ABSTRACT
George F. Kennan took his diplomatic work personally. In his fluent imagination he was able to conceive of many more possibilities than most persons. They were Kennan's doubles, dramatic personae, figuring in active making of policy. In Kennan's diary back in January 1933, the twenty-nine-year-old apprentice Foreign Service officer had imagined his Doppelganger, a double—a personage out of a German storybook—as seen by the popular novelist Friedrich Richter, known as Jean Paul. Kennan later found another double in Paul Henry Nitze, who was much closer in age, background, function, and family life than Walter Lippmann. Characteristically, he remained a friend with his recalcitrant double. The final double was J. Robert Oppenheimer, even more so in his passion for the impossible. Lippmann had been a rather flawed double of Kennan's. His doubles are Walter Lippmann, Charles Bohlen, Paul Nitze, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. With their tensions and denials these doubles have humanized the great, deadly issues they personally dramatized.
