The REAL George F. Kennan with Frank Costigliola

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:46U.S. diplomat and prize-winning historian George Kennan is a complex, unique, but extremely influential figure and one not everyone is familiar with. I first encountered George Kennan in an international relations course at Tufts University in 1982. had no idea who he was. But the more I read about him, the more amazed I was at the fact that this one man created, by and large, the containment policies that were used by the United States in a bipartisan way since the end of the Second World War, let's call that 1946 to 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. Many people don't know who he is, but I am a huge fan of Mr.

1:31Kennan, And I think he was the single intellect responsible for pushing this policy of containment, which was obviously the most elemental theme of post-World War II and the post-World War II architecture that led to global peace and global prosperity. Yes, if you read the book that Frank Castigliola wrote, he is an extremely quirky guy, but his ideas remain powerful and relevant today. here to tell us all about George Kennan is Frank Castigliola.

2:09Joining us now on Open Book, Frank Castigliola, distinguished professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote an amazing book, by the way. I hope it becomes a bestseller, Frank. It's called Kennan, A Life Between Worlds. But by the way, when I read your book, sir, you didn't write it for it to be a bestseller, actually. You wrote it because you wanted there to be a piece, a historical and objective piece about this very brilliant, very complicated man known as George Kennan. Moreover, lots of people that are listening to this podcast who are young people, because we know that from our demographic studies, do have no idea who George Kennan is.

2:48And so I would imagine you wrote it for that reason as well. You wanted there to be an artifact out there to explain the genius and the complexity of this person. But before we get into him, sir, I want to talk to you about you and me, because your name ends in a vow. My name ends in a vow. I think we're very close to our moms. Right, right, right. Tell me a little bit about Frank before we go into George Kennett. Actually, I was going to start off, even before we talked about Kennett, I was going to start off by saying, you know, I have like 20 or so podcasts that I've done or are going to do.

3:18I spoke last week at Princeton University. in December, I'm giving the keynote at a conference at the London School of Economics, where you took some courses. I read your stuff. But I'll be very honest with you. I've been more excited about this interview with you, in part because I respect you and what you've done, but also especially because of your mother. I think it's really cool the way you have your mother come on at the end of every show. And I was thinking in my mind here, okay, if I could make Ken and George Ken understandable to your mother, I would have been able to do that for my mother, who's now passed on.

3:51So I'm serious now. This is a very big honor for me. Well, first of all, I appreciate that. And listen, what you wrote about your mom and how you think about her, I mean, we're both very lucky, very blessed. I think you, I'm not a psychologist, sir, but I do believe you get a lot of your self-confidence and your skin comfort. You're either comfortable in your own skin or you're not. And I think you get it from your parents, actually, and particularly from your mother. I don't care who's richer than me or who's poorer than me or who's on there's that, you know, I'm good with my mom. It's good enough for me, right?

4:21Isn't that more or less the truth, Frank? That's very true. That's very true. And what you said about being comfortable in your own skin, I think is important, especially for president of the United States. The United States is in a difficult situation if we have a president who's not comfortable in his own skin. That's true. If you think about really great presidents, I mean, regardless of their politics, FDR, Reagan, these are people who are comfortable in their own skin. Truman. Truman, right? They didn't feel that they had to prove something to other people. Yeah, well said. And I think the American people are pretty good.

4:51We're in a little bit of a difficult spot now, but they're pretty good at picking that out. In the cases of those figures, Reagan, people said, all right, he had something about him. There's a very famous story about Reagan where he's running for election again. He's 69. Everyone thinks he's too old. Just imagine that now we have 82-year-olds running. But he's 69. And they say, well, the John Birch Society just supported you. And Reagan says, yeah, I don't care, by the way. They're supporting me. I'm not supporting them. And oh, by the way, if this doesn't work out for me, I'm going to go cut brush in Santa Barbara at my ranch.

