{"id":90512,"date":"2014-03-19T09:11:35","date_gmt":"2014-03-19T13:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=90512"},"modified":"2014-04-08T10:51:57","modified_gmt":"2014-04-08T14:51:57","slug":"diaries-of-a-cold-war-diplomat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2014\/03\/diaries-of-a-cold-war-diplomat\/","title":{"rendered":"Diaries of a Cold War Diplomat"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Frank<\/a>
Frank Costigliola, professor of history and an authority on the Cold War, has edited the diaries of George Kennan, a key figure in 20th-century U.S.-Soviet relations. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As Russia moved to begin annexing Ukraine\u2019s Crimea region earlier this month, history professor Frank Costigliola assigned his students three readings for a discussion of the recent events.<\/p>\n

The assignment, part of his \u201cRise of U.S. Global Power\u201d class, included commentaries by Jack Matlock Jr., who was President Ronald Reagan\u2019s ambassador to the Soviet Union, and political columnist Charles Krauthammer, who coined the phrase \u201cReagan Doctrine\u201d to describe Reagan\u2019s opposition to the global influence of the Soviets during the end of the Cold War era.<\/p>\n

The third reading was Costigliola\u2019s own commentary from <\/a>The New York Times<\/a>,<\/i> in which he provided insight about the history of U.S. relations with the Soviet Union through the eyes of longtime diplomat George F. Kennan, a former ambassador to Moscow and Yugoslavia who was a key figure in establishing the containment policy toward the Soviets during the Cold War. Costigliola edited the recently published book \u201cThe Kennan Diaries\u201d (Norton 2014), which is praised by Kennan\u2019s biographer, John Lewis Gaddis, and two former Secretaries of State, Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Schultz.<\/p>\n

Costigliola described the classroom discussion as \u201ca golden moment,\u201d a rare confluence of current events intersecting with history that allowed his students to gain perspectives far beyond their classroom text.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was helpful and enlightening for my students for me to bring the personal element of how Kennan was recommending one thing in 1946-47 and taking a different direction in later years,\u201d Costigliola says.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/div>\n

A prolific writer and authority on the Cold War era, Costigliola served as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2009, when access to Kennan\u2019s papers was expanded. After leaving the diplomatic corps, Kennan spent 50 years at Princeton, his alma mater, writing about foreign policy and diplomatic history. He died in 2005 at the age of 101.<\/p>\n

During his fellowship at Princeton, Costigliola became fascinated by the material contained in the 8,100 pages of handwritten diaries that began when the diplomat was a child.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never edited something like that before. The biggest challenge was getting to within a respectable, feasible length,\u201d says the historian. \u201cKennan wrote beautifully, almost like calligraphy. There\u2019s a lot of words on each page. I went through it four times, each time cutting it down more and more. I wanted all the aspects of his personality to come through: the political stuff, the elegance of his writing, and representative sections of the various periods of his life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u2018Long Telegram\u2019<\/b><\/p>\n

Kennan was on assignment to Moscow early in the post-World War II era of U.S.-Soviet relations when he sent a 5,540-word cable to his superiors in Washington outlining his view that the Soviets were seeking to expand their influence in the world and that the effort should be contained. The 1946 dispatch, known as \u201cThe Long Telegram,\u201d and a subsequent article in Foreign Affairs<\/i> magazine titled \u201cThe Sources of Soviet Conduct<\/a>,\u201d written in 1947 under the alias \u201cX,\u201d became the foundation of America\u2019s Cold War policy toward the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

Costigliola says Kennan later felt the documents were \u201can albatross around his neck,\u201d and he became critical of American foreign policy, arguing that containment could be achieved via a more open dialogue with the Soviets.<\/p>\n

\u201cKennan was arguing first within the government and then outside the government for a re-engagement with the Soviet Union, for removing some of the blocks for containment, and attempting diplomacy again and trying to understand issues from the Soviet point of view,\u201d Costigliola says. \u201c\u2026 Kennan was arguing again and again in subsequent years that there are two sides to every issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

A man of discretion<\/b><\/p>\n

Costigliola says that in editing the thousands of pages of the diaries he focused primarily on the political insights Kennan recorded, and was surprised by the absence of his views on many key historic moments, including the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The diplomat was also silent when advising George C. Marshall, who served as Secretary of State during the Truman Administration.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen he can\u2019t advise the Secretary of State, he writes in the diary,\u201d Costigliola notes. \u201cIn 1947, he had the ear of the Secretary of State. He loved to be at the center of things. In the rush of being a policy maker and planner, he doesn\u2019t need the diary. The other thing was that Kennan was always the professional, in the sense that there\u2019s nothing in there that\u2019s top secret or secret. He would often say: \u2018I talked with so and so,\u2019 without revealing anything substantive. There is very little there about people, particularly when they were alive. He was very discreet. He intended the diary to be read. He was a man of discretion \u2013 and with diplomats, that\u2019s their job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kennan also reflected in the diary about his ambitions, perceived failures, and his family relationships and, later in his life, about his physical and intellectual decline.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was enormously ambitious, and his constant refrain in the diary is his lamenting of his falling short of those ambitions,\u201d Costigliola says. \u201cThere are other people widely respected for their work but who have turbulent inner lives as well. We see the whole picture here from Kennan. I don\u2019t think it takes away from his intellectual achievements at all. We can better see the context of those intellectual achievements by seeing the full person who had those achievements as well as those personal dilemmas.\u201d<\/p>\n

The historian says he will continue to study Kennan for his next book project, one focused on the diplomat\u2019s relationship with the Soviet Union, utilizing a research fellowship recently awarded through the Humanities Institute of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I really want to do is go back and read the things that Kennan read about Russia and go down to the archives in Washington and look at the early reports he sent from Moscow,\u201d he says. \u201cI really want to see things through his eyes as much as I can, and talk about his lifelong relationship with Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n

To hear Costigliola discuss the book on NPR-affiliate WNYC, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George Kennan was a key figure in 20th-century U.S.-Soviet relations. A UConn history professor has edited his diaries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":90537,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2076,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[55],"class_list":["post-90512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-research","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-08 00:59:58","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90512"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91426,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90512\/revisions\/91426"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/90537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90512"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=90512"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=90512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}