George F. Kennan

• 1. Introduction

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  George Frost Kennan sent a telegram from Moscow on the 22nd of February, 1946, that would reshape American foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth century. It ran to 5,363 words. The Treasury Department had asked the State Department a fairly narrow question: why was the Soviet Union declining to endorse the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank? Kennan's answer was anything but narrow. He called it the "Long Telegram", and it argued that the Soviet regime was not merely a difficult negotiating partner but was inherently, structurally driven to expand. It named the cold logic behind Stalin's hostility to the West and proposed a strategy to meet it: containment.

  What followed is one of the stranger careers in American diplomatic history. Kennan became famous for a policy he almost immediately began to disown. He spent decades insisting that his concept had been hijacked, stripped of its political and economic dimensions, and turned into a justification for exactly the kind of military buildup he had warned against. The man who articulated the intellectual foundation of the Cold War became one of the Cold War's sharpest critics.

  How did that happen? And who was George Kennan, really, the diplomat who said he hated democracy, who compared his Moscow ambassadorship to being interned by the Nazis, who at age 98 warned against invading Iraq, and who died in 2005 at age 101 still writing and still arguing?

• 2. A Lonely Education

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  Kennan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the 16th of February, 1904, to Kossuth Kent Kennan, a lawyer who specialized in tax law, and Florence James Kennan. His mother died two months after his birth from peritonitis caused by a ruptured appendix. For years, Kennan believed she had died in childbirth itself. He always lamented not having a mother. He was never close to his father or stepmother, though he was close to his older sisters.

  At the age of eight, he traveled to Germany to stay with his stepmother and learn German. He attended St. John's Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin, and arrived at Princeton University in the second half of 1921. Shy and introverted, Kennan found his undergraduate years difficult and lonely in that elite Ivy League atmosphere.

  After receiving his bachelor's degree in history in 1925, he considered law school but decided it was too expensive. He applied instead to the newly formed United States Foreign Service. He passed the qualifying examination, completed seven months of study at the Foreign Service School in Washington, and took his first job as a vice consul in Geneva, Switzerland. Within a year he was posted to Hamburg. In 1929, rather than resign and pursue a university, Kennan was selected for a linguist training program offering three years of graduate-level study while remaining in the service. He began that program in history, politics, culture, and Russian at the Oriental Institute of the University of Berlin.

  In following that path, he was tracing the footsteps of a relative. His grandfather's younger cousin, George Kennan of 1845-1924, had been a major nineteenth-century expert on Imperial Russia and wrote Siberia and the Exile System in 1891, a well-received account of the Tsarist prison system. The younger Kennan would go on to master German, French, Polish, Czech, Portuguese, and Norwegian alongside Russian, a linguistic range that set him apart from nearly every other American diplomat of his era.

• 3. Moscow Before the Telegram

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  In 1931, Kennan was stationed at the legation in Riga, Latvia, working as third secretary on Soviet economic affairs. He later wrote that the job allowed him to grow into a "mature interest in Russian affairs". When the United States began formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet government in 1933 following the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennan accompanied Ambassador William C. Bullitt to Moscow.

  By the mid-1930s, Kennan was among the trained Russian specialists at the United States Embassy in Moscow, alongside Charles E. Bohlen and Loy W. Henderson. These officials had been shaped by Robert F. Kelley, the long-time director of the State Department's division of East European Affairs. They shared a skepticism about cooperation with the Soviet Union. During this period, Kennan studied Stalin's Great Purge closely, and what he observed would color his view of the internal dynamics of the Soviet regime for the rest of his life.

  He found himself in sharp conflict with Joseph E. Davies, Bullitt's successor as ambassador, who defended the Great Purge and other features of Stalin's rule. Kennan had no influence on Davies' decisions, and Davies even suggested that Kennan be transferred out of Moscow for "his health". In 1935, Kennan wrote to his sister Jeannette expressing his disenchantment with American life: "I hate the rough and tumble of our political life. I hate democracy; I hate the press... I hate the 'peepul'; I have become clearly un-American." He was 31 years old and already writing the first draft of his memoirs.

  By September 1938, Kennan was reassigned to Prague. After Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, he moved to Berlin, where he endorsed Lend-Lease but warned against treating the Soviets as reliable allies. When Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941, Kennan was interned in Germany for six months. In September 1942, he was assigned to the legation in Lisbon, Portugal. In July 1943, when the American Ambassador in Lisbon suddenly died, Kennan became chargé d'affaires. His most consequential act there was personal: he talked his way directly to President Roosevelt and obtained a presidential letter to Portuguese Premier Salazar that unlocked the use of the Azores Islands by American naval and air forces.

