George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  George’s own visit was brief. He found the house overheated, probably because the vitality of its occupants was so low. Kent senior received his son in bed, in a room that darkened as they talked. One of the old man’s legs kept sliding off onto the floor: George wanted to raise it to make him comfortable, but “some Kennan-ish repression made it impossible for me to follow even that little tender impulse, just as it has always made it impossible for me to tell him any of the things I should liked to have told him, throughout a number of years.” “When you bade me good bye last Saturday,” Kent wrote George on November 24, “whole waves and billows of sadness passed over me, . . . in view of my age, that I might never see you again.”32 The premonition proved accurate: Kossuth Kent Kennan died, not unexpectedly, on December 9. But by that time his son, quite unexpectedly, was on his way to Moscow.

  IV.

  “The ranks of American diplomatists have included, over the decades, many unusual people,” George F. Kennan wrote in 1972. Among the most striking, “both in his virtues and in his weaknesses,” was William C. Bullitt. A Philadelphia aristocrat and a Yale graduate, Bullitt had been an ardent supporter of Woodrow Wilson but also of the Bolshevik Revolution. The president’s principal adviser and confidant, Colonel Edward M. House, sent him to Moscow early in 1919 to try to establish contacts with the new Soviet government, but Wilson—ill and preoccupied with the Paris Peace onference—ignored Bullitt upon his return. So he turned on Wilson publicly, bitterly, and unforgivingly. In 1924 Bullitt married Louise Bryant, widow of the radical journalist John Reed, but divorced her six years later. By then he had become a patient of Sigmund Freud, with whom he collaborated on a highly critical psychobiography of Wilson—fortunately still unpublished when, in 1932, Bullitt met Franklin D. Roosevelt. The new president made Bullitt his unofficial agent on the issue of Soviet recognition. Shortly after signing the agreement establishing diplomatic relations, on November 17, 1933, Roosevelt nominated Bullitt to become the first U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R.33

  Now back from Milwaukee, Kennan was walking through the corridors of the State Department one day with a friend, who suggested that he ought to meet Bullitt: “Let’s see whether we can find him.” The new ambassador was in his office, asked Kennan some questions about Soviet transportation and finance, which he was able to answer, and then inquired as to whether he spoke Russian well enough to interpret. Kennan replied that he did, whereupon Bullitt said that he was leaving in a few days for Moscow: “Could you be ready in time to come along with me?” “The room,” George recalled, “rocked around me.” The offer was “a thunder-stroke of good luck” after years of preparation, and the Kennans were ready to sail on the following Monday. They traveled with Bullitt on the SS President Harding, from where George wrote his family: “Bullitt is a splendid man; it is an education just to have him around. Besides that, . . . I can’t forget that it is a rare feather in my cap to be included on this expedition at all.”34

  “Oh, he was so excited,” Annelise remembered. But the passage was rough, so much so that Bullitt ruled out drinking red wine at dinner—“it’s been shaken up too much”—and insisted on providing everyone with champagne. George, who spent much of the voyage in his cabin nursing a cold, remembered vividly the afternoon Bullitt came in, sat on his bunk, and began to talk. “I was naturally curious about the character of this brilliant and fast-moving man who had so suddenly become my immediate superior.” He conveyed an impression of “enormous charm, confidence, and vitality,” but George also detected sensitivity, egocentricity, and pride, as well as “a certain dangerous freedom—the freedom of a man who, as he himself confessed to me on that occasion, had never subordinated his life to the needs of any other human being.”35

  Upon arrival at Le Havre, Annelise went on to Kristiansand to see Grace and await instructions, while the new ambassador and his entourage proceeded to Paris. There Kennan was surprised to be warmly welcomed by “fair-weather”—and no doubt envious—Foreign Service friends. The Bullitt group then went by train to Berlin, and from there through Poland to the Soviet border. A solemn representative from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was waiting, and a banquet was served “with a touching Russian mixture of good will and inefficiency.”

