Description
"In Between America and Russia, historian Frank Costigliola offers an authoritative biography of George F. Kennan (1904-2005), the former State Department official best known for his influence on U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. Kennan's ascent began with the longest telegram ever to arrive in the State Department. In that missive and in a 1947 essay in Foreign Affairs published anonymously as "Mr. X," Kennan elaborated the strategy of containment that would come to guide U.S. policy toward Russia. Originally envisioned as a medium-term strategy, containment offered an escape from the apparent dilemma of either appeasing the Russians or going to war and held out the promise that a balanced stance toward the communist world would eventually lead to a softening within the Soviet Union or to its collapse. After retiring from government service in 1953, the former diplomat embarked on another career as a prize-winning and prolific historian of foreign policy and international relations at the Institute for Advanced Study. He remained an outspoken critic and commentator on American foreign policy until his death in Princeton at the age of 101. Kennan continues to fascinate readers almost two decades after his death. But, despite all of the attention, the most prominent portrait that we have is of a rather conventional man with some unconventional quirks. Costigliola offers a different view in this book. As he notes, Kennan's success in helping define the Cold War belied his frustrated hope for bringing about an earlier end to it, a failure he himself regarded as a tragedy. And though his fame has been notable and enduring, the modesty of his actual influence on American policy haunted him. Kennan's deep love of Russia, its culture, and people figure prominently in this biography, as does his conservative environmentalism. Drawing on diaries, letters, lectures, and archival material, Costigliola paints a nuanced psychological portrait of a complex figure, one whose inner struggles reflected the political and intellectual dramas of the Cold War"--
