556 / 676
556
R. H . S .
CROSSMAN
second time George Kennan's little book
On Dealing with the Com–
munist World.
1
When this slender volume first came into my hands three months
ago, I gulped it down at one reading late at night, and then dropped
it on the floor beside my bed with what I now ashamedly remember
to
have been a sense of superior impatience. "Poor old Kennan," I said
to myself. "Without doubt he is one of the noblest characters I have
been privileged to meet. But what this dedicated public servant
has
always lacked is the politician's sense of proportion. Of course as we
get old we all run along our mental ruts and begin to caricature our
brilliant juvenile improvisations. But even if they were delivered to
undergraduates, these three essays on coexistence are really
too
obvious
in their analysis, and too timid and defeatist in their conclusions.
If
we
are to take Mr. Kennan seriously, we should be driven to the conclusion
that the impetus of the Kennedy peace initiative has already been
dissipated, and that the chances of a positive American contribution
to the solution of the problems of coexistence are very slender indeed.
Of course there are some reactionary crackpots about. But why on
earth should a man of George Kennan's calibre devote a book to
demolishing the
ar~ents
of the John Birch Society, and treat it as
an opponent that must be taken seriously?"
Let me confess it freely. This is what I would have written
if
I
had sat down and reviewed
On Dealing with the Communist World
on the morning after I first read it. Three months later, I realize that
already, while we over here were still treating Goldwater as a figure of
fun, Mr. Kennan appreciated the forces that were operating below the
surface of American public opinion. In his first lecture, he warned his
Princeton listeners against the "resurgence during the last ten years of
a body of opinion which rejects the whole concept of peaceful co–
existence and which sees no issue to the present contest except
in
the
final and complete destruction of one side or the other," and went on
to describe his profound depression when, on rehtrning from his term
at the Embassy in Belgrade, he found all the post-World War I il–
lusions of the Bolshevik peril once again current. "Do we have
to
start once more with all the arguments and counter-arguments of
1918," he asked himself, "as though we had just woken up from some
sort of amnesia?"
And to this question he found there was .only one positive reply.
"We have to do here with a great and important body of opinion in
1. George Kennan,
On Dealing With The Communist World.
Harper
&:
Row.
$3.00.