George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Those debates started in Moscow, and Annelise witnessed them. Because of the housing shortage, Bullitt had initially prohibited wives from accompanying his staff, but she was already there and in much demand. She found the life exhilarating : “We were young, and gay; we danced all night; but we would also talk all night.” Like the other Americans, the Kennans now had a room at the Savoy, where almost everyone was cooking on the hot plates Annelise had pioneered—when the electricity worked. Telephones functioned erratically, often with only labored breathing at the other end. Owing to ill-conceived State Department economy measures, there was no embassy automobile, so Intourist provided chauffeured Lincolns at rates that Kennan believed soon would have paid for one. With taxis scarce, the only alternative was motorcycles: Annelise recalled riding to one dinner in the sidecar dressed in a long formal gown, while George, in white tie, hung on precariously behind the driver. But the other embassies threw great parties, and as Durbrow recalled decades later: “You made better and closer friends in Moscow than any post I’ve ever heard about or been in.”9

  There were also opportunities for George—within the limits the secret police allowed—to begin to feel himself Russian. “Just to ride on a street-car, if you can understand the conversation, is an experience,” he wrote Jeanette. One Sunday in May, with summer having suddenly arrived, the Kennans and several friends picnicked as close as they could get to Stalin’s dacha. “[W]e did not see the big boy,” but skirting the walls of his estate, they found a bluff overlooking the Moscow River filled with families making themselves at home, “with all the delightful informality which is the charm of the Russian countryside.” Security men appeared, “asked where we ‘citizens’ might be from and what we were doing there, and subsided from view just as abruptly upon learning that we were not ‘citizens’ at all, but only a bunch of bourgeois from the American Embassy.”10

  From such daytime excursions and late-night discussions, Kennan gained some preliminary impressions of the Soviet experiment. He expressed these most clearly in a handwritten letter, sent by diplomatic courier, for his sister’s eyes only:

  I find myself continually torn between sympathy for a nation which, within the limitations of its own character and an imported dogma, is trying to reconstruct its life on a basis finer and sounder than that of any other country anywhere, and disgust with the bigotry and arrogance of its leaders, who not only refuse to recognize their own mistakes and limitations but pretend that they have found the solution of all the problems of the rest of the world in their crude interpretation of a worn-out doctrine.

  “I realize,” George admitted, “that no revolution is entirely discriminate, or ever could be, but it could, at least, make its aim an intelligent discrimination.” He would prefer one that “would raise the best elements of society—and not the worst—out of the futility and tragedy which unfortunately surrounds their existence. And this is the sort of revolution which Moscow has not got to offer!”11

  Meanwhile Bullitt was worrying about the physical toll Moscow life was taking on his staff. There was, he advised the State Department, a form of acute indigestion, caused by the excessive use of canned food, that mimicked the symptoms of angina pectoris. One of his subordinates had already suffered such an attack. Russian cuisine was no solution, for even when “obtained at great expense in the best hotels, [it] produces digestive upsets dignified by purple blotches.” If his young men were to stay healthy, they would need more frequent leaves than the department normally provided. 12

  The afflicted staff member was Kennan, who had been on duty in Moscow longer than anyone else. Leave was accordingly granted, allowing George a few days in Leningrad for the first time, while Annelise remained behind to set up the Mokhovaya apartment, into which they were finally now able to move. Peter the Great’s capital, George wrote Jeanette, had been erected atop the poverty and suffering that Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov had described, “like a flower on a manure-heap.” The Bolsheviks had made no effort to clean up the mess. One of the unhealthiest in the world, the city should never have been built and would perhaps one day sink back into the swamp from which Peter had raised it.

  George went on from Leningrad to Norway, where Annelise was to join him. As the mail boat from Oslo approached Kristiansand, having called at each small, freshly painted town along the way, he felt the contrast between Soviet and Scandinavian life that would always move him: “It is wonderful to see the young people all out here on vacation, clean and tanned and so strong and well-built as to put our own younger generation to shame.” Soon “we will pass the island where the Sørensen family have their summer house, and some of the family will probably stand on the rocks and wave handkerchiefs and my little daughter will stare solemnly at the white boat and wonder what it’s all about.... [W]hen she finally sees me, I’m sure she’ll draw a wry face and clutch her grandmother’s skirts for protection.”13

  II.

