Word: kennan
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...this dry, dispassionate account, Kennan, now a member of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, makes clear the irony of his career: he was in official disfavor first for being "too harsh" toward Russia, then for being "too soft." He was burned in effigy by Communist-led mobs in Rio de Janeiro during a Latin American tour in 1950, and burned figuratively by right-wing critics in the U.S. during the decade that followed...
Containment by "X." Few diplomats have ever drawn on so rich a background in international affairs. From the time he joined the Foreign Service, after graduating from Princeton in 1925, Kennan shuttled from one sensitive crisis point to another. In 1933, he helped reopen the American embassy in Moscow, stayed on through the savage purges that soon followed and thus received, as he writes, "a liberal education in the horrors of Stalinism." He arrived in Prague on Sept. 29, 1938, the day of the Munich Conference. He was in Berlin from 1939 until Pearl Harbor, when the Nazis interned...
Unlike many U.S. liberals, Kennan never went through a Marxist phase. Before and during World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted an accommodation with Moscow, but Kennan remained in opposition until the "movement of the pendulum of official thinking from left to right would bring [U.S. policy] close to my own outlook in the years 1946 to 1948, only to carry it away once more in the other direction, with the oversimplified and highly militarized view of the Russian problem that came to prevail after...
Keep Out of Our Way. Kennan thoroughly demolishes the argument, put forward by a growing school of New-Leftist "revisionists," that the U.S., not Russia, was to blame for the cold war. When the Red army stopped at the Vistula River in 1944 and folded its arms while the Nazis bloodily put down the Warsaw uprising, and when Stalin refused to allow the U.S. even to airlift supplies to the dying Polish Resistance, it was obvious, says Kennan, that Stalin meant to swallow Poland, "lock, stock and barrel...
Within months after V-E day, Stalin's "dream" of acquiring a buffer zone along Russia's western border had come true. Kennan dismisses as absurd the notion that Stalin's expansionist appetite was fed by fears of the U.S. or anger at not being offered enormous sums of American aid. He recalls what a Soviet friend told him in 1944: "This is something you should bear in mind about the Russian. The better things go for him, the more arrogant he is. When we are successful, keep...