George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944-1946

George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944-1946 PDF Author: George Frost Kennan
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826211095
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
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.

George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944-1946

George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944-1946 PDF Author: George Frost Kennan
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826211095
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
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.

George F. Kennan

George F. Kennan PDF Author: John Lewis Gaddis
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143122150
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 800

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Book Description
Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Biography Widely and enthusiastically acclaimed, this is the authorized, definitive biography of one of the most fascinating but troubled figures of the twentieth century by the nation's leading Cold War historian. In the late 1940s, George F. Kennan—then a bright but, relatively obscure American diplomat—wrote the "long telegram" and the "X" article. These two documents laid out United States' strategy for "containing" the Soviet Union—a strategy which Kennan himself questioned in later years. Based on exclusive access to Kennan and his archives, this landmark history illuminates a life that both mirrored and shaped the century it spanned.

Around the Cragged Hill

Around the Cragged Hill PDF Author: George Frost Kennan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393311457
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Winner of the National Book Award and two Pulitzer Prizes, diplomat and scholar Kennan now steps forth with a compelling, provocative testament for our times--a brilliant look at the problems facing America today. A New York Times bestseller in hardcover.

The Kennan Diaries

The Kennan Diaries PDF Author: George F. Kennan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393242765
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 760

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Book Description
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.

Long Telegram

Long Telegram PDF Author: George F Kennan
Publisher: Cosimo Classics
ISBN: 9781646797615
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"(while Soviet power was) impervious to the logic of reason, it was highly sensitive to the logic of force." -The Long Telegram, George F. Kennan (1946) Although the United States and the Soviet Union were allies during World War II, their relationship soon changed after the war. In February 1946, the US Moscow embassy was asked by the US Treasury why the Soviet Union was not supporting the newly created World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. George Kennan, the Chargé at the US Embassy in Moscow, responded by telegram, also explaining his broader views of the Soviets. His extensive response, dubbed The Long Telegram, became the inspiration for the US containment policy. According to this strategy, the United States and its allies needed to contain the Soviet Union by preventing the spread of communism. The Long Telegram offers unique insight in a turning point in the US-Soviet relationship and is a must-read for students of US foreign policy, diplomats, and policymakers.

The Wise Men

The Wise Men PDF Author: Walter Isaacson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684837714
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 852

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Book Description
A captivating blend of personal biography and public drama, The Wise Men introduces the original best and brightest, leaders whose outsized personalities and actions brought order to postwar chaos: Averell Harriman, the freewheeling diplomat and Roosevelt's special envoy to Churchill and Stalin; Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than Truman and for the Marshall Plan than General Marshall; George Kennan, self-cast outsider and intellectual darling of the Washington elite; Robert Lovett, assistant secretary of war, undersecretary of state, and secretary of defense throughout the formative years of the Cold War; John McCloy, one of the nation's most influential private citizens; and Charles Bohlen, adroit diplomat and ambassador to the Soviet Union.

George Kennan

George Kennan PDF Author: John Lukacs
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300180950
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
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 European capitals, and twice to Moscow, Kennan was called back to Washington in 1946, where he helped to inspire the Truman Doctrine and draft the Marshall Plan. Among other things, he wrote the “X” or “Containment” article for which he became, and still is, world famous (an article which he regarded as not very important and liable to misreading). John Lukacs describes the development and the essence of Kennan’s thinking; the-perhaps unavoidable-misinterpretations of his advocacies; his self-imposed task as a leading realist critic during the Cold War; and the importance of his work as a historian during the second half of his long life.

The Cold War: a Very Short Introduction

The Cold War: a Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Robert J. McMahon
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198859546
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Vividly written and based on up-to-date scholarship, this title provides an interpretive overview of the international history of the Cold War.

Remembering George Kennan

Remembering George Kennan PDF Author: Melvyn P. Leffler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cold War
Languages : en
Pages : 16

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Book Description
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?"

Russia Leaves the War

Russia Leaves the War PDF Author: George Frost Kennan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691189471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
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.