Posted on 03/17/2005 9:46:12 PM PST by Mike Fieschko
George F. Kennan, the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy of his generation to shape United States policy during the cold war, died on Thursday night in Princeton, N.J. He was 101.Mr. Kennan was the man to whom the White House and the Pentagon turned when they sought to understand the Soviet Union after World War II. He conceived the cold-war policy of containment, the idea that the United States should stop the global spread of Communism by diplomacy, politics, and covert action - by any means short of war. As the State Department's first policy planning chief in the late 1940's, serving Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Mr. Kennan was an intellectual architect of the Marshall Plan, which sent billions of dollars of American aid to nations devastated by World War II. At the same time, he conceived a secret "political warfare" unit that aimed to roll back Communism, not merely contain it. His brainchild became the covert-operations directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Though Mr. Kennan left the foreign service more than half a century ago, he continued to be a leading thinker in international affairs until his death. Since the 1950's he had been associated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was most recently a professor emeritus.
By the end of his long, productive life, Mr. Kennan had become a phenomenon in international affairs, with seminars held and books written to debate and analyze his extraordinary influence on American policy during the cold war. He was the author of 17 books, two of them Pulitzer Prize-winners, and countless articles in leading journals.
His writing, from classified cables to memoirs, was the force that made him "the nearest thing to a legend that this country's diplomatic service has ever produced," in the words of the historian Ronald Steel.
"He'll be remembered as a diplomatist and a grand strategist," said John Lewis Gaddis, a leading historian of the cold war, who is preparing a biography of Mr. Kennan. "But he saw himself as a literary figure. He would have loved to have been a poet, a novelist."
Morton H. Halperin, who was chief of policy planning during the Clinton administration, said Mr. Kennan "set a standard that all his successors have sought to follow."
Mr. Halperin said Mr. Kennan understood the need to talk truth to power no matter how unpopular, and made clear his belief that containment was primarily a political and diplomatic policy rather than a military one. "His career since is clear proof that no matter how important the role of the policy planning director, a private citizen can have an even greater impact with the strength of his ideas."
The force of Mr. Kennan's ideas brought him to power in Washington in the brief months after World War II ended and before the cold war began. In February 1946, as the second-ranking diplomat in the American Embassy in Moscow, he dispatched his famous "Long Telegram" to Washington, perhaps the best-known cable in American diplomatic history. It explained to policy makers baffled by Stalin that while Soviet power was "impervious to the logic of reason," it was "highly sensitive to the logic of force."
Widely circulated in Washington, the Long Telegram made Mr. Kennan famous. It evolved into an even better-known work, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," which Mr. Kennan published under the anonymous byline "X" in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigorous application of counterforce," he wrote. That force, Kennan believed, should take the form of diplomacy and covert action, not war.
Mr. Kennan's best-known legacy was this postwar policy of containment, "a strategy that held up awfully well," said Mr. Gaddis.
But Mr. Kennan was deeply dismayed when the policy was associated with the immense build-up in conventional arms and nuclear weapons that characterized the cold war from the 1950's onward. His views were always more complex than the interpretation others gave them, as he argued repeatedly in his writings. He came to deplore the growing belligerence toward Moscow that gripped Washington by the early 1950's, setting the stage for anti-Communist witch hunts that severely dented the American foreign service.
At the height of the Korean War, he temporarily left the State Department for the Institute for Advanced Study. He returned to serve as ambassador to Moscow, arriving there in March 1952.
He was an important and valuable man at the start of the Cold War. By the Reagan era he was an apologist for the Soviet weapons buildup and a critic of SDI. He was totally discredited by our victory in the Cold War.
Precisely. If he had been on the right side of the Cold War, he wouldn't be getting this glowing obit in the NY Times.
And it was his policies that Reagan had to work around in order to flex a little muscle and bring the cold war to a close.
So be it. God rest his soul.
***.....In his 1947 article, Kennan disagreed with the emphasis on military containment embodied in the "Truman doctrine." That policy, announced three months before publication of Kennan's article, committed U.S. aid in support of "free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure." ...***
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.kennan18mar18,1,7292036.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines
Wasn't Kennan the son of another George Kennan who went to Tsarist Russia in the 1880s or 90s and reported on conditions in Siberia? The name rings a bell.
His great-uncle was the explorer and writer George Kennan (1845-1924).
I read an American Heritage article about his journey through the Tsarist prison camps.
I take this time not to mourn George Kennan, but the millions that his policy helped kill.
You are right, by the 80s, he revealed himself as a Soviet apologist. He may have been one when he advocated containment, he just couldn't be as obvious about it, and so came up with a strategy that allowed the Soviets to keep what they had and continually expand at the margins. Kind of like Islam does now.
It took Reagan to see that the evil empire could and should be knocked down, not 'contained'.
We only get a man like Reagan every hundred or so years, but Bush II comes real close.
This was, of course, under the State Dept. of Alger Hiss & Co. Yes, Mr. Truman, a sad portion of your government was, indeed, "soft" on communism.
Mike, thanks for posting this.
His daughter is Grace Kennan Warnecke, who edited the book "A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union" and his grandson is Kevin McClatchey, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
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