I’d
been reading George
F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis when I came across this paragraph,
page 555, which really hit home:
But he was frightened. On the way from the airport, Kennan
had stopped at the White House to see Arthur Schlesinger, now serving as a
presidential aide – Kennedy was spending the weekend at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
“You and I are historians,” Schlesinger
recorded Kennan having said, “or rather you are a real historian and I am a pseudo-historian.”
We both know how tenuous a relation there is
between man’s intentions and the consequences of his acts…. I have children,
and I do not propose to let the future of mankind be settled or ended by a
group of men operating on the basis of limited perspective and short-run
calculations. I figure that the only thing left in life is to do everything I can
to stop the war.
