Book description
In September 1952, John Lukacs, then a young and unknown historian,
wrote George Kennan (1904-2005), the U. S. Ambassador to the Soviet
Union, asking one of the nation's best-known diplomats what he thought
of Lukacs's own views on Kennan's widely debated idea of containing
rather than militarily confronting the Soviet Union. A month later, to
Lukacs's surprise, he received a personal reply from Kennan.
So began an exchange of letters that would continue for more
than fifty years. Lukacs would go on to become one of America's most
distinguished and prolific diplomatic historians, while Kennan, who
would retire from public life to begin a new career as Pulitzer
Prize-winning author, would become revered as the man whose strategy
of containment led to a peaceful end to the Cold War. Their letters,
collected here for the first time, capture the writing and thinking of
two of the country's most important voices on America's role and place
in world affairs. From the division of Europe into East and West after
World War II to its unification as the Soviet Union disintegrated, and
from the war in Vietnam to the threat of nuclear annihilation and the
fate of democracy in America and the world, this book provides an
insider's tour of the issues and pivotal events that defined the Cold War.
The correspondence also charts the growth and development of an
intellectual and personal friendship that is intense, devoted, and
honest. As Kennan writes in a later letter to Lukacs,
"perceptive, understanding, and constructive criticism is . . .
as I see it, in itself a form of creative philosophical thought."
It is a belief to which both men subscribed and that they both practiced.
Presented with an introduction by Lukacs, the letters in
Through the History of the Cold War reveal new dimensions to
Kennan's thinking about America and its future, and illuminate the
political-and spiritual-philosophies that the two authors shared as
they wrote about a world transformed by war and by the clash of
ideologies that defined the twentieth century.
"[A] fascinating volume. . . . The book poses anew, in an
admirably lean and accessible way, a question that has long swirled
around Kennan: What were the intellectual underpinnings of his
insistence on a restrained, 'realist' foreign policy that shunned bold
efforts to remake the world in the American image?"-New York Times
John Lukacs is the author of more than twenty-five books, including A
Thread of Years and, most recently, Last Rites.
