Jacob Heilbrunn reviews John Lewis Gaddis's new biography:
Kennan was perhaps the most brilliant intellectual of the past century. He was certainly the most tortured. For all the reams of books and essays written about George F. Kennan during his lifetime, it was a neighbor of his, one J. Richards Dilworth, who divined his true character: "George is ultra-conservative. He’s almost a monarchist." Yes, the man who invented the doctrine of containment that saved the West from Stalinism in the late 1940s and prepared the road for victory in 1989 when the Soviet empire came crashing down was himself less than a democrat. He was as old school as it gets. He pined for an older, pristine America, one that wasn’t enraptured by automobiles, suburbs, commercialism, and choked by pollution and greed. He opposed American recognition of Israel and didn’t feel it was America’s duty to interfere abroad to spread democracy.
Larison has more on Kennan's particular understanding of containment doctrine. In a review of Ned O'Gorman's Spirits of the Cold War, Barry Gewen also returns to Kennan:
[T]hroughout his life Kennan was sour, morose, and pessimistic. "Life can never be other than tragic," he said, and that outlook, or "worldview," dictated a policy of caution, moderation, and quiet if unflagging strength. Moralism, with its absolutist strictures, was a dangerous and hopeless pursuit, its implicit utopianism "almost criminally unforgivable." The world was never going to be brought together in universal brotherhood, and it would be reckless for the United States to build its foreign policy on a program of intervening to eradicate what it viewed as evil. It was better advised to understand its genuine interests and to safeguard them. Therefore, the Soviet Union had to be contained, not converted. … Containment was a school for stoicism.
The Dish 