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 was intense, devoted, and
honest. As Kennan later wrote Lukacs in letter, "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.
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