Kennan, the shy, sensitive outsider

This column originally ran in the Feb. 20, 2004 issue of the 'Prince,' during George Kennan's 100th birthday celebration.

George Kennan '25, the great statesman and visionary, whose 100th birthday Princeton celebrates this week, was a miserable outcast as an undergraduate. His experience is worth remembering, especially two weeks after Bicker, when some students are feeling rejected and scorned.

Kennan was a shy, sensitive boy from the Midwest when he arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1921, still brooding over his homosexual yearnings for a handsome basketball player he had admired from afar in high school. (His chief distinction at high school was "class poet," not necessarily an honor at the military school to which he had been sent by his father, mostly to get him away from the feminizing influence of his three sisters.) Kennan chose Princeton after reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's portrayal of the college in "This Side of Paradise," beckoned by "its lazy beauty, its half-grasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of its rushes, the prosperous big game crowds . . ."

During his first week as a freshman, Kennan asked the time of another boy. Taking a drag on his cigarette, the student blew the smoke in Kennan's face and walked away. "This little touch, it just seared me," Kennan recalled more than 50 years later. Kennan's time at Princeton was "not exactly the sort of experience reflected in "This Side of Paradise," he noted in his memoirs. He was a social pariah, dreamy and isolated. "I may have been the most undistinguished student Princeton ever had," he recalled years later, after he had become a trustee of the University.

Kennan applied for the Foreign Service because he decided that law school was too expensive. He was sure he would fail the exams. When he passed, he felt hopelessly out of place. The Foreign Service in the 1920s was, in the proud words of one member, "a pretty good club," drawn mostly from Harvard, Princeton and Yale. No less than 75 percent came from eastern prep schools, mainly Groton and St. Paul's.

"Almost everyone got annoyed with Kennan after they first got to know him," recalled one of his colleagues, Loy Henderson. "He was so engrossed in his own ideas that he never learned to go along or get along. Not one of us took George's ideas as seriously as George did." But, Henderson added, "We knew that someday people would have to."

That day arrived in late 1946. Kennan, a young diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, wrote his famous "Long Telegram," warning that the Kremlin, America's ally-of-necessity in World War II, had become a great threat to the West. Soviet power, Kennan wrote, is "impervious to the logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to the logic of force." The Kremlin was likely to back down "when strong resistance is encountered at any point."

Kennan's telegram electrified Washington, which had been growing increasingly uneasy about the rise of Soviet power. "My reputation was made," Kennan exulted. "My voice now carried." He quickly became known to the public as an oracle of foreign policy by penning an article, "The Source of Soviet Conduct," published in the influential journal "Foreign Affairs" in the summer of 1947. (Kennan signed the article only as "X," but his identity soon leaked out.")

Kennan was installed as the chief of Policy Planning at the State Department, where he wrote prescient papers, including one warning against the United States getting drawn into a land war in Asia. The New York Times dubbed him, "America's global planner." It was Kennan who gave American policy a one-word name — "containment" — a term that endured for the next half century, until the Soviet Union collapsed (which Kennan also predicted).

Typically, Kennan remained a somewhat dissatisfied, gloomy loner. He despaired when the war hawks hyped his warning and used them as an excuse to push for military confrontation. And he was never really easy with the Washington establishment, though he was embraced by it. (One Washington hostess recalled him sitting apart from a raucous poker game, talking morosely about his unfortunate youth, the military academy, and his social slights at Princeton.) Kennan was happier (and better suited) as a thinker of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton than he was in the government. He has never stopped warning against a Pax Americana born of hubris and misguided idealism. He remained, by choice, an outsider. "To the extent that I was accepted among those in the Establishment, it was in a role they cast for me, rather than because of who I really was," he reflected some 20 years ago, as he sat, erect and seemingly ageless, in a leather armchair where I interviewed him at Manhattan's Century club. "I like to think, too, that this was my own choice."

Evan Thomas, an editor at Newsweek, is was a visiting professor at Princeton when this column first ran. He is the coauthor of "The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made."