Free Republic

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...

<p>George F. Kennan's 100th birthday this week has prompted a round of effusive praise for the contributions of the man who has been dubbed "the architect," "the great theorist" and "the founding father" of containment -- the vaunted Cold War method by which the Soviet threat to the West was not so much confronted as "contained." Discussing Mr. Kennan's famous "X" article, published in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, led no less an authority than Henry Kissinger to suggest that Mr. Kennan "came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history."</p>