George Frost Kennan, who died last week in Princeton, N.J., at 101, was an insecure outsider from Milwaukee, Wis., who was embraced, in ways that sometimes made him squirm, by the clubby coterie of wise men who shaped America's bipartisan foreign policy at the outset of the cold war. He was at heart an intellectual and a historian, which made him a little too edgy and anguished to be a natural diplomat. But while stationed in Moscow at the end of World War II, he became the most influential foreign-service officer in American history by authoring a new strategic doctrine--known as...
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