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George Kennan is best known as the author of the containment policy, which served as the overarching principle informing U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, very much along the lines that Kennan had foreseen when launching his policy recommendations in 1946, confirmed his prophetic cast. Kennan was a man who in his own age was prized for taking the long view, was a nonconformist and left government service rather early to find more congenial surroundings in a Princeton research institute for the second half of a very long life, which ended only in 2005 at the age of 101.