The Foreign Service Journal, February 2004

cy to emerge from the U.S. Foreign Service during its 80 years. Kennan joined the Foreign Service in 1926, just two years after the Rogers Act was signed. As he explains below, the Service was then still very much in transition, from the old upper-crust diplomatic corps to a more democratic institution that could welcome a young man like him, a Milwaukee lawyer’s son. Kennan was posted to Germany and the Baltic states, then served in Moscow with the first U.S. mission after the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933. He returned to Moscow in 1944, and while serving in the embassy wrote his famous “Long Telegram” to the State Department on the Soviet worldview, followed by a 1947 article in Foreign Affairs , “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” under the pseudonym “Mr. X.” Kennan urged a sober view of ideologically based Soviet expan- sionism, and coined the term “containment” as an appropriate Western response. Kennan is considered by many to have established the conceptual framework for U.S. policy during the Cold War — so much so, that when that era ended in the early 1990s, many observers asked who would be the “new Kennan” and establish a paradigm for the post-Cold War world. That question is still unanswered. Secretary of State George Marshall selected Kennan in 1947 to be the first director of the department’s new Policy Planning Staff. In 1952, Kennan served briefly as ambassador to the Soviet Union, and retired from the Foreign Service the next year. Soon thereafter, Kennan was appointed a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a position he has held ever since, except for a stint as ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1961 to 1963. He has written numerous works on foreign policy and diplomatic history, as well as several mem- oirs. His book Russia Leaves the War won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. When we visited Kennan at his home in Princeton in December 1998, we found him, at age 94, charming, funny, self-assured and in full command of his material. When Mrs. Kennan, concerned for his health, attempt- ed to cut the interview short, Kennan objected, “We’ve only gotten started! We’ll need at least a half-hour more.” Perhaps we’ve found the Kennan for the new era. Escaping Milwaukee Foreign Service Journal: As you know, this interview is occasioned in part by the upcoming 75th anniver- sary of the modern Foreign Service. George F. Kennan : It’s also occasioned by the fact that I’m probably the oldest living retired member of the Foreign Service. I don’t know if there are any older. At any rate, if anybody is, they’re not very active. FSJ : What first drew you to the Foreign Service, as a young man fresh out of Princeton? GFK : I came from Milwaukee, Wis., but I hadn’t lived there since I was 13, because I was sent away to military school for four years. There followed those four years in Princeton. At Princeton I took a regular humanities course with an emphasis on modern history. There came a man from the State Department in Washington who spoke to those of us that might be interested in the Foreign Service. I had very few ties to Milwaukee at that time, and no particular desire to return. When I left college, I sensed, quite correctly, that I wasn’t really ready to make decisions about my future. The thought of going back to Milwaukee … I was afraid of getting caught there, with a job, a wife, a home and so forth, and never being able to get away from it. What the man told us about the State Department and the Foreign Service interested me, and so I applied. That meant, in those days, several months in Washington, practically an academic year of tutoring, because the Foreign Service exam demanded of you things you did not always have. FSJ : Even if one had done well at Princeton? GFK : Even if one had done well at Princeton. They did want things about the United States and American affairs and especially commerce and geography and all of that. So, like a number of other chaps, I did take the tutoring course given by a great big, often drunken, Scots scholar but a very wonderful teacher and an amaz- F O C U S 14 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 4 I must say that I loved the Service and the life and what it gave me. Bob Guldin, a former editor of the Foreign Service Journal, is now a free-lance writer and editor.