"One’s relations with one’s country, like the relations among intimates, are always complicated; but I conceive myself to have loved my own….

I am now inclined to see my country much the way that I see Russia (in the historical sense): namely, as a politically unsuccessful and tragic country, but one capable of producing out of its midst, from time to time, remarkable literary, artistic, and musical intelligence, politically helpless and always vulnerable to abuse and harassment at the hands of the dominant forces of the moment."

—George Kennan, letter to John Lukacs, July 8, 1984

The correspondence of George Kennan and John Lukacs, now published by University of Pennsylvania Press is remarkable and worth looking at.