AWARD DATE: 1967
AWARD NAME: Best Book on Foreign Affairs
AWARD RECIPIENT: George F. Kennan
AWARD HONORED WORK: Memoirs 1925-1950
George F. Kennan’s Memoirs 1925-1950 met formidable competition in category 11 as the best book on foreign affairs. The volume presented a distinctive combination- international events of recent history recalled, details of happenings of moment behind closed doors, and analysis by a diplomat whose service to his country is beyond question.
Mr. Kennan, no stranger to the OPC, is a Milwaukeean who joined the United States Foreign Service in 1925 at the age of 21. His tours of duty placed him in one after another of the troubled capitals of Europe during tense months before and during the second world war. His writings and his recollections reflect the color of those periods, as only one closest to them could relate them.
After his formal retirement in1953, at the close of a year as Ambassador in Moscow, he went to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton; taught there and at the University of Chicago, and was a viciting professor at Oxford in 1957-1958. From 1961 to 1963 he came out of retirement to serve as United States Ambassador to Yugoslavia, then bowed out once more.
His various books on diplomacy and foreign policy have amassed for him a noteable collection of awards. He has been a careful observer and a shrewd assayist of men and of situations, capable of presenting expressive word portraits throughout his extensively documented chronicles.
Citation for Excellence: William Attwood for The Reds and the Blacks (Harper & Row).