This was not the first time that containment – a strategy devised by George Kennan, the director of the US State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under President Harry Truman, in response to the Soviet threat after World War II – has been rejected as appeasement. In the 1952 presidential election campaign, Dwight Eisenhower and his future secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, heaped scorn on containment, calling instead for a “rollback” of the Soviets in Eastern Europe.