George F. Kennan
George Kennan wrote the two documents that defined American strategy in the Cold War and spent forty years objecting to what was done with them. Born in Milwaukee in 1904, he joined the Foreign Service in 1926, trained in Russian, and was among the first American diplomats posted to Moscow when relations were established in 1933. In February 1946, from the embassy and with influenza, he answered a routine Treasury query about Soviet behaviour with a 5,300-word cable — the Long Telegram — arguing that Soviet hostility was driven by internal insecurity and an ideology requiring an external enemy, that it was impervious to reason, and that it could be contained by firm counter-pressure without war. It reached Washington at the moment officials were ready to hear it, and made his career. He restated it publicly the following year in Foreign Affairs, signed X, and the word containment entered the language. He then spent the rest of his life saying he had been misread. What he had meant was political, economic and psychological containment applied selectively at points of genuine strategic weight — the Marshall Plan, which he helped design — not the global militarised commitment that NATO, the hydrogen bomb, Korea and eventually Vietnam produced. He opposed almost all of it, including the Iraq war at ninety-nine. He was ambassador to Moscow in 1952 and expelled within months, and to Yugoslavia under Kennedy. He won two Pulitzers as a historian and died in 2005 at 101. He is the standard case of an author losing control of his own idea.
- Lived: 1904 CE – 2005 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: diplomat, strategist, historian
