George Kennan, architect of the Cold War, dies at 101 PRINCETON,
N.J. (AP) Diplomat and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian George
Kennan, who gave the name "containment" to postwar foreign
policy in a famous but anonymous article, died Thursday night at
his Princeton home, his son-in-law said. Kennan was 101. "He was
a giant. Many people have called him the most important foreign
service officer of the past half-century," said son-in-law Kevin
Delany of Washington, D.C. "He was a very thoughtful man with an
elegant writing style." Identified only as "X," Kennan laid out
the general lines of the containment policy in the journal
Foreign Affairs in 1947, when he was chief of the State
Department's policy planning staff. The article also predicted
the collapse of Soviet Communism decades later. "It is clear
that the main element of any United States policy toward the
Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and
vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies," Kennan
wrote. When the Communis