George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  “People have sneered at Bullitt for the enthusiasm and optimism with which he approached his task in Russia, and for the meagerness of the results obtained,” Kennan wrote in 1938. That was, he thought, not fair: “It was a gallant try, . . . in a profession where risks are unavoidable.” He himself, however, had never shared Bullitt’s optimism: Kelley’s training had left him without illusions as to what diplomacy could accomplish in Moscow. Kennan also knew, from Russian history, that hostility toward the outside world was not new. To make this point, he prepared a report taken wholly from the dispatches of Neill S. Brown, the U.S. minister in St. Petersburg from 1850 to 1853. They had been found, Kennan claimed, in a pile of rubbish in what was left of the American legation there. “Secrecy and mystery characterize everything,” Brown had written, of the reign of Nicholas I. “Nothing is made public that is worth knowing.” The Russian government possessed, “in an exquisite degree, the art of worrying a foreign representative without giving him even the consolation of an insult.”

  Delighted, Bullitt forwarded Brown’s observations to the State Department as an accurate picture of life in the Soviet Union in 1936: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Kennan saw in them the need to regard Bolshevism, “with all its hullabaloo about revolution,” not as a turning point in history, but as only another milepost in Russia’s “wasteful, painful progress from an obscure origin to an obscure destiny.” Nothing in Brown’s dispatches or in Kennan’s training, however, anticipated the horrors of Stalinism. If the purges continued, he concluded in another study written for Bullitt, “there would be nothing left of the Soviet system of government but rule by a small irresponsible group” whose authority rested only on “bread and circuses” and repressive police power: “in short, fascism.”42

  This did not mean, though, that relations with the U.S.S.R. were useless. Bullitt’s “swan song,” in which he warned of the Soviet desire to “kill millions of Americans,” concluded on a wholly different note: “We should neither expect too much, nor despair of getting anything at all.” There is no way to know who drafted which portions, but the recommendations that followed—a patient balancing of competing pressures over a long period of time with a view to producing growth in desired directions—sounded more like Kennan’s methods for achieving physical health and psychological stability than like Bullitt’s emotional volatility:

  We should take what we can get when the atmosphere is favorable and do our best to hold on to it when the wind blows the other way. We should remain unimpressed in the face of expansive professions of friendliness and unperturbed in the face of slights and underhand opposition. We should make the weight of our influence felt steadily over a long period of time in the directions which best suit our interests. We should never threaten. We should act and allow the Bolsheviks to draw their own conclusions as to the causes of our acts.

  The future of Soviet-American relations would therefore depend chiefly on the United States. “[W]e should guard the reputation of Americans for businesslike efficiency, sincerity, and straightforwardness. We should never send a spy to the Soviet Union. There is no weapon so disarming and effective in relations with the communists as sheer honesty. They know very little about it.”43

  Whoever drafted it, the conclusions of Bullitt’s “swan song” anticipated with eerie precision the most famous essay Kennan ever published: his briefly anonymous 1947 “X” article, in Foreign Affairs, on “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”44 Bullitt, more than anyone else, launched Kennan on the trajectory that led to that achievement. He gave Kennan his first big break by asking him, on the spur of the moment, to help open the Moscow embassy. He nursed Kennan through a year-long health crisis that, without steady behind-the-scenes support, could easily have ended his career. He consistently praised Kennan’s work in reports to the State Department: Bullitt’s critical personnel assessments spared no other member of the Moscow embassy staff. “Nothing but Mr. Kennan’s health,” he concluded in the last of these, “can prevent him from becoming one of the most valuable officers in the [Foreign] Service.”45

  Kennan knew what Bullitt had done for him. His generation of Foreign Service officers, he wrote his former boss after his ambassadorship to France was announced in September 1936, had been trying to save themselves “from the comfortable philistinism or the decadent estheticism which are the refuges of most of our older colleagues.” Bullitt had understood and sympathized with these efforts. It would seem “very strange not to have your guidance in the Moscow work—especially for me, who can recall our associations in this work from the very beginning.” The Americans there would “plug along,” but “the last vestiges of the novelty of opening up a new territory are gone. Our work is routine—and no longer adventure.”46

  SIX

  Rediscovering America: 1936–1938

  SHORTLY AFTER HIS DECEMBER 1935 TRIP TO TOLSTOY’S HOME AT Yasnaya Polyana—with its unexpected assistance from the GPU and its unanticipated evocations of boyhood winters in Wisconsin—Kennan asked the State Department for permission to return to the United States. He had not been there for over two years, he pointed out, and on that visit he had taken only seventeen days of leave before departing with Bullitt for Moscow. Annelise and Grace would be traveling to America in February: it would be Grace’s first trip there. Moreover, “my wife expects another child to be born in April. I should naturally like to join her soon after the child has been born.”1

  There were legal as well as sentimental reasons for the request. A new law had raised the possibility that children born abroad might be denied American citizenship if one parent lacked that status. Annelise was not yet a citizen, so there was little choice, George recalled, but for her to make the long winter voyage back before the baby arrived, after which “I had to come over and fetch them all back to Russia.” The trip would strain finances, he told Jeanette, but with luck there would be enough “to see Annelise and Grace to the United States and the next youngster into the world. Then we’ll see where we stand.”2

  Joan Elisabeth Kennan was born in April at Jeanette’s home in Highland Park, Illinois, and George got there in mid-May. The expanded family vacationed for a few weeks at the Hotchkiss cottage on Pine Lake, just north of Nagawicka—the family compound there had long since been sold. George read Charles Beard’s The Open Door at Home, listened to radio coverage of the Republican national convention, and wrote a letter to Bullitt “wishing that there were another opportunity—just at this time—for one of those high and wide discussions which we have had on only too rare occasions.” What he wanted to talk about, though, was not Russia, but America.

