Kennan, George Frost

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 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), 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).

---

Kennan, George Frost 

Born Feb. 16, 1904, in Milwaukee. American diplomat and historian.

After graduating from Princeton University in 1925, Kennan worked at the US State Department, occupying various diplomatic and consular posts. Kennan was one of the authors of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan; he actively supported the policy of “containing communism” and took part in the establishment of NATO. In March 1952 he was appointed US ambassador to the USSR; however, in October 1952, in connection with hostile attacks against the Soviet Union, he was declared persona non grata by the Soviet government. He worked as a scholar and teacher from 1953 to 1961 and is a professor at Princeton University. From 1961 to 1963 he was US ambassador to Yugoslavia. In the later years of the Eisenhower administration, Kennan criticized certain aspects of the government’s foreign policy and called for an unbiased revision of the US position in the world. He is considered one of the leading American specialists on the Soviet Union. He is the author of a number of books on US foreign policy and Soviet-American relations, including Memoirs (vols. 1–2, 1967–72). [12–122–4; updated]