Word: kennan
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...Arkansas Democrat attacked the Honolulu meeting as "a further obstacle to a negotiated settlement" because it so firmly committed Washington to support of the present regime in Saigon. Fulbright's views were echoed by several anti-Administration witnesses before his Senate Foreign Relations Committee-most notably George F. Kennan, former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow and a leading exponent of the "containment" policy that was designed to defend Europe against Soviet expansionism in the late 1940s...
...Kennan's ideas have changed a bit since then. "I find myself a sort of neo-isolationist," he confessed. "I think we would do better if we would show ourselves a little more relaxed and less terrified of what happens in the smaller countries of Asia and Africa, and not jump around like an elephant frightened by a mouse every time these things occur." While he did not advocate that the U.S. "turn tail and flee from the scene," he agreed with an earlier witness, retired Lieut. General James Gavin, that it should hole up in selected enclaves...
...than it was then, should never commit its manpower in Asia, and has no sound reason to do so. American troops have thus far proved that the U.S. can fight and fight well in Asia. As for the reasons for doing so, the President says in effect that Kennan's containment policy is as valid for Asia today as it was for Europe 20 years ago-perhaps more so, given the special virulence of the Asian strain of Communism...
...intimately the affairs of a given foreign nation. The country-desk men, followed by officers in higher echelons-regional, area, assistant secretarial, under secretarial-must successively judge whether the reported information is worth passing upward. The reports may at any level be edited, rewritten or combined into what George Kennan says is often "a hodgepodge inferior to any of the individual views of which it was brewed." Other Government departments, most notably the Pentagon and the CIA, are drawn in. Great deliberation prevails; John Kennedy (as quoted by Schlesinger) complained that he and McGeorge Bundy could "get more done...
...depredations of those who called for Commitment. But Mr. Lasch is far more interested in the failings of the '40's and '50's, and perhaps it is here that he is most illuminating. He notes that the post-Marxist "realist" school of political analysis, fathered by Niebuhr on Kennan, Morgenthau, Charles Osgood, Louis Halle, and John F. Kennedy, has based most of its concept of America's world role on the European situation, where the possibility of imperialism is understandably slight. Btu in the undeveloped world? Mr. Lasch hints that the old Marxist analysis of world politics, against which...