George F. Kennan: An American Life

Reviews

John Lewis Gaddis: George F. Kennan: An American Life. New York: Pen-guin Press, 2011. 784 pages. ISBN 978- 1- 59420- 312- 1. $39.95 (hard-cover). Reviewed by Constantine A. Pagedas.

It may at first glance seem odd to the casual reader of the Mediterranean Quarterly to see a review of the recently published magnum opus of John Lewis Gaddis — a full biography of the American Cold War diplomat and historian who made a name for him-self as an expert on the Soviet Union and all things Russian, George F. Kennan. This book, however, about the man who originated the US strategy of containment — which Kennan came to disavow because of later misinterpretations — is really about Kennan’s impact on US foreign policy and the truly global dimensions of his work as a diplomat, policy planner, ambassador, lecturer, author, historian, radio commentator, teacher, and critic, among many of his titles.

This dense and weighty 784- page tome is the result of Gaddis spending the past thirty years carefully researching and painstakingly piecing together the 101- year life of arguably America’s most influential twentieth-century diplomat. While some might claim Gaddis’s book is long overdue, it is well worth the wait and shows how truly global and widely influential Kennan’s life work really was.

The book is organized chronologically and broken into five main parts: Kennan’s childhood, education, and the beginning of his foreign service career; the development of the intimate knowledge of European affairs he acquired during the painful run up to, and the US prosecution of, the Second World War; his central role in developing US grand strategy during the early stages of the Cold War; his slow and controversial tran-sition to academia and private life; and finally, his extended twilight years as a writer, critic, and elder statesman.

Mediterranean Quarterly 23:3Copyright 2012 by Mediterranean Affairs, Inc.

Constantine A. Pagedas is book review editor for Mediterranean Quarterly and executive vice president of International Technology and Trade Associates, Inc., a consulting firm based in Wash-ington, DC.

116 Mediterranean Quarterly: Summer 2012 Reviews 117

George Frost Kennan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on 16 February 1904 to Kossuth Kent and Florence James Kennan, who — George was told growing up — died in childbirth, but in fact had died two months later of a ruptured appendix that was not handled properly. He was not especially close to his father, who remarried and left George to be raised by nannies and, more important, his three sisters — all of whom remained close to him, as did his younger step- brother. Kennan was characterized throughout his life as a kind but sensitive individual who at times could be accused of being thin- skinned or even capricious.

As Gaddis correctly points out, Kennan was able to balance his personality with a natural talent to pick up foreign languages (for example, he was bilingual in English and German and spoke Russian better than most native Russians) and, more impor-tant, the ability to write elegantly, eloquently, and at length — probably because the circumstances of his early life led him to confide his innermost thoughts, ideas, and even dreams to a diary, which he maintained on and off for the better part of his long and adventurous life.

Much of Gaddis’s biography covers many parts of Kennan’s life that are already well known. Certainly the author’s earlier works on the origins of the Cold War and US con-tainment policy have already contributed to our historical understanding of the world Kennan helped to shape. What comes out of this biography most strongly is how much Kennan was intellectually, emotionally, physically, and personally challenged to under-stand his own circumstances and, in turn, report to Washington and support (or, as was often the case, criticize) US foreign policy objectives — both in and out of government.

What Gaddis very effectively highlights is that Kennan was unusually gifted in working under great pressure, rising to meet the unique challenges that were placed before him, talents that had made his reputation not only as a Russian expert but also as a highly effective US Foreign Service officer. Several key officials in the US State Department, and even President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself, took note of Kennan’s many diplomatic successes, including the reopening of the US embassy in Moscow from 1933 to 1935 after the United States and Soviet Union agreed to establish diplomatic relations; his posting to Prague during Hitler’s piecemeal acquisition of Czechoslovakia in 1938 – 39 and his subsequent transfer to Berlin to run the US embassy from 1939 to 1941, where he represented the United States to most of German- occupied Europe; his leadership among other US government officials, journalists, radio correspondents, and their families while being interred in Nazi Germany at Bad Nauheim following Ameri-ca’s entry into the war in 1941 – 42; his work in Lisbon with the Salazar government to secure US basing rights in the Azores in 1943; and then his return to the Soviet Union in 1944 at the request of the recently appointed US ambassador to Moscow, W. Averell Harriman, as one of the State Department’s top Russian experts.