5:25And I've had a great life and that's great. But here are my principles. This is what we're doing. And if it works out great, if it doesn't, that's fine. Of course, Truman said very similar things when we were creating the post-World War II architecture, which our friend George Kennan had a lot to say about. But tell us a little bit about you, sir, if you don't mind. You're a professor. How'd you get there? What are you teaching? I grew up in a house, like I mentioned, I think in my website, neither of my parents got past the fifth grade. They had to drop out of school. Frankly, my mother had to drop out of school because there was a lot of anti-Italian prejudice in the town where she was growing up.

6:03And that's literally true. Well, we both know that. You know, the Italians still get it though. You know that, right? I mean, they put the Sopranos on the air. Just imagine if we took other ethnics and we stereotyped them like that, how much of an uproar there would be. Actually, well, yeah, you know, usually I don't think much about that. But in preparing for this interview today, which, as I said, I've really been looking forward to, I went and I Googled the bit that Stephen Colbert did about you after. Right. And I frankly could not believe it. It was just nonstop, you know, Scaramucci, he's Italian, therefore he's a mobster.

6:36Right. That's incredible. Well, you know, Tony Soprano on the Potomac. I was also compared to a Jersey Shore cast member. I did go to Harvard Law School, but let's leave that out. Jim Tan Laundrie. But by the way, you can probably see behind me, sir, there's the cartoon from the Colbert show. Yeah. Okay. They were cartoonifying me. I went on the show, you know, because my attitude is I'm a free speech believer and I don't mind it. I just don't understand why we're so upset about it with other ethnic groups, but we're not upset about it at all with the Italians. Right. But whatever. I'm a free speech person.

7:13Don't mind it. But I appreciate you bringing it up. Yeah, right. So, you know, I grew up, but my father came here to America when he was 18. The next day after he got here, he went to the wholesale Prados market, got a couple of bushels of apples and potatoes, got a push cart and worked making some money on the streets of New York selling the Prados. You know, my mother was nine when she came here. So I grew up in a family like yours that not very much education themselves, but they appreciated the value of education, always pushed me. But, you know, I loved reading as a kid. So my parents thought if you're going to college, you should become a doctor or a lawyer.

7:47What else is there, right? I mean, you know, this is serious. But they were understanding enough when I decided to go major in history, then go to graduate school. You know, I'll tell you another story, though, Anthony. My mother fully accepted by being a professor only about 10 years ago. I've been a professor for 51 years. Only about 10 years ago after she was living in an assisted living place in Florida. And I just wrote a book of Franklin Roosevelt. And so I went down there in the assisted living place, Abby Del Rey, it was called. And I gave a talk about Franklin Roosevelt. And in the audience, in the audience, it was wonderful.

8:22There were these women, many women, a few men, but many women who had voted for FDR back in 1940, 1944. And they were so appreciative. And then my mother, seeing this, seeing this reaction from her friends, thought, well, maybe Frankie did the right thing. I love it. See, I mean, we're going to get way off tangent, but I got to bring this up because I know you'll enjoy it. So my mother wanted me to be a judge. And I could never figure that out. You got to become a judge. And then I went to Harvard Law School. I went to Goldman. My mother told her friends, Frank, for five years that Goldman Sachs was a law firm.

8:53I was in Rosano's Italian Deli getting a hero. And Mrs. Frangidis comes over to me and says, oh, how's that law firm Goldman and Sachs? I said, what are you talking about, Mrs. Frant? She says, well, your mother says you're working at this very prestigious law firm, Goldman and Sachs. Right, right. Because she was embarrassed for me that I didn't practice law. you know? So that's the family. But fast forward, I had the opportunity to have a lunch with Justice Scalia in June of 2014 before he passed. And we regaled each other on the constitution. But then I said to him, sir, what is it with the Italian women and them wanting you to be a judge?

