The man who provided the conceptual framework for the United States’ postwar Cold War policy of containing communism is dead.
His name: George Kennan, who died at 101. The New York Times has an extensive bio which notes:
George F. Kennan, the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy of his generation to shape United States policy during the cold war, died on Thursday night in Princeton, N.J. He was 101.
Mr. Kennan was the man to whom the White House and the Pentagon turned when they sought to understand the Soviet Union after World War II. He conceived the cold-war policy of containment, the idea that the United States should stop the global spread of Communism by diplomacy, politics, and covert action – by any means short of war.
As the State Department’s first policy planning chief in the late 1940’s, serving Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Mr. Kennan was an intellectual architect of the Marshall Plan, which sent billions of dollars of American aid to nations devastated by World War II. At the same time, he conceived a secret “political warfare” unit that aimed to roll back Communism, not merely contain it. His brainchild became the covert-operations directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency.
If you’re a student of history, you know that the Marshall Plan was a cornerstone of strengthening freedom in the wake of the devastation of World War II. Even today, it doesn’t have many detractors. Kennan is still criticized in some quarters today for the CIA operations operations and parts of his containment policy — but he’s vindicated by history since in the end the Eastern European and Soviet Union Communist regimes died…leaving China and Cuba as the most notable survivors. More:
Though Mr. Kennan left the foreign service more than half a century ago, he continued to be a leading thinker in international affairs until his death. Since the 1950’s he had been associated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was most recently a professor emeritus.
By the end of his long, productive life, Mr. Kennan had become a phenomenon in international affairs, with seminars held and books written to debate and analyze his extraordinary influence on American policy during the cold war. He was the author of 17 books, two of them Pulitzer Prize-winners, and countless articles in leading journals.
His writing, from classified cables to memoirs, was the force that made him “the nearest thing to a legend that this country’s diplomatic service has ever produced,” in the words of the historian Ronald Steel.
“He’ll be remembered as a diplomatist and a grand strategist,” said John Lewis Gaddis, a leading historian of the cold war, who is preparing a biography of Mr. Kennan.
Indeed, he was the strategist who designed the grand plan that the high-profile politicos articulated and put into action. And he lived to see his plans work.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.