George F. Kennan

His mother died of peritonitis two months after he was born, and for much of his life he believed she had died giving birth to him. His father was a Milwaukee tax lawyer named after a Hungarian revolutionary. At eight the boy was shipped to Germany to live with his stepmother and learn the language. Princeton, which he entered in 1921, he found cold and unwelcoming — shy, provincial and unaccustomed to the Ivy League, he spent four lonely years there and took a history degree in 1925. He joined the Foreign Service the same year, drew Geneva as a vice consul, and from 1929 spent three years at the University of Berlin's Oriental Institute learning Russian for a country the United States did not yet recognize.

The telegram went out of Moscow on February 22, 1946, ran to roughly 5,300 words, and told Washington that Soviet hostility grew from an old Russian insecurity wearing Marxist clothes. Seventeen months later Foreign Affairs printed the argument again over the pseudonym X, with the sentence calling for long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. The word attached itself to American policy for 40 years. He became the first director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff under George Marshall and helped design the Marshall Plan. Walter Lippmann called the doctrine a strategic monstrosity in print. Truman sent him to Moscow as ambassador in May 1952, and the Soviets expelled him within five months for comparing his conditions there to his internment by the Nazis — a remark he later called foolish.

He spent the rest of his life saying he had been misread. He had meant political and economic pressure at a few strategic points rather than a standing military commitment, and blamed one unqualified sentence in the X article. Harder to file is the rest of his thinking. In a speech at Williamsburg on June 1, 1968, he called for special political courts to try New Left and Black Power activists, answerable to voters but not to the press or the courts. He said he had a soft spot for the concept of apartheid if not its South African practice, and proposed setting aside areas of the United States on the Bantustan model. He held that American women had too much power. At 98 he warned that Latin American culture was displacing what he called inherited American traditions.

He outlived the Cold War by 14 years and never stopped arguing. Two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards came for the histories and the memoirs. He opposed Vietnam, opposed the arms race, and called the enlargement of NATO a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions, telling an interviewer in 1998 that there was no reason for it whatsoever. At 98 he warned that a war begun in Iraq for one stated purpose would end up being fought for another. Princeton threw him a hundredth birthday party in February 2004, with Colin Powell in the room. He died at home there on March 17, 2005, at 101, and the argument over whether NATO proved him right has only grown louder.

George F. Kennan's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Long Telegram other
  Roughly 5,300 words, cabled from Moscow on February 22 1946
• The Sources of Soviet Conduct article
  Foreign Affairs, July 1947, signed only X 1947
• The Policy Planning Staff company
  The State Department unit he was the first to direct, under George Marshall 1947
• American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 book
  A frontal attack on 50 years of American foreign policy 1951
• Russia Leaves the War book
  Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Bancroft and Parkman prizes 1956
• Democracy and the Student Left book
  His attack on the anti-war students he otherwise agreed with 1968

• February 16, 1904 aged 0 Born in Milwaukee His mother died of peritonitis two months later.
• 1925 aged ~21 Takes a history degree at Princeton and enters the Foreign Service His first post was vice consul in Geneva.
• 1929 aged ~25 Begins three years of Russian training in Berlin The United States would not recognize the Soviet Union until 1933.
• 1941 aged ~37 Interned by Germany for six months after the United States enters the war
• February 22, 1946 aged 42 Cables the Long Telegram out of Moscow Roughly 5,300 words. Some accounts put it above 8,000.
• May 5, 1947 aged 43 Becomes the first director of the Policy Planning Staff The X article appeared in Foreign Affairs that July.
• September 19, 1952 aged 48 Expelled from the Soviet Union as persona non grata He had compared conditions for his mission to his internment by the Nazis.
• May 16, 1961 aged 57 Kennedy sends him to Belgrade as ambassador to Yugoslavia He served until July 1963.
• March 17, 2005 aged 101 Dies at home in Princeton at 101

• George C. Marshall 1880–1959
  Army chief of staff who organized U.S. victory in World War II and later designed the Marshall Plan. served under
• Dean Acheson 1893–1971
  Secretary of State who helped build NATO and the postwar architecture of American foreign policy. sidelined by
• Walter Lippmann 1889–1974
  Columnist and political thinker whose work shaped modern journalism and debate over public opinion and democracy. publicly attacked the doctrine
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. appointed him to Belgrade
• Henry Kissinger 1923–2023
  National security adviser and secretary of state who shaped détente, China policy, and controversial Cold War interventions. later heir to realism
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study