Washington
Post | Friday, March 18, 2005; Page A01
George F. Kennan, a diplomat and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian
who formulated the basic foreign policy followed by the United
States in the Cold War, died last night at his home in Princeton,
N.J. He was 101.
A
Foreign Service officer from 1926 to 1953, Mr. Kennan also
was a student of Russian history, a keen and intuitive observer
of people and events and a gifted writer. In his years in
the State Department, he was recognized as the government's
leading authority on the Soviet Union, and his views resonated
in the corridors of authority with rare power and clarity.
His
great moment as a policymaker came in 1946. While serving
in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, he wrote a cable outlining
positions that guided Washington's dealings with the Kremlin
until the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly a half-century
later.
Known
as the Long Telegram, it said that Soviet expansion must be
halted and spelled out how that could be done. Moscow is "impervious
to the logic of reason," Mr. Kennan said, but "it
is highly sensitive to the logic of force." He did not
state, however, that war was inevitable. The policy should
have a military element, Mr. Kennan maintained, but it should
consist primarily of economic and political pressure.
...
In the late 1940s,
when he was a lecturer at the National War College and head
of the State Department's policy-planning staff, he took an
increasingly critical view of U.S. policy. His concern was
that containment had been turned on its head, that an undue
emphasis on military pressure rather than diplomacy was increasing
the danger of war with the Soviet Union rather than reducing
it.
...
In "Sketches
from a Life," he offered his idea of the typical Californian
(and by implication the typical American): "Childlike
in many respects: fun-loving, quick to laughter and enthusiasm,
unanalytical, unintellectual, outwardly expansive, preoccupied
with physical beauty and prowess, given to sudden and unthinking
seizures of aggressiveness, driven constantly to protect his
status in the group by an eager conformism -- yet not unhappy."
