It is odd that a man as unworldly as George Kennan should have had a profound influence on the world.(Foreign Service officer)(Brief article)(Thumbnail biography)

It is odd that a man as unworldly as George Kennan should have had a profound influence on the world. The longtime Foreign Service officer and academic deplored vulgarity, materialism, democracy, and most exercises of American power (in his old age he suggested that the country be broken up into ten or twelve smaller ones). The grace of his prose guaranteed that his opinions would always be read, even as his eccentric estimates of the world guaranteed that they would never have an impact. Never, that is, except for two years, beginning in 1946. Kennan, a diplomat serving in the American embassy in Moscow, wrote the "Long Telegram," a primer on Stalinism for a policy ...