Freedom on the Offensive: Human Rights, Democracy Promotion, and US Interventionism in the Late Cold War by William Michael Schmidli

Abstract

After a perfunctory treatment of Kennan’s role as a policymaker, Costigliola resumes his cataloging of Kennan’s thoughts and feelings. Kennan’s emergence as a notable historian, along with his continuing (but usually failed) efforts to influence U.S. foreign policy, earn some attention. So, too, do the wide range of other issues that spurred Kennan to share his views as a prominent public intellectual—the student movement of the 1960s, civil rights, the environment, immigration to the United States, and the social fabric of America. His positions were usually provocative and occasionally outrageous. Costigliola does not hold back in identifying Kennan’s prejudices and even bigotry toward Jews and blacks. Ultimately, though, Costigliola proves rather forgiving of his subject. Kennan’s various but largely ineffective efforts in the post-Stalin era to seek a settlement with the Soviet Union in the Cold War win Costigliola’s approval. The biographer grants his subject some kind of retrospective absolution, although he is rather awkward in doing so. Costigliola laments that for most of his life Kennan “never articulated remorse for what he had done” in supposedly helping to forge elements of the strategy of containment. Costigliola seems to believe that Kennan should have engaged in much more self-flagellation and expressions of contrition. In an especially vacuous tabulation, he asserts that although Kennan “had spent the four years from 1944 to 1948 promoting the Cold War, he devoted the subsequent forty to undoing what he and others had wrought.” This is appraised “as not a bad record” (pp. 424–425). Costigliola’s judgment on this matter reflects his own defective understanding of both the onset and the course of the Cold War. Kennan’s service as director of the Policy Planning Staff is the one aspect of his long life that most warrants favorable treatment. Readers who want to understand why will need to look somewhere other than Costigliola’s book.