George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  W. Averell Harriman, the American ambassador since October 1943, was as remarkable as his predecessor, Bill Bullitt. The son of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman—whose biographer, curiously, had been the first George Kennan—young Averell was a Union Pacific shareholder while still a Yale undergraduate and rowing coach. He became a company vice president at the age of twenty-four, five years later founded the bank that became Brown Brothers Harriman, and by the mid-1920s was running one of the first foreign mining concessions in the U.S.S.R. An avid skier, polo player, and racehorse breeder, Harriman was also a high-level fixer, which is why Roosevelt made him Lend-Lease administrator to Great Britain in 1941. There he formed a close friendship with Winston Churchill and an even closer one with the prime minister’s daughter-in-law Pamela, who became his lover and, when he was seventy-nine, his third wife. With aid to Britain flowing smoothly after two years, FDR persuaded the reluctant Harriman to take the even more demanding job in Moscow. Like Bullitt a decade earlier, the new ambassador was determined to have good help.2

  “Before I went to Moscow,” he remembered, “I investigated who were the two best Russian experts. They were George Kennan and Chip Bohlen.” But Kennan was handling the Azores bases negotiations, and Bohlen—then head of the State Department’s Soviet desk—was becoming indispensable to Roosevelt as a policy coordinator and Russian-language interpreter. The president therefore promised Harriman, at the Tehran conference in November, that Moscow would be Kennan’s next post. Characteristically, though, he failed to tell the State Department, which instead sent Kennan to London to work on the European Advisory Commission. It took until mid-January 1944 to sort out the confusion, by which time Kennan’s ulcers had made it too risky to send him back to the city that had first provoked them.3

  Kennan’s “rest” at the farm brought a rapid recovery, however, and in May Bohlen arranged for him to meet Harriman—a fellow ulcer sufferer—in Washington. The two hit it off immediately, agreeing that Kennan would run the civilian side of the Moscow embassy. Harriman knew of Kennan’s objections to Roosevelt’s policies, but these did not bother him. Secure in his access to the president, self-confident enough to respect expertise he did not have, Harriman appreciated Kennan’s candor: “I never considered a difference of opinion as something objectionable. It was something that I expected, and hoped for, to bring out the facts and establish a sound judgment.”

  “Averell Harriman was an operator,” Kennan recalled. “He had a direct line to Stalin, which he thought was the only important thing. I don’t think he attached great importance to our analyses of Russian society.” But by encouraging his counselor to provide real counsel, Harriman gave Kennan the freedom to speak his mind without risking his career, as he had had to do in Portugal and on the EAC. Kennan used the opportunity to mount a sustained assault on Roosevelt’s approach to the Soviet Union.

  Most of Kennan’s criticisms remained within the precincts of Spaso House and the Mokhovaya, although Harriman occasionally passed sanitized versions to Washington: “I would change the telegrams he’d drafted, and that sometimes upset him.” Kennan had little sense at the time of whether his “anxious Need-lings” were getting through to his boss. Harriman’s own views on the U.S.S.R. were changing, though, and Kennan helped him find his way. He became, in turn, Kennan’s channel to the highest levels of the American government. Through his official actions Harriman showed, Kennan later acknowledged, that he had not been oblivious to what “caused me such concern.” This was, he was sure, a better way for Harriman to indicate agreement “than by verbally holding, so to speak, my intellectual hand.”

  Kennan regarded Harriman as “a towering figure on our Moscow scene, outwardly unassuming but nevertheless commanding in appearance, without petty vanity, intensely serious but never histrionic . . . , imperious only when things or people impeded the performance of his duties. The United States has never had a more faithful public servant.” Of Kennan, Harriman said simply: “I’ve never been able to work with anyone as closely as I did with him.”4

  I.

