Kennan at Tempelhof airport, in Berlin, in 1952, en route to Moscow. Five months later, he was declared persona non grata by Stalin. Photograph from AKG Pressebild-ullstein bild / Granger Collection

The one puzzle in John Lewis Gaddis’s first-rate biography of the diplomat George Kennan, which Gaddis began in 1982, when his subject was seventy-eight, and waited nearly thirty years to complete, since Kennan lived to be a hundred and one, is the subtitle. The book is called “George F. Kennan: An American Life” (The Penguin Press; $39.95), and the most peculiar thing about Kennan, a man not short on peculiarities, is that he had little love for, or even curiosity about, the country whose fortunes he devoted his life to safeguarding.

Between 1926, the year he began his Foreign Service career, in Geneva, and 1946, when he made a heroic return from Moscow as the author of the primal document of Cold War foreign policy, the Long Telegram, Kennan lived mostly abroad. The woman he married, in 1931, Annelise Sørensen, was Norwegian, and when he and his family resettled in the United States—where he remained, apart from two prematurely terminated appointments as Ambassador, first to the Soviet Union (1952), and then to Yugoslavia (1961-63)—he spent almost all of his time in the State Department, or at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, or on the secluded farm he owned in Pennsylvania, outside a town it amused some god of geopolitics to have named East Berlin.

Kennan thought that Americans were shallow, materialistic, and self-centered—he had the attitude of a typical mid-century European—and the more he saw of them the less fond of them he grew. “You have despaired of yourself,” he wrote in his diary after a visit to Chicago; “now despair of your country!” He had a special distaste for what he called “the Latin-American fringe”—Florida, Texas, and California. “Before us stretches the whole great Pacific Coast,” he wrote in the diary on a plane trip West, “and my only thought, as we approach it, is: throughout the length and breadth of it not one single thing of any importance is being said or done.”

He was firmly anti-majoritarian, not only in foreign affairs, where he considered public opinion a menace, but in governmental decision-making generally. “I hate the rough and tumble of our political life,” he wrote, in 1935, to a sister, Jeanette, to whom he was close. “I hate democracy; I hate the press. . . . I hate the ‘peepul’; I have become clearly un-American.” In the draft of an unfinished book, begun in the nineteen-thirties, he advocated restricting the vote to white males, and other measures designed to create government by an élite.

Many people gave up on liberal democracy in the nineteen-thirties, but Kennan, even after the war, and in his most widely read books—“American Diplomacy,” published in 1951, and the first volume of his “Memoirs,” which came out in 1967 and won a Pulitzer Prize—was blunt about his estrangement from American life and his antipathy to democracy. He believed that a nation’s form of government has little to do with the quality of life, and he admired conservative autocracies such as prewar Austria and Portugal under António Salazar. In the second volume of the “Memoirs,” published in 1972, he proposed that one of the few times American diplomacy had been conducted with integrity, and without political pandering, was the period from 1945 to 1949—which happened to be the years of his own greatest influence.

The country he felt closest to—just to make the irony complete—was Russia. Russia was “in my blood,” he says in the “Memoirs.” “There was some mysterious affinity which I could not explain even to myself.” He wondered whether he had lived in St. Petersburg in a previous life. The Russia he loved, or fantasized about, was, of course, a pre-Bolshevik and pre-industrial Russia—the Russia of Tolstoy, whose estate, Yasnaya Polyana, he visited in 1952, feeling, he said later, “close to a world to which, I always thought, I could really have belonged,” and of Chekhov, whose biography he several times contemplated writing.

He had no sympathy for, or much interest in, Marxism, and he had no illusions about Stalin. He despised the whole Soviet apparat—in part because its minions prevented him from associating with ordinary Russians when he was stationed in Moscow. But he thought that even under Communism Russians cultivated a resilience of character that was disappearing in the West. After running across a Danish youth festival in the nineteen-seventies, a scene, as he described it, “swarming with hippies—motorbikes, girl-friends, drugs, pornography, drunkenness, noise,” he remarked, in an interview, “I looked at this mob and thought how one company of robust Russian infantry would drive it out of town.”

And when he imagined the day the Iron Curtain lifted, a day that his own policy recommendations were intended to bring about, he dreaded what would happen to the Russians after being exposed to “the wind of material plenty” and its “debilitating and insidious breath.” Although he long advocated the reunification of Germany, he took little satisfaction when it happened. It was just the result, he thought, of agitation by young East Germans motivated by the hope of “getting better jobs, making more money, and bathing in the fleshpots of the West.” He wondered whether this was what we had really wanted when we set out, more than forty years before, to wage a Cold War.

Yet he is commonly regarded as the wisest of the Wise Men. That was the name, semi-facetious, that Lyndon Johnson’s national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, gave to the members of the old Cold War foreign-policy establishment whom Johnson called upon, long after their time in office had passed, to help extricate his Administration from the quagmire in which it was eventually consumed, Vietnam. Among the elders Johnson consulted were Averell Harriman, who had been Roosevelt’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Kennan’s boss in Moscow; Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State and Kennan’s boss in Washington; and Charles Bohlen, Kennan’s oldest and closest friend in the Foreign Service and his successor as Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

The Wise Men were not happy with Johnson’s war. They were not thrilled with Johnson, either. They were East Coast lawyers and bankers, Ivy Leaguers, liberal internationalists—men who did not descend to partisan wrangling. When they ran policy, back in the day (“Present at the Creation” was the modest title Acheson gave his memoirs), Southern Democrats were a type they avoided.

But they found themselves in an awkward place. Vietnam was one of the great foreign-policy disasters in American history. Although it may have done little harm to the national security, it damaged the national image and it ruptured the national psyche. It divided a generation. But the war was fought in the name of checking Communist aggression, and checking Communist aggression was the very face of the policy that the Wise Men had put in place at the start of the Cold War, when the Soviets were swallowing up Eastern Europe.

Kennan’s signature was on that policy. When historians discuss American actions in the Cold War, usually the first texts they cite are the Long Telegram, which Kennan composed in February, 1946, and the so-called X article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which he published, in Foreign Affairs, a year and a half later. Vietnam seems the lineal offspring of those pieces. Was Kennan misunderstood? The question is at the heart of any assessment of his career.