As Kennan knew well, Moscow was a challenging post under the best of circum-

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stances. Since 1941, the embassy there had operated under wartime conditions, and Stalin was constantly pressuring his Western allies to open a second front to take some of the burden off of Soviet forces, which were sustaining superhuman numbers of casualties. After the D- Day invasion of Normandy was finally launched on 6 June 1944, along with Soviet military success along the Eastern front that same year, Ken-nan arrived in the summer of 1944 to support Harriman with a focus on winning the postwar peace.

Unsurprisingly, the US embassy in Moscow became a veritable pressure cooker. As Kennan wrote to one of his sisters in October 1944, “A single wrong word — a single mistake — can only too easily ruin a person’s usefulness in any atmosphere as delicate as this, and among people so hyper- sensitive.” The situation was certainly made more complicated for Kennan with policy shifts in Washington resulting from the sudden death of Roosevelt in April 1945 and the ascension of Harry Truman.

By February 1946, Kennan had grown increasingly discouraged with the distinct chill that began to pervade the wartime alliance and over his own government’s inabil-ity to grasp the essence of the Soviet Union’s postwar diplomatic strategy, especially Stalin’s refusal to discuss reducing Soviet control over Eastern Europe or northern Iran. Kennan’s frustrations came out in his now famous “long telegram,” which outlined the Soviet perspective on international affairs. As Gaddis points out, “Kennan’s ‘long tele-gram’ reiterated much that he had said at other times and in other ways.”

Kennan’s telegram arrived at a time when a receptive audience in Washington was searching for a firm direction in US foreign policy. Perceptions in Washington of Stalin had begun to change, and qualities of the telegram itself enhanced its reception. At more than five thousand words it broke State Department rules governing the length of telegrams, which ironically ensured a wide readership within the US government. The style of writing further enhanced the message — Kennan’s elegant prose was marshaled to great effect in placing Soviet diplomatic behavior in its historical context.

Sadly for Kennan, the professional fame from his telegram and his equally famous 1947 Foreign Affairs article titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published under the pseudonym “X,” was never quite replicated. Kennan was promoted within the State Department, including becoming the first director of its Policy Planning Staff from 1947 until 1949, examining everything from the reconstruction of Europe and the vic-tory by the communists in China to the resolution of a divided Europe and political developments in Latin America. It was, nevertheless, a bumpy road for Kennan during the Cold War.

While Kennan played a key role in initiating the Marshall Plan, he became increas-ingly worried that US foreign policy was becoming fixated on confronting the Soviet Union anywhere in the world without regard to core US interests. Indeed, having care-fully studied Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire during his exten-


sive wartime travels, Kennan supported a patient US foreign policy whereby the Soviet Union, like Rome, would see its ultimate demise originate from its occupation of foreign peoples and would collapse under the weight of its corrupted system. He was, for exam-ple, an opponent of the Truman Doctrine, because it appeared to him to exaggerate the communist threat to Greece and Turkey, allowing the Harry S. Truman administration to conduct a military build- up, and thus playing into the hands of the Soviets. He felt similarly about NSC- 68, the classified report requested by President Truman in Janu-ary 1950, which outlined the US government’s national security policy for containment of the Soviet Union in very stark and confrontational political, economic, military, and psychological terms, thus crystallizing US- Soviet antagonism.

His brief and personally disastrous ambassadorship to Moscow in 1952 ended because of his public remarks at Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin, which unfavorably compared his first few months in Moscow to his internment at Bad Nauheim during World War II. This led to his first retirement from the State Department. Subsequently, from Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Studies, and later as a George Eastman Professor at Oxford, Kennan became a critic of evolving US foreign policy in the 1950s that he believed was overly confrontational, risked US strategic interests and ignored political divisions within the communist Eastern bloc. He certainly alienated senior people in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Administration, including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who called for the United States to actively support the liberation of those countries under Soviet domination, as well as his old boss, Dean Acheson, who, with an eye on the electoral fortunes of the Democrats famously issued a very public and stinging rebuke to Kennan’s controversial Reith lectures that had been broadcast on BBC radio in 1957 regarding a settlement with Russia over the continued division of Germany.

