EORGE F. KENNAN, who died Thursday at 101, was “the nearest thing to a legend that this country’s diplomatic service has ever produced,” the historian Ronald Steel has said. He was the man who proposed “containment,” the cornerstone of the cold war, as a way to oppose the Soviet Union.

The idea of containment was worked out by Mr. Kennan in 1946, when he was the chief of mission in the United States Embassy in Moscow. The State Department had asked for help in understanding the Soviet state, to which he responded with an 8,000-word cable, known as the “Long Telegram,” which offered a detailed psychological, historical and political interpretation of the Soviet Union.

The telegram is remarkable for Mr. Kennan’s clear-eyed, prophetic view of the Soviet state, and for his confidence in American society and its ability to counter the challenge of Communism. In 1946, when most of the world was bewildered and frightened by the rise of the Soviet Union, he felt certain a dictatorship could be defeated by a free society, so long as it kept faith with its own traditions and institutions.

Excerpts follow from the original telegram sent to the State Department, replete with missing and superfluous words, as well as words added in brackets by a reader at the State Department trying to make better sense of the text.

861.00/2 – 2246: Telegram

Feb. 22 - 3:52 p.m.]

Answer to Dept.’s 284, Feb. 3, involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of over-simplification.

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.

The world, as seen by the Soviet leaders:

U.S.S.R. still lives in antagonistic “capitalist encirclement” with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence. As stated by Stalin in 1927 to a delegation of American workers:

“In course of further development of international revolution there will emerge two centers of world significance: a socialist center, drawing to itself the countries which tend toward socialism, and a capitalist center, drawing to itself the countries that incline toward capitalism. Battle between these two centers for command of world economy will decide fate of capitalism and of communism in entire world.”

Why, the Soviet leadership is irrational:

At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was… unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries.

It was no coincidence that Marxism… caught hold and blazed for first time in Russia. Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means.

How Soviet policymakers deal with the world, officially:

Wherever it is considered timely and promising, efforts will be made to advance official limits of Soviet power. For the moment, these efforts are restricted to certain neighboring points conceived of here as being of immediate strategic necessity, such as northern Iran, Turkey, possibly Bornholm. However, other points may at any time come into question, if and as concealed Soviet political power is extended to new areas. Thus a “friendly” Persian government might be asked to grant Russia a port on Persian Gulf. Should Spain fall under Communist control, question of Soviet base at Gibraltar Strait might be activated.

With respect to cultural collaboration, lip service will likewise be rendered to desirability of deepening cultural contacts between peoples…. Actual manifestations of Soviet policy in this respect will be restricted to arid channels of closely shepherded official visits and functions, with superabundance of vodka and speeches and dearth of permanent effects.

And unofficially:

On unofficial plane particularly violent efforts will be made to weaken power and influence of Western Powers of [on] colonial backward, or dependent peoples. On this level, no holds will be barred. Mistakes and weaknesses of western colonial administration will be mercilessly exposed and exploited. Liberal opinion in Western countries will be mobilized to weaken colonial policies.

Where individual governments stand in path of Soviet purposes pressure will be brought for their removal from office. This can happen where governments directly oppose Soviet foreign policy aims (Turkey, Iran), where they seal their territories off against Communist penetration (Switzerland, Portugal), or where theycompete too strongly, like Labor government in England, for moral domination among elements which it is important for Communists to dominate.

What is to be done?

In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.

Problem of how to cope with this force in [is] undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face. But I would like to record my conviction that problem is within our power to solve – and that without recourse to any general military conflict.

We must see that our public is educated to realities of Russian situation. I cannot over-emphasize importance of this. Press cannot do this alone. It must be done mainly by government, which is necessarily more experienced and better informed on practical problems involved. In this we need not be deterred by [ugliness?] of picture. I am convinced that there would be far less hysterical anti-Sovietism in our country today if realities of this situation were better understood by our people. There is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown.

We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in past. It is not enough to urge people to develop political processes similar to our own. Many foreign peoples, in Europe at least, are tired and frightened by experiences of past, and are less interested in abstract freedom than in security. They are seeking guidance rather than responsibilities. We should be better able than Russians to give them this. And unless we do, Russians certainly will.

The thing to be feared.

Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. [T]he greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

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T the Congressional hearings last week investigating steroids and baseball, players were scolded not just for taking substances that are unsafe, but for doing something immoral. Those who use performance enhancing substances were called cheaters, cowards, bad examples for the nation’s children.

