George Frost Kennan

George Frost Kennan 1904-2005, U.S. diplomat and historian, b. Milwaukee, Wis., grad. Princeton, 1925. Among the most influential Americans in the Foreign Service in the 20th cent., he served from 1927 in various diplomatic posts in Europe, including Geneva, Hamburg, Riga, Berlin, Prague, Lisbon, and Moscow. From the last he sent his "Long Telegram" (1946), which with his 1947 Foreign Policy article (published under the pseudonym X) was pivotal in the establishment of the cold war U.S. policy of Soviet "containment."

In 1947 he became chairman of the policy-planning staff of the Dept. of State, and contributed to the development of the Marshall Plan . He also was influential in the development of what became the Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine service. Later (1949-50) he was one of the chief advisers to Secretary of State Dean Acheson , but increasingly he disagreed with those in the government who emphasized the military aspects of containment. Kennan was appointed ambassador to the USSR in 1952, but was recalled at the demand of the Soviet government because of comments he made on the isolation of diplomats in Moscow and the campaign that Soviet propagandists were conducting against the United States.

Retiring from the diplomatic service in 1953, he joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J., and from 1956 until 1974 was professor at its school of historical studies. In the late 1950s he became an advocate of withdrawal of U.S. forces from Western Europe and of Soviet forces from the satellite countries. From 1961 to 1963 he served as U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, and in the mid-1960s he opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam, regarding the conflict there as peripheral to U.S. interests. His more than 20 noteworthy books include American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (1951), Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920 (2 vol., 1956-58; Vol. I, Pulitzer Prize), Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (1961), Nuclear Delusion (1982), and At a Century's Ending (1996).

Bibliography: See his memoirs (2 vol., 1967-72; Vol. I, Pulitzer Prize) and the autobiographical Sketches from a Life (1989); biography by J. Lukacs (2007).

Kennan, George F[rost] (1904–2005), nephew of George Kennan, after graduation from Princeton (1925) began a diplomatic career which later included ambassadorships to the Soviet Union and to Yugoslavia. His books include American Diplomacy 1900–1950 (1951); Realities of American Foreign Policy (1954); Russia Leaves the War (1956, Pulitzer Prize) and Decision to Intervene (1958), both comprising Soviet‐American Relations1917–1920; and Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (1961). His Memoirs (1967) won him another Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Its sense of significant detail and of controlled emotion along with sharp insight is later found in Sketches from a Life (1989). Other significant books include The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy (1977), The Decline of Bismarck's European Order (1979), and The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet‐American Relations … (1982).