George F. Kennan, a
diplomat and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who formulated the basic
foreign policy followed by the United States in the Cold War, died last
night at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 101.
A Foreign Service officer from 1926 to 1953, Mr.
Kennan also was a student of Russian history, a keen and intuitive
observer of people and events and a gifted writer. In his years in the
State Department, he was recognized as the government's leading
authority on the Soviet Union, and his views resonated in the corridors
of authority with rare power and clarity.
George F. Kennan, right foreground, is shown in 1952 with Soviet
President Nikolai Shvernik, center, and A.F. Gorkin. Kennan loved
Russian culture.
(AP)
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His great moment
as a policymaker came in 1946. While serving in the U.S. Embassy in
Moscow, he wrote a cable outlining positions that guided Washington's
dealings with the Kremlin until the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly
a half-century later.
Known as the Long Telegram, it said that Soviet
expansion must be halted and spelled out how that could be done. Moscow
is "impervious to the logic of reason," Mr. Kennan said, but "it is
highly sensitive to the logic of force." He did not state, however,
that war was inevitable. The policy should have a military element, Mr.
Kennan maintained, but it should consist primarily of economic and
political pressure.
"My reputation was made," he rejoiced in his memoirs. "My voice now carried."
In 1947, he restated the principles in an article in
Foreign Affairs that was signed "X" -- the identity of the author soon
was disclosed -- and gave the policy the name by which it has been
known ever since: containment.
By confronting "the Russians with unalterable
counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon
the interest of a peaceful and stable world," he wrote, the United
States would "promote tendencies which must eventually find their
outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power."
The Long Telegram and "X" article provided the
rationale for Cold War initiatives ranging from the founding of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949 to the decision to commit
U.S. forces to the war in Southeast Asia in 1965. Containment had
numerous permutations over time but never lost its vitality. It guided
U.S. policy in Iran, the Philippines and the Far East. In the 1980s, it
was transformed by the Reagan administration into an effort to roll
back Soviet power through an arms buildup.
Former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger said
Mr. Kennan came "as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his
era as any diplomat in our history."
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
In 1950, Mr. Kennan took a leave of absence from the
State Department to move to the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton. Except for a brief period in 1952, when he was ambassador to
Moscow, and from 1961 to 1963, when he was ambassador to Yugoslavia, he
spent the rest of his life in Princeton.
Despite his influence, Mr. Kennan was never really
comfortable in government or with the give-and-take by which policy is
made. He always regarded himself as an outsider. It grated on him when
his advice was not heeded, more so because it often turned out that he
had been more right than wrong. He had little patience with critics.
His confidence in his own intellect was such that he
sometimes declined to explain himself to politicians. For example, he
refused to lobby for the Marshall Plan, the aid program that revived
the economy of Western Europe after World War II. He was a diplomat, he
said, not a salesman.
W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow
when Mr. Kennan was minister-counselor of the U.S. Embassy, remarked
that Mr. Kennan was "a man who understood Russia but not the United
States."
Believing as he did in a limitless human capacity
for error, Mr. Kennan was an unabashed elitist who distrusted
democratic processes. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas reported in their
book "The Wise Men" that he suggested in an unpublished work that
women, blacks and immigrants be disenfranchised. He deplored the
automobile, computers, commercialism, environmental degradation and
other manifestations of modern life. He loathed popular American
culture. In his memoirs, he described himself as a "guest of one's time
and not a member of its household."
A touchstone of his worldview was the conviction
that the United States cannot reshape other countries in its own image
and that, with a few exceptions, its efforts to police the world are
neither in its interests nor within the scope of its resources.
"This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center
of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest
of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious and
undesirable," he said in an interview with the New York Review of Books
in 1999.
"I would like to see our government gradually
withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights. I
submit that governments should deal with other governments as such, and
should avoid unnecessary involvement, particularly personal
involvement, with their leaders."
These ideas were particularly applicable, he said, to U.S. relations with China and Russia.
In the late 1940s, when he was a lecturer at the
National War College and head of the State Department's policy-planning
staff, he took an increasingly critical view of U.S. policy. His
concern was that containment had been turned on its head, that an undue
emphasis on military pressure rather than diplomacy was increasing the
danger of war with the Soviet Union rather than reducing it.
He predicted that schisms would appear in the
communist camp that could be exploited by the United States. Indeed,
Yugoslavia declared its independence of Moscow in 1948. Mr. Kennan
wrote that a similar rift would develop between the Soviet Union and
China. It occurred in the 1950s.
At the same time, he warned against such
involvements as the one the United States undertook in Vietnam: "To
oppose efforts of indigenous communist elements within foreign
countries must generally be considered a risky and profitless
undertaking, apt to do more harm than good."
In the early days of the Korean War, when the
invasion of South Korea had been repulsed, he urged that United Nations
forces be kept out of North Korea and that negotiations begin. His
advice was ignored. When the north was invaded, 300,000 communist
Chinese "volunteers" entered the conflict and drove U.N. forces back
below the 38th parallel, the boundary between north and south. In 1951
Mr. Kennan's contacts with the Soviet delegation at the United Nations
started the process that led to a truce in 1953.