But if baseball players are cheating, is everyone else, too?

After all, Americans are relying more and more on a growing array of performance enhancing drugs. Lawyers take the anti-sleep drug Provigil to finish that all-night brief, in hopes of concentrating better. Classical musicians take beta blockers, which banish jitters, before a big recital.Is the student who swallows a Ritalin before taking the SAT unethical if the pill gives her an unfair advantage over other students? If a golfer pops a beta blocker before a tournament, is he eliminating a crucial part of competition – battling nerves and a chance of choking?

Beyond baseball and steroids, where do you draw the line on the use of performance-enhancing drugs? President Bush said in his 2004 State of the Union speech that steroid use in baseball “sends the wrong message: that there are shortcuts to accomplishment, and that performance is more important than character.”

That is easy to say about steroids. After all, the mystique of the major leagues requires that home run records be set without the help of artificial enhancements. And major league players have some responsibility not to encourage teenagers to use a harmful substance.

When it comes to other drugs, and other kinds of endeavors, the lines aren’t so clear. Bioethicists, who don’t even all agree about whether taking steroids is wrong, are even less clear about everything else.

Some say the use of performance-enhanced drugs simply reflects progress – better living through chemistry – and to be human is to strive to be better.

“We’ve gotten very used to already assisting ourselves in other ways,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “No one’s going to say, ‘Don’t drink coffee before the SAT.’ No one’s going to say, ‘Don’t smoke cigarettes before the SAT.’ And most of the drugs we’re talking about are far less harmful than nicotine.”

But others lament that a performance-enhanced society is giving in to a culture that prizes the achievement over the journey. Many Americans already get that message from a young age, said Denise Clark Pope, author of “Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students.”

When surveys ask students which is more important, to be honorable and get a low grade or to cheat and get a high grade, she said, more students choose the A. “The parents will say ‘no, no, no,’ but the message they’re sending says the opposite.”

The use of performance enhancing drugs reflects a society where stress and striving have become the national pastime. Ms. Pope calls it the “credentialism society,” exemplified in her book through a high school student who describes life as a quest to get the best grades, so you can get into the best college, so you can get into the best graduate school, so you can get the highest-paying job, which brings you happiness.

So where people once took illegal drugs like cocaine to escape or stimulate creativity, they now take legal drugs to focus better and achieve more.

The danger in that, said Carl Elliott, the author of “Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream,” is that not performing well will be seen as a medical condition – one that needs to be treated.

“The lines between treating an illness and enhancing a performance are so blurry,” said Dr. Elliott, an associate professor at the center for bioethics at the University of Minnesota. “Most people don’t conceptualize it as performance enhancement; most people conceptualize it as a treatment for an illness.”

But others think there’s no problem. Norman Fost, the director of the medical ethics program at the University of Wisconsin who has long said that the danger of steroids are overstated, similarly sees nothing wrong with taking drugs like Ritalin or Provigil solely to enhance performance.

“We all would like to do better at what we’re doing, whether athletic or intellectual or musical,” he said. “There’s nothing inherently immoral about performance enhancement. It’s what everyone does, or would try to do, for their children. We shouldn’t be obsessed with the fact that it’s a drug, as if it’s a drug like cocaine or heroin.”

Dr. Caplan mocks the handwringing over self-enhancement drugs. To him, it is all technology: “The lawyer who’s taking a pill to stay up is also carrying a computer or P.D.A. to help his brain remember things. Are we going to throw away our calculators?”

Certainly, there is no guarantee that performance enhancement delivers happiness.

As Ms. Pope notes, at the same time stimulants like Ritalin are becoming more popular among high school students, college campuses are reporting a new drug of choice. It used to be marijuana. Now it’s Prozac.

My Amex card still comes in the name of James Guckert, but I want to be called Jeff Gannon. That is who I am.

Or rather it is the pseudonym under which you gained access to White House press briefings for two years, until your identity was revealed. Why do you think they let you in?

I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know the criteria they use. I asked to be let in, and they allowed me to come. I was very fond of all the people in the press office. They treated me well. They probably treated me better than I deserved.

Are you suggesting that Bobby Eberle, the Republican operative who hired you to shill for his Gopusa under the guise of his Talon News service, has special access at the White House?

I just don’t know the answer to that question.