Young president John F. Kennedy, himself a student of history, took notice, and although he did not agree with all of Kennan’s ideas, offered him the post of ambassa-dor to Yugoslavia. In 1948, Marshall Tito had split from the Soviet Union, representing the first major crack within the Eastern bloc. Yugoslavia therefore appeared to be fer-tile ground for someone of Kennan’s intellectual outlook. Again, Kennan’s tour was cut short, this time because he was unable to persuade Congress to remove an amendment to the 1962 trade expansion bill that would deny Poland and Yugoslavia “most- favored nation” trading status. Despite strong warnings from Kennan to key congressional lead-ers in the summer of 1962, passage of the bill had precisely the effect he predicted it would — pushing Tito into the waiting arms of Nikita Khrushchev. Kennan offered his resignation to President Kennedy one day after the bill’s passage, and in 1963 retreated to private life once again, going on to publish his widely acclaimed multivolume mem-oirs and histories of Russia, teaching at Princeton and other academic institutions, periodically appearing at gatherings of elder statesmen, and offering his thoughts and insights on key international questions of the day — including the nuclear arms race and the US run- up to war with Iraq in 2003.

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Keith Neilson is professor in the Department of History at Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario.

Where Gaddis truly makes his mark in this engrossing and indispensable biogra-phy is his ability to reach deep down into Kennan’s complex personality and private sensibilities to probe the intellectual underpinnings of Kennan’s prodigious analysis of the Soviet Union and the multitude of areas where US strategic interests during the Cold War did (and did not) lay. Gaddis is also excellent in providing hitherto unrecog-nized connections regarding the basis for (and reception of) Kennan’s life’s work. How and why Kennan evolved from one of the US Foreign Service’s brightest stars to State Department persona non grata to Cold War commentator to one of the twentieth cen-tury’s “wise men” is all carefully and expertly detailed by Gaddis.

Kennan died in 2005 before seeing any of Gaddis’s work. Though he privately wor-ried in his diary how Gaddis would paint him, Kennan would probably be pleased with the result — an honest portrait true to its subject, critical without taking liberties, and elegantly presented in prose Kennan himself would likely have appreciated.

DOI 10.1215/10474552-1703489

James Barr: A Line in the Sand: Britain, France, and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East. London: Simon and Schuster, 2011. 352 pages. ISBN 978- 1-84737-453-0. $29.99 (hardcover). Reviewed by Keith Neilson.

Like the poor, the Middle East is always with us. Before the First World War, the decline of the Ottoman Empire generated the so- called Eastern Question: What would be the fate of the empire’s constituent territories when the inevitable collapse came? This quandary involved all of the European Great Powers, with Austria- Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia each having conflicting claims in the region. The First World War brought about the end of the Ottoman Empire, with the scramble to claim various bits of its debris complicated not only by the war itself but also by the simul-taneous collapse of three of the possible territorial claimants (the Austro- Hungarian, German, and Russian empires). Solving this tangled situation took until 1948, when the creation of the state of Israel and the emergence of the bipolar world changed, but did not resolve, the conflicting claims of the various states in the region.

James Barr, a sometimes journalist with a foot in academe, has made the period from the beginning of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1914 to the foundation of Israel the subject of this interesting and informative book. It is at once an exciting and sordid tale. Barr, as befits a man who has previously written on T. E. Lawrence, has chosen to build his account around a number of the most prominent actors in this drama. He


begins with the negotiations in 1915 between Sir Mark Sykes, a British MP and putative Middle East expert, and François Georges- Picot, a French diplomat, ardent imperial-ist, and Anglophobe. Between them, the two men carved up the Middle East, mostly without much input from their political masters. This was particularly true in the case of Sykes, as the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was more interested in the functioning of the British- French alliance than in the disposition of the Ottoman lands. As Barr points out, the Sykes- Picot agreement was seen by the British as “an academic exercise in argument, not a blueprint for the future government of the region.”

