John Lukacs on George Kennan

Photo of John Lukacs
from 2005 Schuylkill Oral History Project interview

[Kennan] may have exemplified the beautiful phrase of his contemporary the French writer Jean Dutourd whom he did not know: Écrire une histoire c’est transformer un morceau de temps en un morceau d’éternité — to write a history is to transform a fragment of time into a morsel of foreverness.
— John Lukacs, George Kennan, Yale, 2007, 175.

John Lukacs has written a book, George Kennan: A Study in Character, that will interest everyone interested in this blog. Professor Lukacs was to have talked about Jacques Barzun at a Columbia gathering that Mark Halpern and I tried to plan, but that hoped-for gathering has been superseded by the Society of Columbia Graduates Great Teacher Award Dinner.

See also John Lukacs, George Kennan, Hungary and Changes in Eastern Europe and two volumes of correspondence between Kennan and Lukacs: George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment and Through the History of the Cold War.