Scott McClellan, the press secretary to President Bush, called on you and allowed you to ask questions on a nearly daily basis. What, exactly, is your relationship with him?

I was just another guy in the press room. Did I try to curry favor with him? Sure. When he got married, I left a wedding card for him in the press office. People are saying this proves there is some link. But as Einstein said, “Sometimes a wedding card is just a wedding card.”

You mean like “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”? That wasn’t Einstein. That was Freud.

Oh, Freud. O.K. I got my old Jewish men confused.

You should learn the difference between them if you want to work in journalism.

I’d like to get back into journalism. I’m hoping someone will offer me a job as a commentator or one of those political analysts that you see on the news shows all the time.

What are we supposed to make of the fact that before reporting for Talon News, you had never had a job in journalism and apparently earned your living running a gay escort service?

Don’t let that confuse the issue. We have driven so many good people from public service through the politics of personal destruction. People on the left who disagreed with me decided that I needed to be punished by any means necessary.

How did you get your job at Talon News?

I had submitted some opinion pieces to Gopusa. I believe they were picking up wire feeds, and Bobby Eberle wanted to supplement that with original reporting. He came to Washington for some business, and he called me. It was a breakfast meeting.

Were you paid for your pieces?

Yes. I received a kind of stipend.

I assume Eberle fired you after you asked that now-famous question of President Bush at a press conference in January, suggesting that Democrats had “divorced themselves from reality.”

I wasn’t fired. I resigned. I made the decision by myself after I learned that my family had received threatening phone calls. I decided this is what had to be done to try to make that stop.

What do you mean by your family?

My mother. She is 72. I am a big boy. I can take this. But it’s so hard on my mother. She has to reconcile all of these things, and it’s difficult.

Do you find it hard to be a gay conservative in this country in light of the right-wing hostility to gay rights?

I prefer that to be a private issue. I am more interested in national defense, taxation and immigration than in personal issues. I would like people’s personal lives to be behind the barrier once again, like they used to be.

Still, it seems fair to ask about your position on gay marriage.

My position is that I can’t imagine that gay marriage would be something that I would be interested in in the first place. I actually like being alone. I have decided that is how I want to live. I have a dog named Winston. I am still the same to Winston, no matter what, and there is comfort in that. Winston doesn’t watch the news.

But for those of us who do watch the news, are you interested in defending one’s right to pose in the buff, as photographs on the Internet indicate you have done?

We do have tremendous freedoms in this country, and one of the drawbacks of that is that people are free to take images of me and manipulate them however they want. At some point in the future, everyone is going to have a picture on the Internet that they are unhappy about.

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n the 16th century, Venetian and French glassmakers perfected a technique of coating glass with an alloy of silver to produce an effective mirror. Mirrors soon proliferated in public spaces and private homes, and owning a pocket or hand mirror became a marker of status. The mirror, you might say, was an early personal technology — ingenious, portable, effective — and like all such technologies, it changed its users. By giving us, for the first time, a readily available image of ourselves that matched what others saw, it encouraged self-consciousness and introspection and, as some worried, excesses of vanity.

By the 19th century, it was the machines of the Industrial Revolution — the power loom, the motor, the turbine — that prompted concern about the effects of technology on the person. Karl Marx argued that factory work alienated the worker from what he was toiling to produce, transforming him into ”a cripple, a monster.” Men were forced to become more like machines: efficient, tireless and soulless.

Today’s personal technologies, particularly the cellphone and the digital video recorder, have not provoked similar worries. They are marvels of individual choice, convenience and innovation; they represent the democratization of the power of the machine. Our technologies are more intuitive, more facile and more responsive than ever before. In a rebuke to Marx, we have not become the alienated slaves of the machine; we have made the machines more like us and in the process toppled decades of criticism about the dangerous and potentially enervating effects of our technologies.

Or have we? The cellphone, a device we have lived with for more than a decade, offers a good example of a popular technology’s unforeseen side effects. More than one billion are in use around the world, and when asked, their owners say they love their phones for the safety and convenience they provide. People also report that they are courteous in their use of their phones. One opinion survey found that ”98 percent of Americans say they move away from others when talking on a wireless phone in public” and that ”86 percent say they ‘never’ or ‘rarely’ speak on wireless phones” when conducting transactions with clerks or bank tellers. Clearly, there exists a gulf between our reported cellphone behavior and our actual behavior.

