Volume 2, Number 7 · May 14, 1964
Kennan's Realism
By George Lichtheim
On Dealing with the Communist World
by George F. Kennan
Harper & Row (for the Council on Foreign Relations), 51 pp., $3.00
Mr. George Kennan's many claims to eminence include an enviable capacity for reducing complex problems to relatively simple terms. Scholar-diplomats are rare: diplomats who can put scholarship to enlightened uses are even less common. Mr. Kennan has only recently retired from the post of U.S. Ambassador to Belgrade, and already he has found it possible to turn his stay in Yugoslavia to good purpose, for much of the substance of his latest work (originally delivered in lecture form) clearly represents a distillation of thoughts that occurred to him during those two and a half years spent in an East European environment. This interplay of practice and theory is what his readers have come to expect from him. Even those who missed the intellectual shock of his famous 'X' paper on Soviet conduct in the July 1947 Foreign Affairs have by now acquired the habit of looking to him for variations on this theme, and—perhaps, who knows?—for signs of how the wind may be blowing in official or Congressional quarters where the perennial problem of coexistence is concerned.
Review, 2016 words
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