  Soon we were off again, in one of the big wide Russian sleeping cars. I shared a [compartment] with a Russian newspaper man [who] stripped to his underwear, lay down in the upper berth and snored healthily, but I was too excited to sleep, and bobbed up continually during the night, everytime the train stopped, to look at the little Russian stations, the snow-covered platforms, the booted citizens from the cars up ahead running through the icy cold with their little tea-pots to the boiling water tap which is the prime necessity of every station.

  The next morning in Moscow there was a mix-up, with Bullitt and the official greeters going in one direction and the secretaries, servants, and baggage going in another. It fell to Kennan to reconnect them, which he did with sufficient efficiency “that we ended up with several more bags than we had when we started.”36

  That was December 11, 1933. On December 13 the new U.S. ambassador and his party were driven through the walls of the Kremlin to present credentials to the Soviet “president,” Mikhail Kalinin. While the ceremony was under way, an Associated Press photographer sneaked a shot of the coatrack outside, with five hats lined up on a shelf above it. The caption identified three, a derby, a fedora, and a military cap, as belonging to Foreign Minister Litvinov and his aides. The other two were shiny silk top hats, said to have been worn by William C. Bullitt and his “secretary George Kennan.” This was Kennan’s first experience with inaccurate journalism, for in fact “I was too cheap to buy one.” He did, however, appear in the official photographs, a tall, thin young man, standing politely behind the dignitaries in a cutaway and striped pants, ready to translate for them when needed. Even without his own top hat, it was the high point so far of his diplomatic career: “I almost fainted . . . to think where I was and what I was doing.”37

  V.

  There was another reason to feel faint, though, because on December 12 George had received, through State Department channels, Jeanette’s telegram conveying the news that his father had died. “It is somewhat to my own horror,” he wrote her on the fourteenth, that he had been able to carry on “almost as though nothing had happened.” The shock was not the death so much as “the inadequacy of our last visit, and the feeling that he may never have realized how much I loved him.” It was the final episode of the tragedy that had begun when their mother died.

  I would like to hope that God is now satisfied with his handiwork—and I like to picture Father in a Heaven like the country place at Nagawicka thirty-five years ago, with himself no longer only a Kennan and our mother no longer only a James, but both of them full, complete beings, and ourselves as the group of understanding children we should have been—and then the breeze coming off the lake on summer afternoons, and the sounds of the grasshoppers and the crickets and frogs and the barking of the dogs across the lake on the long summer nights.

  During the past few days in Moscow, George told his sister, he had been through “the most interesting and absorbing things I have ever experienced,” but they seemed nonetheless trifling and foolish. “I have no heart to write about them now.”38

  He did write later about the “kaleidoscopic” ten days Bullitt had spent in Moscow. Kennan went to the ballet with the Litvinov family, and then to a performance of Chekhov ’s The Cherry Orchard accompanied by, improbably, Harpo Marx: there is unfortunately no record of what, if anything, they talked about. Backstage, however, they met the playwright’s widow—a thrill because Kennan already had in mind someday writing Chekhov ’s biography. He called at the Foreign Office and other diplomatic missions, and then with Keith Merrill, the State Department’s specialist on overseas buildings, drove to the outskirts of the city to pace off prospective embassy construction sites, with the temperature at twenty below zero. Too excited to go to bed wh
en the day ’s activities were done, the Americans would sit around and talk until four or five in the morning. Kennan remembered it as a wonderful time, an example of “what Soviet-American relations might, in other circumstances, have been.”39

  He had Bullitt to thank for it all. “When I came back to Washington last fall,” Kennan wrote him at the end of December, “I was—like a number of other young men in the service—pretty well beaten down by the bureaucracy. I despaired of ever getting work of any genuine significance.” Bullitt could well understand, therefore, that “the events of the last few weeks took my breath away.” Kennan was grateful “for the confidence and responsibility you’ve given me. They’ve done me more good than anything could have, . . . [and] the beneficial effect will wear for a long time to come.” Bullitt too was pleased. “The men at the head of the Soviet Government,” he wrote President Roosevelt, “are extremely eager to have contact with anyone who has first-rate intelligence and dimension as a human being. They were, for example, delighted by young Kennan.”40

