George
Kennan was born in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, on 16th February, 1904. After graduating from St John's
Military Academy he studied history at Princeton University. In 1926,
Kennan joined the foreign service and was appointed as vice-consul
in Geneva. This was followed by posts to Berlin, Tallinn and Riga.
Kennan was being trained as an expert on the Soviet
Union and in 1929 was sent to the study Russian at the University
of Berlin.
In
November, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt
established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. William C.
Bullitt was appointed as United States ambassador, and Kennan became
third secretary at the embassy in Moscow. After two years in the Soviet
Union he was assigned to Vienna. This was followed by spells in Prague
and Berlin.
Kennan
was opposed to the idea that the United States
should appear to be supporting the Soviet
Union
against
Germany. He feared this would identify the
United States "with the Russian destruction of the Baltic states,
with the attack against Finnish independence, with the partitioning
of Poland... and with the domestic policy of a regime which is widely
feared and detested throughout this part of the world".
The
bombing of Pearl Harbor, brought America
into the Second World War. Kennan was still
in Nazi Germany at the time and he
was interned. In April 1942 Kennan was released and was reassigned
to Lisbon in Portugal. At the time this was a notorious centre of
international espionage. In 1944 Kennan returned to the Soviet Union
where he took up the post of minister-counsellor and chargé
d'affaires.
Kennan
remained critical of the actions of Joseph
Stalin. This included the decision by Stalin not to order the
Red Army to support the Warsaw
Uprising against the German Army
in 1944. Kennan reported to Franklin D.
Roosevelt that he should have a "thorough-going exploration
of Soviet intentions with regard to the future of the remainder of
Europe".
After
the war Kennan returned to the United States where George
Marshall appointed him as director of the State Department's policy-planning
staff. Over the next couple of years Kennan developed the foreign
policy of containment. Kennan argued that communist influence should
be contained within existing territorial limits, either by armed intervention
or, more often, by economic and technical assistance.
On 22nd February, 1946, Kennan sent a series of five telegrams to
President Harry S. Truman. This eventually
became known as the Long Telegram. It included the following passage:
"At the bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs
is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally,
this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live
on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To
this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced
West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized
societies in that area."
The following year Kennan wrote an anonymous article
in the Foreign Affairs magazine,
where he argued that the Soviet
Union
was fundamentally opposed to coexistence with
the West and desired a world-wide extension of the Soviet system.
However, Kennan argued that communism could be contained if the West
showed determined opposition to their expansion plans. Kennan's ideas
subsequently became the core of United States policy towards the Soviet
Union and was reflected in both the Truman
Doctrine and the European Recovery
Program (ERP).
Kennan's
views had a tremendous influence of a group of important political
figures based in Washington.
Known
as the Georgetown Crowd, it included figures such as Dean
Acheson,
Frank Wisner, Joseph
Alsop, Philip
Graham,
Katharine
Graham,
David
Bruce,
Clark Clifford, Walt
Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip
Bohlen and Paul Nitze.
In
1949 Kennan clashed with John
Foster Dulles
over the issue of the recognizing communist
China. Dulles leaked the story to a journalist
and Kennan decided to resign from his policy planning post. He
joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton but in 1952 Harry
S. Truman appointed Kennan as the United States ambassador in
Moscow.
On his return to Washington
Kennan became critical of the foreign policies
of President Dwight Eisenhower. Kennan
opposed the formation of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) and claimed that developments in Korea
and Vietnam sprang from nationalism rather
than Marxism. Senator Joseph
McCarthy denounced Kennan as "a commie lover". John
Foster Dulles
contacted Kennan and told him he was no longer
wanted by the administration. Ironically, his brother, Allen
Dulles, offered him a job with the CIA.
Kennan refused and decided to become an academic.
In 1956 Kennan was appointed as professor of historical studies at
the Princeton Institute and while there revised his views on containment.
Kennan now advocated a program of disengagement from areas of conflict
with the Soviet Union. He remained at Princeton
until John F. Kennedy appointed Kennan
as the United States ambassador to Yugoslavia
(1961-63).
Books by Kennan include the Realities of
American Foreign Policy (1954), Russia
Leaves the War (1956), Memoirs:
1925-1950 (1967), Russia and the
West (1967), The Nuclear Delusion
(1982) American Diplomacy, 1900-50
(1985), Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920
(1989), Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal
and Political Philosophy (1993) and At
a Century's Ending: Reflections, 1982-95 (1997).
George
Kennan died on 17th March, 2005.
(1)
George Kennan, document sent to Harry S. Truman
(22nd February, 1946)
At the bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional
and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was
insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast
exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was
added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West,
fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies
in that area.
Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively
archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological systems
of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign
penetration, feared direct contact between the Western world and their
own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world
without or if foreigners learned truth about world within...
World communism is like
a malignant parasite, which feeds only on diseased tissue. This is
the point at which domestic and foreign policies meet. Every courageous
and incisive measure to solve the internal problems of our own society,
to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and the community spirit
of our own people is a diplomatic victory over Moscow, worth a thousand
diplomatic notes and joint communiqués.
(2)
George Kennan, Foreign Affairs Journal (July, 1947)
It
is clear that the main element of any United States policy towards
the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and
vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. It is clear
that the United States cannot expect in the foreseeable future to
enjoy political intimacy with the Soviet regime. It must continue
to regard the Soviet Union as a rival, not a partner, in the political
arena. It must continue to expect that Soviet policies will reflect
no abstract love of peace and stability, no real faith in the possibility
of a permanent happy coexistence of the socialist and capitalist worlds,
but rather a cautious, persistent pressure towards towards the disruption
and weakening of all rival influence and rival power.
