George F. Kennan, the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy of his generation to shape United States policy during the cold war, died on Thursday night in Princeton, N.J. He was 101.

Mr. Kennan was the man to whom the White House and the Pentagon turned when they sought to understand the Soviet Union after World War II. He conceived the cold-war policy of containment, the idea that the United States should stop the global spread of Communism by diplomacy, politics, and covert action - by any means short of war.

As the State Department's first policy planning chief in the late 1940's, serving Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Mr. Kennan was an intellectual architect of the Marshall Plan, which sent billions of dollars of American aid to nations devastated by World War II. At the same time, he conceived a secret "political warfare" unit that aimed to roll back Communism, not merely contain it. His brainchild became the covert-operations directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Though Mr. Kennan left the foreign service more than half a century ago, he continued to be a leading thinker in international affairs until his death. Since the 1950's he had been associated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was most recently a professor emeritus.

By the end of his long, productive life, Mr. Kennan had become a phenomenon in international affairs, with seminars held and books written to debate and analyze his extraordinary influence on American policy during the cold war. He was the author of 17 books, two of them Pulitzer Prize-winners, and countless articles in leading journals.

His writing, from classified cables to memoirs, was the force that made him "the nearest thing to a legend that this country's diplomatic service has ever produced," in the words of the historian Ronald Steel.

"He'll be remembered as a diplomatist and a grand strategist," said John Lewis Gaddis, a leading historian of the cold war, who is preparing a biography of Mr. Kennan. "But he saw himself as a literary figure. He would have loved to have been a poet, a novelist."

Morton H. Halperin, who was chief of policy planning during the Clinton administration, said Mr. Kennan "set a standard that all his successors have sought to follow."

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