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George F. Kennan, the father of containment, was a rather obscure and frustrated foreign service officer at the U.S. embassy in Moscow when his "Long Telegram" of February 1946 gained the attention of policymakers in Washington and transformed his career. What is Kennan's legacy and the implications of his thinking for the contemporary era? Is it possible to reconcile Kennan's legacy with the newfound emphasis on a "democratic peace?"
A definitive biography of the U.S. diplomat and prize-winning historian George F. Kennan The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904–2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy—and one of its most complex. Drawing on many previously untapped sources, Frank Costigliola’s authoritative biography offers a new picture of a man of extraordinary ability and ambition whose idea of containing the Soviet Union helped ignite the Cold War but who spent the next half century trying to extinguish it. Always prescient, Kennan in the 1990s warned that the eastward expansion of NATO would spur a new cold war with Russia. Even as Kennan championed rational realism ...
A man of impressive mental powers, of extraordinary intellectual range, and-last but not least-of exceptional integrity, George Frost Kennan (1904-2005) was an adviser to presidents and secretaries of state, with a decisive role in the history of this country (and of the entire world) for a few crucial years in the 1940s, after which he was made to retire; but then he became a scholar who wrote seventeen books, scores of essays and articles, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir. He also wrote remarkable public lectures and many thousands of incisive letters, laying down his pen only in the hundredth year of his life.Having risen within the American Foreign Service and been posted to various E...
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year Drawing on extensive interviews with George Kennan and exclusive access to his archives, an eminent scholar of the Cold War delivers a revelatory biography of its troubled mastermind. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, this extraordinary biography delves into the mind of the brilliant diplomat who shaped U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union for decades. This is a landmark work of history and biography that reveals the vast influence and rich inner landscape of a life that both mirrored and shaped the century it spanned.
When George C. Marshall became Secretary of State in January of 1947, he faced not only a staggering array of serious foreign policy questions but also a State Department rendered ineffective by neglect, maladministration, and low morale. Soon after his arrival Marshall asked George F. Kennan to head a new component in the department's structure--the Policy Planning Staff. Here Wilson Miscamble scrutinizes Kennan's subsequent influence over foreign policymaking during the crucial years from 1947 to 1950.
The annotated diaries of the late influential American diplomat and foreign policy strategist spans ninety years of U.S. history while sharing his insights into Depression-era capitalism, the Cold War, and his literary achievements.
Index and bibliography included.
George F. Kennan (b. 1904), is best known for his writings, pronouncements, and philosophical ex-changes, especially over the past fifty years when he became, in effect, the nation's premier diplomatic intellectual. Through his humane and thoughtful influence, he worked to moderate the fierce complexities of political policy in the West. The "long telegram" he sent the State Department from the embassy in Moscow in 1946 detailed his intricate thoughts on postwar Soviet politics as well as relations between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. He also articulated a long-term plan for containing Communism. This communiqué crystalized as the policy followed by the U.S. and its allies until the crash of t...
These letters show Kennan's fear of the extent to which the United States misunderstood the Soviet regime. Especially in 1944, at the time of the Russians' betrayal of the Warsaw Uprising, it became evident that the Soviets were interested in establishing their rigid domination of Eastern and Central Europe and dividing the continent.
“[Kennan] comes to us…as ambassador of a generation nearly gone and a conservatism so responsible, dutiful and so long extinct it may look revolutionary….As ever, Kennan in the present book has fulfilled his responsibility admirably.” —Chicago Tribune "I have attempted to take the high ground,” writes George F. Kennan in the foreword to this illuminating work, "trying to stick to the broader dimensions of things—the ones that would still be visible and significant in future decades." Against the background of a century of wars, revolution, and uneasy peace, Mr. Kennan advances his thoughts on a broad front: how the individual's quest for power can transform a government into a ...