George F. Kennan : an American life

“Mr. Kennan gives no reasons for the tender of his resignation,” a puzzled State Department official noted, although he did record that William Dawson, who had taught George at the Foreign Service School, thought health might be the explanation. An efficiency report from Geneva had described the new vice-consul as physically “rather delicate.” After pondering the matter, the Office of Foreign Personnel offered a compromise: sixty days of leave in the United States, with the opportunity for “consultation” before making the resignation final. “Don’t be a damn fool, George,” Dawson admonished him. “Take [the leave], and then resign.” Kennan agreed and left Hamburg in mid- January 1928. Spurning the comfort of a passenger liner, he signed on as a supercargo on an American tanker, enjoyed a stormy four-week passage to Norfolk, and suffered the embarrassment, upon arrival, of having a suitcase stolen containing his copy of the United States Consular Regulations. The volume, he tried to assure his superiors, would probably be of no value to the thief.¹⁹

Kennan had in fact cited “urgent and unalterable personal reasons” in his resignation letter, but he had not elaborated on them. His memoirs say only that living in Geneva and Hamburg convinced him, given his “spotty” education so far, of the need for postgraduate study.²⁰ There was, however, a more pressing priority: George had fallen in love and was engaged to be married.

She was Eleanor Van Someren Hard, the daughter of William and Anne Hard, Washington journalists and pioneering radio commentators. They lived in one of the Georgetown houses where students from the Foreign Service School were invited to parties, and that is probably where George met Eleanor. “She was not inhibited at all,” he remembered. “Come and meet these people,” she would insist. “This was very good for me.” The family appeared to be unconventional: Mr. Hard had been thought, during the war, to be a radical; Mrs. Hard favored women’s emancipation; Eleanor “wrote poetry and patronized queer people.” But at a deeper level, they were conservative individualists: their proximity to the opposite camp had hardened their allegiance. They struck George as thoroughly American, “accepting material prosperity as the just due of a spotless conscience.” He was enthralled, began dating Eleanor, and “either I fancied myself in love or I thought I ought to [be].” There was no physical intimacy: “This was innocent, according to the ways of those times.” But before leaving for Geneva, “I did bring myself to ask her to marry me, and she said she would.”²¹

Eleanor confirmed, decades later, what George remembered. Despite having “the Charleston as our lamamba, the hip pocket flask as our pot,” they were to the right of most young people even then: “How close to the Edwardians we were!” Flappers flourished, but under “our minimal dresses beat hearts not too far from Little Women.” George was serious and self-disciplined, she was easily distracted and dependent on fun. Both were bright, but “we had absolutely nothing else in common.” Eleanor’s mother disapproved, convinced that George “would never amount to anything.” And so when he arrived back in the United States, he found that he would not be marrying Eleanor after all. “Very late in life,” she recalled, “my mother asked me if she had made a mistake—she was utterly surprised by George’s success. I could assure her that we would have been totally incompatible.”²²

“I went through the usual melodramatics of a person of that age when such things happen,” a much older George acknowledged, “but it lasted about three days. I was over it at once. I don’t blame her at all.... I don’t know what the hell I was doing, to tell the truth.” Jeanette, however, saw that the effects had been substantial. One reason was the engagement ring, which had belonged to their mother and was never returned: “That was quite a blow to him.”²³ And although George himself did not record—or if he did, failed to preserve—anything about the engagement in his diary, he did write Jeanette a long letter about it after he returned to Europe. “[T]hese last few months,” he began, “have witnessed far greater and more important experiences in the life of G. F. Kennan than have been described in his letters to his parents. Since I saw you last I have finally passed the big turning- point, and I feel, for the first time in my life, that I have just about found my place in the world.”

There were, as he saw it, “two vitally contrasting ways of life.” One was as lived in most of Milwaukee, almost all of Princeton and the Republican Party, and certainly the drawing rooms of northwest Washington. “There were splendid girls, in this America.” Falling in love with and marrying one of them could be the greatest experience of life: one built one’s home in the rock of the country. “Oh Netty, don’t think that I didn’t feel the force of all this.” So “when Eleanor took me in hand, . . . it was no wonder that it struck deep.” George realized, for the first time, “that I could beat the people I had always envied at their own game. I saw that I could become both respected and powerful—that I, too, might someday make the very pillars of the State Department tremble.”

But “I would never have been happy in the life I so nearly entered. I am too much of an extremist, and there are other factors in connection with an unfortunate youthful environment which would have marred the picture.” George did not explain what those were; however, there was no choice but embrace fully the other way of life. That would involve, bleakly, “the renunciation of all individualistic hopes,” even if some might be realized accidentally:

I will probably never be vastly admired; I shall never achieve much personal dignity; my wife, if I ever have one, will doubtless be in no sense ideal and will generally be spoken of as an impossible person. Far from becoming wealthy, I will probably . . . lose what money I have.... Worse than all of these things—for me: I will doubtless cause considerable pain to all persons who love me but are themselves not able to understand what I am doing (Father for instance).

George would stick with the Foreign Service for a few more years, but it would have to realize “that I am a queer duck, and that it can’t demand too much.” During working hours, “I belong to it body and soul.... But when the last visa applicant has left, and the accounts are done, and the door of the Consulate closes behind me, I am George Kennan, and if the government doesn’t like it, it can whistle long and loud.”

As to alternatives, only time would tell. George sensed potentialities, among them “a moderate talent for words,” but he would need to have something to say and hoped that he might one day. In the meantime, he must select from currents of life those that seemed to be flowing in the right direction and align himself with them, “faulty and imperfectible as I may be.” “Poor Netty,” he concluded, “you draw all the melodramatic letters, because you are the only person before whom I may safely act melodramatic. As long as you and I both live you will probably continue to be the butt of epistulary [sic] histrionics.”²⁴

III.

Histrionics there certainly were. “For on this night,” Kennan wrote portentously in his diary on March 26, 1928, “I make my last reluctant obeisance to the obscure gods of Washington—to the cool, derisive deities, who have taken without compensation the two best years of my life.” He would miss “the hurdy-gurdy man in Church Street, on hot summer evenings, ... grey and white buses streaming along Sixteenth Street, in the shadows of the shuttered Russian Embassy . . . charity balls in the Willard Hotel . . . where the softness of the atmosphere and the subdued lilt of the music contrasted so cruelly with the cheapness and vulgarity of the guests . . . shady streets in Georgetown, where the old brick houses sung [sic] to themselves the songs of a still, deep past . . . [and the] cool, dark corridors in the State Department.” But now the train had begun to move, and the Capitol dome loomed above the lights of the switchyard, then faded from view: “These and a thousand other memories return now to taunt me for the homage I have done them. They sear like fire, for in every one of them lies the glow of failure!”²⁵

It’s hard to know, reading passages like this one, whether George was using his diary to substitute for not having anyone close at hand in whom to confide, or whether he was simply practicing to become a writer: a few passages show critical appraisals from a Princeton friend to whom George showed them.²⁶ What’s clear is that he was not leaving Washington having failed professionally. Instead the Foreign Service had gone out of its way to show that it wanted to keep him on.