Kennan, George Frost

(1904- )

   Diplomat and foreign policy specialist George F. Kennan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After graduating from Princeton University in 1925, he joined the Foreign Service and filled a number of State Department posts, most significantly as a member of the first U.S. mission to the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1933 to 1936. His experience there shaped his views of the Soviet Union, and those views influenced U.S. postwar foreign policy during the Cold War. From Russia, Kennan went to Prague and Berlin, and during World War II he was a counselor in Lisbon before returning to Moscow in 1944. In July 1946, he sent the famous “long telegram” back to the State Department outlining the postwar situation with regard to the USSR and the West. A version of this was subsequently published under the pseudonym “X” in Foreign Affairs. According to Kennan, the Soviet Union was committed to a policy of expansion, but if met at every point with firm “containment,” the Communist state would collapse from its own inherent weaknesses. Although he stressed the use of economic power, the policy translated into the Truman Doctrine, and later the “domino theory” became one of military rivalry and confrontation known as the Cold War and spread from Europe across the rest of the globe. After briefly serving as ambassador to the USSR in the 1950s, Kennan became professor of historical studies at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies where he authored a number of texts, including American Diplomacy 1900-1950 (1951), Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1941 (1956), and his own Memoirs, 1925-1950 (1968). Kennan subsequently claimed that his theories had been wrongly applied, and he argued against U.S. involvement in Vietnam on the grounds that the issue there was nationalism not communism and that the outcome was not a matter of U.S. national security.