George Frost Kennan ’25

Diplomat and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian George F. Kennan, who gave the name "containment" to post-World War II foreign policy, died March 17, 2005, at his Princeton home. He was 101.

He was born Feb. 16, 1904, in Milwaukee. Upon college graduation, he entered the foreign service, holding various postings. He was assigned to Berlin at the outbreak of World War II, and was interned for six months after the United States entered the war.

Kennan was appointed ambassador to Moscow in 1952, resigned from the foreign service in 1953, but returned to it in 1961 as ambassador to Yugoslavia.

Identified only as "X," Kennan laid out the general lines of the containment policy in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1947. His article also predicted the collapse of Soviet Communism decades later. "It is clear that the main element of any U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies," he wrote.

Last year Princeton held a conference honoring Kennan's career. "International relations consists of fractured story lines and fleeting images, and George Kennan had a remarkable gift for seeing the very weave of history before him," former Secretary of State Colin Powell said.

Kennan received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Albert Einstein Peace Prize, the German Book Trade Peace Prize, and the Gold Medal in History from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

He is survived by his wife, Annelise Sorenson Kennan; daughters Wendy, Grace K. Warnecke, and Joan K. Griggs; and a son, Christopher J.

The Class of 1925