George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  Leadership also involved being an instantly available ombudsman. On January 25—an unusual day only in that he happened to keep a list—Kennan recorded thirty-two tasks performed. They included accounting for lost luggage, obtaining stationery, determining whether photographs could be taken from hotel balconies, drafting memoranda to go to or through the Swiss, discussing the issue of tips with the hotel management, clearing up several misunderstandings with Patzak, reporting a lady’s missing powder case, and placating a husband who came in “to say that he did not want representations made about his wife.” Later, as the weather warmed up, it fell to Kennan to negotiate the use of a nearby field for baseball. The bat was an improvised tree branch. The ball was a champagne cork wrapped in a sock. Kennan played catcher for the “Embassy Reds” against the “Journalists,” under the puzzled supervision of the Gestapo. “I would never reveal George Kennan’s batting average,” Associated Press reporter Angus Thurmer replied when asked half a century later, “nor would I expect him to reveal mine. Gentlemen in this club don’t do that.”6

  Through all of this, Kennan found the time to become a professor. The setting was “Badheim University,” the school the internees organized to keep themselves busy. Kennan offered a “course” on Russian history, for which he prepared over a hundred pages of lecture notes, some of them scrawled outlines, others typed and finished presentations. They began with the establishment of Christianity and extended—although more thinly toward the end—well into the Stalin era. Apart from his lecture at the Foreign Service School in 1938, these were the first he had ever delivered. They attracted sixty “enrollees,” almost twice the number as the next most popular lecturer. Kennan, the “university” organizers concluded in a written appreciation of his efforts, had “a natural gift for presenting material vividly and interestingly while meeting the highest standards of scholarship.”7

  The lectures stressed historical continuities—geography, climate, soil, ethnicity, culture—as the best way to understand the Soviet Union now that it had become a wartime ally. One in particular stood out for its application of Freudian psychology: in contrast to his skepticism while in Vienna six years earlier, Kennan was now convinced “that the theory is not without foundation.” The “childhood” of peoples was just as important in determining their character as it was for individuals.

  The first five centuries of Russian history had produced an “adolescent” nation with a primitive system of government, a crudely organized society, and an uneducated religious leadership. Beginning with Peter the Great, the tsars embraced modernization but their subjects did not. Industrialization and war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries widened this gap, so that when revolution came, “the mighty tree of Tsardom, which had lost its roots in the people, could not stand the force of the gale.” It fell with “a suddenness and impact that shook the world.”

  Russians at that point “shed their westernized upper crust as a snake sheds its skin,” appearing before the world as a seventeenth-century semi-Asiatic people, with “all the weaknesses of backwardness and all the strength and freshness of youth.” They moved their capital back to Moscow, and an “Oriental” despot—Stalin—installed himself in the Kremlin, bringing with him “the same intolerance, the same dark cruelty, the same religious dogmatism in word and form, the same servility, . . . the same fear and distrust of the outside world,” that had characterized the premodern tsars. The only difference now was that the Russians made weapons and could use them “with the best of us.” That raised the question, then, when the time came to make peace with Germany, “of whether Russia is to be the confusion or the salvation of the Western European continent.”8

  Kennan’s image of a tree with thin roots came close to describing his own condition after weeks of confined hyperactivity. In one sense, he recalled, the responsibility of looking after other people from morning to night kept him from brooding too much about himself. But by February he was contemplating the possibility that he might never see his family again. That was when he drafted his long letter to Grace and Joan—never finished—in which he tried to explain what it would be like to grow up with a missing parent. The Kennan and James families, George warned his daughters, were susceptible to depression, even tragedy, but there was “something placid and gay and healthy in your mother’s nature which is a good corrective for all that, and which I hope you have inherited.”9

  As the days dragged on with no end in sight, Kennan later admitted, “I had moments of real neurosis.” One came on a Sunday when he lunched alone, in “gloomy dignity,” then found in the lobby the luggage from the latest group of Americans to arrive from the latest country swallowed up by the Axis. The hotel had no one to move the bags upstairs, and none of the internees volunteered. So he himself performed the task, shaming a few other Americans into helping him load the elevator. At that point he remembered that his cocker spaniel Kimmy—“an unfortunate beast which [I] had been unable to get rid of in the last harried moments before internment”—had been left alone longer than was wise. Abandoning helpers, luggage, and elevator, George dashed to his room to find the dog surrounded by the shredded remains of the only photographs he had of Annelise, Grace, and Joan. Using the third person, he described what happened next:

  With a gasp of horror, [he] fetched the puppy a whack which sent it flying across the room to the corner, where it promptly made a puddle. Then, to his own dismay, [he] burst into unmanly tears, for the first time in all the months of confinement. Knowing that he could never expect two minutes’ peace from the responsibilities of his position, he quickly locked the door . . . , and then set about laboriously and with streaming eyes . . . attempting to fit the snapshots together. There were several knocks on the door, while this was in progress, repeated indignantly after puzzled pauses; but he ignored them all until finally there was a great thumping and rattling of the door handle. Knowing, with the intuition of a prisoner, that this last visitor could be none other than [Morris] himself, [he] pulled himself together and opened the door.10

  That, however, was not the worst experience. Something else happened in April, and it was serious enough for Kennan to resume—briefly—keeping his diary:

  April 19: [O]ne cannot go through life as a general ascetic, merely to exert control over one particular urge. That is only acknowledging one’s slavery to it.... There is only one solution.... It is to acknowledge one’s self as old and beyond those things. My God, man, you are no youngster any more. What do you expect?