  The journey from East Berlin (Pennsylvania) to Moscow required the entire month of June 1944, partly because wartime travel was complicated, but also because the State Department allowed George to stop off in Lisbon to see his family. While he was there, the D-Day landings took place, a long-awaited military breakthrough that made it possible to begin implementing the postwar planning he had witnessed—and worried about—in London and Washington. In response to a request from Henry Norweb, the new minister to Portugal, Kennan laid out the implications for the Lisbon legation staff, making no effort to conceal his qualms.

  There was no doubting the heroism or the fighting ability of the men sacrificing their lives for faith “in the ultimate righteousness of our society and in the wisdom of those who lead it.” Americans at home had organized “an amazingly successful war effort, which puts to shame all the predictions about the softness and lack of fibre of our people.” But the Roosevelt administration’s strategy for postwar Europe was ill-conceived, and there was cause for concern that war veterans, when they returned, would find their country a changed and perhaps unsettling place.

  Without specifying the details, Kennan portrayed the American approach to the European Advisory Commission as “shallow and often unrealistic.” Washington was proceeding “not from what Europe is, but from what we would wish it to be.” It assumed extreme territorial changes without anticipating the tensions these would create. It was proposing a new international organization, along the lines of the old League of Nations, which would freeze that settlement in place. The resulting repression would “force the vanquished peoples to new feats of inventiveness and organization,” until finally they reached the point at which they could sell their collaboration “to the highest bidder among the erstwhile victors.” It would be, in short, the post–World War I settlement all over again.

  Meanwhile the men fighting the war would have to compete for jobs after it, with workers “spoiled by high wages” secured through collective bargaining. Veterans who had faced death on meager pay would have little sympathy for labor unions. When combined with growing racial tensions and increasing juvenile delinquency, it would be “a miracle if we could survive this crisis without violence and disorder.” Americans should not think “that we can avoid at home the appearance of those same forces of ugliness and cruelty and timidity and intolerance which we are now fighting abroad.” This was the clearest expression yet of an idea Kennan had been wrestling with—at times with erratic results—since the late 1930s: that there were no distinct boundaries between domestic and foreign affairs. Americans could not insulate themselves from forces that had disrupted other societies. How they handled these would largely determine what the United States could do in the postwar world.5

  On June 15 George deposited his baggage at the airlines office in Lisbon, sat with Annelise for an hour at an outdoor café watching Portuguese passersby, and then drove with her to the airport, where “we said another of those tearing watime goodbyes” that had become so familiar. “Don’t worry about me,” she wrote of this latest separation while he was still en route, “because I am feeling quite different about it.” (George had arranged, this time, for Annelise and the children to follow him to his new post.) “But even so, I don’t like it and never will.” Getting to Moscow was more difficult than it had been in peacetime: George’s trip required a circuitous routing across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the southern U.S.S.R. by whatever air transport was available. It took two weeks, giving him time to read more Gibbon, to keep a detailed diary, and to reflect on the Americans—and Russians—he met along the way.6

  The journey provided Kennan’s first close look at the U.S. military, and he liked what he saw. On the flight from Gibraltar to Algiers, “I sat proudly side by side with the pilot.” He had never before been on an operational mission, “and I could not have been more pleased.” The next day he found Naples full of “slouching, imp
assive young American kids” who were running it “pretty damned well.” An Army Air Force general four years younger than he seemed “as efficient as any officer I ever saw.” Kennan spent the night in an Army tent, then used the next morning to reread Gibbon’s account of the Byzantine general Belisarius’s conquest of Naples in A.D. 536. It was a rare opportunity for historical comparison “which only the fortunes of war and the settings of antiquity can provide.”

  Most of the Americans with whom he lunched that day, Kennan discovered, agreed with the great historian’s warning that there was nothing “more averse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations in opposition to their inclination and interest.”7 For the moment, this was reassuring. If there was anything “more hopeful than the skill with which our military men pursue the responsibilities of conquest, it is the alacrity with which they again drop them, once their possession is no longer in dispute.” Empires were not their avocation.

