Diplomat and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian George F. Kennan died Thursday night at his Princeton, N.J. home at the age of 101.
Mr. Kennan was one of America’s foremost foreign policy experts of the post-World War II and Cold War eras. He was one of the primary architects of the highly successful Marshall Plan that underwrote the reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II, and he had an equal amount of influence on the development of the containment postwar foreign policy that the United States government adopted to combat the Soviet Union’s promotion of totalitarism during the Cold War.
When he was chief of the State Department’s policy planning staff, Mr. Kennan was the author identified only as “X” in a famous 1947 article in the Foreign Affairs journal that outlined the containment policy and predicted the demise of Soviet communism that eventually occurred over 40 years later. When the Communist Party was finally driven from power in the Soviet Union after the 1991 coup attempt, Mr. Kennan publicly called the development “a turning point of the most momentous historical significance.”
Despite the “X” article and his work in formulating the Marshall Plan, Mr. Kennan left government service in 1950 after he and Truman administration Secretary of State Dean Acheson disagreed over the reunification of Germany (Kennan supported it). He briefly served as ambassador to Moscow in May 1952, but he soon left foreign service again until the Kennedy Administration after butting heads with the Eisenhower Administration’s first Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.
During the Kennedy Administration, Mr. Kennan returned to foreign service in as ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1961-63, but his highest profile engagement during the 60’s came in 1967 when he persuaded Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, to come to the United States. During the late 1960s, Mr. Kennan opposed American involvement in Vietnam because he argued that the United States had only five areas of vital interest — the Soviet Union, Britain, Germany, Japan and the United States.
Mr. Kennan won the Pulitzer Prize for history and a National Book Award for Russia Leaves the War (1956) and a second Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for Memoirs 1925-1950. As a young college student, I read my late father’s copy of the latter book and it stimulated an interest in foreign affairs that continues to this day. Mr. Kennan’s honors also included the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989, Albert Einstein Peace Prize in 1981, the German Book Trade Peace Prize in 1982, and the Gold Medal in History from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1984.
Professor Drezner, who is one of the blogosphere’s most insightful foreign policy analysts, has more on Mr. Kennan here.