He was not speaking their amoral language of power.Ī decade later, as his age approached three digits, Kennan fell into a fascinating correspondence with Thomas Naylor, the Duke economist who in his Green Mountain retirement had founded the Second Vermont Republic (SVR). In this way, we might resist giantism, uniformity, and depersonalizing bureaucracy while reinvigorating the regions that are America’s heart and soul. In Kennan’s valedictory, Around the Cragged Hill (1993), he had come out as a full-fledged decentralist, musing that the hypertrophied United States should fission into “a dozen constituent republics” to which most of Washington’s current responsibilities would devolve. Yet for all this, his trenchant and even impassioned warnings about “the hubris of inordinate size” are among the most sagacious passages ever committed to paper by an American mandarin.Ĭostigliola notes Kennan’s lifelong preference for “personal rather than anonymous or machine interactions, local sourcing, small farms, other small enterprises, backyard ventures, environmental cleanup, crafting and building things, hand tools, small-scale everything, trains rather than planes and cars, and the arts and technologies lost with the hegemony of the internal combustion engine.”īut he ignores Kennan’s final, and most engagingly radical, enthusiasm: independence for the state of Vermont. He and his Norwegian wife, apparently a dull virago, mistreated the servants the cosseted Kennans kept.
Kennan was almost criminally neglectful of his children and a philanderer withal. I expect he would not have driven the welcome wagon to greet certain of my ancestors. He didn’t much care for blacks, Jews, working-class whites, or Hispanics, though he made individual exceptions. Over his 101 years on this side of the grave, George Kennan managed to be brilliant, prescient, outrageously snobbish, and often unlikable. Why, George: did you find them toothsome?
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