer” and tyrant; Boulanger, who almost took part in a coup against the French Republic in 1889, was a “ditherer”; and Marshal Pétain, the hero of Verdun and leader of Vichy France, was “an old man.” By contrast, de Gaulle was “an authentically great man.” Those are the exact distinctions that needed to be made, and they are well borne out by Jackson’s nuanced narrative. 

The Edge of the Sword, de Gaulle’s most famous work—written between World Wars I and II—took aim at a facile pacifism that ignored the harsh realities of a world where conflict formed an essential part of the life of nations. De Gaulle knew that the Great War, bereft of humane and prudent political leadership, had highlighted many of the horrors of armed conflict. But de Gaulle could not imagine a political world—a human world—“without force.” He did not glorify war and never endorsed conflict or imperialism as ends in themselves. Still, he asked in his preface to the book: “How can one conceive of Greece without Salamis, Rome without her legions, Christianity without the sword, Islam without the scimitar, the Revolution without Valmy?” (Valmy was a French revolutionary battle well known to all French readers, at least in those days.) 

A reader might ask: How did de Gaulle’s opposition to pacifism cohere with his Christian faith? Like Péguy—and like the French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos, whom he also admired—de Gaulle believed that the Christian, too, was called to the path of chivalry and personal and political honor. De Gaulle viewed the condition of his daughter Anne, born with Down syndrome, as a trial from God. He loved her dearly and saw a humble greatness in “poor Anne.” He wept with terrible grief (he told the parish priest he felt “annihilated”) when his daughter died at 20 in 1948. De Gaulle told one of his aides in 1946 that Christ’s sacrifice was at the center of universal history: “He opened up the horizons of religion beyond the hearts of men towards vast regions giving a place to human suffering, to human anguish, to human dignity.” Jackson’s de Gaulle is a croyant, a believer, whose personality, thought, and action were “impregnated” by his Christian faith. 

At the same time, “the man of character,” the model of political magnanimity that de Gaulle embodied and presented in chapters two and three of The Edge of the Sword, was an ideal of heroic leadership marked by the most ascetic of stoicisms. Jackson compares de Gaulle with Corneille’s Augustus, a model of public service informed by solitude and some sacrifice of personal happiness. No Nietzschean overman, de Gaulle suffered as only the “born protector” of a great and free nation can suffer. He was pained, as was Churchill, by Munich and the democracies’ choice for dishonor and peace at any price. “Step by step,” he wrote in the fall of 1938, the French had chosen the path of “humiliation and retreat so it had become a second nature.” He would choose the path of personal and political honor, as a Frenchman, a Christian, and a good European. He had warned about Germany’s bellicose intentions in the years after 1933 and pushed for the modernization of the French armed forces with new tank and air capacities that could take the war to the enemy. The French instead hid naively behind the ineffectual Maginot Line. There was more than a little moral corruption hiding behind this passivity, as de Gaulle argues in the first volume of his War Memoirs. 

De Gaulle rose to the moment in June 1940. A terrible political, moral, intellectual, and military crisis called this “born protector” to lead a damaged France—at least that part of it that refused to surrender to a Germany far worse than the one of 1914. As Jackson observes, “without the fall of France, de Gaulle would undoubtedly have become a leading general in the French army, probably a minister of defense, perhaps even head of the government—but he would not have become ‘de Gaulle.’” De Gaulle, of course, was sensitive to the role of contingency, chance, and choice in the unfolding of human affairs, as all his writings suggest (the philosopher Henri Bergson was a key influence here). On these themes, Jackson quotes from one of de Gaulle’s most insightful prisoner-of-war lectures in 1917:

Without the Peloponnesian War, Demosthenes would have remained an obscure politician; without the English invasion, Joan of Arc would have died peaceably at Domrémy; without the Revolution, Carnot and Napoleon would have finished their existence in lowly rank; without the present war General Pétain would have finished his career at the head of a brigade.

In de Gaulle’s view, Providence, destiny, and chance act as restraints even upon a “prince” filled with the capacity for effective thought and action. De Gaulle was an unusually reflective man of action, contemplative far beyond the capacities of most of his military and political contemporaries. Like Churchill, he knew that he was a “man of destiny” meant to leave his mark on history. The two statesmen were “shepherds” obliged to do battle with totalitarian “wolves.” As Jackson demonstrates, “word” and “deed” converged in the great “appeal” to honor and resistance that de Gaulle delivered from the BBC studios in London on June 18, 1940. A new “adventure,” for de Gaulle, began at age 39, as he observed in his War Memoirs. On June 18, de Gaulle reminded his listeners (and posterity) that the war was a global conflict. What was lost by mechanized force—the planes and tanks of the Axis powers—could be won in the future by the combined mechanized strength of the Allied powers. He knew that Britain and France could rely on their extensive empires and “the immense industry” of a United States that would be inevitably drawn to the cause of European liberty. He spoke simply but eloquently for French independence, for honor, and for the nobility of continued resistance. De Gaulle will always be remembered as the “man of June 18th,” Jackson believes—even more than as the founder of the Fifth French Republic in 1958 (with its energetic, if distant and oligarchic, executive institutions) or as the statesman who reconciled France to the end of empire, if not to a radical diminishment of France’s continuing “rank” in the world. 

De Gaulle was not especially anti-American, as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger came to appreciate in the late 1960s. He worried about French, and European, dependence upon American military protection long before others became aware of this problem. He unhesitatingly sided with the West during the various Berlin crises from 1958 to 1961, and again during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. He may have been right about the imprudence of a long American military involvement in Indochina in the 1960s, but the man who warned Georges Pompidou in the early 1950s about a potential “Asian Munich” might have shown more respect for American efforts to stymie the totalitarian tide. Were Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong merely nationalists, as de Gaulle suggested at Phnom Penh in 1966? Jackson establishes that de Gaulle genuinely hated Communism and did not like what he saw in the Soviet Union when he visited in 1944 and 1966. He thought, rightly as it turned out, that Europe would outlast a Communist ideology so at odds with human nature and the wellsprings of European civilization. But he was wrong in the 1960s in thinking that leaders such as Alexei Kosygin, Władysław Gomulka, János Kádár, and Nicolae Ceausescu were beginning to think and act like nationalists, even patriots. These men combined Bolshevism, no small dose of cynicism, and a lust for power. None was an authentic patriot, and none could be said truly to love his country. This was wishful thinking on de Gaulle’s part, and Jackson is not sensitive to this point. It goes too far to say, as Jackson does, that de Gaulle was somehow vindicated by the antitotalitarian revolutions of 1989.

As Jackson makes clear, de Gaulle was a traditionalist in his social leanings and sensibilities. He hesitated to legalize contraception (what would happen when marriage was just about sex and not at all about fecundity, he asked?), and he thought that the Catholic Church had gone too far in accommodating the excesses of the modern world in the aftermath of Vatican II. Yet he presided over the rapid economic modernization and cultural liberalization of France. As Jackson notes, when people think of postwar France, figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jean-Luc Godard come to mind—men who hardly shared de Gaulle’s vision of French grandeur informed by moderation and respect for tradition. And the student-driven events of May 1968 unleashed a radical assault on everything de Gaulle held dear. But he remained the man of June 18.

