George F. Kennan: “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”

About the Author

George Frost Kennan, acclaimed as the chief architect of U.S. cold war strategy and policy, was born on February 16, 1904, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He attended St. John's Northwestern Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin, and studied at Princeton University, where he earned his B.A. in 1925. After graduating, Kennan joined the Foreign Service, which he later described as the first and last sensible decision he ever made regarding his career. Kennan, who had a natural aptitude for languages, learned that his service entitled him to undertake graduate work without leaving the Foreign Service, so he arranged to study in Berlin, where he focused on Russian and Russian history. The polyglot Kennan also mastered German, French, Polish, Czech, Portuguese, and Norwegian.

Kennan spent several years at the end of World War II trying to convince U.S. policy makers that it was naive to expect the friendly relations between the United States and the USSR to continue, to no effect. Only when the USSR spurned the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, two international organizations established at the end of World War II to expedite the economic recovery of Europe and the international stability of currency markets, did Kennan’s writings find a receptive audience. His famous “Long Telegram” and “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” made Kennan's career and reputation and became foundational documents of postwar U.S. foreign policy. Still, to the end of his life, Kennan lamented that what he had intended as political containment was turned into military containment, spawning the nuclear arms race, which he decried as foolish and dangerous. Kennan’s later writings bemoan this overemphasis on the military aspects of containment, particularly in his opposition to the Vietnam War and his abiding opposition to the nuclear arms race.

The “Long Telegram” and “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” helped form the basis for the Truman Doctrine, President Harry Truman's declaration that the United States would provide economic and military support to free peoples facing either external military threats or internal insurrections by armed—and presumably Communist—minorities. Kennan was also the principal intellectual architect of the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, the economic assistance plan designed to rebuild the war-torn European economies, which built on ideas articulated in these two documents. An outspoken critic of what he called hysterical anti-Communism, Kennan spoke out publicly against the Red Scare, the anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940s and 1950s, led by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, that resulted in witch hunts, blacklisting, and other social and professional persecution of suspected Communists.

As a policy planner, Kennan held to his belief that a coherent foreign policy could not be formed by focusing solely on specific threats but had to consider events from a worldwide perspective. Only on the basis of such a perspective, Kennan argued, could specific policies be formed and evaluated in terms of their projected benefits and expected costs, and he dedicated considerable energies toward efforts in this direction. At the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Kennan continued to work on policy matters, ultimately writing more than twenty books, two of which won Pulitzer Prizes, and dozens of major articles and essays. He died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2005.