George Kennan and the Cold War Between Form and Content

The graphic designer’s role is largely one of giving form to content. Often — perhaps even nearly always — this process is a cosmetic exercise. Only rarely does the form of a message become a signal of meaning in and of itself.

Last week, at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, I saw an example of the power that form can give content: George F. Kennan’s legendary “Telegraphic Message from Moscow of February 22, 1946,” or, as it is better known to students of twentieth century foreign policy, “The Long Telegram.”

The curriculum vitae of George F. Kennan, who turned 100 this year, makes him sound a bit like the Accidental Diplomat. After graduating from Princeton, he entered the foreign service with “the feeling that I did not know what else to do.” Yet time and time again he found himself present at moments of global crisis: in Moscow during Stalin’s show trials, in Prague for the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, in Berlin when Hitler declared war on the United States.

In the aftermath of World War II, Kennan was posted again to Moscow, where he viewed the intentions of our wartime ally, the Soviet Union, with progressively deeper despair, and with increasing concern that Washington was failing to understand the changing postwar landscape. As he wrote in his memoirs, “For eighteen long months I had done little else but pluck at people’s sleeves, trying to make them understand the nature of the phenomenon with which we in the Moscow were daily confronted…So far as official Washington was concerned, it had been to all intents and purposes like talking to a stone.”

So when Kennan received a rather routine question about why the Russians seemed unwilling to join the World Bank, he decided to unburden himself once and for all. As he put it: “Here was a case where nothing but the whole truth would do. They had asked for it. Now, by God, they would have it.” The resulting dispatch was an eight-thousand word telegram that ran for 17 pages. It provided a detailed analysis of postwar Soviet aims and precise recommendations of how the United States should respond.

It’s possible a document this long sent by courier would have been delivered, forwarded, read and filed. But Kennan, who took pains to “apologize in advance for this burdening of the telegraphic channel,” must have been hoping for a more dramatic effect. And he got it: as he put it, the effect was “nothing less than sensational.” The document quickly became known as “The Long Telegram.” Hundreds of copies circulated, including, Kennan suspected, to President Truman. “My reputation was made. My voice now carried.” Less than two weeks later, Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech and the Cold War was officially underway.

I am fascinated by The Long Telegram. Like its ideological opposite, Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, it seems to be a case where, indeed, the merger of content and form has created an icon. At Princeton, where it is on view for the first time ever as part of a Kennan exhibition that runs through April 18, it sits in a custom-made, climate-controlled 18-foot glass case. I confess I was disappointed that it wasn’t printed on a single roll (like that other icon of postwar American literature, the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road), but in all its Courier-besotted glory (now disavowed, alas), it has its own unique power.

This was not the last time the seemingly discreet Kennan would prove himself to be a (perhaps inadvertent) master of public relations. A year later, asked to expand on his analysis for the journal Foreign Affairs, he asked that his article be published anonymously due to his sensitive position at the State Department. Attributed to the mysterious “X,” his piece caused as sensation in no small part because of speculation as to its author. This was revealed in short order, adding further to Kennan’s fame.

I have always known that graphic design requires a degree of tact, especially when dealing with clients. But I would not expect to get useful advice from a diplomat, as I did in Kennan’s Memoirs: “It is axiomatic in the world of diplomacy that methodology and tactics assume an importance by no means inferior to concept and strategy.” That’s as useful a description of the interplay of the forces we designers grapple with as any.