Kennan

Ideas should not be suppressed, but nor should they be worshipped. Kennan was right to call "Gulag" a powerful indictment of a regime.

The best account of Kennan's life as an outsider on the inside is his own two-volume "Memoirs" .

Kennan was a prophet without a following -- at least within the U. S. government.

After the "Long Telegram" , Kennan returned to Washington and founded the State Department's influential Policy Planning Staff.

Kennan's advice to his own country -- to begin unilateral disarmament -- belongs to the same category.

Even Kennan felt sorry for "poor John" ; in 2003 he lamented the "serious burden" of his own "unnatural longevity" .

America's adversary was not, Mr. Kennan insisted, a global force called Communism; it was Russia, an expansionist but conservative power.

In a September 2002 interview, a 98-year-old Kennan described Bush's talk of a pre-emptive war against Iraq as "a great mistake. "

Kennan's formula for victory was economic aid fostering political stability in countries potentially vulnerable to communism's siren song.

These events make George Kennan's containment theory look a bit dated though it did work acceptably at the time, some 55 to 60 years ago.

George Kennan, the author of the cold war doctrine of containment, was among those arguing against Mr Clinton.

Containment (Mr. Kennan also used the imagery of chess and the pruning and pinning of trees) is a metaphor of geographical contiguity.

If Kennan were alive, he would probably still disagree, and not without reason.

Nitze was focused, outgoing and assertive; Kennan ruminative, inward and unsure.

Nitze's world was Wall Street and the Pentagon; Kennan's was a private study or a university library.

In fact, Kennan never believed that Moscow intended a military offensive against Western Europe.

American diplomat and historian George Kennan was born, he won a Pulitzer Prize.

Kennan is altogether the larger, more interesting figure.

Would his own views emerge along with Kennan's?

Called home in triumph, Kennan helped draft Marshall aid for Europe.

But then, the revered Mr Kennan was not infallible.

Kennan's dispatch crystallised thinking in Washington.

How does Kennan explain the importance of Marxism for the Soviet leadership?

In 1992 Kennan made a point of stating that "nobody 'won' the cold war" .

George F. Kennan: An American Life.

George Kennan was right about the cold war.

Before this, Kennan was a promising young officer in the American foreign service;

But as a diplomat, Kissinger recollects Kennan was a hot temper in the cold war;

Blind Oracles: Intellectuals And War From Kennan To Kissinger