The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2015

46 JULY-AUGUST 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL George Frost Kennan (1904-2005), scholar, diplomat and historian, is perhaps best known for his role in developing U.S. foreign policy in the immediate aftermath of World War II. In response to a State Department request for an explanation of Soviet behavior in early 1946, Kennan traced the basic features, background and prospects of Soviet foreign policy and the implications for American policy in a memo now known as the “Long Telegram.” The most famous of all his writings, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” was published in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs under the authorship of “X.” In that article, Kennan outlined the policy of “containment” that would guide U.S. relations with the Soviet Union for the next four decades. During a distinguished Foreign Service career from 1926 to 1953, Kennan served in Geneva, Hamburg, Tallinn, Riga and, later, Prague, Berlin, Lisbon and London. In 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union, Kennan accompanied the new ambassador, William C. Bullitt Jr., to establish the embassy in Moscow, serving there for four years. In July 1944, he returned to Moscow as Ambassador Averell Harriman’s deputy chief of mission. Subsequently, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff in the Department of State from 1947 to 1949, ambassador to the USSR in 1952 and ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1961 to 1963. Kennan retired from the Foreign Service in 1953, and in 1956 joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he taught, researched and wrote for the rest of his life. His first book, American Diplomacy , 1900–1950 (1951), was praised on both literary and historiographical grounds, and he won Pulitzer Prizes for two later works, Russia Leaves the War (1956) and Memoirs: 1925–1950 (1967). His subsequent publications continued to stir interest because his views, if sometimes out of step with official U.S. policy—including his prediction of the demise of the USSR—were often vindicated by his- tory. Even when they weren’t, he was recognized for having raised the level of public discourse. Ambassador Kennan served as president of AFSA from 1950 to 1951. This piece, excerpted from a speech he delivered at AFSA on March 30, 1961, was published in The Foreign Service Reader (AFSA, 1997). The full transcript of the speech was published in the May 1961 Foreign Service Journal . T his is the classic function of diplomacy: to effect the communication between one’s own government and other governments or individuals abroad, and to do this with maximum accuracy, imagination, tact and good sense. Of course, this is not all there is, or not all there is on the surface. But at the bottom of almost every facet of Foreign Service work, if you analyze it, you will find, I think, that what is essentially at stake is this process of communication. In 1961, the legendary diplomat talked with his colleagues at AFSA about the profession of diplomacy. FOCUS ON DIPLOMACY: THE PROFESSION GEORGE KENNAN SPEAKS On Diplomacy As a Profession