George Kennan, RIP

Matt Welch | March 18, 2005

The man who invented containment, brainpowered the Marshall Plan, taught roughly a bazillion young poli-sci students, and lived long enough to go in and out of favor with just about every Foreign Policy school, is dead at a ripe 101. I'll leave his legacy for others, and just add that the 1925-50 segment of his memoir is some of the most thrilling diplomatic writing you'll ever read, as our young hero ventures out into the hinterlands of the great Soviet experiment, and discovers -- decades before others allowed themselves to learn -- that the dream was a murderous lie.