9:30And he said, oh, Anthony, you don't get it. If you're a judge or a priest, they think you're incorruptible because those jobs are for life. If you're a mayor, I mean, maybe if you're a professor because you're tenured, but if you're a mayor, you're probably on the take. They don't want you to be the mayor. A judge or a priest means my son is a good boy. Is that the best, Frank, or what? I think that's it. That's it. Scalia was certainly, he's a piece of work, as you said. Piece of work. He was obviously very well regarded on the left and the right, even though he had an ideological point of view.

10:01He got along really well with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. So, all right. So let's go to this very complex man. Let's say that I've come in from Mars. I've landed near your house. I ring your doorbell and I say, okay, who was one of the leading thinkers in the post-World War II society that understood the threat of the Soviet Union, but also came up with constructs to help promote prosperity and democracy? And you would say who, and hopefully you'd say George Kennan. And then I'd like you to tell me who he was and what you thought of him. Yeah, okay. I'll tell you. But the story is more complicated than that.

10:35And so that's why we have a good opportunity here. Kenning lived to be 101 years old. So he's a man who kind of brought a perspective of the early 20th century into the mid and late 20th century. So in a way, he was a man, in a way, outside of his time who could offer a perspective. You know, like they say, good artists are people kind of often alienated from the society, but they're people who have that kind of perspective from the outside who can see through the BS, see through what's working or what's not working in their own time. So Kennan was a diplomat, meaning that his life's work was getting people to resolve differences with each other, differences that can be very severe.

11:14Particularly, he was an expert on American relations with Russia. Kennan knew Russia intimately. He spent a lot of time in Russia. He spoke the language flawlessly. In fact, he spoke Russian with no accent. he spoke better Russian than Joseph Stalin, the dictator, because Stalin came from Georgia province and still had a Russian, had a Georgian accent. Kennan did not. So Kennan is famous because at the end of World War II, it seemed that the United States had two difficult choices. Here is the United States, 1945-46. The situation was that the Red Army, in pushing back the Germans and getting to Berlin in 1945, the Red Army ended up occupying large parts of Eastern Europe, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and so forth.

11:58And the United States was afraid that Russians would continue moving westward, either with the force of the Red Army or because the largest political party after World War II in France was the French Communist Party. The largest political party in Italy was the Italian Communist Party because the communists had led in the resistance against the Germans and so forth. So Americans feared the further advance of the Russians into Western Europe. And Americans thought there were two bad choices in dealing with that. One was to appease the Russians, to accept their continued movement westward. And the second choice was to go to war with them.

12:32Two bad choices. Kennan said, no, this is 1946, 47. No, those are not the only two choices. A third choice, far better choice, is containment, to contain the Russians, to stop their further expansion. And by that means, actually he said, if we contain the Russians long enough, Russian power or Soviet power, Soviet power will mellow or even collapse. And of course, that's a prediction for the end of the Soviet Union that Kennan made in 1947 that came true in 1991. Okay. That's the part of the story that those who, I know you've taken history courses, you know, that is the widely known part of the story.

13:10What's less well known, what's less well known is that Kennan also believed that after the Russians were contained, after they're pretty much staying within their borders, after Western Europe was revived through the Marshall Plan, which I know you're a big fan of. After Western Europe is revived, then Kennan believed it was time to move from containment to negotiation, to try to ease tensions and try to have compromised solutions that would lead to kind of a permanent peace in Europe and in the rest of the world. So what I'm saying here is that he was a person who's famous for containment, but also moving beyond containment to deal constructively to ease tensions with the Soviet Union because he thought that was necessary, especially in the nuclear age.

13:58Cold War, he feared, could always lead to a hot nuclear war. Well, let me ask you this. Did it work? Well, okay. The it is what the question is. Because Kennan was listened to when it came to containment. When he started advocating in 1949, 50, for negotiating with the Russians, he was not listened to, frankly. And so the Cold War continued. So it worked. And in the terms of containment did lead to the mellowing and collapse of the Soviet power, but only in 1991, that was 40 years, four decades later, Cannon felt that was too long and that we should have come to some kind of agreement with the Russians, some kind of compromise into the Cold War before that.

