Word: kennan
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...Coming Home. Kennan, who favored keeping the channels open for negotiation with Russia, found the channels plugged: he got virtually no chance to talk privately to any Russian officials. Early last month, Acheson seemed to give up hope that his original hunch was right. In a Kansas City speech, he said that the Soviet hate campaign "contradicts [Russian] pretensions of peace and pushes off still further a beginning upon the peaceful settlement by negotiation of problems between the Soviet Union and the outside world." When they heard that passage in Acheson's speech, some Washington hands predicted that Kennan...
Then, in mid-September, Kennan traveled to London for a conference of U.S. Ambassadors. Stopping in Berlin, he made his statement to the press about his life in Moscow. It was even impossible, said Kennan. to speak to Russians in the street: they had orders not to have anything to do with Americans. Even personal servants were hostile. A U.S. diplomat in Russia lived like a prisoner...
...statement was true enough, but hardly news; former U.S. Ambassadors in Moscow had undergone similar treatment. Furthermore, it was not in character: Kennan rarely talks this freely to newsmen. Kennan could hardly have been surprised at the Russian reaction to his remarks. Pravda promptly blasted him as an "ecstatic liar."* Kennan may have had an idea that the Kremlin would ask for his recall; although an important Communist congress was to open in Moscow this week (see FOREIGN NEWS), he did not hurry back to his post, instead went to visit his daughter in Switzerland...
...Kennan does not greatly change U.S.-Russian relations. It is just another instance where the wishful thinking at the heart of the containment policy turned out to be wrong...
...usually carried on by its ambassadors. A few days before the Kennan news broke, the new Soviet Ambassador to the U.S., Georgi Zarubin, presented his credentials to Harry Truman and uttered some impeccable, if spectacularly false sentiments about an improvement of U.S.-Russian relations...