The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

Kennan became known as the author of the containment policy, but he had been talking more about Russia than about Communists. He would eventually find his ideas being exploited, as it were, by his superiors, used as a justification for an increasing militarization of American foreign policy. He eventually broke with the other foreign policy architects because he thought they were too ideological and too military-oriented in their policies. He felt that the Communist world was much more nationalist in its origins than it was monolithic, and that we were creating our own demonology. His opinions in the early fifties represented the first truly major dissent within a largely consensus view of a nonconsensus world. The Kennan experience was not to be the last time that the national security principals would take the intelligence reporting of their own experts and exploit it out of context, de-emphasizing the issue of nationalism and exploiting the issue of Communism. The same thing happened during the Korean War, when the China experts predicted accurately what China would do, not based on Communist intentions but on Chinese history, and the last time would be during the Vietnam war, when again the experts predicted accurately Hanoi’s responses to American escalation.