It is hard to serve 10 presidents in a row. There aren't that many people, after all, who moved from Clinton to Bush or from Bush to Obama. The world moves more quickly now, ideas turn over faster, and partisanship makes it hard to switch from Republican to Democrat administrations, or vice versa. Fame and influence are now more likely to blow away in 15 minutes -- or, in an age of Twitter, maybe 140 characters.
But a couple of generations ago, two men emerged in the foreign-policy establishment who exercised influence over 50 years of debate: Paul Nitze and George Kennan. Nitze, with his bureaucratic skills and nimbleness, worked under every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush. Kennan conceived of the policy of containment that guided America after WW II -- and then spent the next five decades as a powerful, disillusioned voice combating what containment had become.
Both men died five years ago. But their legacy endures. Many young men who served with and under Nitze remain influential today. (In 1969, for example, his crop of interns included Edward Luttwak, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz.) Kennan's realist attitudes, and the ideas behind containment, connect to many of the policies of the Obama administration.
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But really to understand the genesis and subtleties of their enduring impact, one must first understand the towering personalities behind these two men -- and their unique friendship and rivalry.
The Policy Planning Staff (PPS) at the State Department was the ideal environment for George Kennan, perhaps the deepest -- and gloomiest -- thinker ever to serve the United States government. The offices were sparse: The conference room had one round table, scattered with ashtrays, and comfortable chairs. There were no inboxes or outboxes. On the walls hung two maps: one of the United States and one of the world. It was a place for Kennan to contemplate and to hold forth.
Kennan took over PPS in 1947 and for much of his first two years in the office he got his way. His country pursued a policy of containing the Soviet Union through political pressure, just as he famously advocated in his "X Article," "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." The Marshall Plan, quietly establishing a department of covert action, limited support for the corrupt Chinese Nationalists, extensive peaceful support to rebuild Japan -- all these were the fruit of Kennan's ideas for how to counter Soviet influence and ambition.
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