Today, de Gaulle is an uncontested hero for the French, something he hardly was in his lifetime. Yet French elites owe more to the secular antinomianism of May 1968, with its utter contempt for Gaullist austerity (moral and political), than to an authentically Gaullist vision. Emmanuel Macron, the current resident of the Élysée Palace, praises de Gaulle and claims that his War Memoirs provide continuing political inspiration. Macron undoubtedly loves the monarchical trappings of the French presidency, but he is hardly a partisan of the “greatness,” “independence,” and “rank” of France in the manner of de Gaulle. De Gaulle probably would be appalled by Macron’s easygoing accommodation to the behemoth of the European Union and the dictates of a politically unaccountable Brussels Commission. He might even be a supporter of a “French exit” from Europe in its present form.

De Gaulle was an authentically great man, as revealed in his interwar writings, in his stoicism, in his passionate love for France, in his choice for honor and resistance in June 1940, and, above all, in the myriad ways he kept greatness and moderation together in his thought and action. But his efforts were somewhat Sisyphean. De Gaulle even feared that he had amused his contemporaries with flags, as he told André Malraux in a final conversation, recorded in that writer’s fascinating Fallen Oaks. Still, de Gaulle’s writings, and a stellar biography such as Jackson’s, provide enduring witness to a life lived in service to France and to the enduring verities that inform Western civilization.

Daniel J. Mahoney holds the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College, where he has taught since 1986. He is the author of De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Modern Democracy (revised paperback edition, Transaction/Routledge, 2000) and most recently of The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity (Encounter Books, 2018). 

O "milagre" de Hong-Kong e o seu autor - livro biografia sobre John Cowperthwaite

Na verdade, não tem nenhum milagre. Apenas Adam Smith aplicado na prática, e constantemente.
Muito tempos antes que o World Economic Forum ou o Insead, ou a Heritage Foundation e o Fraser Institute, começassem a fazer os seus rankings e classificações de liberdade econômica, de competitividade, de bom ambiente para negócios, Milton Friedman já tinha detectado o sucesso que era e estava se tornando Hong Kong, um monte de pedras, algumas ilhas, que não tinham absolutamente nada em cima, a não ser uma boa localização no sul da China, perto do enclave português, bem mais antigo, que era Macau.
Pois bem: depois que a colônia inglesa (que tinha sido atribuída à Grã Bretanha por cem anos, de acordo com os tratados desiguais do século XIX) foi libertada da dominação japonesa ao final da Segunda Guerra -- um dos que ficaram presos ali foi o militar Charles Boxer, futuro historiador do império marítimo português -- sua renda per capita era menos da metade da renda per capita da metrópole. Bem antes da colônia ser devolvida à China, a renda já tinha ultrapassado a da metrópole, e atualmente é mais de 30% superior, e isso a despeito, desde os anos 1950 (pós-revolução comunista no continente), de um afluxo constante de refugiados e emigrados de várias partes da Ásia, buscando simplesmente liberdade para empreender, pessoas miseráveis, chegando sem qualquer pertence, muitas delas dormindo em cortiços na cidade (que ainda existem) ou em sampans no rio ou na sua embocadura. São essas pessoas miseráveis que criaram a riqueza de Hong Kong, como aliás dizia Adam Smith, seguida pelo administrador inglês da colônia, o homem que criou a sua prosperidade, e que é objeto desta biografia resenhada nesta matéria.
O que dizia Adam Smith, além da sua famosa frase sobre a "mão invisível", que muitos equivocadamente elevam à condição de teoria, quando é uma simpes imagem. Adam Smith disse o seguinte:

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavor to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.

E não venham me dizer que esses princípios só se aplicam em situações especiais, em países pequenos, em cidades-Estado, como Cingapura e Hong-Kong, justamente.
Não: princípios de governo se aplicam em quaisquer circunstâncias, qualquer que seja o tamanho do país, por mais pobre que ele seja. O Brasil podia aprender com isso.
Elementar, não é?

Paulo Roberto de Almeida​
Brasília, 18 de agosto de 2017

CapX, 18 August 2017

The man behind the Hong Kong miracle

By Marian L. Tupy @humanprogress

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• John Cowperthwaite deserves the credit for the rise of Hong Kong
• No modern country has come as close to Adam Smith’s ideal as Hong Kong
• The success of Hong Kong’s experiment with small government was undeniable

I have just finished reading Neil Monnery’s new book, Architect of Prosperity: Sir John Cowperthwaite and the Making of Hong Kong. This fascinating account of the rise of Hong Kong as a global economic powerhouse is well written and, as such, easy to read and understand. I’m happy to recommend it wholeheartedly to CapX’s discerning readership.

I first became interested in the story of Hong Kong in the late 1990s. The emotional handover of the colony from the United Kingdom to China, for example, is deeply impressed on my memory. But also, as part of my doctoral research at the University of St Andrews, I read a number of essays about the rise of Hong Kong written by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. Friedman, an advocate of the free market and small government, believed that individuals, when left unmolested, will strive to improve their lives and those of their families. Prosperity will follow.

His was similar to Adam Smith’s insight:

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavor to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.”

No country in modern history has come as close to Smith’s ideal as Hong Kong. The territory that the British Foreign Secretary Viscount Palmerston described as “a barren island with hardly a house upon it” was once very poor. In the immediate aftermath of World War II and Japanese occupation, its per capita income was about a third of that in the United Kingdom.

By the time British colonial rule ended, Hong Kong was 10 per cent richer than the mother country. Last year, the former colony was 37 per cent richer than the UK. It is, therefore, apposite that the man credited with Hong Kong’s success should be a Scottish civil servant, a University of St Andrews alumnus, and a devotee of Adam Smith: Sir John Cowperthwaite.

As Monnery explains, Cowperthwaite was not the first small government advocate to oversee the colony’s economy and finances. A succession of colonial governors and their financial secretaries ran a shoe string government. But, they did so out of financial necessity, rather than deep ideological commitment to small government.

As Financial Secretaries, Geoffrey Fellows (1945-1951) and Arthur Clarke (1951-1961) established a regime of low taxes and budgetary surpluses, and free flow of good and capital. To those foundations, Cowperthwaite (1961-1971) added not only the vigour of his convictions, but also a handpicked successor, Philip Haddon-Cave (1971-1981). By the time Haddon-Cave departed, the success of Hong Kong’s experiment with small government was undeniable not only to the British, but also to the Chinese. Margaret Thatcher embarked on her journey to dismantle British socialism in 1979, while Deng Xiaoping started undoing the damage caused by Chinese communism in 1978.

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And that brings me to the most important reason why Cowperthwaite, rather than Fellows and Clarke, deserve to be credited with the rise of Hong Kong. Basically, he was the right man at the right place in the right time – the 1960s. It was all well and good to run a small government when the colony was still poor. By the 1960s, however, the colony was prospering and demands for higher government spending (as a proportion of GDP) were increasing. As an aside, the government’s nominal spending increased each year in tandem with economic growth. To make matters much worse, socialism, be it in its Soviet form (i.e., central planning) or in its more benign British form (state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy) was ascendant.

