Word: kennan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dictating at breakneck speed without rewriting a word, Kennan turns out some of the best telegrams in the Foreign Service-and he does not necessarily stick to Yugoslav affairs. A Kennan cable is apt to begin: "While bowing to Tommy Thompson's superior knowledge since he is on the scene in Moscow, I do believe it might be useful to consider...
...Concepts. Kennan's preoccupation with both history and Russia is a family heritage. Though he is convinced that he "must have lived before and been a Russian," Kennan began his present incarnation in Milwaukee. Son of a tax attorney, he was inspired to join the Foreign Service by his cousin, George Kennan, a 19th century traveler, lecturer and writer who became the leading U.S. authority on Czarist Russia. * George Frost Kennan's intense intellectual and often emotional conflict with Communist Russia produced two famous concepts: containment and disengagement...
...destroyed." When he first urged containment in 1946, it was, for its day, a tough anti-Communist policy. Largely through its inspiration, the Truman Doctrine was launched (though he insists that containment was always intended as a peaceful-political, not a military policy); and it was Kennan who brought the Marshall Plan to reality. In time, containment came to seem passive and sterile. While others vainly sought a way of "rolling back" Red power, Kennan preached...
...antithesis: disengagement. With its reference to a demilitarized Europe, the disengagement theory infuriated even Old Colleague Dean Acheson, who accused Kennan of having a "rather mystical attitude" toward power relationships. Wrote Kennan: "We all have to make our compromises with the devil and have our dealings with...
...Yugoslavia, Kennan is trying to prod an ideologically hostile country toward genuine neutrality; in Japan. Ed Reischauer has the opposite task: he must keep an essentially friendly country from moving toward neutrality-or worse. Neutralism, Reischauer believes, is a more potent threat in Japan than Washington realizes. Though the ruling Liberal-Democratic Party has a safe two-thirds majority in the Diet, it commands only about 60% of the popular vote. If this margin swings to the solidly neutralist opposition, the U.S.-Japanese alliance would almost certainly be scrapped, and, argues Reischauer, "neutralism, if not open pro-Communism, would...