George F. Kennan

Kennan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Kossuth Kent Kennan, a lawyer specializing in tax law, and Florence James Kennan. His father was a descendant of impoverished Scots-Irish settlers from 18th-century Connecticut and Massachusetts, and had been named after the Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth (1802–1894). His mother died two months after his birth due to peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, though Kennan long believed that she died after giving birth to him. The boy always lamented not having a mother. He was never close to his father or stepmother; however, he was close to his older sisters.

At the age of eight, Kennan went to Germany to stay with his stepmother in order to learn German. During the summers of 1915 and 1916, he attended Camp Highlands in Sayner, Wisconsin, then known as the Wisconsin Highlands Summer Camp. He attended St. John's Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin, and arrived at Princeton University in the second half of 1921. Unaccustomed to the elite atmosphere of the Ivy League, the shy and introverted Kennan found his undergraduate years difficult and lonely.

After receiving his bachelor's degree in history in 1925, Kennan considered applying to law school, but decided it was too expensive and instead opted to apply to the newly formed United States Foreign Service. He passed the qualifying examination and after seven months of study at the Foreign Service School in Washington, he obtained his first job as a vice consul in Geneva, Switzerland. Within a year, he was transferred to a post in Hamburg, Germany. In 1928, Kennan considered quitting the Foreign Service to return to a university for graduate studies. Instead, he was selected for a linguist training program that would give him three years of graduate-level study without having to quit the service.

In 1929, Kennan began his program in history, politics, culture, and the Russian language at the Oriental Institute of the University of Berlin. In doing so, he followed in the footsteps of his grandfather's younger cousin, George Kennan (1845–1924), a major 19th century expert on Imperial Russia and author of Siberia and the Exile System, a well-received 1891 account of the Tsarist prison system. During the course of his diplomatic career, Kennan would master a number of other languages, including German, French, Polish, Czech, Portuguese, and Norwegian.

In 1931, Kennan was stationed at the legation in Riga, Latvia, where, as third secretary, he worked on Soviet economic affairs. From his job, Kennan "grew to mature interest in Russian affairs". When the U.S. began formal diplomacy with the Soviet government during 1933 after the election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennan accompanied Ambassador William C. Bullitt to Moscow. By the mid-1930s, Kennan was among the professionally trained Russian experts of the staff of the United States Embassy in Moscow, along with Charles E. Bohlen and Loy W. Henderson. These officials had been influenced by the long-time director of the State Department's division of East European Affairs, Robert F. Kelley. They believed that there was little basis for cooperation with the Soviet Union, even against potential adversaries. Meanwhile, Kennan studied Stalin's Great Purge, which would affect his opinion of the internal dynamics of the Soviet regime for the rest of his life.

Kennan found himself in strong disagreement with Joseph E. …

In 1957 Kennan was invited by the BBC to give the annual Reith Lectures, a series of six radio lectures which were titled Russia, the Atom and the West. These covered the history, effect, and possible consequences of relations between Russia and the West. After the end of his brief ambassadorial post in Yugoslavia during 1963, Kennan spent the rest of his life in academe, becoming a major realist critic of U.S. foreign policy. Having spent 18 months as a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) between 1950 and 1952, Kennan joined the faculty of the institute's School of Historical Studies in 1956, and spent the rest of his life there.

During the 1960s, Kennan criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam, arguing that the United States had little vital interest in the region. In February 1966, Kennan testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the request of the committee's chairman, Senator J. William Fulbright, where he stated that the "preoccupation" with Vietnam was undermining U.S. global leadership. He accused the administration of Lyndon Johnson of distorting his policies into a purely military approach. President Johnson was so annoyed by the hearings called by his friend-turned-foe Fulbright that he tried to upstage them by holding a sudden and unannounced summit in Honolulu starting on 5 February 1966 with Chief of State Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and Prime Minister Nguyễn Cao Kỳ of South Vietnam, where he declared that the United States was making excellent progress in Vietnam and was committed to social and economic reforms. …

During his career at the IAS, Kennan wrote seventeen books and scores of articles on international relations. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the National Book Award for Nonfiction, the Bancroft Prize, and the Francis Parkman Prize for Russia Leaves the War, published in 1956. He again won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1968 for Memoirs, 1925–1950. A second volume, taking his reminiscences up to 1963 was published in 1972. Among his other works were American Diplomacy, 1900–1950, Sketches from a Life, published in 1989, and Around the Cragged Hill in 1993.

His properly historical works amount to a six-volume account of the relations between Russia and the West from 1875 to his own time; the period from 1894 to 1914 was planned but not completed. He was chiefly concerned with:

Kennan had a low opinion of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, arguing in 1975: "For all his charm, political skill, and able wartime leadership, when it came to foreign policy Roosevelt was a superficial, ignorant dilettante, a man with a severely limited intellectual horizon."

During his career, Kennan received a number of awards and honors. As a scholar and writer, Kennan was a two-time recipient of both the Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award, and had also received the Francis Parkman Prize, the Ambassador Book Award and the Bancroft Prize. Among Kennan's numerous other awards and distinctions were his election to both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1952), the Testimonial of Loyal and Meritorious Service from the Department of State (1953), Princeton's Woodrow Wilson Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Nation's Service (1976), the Order of the Pour le Mérite (1976), the Albert Einstein Peace Prize (1981), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1982), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal (1984), the American Whig-Cliosophic Society's James Madison Award for Distinguished Public Service(1985), the Franklin D. Roosevelt Foundation Freedom from Fear Medal (1987), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1989), the Distinguished Service Award from the Department of State (1994), and the Library of Congress Living Legend (2000).

Kennan received 29 honorary degrees and was honored in his name with the George F. Kennan Chair in National Security Strategy at the National War College and the George F. Kennan Professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study. In June 2022, a memorial plaque honoring Kennan was unveiled in Belgrade, Serbia at the site of the former U.S. embassy. Kennan had served in the country when it was part of Yugoslavia, from 1961 to 1963.