Looking back at Kennan's influence

When Secretary of State Colin Powell offers a tribute to George F. Kennan '25 this morning, he will honor a man who shaped U.S. Cold War policy at a critical juncture in history.

He will also celebrate a Princetonian who often returned to his alma mater in the 1950s and 1960s, revealing a sense of moral purpose in speeches and interviews that the outside world rarely saw.

Beyond FitzRandolph Gate, Kennan is best known for crafting the so-called Long Telegram while a junior U.S. diplomat in Moscow in 1946. The political analysis, sent to Kennan's State Department superiors in Washington, D.C., characterized Stalin's regime as an expansionist, ideologically driven threat to the United States, and recommended the "containment" approach that became the cornerstone of foreign policy for half a century.

At least that is how the history has long been told. But Kennan often hinted later that he meant to suggest only political and economic policies to contain Soviet expansion, and that he regretted the use of military power to achieve that goal.

In a 1964 interview with the 'Prince,' Kennan reiterated the Long Telegram's message, but seemed determined to argue that the U.S.S.R. did not represent a military threat.

"The Russians, he said, have a semi-religious ideology and would like to see it prevail in the world," the 'Prince' reporter Daniel Winterbottom '66 wrote. "But," Kennan added, "there's a vast difference between that and intending to make it prevail at all costs."

Disagreement over the course of containment may have played a role in Kennan's departure from the foreign service in 1950. That same year Kennan joined the Institute for Advanced Study, where he remained, with brief interruptions, for more than two decades.

The arrival of Kennan, who still lives in Princeton, caught the attention of the University. Though the Long Telegram had been published in the journal "Foreign Affairs" in 1948 under the pseudonym "X," the identity of its author was no secret. Kennan quickly gained fame as a statesman and scholar.

At Princeton, Kennan kept a carrel on the B-floor of Firestone Library and spoke on everything from presidential politics to Soviet power struggles to Christianity.

He also spoke at Alumni Day in 1953, stressing the importance of a humanistic education. "The student needs to acquaint himself with the behavior of individual man and such basic impulses as national feeling, charity, ambition, fear, jealousy, egotism and group attachment," he said.

Having lived under both Nazism and Communism as a diplomat, Kennan said he knew that "totalitarian systems abrogate all moral principles other than that of 'usefulness to the movement.'"

And that, said the man who laid the cornerstone of Cold War policy, is why the fight against the Soviet Union, however difficult, was noble.