14:36And this is the important thing to get across. There was always the danger of a nuclear war. That's something we tend to dismiss, think, well, no one wants that. Well, no one wants a lot of bad things that happen. And that's something Kenan was concerned about. So yes, containment worked, but the process took longer than he thought was necessary. Okay. So I'm a huge Kenan fan, despite his complexity. We'll go into it in a second. But about 30 years ago, I think it came out in 1994, I read one of his books around Cragget Hill. Right. He was being quite reflective at that time. He was well into his 80s.

15:12He was just turning 90. Very religious. The book starts out very religious. I don't know if you remember the book, professor. Right, right, right. Call me Frank. Please call me Frank. Frank, he is big time into God. He's a big time into his Presbyterianism and his religion. And he thinks that there's some divine inspiration and some divine things that happen on earth, Right. We're in more of a secular society now, but he certainly felt that way. And he felt that he had a role in that. And so I guess where I'm going, but he also, you know, he had a complicated personal life. Tell us why, I guess, you picked him for this major tomb, this major subject.

15:52I mean, you say as much in the book and introductions over, but tell the listeners why. Yeah, well, okay. I've just been interested. As you said, he's a complex character. He was ill for much of his life and lived to be 101 years old. He's famous for containment, yet he advocated negotiation with the Soviet Union. He was a pioneering environmentalist. He was somebody picked up on global warming way before most other people. He had a farm. I have a farm. He was a person who loved his family and also had numerous affairs. And he was a person who who is really known among political scientists, I'm an historian, but he's known among political scientists for being a realist, for having a supremely rational approach to foreign relations, yet he was highly emotional.

16:35So it's a person who is a mix of many different things, as many people are, but he seemed to be very, very interesting. And the other thing about Kennan is that there's so much evidence about his internal life. He wrote a diary, started keeping a diary at the age of 11, And he kept that diary till he reached the age of 100. So there's a lot of intimate aspects of his life that are kind of revealed in the diary. He's also a person who wrote over 20 books, many of them won major prizes. He spoke German as well as Russian flawlessly. You know, I felt that his story needed to be told. Well, I mean, it's a beautiful story.

17:14I mean, you cover everything. I want to set this scene for our listeners. He is in the embassy in Moscow. I believe at the time he's working for Avril Harriman. Yeah. And he now is trying to explain to people what he sees and what he knows of the Soviet Union and the Russian culture. And so he telegrams back to the State Department or back to Washington. He signs it with an X. Give us the story. Right. Okay. This is the story of the long telegram. The situation is February 1946. The war ended that previous year. As I said a little earlier, people in Washington are unsure how to respond to the Soviet threat.

17:56Kenyon is also frustrated. He's frustrated with the Soviet government. He's frustrated with the American government. He's frustrated with the Russians because he's upset about their moving into Eastern Europe. He's also upset because Kenyon is a person who loved the Russian people, loved Russian culture. He doesn't love the Russian government, but he loved the Russian people. He loved Russian culture. And the Soviet secret police, Stalin's secret police, had a policy preventing Soviet citizens from having any contact with foreigners. I mean, you could be arrested. You could be sent to Siberia.

18:29You could be executed by having contact, ordinary innocent contact with foreigners. And that's something that just drove Kennan up a wall. So he's upset with the Soviet government. He's also upset with the US government because Kennan is a person of enormous ability. The bumper sticker story of Kennan is he's a person of enormous ability, could do all kinds of things. The only thing greater than his ability was his ambition. And he was frustrated because he had not been invited to the Yalta Conference, the Yalta Summit Conference of a year ago, February 1945, with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin.

19:05He'd not been invited to that. Harriman went and not him. and he has also felt that the US government, this is 1946, was not listening to him in terms of the reports he was sending into Washington. So when he got a telegram from Washington saying, why are Soviets behaving so badly? Cannon said, okay, now he's going to let them have it. And also, as I said, he was sick. He's often sick. He was now sick in bed with the flu. And it was Washington's birthday, February 22nd, 1946. And back in the day, you and I remember this, back in the day, we didn't celebrate the generic President's Day. Lincoln's birthday, February 12th, had a holiday, February 22nd.

