Word: kennan
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OPINION Corruption of the Mind Still cherished by many Westerners is the hope that one fine day a summit meeting will melt Russian suspicions of the West and bring about a lasting thaw in the cold war. Last week Russian Expert George Frost Kennan, 53, onetime U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, longtime favorite foreign-relations philosopher of U.S. liberal Democrats, did a thorough demolition job on the summit-meeting idea. Currently a visiting professor at Oxford University, Kennan argued in a speech broadcast by the BBC that summit meetings with the Russians are doomed in advance to failure. Reason: Soviet leaders...
From the time they seized power 40 years ago, said Kennan, Russia's Communist bosses have used falsehoods as a deliberate weapon of policy. Four decades of cynical intellectual opportunism "have wrought a strange corruption of the Communist mind, rendering it incapable of distinguishing sharply between fact and fiction in its relationship to any external competitive power." Habitual abuse of truth has blurred in the minds of Communist leaders the distinction between what they really believe and what they find it expedient...
...dealing with such corrupted mentalities, argues Kennan, the West must accept the fact that it is futile to try to argue Soviet leaders around to the West's viewpoint. "There is nothing that can be said to Mr. Khrushchev on any occasion by any Western figures, however illustrious, that would suddenly dispel his obscurity of vision. What we are confronted with is not just misunderstanding, not just honest error, but a habit of the mind, an induced state, a condition...
...road to a safer and more hopeful state of world affairs," said Kennan. "is not to be traversed in any giant strides." The way to lessen tension between Russia and the West is to break the conflicts down into specific problems and treat each one separately. "For this, it is not the hectic encounters of senior statesmen under the spotlight of publicity which we need; it is the patient, quiet, orderly use of the regular channels of private communication between governments...
...special areas, the School of Historical Studies may make a similar claim. Although it is not so large as its mathematics counterpart, its faculty is equally distinguished. Such men as Sir Llewellyn Woodward, Homer Thompson, Kennan, and Ernst Kantorowicz make the School one of the finest in the country. The School of Mathematics is larger by about 75 members to 25 members partly because there are more funds available for mathematical study than for historical work and partly because the em- inence of the early mathematical faculty, which included the late Albert Einstein, gave the Institute a brilliant reputation...