In fact, just before departing from Hong Kong, Clarke appears to have had a sudden crisis of confidence in the colony’s economic model, noting:

“We have, I think, come to a turning point in our financial history … There seem to be two courses we can follow. We can carry on as we are doing … Or we can do something to plan our economy … Which course should we adopt?”

Mercifully, Cowperthwaite was able to articulate the reasons for staying the course. In his early budget debates, he noted:

“I now come to the more general and far-reaching suggestion made by Mr Barton and Mr Knowles, that is, the need to plan our economic future and in particular, the desirability of a five-year plan. I would like to say a few words about some of the principles involved in the question of planning the overall economic development of the colony.

“I must, I am afraid, begin by expressing my deep-seated dislike and distrust of anything of this sort in Hong Kong. Official opposition to overall economic planning and planning controls has been characterised in a recent editorial as ‘Papa knows best.’ But it is precisely because Papa does not know best that I believe that Government should not presume to tell any businessman or industrialist what he should or should not do, far less what he may or may not do; and no matter how it may be dressed up that is what planning is.”

And:

“An economy can be planned, I will not say how effectively, when there unused resources and a finite, captive, domestic market, that is, when there is a possibility of control of both production and consumption, of both supply and demand. These are not our circumstances; control of these factors lies outside our borders. For us a multiplicity of individual decisions by businessmen and industrialists will still, I am convinced, produce a better and wiser result than a single decision by a Government or by a board with its inevitably limited knowledge of the myriad factors involved, and its inflexibility.

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“Over a wide field of our economy it is still the better course to rely on the nineteenth century’s ‘hidden hand’ than to thrust clumsy bureaucratic fingers into its sensitive mechanism. In particular, we cannot afford to damage its mainspring, freedom of competitive enterprise.”

It is not clear whether Cowperthwaite ever read Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, which posits that allocation “of scarce resources requires knowledge dispersed among many people, with no individual or group of experts capable of acquiring it all”, or whether he came to the same conclusions as the Austrian Nobel Prize-winning economist on his own. But, even if he were consciously or sub-consciously influenced by Hayek, it speaks much of Cowperthwaite “the thinker” that he took Hayek’s insights to heart, unlike so many decision-makers around the world, who succumbed to the Siren calls of socialism.

And so it was with considerable amazement that, towards the end of my first year at St Andrews, I discovered Cowperthwaite and I were neighbours. His house on 25 South Street was a few hundred feet away from Deans Court, the University’s post-graduate student residence. I immediately wrote to him and he responded, asking me to come for tea. I spent a wonderful afternoon in his presence and kept in touch with him during my remaining time at St Andrews.

Last time I saw him, he came to the launch of the libertarian student magazine Catallaxy, which my friend, Alex Singleton, and I wrote together. As he took his leave, I saw him walk down Market Street and got a distinct feeling that it would be for the last time. Shortly after I graduated and moved to Washington. A new life and new job took precedence and St Andrews slowly receded down memory lane.

Neil Monnery’s book made those wonderful memories come alive again. His work has immortalised a man to whom so many owe so much. Architect of Prosperity is an economic and intellectual history. Above all, it is a tribute to a principled, self-effacing, consequential and deeply moral man. Monnery deserves our gratitude for writing it.

Marian Tupy is Editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity

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The Woman: do que o Brasil escapou: a primeira embaixadora americana, que quase chegou...

Eu recebo tudo sobre o Brasil que é publicado no New Wirk Times. Por isso me surpreendi com uma chamada, com esse título, The Woman, e uma resenha de livro, relativa ao Brasil.
Curioso, fui ler agora, o que só vai ser publicado no NYTimes de domingo, uma longa resenha dessa extraordinária mulher, famosa por suas frases cortantes, a primeira embaixadora dos EUA, primeiro na Itália, e quase no Brasil, e que deixou um legado inesquecível, para o bem ou para o mal, para todos os que com ela conviveram.
Em todo caso, a resenha está muito bem feita, mas não pretendo comprar o livro, sequer folhear em livraria. A única coisa sobre o Brasil é a perspectiva de ter quase ido. Não sei do que escapamos, mas teria sido uma sensação.
O Brasil dos anos 1950 já tinha tantos problemas de instabilidade política e militar, que ela certamente seria mais uma fonte de instabilidade diplomática...
Enfim, leiam pelo menos a resenha que está muito boa. Vou tentar achar a resenha do primeiro volume. Essa mulher realmente fez história, mas apenas petite histoire...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Sunday Book Review

The Woman

‘Price of Fame,’ by Sylvia Jukes Morris

By MAUREEN DOWDJULY 17, 2014

PRICE OF FAME

The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce

By Sylvia Jukes Morris

Illustrated. 735 pp. Random House. $35.

(vejam a foto aqui)

All Clare on the Western Front: With Fifth Army Group troops, 1945. Credit Courtesy of Sylvia Jukes Morris

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Clare Boothe Luce has a lot to answer for.

As the grande dame of the Republican Party, she introduced Richard Nixon to Henry Kissinger at her 1967 Christmas cocktail party. As la belle dame sans merci of Manhattan’s smart set, she took whatever she wanted from life without regard to moral consequences, even after showily converting to Catholicism. As a glamorous World War II correspondent, she wrote a book so self-­regarding that Dorothy Parker titled her review “All Clare on the Western Front.”

Her colleague at Vanity Fair in the 1930s, Helen Lawrenson, wrote about the author of the venomous 1936 play “The Women”: “I can think of no one who aroused so much venom in members of her own sex.”

“Throughout her life she had aimed for the best of everything and usually gotten it,” Sylvia Jukes Morris writes in the second volume of her exhaustive biography of the relentless enchantress who had more hyphens in her résumé than Barbra Streisand. Clare Boothe Luce was an actress-editrix-playwright-screenwriter-­congresswoman-ambassador-presidential adviser. And as the wife of Henry Luce, father of the Time empire, she was the clever half of the predominant power couple of the mid-20th century, even giving Luce many ideas for Life magazine, though she was barred from its masthead.

She was “an accomplished seductress” who married once, if not twice, for money and position, Morris writes. Yet Luce always asserted that “in every marriage there are two marriages. His and hers. His is better. . . . What man now calls woman’s natural feminine mentality is the unnatural slave mentality he forced on her.”

In Morris’s first volume, “Rage for Fame,” Luce — the illegitimate daughter of a violet-eyed, conniving Upper West Side beauty who urged her daughter to use her blue eyes, blond hair and luminous skin to ensnare wealthy men — is on the ascent, driven by “her perpetual hunger for power in yet more spheres.”

She had few real friends, as Lawrenson wrote, because “she seemed to trust no one, love no one.” Yet, Lawrenson said, Luce “could enter a room where there were other women, more beautiful, ­better dressed with better figures, and they faded into the background, foils for her radiance.”

Luce flourished as a coquette and courtesan in bows and ruffles, but she once told male diplomats at a well-lubricated dinner: “Women are not interested in sex. All they want is babies and security from men. Men are just too stupid to know it.” Her sometime escort, the French artist Raymond Bret-Koch, appraised her this way: “It’s a beautiful, well-constructed facade but without central heating.”

