april 2005

Mr. Halperin said Mr. Kennan understood the need to talk truth to power no matter how unpopular, and made clear his belief that containment was primarily a political and diplomatic policy rather than a military one. "His career since is clear proof that no matter how important the role of the policy planning director, a private citizen can have an even greater impact with the strength of his ideas."

George F. Kennan Dies at 101; Leading Strategist of Cold War

By TIM WEINER and BARBARA CROSSETTE
Published: March 18, 2005
www.nytimes.com


George F. Kennan, the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy of his generation to shape United States policy during the cold war, died on Thursday night in Princeton, N.J. He was 101.

Mr. Kennan was the man to whom the White House and the Pentagon turned when they sought to understand the Soviet Union after World War II. He conceived the cold-war policy of containment, the idea that the United States should stop the global spread of Communism by diplomacy, politics, and covert action - by any means short of war.

As the State Department's first policy planning chief in the late 1940's,
serving Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Mr. Kennan was an intellectual architect of the Marshall Plan, which sent billions of dollars of American aid to nations devastated by World War II. At the same time, he conceived a secret "political warfare" unit that aimed to roll back Communism, not merely contain it. His brainchild became the covert-operations directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Though Mr. Kennan left the foreign service more than half a century ago, he continued to be a leading thinker in international affairs until his death. Since the 1950's he had been associated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was most recently a professor emeritus.

By the end of his long, productive life, Mr. Kennan had become a phenomenon in international affairs, with seminars held and books written to debate and analyze his extraordinary influence on American policy during the cold war. He was the author of 17 books, two of them Pulitzer Prize-winners, and countless articles in leading journals.

His writing, from classified cables to memoirs, was the force that made him "the nearest thing to a legend that this country's diplomatic service has ever produced," in the words of the historian Ronald Steel.

"He'll be remembered as a diplomatist and a grand strategist," said John Lewis Gaddis, a leading historian of the cold war, who is preparing a biography of Mr. Kennan. "But he saw himself as a literary figure. He would have loved to have been a poet, a novelist."

Morton H. Halperin, who was chief of policy planning during the Clinton
administration, said Mr. Kennan "set a standard that all his successors have sought to follow."

Mr. Halperin said Mr. Kennan understood the need to talk truth to power no matter how unpopular, and made clear his belief that containment was primarily a political and diplomatic policy rather than a military one. "His career since is clear proof that no matter how important the role of the policy planning director, a private citizen can have an even greater impact with the strength of his ideas."

The force of Mr. Kennan's ideas brought him to power in Washington in the brief months after World War II ended and before the cold war began. In February 1946, as the second-ranking diplomat in the American Embassy in Moscow, he dispatched his famous "Long Telegram" to Washington, perhaps the best-known cable in American diplomatic history. It explained to policy makers baffled by Stalin that while Soviet power was "impervious to the logic of reason," it was "highly sensitive to the logic of force."

Widely circulated in Washington, the Long Telegram made Mr. Kennan famous. It evolved into an even better-known work, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," which Mr. Kennan published under the anonymous byline "X" in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigorous application of counterforce," he wrote. That force, Kennan believed, should take the form of diplomacy and covert
action, not war.

Mr. Kennan's best-known legacy was this postwar policy of containment, "a strategy that held up awfully well," said Mr. Gaddis.

But Mr. Kennan was deeply dismayed when the policy was associated with the immense build-up in conventional arms and nuclear weapons that characterized the cold war from the 1950's onward. His views were always more complex than the interpretation others gave them, as he argued repeatedly in his writings. He came to deplore the growing belligerence toward Moscow that gripped Washington by the early 1950's, setting the stage for anti-Communist witch hunts that severely dented the American foreign service.

At the height of the Korean War, he temporarily left the State Department for the Institute for Advanced Study. He returned to serve as ambassador to Moscow, arriving there in March 1952.

But it was "a disastrous assignment," Mr. Gaddis said. Mr. Kennan was placed under heavy surveillance by Soviet intelligence, which cut him off from contact with Soviet citizens. Frustrated, Mr. Kennan publicly compared living in Stalin's Moscow to his experience as an internee in Nazi Germany. The Soviets declared him persona non grata.

From One Dulles to the Other

Mr. Kennan was then pushed out of the Foreign Service in 1953 by the new
Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who took office under the newly elected President Eisenhower. Allen Dulles, the new director of central intelligence, then offered a post to the man his brother had rejected - knowing, as few others did, of Mr. Kennan's crucial role in the formation of the C.I.A. clandestine service.


