The Liberal Against Himself

From his scholar’s chair at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., George F. Kennan—diplomat, strategist, historian—surveys the charred ruins of the Hungarian resistance. Respectfully at his knee, ‘ armed with a tape recorder, sits reporter Joseph Alsop. The ensuing conversation, as transcribed in the Saturday Evening Post for November 24, 1956, adds up to this:

Kennan, as “our No. 1 Expert on Russia,” has known all along that satellite rebellions were going to take place, and actually predicted (in 1945) that they would. He now predicts still further uprisings, because “the same fundamental forces are at work throughout the whole area.” Reporter Alsop cannot get Kennan to say what these “fundamental forces” are. Aversion to “Russian rule” pops into the conversation—and then melts unobtrusively into something which might be aversion to Communism itself. The satellite peoples were irked because of “the failure to meet economic plans,” and—as Mr. Kennan almost, but not quite, gets around to saying—because Communism denies the elementary rules of ethics. The “events” in Hungary, Kennan says, “have grandeur, very great grandeur, because they are visible proof that certain principles, certain moral principles, really must be observed in the long run in the successful government of great peoples.”

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M. Stanton Evans

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From his scholar’s chair at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., George F. Kennan—diplomat, strategist, historian—surveys the charred ruins of the Hungarian resistance. Respectfully at his knee, ‘ armed with a tape recorder, sits reporter Joseph Alsop. The ensuing conversation, as transcribed in the Saturday Evening Post for November 24, 1956, adds up to this:

Kennan, as “our No. 1 Expert on Russia,” has known all along that satellite rebellions were going to take place, and actually predicted (in 1945) that they would. He now predicts still further uprisings, because “the same fundamental forces are at work throughout the whole area.” Reporter Alsop cannot get Kennan to say what these “fundamental forces” are. Aversion to “Russian rule” pops into the conversation—and then melts unobtrusively into something which might be aversion to Communism itself. The satellite peoples were irked because of “the failure to meet economic plans,” and—as Mr. Kennan almost, but not quite, gets around to saying—because Communism denies the elementary rules of ethics. The “events” in Hungary, Kennan says, “have grandeur, very great grandeur, because they are visible proof that certain principles, certain moral principles, really must be observed in the long run in the successful government of great peoples.”