So many times, it seems of late, a famous fig­ure I admire has died leav­ing me star­tled that he hadn’t actu­ally died a long time ago. George Ken­nan spelled out the phi­los­o­phy of over 40 years of U.S. for­eign pol­icy. He helped write the Mar­shall Plan, which he was very proud of. He helped autho­rize the CIA to per­form covert polit­i­cal oper­a­tions, which he regret­ted ter­ri­bly. He was a keen observer of for­eign nations. Fore­most, for me, he was the best writer ever under the employ of the US gov­ern­ment. His mas­tery of the pen had two effects: first, it launched him from a thank­less embassy desk job to the top of the State Depart­ment almost overnight. Sec­ond, it kept his con­tem­po­raries from ever under­stand­ing exactly what he was try­ing to say.

His famous “long telegram” begins: “I apol­o­gize in advance for this bur­den­ing of tele­graphic chan­nel; but ques­tions involved are of such urgent impor­tance, par­tic­u­larly in view of recent events, that our answers to them, if they deserve atten­tion at all, seem to me to deserve it at once.” I like that.