George F. Kennan ’25 Appointed As Professor

George F. Kennan ’25, former United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union and to Yugoslavia, and a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study on permanent tenure, will serve as a Visiting Professor, from time to time offering instruction both in the Department of History and in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

As Professor of History and International Affairs, he will lecture next term on Russian history during the reign of Czar Nicholas II, and will conduct a preceptorial for specially qualified students. He will also offer a graduate seminar on recent diplomatic history.

A career diplomat and formerly Chief of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Professor Kennan became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1950. Two years later, he was named U.S. Ambassador to Russia, a position he held until 1953 when he returned to the Institute. In 1956 he was appointed a Professor at the Institute in the School of Historical Studies. In 1961 he was appointed Ambassador to Yugoslavia, a post from which he retired earlier this year.

In 1951, he was elected to a four year term as an Alumni Trustee-at-Large. In 1954 he gave the Stafford little lectures at Princeton, and in 1957-58 he served as George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford University. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and the National Book Award for his work, Russia Leaves the War, the first volume in a chronicle of Soviet-American relations from 1917 to 1920. Among his other books are The Decision to Intervene, second volume in the series, Russia, the Atom, and the West, and Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin.

This was originally published in the November 26, 1963 issue of PAW.