George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Not long at all, as it turned out. George wrote that letter on December 2, 1934. Ten days later he fell ill with severe stomach pains, together with the inability to keep food down. “Poor boy,” Annelise wrote Jeanette on the twenty-first: “He hadn’t had anything to eat for 40 hours.” As a consequence, George missed the most famous party ever held at Spaso House: the Christmas Eve celebration at which Thayer, responding to Bullitt’s instructions to “make it good,” brought in trained seals from the Moscow Circus to slither across the ballroom balancing champagne glasses on their noses. Annelise did not miss it: “I remember that very well.” But George lay in bed at the Mokhovaya, entertained only by Grace, the two of them one “in our preoccupation with the present, our indifference to past and future.”27

  “He looks pretty bad to me,” the embassy counselor, John C. Wiley, reported to Bullitt, who was in Washington. Soviet doctors had recommended a sanatorium in Germany or Austria. “Private means zero,” but “Kennan is a valuable asset to the Service.” Bullitt needed no prompting. “I am so fond of that boy and have such confidence in him that I hate to see him leave Moscow,” but he knew from his own experience the agonies of ulcers. Could Kennan come to Washington for free treatment at the Naval Hospital? “[T]he President’s physician . . . is a good friend of mine and would see to it that you had every possible care.” But George’s Foreign Service superiors decided instead to keep him in Europe, temporarily assigning him to the nearest post so that he would not have to take sick leave. They had been “magnificent,” he wrote Jeanette. “I could embrace the old State Department for that, columns, conservatism, intrigues, and all.”28

  As for himself, “I am not unpleased at this turn of events.” After months of feeling miserable while being told that he was suffering from an imaginary ailment, or perhaps “the lack of another drink,” convalescence would be welcome. And so one night in mid-January 1935 his friends put him on the train to Warsaw. “Many of them, I was later told, never expected to see me again.” He was still sick enough to have to be nursed through the night by the sleeping car porter—all the more so for discovering that he had failed to pack passport, visas, and other necessary papers. That required an extra day at the border and further treatment by the village doctor: the station was the one through which he and Bullitt had passed, with much greater ceremony, a little over a year before. Kennan finally made it to Vienna, where duodenal ulcers were confirmed, probably aggravated by inadequate treatment of the amoebic dysentery that had laid George low on his European trip with Nick Messolonghitis a decade earlier. He was sent off to Sanatorium Gutenbrunn, in the town of Baden on the edge of the Wienerwald and at the foot of the Alps, with firm instructions: “rest and diet.”29

  IV.

  George knew European “cures” too well, he assured Jeanette—and, he might have added, his Thomas Mann—to see any Magic Mountain glamour in the Gutenbrunn. His treatment was “a beneficial form of torture.” Except for his doctor’s visits and the delivery of scanty meals, George was left alone and required to stay in bed, a jarring contrast to the hyperactivity of the past year. “Just think of it. Who else could contrive in these harassed days to set aside [even] one hour . . . to no further purpose than the contemplation of three walls, a ceiling, two cupboards, a washbowl, a mirror, a coat rack, and the fading, shifting universe of his own memory?”30

  The doctor was Frieda Por, a Hungarian Jew who became a lifelong friend. “Believe me,” George later recalled, “for a Jewish woman to become a staff physician in Gutenbrunn in those days—a very conservative old Austrian sanatorium with all the other doctors real Viennese—that was quite an achievement.” Her therapy was as much psychological as physical. Whether at her behest or on his own, George read Freud for the first time. “I talked with her many times about this,” the debates extending “high and wide” into the night. She defended the power of human will and the possibilities for happiness, but only, he suspected, as someone who was neither free nor happy and “dares not admit it.” He complained that “your idea of what to do with a patient who has problems like [mine] is to wrap them in soft blankets and tell them not to be ashamed of anything they ever did. That it’s all their parents’ fault.” George preferred the grimmer Puritan tradition, which was “that you jolly well bite the bullet if you have problems.... I think will power has got something to do with it.” But his diary shows him wrestling with himself:

  George #1: You feel the need of unburdening your soul to the Frau Doktor. You are anxious to tell her that you are depressed. You had not, after all, coped with life successfully in the past. That was clear enough from the very fact that you, a young man, in the prime of life, should be lying in this sanatorium together with a lot of old syphilitics and anemic women.