(3)
Harold Jackson, George
Kennan, The Guardian (19th March, 2005)
There
are not many people who can be said to have changed the shape of the
age they lived in, but the American diplomat George Kennan, who has
died aged 101, was certainly one of them. Virtually singlehandedly,
he established the policy which controlled both sides of the cold
war for more than 40 years.
The irony of the US "containment" approach towards the Soviet
Union, which Kennan proposed in 1947, was that it assumed exactly
the opposite shape to that which he thought he had recommended. The
concept emerged from a tiny seed planted when an unknown US Treasury
official sent a message to the American embassy in Moscow asking why
the Russians were being difficult at the World Bank. The official
could never have anticipated the page-upon-page response which clattered
into the state department telex room on the afternoon of February
22 1946.
The then US ambassador,
Averell Harriman, was on leave and Kennan had been left in charge.
"The occasion, to be sure, was trivial," he acknowledged
later, "but the implications of the query were not. Here was
a case where nothing but the whole truth would do. They had asked
for it. Now, by God, they would have it."
Kennan divided his message
into five parts so that "each could pass as a separate telegram,
and it would not look so outrageously long". What has gone into
history as the Long Telegram ran to 8,000 words and triggered a seismic
change in superpower relations.
It was a detailed assessment
of the psychology of the postwar Soviet regime, and recommended a
number of principles to guide Washington's dealings with the Kremlin.
Citing Stalin's belief that peaceful coexistence with the west was
impossible because of its hostile encirclement of his country, Kennan
stressed the Soviet dictator's determination to do everything to advance
Soviet might and, simultaneously, reduce the strength of capitalist
countries.
He counselled that "this
does not represent the natural outlook of the Russian people, who
are, by and large, friendly to the outside world, eager for experience
of it, eager to measure against it the talents they are conscious
of possessing, eager, above all, to live in peace and enjoy the fruits
of their own labour."
But the US was obliged
to deal with a ruling Soviet elite that would cleave firmly to Stalin's
line. These apparatchiks, Kennan argued, lived in an atmosphere of
oriental secrecy, with no belief in objective truth. "There is
good reason to suspect that this government is actually a conspiracy
within a conspiracy and I, for one, am reluctant to believe that Stalin
himself receives anything like an objective picture of the outside
world," he added.
The most effective American
response to this situation, he went on, depended on the health of
its own society. "World communism is like a malignant parasite,
which feeds only on diseased tissue. This is the point at which domestic
and foreign policies meet. Every courageous and incisive measure to
solve the internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence,
discipline, morale and the community spirit of our own people is a
diplomatic victory over Moscow, worth a thousand diplomatic notes
and joint communiques."
The telegram caused a sensation
in Washington, where it was widely circulated. Its impact on the secretary
of state, Dean Acheson, led to Kennan's swift appointment as director
of foreign policy planning.
(4)
Boston
Globe (19th March, 2005)
Kennan
was an old-fashioned conservative, not a neo-conservative who would
use force to impose an American political gospel around the world.
He lamented the cult of economic growth, the paving over of nature,
the Vietnam War, and the notion that security emanates from a nuclear
arsenal that could never be used. His aim was to find the most frugal
means for preserving the preeminent power of the United States after
World War II.
''This whole tendency to
see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers
to a great part of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious,
and undesirable," Kennan said in a 1999 interview. ''I would
like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy
of democracy and human rights. I submit that governments should deal
with other governments as such and should avoid unnecessary involvement,
particularly personal involvement, with their leaders." One need
only recall President Bush's imprudent talk of peering into the pure
soul of Russia's President Vladimir Putin to realize that nothing
could be more antithetical to the practice of the current Bush administration.
Kennan's original outlines
of a containment policy in his famous Long Telegram of 1946 and in
his article the following year in the journal Foreign Affairs assumed
that the Soviet system was unsustainable, that schisms were inevitable
among the disparate communist regimes in Moscow, Beijing, and Belgrade,
and that if America and its allies waged a patient political struggle
they would inevitably outlast the Soviets. Kennan's drive was not
to change the governments in other countries but to keep unavoidable
enmities with foreign powers from changing America.
''We have about 50 percent
of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population,"
Kennan wrote in a Policy Planning Study of 1948. ''In this situation,
we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task
in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which
will permit us to maintain this position of disparity."
Kennan was an unabashed
elitist and an unsentimental realist in his counsel to statesmen.
But when compared with the self-deluding misuse of American power
that passes for conservatism today, Kennan's lucid view of the world
inspires nostalgia.
(5)
Milwaukee
J ournal Sentinel (18th March, 2005)
George
Kennan, the Milwaukee-born scholar-diplomat who died at age 101 Thursday,
lived a life not only of rare accomplishment but of paradox. As the
author of a policy that urged the political "containment"
of the Soviet Union, he was probably the 20th century's most famous
U.S. expert on Russia. Yet throughout his long life, he remained shy,
introverted and uncomfortable in the limelight. Although he was widely
and justly honored for his diplomatic and literary achievements, he
always regarded himself as an unappreciated outsider. His two-volume
memoirs are replete with wrenching complaints about the unwillingness
of Washington to hear and heed his advice. So out of place did he
feel that he described himself as a "guest of one's time and
not a member of its household."
That brief quote provides
a small window not only into Kennan's loneliness and detachment but
into the elegance and candor he brought to the writing of his 22 books.
It is not surprising that historian John Lewis Gaddis, who is preparing
a biography of the diplomat, said Kennan saw himself as a literary figure.
"He would have loved to have been a poet, a novelist." No
one can read Kennan's memoirs without seeing the author as a fully human
being, very much in love with his country and his family and deeply
tormented by what he thought was the futility of reasoned argument and
the growth of militarism throughout the world.
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