The Foreign Service Journal, February 2004

22 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 eorge F. Kennan must surely be numbered among the most notable members of the Foreign Service of the United States. His reputation and significance derive primarily from his service as director of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department from 1947 to 1949. His role there in for- mulating the so-called containment doctrine led no less an observer than Henry Kissinger to suggest that Kennan “came as close to authoring the diplomatic doc- trine of his era as any diplomat in our history.” Whatever the merits of this assessment — it warrants some examination and revision — it certainly is widely shared. Kennan has been variously dubbed “the archi- tect of containment,” “the great theorist of contain- ment,” and “the founding father of containment.” His name remains inextricably linked to the enormously cre- ative burst of policy-making during the Truman adminis- tration that set the main lines of American foreign poli- cy for over a generation. Few predicted a career as a diplomat for the lonely, awkward and diffident boy who grew up in Milwaukee in the first decade of the twentieth century. Kennan’s edu- cation, first at St. John’s Military Academy and then at Princeton, hardly prepared him for this demanding occupation. He left Princeton in 1925 after four undis- tinguished years of study without any well-formed sense of his calling. Nonetheless, he decided to try for the newly formed Foreign Service and, somewhat to his sur- prise, he passed the qualifying examination. Over a quarter-century of service as a diplomat lay ahead. Few diplomats rise in meteoric fashion and Kennan was not numbered among the chosen few. He had a long road to travel before he would exert real influence over policy. Beginning in the fall of 1926 he studied for seven months at the Foreign Service School in Washington, before setting off to serve in the lowly post of vice consul, first in Geneva and then in Hamburg. He settled reasonably adeptly into the role and persona of the diplomat, writing home to his father that he “welcomed the opportuni- ty to assume a new personality behind which the old introverted one could retire.” In 1928 the young diplomat gained selection for a training program for language specialists that gave him three years of graduate study in Europe while remain- ing in the Foreign Service. Of course, he chose to study Russian, influenced by the example of his grand- father’s cousin and his own namesake, who had explored Siberia and written an acclaimed account of the Czarist prison system in the late 19th century. G EORGE K ENNAN ’ S CAREER SPANNED ONLY A QUARTER - CENTURY . Y ET HIS NAME REMAINS INEXTRICABLY LINKED TO THE CREATIVE BURST OF POLICY - MAKING DURING THE T RUMAN ADMINISTRATION . B Y W ILSON D. M ISCAMBLE , C.S.C. F O C U S O N G E O R G E K E N N A N G G EORGE K ENNAN : A L IFE IN THE F OREIGN S ERVICE