The Hindu : International : Kennan, architect of U.S. Cold War policy

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Sunday, Mar 20, 2005

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International

Kennan, architect of U.S. Cold War policy

By Tim Weiner and Barbara Crossette

George Kennan

NEW YORK, MARCH 19. George F. Kennan, the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy of his generation to shape U.S. policy during the Cold War, died on Thursday night in Princeton, New Jersey. 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 1940s, 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 1950s he had been associated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was most recently a professor emeritus.

Powerful ideas

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 analyse 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. 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. Mr. Kennan's best-known legacy was the postwar policy of containment. 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.

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. 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'', which revealed his core social conservatism as he reviewed the evolution of America. Among his other well-known works are ``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.

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