Word: kennan
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...George Kennan has always been fascinated by the Soviet Union, which Winston Churchill characterized as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." A former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow and fellow at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, Kennan, 72, is now engaged in his most ambitious effort to solve that riddle. With Princeton Colleagues James Billington and Frederick Starr, he has set up the first major center for Russian studies to open in the U.S. in more than a decade...
Located in the Smithsonian Institution's Victorian-Gothic headquarters building and affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the new Kennan Institute will bring experts from round the world to Washington for all-expense-paid weekend seminars, short-term research projects and yearlong fellowships. Its goal: to deepen U.S. understanding of the Soviet Union. Says Kennan: "This is the only truly national institution devoted to Soviet studies. It can serve as an anchor in bad times and a channel for improved communications in good times...
...Kennan began planning the institute five years ago when he realized that "Russian studies were in for a bad time. Money was drying up; resources and facilities were scattered. Many leaders in the field were dead. It was felt that if I didn't do something, nobody else would." So as not to drain foundation money from existing university centers* for Soviet studies, Kennan approached companies that do business with the Russians, including PepsiCo, Chase Manhattan, Bank of America and General Electric. They responded with enthusiasm-and generous grants...
Before simplifying the Kissinger/Moynihan statement as a "Marshall Plan for the Third World" [Sept. 15], we would do well to recall the observation of George F. Kennan 25 years ago that "in Europe, it was a case of releasing capacities for self-help that were already present. Elsewhere . . . it [is] a matter not of releasing existing energies but creating new ones...
...Secret. The reasons are both moral and practical. Says Richard N. Gardner, an international-law specialist at Columbia University: "Dirty tricks have always been immoral and illegal. Now they also have outlived their usefulness." Former Ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan disapproves of covert operations as "improper and undesirable." But he also disapproves for pragmatic reasons: "The fact that we can't keep them secret is reason enough to desist." U.C.L.A. Soviet Specialist Roman Kolkowicz argues: "The track record is deplorable. By and large, these operations have been a series of disasters." Adds Eugene Skolnikoff, director of M.I.T...