As “Price of Fame” begins, it’s 1943 and the diaphanous, carnivorous 39-year-old Luce is still on the rise. The woman Morris calls “by far the smartest, most famous and most glamorous member of the House of Representatives” is eluding clamoring reporters as she arrives at Union Station to begin her term as a Connecticut Republican. She is also growing more pompous, becoming the target of contemporaries like Dawn Powell, who wrote “A Time to Be Born,” a piercing satire about the chilly blond climber Amanda Keeler, who was “too successful, too arrogantly on top, to even need good taste.”

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Yet as the onetime Democrat became a Republican star — called “Blondilocks” by The Bridgeport Herald — Luce retained her talent to startle. Speaking to bejeweled Republican supporters at a dinner, in the low, melodious pitch she diligently rehearsed, Luce observed, “One of the troubles with the Republican Party is that it contains too many prehistoric millionaires who wear too many orchids.” Luce preferred to wear a rose in a small vial of water on the lapel of her custom-made suits.

When the Democratic representative J. William Fulbright lectured her on the House floor about her views on national security, she lectured him right back that he mixed up “infer” and “imply.” She attacked Senator Harry Truman’s wife as “Payroll Bess” for taking a salary of $4,500 a year to do her husband’s mail and edit committee reports. As president, Truman banned “that woman,” as he called her, from the White House. Luce accused Vice President Henry Wallace of “globaloney” and President Roosevelt of lying his way into World War II. Roosevelt riposted that Luce was a “sharp-tongued glamour girl of 40.”

After winning re-election, Luce went on a newfangled foreign junket with a delegation from the military affairs committee to visit the battlefields of Western Europe and collect some souvenirs: the hearts of romance-starved military men. Just before photographers snapped their shots, she would reverse her camouflage jacket to show the white lining, looking, as one Army public relations officer recalled, like “a gorgeous laughing snow bunny.”

She ensorcelled the married Lieut. Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr., in command of the Fifth Army in Italy. Soon she was in a black silk suit on the front, having dinner before a roaring fire with the handsome Truscott in his tent. As they sat on his regulation cot, he grabbed her and importuned, “The most beautiful thing in this world is an American division!”

As their romance blossomed, Truscott wrote poetry to her — “I’m troubled by the ghosts that haunt this place / They mock the skull beneath your lovely face” — and confessed, “I was drawn to you as iron is drawn by a magnet and was almost as helpless.” When she went off incommunicado with her general, the Pentagon dispatched a lieutenant to collect her from a villa in Rome and return her to the Z.I. (Zone of the Interior, i.e., the United States).

The ensuing decades, scarred by family tragedy; marital trauma; bouts with “the dismals,” as she called her bad mood swings; drug dependency; a hysterectomy at 44; arsenic poisoning; suicide attempts; a brain tumor and her horror at her fading beauty; a dwindling pool of male admirers and servant problems, make for fascinating but melancholy reading.

Over the years, Morris pursued Luce, who finally gave in and provided access to 460,000 items in the Library of Congress, more than many presidents save. With her husband, the fellow biographer Edmund Morris, Morris spent time with Luce at her home in Honolulu, which the renowned hostess called her “fur-lined rut,” and once ingratiated herself by filling in when Luce was lacking a full-time maid. “I don’t see much hope for a country where you can’t get live-in servants,” Luce, who was very hard on the servants — even once slapping the wife of one — grumpily told Morris.

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She had no small talk, just pontification and a jutting jaw if anyone interrupted her monologues. And, when Luce poured herself a big Scotch despite her ulcers, nicknamed Qaddafi and Begin, Morris writes, “it seldom occurred to her to offer drinks to others.”

Morris is not great at stepping back and analyzing. She just methodically piles up the facts. Two volumes would seem excessive, but Luce’s pathological need to invent and reinvent herself, her restless, acquisitive drive to conquer new worlds and her cascading calamities end up providing plenty of vivid material.

Luce was not enamored of Congress. Her combination of femininity and forcefulness — which Vogue called “analogous to being dynamited by angel cake” — unnerved some colleagues, who ostracized her. She complained to Pearl Buck about “myriad little snubs and discriminations” dished out to “the girls.” (Her husband’s top editors also belittled her, and curtailed coverage of her, despite his importunings. She had to settle for the cover of Newsweek.) When a colleague in Congress tried to flatter Luce by saying she had “a masculine mind,” she demurred: “Thought has no sex.” She was touted as a possible vice-presidential candidate in 1944, but said: “Politics is the refuge of second-class minds.”

Although called “The Woman Who Has Everything,” she was lonely, and her marriage was ragged. Morris chronicles the “heart trouble” of both Luces, to use the euphemism Time editors employed for their boss’s infatuations. While she was recovering from her hysterectomy, Luce got a visit from a lawyer sent by Harry, as her husband was known, telling her that she “owed it” to Roman Catholicism to divorce him. But she clung to the marriage, even though he had refused to have sex with her for eight years, citing two events early in their relationship that he said made him impotent: when she had not been impressed enough that he made $1 million a year, and when she had been dismissive of his cherished membership in Yale’s Skull and Bones.

Although Luce had not been the most nurturing mother (Harry said she had treated her daughter, Ann, “abysmally” when the girl was growing up) she was shattered when the 19-year-old Stanford student died in 1944 in a car accident in Palo Alto. She wandered into a Catholic church in a haze of bitterness. It was the beginning of an intense spiritual odyssey that would end with her conversion to Catholicism — her instructor was Fulton J. Sheen, the monsignor with the piercing eyes who became a television star in the 1950s. It was a move that alienated her from Harry’s anti-­Catholic Presbyterian missionary mother, who would have been appalled to know that Luce asked Pope Pius XII to help persuade Harry to convert. It didn’t work.

Collecting charismatic priests the way she had once collected charismatic generals, Luce wrote religious screenplays and pointed out that Hollywood “means Holy rood — the wood of the Cross.” But she blamed the conversion for her inability to write with bite.

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She moved on to fighting Communism. She conjured the dangerous idea of “preventive war” long before Dick Cheney, urging America to go to war with Russia. After she helped him in his campaign, President Eisenhower made her the ambassador to Italy (the first woman to hold the post). Despite some initial misogyny among Italian politicians and in the newspapers — the leader of the Communist Party described her as “an aging witch” — and a blunder when she urged Italians to vote against Communist pols, she did well in the job, and Harry enjoyed being the “consort.” She became known as “Machiavelli in a Schiaparelli.” But she was descending further into the Valley of the Dolls, not realizing that some of her ailments might be traced to the lead paint fragments in rosettes above her bed in the American embassy residence in Rome that were dropping into her morning coffee and possibly poisoning her.

Back in America, Harry tried to leave her for Lady Jeanne Campbell, the granddaughter of the British press titan Lord Beaverbrook. But she attempted suicide and he stayed, even though he could not bear even to cuddle her anymore, and she called him “a moral leper.” In an unsent letter to the younger Campbell, whom she referred to as “Baby,” Luce summed it up this way: “Big Mama won’t let Big Poppa go.” (Campbell married Norman Mailer instead.) In her “anecdotage,” as she termed it, Luce had a six-year “flirtation” with LSD, and said one trip made her realize that God didn’t like to be flirted with.