However, this proved not to be the case. The need to bring the Arab population of the region into the war meant that Britain turned to yet another Middle East expert, this time the young Oxford scholar Lawrence. As Francophobe as Picot was Anglophobe, Lawrence supported the ambitions of the sharif of Mecca, Hussein, and his son, Feisal, over other possible anti- German Arabs in part because they wished for a greater Arab state that would keep the French out of Syria. Lawrence is at the center of chapters 3 and 4, working in conjunction with the British military commander in the region, Gen-eral Sir Edmund Allenby, to achieve victory, establish the British position, and exclude the French. Part and parcel of this strategy was to extend support to the Zionists, whose supposed influence in US financial circles was thought important for paying for the war. The result was the Balfour Declaration, vaguely promising a Jewish homeland.

By the end of the war, British predominance on the ground made the goals of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, to gain the oil- rich region around Mosul and push the Turks out of the region entirely, seemingly possible. However, he had to work around two barriers: the growing opposition to imperialism associated with Wood-row Wilson and the French insistence that they should be accorded the territories of the Sykes- Picot agreement. The result was a shady compromise with regard to the former (through the agency of League of Nations mandates) and rancor with the French. How-ever, when the costs of occupying the entire Middle East became prohibitive, the Brit-ish turned it all over to Feisal in the hope that the latter’s goal of a greater Arab state would keep the French out of Syria.

The second part of the book deals with the interwar tensions in the region. These had two interlinked components. The first was the ongoing tension between the French and British. The French strove to establish themselves in the region while lacking the means to do so and were determined to sabotage any British efforts in the region. The second component was the attempt of the various Arab groups to further their own cause. For the most part, the British handled their dealings with the Arabs better than did the French. Revolt in Iraq led the British to work through Feisal as a figurehead. Winston Churchill followed this line because the cost of suppressing the uprising was both prohibitive and likely to affect his own political career. For their part, the French decided to take military action to quell the revolt of the Druze in Syria. After some

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fumbling, this was achieved by brutal means (including the shelling of Damascus). This had complications for British- French relations in that French efforts to prevent Britain from acquiring Mosul led London not to prevent supplies flowing to the Druze until 1926, when the Mosul question was settled in Britain’s favor.

British- French divisions continued. In the early 1930s, they centered around a debate over where to put the Mediterranean terminus of an oil pipeline from Kirkuk. The French wanted it to end at Beirut, Tripoli, or Alexandretta, all under French con-trol; the British preferred Haifa, in their mandated territory. Although two termini (Tripoli and Haifa) were eventually chosen, British- French animus remained high. However, the Arab revolt in Palestine, beginning in 1936, proved even more destabiliz-ing for the region, and caused London and Paris even further disagreement. In a tit- for- tat response to London’s perceived earlier support for the Druze, the French refused to prevent supplies flowing from Lebanon and Syria to the Arab revolt. British counter-terrorist methods in 1938 proved to be ineffectual — stronger border controls and raids into the French territories worsened British- French relations (and are reminiscent of similar Israeli actions today). By mid- 1938, with the Munich crisis looming, the British decided to placate the Arabs, leading inevitably to clashes with the Jewish population who wished for greater immigration into the area. The result was London’s being dis-liked (and attacked) by both Arabs and Jews. The British White Paper of 1939 was an attempt to square the circle: limit Jewish immigration and restrictions on Jewish ability to buy up Arab land. With hostilities likely in Europe, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain decided that if either the Jews or the Arabs had to be offended, then it was better to offend the former, since the latter could do more damage to the British position in the Middle East.

The outbreak of war and the rapid fall of France made the Middle Eastern circum-stances even more difficult. While France had shown a greater desire to cooperate with Britain on the eve of war (needing British support in Europe), the Vichy regime and General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French proved to be far less cooperative. British aid to the Free French efforts to take Syria from the Vichyite forces were rewarded by de Gaulle’s reneging on promises to grant Arab independence. The quarrel between de Gaulle and the British representative in the area, General Sir Edward Spears, reached monumental proportions, and Churchill’s support for his old friend Spears forced the French to back down in 1943 — only adding to de Gaulle’s chagrin. Churchill’s support did not last, as Spears’ anti- French position became too extreme. However, the British attempt to create a greater Syria was foiled by Zionist terrorism aided by the French. After the war, the French attempted to regain control of Syria (in a fashion similar to their efforts to re- conquer Indo- China). However, their draconian methods (including bombarding Damascus) lost them British support, and by 1946 France had evacuated its forces from Syria and Lebanon. As to Palestine, Britain faced increased Zionist ter-


rorism, culminating in the bombing of the King David Hotel in July 1946. By 1947, the British decided that the game was not worth the trouble. The issue of Palestine and the fate of the Jews was turned over to the United Nations, with the British promising uni-lateral withdrawal on 14 May 1948 regardless of the result.