  The journey home, Kennan reported, had been a reintroduction to capitalism, of which he had seen little recently except Norway and Austria, which had been too idyllic and too depressing, respectively, to be representative. Germany, as he passed through it, had been a “great garden, well-kept and blooming, . . . populated by clean and healthy people.” London had been full of business activity but striking for its social stability: he had forgotten that such a thing existed. So “I got back to this country almost a complete convert to the horrors of capitalism, ready to forgive even radio advertising, . . . and the Saturday Evening Post.”

  Once home, however, his optimism began to fade. He acknowledged the high living standard, the political liberties, the freedom of expression. But there was also chaotic municipal growth, an increasingly spoiled countryside, and an absence of public regulation, all of which left “little for the future but retrogression.”

  It seems to me that this country doesn’t want government.... It will suffer unlimited injustices and infringements on liberty from irresponsible private groups, but none from a responsible governing agency. Its people would rather go down individually, with quixotic courage, before the destructive agencies of uncontrolled industrialism—like Ethiopian tribesmen before Italian gas attacks—than submit to the discipline necessary for any effective resistance.

  Geography insulated t
he United States from the international consequences of ineffectiveness, but “no oceans can spare us the internal consequences.” Only “strong central power (far stronger than the present constitution would allow)” could rescue individuals from economic hardship and social injustice. “And I’m afraid that’s what’s coming.”3

  Kennan’s letter set forth concerns about his country that would remain with him for the rest of his life: anxiety over the way unrestricted capitalism eroded community; a sense of environmental dangers that was well ahead of its time; frustration over the extent to which domestic political pressures, responding to private interests, shaped public policy; fear that this would weaken the United States in a world dominated by more purposeful states; and finally a striking lack of faith in the health and durability of democratic institutions. “I hate the rough and tumble of our political life,” George had written Jeanette the previous year. “I hate democracy; I hate the press . . . ; I hate the ‘peepul;’ I have become clearly un-American.”4

  The problem, he conceded many years later, was “not just that I had left the world of my boyhood, . . . it was also that this world had left me.” It had of course left everyone else too, but the process had been so gradual that most Americans hadn’t noticed. Only expatriates, returning after years spent abroad, could really see what was happening. “Increasingly, now, I would not be a part of my country, although what it had once been would remain a part of me.” Allegiance would be “a loyalty despite, not a loyalty because, a loyalty of principle, not of identification.”5

  The Kennans sailed for Europe in mid-July 1936, sharing the SS Manhattan with the “gum-chewing supermen” and “hefty amazons” who would represent the United States at the Berlin Olympics. Upon arrival in Hamburg,

  [t]he athletes lined the rail of the ship and light-heartedly shouted their locker-room banter at the people on shore. It did not occur to them that these people would not be apt to understand much of it. They failed to notice that the country before their eyes was a country different—excitingly, provocatively different—from their own. To myself, for whom these transitions from one world to another had never ceased to be momentous, awe-compelling experiences, . . . this was a little sad.

  George, Annelise, Grace, and Joan went by way of Kristiansand, Oslo, Copenhagen, and Helsinki to Leningrad, where the fortress of Kronstadt at the harbor entrance provided a grim welcome. Getting to the Moscow train was an ordeal, followed by terror when family, luggage, and George got separated in the midst of huge crowds. Reunited, they arrived the next morning in a rainstorm with no one to meet them, and so made their own way to the Mokhovaya, “drenched, disorganized, and entirely happy to be again among the people whose friendship and understanding still made Moscow the nearest thing in the world to home.”6

  I.

  Home, to be sure, had its problems. The Mokhovaya, constructed only of brick, wood, and plaster, was already falling apart, leaving cracks from which there emerged, according to an American inspection report, “countless moths, which feed upon the insulating material within the walls,” along with “roaches and other insects against which a constant battle must be fought.” Varying gas pressure made cooking uncertain, while electricity remained erratic. The building was poorly heated in winter, but when the weather was hot and the windows were open, layers of oil, soot, and dust blew in from the traffic on the street outside. Bathrooms doubled as laundry facilities, and servants slept in kitchens and halls. “Our friend Durby [Durbrow] had fought with our cook and fired her,” George wrote Jeanette. “We hunted for another one but couldn’t find any, and finally had to take the old bitch (she is generally referred to in this manner) back. We still have no nurse.”7 Nonetheless the living quarters were better than those of most other foreigners in Moscow, and the work that went on in the offices below was remarkable.

