I just received my first full-length review of the book, and it’s by someone who couldn’t be more qualified to have done it: Gregg Herken. In 1986, he wrote a piece about Nitze and Kennan in American Heritage titled “The Great Foreign Policy Fight”, which was the first magazine article to argue that one of the best ways to understand the cold war is to look at the rivalry between Nitze and Kennan. It was an article that everyone in Washington read, and one that came up frequently in my research. I laughed out loud one day in the Georgetown archives while going through the papers of Paul Warnke, a fierce rival of Nitze’s. In his collection, I found the Herken article and a note attached from Clark Clifford, another rival of Nitze’s. ““On p.65 is a fascinating piece on Kennan and Nitze. They both end up frustrated. I thought you might find it interesting.” Herken has a few critiques, which I will address in a future post. But his article is mostly full of praise—which means a lot coming from him.
