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

Excerpts from the NY Times obit:

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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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."

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