Word: kennan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Critics assailed Yalta as a sellout. Even George Kennan, then a top State Department official, denounced the West's refusal "to name any limit for Russian expansion and Russian responsibilities." But Charles Bohlen, assistant to the Secretary of State and one of the designers of the deal, called such criticism naive. Neither Britain nor the U.S. had any way to coerce Stalin, he argued, and "either our pals intend to limit themselves or they...
...topic, partly because Fukuyama is deputy director of the State Department's in-house think tank, the policy-planning staff. His article is being studied for possible insights into the cerebral underpinnings of the Bush Administration. Forty-three years ago, the founding director of the policy-planning staff, George Kennan, wrote an article in another erudite quarterly, Foreign Affairs, on the need for the West to pursue a policy of "containment" against Soviet Communism. President Bush has spoken of moving "beyond containment." Fukuyama has gone his boss one better, proclaiming that we may be witnessing "not just...
...Kennan says little in Sketches about the great distress the Soviet Union caused him. In fact he was expelled from the U.S.S.R. in 1952 for criticizing the government. "I was interned . . . in Germany for several months during the last war," he complained to reporters while traveling in West Berlin. "The treatment we receive in Moscow is just about like the treatment we internees received then." Soviet officials considered his remarks ! "slanderous attacks . . . in a rude violation of generally recognized norms of international law." Soon afterward Secretary of State John Foster Dulles terminated his career...
Taking up the narrative with his return to the U.S., Kennan allows his wit to twinkle. California reminds him "of the popular American Protestant concept of heaven: there is always a reasonable flow of new arrivals; one meets many -- not all -- of one's friends . . . and the newcomer is slightly disconcerted to realize that now -- the devil having been banished and virtue being triumphant -- nothing terribly interesting can ever happen again...
There are no tears, but no comfort either, in the poems of Larkin, an Englishman who died in 1985. His Collected Poems is an event. -- George Kennan's diverting Sketches from a Life...