  George #2: Whence this urge to confession? Did you really think that she could help you? You know she couldn’t. You know no woman could, unless she were beyond the last trace of femininity and treated you with the unsparing frankness and the contempt which you deserve.

  George #1: Well, after all, she is in charge of my treatment. Should she not know the state of mind of her patient?

  George #2: Oho, you goddam hypocrite! None of that stuff! No sir! None of your limp excuses! You are in a sanatorium, not a psychopathic clinic. It’s your stomach that is being treated, not your head. If you think your head needs treating, then go to a psychiatrist, but don’t come sneaking around to lady stomach doctors with your little intimate confidences. Learn to take it, Kennan. It’s your problem.

  George did acknowledge, though, at least some relationship between his stomach and his head. “I must lack independence of character,” he wrote Bullitt, “because I react so strongly to the confidence or mistrust of others.” Loy Henderson, who supervised his work in Moscow, saw a direct connection between Kennan’s ambition and his health: when things got difficult, he would get sick. Years later Kennan saw the connection as well: “I was too tense, too anxious to please my superiors and to measure up to the responsibilities I had. I noticed that when I left government, the ulcers stopped, because I was no longer responsible to anyone but myself.”31

  For the moment, though, George was using his Gutenbrunn time for self-analysis. Physical sickness, he thought, might provide a path to spiritual recovery. But he had no normal spiritual life, only the pressures of responsibility. So “I dare not relax.... I am like a man on a bicycle: as long as I keep going, I can balance; if I stop, I fall.” What if the body could not stand it? What if there were more physical collapses, each worse than the other? There might be refuge in sleep, sport, and spartan life, but where would that leave Annelise? “Who is going to give her companionship in youth, gaiety, and human society?”

  Communion with the past might be another way to heal. George’s diary from these months contains detailed accounts of being dragged in sullen stubbornness to dancing school as a child, of being lonely at St. John’s and looking forward to the liberation of holidays, of then spending them by himself at home sulking, reading “the dirty poems” in his father’s edition of Robert Burns, snatched furtively from the living room bookshelf. Perhaps he had been trying to warn the grown-ups that they were raising “an unruly, neurotic child,” who was appealing for help. George sent Jeanette a sixteen-page unfinished account of his life as a fledgling diplomat in Geneva and Hamburg, “the unhappy little adjustments of a scared young American, who cracks up now and then with a loud thud.” And he wrote elegia-cally to Cyrus Follmer about “associations of other days” in Berlin, where there were “rare friends in whose eyes and words the world and life were once so nicely mirrored.” There had been none like that in Moscow or Riga. “Never since has life glowed so richly and so deeply. It probably never will.”

  Dreams became vivid enough to record, if not to analyze. The Foreign Service, irritated by George’s messy accounts, tells him it has no further need for his services. Thinking of his family, he pleads for his job, offers if necessary to become a typist, but finds that his super
iors have only been giving him “a good scare.” Jews parade along the Riga Strand holding coffee cups to their mouths—but they could also be thermometers. A Doberman follows George out of a St. Petersburg restaurant where the murdered tsar lies on a bier, surrounded by his security men sitting at tables. The animal rears as if to attack, but then turns to show a sign on his back indicating that he is “an imperial watch-dog, with full official status.” George bows in acknowledgment, introducing himself formally as “Kennan, . . . of the American Embassy.”32

