Word: kennan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Another elegible diplomat trained under the last Democratic Administration is George Kennan, former head of the State Department's policy, planning staff and architect of the containment policy, who could bring his highly professional outlook to the top post in the State Department. Or, by way of contrast, Chester Bowles, once Governor of Connecticut and Ambassador to India, is considered a possible Secretary of State who would be an active salesman for American democracy, particularly in Asia...
...realizes that something is needed besides bigger and better weapons in today's world--something which will inspire people, instead of frighten and mutate them. He sees that a New America and a new world will emerge only from creative leadership. Specifically, in foreign affairs, Stevenson advisers like George Kennan, Chester Bowles, and Thomas Finletter grasp the problems involved in containment, neutralism, economic aid and defense. Supported by these advisers, Stevenson can add imaginative dimensions to this country's foreign policy during the next four critical years. Lincoln said that as our case is new, so we must think anew...
...Bolsheviks won this game of chess by a fool's mate. The fools, of one sort or another, were the gullible men of the Western embassies. In the evening of Nov. 7, 1917, the Czar's Winter Palace was "stormed"-by the back door. Kennan sardonically notes, for, amid the confusion and vacillation of the defenders, someone had inadvertently left the back door open. At the time, British Ambassador Sir George Buchanan was gloomily watching artillery from the River Neva (blanks from the Russian cruiser Aurora, usually credited with a main role in the palace's capture...
...Kennan, who as Mr. X writing in Foreign Affairs plotted the "containment policy" toward Russia after World War II, has no startling recommendations to add to his record. By training and instinct, he habitually mutes moral judgments to the point of understatement. With his main plea-for a more skilled and knowledgeable diplomatic setup-all will agree. But the reader will sadly conclude that the overall Kennan line is that the U.S. can do no better than to pursue what might be called a "Bad Neighbor Policy"; i.e., the U.S. should know an evil thing when it sees...
...Americans today would be willing to settle for such a fatalistic policy. Yet the Kennan volume may suggest that most of what has passed for U.S. "policy" toward Communism in recent decades has in fact been the Wilsonian do-nothing attitude disguised in rhetoric. In any case, the reader may well feel that the last and best word on 1917 was spoken by Philip Jordan, the old Negro valet of Ambassador David Francis, whom no one asked for an opinion. Phil Jordan wrote home to Mrs. Francis: "It is something awful...