She agreed to be Eisenhower’s ambassador to Brazil. Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon fought the nomination, arguing that she was qualified to be only a “political hatchet man.” One Ohio senator even read into the record a poem by Sir William Watson entitled “The Woman With the Serpent’s Tongue.” Luce was confirmed but then proved Morse’s point when she made a crack, culled from Time researchers, about how her tormentor had once been kicked in the head by a horse. In the ensuing furor, Luce decided to drop out.

She proceeded to a new “enthusiasm,” Henry Kissinger, even though she was known to tell people that “there existed a relatively small group of wealthy Jews who met once a year in the greatest secrecy and planned the strategy of world Jewry for the future.” (The one time I met her, at a Time party in the ’80s, her opening gambit was: “Did you know all the mischief in the world was caused by five Jewish men?”)

Harry, a heavy smoker and drinker, died of a heart attack in 1967. Clare had once remarked that “widowhood is one of the fringe benefits of marriage,” but hers, she said, was “a sort of deluxe loneliness.”

Once, not long before she died in 1987 at age 84, felled by a brain tumor, Luce called Morris from her apartment at the Watergate, sad because it was Saturday night and she had no “beaus.” Morris asked her what kind of escort she would like. “A homosexual admiral would be good,” Luce replied, “because at the end of the evening I wouldn’t have to put out.”

Maureen Dowd is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.

A version of this review appears in print on July 20, 2014, on page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Woman

Um historiador ingles: Hugh Trevor-Roper

A Very English Controversialist

By NORMAN STONE

The Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2011

Oxford in the mid-20th century was a romantic place—ancient buildings emerging through the mists, a class hierarchy still in place, complete with grand accents. The place had character and produced characters as well. Hugh Trevor-Roper was one such, and Adam Sisman's biography, "An Honourable Englishman," is a marvelous evocation of man, place and time. Here was an Oxford historian who hunted, drove a Bentley, had duchesses at his parties, worked in British wartime intelligence and wrote a book about the last days of Hitler that was translated into dozens of languages.

There is that surprisingly common thing among the English upper-middle class, a family that offers no affection—like the one Trevor-Roper was born into in 1914. Growing up on the border with Scotland, he was "starved of affection, and even of attention," Mr. Sisman says, and "became a very abstracted child."

His parents made him go to church, but Trevor-Roper passed the time memorizing the Assyrian and Babylonian chronologies. Then it was boarding school, Latin and Greek to a very high standard, travel abroad to get good French and German (which he did not like), then to Oxford as an undergraduate. He had his foot on the academic ladder by the time war broke out in 1939—he'd already published his first book, on the Anglican Church and Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud in the English Civil War, making waves with its anti-clericalism.

Trevor-Roper could not join the army because his eyesight was poor. (He needed spectacles of Palomar Observatory strength and often offended people by not recognizing them.) He went into military intelligence instead and flourished. It was the making of him, because he was assigned at war's end to examine Hitler's final days before his suicide in the Reichstag bunker. The Russians were making a mystery of them.

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Lord Snowdon/Camera Press/Retna

Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1968, the year he wrote 'The Philby Affair.'

Trevor-Roper's job was to locate witnesses in Berlin, and he did it well. He had some help, not entirely acknowledged, from a manuscript (which I saw in Moscow) written by Hanna Reitsch, a famous German pilot who had flown to Berlin in the war's final days with the newly appointed head of the Luftwaffe (his predecessor, Hermann Goering, having been dismissed for defeatism). The plane crash-landed outside the Reichstag as Red Army troops were taking the city. The Luftwaffe chief, badly injured, was hustled in a stretcher down the steps into Hitler's bunker, past the Goebbels children playing hopscotch. Reitsch saw the desperate last moments in the bunker but was ordered away before the very end—and she eluded capture for a time, only to find her entire family dead of cyanide poisoning around the breakfast table on a Salzburg mountain.

Trevor-Roper used Reitsch's manuscript to much effect in "The Last Days of Hitler" (1947). The book holds up well, even in light of additional evidence that became known when the Soviets began releasing German prisoners in the 1950s. The book is also very well written, the model being Edward Gibbon's history of the Roman Empire's decline. "The Last Days of Hitler" was a great success, critically and financially. Mr. Sisman reports that, in those days, Oxford professors like Trevor-Roper were annually paid £1,900 (before tax). "The total sum due him in the first accounting period from sales of the British edition alone would be £3,849."

And Trevor-Roper needed the money. He had upper-class habits—hunting (until he broke his back), smart cars, grand-ish houses (one put up by Sir Walter Scott in the Scottish borders). He also married well, to the daughter of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the World War I British commander. Alexandra, known as Xandra, had divorced her first husband, the British naval attaché in postwar Paris. She acquired a fabulous couturier collection while there; when she and Hugh ran short of money late in life, she began surreptitiously selling off the clothes.

An Honourable Englishman

By Adam Sisman
Random House, 643 pages, $40

Then, in 1957, when he was still in his 40s, Trevor-Roper was appointed Regius professor of modern history, a prestigious post more commonly awarded in recognition of a long and distinguished career. The appointment was made by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who a decade before had been working at the family publishing firm when it brought out "The Last Days of Hitler."

Mr. Sisman knows all the gossip. Trevor-Roper could enrage people, and not all of the ire was caused by envy. Part of the trouble was that he never wrote the promised Great Book, diverting his energies again and again into essays and higher journalism. He did so, apparently, to please Xandra: "You expect me to earn more money than I am paid at Oxford. To do this I must write for the Sunday Times. The Sunday Times wants me to write on foreign politics, and to do this I must go abroad." Mr. Sisman adds: "But she persecuted him for going on 'holidays' without her."

Trevor-Roper did make repeated attempts to take on big book subjects, but he would write four or five chapters before abandoning them for something else. His friends gathered these into collections of essays that were published; it was left to his former pupil, Geoffrey Parker, to write the epic volume on 17th-century European history that Trevor-Roper should have done.

Another distraction from book-writing was Trevor-Roper's willingness to undertake lecture tours. The practice could be fruitful: Some of his best-written pieces began life as lectures. There is a remarkable talk he gave in 1961 asking: "Why did the economic and social and intellectual life of the Roman Catholic countries sink or stagnate, while that of the Protestant countries bounded forward, in the three centuries after the Reformation?" It was an idea broached by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) but pursued with vigor by Trevor-Roper. He delivered the lecture to an unlikely audience: Irish nuns in Galway.

Weber launched his thesis about the Protestant ethic and capitalism at the turn of the century and for the next hundred years everybody said it was All Wrong—in other words, Weber was onto something. Trevor-Roper recognized this, then pursued an explanation. The capitalists were not especially Protestant, he showed, and the Protestants were not especially capitalist. The difference with Catholicism was that the Counter-Reformation in Europe, beginning in the mid-16th century, drove out the capitalists with taxes and bureaucracy, so they set up in Holland, or England, or America—just as happened, though Trevor-Roper did not spell this out, with the Jews of Central Europe in the 1930s. It was emigration, not religion, that made the difference. The explanation was an ingenious one, though in some ways it does just push the question back, leaving questions about the Counter-Reformation unaddressed.

