A remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy and always doubted himself.

" ... The letters in this volume reveal new dimensions in George Kennan's thinking about America and its future and illuminate the political -and spiritual- philosophies that both authors shared as they wrote about a world transformed by war and the clash of ideologies that defined the twentieth century"--Jacket.

When George C. Marshall, the organizer of victory as Army Chief of Staff during World War II, 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. In this major work Wilson.

In 1945 the United States saw the Soviet Union as its principal ally. By 1947, it saw the Soviet Union as its principal opponent. How did this happen? Historian John Lukacs has provided an answer to this question through an exchange of letters with George F. Kennan. Their correspondence deals with the antecedents of containment between 1944 and 1946, during most of which time Kennan was at the American embassy in Moscow. Kennan had strong opinions about America's appropriate role during and after World War II and is perhaps best known as the architect of America's containment policy. Much has been written about Kennan and containment, but relatively little is known about the events that made him compose and send the Long Telegram in 1946 that ultimately became the draft for foreign policy dealing with the Soviets in the following forty years. These letters show Kennan's fear of the extent to which the United States misunderstood the Soviet regime. Especially in 1944, at the time of the