Expert's Expert

The procedure was almost as routine as a fire drill. With every big flare-up in relations with Soviet Russia, George Frost Kennan and his policy planners would retire to their fifth-floor conference room in the Department of State, lock the doors, take off their coats and work through the nights plotting how, if they were the men in the Kremlin, they would heckle the U.S.

Few U.S. citizens knew of George Kennan, for the 45-year-old, restless, intense chief of State's policy-planning staff was an expert's expert. Yet his solid analyses of what the Russians were up to--how far they were likely to go, and what combination of pleading and pressure they might understand--were the basis of most U.S. political strategy in Europe since the war. His thinking was woven into the speeches of the President and Cabinet members, and into policy.

Arrival. Washington had first paid some heed to George Kennan in 1946, when, as a Russian-speaking careerist in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, he took the time and trouble to learn to read the basic texts of Soviet Communism at a period when most of the State Department was playing foreign policy by heart and ear.

Kennan's findings were so drastic that they were first cautiously published in Foreign Affairs under the pen name of "X" before they became, in effect, the primer of U.S. policy (TIME, Sept. 22, 1947). Mr. "X" proposed "containment" to counter Communist successes in Europe, suggested that if the U.S. could successfully restrain the Russians with "the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce" for ten or 15 years, the Soviet Union might collapse from powerful internal pressures, possibly at the time of Stalin's death.

When Secretary of State George Marshall wanted a chief policy planner, Kennan was tapped for the job as State's brightest authority on Russia. Marshall's successor, Kennan's old friend Dean Acheson, leaned heavily on the "X" analysis, sharing Kennan's conviction that the Russians, before they would provoke war, would insist on even greater military superiority than the U.S. brass would--which is plenty. Acheson made Kennan counselor of the department at $13,500 per year.

Distress & Frustration. But as his administrative responsibilities grew, so did his impatience at the demands of domestic politics, of congressional plodding and probing. He was distressed by State's miserable failures in Asia, and said so. He hated to see abandonment of Formosa. Most recently he had urged closest collaboration with Britain but the policy had been watered down. A virtuoso, he worked poorly on a team, often irked his colleagues with his ivory towerishness when they were harried by pressing daily problems.

Last week George Kennan quietly announced that he was leaving the State Department in June "on sabbatical leave" for at least a year, to write and teach, at places unnamed. Money did not seem to be the primary difficulty (as it had been in other recent resignations), nor did anger: only a weariness and frustration. With rough weather forecast in both oceans, Seasoned Navigator Kennan would be sorely missed.

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