19:49Washington's birthday had a holiday that probably had something to do with the state of the country and what's happened. And so it was Washington's birthday. It was a Friday. And so he called his secretary and he was in his apartment in bed with the flu. And she was angry at being taken away from a three-day weekend. And he said, look, I'm going to dictate a telegram to you. And so lying in bed, he dictated this flawlessly worded 5 ,500 word telegram, the longest telegram ever sent to the Department of State in which he laid out his analysis of Soviet behavior. You also, you have to say that Kennan was, as I said, frustrated at being, as he saw it, ignored.

20:30And so he exaggerated how dire the Soviet threat was. He presented it as an existential threat rather than what it was, it was a challenge. And as a consequence, that long telegram, with its very emotional language, but highly persuasive language, it was kind of an advertisement, okay, for containment. The long telegram was a sensation when it hit Washington. It was picked up by not just the State Department, but it was circulated to every cabinet official in the Truman administration. And on March 5th, 1946, two weeks later, coincidentally the same day as Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech, on March 5th, 1946, Kennan's long telegram was sent to every diplomatic post around the world, every U.S.

21:16diplomatic post around the world, because this was now setting out what U.S. policy was going to be, to contain the Soviet Union. You know, it's an amazing story and there are other big players in the story. So I want you to regale us, if you don't mind, and talk a little bit about Harry Truman, talk a little bit about Dean Atkinson, George Marshall. I'm going to draw a blank on the gentleman's name, though. He was the Republican Senate Majority Leader. What was his name? Arthur Vandenberg. Vandenberg. So you had Republicans and Democrats, post-World War II era, they fought the war together, ideologically different, but you needed Vandenberg's help on some of the policy.

21:57And so tell us a little bit about the cast of characters alongside of Kennan as the United States was thinking about the post-World War II architecture and how to put up with and contain the Soviet Union. Right. I think these American leaders at the end of World War II, the United States was fortunate that the United States had such talented leaders, people who were smart, as you said, people of different political parties, but who agreed on basic issues. And they're really the cast of interest, kind of a team of rivals in certain respects, each fascinated. Harry Truman, I mean, Harry Truman, when he became president, most Americans had never experienced any other president.

22:37When he became president, Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12th, 1945. Truman had been vice president for just a few months. FDR thought he would survive his entire fourth term. And so it didn't tell Truman about anything, literally anything. Truman didn't know about the atomic bomb. He didn't know about what had been decided at the Yalta conference in February 45, two months before FDR died. And so Truman, he's the guy who, the only American president in the 20th century who never went to college. He was a person who was not tall. He'd failed at several business ventures in the 1920s and 30s.

23:13And finally, he made it in politics, he was successful, but still he was regarded as, as many people, little Harry Truman. So now he's president of the United States. He said he felt as if the weight of the sun, the moon, and the stars had all fallen upon him all at once. It was just a tremendous responsibility to replace anyone, let alone to replace FDR. So Truman, it took him a while to kind of find this footing, but he had some good advisors. One of them was Dean Acheson, who became a secretary of state in 1949. Acheson was, there's a very interesting relationship. This is something people have to pick up on.

23:49Acheson was a corporate lawyer, a very successful corporate lawyer, Covington and Burling, Washington. And Acheson was tall, had been educated at Yale, had a very kind of arrogant manner. Acheson realized that in a way in negotiations, one way to kind of make your mark in negotiations is to intimidate the other people in the room. And this is among corporate lawyers. So Atchison was a piece of work. He looked like a British aristocrat. Again, he was tall, had a kind of a steel looking face, had a handlebar mustache. So he's now dealing with Truman. But it's a mark of the respect each of them had for each other and a mark for Atchison's savvy that he was able to deal with Truman in a way that Truman felt that Acheson was on his side without being overbearing.