  Kristiansand provided protection for George as well. It reunited his family: he had not seen Grace since leaving for the United States the previous September. She was, he wrote Bullitt, “so absurdly healthy” that he hated to take her away from “this paradise of cleanliness, order, and well-fed respectability.” His own health had improved: “I feel perfectly well again now.” And he had bought a seagoing sailboat. The experienced Norwegians, he added in a letter to Charlie James, had been “waiting for me to turn turtle in one of their numerous local squalls or bust up on one of their numerous local reefs.” But he had come through the first four weeks without incident: “I regard my responsibility as a matter of national prestige.”14

  George would still be sailing Norwegian waters well into his eighties. In the summer of 1934, though, he was developing a higher ambition: he wanted to become a writer. The Kennan children had grown up in a house filled with books. George and Jeanette shared poems with each other and later a passion for novels. Reading good fiction, he had written her from Riga the year before, “leaves me tingling with excitement and dissatisfaction.” Lives throb with beauty and pathos, and “I am instinctively certain that if my poor intelligence was put into the world for any purpose, it was to act as a reflector and magnifier . . . to drag it out of the corners where it lurks and flash it to a world which sees too little of it.”

  The key to the greatness of novelists, though, had always been their limitations: “They knew one thing—one country, at the most—and were saturated with it.” George envied Chekhov his ignorance of all but Russia, Hemingway his war and its relics, Sinclair Lewis his American Midwest.

  But what can a man do whose life has been lived in a hundred different places, who never had a home after he was thirteen and never noticed anything before, who speaks three languages equally easily? There has been nothing which hung together, nothing coherent, nothing even representative or symbolic about my life from the beginning.... [My] attention has been scattered around and wasted like the leaves of a tree, and I have only a hopeless hodgepodge of fading, incoherent impressions.

  He could of course write about colleagues. If Chekhov could describe Russian villagers so clearly that American readers gasped, “how perfectly true,” why couldn’t the Moscow diplomatic community be written up in the same way? But literature was also a kind of history: it portrayed “a given class at a given time, with all its problems, its suffering and its hopes.” Diplomats’ lives, he finally concluded, were “too insignificant, too accidental, to warrant description.”15

  So too, in George’s opinion, was sex. He read Lady Chatterley’s Lover that summer but found it “not a very good book.” Its frankness went nowhere and proved nothing: happiness in life was not contentment in bed. Lawrence’s characters shared only a shallow and transitory compatibility. Sex, George insisted, was “not a field for introspection.” It should be “only incidental,” for people “who spend as little time contemplating its pleasures as they do worrying about its results.... [T]here are other things vastly more important.”16

  Per
haps so, but what were they? There was of course the world itself. George had seen more of it than most people and since his 1924 European trip had been filling his diaries with descriptive impressions. Now he hoped to get some of them published. One such piece, “Runo—An Island Relic of Medieval Sweden,” did come out in 1935 in the Canadian Geographical Journal after having been turned down by The National Geographic Magazine: it was George’s first appearance in print.17 But travel writing was not likely to establish a reputation, or to provide an income.

  Biography, however, might be an alternative. It allowed seeing beauty, pathos, class, sex, and scenes through someone else’s eyes, an attractive possibility for George, who preferred functioning, as he himself put it, “from a certain emotional distance.” That brought him back to Chekhov. Late in 1932 he sought State Department clearance to send an essay on “Anton Chekhov and the Bolsheviks” to The Yale Review. George’s mentors Robert Kelley and Joseph Green (who had moved there from Princeton) liked the article, and the chairman of the department’s publication committee allowed that “[i]f Yale can stand it, I can.” Yale could not, however, and the piece was never published. 18

  There was, though, another possibility: could George F. Kennan write the life of the first George Kennan? The idea originated in Moscow, where he had found a lively interest in his ancestor: even Kalinin had asked about the connection. It had been awkward, George wrote Jeanette, “having the same name and nationality and having so much the same interests, to explain that I know little more of him than the average reader of his works and have never had any association with his branch of the family.” So at some point in the spring of 1934, he asked her to see the elder George Kennan’s widow at her home in Medina, New York, and to raise the question of a biography with her.

