Volume 51, Number 7 · April 29, 2004
George Kennan at 100
By Ronald Steel
George Kennan, who recently celebrated his hundredth birthday, has been best known as the author of the containment doctrine—an ill-defined formula he proposed as a government official early in the cold war for confronting the Soviet Union with a vigorous American 'counterforce.' This is a great pity, for it is among the least of his accomplishments, and the one that most distorts the subtlety of his mind and the acuteness of his sensibility. Indeed it is one that he himself later denounced as being excessively focused on military rather than political containment.
Feature, 2083 words
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