What kind of man writes a 5,500-word telegram on a single night and, fifty years later, is still being read? George Frost Kennan (1904–2005) was an American diplomat and historian who served in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1926 to 1956 and is best known as the architect of the policy of containment. His “Long Telegram” of February 22, 1946, and his July 1947 “X article” in Foreign Affairs, gave the Truman administration its strategic framework for confronting the Soviet Union — and then Kennan spent the rest of his long life criticizing how that framework was implemented.
Early Career and Moscow
Kennan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on February 16, 1904, into a family of moderate means. He studied at Princeton (class of 1925) and entered the Foreign Service. His first posting to Moscow, in 1933, lasted only two years — Stalin’s anti-religious campaigns led the United States to recall its ambassador — but it shaped the rest of his career. He spent long hours walking the streets, learning the language in depth, and developing the reading of Russian political culture that would distinguish him from his colleagues.
His second Moscow posting, beginning in 1944 as minister-counselor, gave him direct access to the day-to-day behavior of the Soviet leadership. The Long Telegram was a response to a routine Treasury Department request for an analysis of Soviet policy. Kennan drafted it in a single night, on February 22, 1946, and the document ran to roughly 5,500 words. The State Department distributed it widely. Within weeks, the strategic vocabulary of American foreign policy had changed.
The X Article and Its Consequences
In July 1947, Foreign Affairs published “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” a slightly more accessible version of the Long Telegram published under the pseudonym “X” (the article was attributed to “George F. Kennan” only on his retirement from the Foreign Service in 1956). The article introduced the term “containment” to the public and presented the strategy in a form that policymakers could quote.
Kennan became a celebrity. The Truman administration made him the first director of the State Department’s new Policy Planning Staff in 1947. He left the government in 1950, partly because of disputes over his own prescriptions and partly because, by his own account, his colleagues in the State Department found him difficult. He joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he spent the rest of his life, with time off for ambassadorships to Yugoslavia (1961–1963) and the Soviet Union (1952).
Two Pulitzer Prizes and a Long Second Act
In Princeton, Kennan became one of the most productive American historians of the twentieth century. His two-volume study of Russian foreign policy, Russia Leaves the War (1956) and The Decision to Intervene (1958), won Pulitzers in 1957 and 1959. His two-volume Memoirs (1967, 1972) are a primary source for understanding early Cold War diplomacy from inside the government. Later works, including Around the Cragged Hill (1993) and his final, unfinished, Around the Cragged Hill companion, are indispensable to understanding how Kennan came to see his own legacy.
He spent his last decades criticizing the strategy that bore his name. He opposed the Vietnam War, the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe, the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe after 1999, and the use of force as a primary tool of American foreign policy. He died on March 17, 2005, at 101, having lived through every phase of the Cold War and most of what came after. For the policy framework Kennan created, see the Truman Doctrine and containment.