  April 20: What I have been guilty of was in my eyes a folly, to be sure, but a minor one; and there were plenty of ameliorating circumstances. That it should have been punished in so grotesque and humiliating a manner is what sets me back.... I cannot face these people now.... To think that I, George Kennan, should be in the position of having to conceal anything. If I go among them and lead a normal life, and the thing later comes out, I have made myself a double-hypocrite.... I have been thwarted, as I was when I was a boy. . . . But what are the “real things” you can’t have? Women, that’s one thing. Liberty is another. Peace of mind’s a third. Isn’t that enough? Yes, I suppose it is.

  April 22: For a man to feel himself young in my circumstances means that he must of necessity be very tough of heart, very gay, very well-balanced in his human relationships, and relatively irresponsible. I am none of these things. I cannot therefore be young successfully. Nor can I continue to be young unsuccessfully. The resultant fiascos would soon be too much for me and would affect not only me but likewise the people I love.11

  So what was this all about? Another sexual indiscretion? An exposure of irresponsibility in some other form? Perhaps even an overblown reaction to having lost his composure and locked himself in his room over the depredations of a dog?

  What occurred was less important than what it showed, which was how precariously Kennan balanced leadership against fragility. Both were in evidence on May 5, 1942, the day he got confirmation that the internment was t
o end: the group would depart by train for Lisbon in a week, and thence by ship home. Kennan drafted the notice, got Morris to sign it, posted it in the empty front hallway, and then walked away. It had required months of work to bring this about, and he was sure that his fellow internees, for the most part, would be ungrateful.

  I am utterly worn out by the strain of living uninterruptedly for 5 months under one roof with 135 other people among whom I have no single intimate friend, and of trying to save them from dangers for which they had no appreciation. My own personal life and strength have been so neglected that I have felt during the last few days something close to an incipient disintegration of personality: a condition of spirit devoid of all warmth, all tone, all humor and all enthusiasm.

  There were complaints about being limited to a single carry-on bag on the train, this on a day “when thousands of people are dying . . . for what they conceive to be important issues.” Kennan was so disgusted “that I couldn’t bring myself to go down to dinner and have locked myself in my room for the evening.”12

  He was also, by this time, fed up with his own government. There had been no communication from the State Department, even through the Swiss, until shortly before the departure. At that point two messages arrived, neither of which boosted morale. One announced that the Foreign Service officers would not be paid for the period of their internment, since they had not been working. A second raised the possibility of sending only half of the internees back on the Drottningholm, the designated Swedish repatriation ship, in order to make room for refugees, presumably Jewish. “Mr. Morris and I succeeded in warding off both of these blows.” It was not, Kennan explained years later, that “you didn’t want the Jews to come.” But “my God, this was an exchange ship.” If half the Americans hadn’t come, half of the Germans wouldn’t have been repatriated either. “We didn’t know anything about [the Holocaust], and obviously being prisoners we didn’t learn anything about it.”13

  The Americans arrived in Lisbon on May 16, a day on which Kennan indulged himself in two long-postponed pleasures. One was a hearty breakfast at the Spanish-Portuguese border station, which he, as the internees’ official representative, was able to enjoy while they remained, enviously hungry, on the train. The second was a poem composed—it showed—on a full stomach:

  From you, embattled comrades in abstention,

  Compatriots to this or that degree,

  Who’ve shared with me the hardships of detention,

  In Jeschke’s Grand and guarded hostelry—

  From you, my doughty champions of the larder,

  Who’ve fought with such persistency and skill,

  Such mighty hearts, such overwhelming ardor,

  The uninspiring battle of the swill—

  From you, my friends, from your aggrieved digestions,

  From all the pangs of which you love to tell,

  Your dwindling flesh and your enraged intestines,

  Permit me now to take a fond farewell. . . .

  The world might choke in food-restricting measures;

  Chinese might starve; and Poles might waste away;

  But God forbid that you—my tender treasures—

  Should face the horrors of a meatless day.

  The Drottningholm sailed, well supplied, on the twenty-second, with the ship’s name and the word “DIPLOMAT” painted in huge black letters against its white sides to ward off submarine attacks. It arrived safely arrived in New York on the thirtieth.14

  II.

