James Graham Wilson, America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan (Cornell University Press, 2024) On May 11, 1987, Secretary of State George Shultz celebrated the 40th anniversary of his department’s iconic Policy Planning Staff by convening 11 of its former directors for an Open Forum at the State Department.
George Kennan, who in 1947 had become the inaugural director of “S/P,” as the office is known in Foggy Bottom’s acronymic vernacular, delivered a typically morose assessment of the world situation. Though four decades earlier Kennan had devised the “containment” doctrine to guide America’s Cold WarThe post Paul Nitze’s 20th-Century Life in Statecraft appeared first on War on the Rocks.