George Kennan

George Kennan (1904-2005), American diplomat and historian.

George Frost Kennan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and educated at Princeton University in New Jersey. After entering the United States Foreign Service in 1926, he served at posts in eastern and central Europe. While stationed in Moscow from 1944 to 1946, Kennan sent dispatches to the U.S. government predicting that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, or Soviet Union) would seek military and political expansion into Western Europe after World War II (1939-1945).

In 1947 Kennan was appointed director of the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State. That year he wrote an article for the journal Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “Mr. X” in which he urged the United States to prevent Soviet expansion, particularly in Europe. Kennan’s article publicized the policy of containment of Soviet communism, a policy adopted by the administration of President Harry S. Truman. Kennan’s ideas provided an influential justification for American policy toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Kennan served briefly as ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1952. In 1953 he retired from the Foreign Service to study Soviet-American relations at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy appointed Kennan ambassador to Yugoslavia, where he attempted to strengthen that country’s ties to the West. However, his efforts were undermined by the U.S. Congress, which passed legislation restricting American trade with Yugoslavia. In 1963 Kennan resigned his ambassadorship.

In the mid-1960s Kennan emerged as a critic of U.S. policy in Vietnam (see Vietnam War). In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1967, Kennan argued that Southeast Asia was not vital to American national interests and that the country’s prestige would not be damaged by withdrawal from South Vietnam. In his book The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy (1977), Kennan called for the United States to disengage from the world’s underdeveloped nations. At the same time, Kennan said that the United States should maintain strong ties to Western Europe and Japan, and to continue the policy of détente with the Soviet Union.

As an author, Kennan won both the Pulitzer Prize in history and the National Book Award for the first volume of his two-volume work Soviet-American Relations: 1917-1920, entitled Russia Leaves the War (1956). He also won the Pulitzer Prize in biography and the National Book Award for Memoirs: 1925-1950 (1967). The second volume of the first-named work is Decision to Intervene (1958); his autobiography is continued in Memoirs: 1950-1963 (1972). Among Kennan’s other works are American Diplomacy (1984), Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (1993), and Sketches from a Life (2001).