George F. Kennan : an American life

the war. Much seemed slavishly Russian: the tawdry apartment blocks rising from seas of mud; the Stalinist skyscraper on which Poles carefully did not comment; the Hotel Bristol, which with its “shoddy air of mystery,” its “dreary, furtive corridors,” its “intensive eyeing of people,” even its delegations of visiting Chinese, Mongolians, and North Koreans, evoked the Metropole in Moscow.

But in the city center, a declaration of architectural independence had taken place: the Polish government was meticulously reconstructing the palaces and churches of the feudal and bourgeois eras. Had it tried to design anything more modern, Kennan was sure, the plans would have been ideologically incorrect and hence rejected. The Poles sensed, though, a respect on the Russians’ part for prerevolutionary culture, the natural evolution of which their revolution had so brutally broken off. So the new buildings were safe because they looked old. They stood “a trifle sheepishly, as [though] surprised, and almost discomfited, to be thus resurrected from a past [to] which, after all, they can never return.”

Kennan’s hosts at the Institute of International Affairs were charming, urbane, and politically sophisticated. Not really communists, they treated recent history like Soviet architecture: one did not speak of the Katyn massacre, or of the Red Army’s failure to prevent the crushing of the Warsaw Uprising, and “in this studied silence, there is a condemnation more devastating than in any words.” The only committed communist Kennan met was trying to build something hopeful on a “dismal foundation of error and grim despotism.” He felt sorry for her: she was “destined, unquestionably, for disillusionment and tragedy.”

Knowing that he would be among scholars, Kennan had planned to lecture on American intervention in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. Upon his arrival, however, the head of the institute informed him, with some embarrassment, that the Soviet authorities had objected to this topic, but that he was to go ahead with it anyway. The lecture was readvertised as one on contemporary problems of U.S. foreign policy. Puzzled, Kennan asked if he should now switch to that subject. No, he was told, he was to give the original talk, under the newly announced title. This had been “the bargain” with Moscow.

So Kennan spoke, on July 1, to a hand-picked audience, received polite applause when he finished, and then waited, in awkward silence, for questions. Only one came: how he could have called World War I a “tragedy,” since it had led to the formation of the modern Polish state? Kennan stumbled through an answer, and the session ended. The audience’s reticence, he later realized, reflected the fact that it was being watched. But it had been happy for him to say whatever he wished.²

Kennan subsequently reported to the CIA on how much the Poles were departing from Soviet “socialism.” If left unchallenged, the liberties they were taking would become rights, so deeply rooted that “any withdrawal of them would appear as a preposterous injury.” A kind of “liberation” was occurring from within. Further rhetoric about “liberation” from without could only delay its development. “While I do not share the views of the writer on many subjects,” Allen Dulles commented, in forwarding Kennan’s analysis to the White House, “his report on Poland is the best summary I have seen on the evolving situation there. It is possible that the President would be interested in glancing it over.” The initials “DE” on the document, together with underlinings and a distinctive doodle, show that he did.³

George could have felt some satisfaction, therefore, as he, Annelise, Christopher, and Wendy sailed for home in late July on a slow freighter, the MS Texas, whose principal cargo was cement, granite blocks, and a hundred Volvos. The European balance of power looked very different from what it had been a decade earlier. With American help, the Western Europeans had regained prosperity and self-confidence. It was now the Russians who were walking a tightrope in Eastern Europe, knowing how gleefully their “allies” would welcome a tumble into the abyss. Kennan had anticipated both possibilities, devised a strategy to bring them about, and for all of its parochialism, immaturity, and opportunistic politics, his country had broadly followed it.

In fact, though, Kennan made no further effort, on the long voyage home, to reflect on the relaxed Americans and resolute Poles he had met—or to wonder why the Russians, in Warsaw, had been so nervous about his presence. Instead, as the ship approached the New England coast, he was brooding about what lay ahead.

[W]hat does one do with this contemporary America: with this great hive of bewildered people, now in such deep trouble, so anxious in some ways for the sort of help I can give, so resentful of it in others, so exhausting and competitive in its demands, so quick to pluck to pieces and destroy anything and anyone that engages its attention?

Should he try to help? Or should he admit the futility of doing so and retire to cultivate his garden, writing books that only a handful of people might read and that would “probably burn up, anyway, in the imminent atomic holocaust?” The Texas rounded Nantucket on August 2, “and just as we did so the moon rose, ominous and blood-red, in the east. A strange evening, intensely beautiful, and slightly sinister.”⁴

I.

The Kennans spent the rest of August 1958 at the farm, where George carefully chronicled his activities: ditch digging, fence building, buying a tractor, completing a survey of the property, arranging for a new tenant to manage the place. He also granted an interview—his first in over a year—to the Harrisburg Patriot- News, which celebrated its exclusive “Press Conference with Ex-Ambassador Keenan” by staging a “Mr. X Contest.” Princeton, when the family returned to it in September, was “gloriously quiet, relaxed, comfortable,” but George soon felt himself sinking back into “the false, tense, harried life of the American upper class—tightly organized, over-elaborate in all its arrangements, lacking in spontaneity, everyone living on the outward edge of their energies and resources, ... attempting to meet standards which, being themselves survivals of the age of servants, are themselves exorbitant.” So he resolved to seek refuge, for three hours each day, deep within the university’s Firestone Library, “where no one knows where to find me.” That would leave twelve hours for sleeping and meals, eight for activities apart from scholarship, and one for work around the yard and the house.⁵

George liked to joke that separating his older and younger children by thirteen years had been a triumph of policy planning: “We raised our baby sitters first.” Now, though, they were leaving. Grace had married in March, while her parents and younger siblings were still in Oxford: the bridegroom was Charles K. McClatchy, a reporter and former Adlai Stevenson aide whose family owned a major newspaper chain in California. George and Annelise covered the costs of the event, which took place in Washington, but then could not afford to fly back for it. They met their new son-in-law when he and Grace came through London in May, and by the end of the year, there was a first grandchild.⁶

Joan, in the meantime, had announced her engagement to Larry Griggs, a rising senior at Brown University. Shortly after returning for her own final year at Connecticut College, she received a letter, in familiar handwriting and on Institute for Advanced Study stationery, purporting to be from the family dog Krisha. Life in Princeton was lonely, the poodle complained. Rations were meager. It was a relief to get Christopher and Wendy off for school each morning, because their idea of petting resembled Greek-Roman wrestling. And the neighborhood canines were either ancient or lascivious:

[D]ear Joany, what does one do with the male sex? Why are they so single-minded? It’s all very flattering; and I suppose one wouldn’t be without it; but why can’t they show a little imagination? . . . I heard Wendy tell your Dad, yesterday, that there was a wedding going on in the backyard, and I suppose that’s one way of putting it.

Dismayed, on a trip to the farm, not to find Joan there, Krisha had to spend the weekend “in the scintillating