The diaries establish beyond any doubt that Kennan was given to gross and derogatory generalizations about virtually all foreign peoples. (Historians have known about Kennan’s ugly qualities, but the diaries lay it bare for any reader.) His belief in national character was strong, and if it led him to important insights about Russian behavior, much more often it led to repulsive and ill-informed slurs. The shockers start early. During his junior year at Princeton, he writes about a conversation with a friend called Army. “He half-converted me to his ‘extermination of the lower races’ idea,” Kennan writes. “I cannot see why it is wrong in principle.” As a twenty-eight-year-old Foreign Service officer, he remains convinced that the world’s problems are “essentially biological” in that “We have a group of more or less inferior races.... No amount of education and discipline can effectively improve conditions as long as we allow the unfit to breed copiously and to preserve their young.” Nor does Kennan learn, in his long globe-trotting career, to see this rubbish for what it is. At the age of eighty, he is still confiding to his diary his enthusiasm for eugenics. “If I had my way...” he muses, “Men having spawned more than 2 children will be compulsively sterilized. Planned Parenthood and voluntary sterilization will be in every way encouraged.” Policy planning indeed. (Immigration, too, “will be effectively terminated.”)
Who were these “inferior races” whose perpetuation Kennan deplored? Jews, to be sure. But the Jews were in good company. In fact, it is hard to find an ethnic group that escapes his contempt. An Italian he meets while traveling is a “typical dago—wears a cap, a bushy, black, moustache ... talkative in a weak, ignorant, furtive, sneering way.” The Georgians, he proclaims, are “a lazy, dirty, tricky, fiercely proud, and recklessly brave people. They never seem to work unless they have to.” The Iraqis he encounters on a trip to Baghdad are “a population unhygienic in its habits, sorely weakened and debilitated by disease, inclined to all manner of religious bigotry and fanaticism, condemned by the tenets of the most widespread faith to keep a full half of the population, namely, the feminine half, confined and excluded from the productive efforts of society by a system of indefinite house arrest.”
No group is too small or too far outside Kennan’s expertise to elude his confident condescension. Zambians are wracked by “suppressed anger” and “ostentatious cockiness.” Lithuanians are “foolish.” What he finds ugly about southern stretches of New England—the landscape “grown over by scrub forest”—he attributes to the “Italians and Portuguese, the tone set increasingly by the Catholic Church.” Even the Norwegians—of whom his wife was one—“for all their admirable characteristics ... have small regard for subtleties & refinement of thought.”