{"id":1527,"date":"2013-11-23T21:27:52","date_gmt":"2013-11-24T03:27:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1527"},"modified":"2015-05-31T08:56:07","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T14:56:07","slug":"george-f-kennan-an-american-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1527","title":{"rendered":"George F. Kennan: An American Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

by John Lewis Gaddis, 2010, Penguin Books<\/p>\n

This book was on my dad’s Kindle which I inherited after he passed away.\u00c2\u00a0 Dad always had an interest in George Kennan’s career and had read many of his books.\u00c2\u00a0 Since I already had the book, I decided I should read it.<\/p>\n

The biography was fairly well-written but it was a bit repetitious at times, continually returning to the same points the author was emphasizing.<\/p>\n

What I didn’t realize prior to reading this book was how strange an individual Kennan was.\u00c2\u00a0 As an employee of the\u00c2\u00a0State Department, he knew more about the Soviet Russians than probably any other American.\u00c2\u00a0 He was able to articulate a foreign policy for the U.S. toward the Soviet Union that served us very well in the Cold War.\u00c2\u00a0 On the other hand, there were several instances when his tunnel vision caused him to get things totally wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 His personal issues,\u00c2\u00a0which included\u00c2\u00a0depression, marital problems, poor health, and an insatiable desire for recognition, caused\u00c2\u00a0 him quite a few problems, both in his life and his career.\u00c2\u00a0 Despite this, he managed to live to a ripe old age of 95 before he died.\u00c2\u00a0 On the whole, his contributions to U.S. foreign policy were substantial.\"3<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by John Lewis Gaddis, 2010, Penguin Books This book was on my dad’s Kindle which I inherited after he passed away.\u00c2\u00a0 Dad always had an interest in George Kennan’s career and had read many of his books.\u00c2\u00a0 Since I already …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[17,20,16,38],"class_list":["post-1527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-biography","tag-history","tag-non-fiction","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1527"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1745,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527\/revisions\/1745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}