Woolworth Bldg.” There were visits to the Louvre, the Moulin Rouge, and Versailles, the last of which reminded George that ceremonies could be comic opera: he had first seen this at the unveiling of the Revolutionary War battle monument outside of Princeton, with “poor Harding sitting there in a glaring sun on the white concrete steps, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, and caring more for a glass of good, cold beer, than [for] all the heroes of history.”
July 26 brought an unexpected windfall at the American Express office: $100 from Frances, with instructions to ask for more if required. “[S]he evidently got scared by the letter I wrote to her from London, and told the whole tale to Father, who, of course, gritted his teeth, boiled with rage, and assured her he would send me all [I] needed.” Priding himself on his independence, George professed to be appalled: “She couldn’t have meant better; she couldn’t have done worse.” It would be a while before he could show his face in Milwaukee again.38
But the cash made it possible to get to Italy, where George was afflicted by “terrible and weird dreams” about his family. There were, he thought, two kinds of dreams: random impressions “flashing around in the brain at will, with no semblance of order,” and, less frequently, dreams in which “we see and hear clearly interesting things which we know we have never heard or seen in real life.... It seems to me that the only possible explanation for these lies in the action of some kind of mental telepathy.” The dreams in Turin were of the latter variety, and they left him “very much depressed.”
It was a signal, perhaps, that it was time to go home, so George and Nick proceeded to Genoa, where they began again “the sad parade of the water-front. If there be anything . . . more discouraging than trying to get a job on a boat I have yet to find it.” They sought out, as planned, the American consul: “We lied to him about how much money we had and he lied to us in return about our chances of working away from this dump.” It was, he insisted, “utterly impossible.... He won’t help us out until we’re flat broke or until he’s convinced that we couldn’t be scared into wiring for money.” But “when we go broke we go to jail.... Then, the question is, must he send us home or can he let us stay in jail as long as possible?”39
Increasingly desperate and with George suffering from dysentery—“Nick kindly informs me that people die from it”—they did accept another $130, wired this time from Milwaukee. With it they were able to make it to Paris, where George found a doctor and where “Nick was a nervous wreck, as jumpy and fidgety and weak as an old woman,” and then on to Boulogne-sur-Mer, where they had booked passage on a new Holland-America ship, the SS
Here they separated, and George, unsure what to do next, decided to hitchhike to Schenectady, where Constance and her husband lived. He arrived at about midnight, and “[t] hey pretended to be real glad to see me.” “Oh, I’m so glad you’re home, Connie,” she remembered him having said. “I thought I’d have to sleep in the park.” Fed, clothed, and refinanced, George took a Hudson River boat to New York and then went on to Princeton, closing out his diary: “Here ended, by exhaustion, the account of the European trip of George F. Kennan.”41
VI.
“The only thing I’m really qualified for,” George had written Jeanette during his first year at Princeton, “is to play in a dance orchestra.” He had, by then, mastered the piano (despite being denied lessons at home), the cornet (an outgrowth of bugling at St. John’s), the banjo, the guitar, and—to the amazement of his half-brother Kent, who would become a distinguished musician and composer—the French horn, “a fiendishly difficult instrument.” George played in orchestras and dance bands throughout his college years, with the latter generating badly needed income. “Marvelously peppy party,” he noted of one dance. “[E]ven I enjoyed myself—profitable too.” But as he had pointed out to his sister, this was not a profession “as a rule, followed by Princeton men, as a life occupation.”42
There had also been a succession of physically demanding summer jobs—cherry-picking, tree-trimming, even working on a railroad during a strike and having to cross picket lines—but these were not right for a Princeton graduate either. There was, to be sure, his father’s profession, the law, and at the end of his sophomore year George had “fairly definitely” decided on that path. But Kent senior was “too modest and honest, too conscious of his remoteness from the modern age and his inadequacy as a guide,” to press his son to follow his example: George recognized him as “a shy, lonely, and not very happy person.” Perhaps with their father in mind, he lamented to Jeanette at about this time that “[w]e all run along with our heads in the clouds, most of our lives, hoping for some kind of great thing, until we suddenly realize that we’ve almost come to the end of our rope and nothing great has happened at all. It must be sort of a disappointment.”43
Like most college students, George sought in his summer travels something great, even if neither he nor Nick had much of a sense of what that might be. In a way, he found it: the weary young man who arrived back in Princeton at the end of August was not the one who had happily hitched rides out of it the previous June. The trip had been both a flight from and an assumption of responsibility—a liberation but also a test. It occasioned his first sustained descriptive writing: George found words to reflect what his eyes had seen and his body had experienced, a skill he would never lose. And like most such trips, this one explored an inner self as well as a wider world. “I am making a strong effort,” he wrote at one point, “to be more equable in temper and disposition, by restraining myself when I find myself too congenially inclined.”44
George came back from Europe with firmer views about himself and his future. He resigned from Key and Seal, thereby resigning himself to his bleak, though principled, senior year. He had also decided against law school. “I will probably disappoint you,” he wrote his father, but “three more expensive years of education and another long period of time required to ‘get headway’ ” did not seem to make sense. “I have learned a
The best argument George made against law school, however, was one that Kent senior, who had himself traveled and worked abroad as a young man, could hardly question: “Very few of my ancestors, if any, can have been living such a restrained and quiet life at the age of twenty-one . . . it makes me very restless. I don’t fit well in a leisurely life.” The European trip, for all its travails, had demonstrated that. George made few references to home in his diary that summer, but when the harbor at Genoa reminded him of Milwaukee, he pointedly added that it would be a “misfortune” if he had to go back there.46
So what to do? Foreign languages came naturally: George’s family and Milwaukee Normal had equipped him with German, and he had taken Latin and French at St. John’s and Princeton. Professors Green, Hall, and Sontag had had their influence as well: “I had enjoyed the study of international politics and had prospered in it.” George recalled having studied history and politics “with increasing enjoyment and success.” It made sense, therefore, one day in January 1925, to drop in on his international law professor, Philip M. Brown, to ask about becoming a diplomat. Brown was encouraging and discouraging. On the one hand, the recently passed Rogers Act, which consolidated the Department of State’s diplomatic and consular functions into a single new United States Foreign Service, had raised standards and ensured adequate salaries. Law school, on the other hand, would be a prudent backup, since ministerial and ambassadorial appointments could still be given to political appointees. A career
