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A definitive biography of the U.S. diplomat and prize-winning historian George F. KennanThe diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904–2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy—and one of its most complex. Drawing on many previously untapped sources, Frank Costigliola’s authoritative biography offers a new picture of a man of extraordinary ability and ambition whose idea of containing the Soviet Union helped ignite the Cold War but who spent the next half century trying to extinguish it. Always prescient, Kennan in the 1990s warned that the eastward expansion of NATO would spur a new cold war with Russia.Even as Kennan championed rational realism in foreign policy, his personal and professional lives were marked by turmoil. And though he was widely respected and honored by presidents and the public, he judged his career a failure because he had been dropped as a pilot of U.S. foreign policy. Impossible to classify, Kennan was a sui generis thinker, a trenchant critic of both communism and capitalism, and a pioneering environmentalist. Living between Russia and the United States, he witnessed firsthand Stalin’s tightening grip on the Soviet Union, the collapse of Europe during World War II, and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.An absorbing portrait of an eloquent, insightful, and sometimes blinkered iconoclast whose ideas are still powerfully relevant, Kennan invites us to imagine a world that Kennan fought for but was unable to bring about—one not of confrontations and crises but of dialogue and diplomacy.

Ambassadors --- Kennan, George F. --- A Terrible Mistake. --- Adolf Hitler. --- Aftermath of World War II. --- American Thinker. --- Anti-Americanism. --- Anti-communism. --- Appeasement. --- Ash heap of history. --- Atlantic Community. --- Big lie. --- Bolsheviks. --- Boris Godunov. --- Carmel Offie. --- Cataclysm (Dragonlance). --- Cold War (1985–91). --- Cold War. --- Communism. --- Communist propaganda. --- Containment. --- Counter-revolutionary. --- Dean Rusk. --- Demagogue. --- Disarmament. --- Disenchantment. --- Drew Pearson (journalist). --- Eros and Civilization. --- Evil empire. --- Fall of the Western Roman Empire. --- Franklin D. Roosevelt. --- George F. Kennan. --- George Kennan (explorer). --- German Order (decoration). --- German re-armament. --- Great Disappointment. --- Great Purge. --- Henry A. Wallace. --- Huey Long. --- Hungarian Revolution of 1956. --- Imperialism. --- Jeremiad. --- Jimmy Carter. --- Jingoism. --- John F. Kennedy. --- John Hersey. --- John Lewis Gaddis. --- Joseph Stalin. --- Josip Broz Tito. --- Karl Marx. --- Konrad Adenauer. --- Kurt Schuschnigg. --- Lavrentiy Beria. --- Lazar Kaganovich. --- Lecture. --- Loss of China. --- Mail. --- Marshall Plan. --- Maxim Litvinov. --- Memoir. --- Mr. --- Muckraker. --- Nazi Germany. --- Nazi propaganda. --- Nikita Khrushchev. --- Nuclear arms race. --- Nuclear warfare. --- On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences. --- Ostracism. --- Paul-Henri Spaak. --- Persona non grata. --- Plausible deniability. --- Police state. --- Reprisal. --- Ridicule. --- Romanticism. --- Round Table. --- Russian culture. --- Russians. --- Scholasticism. --- Secret police. --- Sinclair Lewis. --- Soviet Empire. --- Soviet Union. --- Soviet Union–United States relations. --- Soviet dissidents. --- Stereotypes of Jews. --- Superiority (short story). --- Svetlana Alliluyeva. --- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. --- Theodore Dreiser. --- Time of Troubles. --- Total war. --- Un-American. --- United States Department of State. --- W. Averell Harriman. --- War and Peace. --- War crime. --- War. --- Weimar Republic. --- West Germany. --- World War II.