The Kennan Diaries - download pdf or read online

A landmark assortment, spanning 90 years of U.S. background, of the never-before-published diaries of George F. Kennan, America’s most famed diplomat.

On a scorching July afternoon in 1953, George F. Kennan descended the stairs of the kingdom division construction as a newly retired guy. His occupation were tumultuous: early postings in jap Europe by means of Berlin in 1940–41 and Moscow within the final 12 months of worldwide struggle II. In 1946, the forty-two-year-old Kennan authored the “Long Telegram,” a 5,500-word indictment of the Kremlin that grew to become obligatory examining in Washington. A yr later, in an editorial in Foreign Affairs, he defined “containment,” America’s guiding procedure within the chilly struggle. but what must have been the head of his career—an ambassadorship in Moscow in 1952—was sabotaged by means of Kennan himself, deeply pissed off at his failure to ease the chilly conflict that he had helped launch.

Yet, if it wasn’t the top, neither used to be it the capstone; over the subsequent fifty years, Kennan might develop into the main revered international coverage philosopher of the 20 th century, giving influential lectures, advising presidents, and authoring twenty books, successful Pulitzer prizes and nationwide booklet awards within the process.

Through all of it, Kennan saved a diary. Spanning a spectacular eighty-eight years and totaling over 8,000 pages, his journals brim with prepared political and ethical insights, philosophical ruminations, poetry, and brilliant descriptions. In those pages, we see Kennan rambling via Nineteen Twenties Europe as a faculty pupil, despairing for capitalism in the middle of the melancholy, agonizing over the dilemmas of intercourse and marriage, turning into enchanted after which horrified via Soviet Russia, and constructing into America’s prime Soviet analyst. however it is the second one 1/2 this near-century-long record—the blossoming of Kennan the proficient writer, clever counselor, and biting critic of the Vietnam and Iraq wars—that showcases this striking guy on the top of his singular analytic and expressive powers, earlier than giving means, heartbreakingly, to a couple of his so much human moments, as his power, reminiscence, and eventually his skill to write down fade away.

Masterfully chosen and annotated by way of historian Frank Costigliola, the result's a landmark paintings of profound highbrow and emotional energy. those diaries inform the whole narrative of Kennan’s existence in his personal intimate and unflinching phrases and, via him, the arc of worldwide occasions within the 20th century.