american diplomacy sixtieth anniversary expanded edition

In these pages, we see Kennan rambling through 1920s Europe as a college student, despairing for capitalism in the midst of the Depression, agonizing over the dilemmas of sex and marriage, becoming enchanted and then horrified by Soviet Russia, and developing into America's foremost Soviet analyst. Spanning a staggering eighty-eight years and totaling over 8,000 pages, his journals brim with keen political and moral insights, philosophical ruminations, poetry, and vivid descriptions. Yet, if it wasn't the pinnacle, neither was it the capstone over the next fifty years, Kennan would become the most respected foreign policy thinker of the twentieth century, giving influential lectures, advising presidents, and authoring twenty books, winning two Pulitzer prizes and two National Book awards in the process. Yet what should have been the pinnacle of his career-an ambassadorship in Moscow in 1952-was sabotaged by Kennan himself, deeply frustrated at his failure to ease the Cold War that he had helped launch. A year later, in an article in Foreign Affairs, he outlined 'containment,' America's guiding strategy in the Cold War. In 1946, the forty-two-year-old Kennan authored the 'Long Telegram,' a 5,500-word indictment of the Kremlin that became mandatory reading in Washington. His career had been tumultuous: early postings in eastern Europe followed by Berlin in 1940-41 and Moscow in the last year of World War II.

Kennan descended the steps of the State Department building as a newly retired man. On a hot July afternoon in 1953, George F.

American diplomacy sixtieth anniversary expanded edition