ABSTRACT
The new mood of suspicion had been evident for some time, but it had never been laid down in systematic form. That gap was filled in February 1946 when George Kennan sent an eight-thousand-word message from the Moscow embassy to his superiors in the State Department. That "long telegram," as it came to be known, summed up everything the administration had already decided about the Soviets. Russian leaders took a "neurotic view" of the world, Kennan declared, because communist ideology, not security interests, governed their policy. Waiter Lippmann continued to believe a settlement was possible, with a few big ifs: if the West would show good faith, if it would accept that Eastern Europe unavoidably lay under Soviet influence, and if the Russians would not try to push their control beyond this area. If the Russians were in Eastern Europe because of fears about their security, the way to get them to leave was to allay those fears.