  The visit went badly. Mrs. Kennan, now eighty, remembered George’s inadequate thank-you letter, written at the age of seven after his only meeting with his famous namesake. She also resented George’s name: convinced, erroneously, that the “Frost” had been meant to honor George A. Frost, the difficult traveling companion her husband had endured in Siberia, she had, she revealed, tried unsuccessfully after young George’s birth to get it changed. “Because George Frost Kennan can speak Russian is no reason that he can do full just[ice] to a man who had spent a large part of his life stud[y]ing different races,” Mrs. Kennan wrote Jeanette. “You see, my dear, you don’t know anything of . . . our life, the world we knew, or our tastes, so extremely different from your father’s or any of the [other] Kennan’s.” The current George Kennan had not fitted himself to be a writer, having neither style nor originality nor personality in expression. “[H]e may get all these things later in life after more experience,” but if the first George Kennan’s life were ever to be written, it would have to be by an “experienced biographer.”

  George was stung by the brush-off. “It is no fault of mine—nor is it very important—that my middle name is Frost,” he complained to Jeanette. “I can also not feel apologetic about letters I may have written as a boy. Anyone who can remember the anguish of a child who is forced to try to write letters to grown-ups whom he scarcely knows will not take too seriously the products of these unnatural efforts.” As for not understanding that branch of the Kennan family, he had, after all, managed to understand “many other sets of tastes and ideas and acquaintances.” But with Mrs. Kennan convinced “that we are a strange crowd of backwoodsmen,” and that “we would like . . . to ride into fame on the coattails of an illustrious cousin,” there was little point in pursuing the matter. “I should prefer to make my progress as a Russian specialist independently.”19

  Whether because of this rejection or not, George admitted to Jeanette at the beginning of August that—despite his summer in Kristiansand—he had been through “a spell of the most miserable nervous depression, which almost made me physically ill.” It had to do with his career, his marriage, and reaching the age of thirty.

  I have no illusions about the significance of my petty bureaucratic success nor the qualities which have helped to bring it about. I could take more pride in one page of decent writing than in being an Ambassador. And there are times when I see myself as a spineless, somewhat infantile, futile little man, passively growing older in the bonds of matrimony—missing dreams which grow fainter and fainter, and farther and farther from realization as the years go by.

  George had been struck to learn that Jeanette was having similar problems: “We are so alike. It’s almost embarrassing.” And it was “ridiculous” that neither of them had been able to discover what their shared symptoms meant. Perhaps “thwarted ambitions” were “only the scapegoats on[to] which our . . . subconscious minds divert dissatisfaction.” They probably reflected the family inheritance “of repression and sacrifice,” or perhaps “a strange, stiff, motherless childhood.”

  The night before, George added, he had written in his notebook of a man sobered by scrapes with catastrophe who was willing to sacrifice much to save a little. There was humor and enjoyment in this, but no great elation: “No fantastic vistas gleam momentarily through the shifting mists.” A price had been paid for peace of mind. It brought him “courage and a concentration of strength which he lacked before. His eyes are clear and his nerves are steady.” However, “I disrigged my sailboat today and it was very sad.”20

  III.