  Part II

  FIVE

  The Origins of Soviet-American Relations: 1933–1936

  “ TH E BLOW HAS FALLEN NOW, WITH A BANG,” GEORGE WROTE Annelise from Riga on December 29, 1933: “It is a mean one, but we’ ll make the best of it.” He had gone there to collect their possessions while Bullitt returned temporarily to the United States; but now the State Department had ordered Kennan back to Moscow to set up the new American embassy. However thrilling the previous weeks had been, this was not a task he welcomed. He would not be, as he had hoped, chargé d’affaires. The salary and benefits would be minimal, and his status would be “full of dangers and responsibilities.” Should Annelise choose to join him, she would be the only Foreign Service wife in town, and because conditions were difficult, Grace would have to stay in Kristiansand. “You’ll hate the hotel, and there won’t be much for you to do there.” He would leave it to her: “If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to.” But “I am damned anxious to have you with me again as soon as possible. After all, darling, we are man and wife, aren’t we?”1

  The assignment had come about because Bullitt insisted on it. He wanted Kennan in Moscow until the full embassy staff arrived, supervising building activities “and other urgent matters.” The State Department questioned Kennan’s training for such duties, but Soviet officials had asked specifically for him because of his linguistic fluency. They also associated him with the first George Kennan, who had exposed the Siberian prison conditions under which some of them, as young revolutionaries, had once been held. Bullitt took the issue to Roosevelt himself: without someone like Kennan to deal with authorities at the top, the staff could arrive in February to find their accommodations half finished, creating “extreme inefficiency and possibly . . . endanger[ing] life.” Faced with this onslaught, the department capitulated. Kennan was “detailed for purpose outlined.”2

  He arrived in Moscow on January 3, 1934, and Annelise joined him two weeks later. “There is nothing I want to do more dear,” she had replied to him. “I don’t think it will be bad.... As long as we are together I don’t care.” She found George, still a month shy of his thirtieth birthday, the sole responsible representative of the United States of America in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.3

  I.

  They lived, for the moment, in the National Hotel, just off Red Square. With restaurants slow and the food bad, Annelise cooked for George in their room, using a hot plate on a whiskey case behind a screen. Under construction next door was the Mokhovaya, named for the street on which it was located, the building that was to be the temporary embassy chancery. Spaso House, the American ambassador’s future residence, stood on a side street a mile west. Constructed by a wealthy merchant in 1914, it had been seized by the Soviet government, which used it for offices and apartments and was now leasing it to the Americans, along with the Mokhovaya, until a new residence and chancery could be built on a bluff in the Sparrow Hills, overlooking the city. Bullitt had proposed the location—it could be, he argued, a “Monticello in Moscow”—and Josef Stalin agreed at the end of a vodka-fueled Kremlin dinner, sealing the pledge by kissing the astonished ambassador. But the diplomatic climate soon cooled, and the compound never got built. Spaso House and the Mokhovaya were still the principal American facilities in Moscow when Kennan himself became ambassador in 1952.4

  Kennan’s job was to negotiate the leases, oversee construction and remodeling, arrange gas and telephone service, and clear shipments of office supplies and furniture through customs so that Bullitt and his staff would have places to live and work. Helping out were a male stenographer, the State Department architect Keith Merrill, and Charles W. Thayer, a young West Point graduate who had shown up in Moscow hoping to acquire Russian and a position in the Foreign Service. Kennan hired him; Thayer found a Harley-Davidson and was soon zooming around town on official business, “the ear tabs of his Russian fur cap flapping wildly in the wind.” This bare-bones establishment operated without codes, safes, security, couriers, or even at first an office. Contrary to Bullitt’s expectations, it had no access to the highest authorities: instead it dealt with a ponderously inefficient bureaucracy, the respective parts of which usually did not connect. “Nevertheless,” Kennan recalled, “I felt that we, with our absence of bureaucracy, accomplished more in a few weeks than did the full embassy staff, when it arrived, over the first year of its existence.”5

