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Rating: 
Summary: Historically Significant and Equally Sensitive - Rare Combo
Review: "Experience had convinced us that far more could be learned by careful, scholarly analysis of information legitimately available concerning any great nation than by the fanciest arrangements of clandestine intelligence."(p48)"In the face of this knowledge, [of the inevitable Russion domination of Poland] I could only feel that there was something frivolous about our whole action in this Polish question. I reflected on the lightheartedness with which great powers offer advice to smaller ones in matters affecting the vital interests of the latter. I was sorry to find myself, for the moment, a part of this. And I wished that instead of mumbling words of official optimism we had had the judgment and the good taste to bow our heads in silence before the tragedy of a people who have been our allies, whom we have helped to save from our enemies, and whom we cannot save from our friends."(pp209/10) "The strength of the Kremlin lies largely in the fact that it knows how to wait. But the strength of the Russian people lies in the fact that they know how to wait longer."(p511) [On the German war crime trials] "I have already mentioned my aversion to our proceeding jointly with the Russians in matters of this nature. I should not like to be misunderstood on this subject. The crimes of the Nazi leaders were immeasurable. These men had placed themselves in a position where a further personal existence on this earth could have had no positive meaning for them or for anyone else. I personally considered that it would have been best if the Allied commanders had had standing instructions that if any of these men fell into the hands of Allied forces they should, once their identity had been established beyond doubt, be executed forthwith. "But to hold these Nazi leader for public trial was another matter. This procedure could not expiate or undo the crimes they had committed. It could have been justified only as a means for conveying to the world public the repudiation, by the conscience of those peoples and governments conducting the trial, of mass crimes of every sort. To admit to such a procedure a Soviet judge as the representative of a regime which had on its conscience not only the vast cruelties of the Russian Revolution,of collectivization, and of the Russian purges of the 1930s, as well as the manifold brutalities and atrocities perpetrated against the Poles and the peoples of the Baltic countries during the wartime period, was to make a mockery of the only purpose the trials could conceivably serve, and to assume, by association, a share of the responsibility for these Stalinist crimes themselves."(pp260/1) This is a great book. It shows the progress of a fine mind possessed of a practical scholarship and a moral voice in what were often excrutiatingly ambiguous circumstances. Kennan was in Moscow in 1935 when Stalin began the purges; he was in Prague in 1938 when Germany invaded the Sudetenland; he was in Berlin when Germany declared war on the U.S.; he was the chief architect of the Marshall plan. Of course, he is associated with our Cold War policy of "containment" of the Soviet Union, an association that he regrets, since very little of it reflects his thinking. The book is a fascinating look at modern power politics from a bemused, but acute, inside observer.
Rating: 
Summary: kennan's filth
Review: His writing lacks coherency and he seems as though he genuinely has no knowledge of the subject, a thoroughly challenging book with no discernable benefit. The conclusion is inadequate and unjust, perhaps he should learn the facts first.
Rating:
Summary: kennan's filth
Review: His writing lacks coherency and he seems as though he genuinely has no knowledge of the subject, a thoroughly challenging book with no discernable benefit. The conclusion is inadequate and unjust, perhaps he should learn the facts first.
Rating:
Summary: A must-read for anyone involved in foreign affairs
Review: In a very different period of time, I have travelled to (or lived in) almost all the places described in these memoirs. Furthermore, I have confronted - a generation or so removed - many similar anecdotes, characters and bureaucratic missteps. This book has a ring of authenticity that is striking. It describes the ordinary and then shifts smoothly to the momentous. I have not found anything else quite like it. (Leigh White's 'The Long Balkan Night' has this similar feature, but it's the story of a journalist). With all of that said, I was nonetheless struck by Kennan's essential desire to survive by avoiding any personal risk. He was a successful bureaucrat. During his life, he derived his status entirely from his position, or membership in an organization, and not from any personal endeavour. How many today would naively do as Kennan and, during a whole career, derive status from membership? There are too many other things on offer. And the bureaucracy now is, well, too bureaucratic. Thank God.
Rating:
Summary: Historically Significant and Equally Sensitive - Rare Combo
Review: It is extremely rare that the memoirs of someone who played a truly significant role in his country's history are also beautifully and sensitively written. They candidly reveal the shy and introspective man who also happen to have been a critical player in the U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union from the 1940s through the 1980s (from the late 1920s thorugh the 1950s in his governmental role and as historian and critic since then). Kennan is candid, brilliant, critical, and happens to have a wonderful writing style. This is personal history at its best. If you've read this one (which won the Pulitzer Prize), be sure to read the sequel.
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