A Line in the Sand is well written and tells a lively and engaging story. Barr is well versed in both the secondary literature and the primary sources. The book’s focus on individuals makes it very readable and underlines the significance of people in history (in contrast to the emphasis put on systems and theory by political scientists). However, the weakness of the book is that it often fails to discuss context. For example, during the First World War the Sykes- Picot discussions were enmeshed in British policy with respect to bringing Italy into the war, satisfying Russian desires in the region, and pla-cating the French with regard to the British effort on the Western front. At Paris, the spectacular collisions between Lloyd George and the French premier, Georges Clem-enceau, were not just about the Middle East but also about Russia. The postwar discus-sions about the Middle East were as much about the fate of the Ottoman Empire (would the Treaty of Sèvres be enforced?) as about the Arabs and Jews. The British unilateral withdrawal from Palestine in 1948 was part of their similar actions everywhere (India, for example), and reflected the diminished power of Britain after 1945. However, the question of context is a problem in all historical writing, and, if Barr occasionally has failed to insert as much context as I would prefer, he has perhaps gained a greater clar-ity than would be the case if he had focused more on the broader picture.

This is a book that all of those interested in the contemporary Middle East should read. Barr is remarkably even- handed in looking at this contentious subject. He avoids placing too much blame on anyone for the unsatisfactory outcome of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, perhaps excusing more than should be the case the French effort to maintain their position despite lacking the power to do so. However, the British, the Arabs, and the Jews are all portrayed with warts and all, none seen as occupying the moral high ground. And perhaps that is as it must be when conflicting and irreconcil-able interests collide.

DOI 10.1215/10474552-1703498

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James Coomarasamy is a presenter of the Newshour program for the British Broadcasting Corpora-tion’s World Service.

Maurizio Viroli: The Liberty of Servants: Berlusconi’s Italy. Translated by Antony Shugaar. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010 (English translation, 2012). 178 pages. ISBN 978- 0- 69116-182- 3. $27.95 (hard-cover). Reviewed by James Coomarasamy.

There has been one rather significant change in Italian politics since 2010 when Maurizio Viroli wrote his book The Liberty of Servants. Silvio Berlusconi, the man who gives the book its subtitle and whose smirking face stares out from the cover, is no longer prime minister. He has been swept from power, not by the ballot box or the judi-ciary, but by the relentless pressure of the markets.

Strange as it may seem, that doesn’t detract from the central thrust of the book. Although, on one level it is an attempt to explain one man’s dominance of Italian poli-tics (a “country of fragile liberty,” as Viroli puts it) for nearly two decades, it also serves as a warning to all democratic nations about the ease with which a powerful individual can come to dominate a society, voluntarily exchanging the “liberty of citizens” for the “liberty of servants.”

Viroli begins his unapologetically idealistic polemic by spelling out the differences between these two forms of freedom. He defines the “liberty of citizens” as a civic liberty — a liberty based on laws that doesn’t involve dependency on the arbitrary deci-sions of a master. The liberty of servants, however, is an illusory, or precarious, free-dom, which could easily see a benevolent leader replaced by a tyrannical one.

Under Berlusconi, Viroli argues, Italians were governed by a de facto court system, with the prince ruling over “a theatre of courtesy and entertainment.” In this version of events, Berlusconi’s coterie of young, attractive women (who appear only fleetingly in the book) are on hand “to brighten the lives of the signore and the courtiers with their charms.”

Viroli introduces us to some of those courtiers. In the main, they are sycophantic, forelock- tuggers, who go to extraordinary lengths to please Berlusconi. One striking example is the Rome city councilman who proposed naming a square after Berlusconi’s mother, because her “dedication helped write a page of our recent national history by contributing to the decision of her son to enter politics.” As Viroli wryly observes, “No one, as far as I know, ever suggested dedicating a square to the mother of Garibaldi, Cavour, Mazzini . . . or any other great Italian.”

