Memoirs, 1950-1963

MEMOIRS 1925-1950 published by Atlantic-Little, Brown in 1967 covered twenty-five years George F. Kennan spent in Berlin, in Moscow, in Prague, as a Foreign Service Officer before and during the war, and in Washington, as an architect of foreign policy after it. Awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, that volume was proclaimed “the single most valuable political book written by an American in the twentieth century” (NEW REPUBLIC).

Now George Kennan resumes the remarkable narrative of his career, beginning in 1950 with his temporary retirement from public life and the commencement of his stay at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study as a scholar and public commentator. In the background are the issues of Korea and postwar Japan, the ever-sensitive question of the U.S.-Soviet power balance; and despite his ever-deepening conflicts with administration policy, Kennan, as a Russian expert, remains in the arena — participating in talks with Secretary of State Acheson, the Pentagon and the Soviet representative to the UN, Jacob Malik. From his own notes and his vivid, comprehensive recollections, George Kennan re-creates his development as a historian: his lecture series at the University of Chicago, out of which came the standard work AMERICAN DIPLOMACY, 1900-1950; his studies at Princeton; his controversial Reith Lectures, delivered over the BBC in 1957, which sparked an extraordinary international debate over the future of Germany and the role of the U. S. in Western Europe.

And Kennan speaks eloquently and critically of the last two ambassadorships he was to hold: the Russian post in the final hours of the Truman administration, from which he was abruptly released by the Soviets as persona non grata; and the Yugoslavian post under Kennedy. Throughout, George Kennan confronts the questions of foreign policy which haunted and still haunt the United States: military dominance of foreign affairs; U.S. insistence on complete victory in conflict; the intransigence of the Soviet-American relationship; and the frequently appalling misconceptions held by Congress and the American public about foreign policy.

For its portraits of Truman, Eisenhower, Acheson, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Tito, Stalin, John Foster Dulles, McCarthy and others, and for its incisive analysis of the critical issues of the twentieth century, George Kennan’s MEMOIRS 1950-1963 stands as an extraordinary political document as well as a distinguished American autobiography.