A Scolding from the Ambassador

In the manner of an aging schoolmaster soured by the perennial naughtiness of his charges, George F. Kennan gives us a piece of his mind in three lectures On Dealing With The Communist World, delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations and now published as a little book, or booklet (Harper & Row, $3.00). Before he has finished, we all get what-ho: “a prominent political figure” (let him be nameless) who asks, “Why not victory?”; “one of our leading conservative columnists” (no less nameless, he) who has a habit of “referring to us as being ‘at war’ with the Soviet Union”; members of that eighteenth-century millstone around a diplomat’s neck, the Congress; the mad “liberationists” who conned Congress into adopting “the so-called Captive Nations Resolution”; and all the rest of us too—even the sponsors of the Council on Foreign Relations—who supinely permit the barbarians to deflect the course of the nation’s foreign policy.

We are led astray by our ignorance: by “deep failures of understanding about… the problems of Communist power generally,” by “an inability to absorb the lessons of this decade” or “to remember those of earlier ones.” Ambassador Kennan offers his text as “a contribution” toward overcoming our ignorance and thus permitting our government, no longer encumbered by a besotted citizenry, to find its way out of the dark wood.

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James Burnham

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In the manner of an aging schoolmaster soured by the perennial naughtiness of his charges, George F. Kennan gives us a piece of his mind in three lectures On Dealing With The Communist World, delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations and now published as a little book, or booklet (Harper & Row, $3.00). Before he has finished, we all get what-ho: “a prominent political figure” (let him be nameless) who asks, “Why not victory?”; “one of our leading conservative columnists” (no less nameless, he) who has a habit of “referring to us as being ‘at war’ with the Soviet Union”; members of that eighteenth-century millstone around a diplomat’s neck, the Congress; the mad “liberationists” who conned Congress into adopting “the so-called Captive Nations Resolution”; and all the rest of us too—even the sponsors of the Council on Foreign Relations—who supinely permit the barbarians to deflect the course of the nation’s foreign policy.

We are led astray by our ignorance: by “deep failures of understanding about… the problems of Communist power generally,” by “an inability to absorb the lessons of this decade” or “to remember those of earlier ones.” Ambassador Kennan offers his text as “a contribution” toward overcoming our ignorance and thus permitting our government, no longer encumbered by a besotted citizenry, to find its way out of the dark wood.