New Books In National Security

I met George Kennan twice, once in 1982 and again in about 1998. On both occasions, I found him tough to read. He was a very dignified man–I want to write “correct”–but also quite distant, even cerebral. Now that I’ve read Nicholas Thompson‘s very writerly and engaging The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (Henry Holt, 2010) I can see that my impressions were largely correct. He was distant, cerebral, and, well, a bit hard to read. Not so the other protagonist in Thompson’s tale of two key personalities of the Cold War. Paul Nitze–who was Thompson’s grandfather–was a sort of “hail fellow well met,” the kind of backslapping, can-do guy that Americans like to think characterizes the “American Spirit.” Thompson skillfully weaves Kennan’s ying and Nitze’s yang into the story of America’s long struggle to come to terms with the Soviet Union and its “ambitions”