Dealing with the enemy

Three decades ago George Kennan— former American ambassador to Moscow, multilingual diplomat and conceptualiser of “containment”, the heart of his country’s foreign policy towards the Soviet Union—agreed to allow an American cold-war historian, John Lewis Gaddis, to serve as his biographer. Kennan had decamped from public service to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton more than 20 years earlier and was already 78 years old. When he began giving Mr Gaddis interviews and stacks of personal papers in 1981, their understanding was that the biography would appear in the presumably not-too-distant future after the elder man’s passing.

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