George F. Kennan : an American life

without destroying. But it is a difficult position for the gadfly.

Moscow might be feasible, therefore, for the work there involved the analysis of Soviet policy, not the making of policy in Washington. Commitments at the Institute and elsewhere, however, would keep him from going until well into 1952. Perhaps Admiral Alan G. Kirk, the current ambassador, could stay on; if not, the mission could probably be left under a charge d’affaires.⁴²

The Kennans sailed for home on September 5, with George worried that the children had enjoyed Europe less than he had. “My friends,” he wrote them gravely one day at sea,

with stoic mien, with patience grim,

With martyr’s silence, with impassive stare,

You have now coursed the chambers of the past,

The crooked climbing street, the boulevard,

The pavement where the scaffold stood, the scenes

Of valor and of battle and the spots

Where once, in verse or note or stone,

The idle muse lent mystery and grace

To drab old life.

Now these and other things

That in past ages caused the simpler human heart

To stir have passed unanswered, unsaluted,

Before your glazed impassive orbs; and I

Have been allowed to sense that I should not

Have dragged you thither.

He also composed, for himself, a bucolic poem about flies—which could also have been State Department gadflies:

How long before the unctuous fly

—Its love for mammals still undaunted—

Will learn from swats and slaps and flails,

From sticky traps and swishing tails,

That its attentions are unwanted?

Kennan decided not to send Acheson a four-page summary of “points of difference” with the State Department that he had prepared. It listed disagreements over the United Nations, nuclear weapons, the future of Europe, the Near and Middle East, East Asia, Latin America, relations with Congress, and the administration of foreign policy. “This is, in my opinion, important,” he wrote across the top, presumably with historians and maybe even a biographer in mind. It was certainly comprehensive: when he finished, it was hard to find a policy with which he did agree.⁴³

“It is reasonable that I should look forward with a sense of relief to the prospect of being an ambassador,” Kennan commented in an undated diary fragment that summer. “It is just about the only profession one can have these days in which nothing—but really nothing—is either expected or required of you.” But there was more to it than that. He was still a Foreign Service officer: “I did not feel it proper to decline any assignment given to me.” It would be difficult to pass up an appointment to the Soviet Union, “a task for which my whole career had prepared me, if it had prepared me for anything at all.” Finally, Bohlen had urged him to take the job, on the grounds that Stalin might be more open than in the past to negotiations, particularly on Germany. So with Acheson having assured him that the president really wanted him in Moscow, Kennan agreed to go.⁴⁴

There was, however, one last effort to derail the appointment. It came from Annelise, who knew how bleak conditions there would be, and how reluctant George was to disrupt his work at the Institute. She surely had some sense, from the spring and summer, of how precarious his psychological balance had become. And she had just learned that she was again pregnant. So she took it upon herself—without asking George—to go to Washington and talk with their old Moscow friend Elbridge Durbrow, then in charge of State Department personnel assignments. “I told him that I thought this was a very bad time, that he should send somebody else, and then we could go afterwards in a couple of years.”

Well, they gave me this lovely run-around—how wonderful it would be to have George there, they didn’t want to change it. I still remember, I was furious! I was livid! I mean, for somebody I knew very well—Durbrow—to give me this little song and dance. It was not necessary.

She never doubted that George should return to Moscow. “I felt very strongly that he was a specialist and he should go back, [and] at that time one still felt pretty young.” It was also “a nice honor to go as an ambassador, because we don’t have so many career ambassadors in the major countries. It was just that the timing was not so good.”⁴⁵

Annelise had still one other reason for not wanting to go to Moscow at that moment: the Kennans had just bought a house of their own in Princeton. The all-electric one they had rented, Patricia Davies recalled, had become barely inhabitable the previous winter when a blizzard knocked out the power: the family survived by huddling around the fireplace, which contained a hook from which Annelise could cook, “in her proper Norwegian fashion.” The new house—old enough to match George’s age, having been built in 1904—was located on a large lot at 146 Hodge Road, a tree-lined street half a mile from the university and a mile from the Institute. George was soon bicycling to both destinations and would continue to do so for decades.

Apart from the farm, it was the first permanent residence the Kennans had occupied during their twenty years of marriage. The first floor contained large living and dining rooms, a library, a kitchen, and a breakfast nook. Upstairs there were seven bedrooms, some meant for maids, one in a third-story tower. There was even a separate apartment over the garage, useful for visiting family and, at times, for renters. “We lack beds now,” George wrote Jeanette in October 1951, “but I am sure we will have them by Thanksgiving.” The Ford Foundation salary had made the purchase possible, he explained to Kent, even though “we haven’t saved any money.” The house was “friendly and receptive in a relaxed way,” George wrote in his memoir two decades later, “but slightly detached, like a hostess to a casual guest—as though it did not expect us to stay forever.” The Kennans did stay for a long time: George and Annelise would each die in the house, fifty-four and fifty-seven years, respectively, after they moved into it.⁴⁶

VIII.

“A book by George Kennan is an event in Washington,” James Reston wrote in The New York Times on September 30, 1951. The relentlessly efficient University of Chicago Press had rushed Kennan’s Walgreen lectures into print as American Diplomacy: 1900–1950. To flesh out the thin volume, Kennan added the 1947 “X” article, as well as the essay he intended as its successor, “America and the Russian Future,” which had appeared in the April issue of Foreign Affairs. But the first piece was familiar and the second looked too far into the future to attract much attention: it was an unclassified update of PPS/38, the 1948 study in which Kennan had tried to specify American objectives for a post- Soviet Russia. The lectures, however, enthralled their readers, just as they had packed the room—and then the auditorium—in which he delivered them. It was Kennan’s first book, but it sold better than anything else he ever wrote.