George Kennan, architect of America's policy of containment adopted in 1946-47, said a decade later in his Reith Lectures over the B.B.C. (subsequently published as Russia, the Atom and the West), that the “moral example” of this country should be its primary instrument of foreign policy. In his words, this country could best “apply the hand” (to stem Communist challenges) to “our American failings— to the things we are ashamed of in our own eyes: to the racial problem, to the conditions in our big cities, to the education and environment of our young people, to the growing gap between specialized knowledge and popular understanding.“