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America 's Foreign Policy Proposals Essay

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This biography offers insight into the personal and public lives of two men who so initially agreed then feverishly denied each other’s foreign policy proposals. Concluding with Nitze, as the hawk and Kennan, starring as the dove.
Washington D.C. in the summertime is constantly perspiring, a rather miserable place to be. And, although the summer of 1949 was equally as dredged, Paul Nitze, an expert economist who lacked status in the United States government, was about to receive the opportunity of a lifetime. George Kennan, longtime diplomat and Russian studies expert, was looking to retire to his quiet farm in Pennsylvania, but he needed to leave a successor for the Policy Planning Staff. He decided on Paul Nitze. However, just months later after Russia succeeded in building and testing an atomic bomb and Nitze’s appeal for an assessment of U.S. Foreign Policy, Kennan on September 30 wrote, “I face the work of these remaining months with neither enthusiasm nor hope for achievement.” Obviously, the Cold War would be a large undertaking for any Russian expert in the State Department, however, it is more than likely that he was referring to working closely with colleague whose foreign policy tactics evidently began to differ greatly from his own as time would show. On February 23, 1946, George Kennan was the most careful, thought-provoking, “nobody” in the United States government. He was considered to be the most widely knowledgeable on Russian affairs, after having lived

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