George F. Kennan : an American life

York Times Moscow correspondent, that Stalin was about to veto the appointment. Kennan was well known, after all, as the author of the “long telegram” and the “X” article; moreover, Ralph Parker, a left-leaning British journalist, had been allowed to publish a book in Moscow in 1949, entitled Conspiracy Against Peace, claiming that at the victory celebration outside the Mokhovaya four years earlier, Kennan had turned away cynically from the cheering crowds to predict a new world war. By December 26, Salisbury had a story ready on the impending rejection, but the censors refused to clear it.

Andrey Gromyko, the wartime Soviet ambassador in Washington, had advised Stalin that “it is hardly conceivable that the USA government at present may appoint a more acceptable candidate.” Whether for that reason or some other, the Kremlin boss then gave his approval, allowing the White House to confirm that Kennan was indeed Truman’s choice. Salisbury, for once, was grateful to the censors: “By killing my adverse speculation [they] spared me an embarrassing error.”⁵³

A week later, in bed at the Princeton house with a sprained back from having fallen off his bicycle, the ambassador-designate wrote out in longhand, for his future embassy counselor Hugh Cumming, what he hoped to accomplish:

It seems to me that the best an ambassador can hope to do in Moscow is to reside there patiently, cheerfully, and with a reasonable modicum of dignity, burdening the rest of the Mission as little as possible with his household and his presence, holding himself available for such chores of negotiation as may come his way, gaining what understanding he can of the local scene from such fragmentary evidence as the regime finds it impossible not to divulge to him, keeping himself prepared to give advice on Soviet-American relations whenever it can be useful to the Government, and helping himself and his associates to remain of good heart and bear themselves with confidence and dignity in an atmosphere of hostility and insults, of suspicion and misinterpretation of their every action, of attempts to belittle their world and their beliefs—an atmosphere of lies and distortions, in other words, of which the very essence is the unceasing effort to induce people to abandon the evidence of their senses and of all objective criteria and to accept as valid a version of reality artificially created, unconnected with objective fact, and calculated to reduce them to a state in which no reactions are operative but those of fear and respect for the mysteries of Soviet power.

This might seem an “overly modest set of aspirations,” Kennan added, “but I think you will agree with me that it is job enough for any man; and if I am able to acquit myself of it with as few mistakes and as much distinction as have my immediate predecessors, I shall be satisfied.”⁵⁴

Cumming would probably also have agreed—a very long telegram once having made its way from Moscow—on the appropriateness of a very long sentence now making its way back.

EIGHTEEN

Mr. Ambassador: 1952

“GEORGE F. KENNAN, THE STATE DEPARTMENT’S ‘MR. X,’ IS LEAVING for Moscow this spring to take over a job for which he has been preparing for 25 years—and which he doesn’t want.” This is how the journalist Louis Cassels introduced the new U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union to the readers of Collier’s in March 1952. Based on a conversation with Kennan at the farm on the day after Truman announced the appointment, the article portrayed an envoy who “probably knows as much about Russia’s history, literature, and national characteristics as many members of the Politburo.” He would be the first since the opening of relations with the U.S.S.R. to need no interpreter when meeting Stalin. He “certainly ought to know his way around,” the president was said to have commented. Even Pravda had honored the ambassador-designate by awarding him “its highest decorations for Western statesmen—‘spy,’ ‘warmonger,’ and ‘tool of Wall Street.’ ”

Why, then, did Kennan not want the job? The “deep dark truth about Mr. X,” Cassels revealed (not quite accurately), “is that he has never had any great ambition to be ambassador to Russia, or anywhere else.” What he wanted instead was “to write a dozen or so books that have been stillborn in his wide- ranging mind during his hectic two and a half decades as a public servant.” The Institute for Advanced Study had given Kennan that opportunity, so why had he agreed to go to Moscow? Because, Cassels suggested (not inaccurately), Kennan believed in predestination.

He was, after all, the son of three men. One was his real father, a stern Scotch Presbyterian with a strong sense of duty and—owing to his youthful travels in Europe—an international outlook rare in turn-of-the-century Wisconsin. Kossuth Kent Kennan would not have wanted George to decline the job for which the Foreign Service had trained him, at public expense, over so many years. “I’ve never had the opportunity of serving in the armed forces,” the younger Kennan added. “I don’t think any man has the right to refuse to serve his country in any position where he might be useful.”

A second “father” was the first George Kennan. When given the choice, in 1928, of studying Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Russian, young George had chosen the last out of deference to his famous ancestor. The many parallels in their lives, down to sharing the same birthday, “almost makes me believe in astrology,” the mature George admitted. Then, while studying Russian in Berlin, he had encountered a third “father,” Anton Chekhov, whose plays and short stories Kennan came to regard “as Russia’s and perhaps the world’s greatest literature.” Trained in medicine, Chekhov made his reputation as a writer—a trajectory Kennan envied as he weighed his professional obligations against his literary inclinations. And it had been Chekhov, he believed, who had posthumously persuaded him to buy the farm. George knew he had to do it when Annelise compared the place with the run-down Russian estate in The Cherry Orchard.

No visitor could regard its owner as an aloof intellectual after seeing him tramping around “in torn khaki trousers, plaid cotton shirt, heavy leather boots and a Russian-style fur hat.” Kennan did much of the work himself to hold down expenses: “He is not independently wealthy, as some people suppose.” Finances, not fame, preoccupied him on the day the newspapers reported his appointment: “Well-wishers found him behind a paper- strewn desk in the parlor of the farmhouse, struggling with ‘the books’ and trying to make out his income-tax return.”

Cassels concluded his profile by reporting one further step Kennan had taken to put down roots: in a “full-cycle return to the faith of his fathers,” he had recently joined the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton. “I drifted away from the church when I was a young man,” Kennan explained. “But I have come back to it. I still see much in formal religion that is imperfect, but I know now that a man with no religion is a very hideous character. I have a great horror of people who have no fear of God.”

Arthur Link, who knew Kennan well, was certain of his belief in predestination: “He was reared a Presbyterian, but he’s been much more influenced by Russian Orthodoxy: the acceptance of things as they are, without getting too high expectations; [the view] that the world is fundamentally evil and that really there’s not a great deal that you can do about it.” Kennan himself, recalling his stay as a young man at the Pskovo-Pechorsky monastery in Estonia, assured a Russian Orthodox bishop late in 1951 that “I have never felt anything but the deepest respect for the grandeur of [the Church’s] spiritual tradition, the power and beauty of its ritual, and the warm current of human feeling that flows through all of its life.”