George F. Kennan | Cold War Strategist, Historian & Diplomat (2024)

George F. Kennan (born February 16, 1904, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.—died March 17, 2005, Princeton, New Jersey) was an American diplomat and historian best known for his successful advocacy of a “containment policy” to oppose Soviet expansionism following World War II.

Upon graduation from Princeton in 1925, Kennan entered the foreign service. He was sent overseas immediately and spent several years in Geneva; Berlin; Tallinn, Estonia; Riga, Latvia; and other “listening posts” around the Soviet Union, with which the United States had no diplomatic relations at the time. Anticipating the establishment of such relations, the State Department sent Kennan to the University of Berlin in 1929 to immerse himself in the study of Russian thought, language, and culture. He completed his studies in 1931 and in 1933 accompanied U.S. ambassador William C. Bullitt to Moscow following U.S. recognition of the Soviet government. Two years later he was assigned to Vienna, and he finished the decade with posts in Prague and Berlin.

Interned briefly by the Nazis at the outbreak of World War II, Kennan was released in 1942 and subsequently filled diplomatic posts in Lisbon and Moscow during the war. It was from Moscow in February 1946 that Kennan sent a cablegram, known as the “Long Telegram,” that enunciated the containment policy. The telegram was widely read in Washington, D.C., and brought Kennan much recognition. Later that year he returned to the United States, and in 1947 he was named director of the State Department’s policy-planning staff.

Kennan’s views on containment were elucidated in a famous and highly influential article, signed “X,” that appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine for July 1947, analyzing in detail the structure and psychology of Soviet diplomacy. In the article Kennan, who drew heavily from his Long Telegram, questioned the wisdom of the United States’ attempts to conciliate and appease the Soviet Union. He suggested that the Russians, while still fundamentally opposed to coexistence with the West and bent on worldwide extension of the Soviet system, were acutely sensitive to the logic of military force and would temporize or retreat in the face of skillful and determined Western opposition to their expansion. Kennan then advocated U.S. counterpressure wherever the Soviets threatened to expand and predicted that such counterpressure would lead either to Soviet willingness to cooperate with the United States or perhaps eventually to an internal collapse of the Soviet government. This view subsequently became the core of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union.

Kennan accepted appointment as counselor to the State Department in 1949, but he resigned the following year to join the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He returned to Moscow in 1952 as U.S. ambassador but came back to the United States the following year after the Russians declared him persona non grata for remarks he made about Soviet treatment of Western diplomats. In 1956 he became permanent professor of historical studies at the institute in Princeton, a tenure broken only by a stint as U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia (1961–63). In the late 1950s Kennan revised his containment views, advocating instead a program of U.S. “disengagement” from areas of conflict with the Soviet Union. He later emphatically denied that containment was relevant to other situations in other parts of the world—e.g., Vietnam.

A prolific and acclaimed author, Kennan won simultaneous Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards for Russia Leaves the War (1956) and Memoirs, 1925–1950 (1967). Other autobiographies include Memoirs, 1950–1963 (1972), Sketches from a Life (1989), and At a Century’s Ending: Reflections, 1982–1995 (1996). Kennan, who received numerous honours, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989.