NOTES

Abbreviations

ATMLP	Alfred Thayer Mahan Letters and Papers
FRUS	Foreign Relations of the United States
GFKP	George F. Kennan Papers
JFKL	John F. Kennedy Library
KD	The Kennan Diaries, edited by Frank Costigliola
Kissinger Telcons	Henry Kissinger Telephone Conversations on World Affairs
LBJL	Lyndon Baines Johnson Library
PP	Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann, edited by John Morton Blum
PWW	The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, edited by Arthur S. Link
“T&T”	Walter Lippmann, “Today & Tomorrow,” New York Herald Tribune
WLP	Walter Lippmann Papers
WLR	Walter Lippmann Reminiscences

Introduction

    1. Quoted in Morris, Why the West Rules, 534.

    2. Miscamble, George F. Kennan, 303.

    3. Memorandum from George F. Kennan, January 20, 1950, FRUS: 1950, 1:38. The memo appears in heavily edited form on pp. 22–44.

    4. Ibid., 43–44. For an excellent discussion of the debate, see Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 98–108.

    5. Quoted in Beisner, Dean Acheson, 119.

    6. Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, 89.

    7. Nitze, “The Role of the Learned Man in Government,” 277.

    8. Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, 89.

    9. On Teller’s life and career, see Goodchild, Edward Teller. On Oppenheimer, see Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus.

  10. Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, 106.

  11. Beisner, Dean Acheson, 233.

  12. Herken, “The Great Foreign Policy Fight,” 73.

  13. Galison and Bernstein, “In Any Light,” 311.

  14. “Realism” is of course a loaded term that contains multiple gradations and types. Kennan is often characterized as a “classical realist”—in his focus upon the self-interested verities of human nature—as opposed to, say, “neorealists” or “structural realists” like Kenneth Waltz, Stephen Walt, and John Mearsheimer, who focus on structural constraints and incentives that shape international relations. See Waltz, Theory of International Politics.

  15. Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, 151.

  16. Several fine histories of American foreign policy have adopted an ideational frame. See, for example, Immerman, Empire for Liberty; Kuklick, Blind Oracles; Brands, What America Owes the World; and Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. Preston’s Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith traces with great skill the influence of religion on U.S. foreign policy.

  17. George F. Kennan, March 12, 1949, KD, 213.

  18. I am grateful to Joel Isaac for his insights on this subject.

  19. The analytic philosopher Nelson Goodman used the word “worldmaking” in his Ways of Worldmaking, an erudite and wide-ranging discussion of art, science, literary criticism, and psychology. I use it here in a very different, specifically foreign-policy context.

  20. See Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 129–36.

  21. Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft, 87.

  22. Nichols’s Promise and Peril is particularly successful in rescuing isolationism from the condescension of history.

  23. George F. Kennan, July 30, 1982, KD, 542.

  24. On Roosevelt’s personal diplomacy, see Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances.

  25. Kimball, The Juggler, 7.

  26. See Steel, Walter Lippmann, 385, and WLR, 178.

  27. www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm.

  28. Quoted in Stephen Wertheim, “A Solution from Hell: The United States and the Rise of Humanitarian Interventionism, 1991–2003,” Journal of Genocide Research 12, no. 3–4 (September–December 2010).

  29. Partial audio of the speech (and a full transcript) is available at www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=99591469&m=99603945.

  30. Zachary A. Goldfarb, “Obama Says Iran Shouldn’t Misinterpret U.S. Response to Syria,” The Washington Post, September 15, 2013.

  31. President George W. Bush, second inaugural address, January 20, 2005, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4460172.

  32. Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, 181.

  33. David Remnick, “Going the Distance,” The New Yorker, January 27, 2014, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/01/27/140127fa_fact_remnick.

  34. Quoted in Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 319.

  35. See, for example, Paul Wolfowitz, “Obama Needs to Change Stance on Iran,” The Washington Post, June 19, 2009; Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Obama Should Remember Rwanda as He Weighs Action on Syria,” The Washington Post, April 26, 2013; and Nasr, Dispensable Nation.

  36. Quoted in Hyde, Common as Air, 187.

  37. Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, 346.

  38. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Legitimacy and Force: Political and Moral Dimensions (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988), 1:461.

  39. I am grateful to Andrew Preston for this comparison. See Preston, The War Council, 246.

  40. Quoted in Mistry, The United States, Italy, and the Origins of the Cold War, 207.