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.

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.

George F. Kennan is well known as the preeminent American expert on the Soviet Union during the Cold War and the author of the doctrine of containment. In Mr. X and the Pacific, Paul J. Heer chronicles and assesses Kennan's work in affecting US policy toward East Asia. Heer traces the origins, development, and bearing of Kennan's strategic perspective on the Far East during his time as director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff from 1947 to 1950. The author follows Kennan's career and evolution of his thinking as he subsequently became a prominent critic of American participation in the Vietnam War. Mr. X and the Pacific 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.

On April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died and Harry Truman took his place in the White House. Historians have been arguing ever since about the implications of this transition for American foreign policy in general and relations with the Soviet Union in particular. Was there essential continuity in policy or did Truman's arrival in the Oval Office prompt a sharp reversal away from the approach of his illustrious predecessor? This study explores this controversial issue and in the process casts important light on the outbreak of the Cold War. From Roosevelt to Truman investigates Truman's foreign policy background and examines the legacy that FDR bequeathed to him. After Potsdam and the American use of the atomic bomb, both of which occurred under Truman's presidency, the US floundered between collaboration and confrontation with the Soviets, which represents a turning point in the transformation of American foreign policy. This work reveals that the real departure in American policy came only after the Truman administration had exhausted the legitimate possibilities of the Rooseveltian approach of collaboration with the Soviet Union.

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.

“The material contained in this book is drawn from lectures, some of which were delivered in 1957-1958 in the schools at Oxford University, others — in the spring of 1960 — at Harvard University... This is a study of the relationship between the Soviet Union and the major Western countries, from the inception of the Soviet regime in 1917 to the end of World War II. It is not intended as a chronological account of the happenings in this phase of diplomatic history, but rather as a series of discussions of individual episodes or problems.” — George F. Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin Kennan describes the diplomatic dilemmas that grew out of ignorance and mutual distrust, beginning with the Allied intervention in Russia in 1918, through World War I, the Versailles conference, Stalin’s bloody purges of 1934-1938, the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact of 1939, the end of World War II, and the meeting in Yalta between Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt. “It is not often that a book as instructive as this one manages at the same time to be so engrossing that it is bound to keep even general readers fascinated long past their bedtimes. The book’s message is a stern one; the pleasure in reading it derives from the elegant and yet fresh prose style that is one of the many gifts of [the author who] is an artist as well as an experienced diplomat; a moralist as well as a consummate historian. With superb felicity and grace, he here unfolds a historical narrative rich in prophetic judgments — prophetic in the Biblical sense of the word. Not everyone, of course, will agree with all of Mr. Kennan’s conclusions, but there is so much that is useful in this volume that even those who have reservations about one or another of the judgments in it will welcome it warmly as a significant contribution in several ways.” — Marshall D. Shulman, The New York Times “Superbly concise, meaty, and lucid. It surveys the whole fascinating, involved drama of Communism’s rise to world power.” — Newsweek “Every adult American ought to read it.” — William L. Shirer “Surely one of the most important books since the end of the last war... an over-all view that transcends the provinciality of so much of our foreign policy and embraces the whole immense area from Washington to Peking.” —The New Yorker “An important, a disturbing, a deeply moving book.” — New York Herald Tribune Book Review “Not only Mr. Kennan’s finest book, but also the best that has been written on Russia in this century.” — Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart “In this absorbing and eloquent book... Mr. Kennan reviews with much perception and sensitivity the ragged course of relations between the Soviet Union and the West from 1917 to 1945. While there is much in Western understanding and action to be criticized in the early years, during the inter-war period and during World War II, Mr. Kennan is keenly aware of the intense hostility of the Communist stance which exacerbated all problems.” — Foreign Affairs “Kennan, a fine writer as well as historian and diplomat, has made a magnificent attempt to put into order the chaotic relations between Russia and the West from the Communist Revolution to the end of World War II... A most important book, deserving the widest possible readership.” — Kirkus “[A] remarkable ‘best-seller.’ This fact is a tribute to both the author and the subject with which he deals. It is superfluous to comment on Mr. Kennan’s authority or on the brilliance of his lucid prose, which are again in evidence in this work. It is a volume not easily put aside as a mere purveyor of information; it solicits judgments and proffers them lavishly, inviting agreement or dissent.” — Slavic Review “[A] valuable volume. It is full of flashes of insight, into both Soviet and Western attitudes and policies, and it reveals the painful dilemmas Wilson, Roosevelt, and other Western leaders faced in dealing with this new state and system.” — The Slavic and East European Journal

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.

A DRAMATIC AND REVEALING ACCOUNT, FROM INSIDE THE GOVERNMENT, OF THE MOMENTOUS DAYS IN WHICH AMERICA ASSUMED THE RESPONSIBILITY OF WORLD LEADERSHIP. First published in 1955, Joseph M. Jones’ memoirs The Fifteen Weeks chronicle his role in the development of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. “The fifteen weeks which form the title and subject of this book comprise the period in 1947 when the United States stepped out irrevocably and wholeheartedly as leader upon the world stage.... “The greatness of a nation, like the greatness of an individual, is in the last analysis a mystery. We do not know why at one time immense exertions and far-reaching vision are more prevalent than at others. Yet to look within, to account for the obvious factors in the situation is highly useful. That function is performed in a book which for readability and for responsible narration would be hard to surpass.”—August Heckscher in the New York Herald Tribune.

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.