George F. Kennan (born 1904), diplomat and historian; the explorer's great-nephew
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By the mid-1930s, Kennan was among the core of professionally-trained Russian experts on the staff of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, along with Charles E. Bohlen, and Loy.
Kennan belittled this supposed "encirclement," omitting evidence to the contrary, such as the U.S. and Japanese intervention in Russia between 1918 and 1920 and the U.S. attempt to isolate the Soviets internationally through the 1920s.
Containment, to GeorgeKennan in 1967, when he published the first volume of his memoirs, involved something other than the use of military "counter-force." He was never pleased that the policy he influenced was associated with the arms build-up of the Cold War.
GEORGEKENNAN: --and then brought home, because I had seen us make one concession after another to the Soviet leadership, which I didn't think it was necessary for us to make, and we were really misleading them because we catered so to them that we gave them the false idea of their own prestige.
GEORGEKENNAN: Yes, I do, and one of the things that bothers me about the computer culture of the present age is that one of the things of which it seems to me we have the least need is further information.
GEORGEKENNAN: Even now, and they forget that this is a country whose armed forces are largely in a shambles, that this is a deeply injured country that's in the process of change, where you could never do what Stalin did in the beginning of this war.
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