Word: kennan
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...George Kennan plainly thrives on the controversy. Says he: "It's a vacation from the strains of scholarship. I feel like a boy out of school." Kennan and his Norwegian-born wife Annelise entertain to advantage (nearly 300 Yugoslavs so far) in their house, just down the street from Tito's villa. He has had six private sessions with Tito, more than any of the 45 other ambassadors in Belgrade. He explores the countryside on horseback or by car, has been busily reading Yugoslav literature (including all four novels by 1961 Nobel Laureate Ivo Andric). When he found...
Dictating at breakneck speed without rewriting a word, Kennan turns out some of the best telegrams in the Foreign Service-and he does not necessarily stick to Yugoslav affairs. A Kennan cable is apt to begin: "While bowing to Tommy Thompson's superior knowledge since he is on the scene in Moscow, I do believe it might be useful to consider...
...Concepts. Kennan's preoccupation with both history and Russia is a family heritage. Though he is convinced that he "must have lived before and been a Russian," Kennan began his present incarnation in Milwaukee. Son of a tax attorney, he was inspired to join the Foreign Service by his cousin, George Kennan, a 19th century traveler, lecturer and writer who became the leading U.S. authority on Czarist Russia. * George Frost Kennan's intense intellectual and often emotional conflict with Communist Russia produced two famous concepts: containment and disengagement...
...destroyed." When he first urged containment in 1946, it was, for its day, a tough anti-Communist policy. Largely through its inspiration, the Truman Doctrine was launched (though he insists that containment was always intended as a peaceful-political, not a military policy); and it was Kennan who brought the Marshall Plan to reality. In time, containment came to seem passive and sterile. While others vainly sought a way of "rolling back" Red power, Kennan preached...
...antithesis: disengagement. With its reference to a demilitarized Europe, the disengagement theory infuriated even Old Colleague Dean Acheson, who accused Kennan of having a "rather mystical attitude" toward power relationships. Wrote Kennan: "We all have to make our compromises with the devil and have our dealings with...