  “It is not an exaggeration to say,” Kennan noted with pride the following year, “that by the beginning of 1937 the American Embassy at Moscow, which had started from scratch three years before, had become one of the two or three best-conducted and best-informed missions in the city.” He and four other Foreign Service officers sent the State Department 329 dispatches of an “original informative or reportorial” character in 1936, comprising 3,857 pages. Topics ranged from Soviet relations with the United States and other countries through the operations of the Communist International, Stalin’s first purge trials, the successes and shortcomings of the Soviet economy, the new draft constitution, and the activities of Americans living in the U.S.S.R. There were also reports on slum clearance, fish exports, fur auctions, sausage casings, and the All-Union Conference of Engineers’ Wives. At the department’s request, Kennan himself produced a 115-page analysis of Russian documents relating to the purchase of Alaska in 1867.

  The embassy library received over a hundred Soviet and foreign newspapers daily, subscribed to between 350 and 400 periodicals, and maintained a collection of over a thousand books while forwarding additional copies to the legation in Riga and to the Division of Eastern European Affairs library in Washington. However moth-ridden and roach-infested it may have been, the Mokhovaya was now a major research center on Soviet affairs—so much so that department officials were beginning to grumble about the number of dispatches they were receiving, some of which seemed “unnecessarily voluminous.”8

  The work was “very hard, very delicate, and quite thankless,” George wrote. “We don’t try to see anything of the Russians any more, except for a few official parties. It’s too risky for them.” The isolation of foreigners had never been greater, and the group that remained got smaller, more ingrown, and increasingly bored with each other. Social life within the embassy was, if anything, more intense. “Have been out every single night [except] last night,” Annelise added on January 2—George was back in Vienna for a medical checkup.

  On the 30th Durbie had a few people in for dinner. At about 2 o’clock we were having such a good time that we decided we were celebrating New Years Eve in advance. I got home at 4:00, and 3 of the boys sat talking afterwards until 6. On New Years Eve I was first at the Hendersons, afterwards at the Metropole and finally ended at Durbie’s. Got to bed at 6, slept to 12, and felt fine. It always seems fatal when George is away about getting to bed at any reasonable hours.

  It helped that there was now, for recreation, an American dacha outside Moscow, which several of the embassy bachelors had purchased. Not far from Stalin’s own country retreat, it had a log house, a tennis court, a garden, horses to ride, and a high wooden fence. There was something very comforting, Charlie Thayer remembered, “about driving through those big wooden gates after a long hard day trying to understand the Russians.... [T]he GPU seemed to disappear from existence.”9

  The Kennans used the place regularly. “We had the feeling we could go out at any time,” Annelise remembered. Surrounding the dacha, George explained, was “the most wonderful riding country you can imagine. We make a point of saying good-day to all the peasants. They look as though they were seeing a ghost, and grope uncertainly for their hats. They think maybe the Revolution was all a bad dream, and that the masters are back in the saddle.” On one memorable occasion, George, Grace, and Stalin drove back from their respective dachas on the same road at the same time. As his limousine passed, the dictator “stared gloomily out of his window at Grace and myself and we stared back.”10

  Still, Moscow was a difficult place to raise children. When Grace fell ill with bronchial pneumonia, no nurse dared enter a foreign embassy. A Russian doctor did come, but only after receiving permission from the Foreign Office, which also had to approve the use of a portable X-ray machine. “For one whole day,” George admitted, “I literally didn’t dare to hope that she would live.” He worried that “we wouldn’t even be able to find a priest to bury the little girl.” Grace recovered dramatically, however, and was soon sitting up and pestering everyone, being as naughty as one can be with “feet firmly on this earth.”

  “I feel that I a
m ripe for a transfer,” Kennan confessed wearily at the end of this December 1936 letter to Jeanette. For in addition to the hardships of life in Moscow, he and his colleagues were developing “a doctrinaire skepticism which cannot be a good thing. We know so thoroughly the limitations of our job that it seems hard to see its possibilities.... [W]e have the psychology of old men.” The time had come to turn things over to people “whose experience is less and whose enthusiasm is greater. It will do us all good.”11

  II.

  That opportunity came quickly enough. Bullitt’s successor, Joseph E. Davies, arrived on January 19, 1937, with ample enthusiasm but no experience whatever. He was, like Bullitt, a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but there the similarities ended. A lawyer, campaign contributor, and the new (but third) husband of Marjorie Merriweather Post, one of the richest women in the world, Davies was in every sense a political appointee. He was sleek, self-confident, hungry for publicity, and proud of not being a diplomat. He knew nothing of the Soviet Union but was sure that powerful men were the same everywhere and that he could, through the force of his own personality, get through to its leaders. All of this placed Davies at odds with the disillusioned Bullitt and the staff he had left behind. Davies “drew from the first instant our distrust and dislike,” Kennan recalled. “We doubted his seriousness.... We saw every evidence that his motives in accepting the post were personal and political and ulterior to any sense of the solemnity of the task itself.” At the end of the new ambassador’s first day in Moscow, Kennan and several other young career officers gathered in Henderson’s rooms to consider “whether we should resign in a body from the service.”12