Kennan, George Frost definition of Kennan, George Frost in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

Kennan, George Frost, 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 cold war, term used to describe the shifting struggle for power and prestige between the Western powers and the Communist bloc from the end of World War II until 1989.
..... Click the link for more information. 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 Marshall Plan or European Recovery Program, project instituted at the Paris Economic Conference (July, 1947) to foster economic recovery in certain European countries after World War II. The Marshall Plan took form when U.S.
..... Click the link for more information. . 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 Acheson, Dean Gooderham (ăch`ĭsən), 1893–1971, U.S. secretary of state (1949–52), b. Middletown, Conn., grad.
..... Click the link for more information. , 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), 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) and the autobiographical Sketches from a Life (1989).