In keeping with a long tradition of conservatism, Kennan mourned the loss of small communities with their sense of common purpose. In 1938, while working at the State Department, he took a brief leave and bicycled through rural Wisconsin, the state he grew up in, and recalled how the small villages he moved through had often rallied together, in the wake of floods, hurricanes and war, and how modern life, with its emphasis on individualism, was eroding that sense of solidarity. Seventeen years later, he surveyed his country — the booming, urbanizing America of the 1950s — with disgust: “I could leave it without a pang: the endless streams of cars, the bored, set faces behind the windshield, the chrome, the asphalt, the advertising, the television sets, the filling stations, the hot-dog stands, the barren business centers, the suburban brick boxes, the country clubs, the bars and grills, the empty activity.”

He saw a dark side in almost all the advances of modern life, especially cars and airplanes. On the former: “The best thing is travel by turnpike — at night, a wholly useless exercise, to be sure — hours of death subtracted from the hours of life, but better than seeing anything.” “Flying (but particularly the airports) puts me into the nearest thing to a wholly psychotic depression,” he explained. His reaction to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 was to note that he would gladly trade “the entire American space program, in all its forms military and civilian, for a good national telegraph system and railway transportation network such as we used to have.”

His views were rooted in history, philosophy and — somewhat surprisingly to me — faith. Writing on Good Friday, 1980, he composed a beautiful paean to the life and legacy of Jesus Christ: “Most human events yield to the erosion of time. . . . The greatest, most amazing, exception to this generalization . . . occurred . . . on the hill of Golgotha. . . . A man, a Jew, some sort of dissident religious prophet, was crucified in company with two common thieves . . . . In the teachings of this man were two things: first the principle of charity of love . . . but secondly, the possibility of redemption in the face of self-knowledge and penitence. . . . The combination of these two things: charity and redemption . . . inspired an entire vast civilization, created a great art, erected a hundred thousand magnificent churches, . . . shaped and disciplined the minds and the values of many generations — placed, in short, its creative stamp on one of the greatest of all flowerings of the human spirit.”

Kennan’s conservatism was poetic, comprehensive and utterly impractical. In 1979, he outlined the kind of politics he would favor. “In addition to being a political isolationist, I am a believer in autarky. Not only do I believe that the healthy national society would rigidly eschew the importation of foreign labor . . . but I consider that it should restrict to a minimum its economic and financial involvements with other peoples.” To some readers, this may sound like North Korea, but Kennan’s celebration of the character, coherence and moral superiority of small communities has a rich pedigree in European thought. It also informs what can only be described as Kennan’s racism.

Image The first page of the "Long Telegram" sent by Kennan in February 1946. Credit... Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum

Writing on a flight to Los Angeles in 1978, Kennan thinks about how few white faces he will see when he lands and laments the decline of people “of British origin, from whose forefathers the constitutional structure and political ideals of the early America once emerged.” Instead, he predicts, Americans are destined to “melt into a vast polyglot mass, . . . one huge pool of indistinguishable mediocrity and drabness.” Kennan at times displayed conventional racism. His views on South Africa were strongly shaped by his feeling that blacks were simply not capable of handling liberty and democracy. “I would expect to see within five or 10 years’ time,” he wrote in 1990, “only desperate attempts at emigration on the parts of whites, and strident appeals for American help from an African regime unable to feed its own people from the resources of a ruined economy.” But for the most part, Kennan’s racism was a product of his conservatism, which is to say that he was profoundly mistrustful of the modern multiethnic ­nation-state with its “mingling of the ­races.” He did not look down on the Chinese, Indians, Russians or Jews, believing that they would succeed better in their own coherent communities than in a mixed-up melting pot. The tone of his comments about nonwhites, however, always has a sharp and derisory edge.