ABSTRACT
In September 1950, one architect of the Cold War, George Kennan, asked for an indefinite leave of absence without pay from his post within the US State Department, where he was an adviser on foreign affairs to the Truman administration. He was 46, too young to retire, too old to back down when he thought he was right, and a 'small, inward voice' was telling him, 'You have despaired of yourself. Now despair of your country!'. Kennan was a strategist on a grand, almost eighteenth-century, scale, of liberal views, educated at Princeton, and blind to neither the political nor the human realities of what he was preaching. His life was mostly spent at Princeton, where he struggled to 'de-mythologise' US foreign policy, to get rid of its crusading zeal and its dependence on nuclear weapons. But he quickly discovered that it is not so easy to get rid of myths once they have been brought into existence.
