Beginning in the fall of 1926 he studied for seven months at the Foreign Service School in Washington, before setting off to serve in the lowly post of vice consul, first in Geneva and then in Hamburg. He had a long road to travel before he would exert real influence over policy. Over a quarter-century of service as a diplomat lay ahead.įew diplomats rise in meteoric fashion and Kennan was not numbered among the chosen few. Nonetheless, he decided to try for the newly formed Foreign Service and, somewhat to his surprise, he passed the qualifying examination.
He left Princeton in 1925 after four undistinguished years of study without any well-formed sense of his calling. John's Military Academy and then at Princeton, hardly prepared him for this demanding occupation. Kennan has been variously dubbed "the architect of containment," "the great theorist of containment" and "the founding father of containment." His name remains inextricably linked to the enormously creative burst of policy-making during the Truman administration, that set the main lines of American foreign policy for over a generation.įew predicted a career as a diplomat for the lonely, awkward and diffident boy who grew up in Milwaukee in the first decade of the twentieth century. Whatever the merits of this assessment-it warrants some examination and revision-it certainly is widely shared. His role there in formulating the so-called containment doctrine led no less an observer than Henry Kissinger to suggest that Kennan "came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history." His reputation and significance derive primarily from his service as Director of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department from 1947 to 1949. Kennan must surely be numbered among the most notable members of the Foreign Service of the United States. The article originally appeared in the Foreign Service Journal and is reprinted with that publication's permission.
In this article Father Miscamble recounts the life and career and accomplishments of this extraordinary diplomat, scholar and man of letters. George Kennan's career in the Foreign Service spanned only a quarter-century, yet his name remains inextricably linked to the creative burst of policy-making during the Truman Administration. George Kennan, a Life in the Foreign Service
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