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The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009. 403+10 pp. $27.50
George F. Kennan and Paul H. Nitze were contemporaries, colleagues, and friends. Their lives and careers ran in parallel: each was born and raised in the Midwest, attended college on the east coast, became involved in foreign affairs, held important positions in the American government, and influenced the course of American foreign policy throughout the Cold War. These parallels make them, together, an appropriate subject for the insightful, informative, and well-written dual biography by Nicholas Thompson, a grandson of Nitze.
As the book's title indicates, they took different positions on major issues of foreign policy. Nitze earned a reputation as a hawk, in particular in his approach to American nuclear weapons policy, while Kennan became a celebrated dove because of his opposition to the American war in Vietnam. In fact, as Thompson ably demonstrates, the differences between the two men stemmed not only from their judgments about how best to advance the interests of the United States in the world, but also from differences of talent and temperament.
These differences of personality account for the fact that Kennan is the better known of the two, well enough known in fact to rate a mention in a recent Hollywood movie. In the Coen Brothers' 2008 film "Burn After Reading" John Malkovich plays a CIA analyst who is fired for alcoholism and decides to write a memoir. One scene shows him dictating it: "The ideals of George Kennan, a personal hero of mine . . ." he says into the recorder. Three years after his death Kennan's name remained one that the filmmakers thought would seem vaguely familiar. How did this happen?
Kennan's name initially became known...