  The Germans were still much on Kennan’s mind. Prisoners of war, he learned, had been claiming that the Americans were destroying Europe’s cultural values and turning it over to Bolshevism, “that we understand nothing of the continent, and have no plan for its future.” The charge sat strangely, Kennan thought, against discoveries “of SS torture instruments, of bodies without fingernails or toenails, of tons of high explosives hidden in the German Embassy.” But even if accurate, “the fault is still with the Germans for having provoked our intervention.”

  We are bound to come over here every time anyone threatens the security of England; and if continental peoples do not wish to bring down upon their heads this dread plague of ununderstanding Americans, they must learn to leave the English alone. Let the Germans take a lesson from this, and not repeat their folly.

  This thought too would stick with Kennan: that the national security of the United States was inseparable from the balance of power in Europe. Beyond that, though, the Americans were novices. “The French know exactly what they want, and are quite unreasonable about it. We are the soul of reasonableness and have only the dimmest idea of what we are after.”

  No one could say the same of the Soviet Union. “Whoever would understand Russia today should study . . . the great mass of women of the educated officer class,” Kennan concluded after meeting one of them in Naples. For such women, “work is not a decoration to private life but a stern duty to the state. And independent thought is, as in Nazi Germany, a form of self-corruption, unnecessary, dangerous, immoral.” Nor was the tendency confined to women: it was what Bolshevism had done to Russia. Kennan thought it “the most terrifying and discouraging difference from our own mentality.”8

  The next few days, which involved stops in Cairo, Baghdad, and Tehran, exposed Kennan for the first time to the Middle East. Overwhelmed by its heat, dust, and languor, repelled by the “religious bigotry” that—in contrast to the Russians—kept the feminine half of society under “indefinite house arrest,” he found little in the region to recommend it. The trip left Kennan with an aversion to what would later be called the “third world” that he did little, in his own later life, to overcome.9

  In Baghdad, Kennan stayed with Loy Henderson, exiled there by Roosevelt, Henderson believed, for his anti-Soviet views. Stuck in the legation because it was too hot to go out during the day and too dangerous at night, Kennan persuaded himself that the very bleakness of the place might someday tempt Americans into trying to fix it: “If trees once grew here, could they not grow again? If rains once fell, could they not again be attracted from the inexhaustible resources of nature? Could not climate be altered, disease eradicated?” His countrymen would do better to return, “like disappointed but dutiful children, to the sad deficiencies and problems of their native land.”10

  Kennan flew from Tehran to Moscow by way of Baku and Stalingrad on July 1, 1944. In the latter city, everything except the airport seemed to have been destroyed. Lunch was served in a dining hall with few chairs and only one glass, but everyone was good-natured about it: “How deeply one sympathizes with the Russians when one encounters the realities of the lives of the people and not the propagandistic preten[s]ions of their government.” On the final leg into Moscow, “I sat glued to the window, moved and fascinated to see before me again this great, fertile, mysterious country which I had spent so many years trying to understand.” Harriman had a car waiting at the airport, insisted on putting Kennan up at Spaso House, “and with that a new life began.”11

  II.

  Kennan found the Soviet Union less wracked by fear than it had been when he left it in 1937. Stalin’s purges had long since ended. Hitler’s attack and the brutality that followed had “pulled regime and people together, in a process for which the former, at any rate, can be highly thankful.” Soviet diplomats, to be sure, were still uneasy at social events with their Western counterparts, trying to imagine how what they said might sound “if repeated by an accusing comrade.” But national self-confidence as a whole had been greatly strengthened, for the Russian people had “repelled the invader and regained their territories in a series of military operations second in drama and grandeur to nothing else that the history of warfare can show.”12

