George F. Kennan: An American Life (14 page)

The Kennans were back in the United States by then, having left Grace with the Sørensens in Kristiansand. They had planned the trip chiefly for family reasons. Kent senior was eighty-one and in precarious health. “As one year after another is sliced off from our allotted span,” he had written George with mournful formality the previous winter, “we may well look with some misgivings at the diminished balance which remains.” It would be Annelise’s first visit: “To see America which I have heard and read so much about and to meet you all,” she wrote Jeanette, “will be ‘grand.’ ” The trip almost didn’t happen because the State Department grumbled about Kennan’s leaving the Riga legation understaffed, but Felix Cole, who ran the Russian Section, stood up for George, citing his family obligations together with the fact that he and Annelise had already given up their dacha, stored their furniture, and made all of their preparations.
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Many years later Loy Henderson, a longtime Foreign Service colleague, insisted that Kennan had asked for leave and rushed home knowing that the Roosevelt administration was about to recognize the Soviet Union: “George never misses an opportunity.” This seems unlikely: the trip was authorized before anyone knew that Litvinov would be traveling to Washington. Kennan did spend three weeks in the Division of Eastern European Affairs helping to prepare for the upcoming talks, but he was no enthusiast for recognition, having convinced himself through his Riga research that the U.S.S.R. would violate whatever agreements were made with it. During the critical phase of the Roosevelt-Litvinov negotiations in mid-November, Kennan was not on the scene at all, but back in Milwaukee.
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George had sent Annelise ahead of him to save money—Washington hotels were expensive. So, he wrote Jeanette, he was “entrusting my youthful wife to your care.” “[I]t’s a shame that you aren’t here to see the furor your wife is causing,” she replied a few days later. Men were commenting: “That young sister-in-law is certainly a peach.” George’s father, pleased that Annelise had come five thousand miles to see him, met her at the door and embraced her without a word. Louise did too, and “we all wiped our eyes.” She gave a tea that afternoon for the daughter-in-law she had just met, an occasion unusual enough to rate coverage in the
Milwaukee Journal.
Jeanette was “amazed at the amount of wisdom her sleek young head holds.” She was equally astonished “at what a good husband you’re making. I really thought you’d be quite a rotten one.” Then she added: “She’ ll keep you from becoming ‘queer.’ And people who are too queer are neither happy nor effective as a rule.”
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George’s own visit was brief. He found the house overheated, probably because the vitality of its occupants was so low. Kent senior received his son in bed, in a room that darkened as they talked. One of the old man’s legs kept sliding off onto the floor: George wanted to raise it to make him comfortable, but “some Kennan-ish repression made it impossible for me to follow even that little tender impulse, just as it has always made it impossible for me to tell him any of the things I should liked to have told him, throughout a number of years.” “When you bade me good bye last Saturday,” Kent wrote George on November 24, “whole waves and billows of sadness passed over me, . . . in view of my age, that I might never see you again.”
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The premonition proved accurate: Kossuth Kent Kennan died, not unexpectedly, on December 9. But by that time his son, quite unexpectedly, was on his way to Moscow.

“The ranks of American diplomatists have included, over the decades, many unusual people,” George F. Kennan wrote in 1972. Among the most striking, “both in his virtues and in his weaknesses,” was William C. Bullitt. A Philadelphia aristocrat and a Yale graduate, Bullitt had been an ardent supporter of Woodrow Wilson but also of the Bolshevik Revolution. The president’s principal adviser and confidant, Colonel Edward M. House, sent him to Moscow early in 1919 to try to establish contacts with the new Soviet government, but Wilson—ill and preoccupied with the Paris Peace onference—ignored Bullitt upon his return. So he turned on Wilson publicly, bitterly, and unforgivingly. In 1924 Bullitt married Louise Bryant, widow of the radical journalist John Reed, but divorced her six years later. By then he had become a patient of Sigmund Freud, with whom he collaborated on a highly critical psychobiography of Wilson—fortunately still unpublished when, in 1932, Bullitt met Franklin D. Roosevelt. The new president made Bullitt his unofficial agent on the issue of Soviet recognition. Shortly after signing the agreement establishing diplomatic relations, on November 17, 1933, Roosevelt nominated Bullitt to become the first U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R.
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Now back from Milwaukee, Kennan was walking through the corridors of the State Department one day with a friend, who suggested that he ought to meet Bullitt: “Let’s see whether we can find him.” The new ambassador was in his office, asked Kennan some questions about Soviet transportation and finance, which he was able to answer, and then inquired as to whether he spoke Russian well enough to interpret. Kennan replied that he did, whereupon Bullitt said that he was leaving in a few days for Moscow: “Could you be ready in time to come along with me?” “The room,” George recalled, “rocked around me.” The offer was “a thunder-stroke of good luck” after years of preparation, and the Kennans were ready to sail on the following Monday. They traveled with Bullitt on the SS
President Harding
, from where George wrote his family: “Bullitt is a splendid man; it is an education just to have him around. Besides that, . . . I can’t forget that it is a rare feather in my cap to be included on this expedition at all.”
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“Oh, he was so excited,” Annelise remembered. But the passage was rough, so much so that Bullitt ruled out drinking red wine at dinner—“it’s been shaken up too much”—and insisted on providing everyone with champagne. George, who spent much of the voyage in his cabin nursing a cold, remembered vividly the afternoon Bullitt came in, sat on his bunk, and began to talk. “I was naturally curious about the character of this brilliant and fast-moving man who had so suddenly become my immediate superior.” He conveyed an impression of “enormous charm, confidence, and vitality,” but George also detected sensitivity, egocentricity, and pride, as well as “a certain dangerous freedom—the freedom of a man who, as he himself confessed to me on that occasion, had never subordinated his life to the needs of any other human being.”
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Upon arrival at Le Havre, Annelise went on to Kristiansand to see Grace and await instructions, while the new ambassador and his entourage proceeded to Paris. There Kennan was surprised to be warmly welcomed by “fair-weather”—and no doubt envious—Foreign Service friends. The Bullitt group then went by train to Berlin, and from there through Poland to the Soviet border. A solemn representative from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was waiting, and a banquet was served “with a touching Russian mixture of good will and inefficiency.”

