but now here's tanenhaus on kennan. one is hard-pressed to think of another public individual so consistently driven not merely to revive himself but also to repeat himself, agonizingly at times with result that his words can be summoned today in defense or in rebuttal of almost any foreign policy position. while kennan can be capped and almost any light. kennan has become his admirers but also his detractors. so this got me to thinking about plutarch. recovery to thinking about parallel lives. it got me to think about what would happen if you just as a kind of brief intellectual exercise or friday afternoon think about the parallel lives of george kennan and whittaker chambers. if chambers and kennan would each like so few others, how much would they like each other? and that's what i'm going to spend the rest of my time talking. chronologically, they are only close in part. chambers as most of you know was born in 1901. kennan in 1904. but chambers lived only to the age of 60. kennan lived to the age of 101, and hence

kennan and american life. now, i am chagrined by going back and looking at my book. in its 800 pages it certainly is not brief. there is not a single reference twitter chambers and it. and i particularly appreciate the forbearance of chambers biographers for not mentioning this embarrassing facts in his long and thoughtful review of my book in the new republic last winter. he himself did refer briefly to chambers in the second volume of his memoir. took a couple of pages to say that he had followed the case carefully the quarter century earlier bill was still unsure, as many people were in 1972 of who to believe. of course we know the answer to that question much more clearly now natalie to the biography, but also to the courageous scholarship of those who followed his work. today no one can reasonably doubt the truth particularly of the evidence that has surfaced from soviet sources in the last 20 years. although, as pointed out the other day, you can still get in trouble if you stand in the middle of certain sidestreets in upper manhattan and shout out, alger hills

kennan, but is is the president of the united states, franklin d. roosevelt who, for whatever reason, and we may never know the reason, don't wallace from the ticket in 1944. and sent him on an inspection trip to siberia. [laughter] what he confused gulags with collective farms. now, if you want to play the counterfactual game, and someone should write i think a philip roth's counterfactual novel, change just one thing. truman -- or roosevelt does not dump wallace from the ticket in 44, and then wallace becomes president of the united states at the time that all of this stuff is breaking loose. what would've happened at that point? why don't more people talk about this? >> we have time for one more question. i'm going to use my prerogative and see if i can gauge lead maybe with this question. in the famous letter to my children, the forward to the book, "witness," chambers writes on, quote, on page 16. communism is what happened when in the name of mind, meant -- men freedom social god, a little bit, although below that, there has never been a socie