George F. Kennan : an American life

and flouncy, the men bored, and a few sleek students on tour gawking at the celebrities. Unimpressed, Kennan escaped to the lobby to read a magazine until tea was served and the guest of honor was ready to speak. He was Admiral Hilary P. Jones, the U.S. representative at the Geneva conference on naval arms control. What they were hearing was “conference fodder,” Kennan explained to a British friend, but then it occurred to him that his superiors might not appreciate his candor. There were still things to learn about not having opinions.⁷

Kennan had arrived in Switzerland six weeks earlier and almost at once suffered a nightmare. He dreamed of being a consular officer surrounded by two gigantic clerks, evaluating an applicant for something. Upon discovering that the man was guilty of a despicable crime, he ordered the clerks to throw the culprit out of the office, which they did with such force that he hit the pavement with a thud and was unable to rise, while perspiration poured from him. “Does any man deserve that?” Kennan asked himself, horrified, in his dream. And then he woke up, bathed himself in sweat, with a soft rain falling outside, and the only sound that of a locomotive’s shrill whistle as it switched cars off in the distance.⁸

It’s hard not to see in this an inverted replay of the day, less than three years earlier, when George and Nick Messolonghitis tried to impose their indigence on the American vice-consul in Genoa. Now George had the same job, if in a different city, and he would soon come to loathe “any and all ragged students” seeking refuge “from the predictable consequences of their own improvidence.”⁹ Perhaps the dream marked a passage from irresponsibility to its opposite, a process never completely free from anxiety, regret, and projected guilt.

This, though, was the Foreign Service: it forced young men to grow up. It offered Kennan a new personality behind which to hide his earlier one. There were moments, to be sure, when “the silly student [would] reappear— pouting, resisting, posing, refusing to be comforted,” but authority provided a welcome mask. Diplomacy was theater, and like an actor, “I have been able, all my life, to be of greater usefulness to others by what, seen from a certain emotional distance, I seemed to be than by what, seen closely, I really was.”¹⁰

Geneva itself was a theater. Mont Blanc faded out one evening, to be replaced by a brilliant full moon emerging dramatically from a bank of clouds, “a great, strident, sexless disc of light, that mounted the sky with the assurance of a star actor making his appearance on the stage.” The Genevese were spectators, eternally watching something, whether boats departing, policemen directing traffic, or buildings being torn down: “I have a suspicion that as they stood up here on their mountain tops and watched the rest of Europe fight, they had that same solemn air of attentiveness on their faces . . . , and I think they must have enjoyed it just as much.”¹¹

Kennan’s consular duties did not rise to the level of war and peace. He forced himself, after interviewing an American who sold lamps, to develop an astounding interest in all things “electric and bulbous.” Unlike Kennan, he had no disappointments, disillusionments, or longings, just an uncluttered belief that his product was good for humanity. “He may be right. Yet tonight, after dinner, I walked up and down the terrace, smoked a pipe, and wondered about it.” A single star hung frozen, in the twilight, “and brooded on the world.”¹²

On the day Swiss newspapers announced the impending execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the wife of the consulate concierge intercepted Kennan, quivering with rage, expecting him, apparently, to cable the president immediately to demand their release. Acknowledging it as a “mauvaise affair,” Kennan slunk shamefacedly out of the building, “but I couldn’t help feeling that there was something glorious in the fact that that poor little dried-up woman, who putters around all day in the dirty basement of a Geneva office building, should . . . want to assault a vice-consul because she considered that somewhere, thousands of miles away, human beings were going to be cruel and unjust to two of their fellows.”¹³

Kennan’s Geneva assignment was temporary—he was, in effect, summer help while the arms control conference was under way—and at the end of August he reported for duty at the U.S. consulate in Hamburg, where the State Department had originally intended to send him. It was one of those places that quietly spread tentacles of both beauty and evil. There was a melancholy loveliness in its boulevards and a thrilling strength in the machinery of its harbor. But there were also “dismal, sooty streets” that looked like West Pittsburgh or South Milwaukee, and “unutterable horror [in] the lurid, repulsive alleys of St. Pauli,” from which American seamen too frequently found their way to the consulate to “inflict their lives on mine.”¹⁴

These juxtapositions left Kennan attuned “to all the struggle and tragedy and discord of the world as well as to all its harmony.” An expatriate wedding caused him to conclude gloomily that “we are all expatriates” from another, more kindly world, “the memories of which fade from us with our childhood.” But other days found him enjoying the beer halls, relishing the harbor lights as darkness set in, or sleeping until nearly noon on a clear, brisk autumn Sunday. An evening at the theater had him wanting “to lay my head on the expansive shoulder of the fat lady ahead of me and heave vast blubbers. Only the sense of my consular dignity . . . restrained me.” On another evening he marveled at the exquisite taste and incredible technique of a young pianist named Horowitz, said to be near death from tuberculosis, whose “nervous spidery fingers trembled on the keys,” while his “whole body [vibrated] tensely to every note of the music.”¹⁵

As did Kennan himself, it seemed, to whatever he happened upon. A walk to the post office on the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution caught him up in a communist demonstration: thousands of people marching with red flags in the rain behind sickly fifes and drums, singing the “Internationale,” listening to speeches from soapboxes, protesting the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti. Fully aware of communism’s “falseness and hatefulness,” he nonetheless felt “a strange desire to cry.” The experience hinted at “the real truth upon which the little group of spiteful Jewish parasites in Moscow feeds—. . . that these stupid, ignorant, unpleasant people were after all human beings—that they were, after centuries of mute despair, for the first time attempting to express and to assert themselves.”¹⁶

Meanwhile, the European political scene was a world of its own, which most people knew nothing about. One minister could denounce another, provoking counterdenunciations, but underneath this “prattling of bitter little men,” the great forces of nations and classes made their own unaffected way. And so, at the great fall fair in front of the cathedral, “[m] en yell . . . wheels revolve . . . lights blink . . . whistles blow . . . people laugh . . . people eat . . . human life flows along in all its variety and in all its monotony . . . and behind it all . . . the gods themselves dance on, in high indifference!”¹⁷

Kennan wrote in his memoirs that the Foreign Service had steadied “a young man by no means ready yet for complete personal independence.” Maybe later, but not at this point. Six months abroad had left him with increasingly unsettling mood swings, and by November he was close to the breaking point. While at a charity dance on a new passenger liner in the harbor one afternoon, Kennan saw a tramp freighter glide past and felt a sudden urge to exchange his cutaway for a sailor’s dungarees. He would sail

into the darkness and the night rain, down the long black aisles of twinkling channel buoys on the river, past the clustered harbor lights . . . at the mouth, [and] on beyond, to where . . . the revolving beams from the light- houses cut sweeping great circles around the black line of the horizon, . . . to where the wind, coming sharp and cold and salt-tanged from the North Sea, sang an ecstatic low song in the stays and the wireless aerial, and the bow of the freighter rose almost imperceptibly to the first long swell of the sea.

But then the orchestra struck up, he drank some more champagne and found someone to dance with. “Perhaps it was just as well.” Ten days later George F. Kennan sat down and, in the formal language he had been trained to use, addressed a letter to the secretary of state. “Sir,” it read, “I have the honor to submit herewith my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States.”¹⁸

II.