Kennan, George F. : Memoirs, 1950-1963

The experiences of one of the most influential U.S. career diplomats and authority on the Soviet Union. From The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, George Frost Kennan, U.S. diplomat and historian, b. Milwaukee, Wis., grad. Princeton, 1925. After 1927 he served in various diplomatic posts in Europe, including Hamburg, Riga, Berlin, Prague, and Moscow. In 1947 he was on the policy-planning staff of the Dept. of State; later (1949-50) he was one of the chief advisers to Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He was appointed ambassador to the USSR in 1952, but was recalled at the demand of the Soviet government because of comments he made on the isolation of diplomats in Moscow and the campaign that Soviet propagandists were conducting against the United States. Retiring from the diplomatic service in 1953, he joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J., and from 1956 until 1974 was professor at its school of historical studies. He served (1961-63) as U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia. Kennan, who had helped formulate the Truman administration's policy of "containment" of the USSR, eventually became an advocate of withdrawal of U.S. forces from Western Europe and of Soviet forces from the satellite countries.