• 4. The Telegram and the X Article

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  Kennan served as deputy head of the mission in Moscow until April 1946. The Long Telegram, dispatched on the 22nd of February, 1946, reached Secretary of State James Byrnes and quickly spread through Washington. Kennan wrote that at the bottom of the Kremlin's "neurotic view of world affairs is the traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity". After the Russian Revolution, this merged with communist ideology and "Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy". Stalin, Kennan argued, needed a hostile world to legitimize his autocratic rule. Marxism-Leninism had become, in Kennan's phrase, "the fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability".

  The telegram caught the attention of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, a major advocate of confrontation with the Soviets. Forrestal helped bring Kennan back to Washington to serve at the National War College. Then, in July 1947, the journal Foreign Affairs published an article under the pseudonym "X" titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct". Kennan was its author. The X article carried a sharper argument than the telegram: that Stalin's policy was driven by a fusion of Marxist-Leninist ideology and his need to legitimize internal regimentation. Kennan argued that the United States would have to contain Soviet expansive tendencies through "a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant" application of counterforce at shifting political and geographic points. If it could do so without undermining its economic health or political stability, the Soviet system would eventually either break up or gradually mellow.

  The article was signed only "X", but word spread informally that Kennan was the author, lending it the weight of official policy. Walter Lippmann, a prominent commentator on international affairs, attacked the X article as "a strategic monstrosity" that could only be executed by maintaining "a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents, and puppets". Lippmann instead advocated diplomacy and the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe. From that moment forward, Kennan spent the rest of his public life insisting the article did not call for military containment everywhere. In a 1996 CNN interview, he said: "My thoughts about containment were of course distorted by the people who understood it and pursued it exclusively as a military concept; and I think that that, as much as any other cause, led to the 40 years of unnecessary, fearfully expensive and disoriented process of the Cold War." He had intended containment as a political and economic strategy. The military interpretation, he felt, had been an act of misreading that shaped an entire era.

• 5. The Marshall Plan Years

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  Between April 1947 and December 1948, when George C. Marshall was Secretary of State, Kennan reached the peak of his influence. Marshall valued Kennan's strategic sense and had him create and direct the Policy Planning Staff, the State Department's internal think tank. Kennan became its first director and prepared policy recommendations that Marshall relied on heavily.

  Kennan's central analysis of Western Europe was economic. He regarded the Soviet Union as too weak to risk a direct military confrontation, but he feared Communist parties could gain popular support by exploiting the devastation that the Second World War had left across Western Europe. His solution was economic aid and covert political support directed at Japan and Western Europe to revive their governments and restore a balance of power. In June 1948, he proposed covert assistance to left-wing parties not oriented toward Moscow and to labor unions in Western Europe, seeking to engineer a rift between the Kremlin and working-class movements.

  In 1949, Kennan put forward what became known as "Plan A" or "Program A" for Germany, arguing that Germany's partition was unsustainable. He proposed the reunification and neutralization of Germany, with most British, American, French, and Soviet forces withdrawing from Germany except for small enclaves near the border supplied by sea, governed ultimately by a four-power commission while allowing Germans substantial self-rule. In May 1949, a distorted version of Plan A was leaked to the French press, suggesting the United States was prepared to pull out of all of Europe in exchange for a unified, neutral Germany. The resulting uproar gave Dean Acheson the cover to kill the plan.

  Kennan also dealt with Greece during this period, insisting on a capitalist approach and integration with the rest of Europe. Marshall Plan aid to Greece successfully rebuilt ports, railroads, paved roads, a hydroelectric transmission system, and a national telephone system, though the attempt to impose what Kennan called "good government" on the Greek economy was less successful, as the country's rentier system, dominated by a few wealthy families, the officer corps, and the royal family, largely ignored his advice.

• 6. Exile and Influence from Outside

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  Kennan's influence collapsed when Dean Acheson replaced the ailing George Marshall as Secretary of State in 1949. Acheson viewed the Soviet threat as primarily military rather than political, and he pointed to the Berlin Blockade starting in June 1948, the first Soviet nuclear test in August 1949, the Communist revolution in China a month later, and the beginning of the Korean War in June 1950 as evidence. In January 1950, Acheson replaced Kennan as Director of Policy Planning with Paul Nitze, who was far more comfortable with military power calculations.