Mr. Kennan had argued for "the inauguration of political warfare" against the Soviet Union in a May 1948 memorandum that was classified top secret for almost 50 years. "The time is now fully ripe for the creation of a covert political warfare operations directorate within the government," he wrote. This seed quickly grew into the covert arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. It began as the Office of Policy Coordination, planning and conducting the agency's biggest and most ambitious schemes, and within four years grew into the agency's operations directorate, with thousands of clandestine officers overseas.

A generation later, testifying before a 1975 Senate select committee, he called the political-warfare initiative "the greatest mistake I ever made."

Mr. Kennan also played a formative role in the foundation of Radio Free Europe. Seeking ways to use the skills of émigrés from the Soviet Union's cold-war satellites, he asked a retired ambassador, Joseph C. Grew, to form an anticommunist group called the National Committee for a Free Europe. Backed by the C.I.A., the committee set up Radio Free Europe, which broadcast news and propaganda throughout Eastern Europe. Two prominent dissidents of their times, Lech Walesa in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, praised R.F.E. as highly influential.

Mr. Kennan supported the war in Korea, albeit with some uncertainty, but opposed United States involvement anywhere in Indochina long before American troops were sent to Vietnam. He did not include the region in his mental list of areas crucial to American security.

In February 1997, Mr. Kennan wrote on The New York Times's Op-Ed page that the Clinton administration's decision to back an enlargement of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to bring it to the borders of Russia was a terrible mistake. He wrote that "expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era."

"Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking," he wrote. His views, shared by a broad range of policy experts, did not prevail.

Mr. Kennan was the last of a generation of diplomatic aristocrats in an old world model - products of the "right" schools, universities and clubs, who took on the enormous challenges of building a new world order and trying to define America's place within it after the defeat of the Nazis and a militaristic Japanese empire.

With history as a guide, these worldly-wise policy makers ultimately decided against punitive policies toward the losers, instead helping the defeated countries rebuild as democracies. But the diplomatic establishment had no precedent to fall back on as they wrestled with Soviet Communism and a Maoist revolution in China.

Though Mr. Kennan is often grouped among the "Wise Men" who shaped Washington after World War II, he did not share their heritage. "He was not part of the elite East Coast establishment," Mr. Gaddis said. "He was never wealthy. He worked his way through college, and he lost all his money in the Depression. He always felt he was an outsider, never an insider."

Mr. Kennan was often a gloomy, sensitive and intensely serious man. Perennially unable to tailor his crisp intellectual views to political necessity in Washington, and lacking the political and bureaucratic skills needed to survive there, Mr. Kennan appeared to those who knew him to be happy to find a long-term home in Princeton, where Albert Einstein and other leading thinkers also honed their ideas.

Ever the Policy Maker

From that perch in 1993, Mr. Kennan recommended, characteristically, that the United States needed an unelected, apolitical "council of state" drawn from the country's best brains to advise all branches of government in long-term policies. He proposed the council in a very personal book, "Around the Cragged Hill" (Norton 1993), which revealed his core social conservatism as he reviewed the evolution of America.

He fretted that the population of the United States was growing too fast and that, environmentally, the country was "exhausting and depleting the very sources of its own abundance." He blamed cars and the suburban sprawl they created for the death of not only a magnificent railway network but also the "great urban centers of the 19th century, with all the glories of economic and cultural life that flowed from their very unity and compactness."

But Mr. Kennan was most preoccupied with society's effects on making foreign policy, an increasingly shrunken intellectual field in an age when American diplomacy itself has been driven to penury by a dominant new breed of post-cold-war America-Firsters. He saw American policy by the end of the 20th century as unfocused, adrift and subject to too many (sometimes conflicting) domestic political pressures, with a host of players who have diminished the role of the secretary of state at a moment in history when the United States stood alone in its world power.

"It is not too much to say that the American people have it in their power,
given the requisite will and imagination, to set for the rest of the world a
unique example of the way a modern, advanced society could be shaped in order to meet successfully the emerging tests of the modern and future age," he wrote in "Around the Cragged Hill."

Among his other well-known works were "American Diplomacy 1900-1950"; "Russia Leaves the War," winner of the Pulitzer prize for history in 1957 and the Bancroft and Francis Parkman prizes and a National Book Award; and two volumes of memoirs, in 1967 and 1972, the first of which won another National Book Award and another Pulitzer. Mr. Kennan was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, by President George H.W. Bush in 1989.

The Modest Beginnings

George Frost Kennan was born in Milwaukee on Feb. 16, 1904, the son of Kossuth Kent Kennan, a lawyer who was a descendant of Scotch-Irish settlers of 18th-century America and who was named for the Hungarian patriot. His mother, the former Florence James, died two months after his birth.

When he was 8, he was sent to Germany in the care of his stepmother - his father had remarried - to learn German in Kassel, because of the purity of the language there. It was the first of numerous languages he would eventually master: Russian, French, Polish, Czech, Portuguese and Norwegian.

