The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War

The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War

Nicholas Thompson

Language: English

Pages: 432

ISBN: 0312658869

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Only two Americans held positions of great influence throughout the Cold War. The two men embodied opposing strategies for winning the conflict. Yet they dined together, attended the weddings of each other's children, and remained lifelong friends.

Paul Nitze was a consummate insider who believed the best way to avoid a nuclear clash was to prepare to win one. George Kennan was a diplomat turned academic whose famous "X article" persuasively argued that we should contain the Soviet Union while waiting for it to collapse from within. A masterly double biography, The Hawk and the Dove "does an inspired job of telling the story of the Cold War through the careers of two of its most interesting and important figures" (The Washington Monthly).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

tinyurl.com/2xgnas, accessed on Jan. 23, 2009. 127   With the North Koreans retreating: Stalin to Kim Il Sung, Aug. 28, 1950, Cold War International History Project, www.wilsoncenter.org and tinyurl.com/2o23sk, accessed on Jan. 23, 2009. 127   to send planes: Aleksandr Vasilevsky to Stalin, Sept. 23, 1950, Cold War International History Project, www.wilsoncenter.org and tinyurl.com/33xcvu, accessed on Jan. 23, 2009. 127   crews went without: Jon Halliday, “Air Operations in Korea,” in William

Sept. 28, 2007. 209   “She’s so nice”: Sylvan Fox, “Life, The Times to Serialize Stalin Daughter’s Memoirs,” NYT, April 23, 1967. 13. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BARRICADES 210   Radicals tried to provoke: Robert McNamara, In Retrospect, 304. 211   would self-immolate: PHN, meeting notes, Oct. 21, 1967, PHNP LOC, box 85, folder 3. 211   None of their rifles: McNamara, In Retrospect, 303. 211   burst in and rape: Leslie Gelb, author interview, March 18, 2006. 211   “Warren Christopher and I

senator asked Nitze: PHN, AFOH, 351. 280   “If there are enough”: Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels, front cover. 280   “Depending upon certain assumptions”: “Hearings on Nomination of Eugene V. Rostow to Be Director, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,” Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Ninety-Seventh Congress, First Session; June 22–23, 1981, 48–49. 280   “mad welter”: GFK, Nuclear Delusion, 206. 281   In June 1982: Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Journals, 464. 281   “In 1941”: Vojtech

Kennan nor Nitze had been born. Perhaps there would have been a final clash between the two superpowers. Perhaps the United States and the Soviet Union would never have entered into—or would have found a way to end—their ruinous arms race. But there’s one thing I feel confident saying after several years immersed in the worlds of these two men: America is a richer place because of the examples set by Paul Nitze and George Kennan. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many brilliant and generous people helped with

him down at his daughter’s school and surrounded the campus. The director of the institution had to hustle Kennan out the back entrance. He was now an international sensation. His oldest daughter, Grace, heard the news by way of a passing newsboy’s holler: “Kennan kicked out of Moscow.” The former ambassador to the Soviet Union was despondent. He grabbed the same little notebook in which he had scrawled the advice for the press conference to write out a few lines from Shakespeare. “Nay then,

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