George F. Kennan : an American life

officer might “work for years in the service and then suddenly find himself entirely out of it.”⁴⁷

George decided to accept the risk and to seek direct entry into the Foreign Service after graduation. “My decision . . . was dictated mainly, if memory serves, by the feeling that I did not know what else to do.” His academic advisers did not object. Green thought George “well fitted” for diplomacy: “If you succeed in getting into the Service I am sure that you will find the work both interesting and valuable.” Brown was “confident you will succeed in entering and in more than making good.” George’s own sense was that “[s]ome guardian angel must have stood over me at that point. It was the first and last sensible decision I was ever deliberately to make about my occupation.”⁴⁸

George Kennan graduated from Princeton in June 1925 with a respectable but not brilliant academic record: he ranked eighty-third in a class of 219. He resisted, to the end, fitting in. Convinced that commencement was just “an attempt to telescope, in a symbolic and over-simplified form, something which was of importance,” he skipped all the ceremonies “except the one at which I got my diploma. My high principles did not go quite far enough for me to forego attendance at that particular occasion.” The Class Day edition of the Nassau Herald recorded him as “undecided as to his future occupation,” and George promptly went off to work as a deckhand on a steamer operating between Boston and Savannah: “We received forty-eight cents an hour, worked up to sixteen hours straight on the days we came into port, and were quite happy.”⁴⁹

Princeton had, however, provided something of importance. It had guided George, along with his classmates, through the limbo that separated the constraints of childhood from assertions of independence and assumptions of responsibility. He left the university less of a chameleon than he had been while there, or before he had arrived— and he knew something about the world that lay beyond. Princeton had, he later acknowledged, “prepared the mind for future growth.” And what was the task of a university, after all, if not to ready its students for “the formation of their prejudices, not to impregnate them with its own”?⁵⁰

THREE

The Foreign Service: 1925–1931

THE GUARDIAN ANGEL THAT GUIDED GEORGE KENNAN TOWARD THE newly established Foreign Service had insufficient influence to gain him entry. That he had to accomplish on his own, by passing the formal examination the 1924 Rogers Act had mandated. It had two stages: a written test based on factual knowledge, and an oral interview before senior officers that was meant to determine whether the applicant would “fit in.” The purpose, Kennan recalled, was to provide a way to “exclude you even though you passed the written.” This dual structure reflected tensions within the Foreign Service itself. It was now a professional organization, with specified standards for admission, salary, benefits, promotion, and evaluation. But it was still run by a small group of career diplomats from wealthy families, educated at East Coast preparatory schools and Ivy League universities. They belonged to, and were determined to preserve, what one of them described at the time as “a pretty good club .”¹

Standard preparation for Foreign Service examinations involved enrollment at a Washington tutoring school taught by Angus MacDonald Crawford, whom Kennan remembered as “a big old Scot, . . . terribly interesting when he wasn’t drunk.” The emphasis was on memorization, not thought. Princeton history courses had allowed stretching a little knowledge into a lot of opinions, George wrote Jeanette, but “there is as much demand for free love advocates in the ‘Bible belt’ as there is for opinions in Washington.” Style counted as much as substance. There wasn’t much chance for “poor white-hosed, gold-teethed Elks and civil-service hounds from your Midwestern ‘bad- lands’ who . . . expect to get in, without ever having so much as seen a dress-suit, unless it were on a vaudeville magician.”²

George lived, while studying for his examinations, in a boardinghouse on Church Street. The other residents were young Foreign Service aspirants like Kennan, and although they worked hard, there was time for bridge parties, dances, and even a few grand dinners. Health continued to be a problem: George was hospitalized with fever soon after he arrived, but recovered sufficiently to have fun with his nurse, who liked being spanked by interns. “If I hadn’t been so helpless I would have done it myself,” he confided in Jeanette, “because she washed my mouth out with soap for saying ‘goddam.’ ”³

“Professor” Crawford prepared his students well, and Kennan passed the written examination easily enough. But the oral interview, presided over by the formidable under secretary of state, Joseph C. Grew, was terrifying: “In my first words—to the effect that I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—my voice broke into a falsetto on the second syllable of Wisconsin and set the board roaring with laughter.” The examiners accepted him anyway, leaving Kennan to wonder whether it had been his performance that got him in, or the fact that Grew had met him a few nights before at a dinner given by the wealthy mother of one of the more socially acceptable candidates.⁴

However it happened, Kennan was appointed to the rank of “Foreign Service Officer, Unclassified” on September 9, 1926, at an annual salary of $2,500. He was given a loose-leaf book of instructions, some drafted before the Civil War, and a tremulous greeting by Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg. His first assignment was to the new Foreign Service School, then a single room in the extravagantly ornate State, War, Navy Building (now the Executive Office Building), with a view of the White House and occasionally its occupant, Calvin Coolidge, next door. The lectures, which focused on passports, visas, and notarials, provoked a poem:

The steady flow of words

Rises and falls with dull vacuity. . . .

We sprawl in stolid patience on our chairs, . . .

Read papers, surreptitiously....

We are a joint, slumbering animal,

And if you prod one part,

With a question,

It twitches, verbally,

Then it falls asleep again.

But the training was useful, and there were opportunities to apprentice in the State Department itself, where Kennan’s first formal report, on a British Commonwealth conference, received high praise. The students were also expected to participate in Washington high society: “It was like a coming-out.”⁵

Society had been important at Princeton too, but George had hardly bothered with it: the rituals required to “fit in” there repelled him. The Foreign Service, however, was a profession, not an eating club. It had a function, and he had a role. He realized this for the first time the summer of 1927 when, just graduated from the Foreign Service School and newly installed as vice-consul in Geneva, he found himself, resplendently attired, greeting guests at the official Fourth of July reception: “There on that summer day, with the orchestra playing on the terrace and the great lake shimmering beyond, . . . I suddenly became aware that I had a reputable and appointed place in the proceedings.” He was no longer “a species of naked intruder on the human scene.”⁶

I.

Or so his memoirs say. But Kennan’s diary that day has him “sour and sleepy,” still suffering from the effects of a bad lunch the day before. Dragging himself to the reception at the Hotel Beau Rivage, he found the women fresh