  Life in Moscow, if anything, was harsher than during Kennan’s earlier tour of duty. American embassy personnel had been evacuated to Kuibyshev after the Nazi invasion, leaving Spaso House and the Mokhovaya empty. By 1943, when they returned, both buildings had deteriorated, and not much had been done since to fix them. “All is as well as it could be in our little world,” Kennan wrote Bohlen in September 1944. By that he meant that “the building is falling to pieces, the majority of our cars don’t run, . . . [and] the mouse population is increasing fast after its war-time vicissitudes.” A State Department report, completed that summer, cataloged with grim precision what anyone assigned to Moscow should bring, keeping in mind weight limitations on airplanes: full dress evening attire with white tie, winter and summer clothing, overshoes and galoshes, socks and stockings, electrical appliances with adapters, radios and phonographs, extra eyeglasses, dental plates and prostheses. It warned not to expect drinkable tap water, fresh fruit, safe milk, palatable eggs, or recreational facilities: “There are no golf courses in the Soviet Union.” And it strongly advised against sending anyone with “chronic, relapsing or recurrent diseases,” such as “gastric or duodenal ulcer[s].”13

  Despite the vicissitudes, Kennan was happy to be back. “Russia seems something poignantly familiar and significant to me,” he explained to Jeanette, “as though I had lived here in childhood.” Wandering the streets of Moscow and rambling through the nearby countryside left him with “an indescribable sort of satisfaction to feel myself back again in the midst of these people—with their tremendous, pulsating warmth and vitality.” He sometimes felt that he would rather be sent to Siberia with them, “which is certainly what would happen to me without delay if I were a Soviet citizen,” than to live among the “stuffy folk” on Park Avenue.

  On the other hand, the knowledge that I will never be able to become part of them, that I must always remain a distrusted outsider, that all the promise of the white nights, of the lovely birches, of the far-flung rivers, and of a thousand other things that have meaning for me in Russia will never be realized—this knowledge was harder than ever to swallow this summer.

  Having forced himself to acknowledge that he could never become a Russian—“for at the age of forty one cannot afford to be unrealistic”—George had the sense of having passed the point “before which one still hopes for some unfolding of the mystery and after which one settles down to derive such modest comforts as one can from the remaining years of life.”

  By the time he wrote this, in early October, Annelise and the children had arrived, by much the same route that George had taken. “I have really enjoyed having the family here,” he wrote Jeanette. “They couldn’t be sweeter, and we have a lovely home life in the little apartment which we inhabited seven years ago.” Grace
and Joan were adapting to the life of diplomatic children in Moscow, playing regularly in the Spaso House garden, the closest equivalent to an American backyard. Both girls were learning Russian, and Grace was attending a Soviet school, where she was treated well by her teachers despite the ideological requirements they had to follow. The Kennans visited one day when gifts from America were being handed out. The teachers gave party-line speeches, but George noticed that while these were going on, “little hands were reaching out” attempting to open the packages. These were locked up after the ceremony, and the children never saw them again.

  Grace pleased George, one day that fall, by praising him as a father: “I replied that I wasn’t gay enough to make a really good Daddy.” Joan at that point chimed in: “Oh Daddy, that’s all right. With a little forcing, it would do. And if you wouldn’t work in that office all the time.” There were evenings, Joan recalled, when “my father told me wonderful stories that he made up himself, each installment being invented on the spot—they were so good that I wish he had written them down.” He also read from Grimm’s Fairy Tales: “It was one of my father’s lesser known gifts, reading aloud.” Diplomacy made its demands, though: her parents went out a lot, and “my mother would come in and say good night to me before they left.”14

  “George has put on weight since we came,” Annelise reported to Jeanette, “so it looks as if it agrees with him!” But he was working hard, there were plenty of things to “upset a nervous tummy,” and they all missed the farm, as well as the warmth and fresh food of Portugal. Annelise had no formal job in Moscow but spent much of her time introducing Foreign Service wives at other embassies: a whiz at languages, she also acted as their interpreter. That role could be tedious, but there were compensations. “Churchill is here,” she wrote Jeanette in October, “and the big shots are busy and the smaller ones wish they were in on it.” The Kennans fell somewhere in between. British ambassador Archibald Clark Kerr did not invite them to the dinner he gave for the prime minister, which Stalin attended, but they were allowed in afterward to gawk at the great men. “We waited for hours.... [A]t least I can tell my grandchildren that I have seen some of the people who [have] made history.”15