Educated at St. John's Northwestern Military Academy in Delafield, Wis., and at Princeton University, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1925, he decided to try for the Foreign Service rather than return to Milwaukee. "It was the first and last sensible decision I was ever deliberately to make about my occupation," he said.

Mr. Kennan served as a vice consul in Geneva and Hamburg in 1927 and was on the verge of resigning to go back to school when he learned that he could be trained as a linguist and get three years of graduate study without leaving the service. He went to Berlin University and chose to study Russian, partly in preparation for the opening of United States-Soviet relations, which occurred in 1933, and partly because another George Kennan, his grandfather's cousin, had devoted himself to studying Russia.

While in Berlin, Mr. Kennan met Annelise Sorensen, a Norwegian, and they were married in 1931. They had four children. He is survived by his wife and their children - Grace Kennan Warnecke of New York, Joan Kennan of Washington, D.C., Wendy Kennan of Cornwall, England, and Christopher J. Kennan of Pine Plains, N.Y. - and by eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

In the five and a half years between Mr. Kennan's decision to become a
specialist on Soviet affairs and his first assignment to Moscow in 1933, he
served in a number of posts on the periphery of the Soviet Union. He was third secretary in the embassy in Riga, Latvia, when he was assigned to accompany William C. Bullitt, the first United States ambassador to the Soviet Union.

During his career, he was assigned to Moscow three more times - as second secretary in 1935 and 1936, as minister-counselor from 1944 to 1946, first under W. Averell Harriman, then under Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, and finally for a brief term as ambassador in 1952.

When he was appointed to the embassy in Moscow in 1944 as minister-counselor, he described his return after a six-year absence as an unsettling experience because of the hostility and suspicion he found in the official circles of a wartime ally.

"Never," he wrote, "except possibly during my later experience as ambassador to Moscow, did the insistence of the Soviet authorities on the isolation of the diplomatic corps weigh more heavily on me. We were sincerely moved by the sufferings of the Russian people as well as by the heroism and patience they were showing. We wished them nothing but well. It was doubly hard in these circumstances to find ourselves treated as though we were the bearers of some species of the plague."

Mr. Kennan, convinced that it would be folly to hope for extensive Soviet
cooperation in the postwar world, was frustrated by the development in
Washington of what he saw as an increasingly naïve policy based on notions of
Soviet friendship. He wrote analytical essays, but these won little or no
attention in the State Department.

It was not until the United States Treasury, stung by Moscow's unwillingness to support the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, asked the State Department for an explanation of its behavior that Mr. Kennan was able to make his points in the "Long Telegram," which arrived in Washington on Feb. 22, 1946. It was so well-received that "my official loneliness came to an end," he wrote later. "My reputation was made. My voice now carried."

Regrettably, in Mr. Kennan's view, the warnings that had fallen on deaf ears for so long found receptive ones partly for the wrong reasons, and he felt that the idea of a Soviet danger became as exaggerated as the belief in Soviet friendship had been.

He held that the Soviet Union should be challenged only when it encroached on certain areas of specific American interest, but he did not accept the view that this could be accomplished only by military alliances or by turning Europe into an armed camp. He felt that Communism needed to be confronted politically when it appeared outside the Soviet sphere.

Publicly, he was sharply critical of émigré propaganda calling for the overthrow of the Soviet system, believing that there was no guarantee that anything more democratic would replace it. In the 1960's and 70's, he concluded that the growing diversity in the Communist world was one of the most significant political developments of the century. But "he missed the ideological appeal of democratic culture in the rest of the world," Mr. Gaddis said, as the slow rot of Soviet Communism undermined the cold war's architectures.

The 'X' Article on Containment

Mr. Kennan had returned to Washington in 1946 as the first deputy for foreign affairs at the new National War College, where he prepared a paper on the nature of Soviet power for James V. Forrestal, then secretary of the Navy. In July 1947, that paper, drawn largely from his Moscow essays, became the "X" article. The article, advocating the containment of Soviet power, was not signed because Mr. Kennan had accepted a new State Department assignment. But the author's identity soon became known.

Mr. Kennan was attacked by the influential columnist Walter Lippmann, who interpreted containment - as did many others - in a military sense.

In his memoirs, Mr. Kennan said that some of the language he had used in advocating a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies "was at best ambiguous and lent itself to
misinterpretation." He had failed to make it clear, he said, that what he was talking about was not the containment by military means or military threat, but the political containment of a political threat.

As chairman of the planning staff at a time when planning still played a large role in policy-making, Mr. Kennan helped shift the United States to political and diplomatic containment.

He contributed an overall rationale to a series of actions like Greek-Turkish aid, under what became known as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the creation of the Western military alliance.

