The Intellectual as Diplomat

The whim of history will press into a man’s hand a flag behind which he rallies people—only to discover that he does not understand them and that they don’t know why they follow him. This happened to George F. Kennan, a diplomat’s diplomat, civilized survivor of the Great Century which conceived of diplomacy as an art, and architect of the policy of “containment” which Walter Lippmann has denounced as the origin of the Cold War. Yet the same George Kennan, ten years later, became the hero of the liberal Left, of pacifists and of neo-isolationists, when he coined the slogan “disengagement” and seemed to call for a radically new policy, a policy either based on the premise that the Cold War was o...