Když diplomat vypráví
As Told by a Diplomat

Summary/Abstract: Diplomat and author of numerous award-winning books George F. Kennan (1904–2005) became an influential figure in American foreign policy shortly after the Second World War. As chargé d’affaires to Moscow, in the so-called Long Telegram, hearticulated the principles that became the basis of the strategy of containment between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1938–1939, he worked at the embassy in Prague and thirty years later published a selection of diplomatic reports on the situation in the Czechoslovak Second Republic and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which he sent from Prague (and later also from Berlin) to Washington. The book "From Prague after Munich: Diplomatic Papers 1938–1940" (Princeton, Princeton University Press 1968) has now been published in Czech translation under the title "Z Prahy po Mnichovu: Diplomatické zprávy 1938–1940", with an introductory study by historians Vít Smetana and Jiří Ellinger and in Smetana’s careful edition. The reviewer introduces the career of George F. Kennan, describes the circumstances of the creation of this volume, and analyses its contents. In his view, although highly authentic, Kennan’s analyses also reveal an occasional ignorance of local historical realities and they reproduce some of the diplomat’s ethno-cultural prejudices. It is evident that Kennan applied the principles of realpolitik and observed the Central European region through the lens of a great power.

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