The next morning in Moscow there was a mix-up, with Bullitt and the official greeters going in one direction and the secretaries, servants, and baggage going in another. It fell to Kennan to reconnect them, which he did with sufficient efficiency “that we ended up with several more bags than we had when we started.”
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That was December 11, 1933. On December 13 the new U.S. ambassador and his party were driven through the walls of the Kremlin to present credentials to the Soviet “president,” Mikhail Kalinin. While the ceremony was under way, an Associated Press photographer sneaked a shot of the coatrack outside, with five hats lined up on a shelf above it. The caption identified three, a derby, a fedora, and a military cap, as belonging to Foreign Minister Litvinov and his aides. The other two were shiny silk top hats, said to have been worn by William C. Bullitt and his “secretary George Kennan.” This was Kennan’s first experience with inaccurate journalism, for in fact “I was too cheap to buy one.” He did, however, appear in the official photographs, a tall, thin young man, standing politely behind the dignitaries in a cutaway and striped pants, ready to translate for them when needed. Even without his own top hat, it was the high point so far of his diplomatic career: “I almost fainted . . . to think where I was and what I was doing.”
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There was another reason to feel faint, though, because on December 12 George had received, through State Department channels, Jeanette’s telegram conveying the news that his father had died. “It is somewhat to my own horror,” he wrote her on the fourteenth, that he had been able to carry on “almost as though nothing had happened.” The shock was not the death so much as “the inadequacy of our last visit, and the feeling that he may never have realized how much I loved him.” It was the final episode of the tragedy that had begun when their mother died.

During the past few days in Moscow, George told his sister, he had been through “the most interesting and absorbing things I have ever experienced,” but they seemed nonetheless trifling and foolish. “I have no heart to write about them now.”
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He did write later about the “kaleidoscopic” ten days Bullitt had spent in Moscow. Kennan went to the ballet with the Litvinov family, and then to a performance of Chekhov ’s
The Cherry Orchard
accompanied by, improbably, Harpo Marx: there is unfortunately no record of what, if anything, they talked about. Backstage, however, they met the playwright’s widow—a thrill because Kennan already had in mind someday writing Chekhov ’s biography. He called at the Foreign Office and other diplomatic missions, and then with Keith Merrill, the State Department’s specialist on overseas buildings, drove to the outskirts of the city to pace off prospective embassy construction sites, with the temperature at twenty below zero. Too excited to go to bed when the day ’s activities were done, the Americans would sit around and talk until four or five in the morning. Kennan remembered it as a wonderful time, an example of “what Soviet-American relations
might
, in other circumstances, have been.”
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He had Bullitt to thank for it all. “When I came back to Washington last fall,” Kennan wrote him at the end of December, “I was—like a number of other young men in the service—pretty well beaten down by the bureaucracy. I despaired of ever getting work of any genuine significance.” Bullitt could well understand, therefore, that “the events of the last few weeks took my breath away.” Kennan was grateful “for the confidence and responsibility you’ve given me. They’ve done me more good than anything could have, . . . [and] the beneficial effect will wear for a long time to come.” Bullitt too was pleased. “The men at the head of the Soviet Government,” he wrote President Roosevelt, “are extremely eager to have contact with anyone who has first-rate intelligence and dimension as a human being. They were, for example, delighted by young Kennan.”
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“ TH E BLOW HAS FALLEN NOW, WITH A BANG,” GEORGE WROTE Annelise from Riga on December 29, 1933: “It is a mean one, but we’ ll make the best of it.” He had gone there to collect their possessions while Bullitt returned temporarily to the United States; but now the State Department had ordered Kennan back to Moscow to set up the new American embassy. However thrilling the previous weeks had been, this was not a task he welcomed. He would not be, as he had hoped,
chargé d’affaires.
The salary and benefits would be minimal, and his status would be “full of dangers and responsibilities.” Should Annelise choose to join him, she would be the only Foreign Service wife in town, and because conditions were difficult, Grace would have to stay in Kristiansand. “You’ll hate the hotel, and there won’t be much for you to do there.” He would leave it to her: “If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to.” But “I am damned anxious to have you with me again as soon as possible. After all, darling, we are man and wife, aren’t we?”
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The assignment had come about because Bullitt insisted on it. He wanted Kennan in Moscow until the full embassy staff arrived, supervising building activities “and other urgent matters.” The State Department questioned Kennan’s training for such duties, but Soviet officials had asked specifically for him because of his linguistic fluency. They also associated him with the first George Kennan, who had exposed the Siberian prison conditions under which some of them, as young revolutionaries, had once been held. Bullitt took the issue to Roosevelt himself: without someone like Kennan to deal with authorities at the top, the staff could arrive in February to find their accommodations half finished, creating “extreme inefficiency and possibly . . . endanger[ing] life.” Faced with this onslaught, the department capitulated. Kennan was “detailed for purpose outlined.”
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