The Trevor-Ropers' make-it-and-spend-it life meant that they improvidently neglected to buy a decent house in London; as he neared 70, Trevor-Roper was rather stuck in Cambridge, where he had become the head of Peterhouse College in 1980. (The year before, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had made him a life peer; he chose the title Baron Dacre of Glanton, for his birthplace in Northumberland.) By 1983, he was unhappy at Peterhouse, feeling isolated and pinched for money, and worried about retiring and about where he and Xandra would live.

The mixture was an explosive one, and it helps to account for that comic and sad episode when Trevor-Roper endorsed the authenticity of Hitler's purported diaries. "Ever since he made his name as a Hitler expert with the worldwide success of The Last Days of Hitler," Mr. Sisman writes, "Hugh had been called upon to judge the authenticity of documents from the Nazi period. It had become a profitable sideline." The German magazine Stern claimed to have obtained Hitler's diaries and was offering them for syndication to the Times and Sunday Times, who hired Trevor-Roper to examine the papers for a "five-figure fee," Mr. Sisman says.

Trevor-Roper's German had become very rusty, and anyway his eyesight could not handle the forger's scribbles—which were quickly revealed as fake after the diaries were publicly trumpeted. The whole episode is brilliantly written up in Robert Harris's "Selling Hitler" (1986). Oddly enough, Trevor-Roper had made a fool of himself in the Sunday Times two decades earlier, by pontificating about ballistics in support of some idiotic theory about the assassination of President Kennedy. God knows why he did these things. Adam Sisman has done a wonderful job with a life that, in its way, is very English.

—Mr. Stone is a professor of modern history at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey

George Kennan, biography by John Lewis Gaddis - Henry Kissinger

The New York Times Review of Books, November 10, 2011

The Age of Kennan

By HENRY A. KISSINGER

GEORGE F. KENNAN:An American Life

By John Lewis Gaddis

Illustrated. 784 pp. The Penguin Press. $39.95.

