George F Kennan

Author : John Lewis Gaddis
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 1011 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2011-11-10
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781101548103

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George F. Kennan by John Lewis Gaddis Pdf

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. In the late 1940s, George Kennan wrote two documents, the "Long Telegram" and the "X Article," which set forward the strategy of containment that would define U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union for the next four decades. This achievement alone would qualify him as the most influential American diplomat of the Cold War era. But he was also an architect of the Marshall Plan, a prizewinning historian, and would become one of the most outspoken critics of American diplomacy, politics, and culture during the last half of the twentieth century. Now the full scope of Kennan's long life and vast influence is revealed by one of today's most important Cold War scholars. Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis began this magisterial history almost thirty years ago, interviewing Kennan frequently and gaining complete access to his voluminous diaries and other personal papers. So frank and detailed were these materials that Kennan and Gaddis agreed that the book would not appear until after Kennan's death. It was well worth the wait: the journals give this book a breathtaking candor and intimacy that match its century-long sweep. We see Kennan's insecurity as a Midwesterner among elites at Princeton, his budding dissatisfaction with authority and the status quo, his struggles with depression, his gift for satire, and his sharp insights on the policies and people he encountered. Kennan turned these sharp analytical gifts upon himself, even to the point of regularly recording dreams. The result is a remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy and always doubted himself. 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.

Author : George F. Kennan
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 760 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2014-02-16
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780393242768

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The Kennan Diaries by George F. Kennan Pdf

A landmark collection, spanning ninety years of U.S. history, of the never-before-published diaries of George F. Kennan, America’s most famous diplomat. On a hot July afternoon in 1953, George F. Kennan descended the steps of the State Department building as a newly retired man. 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. 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. A year later, in an article in Foreign Affairs, he outlined “containment,” America’s guiding strategy in the Cold War. 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. 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. Through it all, Kennan kept a diary. 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. 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. But it is the second half of this near-century-long record—the blossoming of Kennan the gifted author, wise counselor, and biting critic of the Vietnam and Iraq wars—that showcases this remarkable man at the height of his singular analytic and expressive powers, before giving way, heartbreakingly, to some of his most human moments, as his energy, memory, and finally his ability to write fade away. Masterfully selected and annotated by historian Frank Costigliola, the result is a landmark work of profound intellectual and emotional power. These diaries tell the complete narrative of Kennan’s life in his own intimate and unflinching words and, through him, the arc of world events in the twentieth century.

Author : Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C.
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 440 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2021-04-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691227993

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George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950 by Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C. Pdf

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.

Author : Anders Stephanson
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 1989
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0674502655

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Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy by Anders Stephanson Pdf

From an array of intellectual reference points, Stephanson (history, Rutgers U.) has written a serious assessment of this complicated, often controversial, highly respected American policymaker. A work of general significance for a wide range of contemporary issues in foreign and domestic politics a

Author : George Frost Kennan
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1578064481

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Interviews with George F. Kennan by George Frost Kennan Pdf

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 the Soviet Union. Such prescience was typical of Kennan's political thought. "I believe," he said in 1956, thirty-three years before the Berlin Wall collapsed, that "some day Russia will have to abandon East Germany and let it rejoin Berlin." In 1960, forty years before others took up the banner, he decried the encroachment of technology on American culture and the fragmenting impact it was having on the average American's consciousness. That same year he noted how America's over-reliance on the automobile and the direction toward unchecked suburban growth were splintering communities, causing environmental degradation, and depleting resources, all of which have grown to be pressing issues in American discourse. This collection of Kennan's interviews ranges over four decades. All feature his perceptions on international affairs and foreign policy. Two have never before appeared in print--one from the Oral History Project at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the other from the John Foster Dulles Oral History Project. These give extensive, broad-ranging overviews of Kennan's career in international relations and the developments of his thought. T. Christopher Jespersen is chair of the history department at North Georgia College and State University. He is the author of American Images of China, 1931-1949 and editor (with David Schmitz) of Architects of the American Century: Individuals, Ideas, and Institutions in Twentieth-Century American Foreign Policy--Essays on American Foreign Policy-makers and the Organizations They Have Shaped.

