American policymakers such as George Kennan and John Foster Dulles acknowledged that the Cold War was essentially a war of ideas.

As Kennan shows, the judgment of the Allied governments about what was happening in Russia was warped by the obsession of defeating Germany.

George Kennan, an American working on the Western Union Telegraph Expedition in the late 1860s, found that dog sled travel on the lower Anadyr was limited by lack of firewood.

Though the article was signed pseudonymously by " X ," it was well known at the time that the true author was George F. Kennan, the deputy chief of mission of the United States to the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1946, under ambassador W. Averell Harriman.

The Plan was largely the creation of State Department officials, especially William L. Clayton and George F. Kennan.

Cutler and NSC Executive Secretary James Lay testified in support of the effectiveness of the system, but their testimony was offset by that of former Truman administration officials such as George Kennan, Paul Nitze, and Robert Lovett.

Later that year, diplomat George Kennan wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine that became known as the " X Article ", which first articulated the policy of containment, arguing that the further spread of Communism to countries outside a " buffer zone " around the USSR, even if it happened via democratic elections, was unacceptable and a threat to U. S. national security.

Kennan was also involved, along with others in the Truman administration, in creating the Marshall Plan, which also began in 1947, to give aid to the countries of Western Europe ( along with Greece and Turkey ), in large part with the hope of keeping them from falling under Soviet domination.

Galbraith favored détente with the Soviet Union, and was out of step with the Containment policy then being developed by George Kennan and the State Department's policymakers.

The Reagan Doctrine was especially significant because it represented a substantial shift in the post – World War II foreign policy of the U. S. Prior to the Reagan Doctrine, U. S. foreign policy in the Cold War was rooted in " containment ," as originally defined by George F. Kennan, John Foster Dulles, and other post – World War II U. S. foreign policy experts.

Holbrooke's unfulfilled ambition was to become Secretary of State ; he along with George Kennan and Chip Bohlen, were considered among the most influential U. S. diplomats who never achieved cabinet rank.

The decision, made by the network's vice president of broadcasting, John M. Schneider, specifically related to the testimony of George F. Kennan not being shown, in contrast to NBC News, which was showing it live.

George Frost Kennan ( February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005 ) was an American adviser, diplomat, political scientist and historian, best known as " the father of containment " and as a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War.

Subsequently, prior to the end of 1948, Kennan was confident the state of affairs in Western Europe had developed to the point where positive dialogue could commence with the Soviet Union.

Soon thereafter, U. S. Cold War strategy assumed a more assertive and militaristic quality, causing Kennan to lament over what he believed was as an aberration of his previous assessments.

Kennan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Kossuth Kent Kennan, a lawyer specializing in tax law, and Florence James Kennan.

After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1925, Kennan considered applying to law school, but decided it was too expensive and instead opted to apply to the newly formed Foreign Service.

In 1928, Kennan considered leaving the Foreign Service to go back to school when he was selected for a linguist training program that would give him three years of graduate level study without having to leave the service.

In 1931, Kennan was stationed at the legation in Riga, Latvia, where, as third secretary, he worked on Soviet economic affairs.

Mr. Kennan, who has recently abandoned authorship for a new round of diplomacy as the recently appointed American ambassador to Yugoslavia, is not the only man who finds it easier to portray the past than to prescribe for the future.

In this position he built a working framework for containment, first formulated by George Kennan, who served as the head of Acheson's Policy Planning Staff.

He is best known for writing the Brennen Siding Trilogy, three connected novels set in the fictional community of Brennen Siding, New Brunswick ( loosely based on Kennan Siding, New Brunswick ).

He is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th century statesman George F. Kennan, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2012.

In 1950, Kennan left the Department of State, except for two brief ambassadorial stints in Moscow and Yugoslavia and became a leading realist critic of U. S. foreign policy.

Meanwhile, Kennan closely followed Stalin's Great Purge, which would profoundly affect his outlook on the internal dynamics of the Soviet regime for the rest of his life.

Kennan carried no sway over Davies's decisions, and the ambassador even suggested that Kennan be transferred out of Moscow for " his health.

Kennan tried repeatedly to persuade policymakers to abandon plans for cooperation with the Soviet Union in favor of a sphere of influence approach in Europe to reduce the Soviets ' power there.

Forrestal helped bring him back to Washington, where Kennan served as the first deputy for foreign affairs at the National War College and then strongly influenced his decision to publish the " X " article.

Kennan had not intended the " X " article as a prescription for policy.

The " X " article meant sudden fame for Kennan, who became the father of the government's containment doctrine overnight, leading him to write in his memoirs, " My official loneliness came in fact to an end .... My reputation was made.

Although Kennan regarded the Soviet Union as too weak to risk war, he nonetheless considered it an enemy capable of expanding into Western Europe through subversion, given the popular support for Moscow-controlled Communist parties in Western Europe, which remained demoralized by the devastation of the Second World War.

Kennan and Charles Bohlen another State Department expert on Russia, fought over the wording of NSC-68, which emerged as the blueprint for waging the Cold War.

Kennan rejected the idea that Stalin had a grand design for world conquest implicit in Nitze's report and argued that he actually feared overextending Russian power.

During the Korean War ( which began when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950 ), when rumors started circulating in the State Department that plans were being made to advance beyond the 38th parallel into North Korea, a move that Kennan considered highly dangerous, he engaged in intense arguments with Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East Dean Rusk, who apparently supported Acheson's goal to forcibly unite the Koreas.

Afterwards, Kennan accepted an appointment as Visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study from fellow moderate Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Institute.

At the time, Soviet propaganda charged the U. S. with preparing for war, which Kennan did not wholly dismiss.

Although Kennan had not been considered for a position by Kennedy's inner circle of advisers, the president himself offered Kennan the choice of ambassadorship in either Poland or Yugoslavia.

According to historian David Mayers, Kennan argued that Tito's perceived pro-Soviet position was in fact a ploy to " buttress Khrushchev's position within the Politburo against hardliners opposed to improving relations with the West and against China, which was pushing for a major Soviet – U. S. showdown.

Other famous scholars who have worked at the institute include Alan Turing, Paul Dirac, Edward Witten, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson, Julian Bigelow, Erwin Panofsky, Homer A. Thompson, George Kennan, Hermann Weyl, Stephen Smale, Atle Selberg, Noam Chomsky, Clifford Geertz, Paul Erdős, Michael Atiyah, Erich Auerbach, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Michael Walzer, Andrew Wiles, Stephen Wolfram, and Eric Maskin.

Vietnam War-era activists, such as Seymour Melman, referred frequently to the concept, and use continued throughout the Cold War: George F. Kennan wrote in his preface to Norman Cousins's 1987 book The Pathology of Power, " Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented.

Kennan further argued that the United States would have to undertake this containment alone but if it could do so without undermining its own economic health and political stability, the Soviet party structure would undergo a period of immense strain eventually resulting in " either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.

Kennan even argued that NSC-68 should not have been drafted at all, as it would make U. S. policies too rigid, simplistic and militaristic.

Kennan was vehemently against the October Revolution, because he felt the Soviet government lacked the " knowledge, experience, or education to deal successfully with the tremendous problems that have come up for solutions since the overthrow of the Tsar.

" Kennan himself attributed the enthusiastic reception to timing: " Six months earlier the message would probably have been received in the State Department with raised eyebrows and lips pursed in disapproval.

Kennan described dealing with Soviet Communism as “ undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face ”.

This policy was considered to have been largely developed by American diplomat and Soviet expert George F. Kennan.

Kennan proposed a strategy of containment of Soviet expansion, while Bohlen was more cautious and recommended accommodation, allowing Stalin to have a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.