While writing this essay, I asked several young men and women what George F. Kennan meant to them. As it turned out, nearly all were essentially oblivious of the man or his role in shaping American foreign policy. Yet Kennan had fashioned the concept of containment in the name of which the cold war was conducted and won and almost concurrently had also expressed some of the most trenchant criticism of the way his own theory was being implemented. To the present generation, Kennan has receded into a vague past as has their parents’ struggle to bring forth a new international order amid the awesome, unprecedented power of nuclear weapons.
For the surviving participants in the emotions of that period, this state of affairs inspires melancholy reflections about the relevance of history in the age of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle. Fortunately, John Lewis Gaddis, a distinguished professor of history and strategy at Yale, has brought again to life the dilemmas and aspirations of those pivotal decades of the mid-20th century. His magisterial work, “George F. Kennan: An American Life,” bids fair to be as close to the final word as possible on one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants. The reader should know that for the past decade, I have occasionally met with the students of the Grand Strategy seminar John Gaddis conducts at Yale and that we encounter each other on social occasions from time to time. But Gaddis’s work is seminal and beyond personal relationships.
George Kennan’s thought suffused American foreign policy on both sides of the intellectual and ideological dividing lines for nearly half a century. Yet the highest position he ever held was ambassador to Moscow for five months in 1952 and to Yugoslavia for two years in the early 1960s. In Washington, he never rose above director of policy planning at the State Department, a position he occupied from 1947 to 1950. Yet his precepts helped shape both the foreign policy of the cold war as well as the arguments of its opponents after he renounced — early on — the application of his maxims.
A brilliant analyst of long-term trends and a singularly gifted prose stylist, Kennan, as a relatively junior Foreign Service officer, served in the entourages of Secretaries of State George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson. His fluency in German and Russian, as well as his knowledge of those countries’ histories and literary traditions, combined with a commanding, if contradictory, personality. Kennan was austere yet could also be convivial, playing his guitar at embassy events; pious but given to love affairs (in the management of which he later instructed his son in writing); endlessly introspective and ultimately remote. He was, a critic once charged, “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”
For all these qualities — and perhaps because of them — Kennan was never vouchsafed the opportunity actually to execute his sensitive and farsighted visions at the highest levels of government. And he blighted his career in government by a tendency to recoil from the implications of his own views. The debate in America between idealism and realism, which continues to this day, played itself out inside Kennan’s soul. Though he often expressed doubt about the ability of his fellow Americans to grasp the complexity of his perceptions, he also reflected in his own person a very American ambivalence about the nature and purpose of foreign policy.
When his analytical brilliance was rewarded with ambassadorial appointments, to the Soviet Union and then to Yugoslavia, Kennan self-destructed while disregarding his own precepts. The author of trenchant analyses of Soviet morbid sensitivity to slights and of the Kremlin’s penchant for parsing every word of American diplomats, he torpedoed his Moscow mission after just a few months. Offended by the constrictions of everyday living in Stalin’s Moscow, Kennan compared his hosts to Nazi Germany in an offhand comment to a journalist at Tempelhof airport in Berlin. As a result, he was declared persona non grata — the only American ambassador to Russia to suffer this fate. Similarly, in Belgrade a decade later, Kennan reacted to Tito’s affirmation of neutrality on the issue of the Soviet threat to Berlin as if it were a personal slight. Yet Tito’s was precisely the kind of neutralist balancing act Kennan had brilliantly analyzed when it had been directed against the Soviet Union. Shortly afterward, Kennan resigned.
Nonetheless, no other Foreign Service officer ever shaped American foreign policy so decisively or did so much to define the broader public debate over America’s world role. This process began with two documents remembered as the Long Telegram (in 1946) and the X article (in 1947). At this stage, Kennan served a country that had not yet learned the distinction between the conversion and the evolution of an adversary — if indeed it ever will. Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one comprehensive act or gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a willingness to pursue one’s ultimate foreign policy goal in imperfect stages.
America had conducted its wartime diplomacy on the premise that Stalin had abandoned Soviet history. The dominant view in policy-making circles was that Moscow had embraced peaceful coexistence with the United States and would adjust differences that might arise by quasi-legal or diplomatic processes. At the apex of that international order would be the newly formed United Nations. The United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain were to be the joint guardians. (China and France were later additions.)
Kennan had rejected the proposition of an inherent American-Soviet harmony from the moment it was put forward and repeatedly criticized what he considered Washington’s excessively accommodating stance on Soviet territorial advances. In February 1946, the United States Embassy in Moscow received a query from Washington as to whether a doctrinaire speech by Stalin inaugurated a change in the Soviet commitment to a harmonious international order. The ambassador was away, and Kennan, at that time 42 and deputy chief of mission, replied in a five-part telegram of 19 single-spaced pages. The essence of the so-called Long Telegram was that Stalin, far from changing policy, was in fact implementing a particularly robust version of traditional Russian designs. These grew out of Russia’s strategic culture and its centuries-old distrust of the outside world, onto which the Bolsheviks had grafted an implacable revolutionary doctrine of global sweep. Soviet leaders would not be swayed by good-will gestures. They had devoted their lives (and sacrificed millions of their compatriots) to an ideology positing a fundamental conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds. Marxist dogma rendered even more truculent by the Leninist interpretation was, Kennan wrote, “justification for their instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value. . . . Today they cannot dispense with it.”
The United States, Kennan insisted (sometimes in telegramese), was obliged to deal with this inherent hostility. With many of the world’s traditional power centers devastated and the Soviet leadership controlling vast natural resources and “the energies of one of world’s greatest peoples,” a contest about the nature of world order was inevitable. This would be “undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face.”
In 1947, Kennan went public in a briefly anonymous article published in Foreign Affairs, signed by “X.” Among the thousands of articles produced on the subject, Kennan’s stands in a class by itself. Lucidly written, passionately argued, it elevated the debate to a philosophy of history.
The X article condensed the Long Telegram and gave it an apocalyptic vision. Soviet foreign policy represented “a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power.” The only way to deal with Moscow was by “a policy of firm containment designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”
So far this was a doctrine of equilibrium much like what a British foreign secretary in the 19th century might have counseled in dealing with a rising power — though the British foreign secretary would not have felt the need to define a final outcome. What conferred a dramatic quality on the X article was the way Kennan combined it with the historic American dream of the ultimate conversion of the adversary. Victory would come not on the battlefield nor even by diplomacy but by the implosion of the Soviet system. It was “entirely possible for the United States to influence by its actions” this eventuality. At some point in Moscow’s futile confrontations with the outside world — so long as the West took care they remained futile — some Soviet leader would feel the need to achieve additional support by reaching down to the immature and inexperienced masses. But if “the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument” was ever so disrupted, “Soviet Russia might be changed over night from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.”
No other document forecast so presciently what would in fact occur under Mikhail Gorbachev. But that was four decades away. It left a number of issues open: How was a situation of strength to be defined? How was it to be built and then conveyed to the adversary? And how would it be sustained in the face of Soviet challenges?
Kennan never dealt with these issues. It took Dean Acheson to translate Kennan’s concept into the design that saw America through the cold war. As under secretary to George Marshall, Acheson worked on the Marshall Plan and, as secretary of state, created NATO, encouraged European unification and brought Germany into the Atlantic structure. In the Eisenhower administration, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles extended the alliance system through the Baghdad Pact for the Middle East and SEATO for Southeast Asia. In effect, containment came to be equated with constructing military alliances around the entire Soviet periphery over two continents.
The practical consequence was to shelve East-West diplomacy while the positions of strength were being built. The diplomatic initiative was left to the Soviet Union, which concentrated on Western weak points, or where it calculated that it had an inherent advantage (as in the exposed position of Berlin). Paradoxically containment, while hardheaded in its absolute opposition to the further expansion of the Soviet sphere, failed to reflect the real balance of forces. For with the American atomic monopoly — and the huge Soviet losses in the world war — that actual balance was never more favorable for the West than at the beginning of the cold war. A situation of strength did not need to be built; it already existed.
The most illustrious advocate of this point of view was Winston Churchill. In a series of speeches between 1946 and 1952, he called for diplomatic initiatives to produce a European settlement while American strength was still preponderant. The American policy based on the X article appealed for endurance so that history could display its inevitable tendencies. Churchill warned of the psychological strain of a seemingly endless strategic stalemate.
At the same time that Churchill was urging an immediate diplomatic confrontation, Kennan was growing impatient with Washington’s tendency to equate containment with a largely military strategy. He disavowed the global application of his principles. As he so often did, he pushed them to their abstract extreme, arguing that there were some regions “where you could perfectly well let people fall prey to totalitarian domination without any tragic consequences for world peace in general.” We could not bomb the Soviets into submission, nor convince them to see things our way; we had, in fact, no direct means to change the Soviet regime. We had instead to wait out an unsettled situation and occasionally mitigate it with diplomacy.
The issue became an aspect of the perennial debate between a realism stressing the importance of assessing power relationships and an idealism conflating moral impulses with historical inevitability. It was complicated by Kennan’s tendency to defend on occasion each side of the issue — leading to incisive and quite unsentimental essays and diary entries analyzing the global balance of power, followed by comparable reflections questioning the morality of practicing traditional power politics in the nuclear age.
Stable orders require elements of both power and morality. In a world without equilibrium, the stronger will encounter no restraint, and the weak will find no means of vindication. At the same time, if there is no commitment to the essential justice of existing arrangements, constant challenges or else a crusading attempt to impose value systems are inevitable.
