When he died in March at the age of 101, George F. Kennan was remembered principally as America's leading Cold War strategist, one of the "Wise Men" who took control of American foreign policy in the pivotal years after World War II and molded the institutions that shaped the world for the next 50 years. The containment doctrine most associated with him—espousing the need to confront Soviet postwar expansion with an American "counterforce" and holding out the prospect that a Soviet communism denied significant military or political expansion would eventually wither and die—was the central skein of American strategy for two generations after World War II.

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