Cellphone users — that is to say, most of us — are both instigators and victims of this form of conversational panhandling, and it has had a cumulatively negative effect on social space. As the sociologist Erving Goffman observed in another context, there is something deeply disturbing about people who are ”out of contact” in social situations because they are blatantly refusing to adhere to the norms of their immediate environment. Placing a cellphone call in public instantly transforms the strangers around you into unwilling listeners who must cede to your use of the public space, a decidedly undemocratic effect for so democratic a technology. Listeners don’t always passively accept this situation: in recent years, people have been pepper-sprayed in movie theaters, ejected from concert halls and deliberately rammed with cars as a result of rude behavior on their cellphones.

Recently, when hackers gained access to Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile Sidekick, news organizations had no trouble finding pictures of her talking and typing into the device to illustrate their stories; Hilton, like most wireless users, spends a great deal of time in public engaged in private communications. Why? The cellphone, like the mirror, also offers a great deal of gratification to our egos. By making us available to anyone at any time, it serves as a ”publicization of emotional fulfillment,” as the French sociologist Chantal de Gournay has argued. Answering the phone and entering into conversation immediately informs everyone around us that we are in demand by someone, somewhere. Like a security blanket, the cellphone and other wireless devices serve as a form of connection when we are alone — walking down the street, standing in line — and connection is our contemporary currency.

So is control, and enthusiasts of DVR’s like TiVo ecstatically praise the amount of it the device gives them: they can skip commercials, record hundreds of hours of their favorite shows, pause live television and be pleasantly surprised by recommendations, based on stored preferences, of other programs they might like to watch. In one TiVo subscriber survey, 98 percent of TiVo owners reported that they ”couldn’t live without” the device.

Fewer Americans will in the years to come. According to Forrester Research, 41 percent of American homes will have a DVR within the next five years. Given that the only two things we do more than watch television are sleep and work, the DVR is, it seems, a perfect technological solution for controlling viewing habits. Yet, as a recent study by Next Research found, DVR users end up watching five to six hours more television per week than they did before they owned the device. Rather than freeing them to watch less television by eliminating waste, the DVR encourages them to watch greater amounts of television by making it a thoroughly personalized experience.

The near future promises even more of these ego-casting technologies, which offer us greater control and encourage the individualized pursuit of personal taste. Soon we’ll carry cellphones that double as credit cards, toll passes, televisions and personal video cameras. At home, we’ll merge the functions of these many technologies into a single streamlined machine that will respond to the sound of our voice, like the multimodal browser being developed by I.B.M. and Opera. This expansion of choice and control will foster the already prevalent expectation that we can and should be able to have anything we want on demand.

This is not a world without costs. Having our every whim satisfied at the touch of a button might encourage a childish expectation of instant gratification and could breed intolerance for the kinds of music, film and literature that require patience to enjoy fully. As we use these technologies to increase the pace and quantity of our experiences, we might find that the quality of our pursuits declines. Nevertheless, whatever ambivalence we might feel toward these technologies, we end up buying and using them anyway, not only because they make life more convenient but also because everyone else uses them and so we must as well. The traveling businessman without a cellphone will not have a business for long.

Although there is no obvious political solution to the unintended problems created by our personal technologies — we wouldn’t want the government taxing our TiVo use — there are possibilities for nonpartisan agreement about changing our use of them. Conservatives like to complain about the content of popular culture and yet champion an unregulated market that thrives on creating and supplying new wants. Liberals herald the power of individual choice yet fret about the decline of community and the power corporations often exercise over our politics and culture. Both might agree, then, that it is a good thing if parents discourage children from watching too much television. Both might find something beneficial in private entities enforcing civility in discrete spaces, like restaurants and theaters that ban cellphones, and an increase in public transportation providers who offer cell-free spaces, like the ”quiet car” that Amtrak offers.

As a society, we need to approach our personal technologies with a greater awareness of how the pursuit of personal convenience can contribute to collective ills. When it comes to abortion or Social Security, we avidly debate the claims of individual freedom against other goods. Why shouldn’t we do the same with our private technologies? In the end, it does matter if we watch six more hours of television every week, and it does affect our broader quality of life if hollering into our cellphones makes our daily commute a living hell for our fellow citizens on the bus or a danger to other drivers on the road. Rather than turning on, tuning in and dropping out, we might perhaps do better, individually and socially, to occasionally simply turn our machines off.

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