Obituary: George Kennan

Obituary: George Kennan
Veteran diplomat and historian who shaped US policy towards the Soviet
Union for more than 40 years

Harold Jackson, Saturday March 19, 2005, The Guardian

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.

There was, however, no mention in the Long Telegram of the key strategy for which Kennan has gone down in history. The notion of containment only emerged 17 months later, when Foreign Affairs magazine carried Kennan's public exposition of his analysis, written under the pseudonym "X". Much of this second essay was simply a more elegant version of the Long Telegram, but Kennan's reflections after his return to Washington had led him to make what turned out to be a world-shaking addition.

He first described Soviet political policy as a fluid stream, in which the main concern was to ensure it filled every available nook and cranny of world power. "But," he continued, "if it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts these philosophically and accommodates itself to them ... In these circumstances, it is clear that the main elements of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be
that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

When he penned that sentence, Kennan may well have had in mind something allied to the self-improvement policy advocated at the end of his Long Telegram. At the time, however, his diplomatic message remained locked in the state department archives. The public response to the idea of containment was, therefore, entirely in military terms.

Decades later, Kennan acknowledged how jolted he had been by this reaction. He said he had never thought the Russians had military designs on America; his idea, as originally outlined in the Long Telegram, had been to concentrate on political confrontation. "The real response," he remarked ruefully, "was the Marshall Plan" (announced in July 1947, just a month after the "X" article had appeared).

At this distance, however, his attitude seems strangely naive, given the disastrous diplomatic climate of the period. While the US and Britain had largely demobilised, the Soviet Union, though still without nuclear weapons, was maintaining a vast standing army in the centre of Europe. Winston Churchill's "iron curtain" speech of March 1946 - echoed, a few months later, by a similar attack from the US secretary of state, James Byrne - had signalled the end of the wartime alliance with Moscow.

Having unilaterally decided to combine the US, British and French occupation zones in Germany, the west had, unsurprisingly, failed to make progress in its talks with the Russians about a German peace treaty. President Harry Truman had proclaimed America's defence of Greece and Turkey against communist insurgents, and promised help for any other threatened nations. Finally, Stalin's rejection of Marshall aid had set the seal on the cold war division of Europe.

Against this background there was not the slightest chance of a purely diplomatic response to Stalin; even less was it likely in the face of the 1948-49 Soviet blockade of Berlin and the ensuing western airlift. With that blockade still under way, Nato had been brought into being, followed by the elections from which the West German republic emerged
and Stalin's retaliatory creation of the German Democratic Republic. The shape of containment as a military strategy had been firmly fixed.

Kennan's curious misreading of America's likely domestic response probably stemmed from his background, and the fact that he had spent little of his adult life at home. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he was something of a loner from his earliest years. After graduating from St John's Military Academy, he went to read history, with particular emphasis on modern European diplomacy, at Princeton University.

He joined the US foreign service in 1926, at the age of 24, and was almost immediately appointed vice-consul in Geneva. America still had no diplomatic relations with the fledgling Soviet Union, so it used surrounding capitals as listening posts.

From Geneva, Kennan was transferred, in quick succession, to Berlin, Tallinn and Riga to piece together what was happening in Moscow. In 1929, the state department decided to train him formally for the job, and sent him to the University of Berlin, where he learned Russian and studied that country's culture and thought.

In November 1933, when the newly elected President Roosevelt established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, Kennan became third secretary at the US embassy in Moscow. But events in central Europe rapidly engaged Washington's interest rather more, and he was moved, first, to Vienna, then to Prague, and finally to Berlin, where, as first secretary, he reported on Hitler's steady march through Europe and into the Soviet Union.

When America entered the war in December 1941, the Nazis interned Kennan for five months. Upon his release, he was reassigned to Lisbon, then a notorious espionage centre. However, as US relations with Stalin assumed paramount importance, in 1944 he returned to Moscow as minister-counsellor and chargé d'affaires.

While still in Berlin, Kennan had expressed grave reservations to his fellow diplomat, Loy Henderson, about America's alliance with Russia. He thought that welcoming the Soviet Union as a defender of democracy could only identify the US "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".

On his return to Moscow, he found that his warnings to treat Stalin with circumspection had been ignored in Washington, so he reiterated them when the Red army failed to support the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis in 1944. "This was the point at which we should have insisted on a thorough-going exploration of Soviet intentions with regard to the future of the remainder of Europe," he cabled.

Kennan blamed Roosevelt for ignoring the warnings, saying that, towards the end of his life, the ailing US president had clung to a concept of Stalin's personality that was far below his normal quality of statesmanship. It was against this background, and after an absence of some 20 years, that Kennan returned home, at the age of 43, to direct foreign policy planning.

His career prospered in the early years, but the shadow of John Foster Dulles soon fell across it. Under the patronage of the powerful Senator Vandenberg, Dulles (a dyed-in-the-wool Republican) had improbably been appointed as a foreign policy adviser by the Truman ad-ministration. He and Kennan immediately fell out over the question of recognising communist China - Dulles leaked to a reporter the substance of their secret discussions on the issue to demonstrate how dangerous an official Kennan had become.

In 1949, Kennan resigned his policy planning post to become the state department's counsellor, but decided, the following year, to join the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In 1952, however, Truman made him ambassador to Moscow, where he immediately fell victim to Stalin's growing paranoia. When he complained about the isolation the Russians were imposing on western diplomats, he was unceremoniously thrown out.

In America, meanwhile, the detonation of the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon in September 1949, and the outbreak of the Korean war nine months later, precipitated an anti-communist frenzy from which Senator Joe McCarthy emerged with his infamous list of "a great many known communists" employed by the state department.

Kennan returned to Washington at the height of McCarthy's campaign, to find himself among those in the firing line. He strongly opposed the new defence doctrine NSC-68, in which the US national security council defined containment as "a policy of calculated and gradual coercion". He had also argued against the creation of Nato, and maintained that developments in Korea and Vietnam sprang from nationalism rather than Marxism.

President Eisenhower's selection of Dulles as his secretary of state in 1953 spelled the beginning of the end. After McCarthy had denounced Kennan as "a commie lover", Dulles called him in to say that the administration "don't seem to have a niche for you". This was not a problem John Foster's brother Allen Dulles shared; as director of the CIA, he offered Kennan any job he wanted.

When Kennan left the state department, no one in the new Republican administration even acknowledged his years of public service. He returned to Princeton as professor of historical studies and, apart from a further ambassadorial stint in Yugoslavia for the Kennedy administration from 1961 to 1963, passed the rest of his long life writing history and mordantly observing the social and political turns of his nation.

Among his 17 books were Russia Leaves The War (1956), which won a Pulitzer prize and the National Book award, and two volumes of memoirs. The first, published in 1967 and covering the period from 1925 to 1950, won a Pulitzer and the National Book award; the second, taking the story up to 1963, came out in 1972. Sketches From A Life appeared in 1989. His awards included the Presidential Medal Of Freedom in 1989.

Apparently appalled by the way containment had turned out, Kennan became a forceful advocate of superpower disengagement, allied to progressive disarmament. He also despaired of a cultural evolution which had turned out so wildly differently from that he had championed in the Long Telegram.

At the age of 95, he complained to the New York Review of Books that "we export to anyone who can buy it or steal it the cheapest, silliest, and most disreputable manifestations of our culture. No wonder that these effusions become the laughing stock of intelligent and sensitive people the world over."

In 1931, Kennan married Annelise Sorensen, a Norwegian he had met in Berlin. She survives him, as do their son and three daughters.

George Frost Kennan, diplomat and historian, born February 16 1904; died March 17 2005.

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