Kennan in a class of his own

It's hard for us to imagine the world of George F. Kennan '25 as anything but newsreel footage. The Long Telegram, the Marshall Plan, the vocabulary of "containment" and "rollback": these are the relics of the early Cold War, a historical moment long since incorporated into high school history textbooks. Even if Kennan has never quite faded into history at Princeton — after all, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell celebrated the diplomat's 100th birthday with a high-profile speech on campus last year — we suspect that most University students are only dimly aware of the life he lived.

Kennan was no generic Cold Warrior. He hated Communism's intolerance for religious belief, but he also protested the use of his "containment" strategy to justify a military buildup, and warned against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Committed to democratic ideals, but reluctant to use force, Kennan never confused the moral urgency of his aims with the practical need to conserve American power.

That sense of balance, calibrated in the age of communism, is far from irrelevant to the age of terrorism we live in today. But Kennan leaves us with another lesson as well, one with special resonance for Princeton students. He may have been miserable as an undergraduate, but Kennan never stopped looking at the world through the lens of a scholar. His famed Long Telegram is at once a dissection of Marxist-Leninist theory, a history capsule of the Soviet Union and a prescription for geopolitical strategy. A poet and diarist, fluent in eight languages, Kennan was far better at academics than politics, which is one reason he left the State Department in 1953. But he never lost faith in the power of reason to shape sound policy or to help navigate the challenges of the modern world.

At Alumni Day in 1953, Kennan argued that the humanistic perspective provided by an education in the liberal arts is necessary to understand the complexities of international politics. "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. These may not be the cheeriest words, and they may not agree with our picture of human nature. But they remind us that Kennan ultimately viewed his years at Princeton as something more than a credential-conferring steppingstone. At a university where public service-oriented students rarely venture beyond the confines of Woody Woo or Corwin Hall, George Kennan should be remembered as a model of an intellectual adventurer.

As the challenges of America's place in the world grow ever more urgent, Kennan's life reminds us of the way forward. A pragmatic moralist and scholarly diplomat, he thought in terms of big ideas, and he always looked to the world beyond Princeton.