George Frost Kennan

US Diplomat, Author. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he was a career foreign service officer who was part of the first United States delegation to return to the Soviet Union, serving from 1933 to 1937. He was in Berlin at the outbreak of World War II, and was interned for six months. At the close of war he returned to Moscow to serve as the number two American diplomat there. Because of his extensive 1946 assessment (8,000 word telegram to Washington DC) that the Russians suffered from insecurity dating back to the Tsars which would cause them to support centers of opposition to Western concentrations of power, he was made head of long-range planning for the State Department following World War II. There he developed the concept of "containment" as a strategy to keep Soviet influence from expanding and maintain the status quo. The strategy was based on the theory that the Soviet Union would eventually have to relinquish its harsh grip on its citizens and change its foreign policies if the West could maintain a firm and consistent posture of opposition. Although containment was often erroneously viewed as a military rather than a political strategy, it became a cornerstone of United States foreign policy for every American. president from Harry S. Truman through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Later in life was a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he spoke out against the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. He served brief stints as United States ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1952 (declared persona non grata after a year) and Yugoslavia from 1961 to 1963. He won the Pulitzer Prize for history and a National Book Award for "Russia Leaves the War," published in 1956 and he again won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for "Memoirs, 1925-1950." He was also a widely sought-after lecturer on foreign policy issues. He received the Medal of Freedom in 1989 and the Albert Einstein Peace Prize in 1981, the German Book Trade Peace Prize in 1982, and the Gold Medal in History from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1984.