Such reputations as present day pundits enjoy owe much to the fact that the newspaper columns they wrote forty-three days ago have already become recycled paper. Re-reading Walter Lippmann's columns on George Kennan's “X” article forty-three years after they were first published—in my case on the very day that the World War II conquerors relinquished their powers over Germany—is an unsettling experience. What are we to make of these twelve columns that Lippmann published a few months later as The Cold War? The clarity, the intellectual power, and the breadth of the analysis cannot fail to impress the reader, whatever one thinks of Lippmann's argument. As the United States stands on the threshold of another series of fateful choices, the contemporary relevance of the Lippmann-Kennan debate is striking.

The Cold War lays out a surprisingly coherent view of politics and diplomacy. It is a traditionalist, realist argument for a path not taken. Embedded in these columns and in Kennan's “Sources of Soviet Conduct” are many of the concerns that are likely to engage future historians of the Cold War. What was the Cold War? Was it inevitable? Could it have ended sooner? Is it reasonable to think that it could have ended differently under happier circumstances? (It is easy to imagine it ending under far worse.) What were the costs? Were any of them avoidable? It is most unlikely that these questions will ever be put to rest.