Mr. Kennan was the first analyst to say that nuclear
weapons could serve as a deterrent but could never be used in war. He
was so outspoken in his opposition to developing a hydrogen bomb that
Secretary of State Dean Acheson said, "If that is your view, you ought
to resign from the Foreign Service and go out and preach your Quaker
gospel, but don't do it within the department."
In 1953, when he returned to the State Department
from Princeton, he asked Secretary of State John Foster Dulles what his
assignment would be. Dulles replied that he had nothing to offer. A
brilliant career thus came to an end.
In academia, Mr. Kennan established himself as a
leading diplomatic historian. He also contributed to the ongoing debate
on how the United States should conduct itself in the world. In 1966,
he made an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in
which he advised against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In the 1980s, he
emerged from a period devoted to academic pursuits to campaign for
nuclear disarmament.
His books included "American Diplomacy, 1900-1950"
(1951), which won the Freedom House award; "Russia Leaves the War"
(1956), which won the Bancroft Prize, the National Book Award and the
Francis Parkman and Pulitzer prizes; "Russia and the West Under Lenin
and Stalin" (1961); "Memoirs, 1925-1950" (1967), which won the Pulitzer
Prize and the National Book Award; "Memoirs, 1950-1963" (1972); "The
Decline of Bismarck's European Order" (1979); "The Nuclear Delusion"
(1982); "Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920" (1984); and "At a
Century's Ending" (1997), a collection of essays and lectures.
An issue Mr. Kennan explored in later years was
environmental despoliation, which he believed might prove to be a
greater threat than political and military rivalries. But the body of
his work still involved the themes he had noted in his years in the
State Department: Foreign policy should be "very modest and
restrained," and Washington's tendency to rely on military force rather
than diplomacy should be avoided.
In the same period, he issued an impassioned plea for nuclear disarmament that ended with these words:
"For the love of God, for the love of your children
and of the civilization to which you belong, cease this madness. You
are mortal men. You are capable of error. You have no right to hold in
your hands -- there is no one wise enough and strong enough to hold in
his hands -- destructive power sufficient to put an end to civilized
life on a great portion of our planet."
In February 1994, in a speech to the Council on
Foreign Relations at a celebration of his 90th birthday, Mr. Kennan
harked back to the "X" article. The time to have negotiated with
Moscow, he said, was right after the evident success of the Marshall
Plan and the Berlin Airlift, "when the lesson I wanted to see us convey
to Moscow had been successfully conveyed."
But the United States and its allies insisted on
"unconditional surrender" by the Soviets. The result, he said, was 40
years of Cold War at a cost of vast and unnecessary military
expenditure, a useless and dangerous nuclear arsenal and 40 years of
communist misgovernment in Eastern Europe.
In 1989, Mr. Kennan published "Sketches From a
Life," and in 1992, he published "Around the Cragged Hill." In these
volumes, he expounded a deeply conservative political philosophy and a
pessimistic view of mankind and of the United States in particular.
In "Sketches," he offered his idea of the typical
Californian (and by implication the typical American): "Childlike in
many respects: fun-loving, quick to laughter and enthusiasm,
unanalytical, unintellectual, outwardly expansive, preoccupied with
physical beauty and prowess, given to sudden and unthinking seizures of
aggressiveness, driven constantly to protect his status in the group by
an eager conformism -- yet not unhappy."
In Cragged Hill," he wrote that the United States is
devoid of "intelligent and discriminating administration," and should
be broken up into a dozen republics. The country should be guided by an
advisory council made up of distinguished citizens.
George Frost Kennan was born in Milwaukee on Feb.
16, 1904. His parents were Kossuth Kent Kennan and his wife, Florence.
He was educated at a military school in Delaware and at Princeton
University, from which he graduated in 1925.
He was a past president of the National Institute of
Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He held
numerous honorary degrees and he was a fellow of Harvard University and
of All Souls College, Oxford University.
He passed the State Department examinations and was
commissioned in the Foreign Service in 1926. His first post was Geneva,
where he was a consular officer. In 1927, he was transferred to
Hamburg, Germany, and the following year to Tallinn, Estonia.
In 1928, he went to Berlin as a language officer.
The following year, he was designated a member of the first group of
State Department officials to begin preparing to work in the Soviet
Union. Although he detested Soviet communism, he had a deep affection
for the Russian people and their culture.
From 1931 until 1933, Mr. Kennan was stationed in
Latvia and Lithuania, listening posts for the Soviet Union. In 1933, he
went to Moscow with Ambassador William C. Bullitt and helped establish
diplomatic relations between Washington and the Kremlin, ending a break
that began after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Mr. Kennan later served in Austria, Czechoslovakia
and Germany, where he was detained for five months during World War II.
After his release, he had assignments in Lisbon and London before
returning to Moscow. He was transferred to Washington in 1946 to
lecture at the National War College.
His brief tenure as ambassador in Moscow in 1952
ended when he was expelled by Stalin for comparing conditions in Moscow
to those in Nazi Germany.
Survivors include his wife, Annelise
Kennan, whom he married in 1931; and four children, Grace Kennan
Warnecke of New York, Joan Kennan of Washington, Christopher James
Kennan of Pine Plains, N.Y., and Wendy Kennan of Penzance, England;
eight grandchildren; and two great-grandsons.