  Annelise had rented a house in Bronxville, New York, shortly before Pearl Harbor, and was there with the children when she learned of George’s internment. The State Department told her not to expect him back before March: “I just keep praying that nothing will happen to make it more complicated than it is.” Beyond that, she had no information: “I never had heard a word about him. No communication whatever.” Shortly before his release, George was able to send a message through the department asking about his family. It reached Annelise as a telegram from the secretary of state. “I was sure he was dead,” she recalled. “I was so furious. I sat down and wrote a telegram [that] said: ‘I’m glad for the first opportunity to tell where we are and the welfare of the children.’ He never got it.”15

  Frieda Por, who examined George soon after his return, found that he had lost fifteen pounds, his stomach problems had returned, and it had been only “through the exercise of great willpower that he was able to continue carrying out his heavy responsibilities.” On the basis of her report, the State Department authorized a forty-five-day leave.16 The Kennans used it, not to relax, but to buy a farm.

  “I am a great believer in the power of the soil over the human beings who live above it,” George had told his Badheim University “students” in one of his lectures on Russian history. His private reasons for wanting a farm were more complicated. A happy personal life, he had concluded while interned, would never be possible. Professional satisfaction was out of reach because Americans, “biologically undermined and demoralized,” had a broken political system. The solution, then, was “the sort of glorified gardening called gentleman farming, . . . the only form of playing with toys which is not ridiculous in elderly men.” (George was thirty-eight at the time.) But he could not ask his wife and children to give up “the advantages of education and all personal amenities.” The ideal thing, therefore, would be to combine agriculture and diplomacy, “[f]or the same sort of catastrophe is not likely to hit both of them simultaneously.”17

  The Kennans had no farming experience: only a book, called Five Acres and Independence. They would not be able to manage a farm alone, but they could, Annelise pointed out, rent it to a resident farmer: “I’m always a little more realistic than George.” Wisconsin was out as long as he remained in the Foreign Service, so the farm would have to be near Washington. They began looking, then, in the Gettysburg region of southern Pennsylvania. “It is lovely rolling country, with beautiful rich soil,” George wrote Jeanette.

  I’m sure you would love the houses. They are all, I think, well over a century old, and have great potential charm. The farms themselves are also beautiful: with plenty of timber and springs and streams and comfortable quiet old lanes. I am quite surprised at the values, because although they are not much more expensive than the farms we looked at in Wisconsin, the buildings and equipment are better beyond comparison.

  By the last week in June, the Kennans had given up the Bronxville house, stored their furniture, and set off “after the fashion of modern pioneers: the whole damned family, including the dog [the disgraced Kimmy, now forgiven], the phonograph and the typewriter, in an old Ford car—and with no home on the face of the globe.” Their address, for the near future, would be simply “General Delivery, Gettysburg, Pa.”18

  “[W]e haven’t bought a farm yet,” Annelise added a few days later, but despite the temptation “to say to hell with it all, let’s go somewhere nice where we can swim and sail and loaf,” they were still at it “with all the perseverance that a Scott [sic] and a Norwegian can muster.” They had seen one promising possibility: a 238-acre farm with an enormous three-story house, a smaller one for a tenant farmer, a tobacco barn, and a three-car garage, owned by the children of a Jewish emigrant, Joseph Miller, who had used it as a temporary refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The house was ugly, awkward, filled with junk, and had not been cleaned since the old man’s death: “It was just like the Cherry Orchard without the orchard.” The price was $14,000, which would require, Annelise worried, “such a big mortgage.” A few days later, she wrote again: “Jeanette, hold on tight—yesterday we bought it!”19

  On July 21, 1942, George reported to his sister that the family had spent its first night in their own house. There had been cobwebs everywhere, “and I had no idea what sort of beasts or ghosts would emerge.” Only a few doors had banged, though, and “we are starting on our first full day of country life.” The motor for the pump had rusted and the well had silted up, but “never mind, we
’ll make it.” By the next morning, he was relishing

  the horses munching and stamping, the cows giving voice, the pidgeons cooing in the loft, the roosters crowing, and the flies buzzing. I even enjoy having to chase the ducks out from under my car every time I want to drive it away. In short, I really do enjoy these things, and I don’t much care that I have to work hard from morning to night to do so.

  It was not clear “whether we’ll be able to swing it financially, or whether [the farm] will gradually eat us up and ruin us, too.” But he had no regrets. “I have the sense of having my hands on something really solid.... I can see the results of my own handiwork, and they are results that last.” On the door frame leading into the house the Kennans discovered—and thought it right to keep—a mezuzah, the Jewish acknowledgment of the blessings of life.

  That evening George took Grace, one of the tenant farmer’s children, and Kimmy on a walk through towering stalks of corn. While the dog flushed pheasants and chased rabbits, George climbed a cherry tree to survey his estate. It was astonishing, he explained to his sister,

  to have so much land that you can take an hour’s walk just in one direction without getting off your own property. To me it was such an enjoyment that I sometimes think if it only lasts a year or two it will have been well worth it, and I can return again to vagabondage, strengthened and refreshed by the mere reminiscences.