Author : Paul J Heer
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2023-06-15
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1501770314

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Mr. X and the Pacific by Paul J Heer Pdf

George F. Kennan is well known for articulating the strategic concept of containment, which would be the centerpiece of what became the Truman Doctrine. During his influential Cold War career he was the preeminent American expert on the Soviet Union. In Mr. X and the Pacific, Paul J. Heer explores Kennan's equally important impact on East Asia. Heer chronicles and assesses Kennan's work in affecting U.S. policy toward East Asia. By tracing the origins, development, and bearing of Kennan's strategic perspective on the Far East during and after his time as director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff from 1947 to 1950, Heer shows how Kennan moved from being an ardent and hawkish Cold Warrior to, by the 1960s, a prominent critic of American participation in the Vietnam War. Mr. X and the Pacific provides close examinations of Kennan's engagement with China (both the People's Republic and Taiwan), Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Country-by-country analysis paired with considerations of the ebb and flow of Kennan's global strategic thinking result in a significant extension of our estimation of Kennan's influence and a deepening of our understanding of this key figure in the early years of the Cold War. In Mr. X and the Pacific Heer offers readers a new view of Kennan, revealing his importance and the totality of his role in East Asia policy, his struggle with American foreign policy in the region, and the ways in which Kennan's legacy still has implications for how the United States approaches the region in the twenty-first century.

Author : Melvyn P. Leffler
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 16 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Cold War
ISBN : PURD:32754076285166

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Remembering George Kennan by Melvyn P. Leffler Pdf

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?"

Author : George Frost Kennan
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 592 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2023-01-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691189475

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Russia Leaves the War by George Frost Kennan Pdf

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and the Parkman Prize From acclaimed diplomat and historian George Kennan, a landmark history of the crucial months in 1917–1918 that forged the pattern of Soviet-American relations When the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, American diplomats in St. Petersburg and Moscow were thrown into a bewildering situation. Should the new regime be recognized? What was its true nature? And was there any way to keep Russia fighting against Germany in the Great War? In vivid detail, George Kennan’s classic history tells the gripping story of the Americans’ furious, and ultimately failed, efforts to strike a deal to keep the Soviets in the war—and how these events set the pattern of future relations between the two emerging superpowers. In a new foreword, Kennan biographer Frank Costigliola puts the book in the context of its Cold War publication and Kennan’s life.

Author : George F. Kennan
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 1994-05-17
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781324020943

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Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy by George F. Kennan Pdf

“[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 confusion of ambition, rivalry, and suspicion; how a nation's size can create barriers between the rulers and the ruled; why America must first set its own house in order before it can become a beacon to others. Deeply aware of the pressures under which public officials must act, Mr. Kennan sees a government in Washington that is forced to make decisions on issues of the moment, often without regard for long-term consequences. Neither the legislature, responsive to the interests of a narrow constituency, nor the executive branch, swamped by urgent problems at home and abroad, has the time or inclination to look far beyond the next election. Lost entirely is a vital element in any democracy: deliberation based upon study, review, and judgment. To address problems that defy quick political solutions, Mr. Kennan here boldly lays down a blueprint for a Council of State, a nonpolitical, permanent advisory board that would stand alongside yet apart from government policy makers, with the prestige to be heard "above the cacophony of political ambitions." Rich in historical example, this volume is a brilliant summing up of the experience and thought of the man the Atlantic described in a cover story entitled "The Last Wise Man" as: "diplomat, scholar, writer of rare literary gifts, one of most remarkable Americans of this century."

Author : George Frost Kennan
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 1984
Category : History
ISBN : 0719017076

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The Fateful Alliance by George Frost Kennan Pdf

An analysis of the Russian-French alliance of 1894 and what went wrong in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.