Another memorable vignette features a television journalist — not even one who works for a network owned by Berlusconi — who places words in the mouth of a tooth-less old woman after the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake. Although the woman didn’t actu-


ally hear what the visiting prime minister told her during their brief encounter, the eager- to- please journalist convinces her that she’s been promised new dentures.

Some of the references might be lost on those who haven’t followed the Berlusconi saga closely. I wasn’t aware, for example, of “the court minstrel” Mariano Apicella, Berlusconi’s favorite singer — and holiday companion — who, according to Viroli, sings “soulless” ditties to the signore.

As Viroli points out, many of the more titillating aspects of the Berlusconi era have already been well documented. His book (which predates some of the most damaging tales of “bungabunga” parties and call girls) spends little time analyzing the gaudy sur-face of the system but concentrates instead on the philosophical and historical factors that underlie it, making it possible in the first place.

To the key question of who is responsible for this state of affairs, the answer seems to be virtually the entire Italian political class. Focusing on a few, well- chosen moments from Italian parliamentary history, Viroli shows how politicians from the Left and Right acquiesced, allowing Berlusconi, with virtually no argument or fuss, to begin his politi-cal career, without having to relinquish his ownership of the media. This, Viroli argues, was a dereliction of duty and a betrayal to the nation.

One of the author’s main regrets is systemic. Italy, he says, lacks the checks and bal-ances of the US political system. By way of illustration, he contrasts Berlusconi’s ability to use all the business and media tools at his disposal with the judicial constraints that were placed on his closest US equivalent, the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg. When the latter assumed office at the beginning of 2002, the man who has a media empire named after him was asked by the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board to sell any stock linked to city government. And, Viroli points out, it is not just US politi-cians but their families who have to play by the rules. As he wistfully notes, “The wife of President Lyndon Johnson gave up control of a small local broadcasting company in Texas.”

But the criticism extends far beyond Italy’s political class or, indeed, its political system. With a rhetorical wave of the hand, Viroli dismisses his fellow countrymen as morally weak and having a historical inclination to servitude. The most recent example of this was their experience of fascism under Benito Mussolini. Now, more than sixty years after the end of the Second World War, Viroli argues that “a sizable number of Italians have not yet risen from the status of freedmen to citizens, but rather regressed from freedmen to voluntary servants.”

Although he generally supports his arguments with historical points of reference — Constant, Cicero, and Leopardi are among those he quotes — Viroli’s anger can, at times, give way to unsubstantiated, sweeping accusations. And if there is one big thing that is missing from this book, it is the perspective of the “servants” themselves. After all, they chose to vote for Berlusconi — and the system he represents — of their own free will.

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In Viroli’s portrait, Italians come across as a passive people, partly cowed into sub-mission and servitude by the media empire that Berlusconi controls. This thought is expressed most stridently in the book’s final chapter, which is, effectively, a call to arms to the then prime minister’s political opponents. Lamenting the decline of literacy and the political ramifications of that trend, Viroli doesn’t mince his words. “The triumph of television,” he writes, “has engendered hordes of illiterates who are incapable of under-standing the written word, unable to grasp a concept or develop a line of reasoning.” As that quotation makes clear, this book is anything but comfortable reading for Ital-ians. But that is the point. Viroli clearly wants to shock his countrymen out of their comfy servitude, which he believes has blinded them to the dangers that Berlusconi represents — or, at least, represented. As he searches, in the final chapter, for a “path to freedom,” Viroli unwittingly foreshadows the events that would bring an end to Berlus-coni’s latest spell as prime minister.

“We must educate people to feel that they are both Italian citizens, European citi-zens and citizens of the world,” Viroli writes. And it was Italy’s role as a eurozone member, not the sexual or corruption scandals in which Prime Minister Berlusconi was implicated, that brought about his downfall. The global markets didn’t care about his zipper problems, but they didn’t like the way his government was dealing with its debt problem.

Berlusconi was replaced by the measured, consensual, technocratic Mario Monti, who seems to represent the very sense of duty that Viroli hopes his book will inspire in his fellow countrymen. Be that as it may, his arrival as an unelected leader, in what some have called a “bloodless coup,” seems to pose new questions about the kind of liberty Italians enjoy.

DOI 10.1215/10474552-1703507

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Documents

George F. Kennan: An American Life