George F. Kennan, Master of Statecraft

If there were one word to encapsulate the life of George Frost Kennan, it would be â??conflicted.â? Starting with his youth in Milwaukee in the first decades of the 20th century, and throughout a career that stretched from a foreign service position with the Coolidge administration, on through to the latter years of the Reagan presidency (when the president, as biographer John LewisGaddis laments, â??had little need of Kennan"), Kennan was often conflicted in his world view, though indeed ahead of his time â?? in his thoughts, actions, and policy positions.