Author : John Lukacs
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2011-06-06
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780812204858

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Through the History of the Cold War by John Lukacs Pdf

In September 1952, John Lukacs, then a young and unknown historian, wrote George Kennan (1904-2005), the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, asking one of the nation's best-known diplomats what he thought of Lukacs's own views on Kennan's widely debated idea of containing rather than militarily confronting the Soviet Union. A month later, to Lukacs's surprise, he received a personal reply from Kennan. So began an exchange of letters that would continue for more than fifty years. Lukacs would go on to become one of America's most distinguished and prolific diplomatic historians, while Kennan, who would retire from public life to begin a new career as Pulitzer Prize-winning author, would become revered as the man whose strategy of containment led to a peaceful end to the Cold War. Their letters, collected here for the first time, capture the writing and thinking of two of the country's most important voices on America's role and place in world affairs. From the division of Europe into East and West after World War II to its unification as the Soviet Union disintegrated, and from the war in Vietnam to the threat of nuclear annihilation and the fate of democracy in America and the world, this book provides an insider's tour of the issues and pivotal events that defined the Cold War. The correspondence also charts the growth and development of an intellectual and personal friendship that was intense, devoted, and honest. As Kennan later wrote Lukacs in letter, "perceptive, understanding, and constructive criticism is . . . as I see it, in itself a form of creative philosophical thought." It is a belief to which both men subscribed and that they both practiced. Presented with an introduction by Lukacs, the letters in Through the History of the Cold War reveal new dimensions to Kennan's thinking about America and its future, and illuminate the political—and spiritual—philosophies that the two authors shared as they wrote about a world transformed by war and by the clash of ideologies that defined the twentieth century.

Author : George Frost Kennan
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 495 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 1981-04-21
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691007847

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The Decline of Bismarck's European Order by George Frost Kennan Pdf

In an attempt to discover some of the underlying origins of World War I, the eminent diplomat and writer George Kennan focuses on a small sector of offstage events to show how they affected the drama at large long before the war even began. In the introduction to his book George Kennan tells us, "I came to see World War I . . . as the great seminal catastrophe of this century--the event which . . . lay at the heart of the failure and decline of this Western civilization." But, he asks, who could help being struck by the contrast between this apocalyptic result and the "delirious euphoria" of the crowds on the streets of Europe at the outbreak of war in 1914! "Were we not," he suggests, "in the face of some monstrous miscalculation--some pervasive failure to read correctly the outward indicators of one's own situation?" It is from this perspective that Mr. Kennan launches a "micro-history" of the Franco-Russian relationship as far back as the 1870s in an effort to determine the motives that led people "to wander so blindly" into the horrors of the First World War.

Author : George Frost Kennan
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 114 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 1951
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:954517348

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American diplomacy, 1900-1950 by George Frost Kennan Pdf

Author : Grace Kennan Warnecke
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2018-05-04
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780822983347

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Daughter of the Cold War by Grace Kennan Warnecke Pdf

Grace Kennan Warnecke's memoir is about a life lived on the edge of history. Daughter of one of the most influential diplomats of the twentieth century, wife of the scion of a newspaper dynasty and mother of the youngest owner of a major league baseball team, Grace eventually found her way out from under the shadows of others to forge a dynamic career of her own. Born in Latvia, Grace lived in seven countries and spoke five languages before the age of eleven. As a child, she witnessed Hitler’s march into Prague, attended a Soviet school during World War II, and sailed the seas with her father. In a multi-faceted career, she worked as a professional photographer, television producer, and book editor and critic. Eventually, like her father, she became a Russian specialist, but of a very different kind. She accompanied Ted Kennedy and his family to Russia, escorted Joan Baez to Moscow to meet with dissident Andrei Sakharov, and hosted Josef Stalin’s daughter on the family farm after Svetlana defected to the United States. While running her own consulting company in Russia, she witnessed the breakup of the Soviet Union, and later became director of a women’s economic empowerment project in a newly independent Ukraine. Daughter of the Cold Waris a tale of all these adventures and so much more. This compelling and evocative memoir allows readers to follow Grace's amazing path through life – a whirlwind journey of survival, risk, and self-discovery through a kaleidoscope of many countries, historic events, and fascinating people.

Author : George Frost Kennan
Publisher : Pantheon
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 1983
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0394716264

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Memoirs, 1950-1963 by George Frost Kennan Pdf

The American diplomat's reflections of his years of government service provide insight into four decades of U.S. policy