Measures short of war: The
George F. Kennan lectures at the National War College 1946-47.
Hixson,
George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (1989); Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (1989).
Finally released in November after 30 years of work, George F. Kennan: An American Life is a triumph of scholarship and narrative.
The book that brings them together, George F. Kennan: An American Life, probes to an unprecedented degree the erratic brilliance of the great diplomat.
As the first Deputy Commandant for Foreign Affairs,
George F. Kennan, noted, "It was the first time the United States Government had even prescribed this area of inquiry for study in an official academic institution." (4) As the Secretaries of War and the Navy wrote to James Byrnes, Secretary of State, in 1946, "We both feel that the recent war has demonstrated a necessity for close coordination between the State Department and the Armed Forces.
His riveting retelling of
George F. Kennan's report on Latin America, written in the wake of his trip through the region in 1950, deftly captures the siege mentality of Washington policymakers just as McCarthyism gripped the nation.
12, 1999) with retired American diplomat and author
George F. Kennan, the father of the containment doctrine:
Marshall had the good sense to pick able assistants who did understand a changing world, most notably Marshall's chief of policy planning,
George F. Kennan. Indeed, Marshall seems to have always been away giving a speech or attending a conference in South America when crises erupted.
That article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," propelled its author, the warrior and statesman
George F. Kennan, to the center of the debate among policymakers concerning the Nation's strategic course during the early Cold War.
George F. Kennan's Strategic Thought: The Making of an American Political Realist.
Salzman's treatment of this episode cannot avoid comparison with
George F. Kennan's analysis in his magisterial two-volume Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920.
The problem, as Barton Gellman points out in his preface to Contending With Kennan, is that there are two
George F. Kennans. In the 1940s and 1950s there was the Kennan of Smith's article--the practicing diplomat and cold-warrior who, in Gellman's words, "sounded alarms about the Soviets and plotted the strategy of 'containment.'" More recently, since the late 1970s, there has been the New Yorker Kennan--the dovish diplomatic historian whose writings consist mainly of old stories retold as contemporary lessons along with exhortations against nuclear arms.
