George F. Kennan
George Frost Kennan was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men".
During the late 1940s, his writings confirmed the Truman Doctrine and inspired the U.S. foreign policy of containing the USSR. His "Long Telegram" from Moscow in 1946 and the subsequent 1947 article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be "contained" in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States. These texts provided justification for the Truman administration's new anti-Soviet policy. Kennan played a major role in the development of definitive Cold War programs and institutions, notably the Marshall Plan.
Soon after his concepts had become U.S. policy, Kennan began to criticize the foreign policies that he had helped articulate. By late 1948, Kennan became confident that the US could commence positive dialogue with the Soviet government. His proposals were dismissed by the Truman administration, and Kennan's influence waned, particularly after Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State in 1949. Soon thereafter, U.S. Cold War strategy assumed a more assertive and militaristic quality, causing Kennan to lament what he believed was an abrogation of his previous assessments.
In 1950, Kennan left the State Department—except for a brief ambassadorial stint in Moscow and a longer one in Yugoslavia—and became a realist critic of U.S. foreign policy. He continued to analyze international affairs as a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1956 until his death in 2005 at age 101.
Early life
Kennan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Kossuth Kent Kennan, a lawyer specializing in tax law, and Florence James Kennan. His father was a descendant of impoverished Scots-Irish settlers from 18th-century Connecticut and Massachusetts, and had been named after the Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth. His mother died two months after his birth due to peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, though Kennan long believed that she died after giving birth to him. The boy always lamented not having a mother. He was never close to his father or stepmother; however, he was close to his older sisters.At the age of eight, he went to Germany to stay with his stepmother in order to learn German. During the summers of 1915 and 1916, he attended Camp Highlands in Sayner, Wisconsin, then known as the Wisconsin Highlands Summer Camp. He attended St. John's Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin, and arrived at Princeton University in the second half of 1921. Unaccustomed to the elite atmosphere of the Ivy League, the shy and introverted Kennan found his undergraduate years difficult and lonely.
Diplomatic career
First steps
After receiving his bachelor's degree in history in 1925, Kennan considered applying to law school, but decided it was too expensive and instead opted to apply to the newly formed United States Foreign Service. He passed the qualifying examination and after seven months of study at the Foreign Service School in Washington, he obtained his first job as a vice consul in Geneva, Switzerland. Within a year, he was transferred to a post in Hamburg, Germany. In 1928, Kennan considered quitting the Foreign Service to return to a university for graduate studies. Instead, he was selected for a linguist training program that would give him three years of graduate-level study without having to quit the service.In 1929, Kennan began his program in history, politics, culture, and the Russian language at the Oriental Institute of the University of Berlin. In doing so, he followed in the footsteps of his grandfather's younger cousin, George Kennan, a major 19th century expert on Imperial Russia and author of Siberia and the Exile System, a well-received 1891 account of the Czarist prison system. During the course of his diplomatic career, Kennan would master a number of other languages, including German, French, Polish, Czech, Portuguese, and Norwegian.
In 1931 Kennan was stationed at the legation in Riga, Latvia, where, as third secretary, he worked on Soviet economic affairs. From his job, Kennan "grew to mature interest in Russian affairs". When the U.S. began formal diplomacy with the Soviet government during 1933 after the election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennan accompanied Ambassador William C. Bullitt to Moscow. By the mid-1930s, Kennan was among the professionally trained Russian experts of the staff of the United States Embassy in Moscow, along with Charles E. Bohlen and Loy W. Henderson. These officials had been influenced by the long-time director of the State Department's division of East European Affairs, Robert F. Kelley. They believed that there was little basis for cooperation with the Soviet Union, even against potential adversaries. Meanwhile, Kennan studied Stalin's Great Purge, which would affect his opinion of the internal dynamics of the Soviet regime for the rest of his life.