  Bullitt asked Kennan not to hurry back to Moscow. There was a long, hard winter ahead, and the work to be done there was less important than his health. But by the end of July George was ready to return: “I really feel that I have gotten all I can get out of my vacation here, and that to stay longer would only mean to get rusty and lazy from inactivity.” The entire family—including Grace and a Norwegian girlfriend of Annelise’s who served as a nanny—were back in Moscow by the end of August. “Kuniholm, Kennan, and Bohlen are all working admirably,” Bullitt reported to the State Department a few weeks later. “[W]e could run this Embassy with the assistance of these three boys and no superior officers whatever.”21

  Kennan would have blanched at this after going through the previous winter, but he and his family were at least reasonably comfortable in their apartment on the fifth floor of the Mokhovaya. They shared the building with some forty other Americans who lived and worked there, mostly free of friction, with an intimacy and informality unusual in a Foreign Service post. Grace spoke a mixture of Norwegian and English that George found “fluent for this peculiarity.” She was, he wrote Jeanette, “a sweet, happy child, and a good companion” who enjoyed family activities, including “the scrubbing of my back, whenever she is allowed to.” Dividing her attention between Americans in the Mokhovaya and children in the Kremlin park, Grace “commanded communists and capitalists alike with a queenly contempt for ideological differences.”22

  Annelise had a Russian cook and maid, although it was a mystery to her how they could work so slowly. She had bought George a guitar and was herself learning Russian. “I understand a lot when I hear people speaking, even more when I read.” One book on her list was Trotsky’s autobiography: “He is a brilliant man, but also very vain.” Family finances were better than they had been for some time, with George having received a promotion and a salary increase—the apartment came free. He was even considering co-purchasing, with Annelise’s father, the island off Kristiansand where they had spent the summer: “It might provide for little Grace—as Nagawicka did for us—the symbol of a home, something which she will otherwise lack sadly as long as we continue our wandering existence.”23

  In the privacy of his diary, however, George was as gloomy as ever. He could not help but contrast the Soviet experience with “the neurotic unreality of our own.” Russians lived life “in the raw, . . . good and evil, drunk and sober, loving and quarreling, laughing and weeping—all that human life is and does anywhere—but all the more simple and direct and therefore stronger.” Their revolution, like nature, was lavish and careless. “Its victims are no more to it than the thousands of see
ds which are cast to the wind, in order that one tree may grow.” The survivors, though, possessed a healthy, earthy vitality that attracted him despite the fact that it would quickly crush him, “as it crushes all forms of weakness.” So much for Kennan’s confidence, two years earlier in Riga, that the Soviet system carried within itself the seeds of its own self-destruction.24

  One visitor to Moscow that fall was George’s half-brother Kent, then twenty-one, who spent a month in Bohlen’s temporarily vacant apartment. Kent got to practice on the Spaso House grand piano while the ambassador was away. He relished seeing opera and ballet at the Bolshoi—“lavishly mounted, frequently with a good deal of gimmicky stage business like rising moons and setting suns (in which the Russian audiences seemed to take a certain naïve delight)”—and even managed to get into a performance of Dimitri Shostakovich’s controversial Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk before Stalin shut it down. Annelise found it alarming, though, that Kent was even thinner than George, and George worried about his shyness. “I see in him,” he wrote Jeanette, the “restless ghost (and a very gaunt ghost it is) of my former self.” Kent remembered the visit as an exciting experience, with George and his colleagues constantly dropping into each other’s apartments, confusing the maids and the hidden microphones with code words, expecting GPU eavesdropping—that was the current acronym for the secret police—on every telephone call.25

  On November 7, the seventeenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Kennans watched the six-hour military parade in Red Square from their apartment windows. The next day George and Annelise attended their first Kremlin reception, mounting a terrifyingly high straight staircase that “made us feel like ants” to enter the great ballroom where Ivan the Terrible had once received foreign emissaries. “America,” Annelise wrote, “seems far away.” Life in Moscow was getting strenuous again, George complained later that month, as much because of social obligations as office work. In a single week the Kennans went to three dinners, three parties, and an impromptu luncheon, while giving another dinner and a tea. One event, hosted by the Russians, began at eleven in the evening and lasted until three-thirty in the morning. “I sometimes have misgivings as to how long I can stand it.”26