  By mid-February, Annelise and Grace had joined George in Baden. “They take too much time,” he groused to Jeanette in a letter on March 6. “Don’t idealize our marriage. It’s been near enough the rocks on more than one occasion.” But the same letter devotes four pages to a rhapsodic description of the island off Kristiansand that he and Annelise’s father hoped to buy. And when his wife and daughter left in April for a visit to Norway, George wrote wistfully, in his diary, of their departure:

  Annelise and Grace leaned out of the [train] window.... Annelise tried hard and unsuccessfully not to cry. Grace ran her lips dreamily along the metal rim of the window. I stared hard, for a while, into the blue glaze of the side of the car. Annelise could not reach down far enough to kiss me, so she gave me her hand, and I kissed it. Then Grace took off her woolen glove and held her hand out, too, for the same purpose. That saved the moment—if not the day.

  “You can’t come back to[o] soon for me,” George wrote Annelise on the twentieth. A few days later he told Jeanette that “we are just sentimental enough to abandon our brave plan of staying separated until July.” The family would be back in May.33

  George was still searching out paths—however tortuous—to recovery. He must “pretend” to be interested in life and work: “It is the only way you can beat down your own ego and at the same time save your family.” Or maybe he could arrange to “be a martyr by getting well.” If someone could convince him that recovery was such a difficult and strenuous process that he should not attempt it—“if people shook their heads with disapproval and concern at every meal I ate, every hour I rested, and every pound I put on”—then he might get well right away. He was at least trying to be “vernünftig” (sensible, judicious, reasonable) about his health, he assured Bullitt: “With these words I sound exactly like my Puritan father, but I can’t help it: I am that way.”34

  Bullitt, in Moscow, insisted that he not rush things. “I want to have Kennan but not kill him,” he explained to the State Department. “He is the best officer I have had here.” So after being released from the sanatorium in April, Kennan was assigned light duty at the American consulate general in Vienna and later at the legation under the sympathetic supervision of the minister, George Messersmith. The idea was to see whether he could work without losing weight. There were setbacks, but Bullitt, passing through in June, was pleased to find that George had gained twenty-two pounds. “We are both homesick for Russia,” Annelise wrote Jeanette. That seemed incredible to their friends. It had been “glorified in our memory and we will be disappointed when we go back.” For the moment, though, George’s stomach still needed a holiday.35

  George, for his part, was learning “that you can’t change human beings radically, all of a sudden.” In a horticultural metaphor that would stick with him, he concluded that “[t]he best you can do is to influence them, like plants, over a long period of time, by gradual changes in their environment.” The State Department had allowed him time, but it would ultimately want him back, and he would need to adapt. Diplomacy in most places required

  a facile tongue, unhampered by any sincerity; you must have a great capacity for quiet, boring dissipation: not great brawls, but continual rich food, irregular meals, enervating liqueurs and lack of sleep; you must have a deep interest . . . in golf and bridge, in clothes and other people’s business; you must have an utter lack of conscience for the injustices of the world about you and not the faintest intention of ever doing anything about them; you must, in fact, be able to rid yourself of every last impulse to distinguish between right and wrong.

  Diplomacy in Moscow was different, however, for Soviet society lacked the cynicism and listlessness found elsewhere: it “deludes itself into believing that it is going somewhere.” George hastened to assure Jeanette, quite unnecessarily, that “I am no Bolshevik.” But “some of the visions of the more intelligent communist leaders are the most impelling and inspiring human conceptions which it has been my lot to encounter—and my experience in this respect has not been small.”

  Of course diplomacy required selling one’s soul “for a mess of very meretricious ministerial dignity.” But the price of souls, like everything else, was subject to the law of supply and demand: “Probably it is better to sell one’s soul . . . than to let it dry up in its own bitterness and get nothing for it whatsoever.” It was like hanging on too long to virginity, which “only too soon comes to be worth nothing at all.” And so in early November the Kennans were on their way back to Moscow: “I am looking forward to my return probably more than I should,” George wrote Bullitt, “more, in any case, than I can justify through any amount of rationalization—and don’t let anyone tell you I’m not.”36

  V.

