Word: kennan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sobering shock for Kennan came with the conference last September of "nonaligned nations" in Belgrade. After assurances from Tito and top officials that Yugoslavia aimed to act as a "moderating force" on the other countries at the conference, Kennan flatly reported to Washington that Tito's speech would be genuinely neutral. But he did not know that when Russia resumed nuclear tests, Soviet Ambassador Alexei Epishev had called on Tito and left him convinced that Khrushchev needed his support. Unaware of the switch, Kennan was shocked and infuriated by Tito's anti-Western speech, which defended Khrushchev...
Shades of Ben. The three professors plenipotentiary have written 25 books among them, are unabashed intellectuals in countries that respect scholars or ideologists. Outwardly, they are as dissimilar as their specialties. Trim (5 ft. 11¼ in., 155 Ibs.), athletic George Kennan is blunt, analytical, professional, and a deeply moral man who agonizes over the increasingly "sterile" clash of East and West. Towering (6 ft. 8 in.) Ken Galbraith is a vastly engaging, vastly self-assured pragmatist; given to heavily ironic wisecracks, he likes to be taken for an ogre, and in diplomacy, he claims, he has had to make...
...their jobs, Kennan, Reischauer and Galbraith have set markedly individual styles. Their joint characteristics are frankness, sensitivity to the nerves and taboos of their host countries, an eagerness to listen as well as a marked capacity for eloquence, love of exercise and travel, impatience with the failures of U.S. society, and ill-concealed dislike of Embassy Row cocktail parties. In one of his books, Ed Reischauer says: "Diplomatic relations have grown out of the exchange of personal representatives between kings, and they still preserve some of the aristocratic aura of their origin. But diplomatic relations today are not really between...
...good cellar are classic assets, nowadays the only essential for diplomatic success, as the State Department's Loy Henderson insisted, is "political sensitivity-without it a Ph.D. is useless. With it a high school student is invaluable." Messrs. Kennan, Reischauer and Galbraith will not win the cold war by setting fine tables. But they have personable wives, and. above all, they possess political sensitivity to the highest degree...
...three posts, Kennan's is probably the trickiest, because of Yugoslavia's own anomalous situation-a thoroughgoing Communist state that broke with Stalin in 1948, has been heavily aided by the West ever since, is now generally subservient to Khrushchev in foreign policy but proclaims itself neutral. To start with, Ambassador Kennan hoped Tito Communists would be more "objective" than Soviet comrades, that with care and cultivation Tito might be induced to practice true neutrality. For four months, says an old Belgrade hand, Kennan "thought his personality and techniques were reshaping Tito's thinking"-a mistake Historian...