The challenge of statesmanship is to define the components of both power and morality and strike a balance between them. This is not a one-time effort. It requires constant recalibration; it is as much an artistic and philosophical as a political enterprise. It implies a willingness to manage nuance and to live with ambiguity. The practitioners of the art must learn to put the attainable in the service of the ultimate and accept the element of compromise inherent in the endeavor. Bismarck defined statesmanship as the art of the possible. Kennan, as a public servant, was exalted above most others for a penetrating analysis that treated each element of international order separately, yet his career was stymied by his periodic rebellion against the need for a reconciliation that could incorporate each element only imperfectly.
At the beginning of his career, Kennan’s view of the European order was traditional. America should seek, he argued, an equilibrium based on enlightened self-interest and sustained by the permanent introduction of American power. “Heretofore, in our history, we had to take the world pretty much as we found it,” he wrote during the war. “From now on we will have to take it pretty much as we leave it when the crisis is over.” And that required “the firm, consistent and unceasing application of sheer power in accordance with a long-term policy.”
In pursuit of that European equilibrium, Kennan urged Washington and its democratic allies to oblige the Soviet Union to accept borders as far east as possible. In 1944, he proposed that Poland be placed under international trusteeship to prevent its domination by the Soviet Union. But when this was rejected by Roosevelt, who did not want to risk alienating Moscow in the last phase of the war, Kennan adjusted his view to the new realities as he saw them. If the United States was unwilling to force the Soviet Union into acceptable limits, “we should gather together at once into our hands all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full value.” That meant dividing Europe into spheres of influence with the line of division running through Germany. The Western half of Germany should be integrated into a European federation. He called this a “bitterly modest” program, but “beggars can’t be choosers.”
Six years later, Acheson was building an Atlantic partnership in essentially the manner Kennan had proposed. But Kennan rejected it for three reasons: his innate perfectionism, his growing concern about the implications of nuclear war and his exclusion from a role in government.
The irony of Kennan’s thought was that his influence in government arose from his advocacy of what today’s debate would define as realism, while his admirers outside government were on the whole motivated by what they took to be his idealistic objections to the prevalent, essentially realistic policy. His vision of peace involved a balance of power of a very special American type, an equilibrium that was not to be measured by military force alone. It arose as well from the culture and historical evolution of a society whose ultimate power would be measured by its vigor and its people’s commitment to a better world. In the X article, he called on his countrymen to meet the “test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations.”
Kennan saw clearly — more so than a vast majority of his contemporaries — the ultimate outcome of the division of Europe, but less clearly the road to get there. He was too intellectually rigorous to countenance the partial steps needed to reach the vistas he envisioned. Yet policy practice — as opposed to pure analysis — almost inevitably involves both compromise and risk.
This is why Kennan often shrank from the application of his own theories. In 1948, with an allied government in China crumbling, Kennan — at some risk to his career — advanced the minority view that a Communist victory would not necessarily be catastrophic. In a National War College lecture, he argued that “our safety depends on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile or undependable forces of the world.” A wise policy would induce these forces to “spend in conflict with each other, if they must spend it at all, the intolerance and violence and fanaticism which might otherwise be directed against us,” so “that they are thus compelled to cancel each other out and exhaust themselves in internecine conflict in order that the constructive forces, working for world stability, may continue to have the possibility of life.” But when, in 1969, the Nixon administration began to implement almost exactly that policy, Kennan called on me at the White House, in the company of a distinguished group of former ambassadors to the Soviet Union, to warn against proceeding with overtures to China lest the Soviet Union respond by war.
So emphatically did Kennan sometimes reject the immediately feasible that he destroyed his usefulness in the conduct of day-to-day diplomacy. This turned his life into a special kind of tragedy. Until his old age, he yearned for the role in public service to which his brilliance and vision should have propelled him, but that was always denied him by his refusal to modify his perfectionism.
A major element in this refusal was Kennan’s growing repugnance at the prospect of nuclear war. From the beginning of the nuclear age, he emphasized that the new weapons progressively destroyed the relationship between military and political objectives. Historically, wars had been fought because the prospect of accommodation seemed more onerous than the consequences of defeat. But when nuclear war implied tens of millions of casualties — and arguably the end of civilization — that equation was turned on its head.
The most haunting problem for modern policy makers became what they would in fact do when the limit of diplomatic options had been reached: Did any leader or group of leaders have the right to assume the moral responsibility for taking risks capable of destroying civilized order? But by the same calculus, could any leader or group of leaders assume the responsibility for abandoning nuclear deterrence and turn the world over to groups with possibly genocidal tendencies? Acheson chose the risk of deterrence, probably convinced that he would never have to implement it. Kennan abandoned deterrence and the nuclear option, at one stage even seeking to organize a no-first-use pledge from American policy makers and musing publicly in an interview whether Soviet dominance over Western Europe might not be preferable to nuclear war.
When Kennan was operating in the realm of philosophy, he tended to push matters to passionate and abstract conclusions. Yet under pressure of concrete events, he would swing back to the role of a hard-nosed advocate of specific operational policies. After the Chinese offensive across the Yalu in 1950, he overcame his distaste for Acheson’s more militant policy to urge him to refuse any attempt at diplomacy with the Communist world and instead adopt a Churchillian posture of defiance. Similarly, in 1968, his decade-long advocacy of military disengagement in Europe did not keep him from urging President Johnson to respond to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia by sending another 100,000 troops to Europe.
It was my good fortune to know both Acheson and Kennan at or near the height of their intellectual powers. Acheson was the greatest secretary of state of the postwar period. He designed the application of the concepts for which Kennan was the earliest and most eloquent spokesman. The growing estrangement between these two giants of American foreign policy was as sad as it was inevitable. Acheson was indispensable for the architecture of the immediate postwar decade; Kennan’s view raised the issues of a more distant future. Acheson considered Kennan more significant for literature than for policy making and wholly impractical. Kennan’s reaction was frustration at his growing irrelevance to policy making and his inability to convey his long-term view.
On the issues of the day, I sided with Acheson and have not changed my views in retrospect. If Europe was to be secured, America did not have the choice between postponing the drawing of dividing lines or implementing a diplomatic process to determine whether dividing lines needed to be drawn at all. The application of Kennan’s evolving theories in the immediate postwar decades (particularly his opposition to NATO, his critique of the Truman doctrine and his call for a negotiated American disengagement from Europe) would have proved as unsettling as Acheson predicted.
At the same time, Kennan deserves recognition for raising the key issues of the long-term future. He warned of a time in which America might strain its domestic resilience by goals beyond the physical and psychological capacity of even the most exceptional society.
Kennan was eloquent in emphasizing the transient nature of a division of the world into military blocs and the ultimate need to transcend it by diplomacy. He came up with remedies that were both too early in the historical process and occasionally too abstract. He at times neglected the importance of timing. Gaddis quotes him as pointing out that he had problems with sequencing: “I have the habit of seeing two opposing sides of a question, both of them wrong, and then overstating myself, so that I appear to be inconsistent.”
In a turbulent era, Kennan’s consistent themes were balance and restraint. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he applied these convictions to his side of the debate as well. He testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against the Vietnam War but on the limited ground that there was no strategic need for it. He emphasized that the threat posed by Hanoi was exaggerated and that the alleged unity of the Communist world was a myth. But he also warned elsewhere against “violent objection to what exists, unaccompanied by any constructive concept of what, ideally ought to exist in its place.” He questioned the policy makers’ judgment but not their intent; he understood their dilemmas even as he both criticized and sought to join them.
Oscillating between profound perceptions of both the world of ideas and the world of power, Kennan often found himself caught between them. Out of his inward turmoil emerged themes that, like the movements of a great symphony, none of us who followed could ignore, even when they were occasionally discordant.
s time went on, Kennan retreated into writing history. He did so less as a historian than as a teacher to policy makers, hoping to instruct America in the importance of moderation in objectives and restraint in the use of power. He took as an example the collapse of the European order that led to the outbreak of World War I. He produced two works of exemplary scholarship and elegant writing, “Russia Leaves the War” and “The Decision to Intervene.” He published a book of lectures and essays about the making of American foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century, “American Diplomacy: 1900-1950,” which remains the best short summary of the subject.
Yet Kennan did not derive genuine satisfaction from the accolades that so fulsomely came his way from the nonpolicy world. His partly self-created exile from policy making was accompanied by permanent nostalgia for his calling. In his diary he meticulously recorded the tribute that was paid to him by the American chargé d’affaires at an embassy dinner in Moscow in 1981, noting that no secretary of state had ever paid him comparable attention.
Policy makers, even when respectful, shied away from employing him because the sweep of his vision was both uncomfortable (even when right) and beyond the outer limit of their immediate concerns on the tactical level. And the various protest movements, which took up some of his ideas, added to his discomfort because he could never share their single-minded self-­righteousness.
Dean Acheson wrote that separation from high office is like the end of a great love affair — a void left by the disappearance of heightened sensitivities and focused concerns. What is poignant about Kennan’s fate is that his parting came before he reached the pinnacle. He spent the rest of his life as an observer at the threshold of political influence, confined to what he called “the unbroken loneliness of pure research and writing.”
Though he lived until the age of 101 (dying in 2005) and saw many of his prophecies come into being, even the collapse of the Soviet Union did not confer on him the elation of vindication. Rather, it marked in his mind the end of his literary vocation. The need for his influence on policy making had irrevocably disappeared. “Reconcile yourself to the inevitable,” he confided to his diary, “you are never again, in the short remainder of your life, to be permitted to do anything significant.” He put aside the third volume of his majestic history of pre-World War I diplomacy. He had no further lessons to teach his country.
We can be grateful to John Lewis Gaddis for bringing Kennan back to us, thoughtful, human, self-centered, contradictory, inspirational — a permanent spur as consciences are wont to be. Masterfully researched, exhaustively documented, Gaddis’s moving work gives us a figure with whom, however one might differ on details, it was a privilege to be a contemporary.
Early in his career, Kennan wrote that he was resigned to “the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.” Gaddis had the acumen to follow Kennan’s tortured quest and to convince us that Kennan had indeed reached his mountaintop.

Henry A. Kissinger’s latest book, “On China,” was published in May.