  But while Kennan was balancing the competing claims of body, mind, family, and profession in Vienna, the Soviet Union had changed. Although hardly free from difficulties, the political atmosphere throughout most of 1934, he recalled, had been “far more friendly, pleasant, and relaxed than anything Russia was to know for another two decades.” The mood disappeared overnight, with the assassination, on December 1, of the Leningrad party boss, Sergei Kirov. It remains unclear, to this day, whether Stalin ordered the murder. But he used the provocation to consolidate absolute power through a wave of arrests, imprisonments, and executions that would terrorize the country for the next five years and would haunt it long after that. It was, as Kennan saw it, “one of the major catastrophes of Russian history . . . the revenge of the Revolution upon itself.”37

  By the time the Kennans returned to Moscow in mid-November, George had to admit to Jeanette that the life to which he had looked forward was not likely to be possible. Foreign friends were leaving, and Russian friends were vanishing, “even the doctors and dentists who are bold enough to treat us.” Embassy life went on, but under the scrutiny of a staff riddled with spies. “Our position is precisely that of enemy negotiators in a hostile camp in time of war.” The Soviet government was behaving, indeed, “as if the war were already here.”38

  There were still opportunities to travel, but only under strict police supervision. In mid-December Kennan attempted to visit Leo Tolstoy’s country home, Yasnaya Polyana, as an ordinary tourist, without seeking special privileges. The trip was exhausting, though, and he became ill on the way: Russia was still “a bad place for weak stomachs.” The GPU, which had been tailing him, intervened sympathetically to provide an overnight hotel room in Tula, a taxi to the estate the next day, and a guided tour, leaving Kennan with a rare feeling of gratitude to his minders—but also with the inescapable sense of being minded. The place reminded him of the Frosts’ country house, near Delafield, where he used to hike from St. John’s in the winter. “There was the same smell of apples and wood fires, the same chill in the corners away from the stove, the same sense of snow-covered fields outside.”39

  Kennan devised a more ambitious challenge to his own stamina—and to GPU ingenuity—when he risked a journey to the Caucasus in March 1936. Official timetables promised regular air service from Moscow: “I insisted on putting it to the test and asked for a ticket.” Rather than admit that the flights did not exist, the authorities “placed a couple of ancient crates at my disposal.” One of them, assigned to fly Kennan from Kharkov to Rostov-on-the-Don, was an open monoplane. He arrived too frozen to speak, “to the consternation of a girl guide sent out to meet me, who saw her linguistic talents confronted with ignominious failure.” After thawing out, Kennan went more sensibly b
y train to the Black Sea, where he found tsarist hotels that were now proletarian “pig-sties,” and then to Georgia, where the air at least felt freer than in Russia. He returned by slow train from Tiflis, after which Moscow seemed “a haven of civilization, culture, and comfort.” Bullitt, who had suggested the trip, watched it carefully. His young aide arrived healthier than he had been for some time, he reported to the State Department. Perhaps there had been “no organic defect” at all, but “merely a general nervousness.”40

  Bullitt was in his final months of service in Moscow: he would spend the summer and fall working for Roosevelt’s reelection, with the understanding that the president would then appoint him to some less demanding overseas post. With help from Kennan and his colleagues, the ambassador prepared a series of valedictory reports on what two and a half years of diplomatic relations had accomplished. The record was sparse: trade remained unimpressive, negotiations on debts and claims had broken down, there had been no further progress on the new embassy chancery, and the previous summer the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had hosted a meeting of the Third International, the organization dedicated to spreading revolution throughout the world. American communists attended, a blatant violation, Bullitt believed, of Litvinov’s promise to Roosevelt, in 1933, that the Soviet Union would refrain from interfering, in any way, in the nation’s domestic affairs. “[I]t must be recognized,” the ambassador warned dramatically in what the staff referred to as his “swan song” dispatch, that “communists are agents of a foreign power whose aim is not only to destroy the institutions and liberties of our country, but also to kill millions of Americans.”41