In the diaries, Kennan does not sing the praises of outright dictatorship after his 1930s flirtation, and he surely knew that the United States was not going to renounce its open political system. Yet throughout his life he continued to imagine “better” alternatives, such as “hereditary oligarchy,” which he believed history had shown to be a far more reliable custodian of the public welfare than self-government ever was. Later in life, as if resigned to the permanence of democratic forms in the United States, he takes pains to make clear that he supports only “representative government” and not direct democracy; and he contends that the public should be restricted in its voting choices to a slate of candidates selected by some other elite body. “It is not in the election of representatives that our system fails; it is in the process of nomination. That is an extremely complicated problem.” By the time Kennan published Around the Cragged Hill in 1993, another volume of lugubrious reflections on all that is wrong with everything, he arrived at a solution that he called a “Council of State,” an unelected body that would take over certain functions of government. Reviewers, who generally treated the idea as eccentric but charming, failed to recognize that it was only the most gentle of Kennan’s anti-democratic tendencies, one of the few he was willing to publish.

Kennan’s dim view of democracy, of America, of humankind, is of more than passing interest, more than a quirky sidelight to a distinguished intellectual career—like Vladimir Nabokov’s lepidopterology or Dwight Macdonald’s nudism. It forces a reconsideration of his much-praised realism, the cold-eyed interest-based pragmatism that he prescribed for American foreign policy. In making notes for an article for Foreign Affairs in 1953, he writes, “What I would like to show is that the conduct of the foreign relations of a great country is a practical, not a moral, exercise. What is at stake is the adjustment of conflicting interests.” This nostrum makes sense in considering how to handle a rival superpower, but it has some glaring limitations when it comes to peoples whose interests are not represented at the great powers’ bargaining table in the first place. Foreign policy should not be sentimental, but neither should it be inhumane. Kennan’s “realism” was inextricably tied to a callous willingness to see other people suffer, a gaping moral deficiency that permitted him far too easily to distance himself from his fellow human beings, even his fellow countrymen. “For my entire literary life, as I now see it,” he writes at one point, “has been one long effort to gain understanding for the outlooks of others and to reach their understanding for my own.” Never did a statement show less self-awareness.

He was at his best when he could engage with given geopolitical realities and apply his chessboard thinking and pragmatic judgments. In these self-pitying pages, he likes to note those occasions on which he was astute or prescient in assessing big problems: “In the case of the Soviet Union, I was one of the first to recognize the essentiality of the ideology to the regime ... that you cannot expect to have normal relations with people who have a great deal of blood on their hands.” And again: “I was one of the first, and the few, to recognize that the weapons of mass destruction invalidated all previous thinking and doctrine concerning the value and uses of armed force.” To be sure, he was right—and profoundly influential—on many of the most important questions of the day, although sometimes right for the wrong reasons. But America was spared the full consequences of his uglier ideas because he always played a subordinate role to men who were superior politicians—superior in part because they had a greater love for the people of the United States and the people of the world: Franklin Roosevelt, Averell Harriman, George Marshall, Harry Truman, John Kennedy. It was all to the good that these superiors, even as they drew on his understanding of the Soviet regime and his strategic acumen, confined him to his advisory roles, and never allowed George Kennan, as he himself might have written, to have very much to do with actual government.

David Greenberg is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers and the author of Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (Norton), among other books.