ABSTRACT
As Project Solarium developed over that hot Washington summer of 1953, it became clear that President Eisenhower was in command and, in a sense, sympathetic to George F. Kennan. The new project would place the presidential coping stone on the ultimate containment project, beginning with his Long Telegram expressing the basic idea of containment. Kennan himself reported on the events in his Memoirs, discussing the negotiations leading to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Kennan had left the United States on February 26, 1948, and, after suffering recurring ulcers, did not emerge from the Bethesda Naval Hospital until April 19, 1948. He found the extinction of an independent Czechoslovakia a Soviet defensive measure, as he also saw the beginning of the Berlin Blockade. Throughout from 1948 and 1949, after his return Japan, Kennan was fighting a delaying action against the creation of NATO. The United States had won the first and second stages of the Cold War.