  “All this had to be done,” George wrote his cousin Charlie James, “in a place which has the world’s craziest financial system,” on behalf of a government—his own—“which has the world’s craziest system of expenditure control.” The State Department provided only minimal instructions, so Kennan meticulously documented every meeting, phone call, and disbursement of funds. He was attempting to master Soviet laws on insurance—such as they were—translating tortuously worded contracts, juggling the intricacies of currency exchange, assigning space in the still-uncompleted Mokhovaya, urging the eviction of Spaso’s recalcitrant tenants, even bargaining on hotel rates for the incoming staff. The manager of the National agreed with Kennan that any Western European establishment would happily give official Americans a 25 percent discount, but that was because “the capitalist world had an economic crisis and Soviet Russia did not.”

  Kennan was also becoming an expert on menu planning, interior decorating, trade promotion, tourism, emigration, marriage counseling, and mortuary science. He spent hours one day trying to explain the concept of a “quick lunch” to the kitchen staff at the Savoy Hotel, where the Americans had relocated because the National would not budge on its room rates: he could provide recipes for “light, simple dishes,” to be prepared “at very low cost.” With his assistants, Kennan was measuring the rooms in Spaso House for rugs and draperies, while trying to meet the demands of Americans already in the Soviet Union who had hitherto lacked an embassy to which to turn: there were export-hungry businessmen, tourists with lost passports, requests for help with exit visas, questions about divorce proceedings, and in one instance the dilemma of whether to disinter and photograph a corpse in Chelyabinsk in order to persuade its widow in Wisconsin that it indeed had expired.

  On the night before Bullitt’s return, it fell to Kennan, Thayer, and Merrill to wrestle the ambassador’s bed up the grand staircase at Spaso. They also had to tell him that, for several more months until the Mokhovaya was ready, his residence would double as the embassy chancery. Bullitt was “steaming with fury.” There were evenings, Kennan remembered, when he and the other official Americans in Moscow, “assembled in my hotel room, gloomily sipping our highballs and watching the mice play hide-and-seek along the base-boards,” were on the verge of admitting defeat, fearing that they would soon have to “give it up and sneak shame-facedly away, the laughing-stock of Europe.”6

  “The honeymoon atmosphere had evaporated completely,” Bullitt reported to Roosevelt a few weeks after his arrival back in Moscow on March 7. The Soviets’
hostility toward all capitalist countries, muffled during the negotiations leading to recognition, was now coming out. The only way to deal with them would be to offer carrots but to make it clear that if these were refused, “they will receive the club on the behind.” The embassy staff was the only “bright spot in the murky sky. . . . I am delighted with every man.”7

  They were impressive. Loy Henderson, who went with Bullitt to Moscow as second secretary, understood that he wanted “dash, brilliance, imagination and enthusiasm,” and this he got. For in addition to Kennan and Henderson, the embassy now had three other Foreign Service officers whose careers would shape Soviet-American relations well into the Cold War. One was Elbridge Durbrow, who followed Soviet economic affairs and would serve with Kennan again in Moscow during the mid-1940s. A second was Bertel E. Kuniholm, a Kelley protégé who had studied Russian in Paris, and would later report on Soviet activities in Iran. A third, Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen, also trained with Kelley, became Kennan’s closest colleague, and would succeed him as ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1953. “In numberless verbal encounters, then and over ensuing decades,” Kennan recalled, “our agreements and differences would be sternly and ruthlessly talked out, sometimes with a heat so white that casual bystanders would conclude we had broken for life.” But “no friendship has ever meant more to me than his.”8