  Nitze then authored NSC 68, a classified national security report issued in April 1950 that assumed Soviet menace and recommended large-scale military buildup. Kennan and Charles Bohlen argued against the wording of NSC 68. Kennan rejected the premise that Stalin had a grand design for world conquest and argued that Stalin actually feared overextending Soviet power. Acheson overruled them both.

  In December 1951, President Truman nominated Kennan as ambassador to the Soviet Union. The appointment was warmly endorsed by the Senate. But Kennan found Moscow even more suffocating than before, with police guards following him everywhere and discouraging contact with Soviet citizens. In September 1952, answering a question at a press conference, Kennan compared his conditions at the ambassador's residence in Moscow to his internment in Berlin after December 1941. The Soviets interpreted it as an analogy with Nazi Germany. They declared Kennan persona non grata. He acknowledged later that it was "a foolish thing for me to have said".

  After that, Kennan accepted a post at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, at the invitation of its director, Robert Oppenheimer, a fellow moderate. In 1954, Kennan appeared as a character witness for Oppenheimer when the government moved to revoke his security clearance. In 1956, Kennan joined the institute's School of Historical Studies, where he would remain for the rest of his life. In 1957, he went to Oxford as George Eastman Professor at Balliol College. He had expected the fellows to be engaged in conversation "polished by deep tradition, refinement, moral quality", but wrote to Oppenheimer in dismay: "I've never seen such back-biting, such fury, such fractions in all my life." His twice-weekly lectures on international relations were, in his own description, "tremendously successful", drawing hundreds of students and requiring a larger hall.

• 7. Vietnam and the Counterculture

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  In February 1966, Kennan testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the request of Senator J. William Fulbright, the committee's chairman. He stated that the American preoccupation with Vietnam was undermining U.S. global leadership and accused the administration of Lyndon Johnson of distorting his containment policies into a purely military approach. He quoted a remark by John Quincy Adams: "America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all."

  The hearings were televised live, unusual for the time. Johnson pressured the television networks not to air Kennan's testimony. The CBS network complied, running reruns of I Love Lucy while Kennan appeared before the Senate; the CBS director of television programming, Fred Friendly, resigned in protest. NBC resisted and aired the proceedings. Before his testimony, 63% of the American public approved of Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War; after it, 49% did. Kennan recalled receiving a flood of letters in the following month: "It was perfectly tremendous. I haven't expected anything remotely like this."

  Kennan's opposition to the Vietnam War did not extend to the student movements protesting it. His 1968 book Democracy and the Student Left attacked left-wing university students as violent and intolerant. He compared the New Left students with the Narodnik student radicals of nineteenth-century Russia, calling them an arrogant elite whose ideas were fundamentally undemocratic. In a speech delivered in Williamsburg on the 1st of June, 1968, Kennan called for the suppression of the New Left and Black Power movements, calling for special political courts to try their activists. That same year, he stated: "I have a soft spot in my mind for apartheid, not as practiced in South Africa, but as a concept." His views on race and on political order made him one of the more troubling figures among America's foreign policy intellectuals, holding positions that were extreme even by the standards of his era's establishment.

• 8. The Long Argument Against Militarism

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  When Kennan published the first volume of his memoirs in 1967, he used it to insist again that containment had never meant military counterforce. The Soviet Union, exhausted by war, had posed no serious military threat to the United States or its allies at the start of the Cold War; it was an ideological and political rival. Through the 1970s and 1980s, as detente collapsed and the arms race intensified under President Reagan, Kennan became a persistent and prominent voice against the nuclear buildup.

  In 1989, President George H. W. Bush awarded Kennan the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Ten years later, he told an interviewer that the United States should "withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights", describing the tendency to see the country as "the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world" as "unthought-through, vainglorious and undesirable".

  In 1998, after the U.S. Senate ratified NATO's first round of expansion, Kennan described NATO enlargement as a "strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions". He had opposed the establishment of NATO half a century earlier. He warned in a New York Times interview that expansion would "inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic" opinions in Russia and that Russians would "gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies".

  At age 98, he warned against invading Iraq. He wrote that the Bush administration's attempts to link Al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein were "pathetically unsupportive and unreliable" and offered a warning drawn from his decades studying the behavior of states at war: "War has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it." He died on the 17th of March, 2005, at age 101, still a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study, where he had spent nearly half a century arguing that power and prudence were not the same thing.