page_612 < previous page page_612 next page > Page 612 for example, the next order of business on the Senate floor after ratification was a bill appropriating $274 million to build warships. The treaty is considered a diplomatic failure because a mere fourteen years after it purported to outlaw war, all the signatories had become belligerents in World War II. Kennan, George (1904 ), diplomat and historian. Kennan, one of the few outstanding American public intellectuals of the twentieth century, is best known as "the father of containment" and therefore as a key figure in the emergence of the cold war. This is not a wholly undeserved reputation, although he only articulated more eloquently than others what was taking place. But his "long telegram" from Moscow in 1946 and the article he wrote the next year under the pseudonym "X" have rightly been seen as foundational texts of the cold war, expressing and legitimating Washington's new and vigorously anti-Soviet policy. Kennan, who played a leading role in the formulation of many crucial policies of this period, most notably the Marshall Plan, assumed that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and had to be "contained"  stopped from expanding in places of vital importance to the West. Since the Russians were thought to be fanatics, they were impossible to talk with. Stopping them therefore meant the abandonment of real diplomacy  in effect, a period of deep freeze coupled with tit-for-tat moves until frustration either broke the Soviet regime or mellowed it to the point where it could be made to see Western reason. Insofar as no "real diplomacy" was indeed the characteristic mark of the cold war, Kennan was its most sophisticated originating spirit. By mid-1948, however, Kennan had become convinced that the situation in Western Europe had improved to the point where negotiations could be initiated with Moscow with a view to creating a unified Germany outside the power configurations of East and West. The suggestion did not resonate within the Truman administration, in part because the idea of a divided Europe had come to seem a useful arrangement. Kennan was thus increasingly marginalized. In 1950 he left the State Department, except for two brief ambassadorial stints in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and became a leading "realist" critic of American foreign policy. Intelligent pursuit of the national interest seemed to him impossible given such a decentered system of government, such an ingrained need to moralize by projecting American values on the world, such a basic lack of a sense of limits. His long-standing disenchantment with the mass culture of consumerism also surfaced. In the 1960s, he was, oddly, a celebrated critic of both the Vietnam War and the student revolt. Throughout these years he wrote voluminously, publishing several important historical works on the Soviet Union and Soviet-American relations and, more recently, a multivolume treatise on the origins of the First World War. His Memoirs is a work of lasting literary value and one of the great American autobiographies. In the 1970s and 1980s he joined in the public debate as a profound and unbending critic of the arms race. Walter Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (1989); George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 2 vols. (1967, 1973); Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (1989). ANDERS STEPHANSON See also Cold War. Kennedy, John F. (19171963), thirty-fifth president of the United States. Kennedy was born into an Irish-American family with aspirations resembling those of the British gentry. Overcoming limitations of health and doubts about his personal ambitions, he achieved the presidency by battling simultaneously on several fronts. Kennedy coasted to the inevitable first-ballot nomination at the Democratic party's Los Angeles convention in July 1960 and then pulled off what proved to be an essential political coup by selecting Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas as his running mate. Kennedy's electoral college margin of 303219 was won with little more than a 100,000-vote plurality out of nearly 69 million cast. At the age of forty-three, he became the youngest man to reach the White House via the  < previous page page_612 next page >