ABSTRACT
The young diplomat George Frost Kennan was alone in a sanatorium in the resort of Baden-bei-Wien, near Vienna. In his diary he was writing about a boy in a military academy who was "very lonely", although many people surrounded him. Depression, accompanied by an acute sense of loneliness, boldly striated Kennan's busy, richly populated, long life with its labors, achievements of historical dimension, considerable enjoyments, and domestic comforts. A note of depression and loneliness accompanied Kennan through all of his life—accompanied also by somatic ailments. During and after the Second World War Kennan engaged in important service again in Moscow, followed by his most important—indeed his historical operations—as head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff. Kennan was a Foreign Service officer uninterruptedly for just a quarter of a century, thereafter serving briefly as a foreign-affairs consultant during the Korean War, in a special exercise of a few weeks in 1953.
