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In the New York Times Book Review of April 7,-1996, Fareed Zakaria, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, reviewed the latest book by George F Kennan, the ninetytwo-year-old former diplomat and author of the containment doctrine. Zakaria began his review by praising the "clarity" and the "gripping, declarative prose" of Kennan's "famous long telegram from Moscow in 1946."1 In that 5,540-word telegram, Kennan laid out the argument for deemphasizing negotiations with Moscow on issues arising from World War II and for instead emphasizing the containment of the Soviet Union. Ever since Kennan's cable reached the State Department a half century ago, officials and scholars have been pointing to Kennan's prose-without, however, examining why his language appeared so clear and so gripping or how his emotions and rhetorical strategies infused his writings, particularly the long telegram (LT), with such persuasive force. A close reading of Kennan's writings demonstrates that the language is neither transparent nor value-free, and that Kennan's figures of speech-which scholars have quoted as "colorful language" but have not fully analyzed-emotionalize and condition the interpretation of his ostensibly realistic prose.
Kennan wrote the LT on February 22, 1946, after two decades of deep, conflicted feelings about the Soviet people and their government. For much of that period, he longed to immerse himself in Russian society even as he felt alienated from United States society. Perhaps his deepest aspiration was to use what he saw as the primitive vitality of Russian culture to revitalize the United States. The exuberance and sensuality that Kennan and other United States diplomats such as William C. Bullitt and Charles E. Bohlen had enjoyed in Moscow in 1933-1934 sharpened the bitterness with which they approached United States-Soviet relations at the onset of the Cold War. Kennan expressed his intense feelings in his writing, often in metaphors of gender and pathology.2 Because these emotion-laden tropes remained camouflaged by Kennan's expertise on Soviet affairs and his claim to realism, they offered a particularly effective rhetorical strategy for demonizing the leadership of the Soviet Union in a supposedly dispassionate analysis.3
In the LT, Kennan portrayed the Soviet government as a rapist exerting "insistent, unceasing pressure for penetration and command" over Western societies. A few months later, he compared the Soviet people to "a...