The Prophet

A man wakes up in the middle of the night in Moscow. He is sick. Shivery. Feverish. But he has a mission. A mission that will end up changing the course of world history.

After World War Two was over, America was ready for peace. And to continue working with their ideological adversary, the Soviet Union. Franklin Delano Roosevelt even flew to Crimea to make a deal with Churchill and Stalin.

But there was one man who was sounding the alarm, all the way from a freezing Moscow winter. A Chekhov-obsessed diplomat called George Kennan who’s witnessed Stalin’s repressions first hand and would live to 101. More than anyone else, he will set the trajectory of American foreign policy in the 20th Century - with a telegram. A telegram he would come to deeply regret.

This is the story of how the US and USSR went from allies to enemies. And the man who made this happen - starting what would come to be called the Cold War.

David Dimbleby tells the story of how in the middle of the 20th Century one country - America - became a superpower and shaped the world around it.

It began with a vision. A vision born out of the ashes of World War Two. A vision of a world shaped not by war but by peace. This vision of America at the head of the free world came to be the defining idea at the center of the past 80 years of world politics. And yet now it is under threat.

So how did we get here? How did America become the leader of the free world and why did it go wrong? It’s a story shaped by people. People you have probably never heard of.

In the 20th Century, these ‘invisible hands’ wrote the story America came to believe about itself. A story of moral leadership leading to prosperity and peace. But is it a story that has run out of steam?

A Samizdat production for BBC Radio 4