At the Soviet Embassy
Kennan found himself in strong disagreement with Joseph E. Davies, Bullitt's successor as ambassador to the Soviet Union, who defended the Great Purge and other aspects of Stalin's rule. Kennan did not have any influence on Davies' decisions, and Davies himself even suggested that Kennan be transferred out of Moscow for "his health". Kennan again contemplated resigning from the service, but instead decided to accept the Russian desk at the State Department in Washington. A man with a high opinion of himself, Kennan began writing the first draft of his memoirs at the age of 34 when he was still a relatively junior diplomat. In a letter to his sister Jeannette in 1935, Kennan expressed his disenchantment with American life, writing: “I hate the rough and tumble of our political life. I hate democracy; I hate the press... I hate the ‘peepul’; I have become clearly un-American".Prague and Berlin
By September 1938, Kennan had been reassigned to a job at the legation in Prague. After the occupation of the Czechoslovak Republic by Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War II, Kennan was assigned to Berlin. There, he endorsed the United States' Lend-Lease policy but warned against any notion of American endorsement of the Soviets, whom he considered unfit allies. He was interned in Germany for six months after Germany, followed by the other Axis states, declared war on the United States in December 1941.Lisbon calls
In September 1942 Kennan was assigned to the legation in Lisbon, Portugal, where he begrudgingly performed a job administering intelligence and base operations. In July 1943 Bert Fish, the American Ambassador in Lisbon, suddenly died, and Kennan became chargé d'affaires and the head of the American Embassy in Portugal. While in Lisbon Kennan played a decisive role in getting Portugal's approval for the use of the Azores Islands by American naval and air forces during World War II. Initially confronted with clumsy instructions and lack of coordination from Washington, Kennan took the initiative by personally talking to President Roosevelt and obtained from the President a letter to the Portuguese premier, Salazar, that unlocked the concession of facilities in the Azores.Second Soviet posting
In January 1944, he was sent to London, where he served as counselor of the American delegation to the European Advisory Commission, which worked to prepare Allied policy in Europe. There, Kennan became even more disenchanted with the State Department, which he believed was ignoring his qualifications as a trained specialist. However, within months of beginning the job, he was appointed deputy chief of the mission in Moscow upon request of W. Averell Harriman, the ambassador to the USSR.The "Long Telegram"
In Moscow, Kennan again felt that his opinions were being ignored by President Truman and policymakers in Washington. Kennan tried repeatedly to persuade policymakers to abandon plans for cooperation with the Soviet government in favor of a sphere of influence policy in Europe to reduce the Soviets' power there. Kennan believed that a federation needed to be established in western Europe to counter Soviet influence in the region and to compete against the Soviet stronghold in eastern Europe.Kennan served as deputy head of the mission in Moscow until April 1946. Near the end of that term, the Treasury Department requested that the State Department explain recent Soviet behavior, such as its disinclination to endorse the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Kennan responded on February 22, 1946, by sending a lengthy 5,363-word telegram, commonly called "The Long Telegram", from Moscow to Secretary of State James Byrnes outlining a new strategy for diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The ideas Kennan expressed in the Long Telegram were not new but the argument he made and the vivid language he used in making it came at an opportune moment. At the "bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is the traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity". After the Russian Revolution, this sense of insecurity became mixed with communist ideology and "Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy".
Soviet international behavior depended mainly on the internal necessities of Joseph Stalin's regime; according to Kennan, Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his autocratic rule. Stalin thus used Marxism-Leninism as a "justification for the Soviet Union's instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand ... Today they cannot dispense with it. It is the fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability".
The solution was to strengthen Western institutions in order to render them invulnerable to the Soviet challenge while awaiting the mellowing of the Soviet regime. Using propaganda and culture was vital to Kennan, it was important that America presented itself correctly to foreign audiences and the Soviets would limit the cultural cross contamination of America and USSR.
It is notable that Kennan shared his telegram with his friend and collaborator at the British Embassy in Moscow, Frank Kenyon Roberts, whom he had first met in Lisbon in 1943. As his Embassy's chargé d'affaires, Roberts drew on some of Kennan's ideas in March 1946 when he presented his own, lengthy analyses of Soviet policies in which he encouraged the British government to take a firm stance towards the Soviet Union and to relinquish hopes of Anglo-Soviet cooperation. Roberts' arguments went down well in Whitehall, which meant that Kennan influenced British policies as well as American ones, and contributed to the development of the Anglo-American Cold War partnership.