Taking an active interest in the occupation of Japan and Germany, he incurred considerable criticism by opposing the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, arguing that the United States should not sit in judgment with the Soviet Union, where millions had been killed by their own government.

He also argued against basing American troops in Japan under long-range agreements, feeling this would antagonize the Soviet Union, which might feel its eastern flank threatened.

In 1950, having left the planning staff to become a counselor to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Mr. Kennan was at odds with the State Department over the American military role in Korea and other issues. He asked for a leave of absence and moved to Princeton at the invitation of his friend J. Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the American development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, to join the Institute for Advanced Studies. He and his family divided their time between a home in Princeton and a farm in New Berlin, Pa. Later they added a family home in Norway.

After General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was dismissed by President Truman in 1951, Mr. Kennan was asked by the State Department to sound out Yakov A. Malik, the Soviet delegate to the United Nations, about a possible settlement of the Korean War. Secret meetings took place between the two men in June 1951- Russian was spoken - and formal talks leading to a cease-fire followed, a sequence that, in Mr. Kennan's view, underlined the value of secret diplomacy conducted by professionals.

Mr. Kennan's entire career had seemed to be preparation for his 1952 appointment as ambassador to Moscow, but his tour ended after five months when he was declared persona non grata - on Stalin's whim, he thought - for a chance remark to a reporter in West Berlin who had asked him what life was like in the Soviet Union. He drew a comparison to his imprisonment earlier by the Nazis, adding, "Except that in Moscow we are at liberty to go out and walk the streets under guard." Left in limbo by the State Department on his return to Washington, and with policy disagreements growing between him and Secretary of State Dulles, who viewed containment as too passive, Mr. Kennan retired from the Foreign Service in 1953. This difficult period was made even more painful by McCarthyism. Many of Mr. Kennan's old colleagues and friends - among them Professor Oppenheimer, John Paton Davies, John Stewart Service and Charles W. Thayer - came under attack. He testified repeatedly in their defense and wrote and spoke against what he termed the malodorous tide of the times. During a pleasant academic year
in 1957-58 as Eastman professor at Oxford, he was invited to deliver the BBC's annual Reith Lectures, radio talks to which all intellectual Britain is attuned.

A Surprising Offer to the Soviets

He attracted great attention by proposing that the time was right to begin
negotiating with the Soviet Union for mutual troop withdrawals from Germany. It was an idea acceptable to only a small body of left-wing opinion, as was his further suggestion that the demilitarization be achieved through the guarantee of a neutral, unified Germany. His views came under immediate fire all over Western Europe and in North America.

Called back into government service in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, Mr. Kennan was named ambassador to Yugoslavia and became embroiled in arguments over the proper role of Congress in foreign affairs. He sought unsuccessfully to dissuade Mr. Kennedy from proclaiming Captive Nations Week in 1961 - as required by a Congressional resolution of 1959 - on the ground that the United States had no reason to make the resolution, which in effect called for the overthrow of all the governments of Eastern Europe, a part of public policy. The next year Congress voted to bar aid and trade concessions to the Yugoslavs, so Mr. Kennan felt he could no longer serve usefully in Belgrade.

In 1966 Mr. Kennan, who had returned to Princeton in 1963, was called to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the Vietnam War, an American involvement he felt should not have been begun and should not be prolonged. In 1967 he took part in a Senate review of American foreign policy.

For Mr. Kennan the Vietnam years were what he later characterized as instructive. His views on what he saw as almost entirely negative Congressional interference in foreign affairs altered as Congress moved to curtail the American role in Southeast Asia, an area where he believed the American interest was not at stake. In an interview at the time of his 72nd birthday, he said that he had been "instructed" by Vietnam, and that he now agreed that Congress should help in determining foreign policy. He added that given that reality, the United States would have to reduce its scope and limit its methods because Congressional control of foreign affairs deprives the Government of day-to-day direction of events "and means that as a nation we will have to pull back a bit - not become isolationist, but just rule out fancy diplomacy."

Opposed though he was to United States involvement in Southeast Asia, he was critical of the student left in the 60's. In a speech at Swarthmore College in December 1967, he assailed the students' methods of protest and their failure to present a coherent program of reform.

Later in life, Mr. Kennan turned his attention to support of Russian and Soviet
studies in the United States, feeling that scholarship was one of America's most
productive links with Moscow. "They are impressed by our work," he remarked in
an interview. "It keeps Russian intellectuals from thinking we are all a nation
of flagpole-sitters."

In 1974 and 1975, while in Washington as a Woodrow Wilson scholar, he helped to
establish the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in the Smithsonian
complex. Recalling the ancestor who led him to study Russian, he said, "When my
colleagues gave it a name, they had in mind both George Kennans."