Quotes About Kennan

History, as Kennan had observed, was "the common refuge of those who find themselves helpless in the face of the present."17

But when Christopher mentioned that he and Talbott had been trying to package post-Cold War policy in a single phrase, Kennan said they shouldn't. Containment had been a misleading oversimplification; strategy could not be made to fit a bumper sticker. The president laughed when Talbott told him what had happened: that's why Kennan's a great diplomat and scholar but not a politician.

They also reflect, at this relatively early stage in Kennan's career, one of his most persistent paradoxes: that he understood the Soviet Union far better than he did the United States.