usually with a bottle of Caucasian brandy in hand, to ask: “Why don’t you ever come to Russia?” The queries reminded Kennan of a line to a former lover in an Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet: “I find this frenzy insufficient reason for conversation when we meet again.” The frenzy of his expulsion need not now be discussed. He would be welcomed back.16
Knowing that he was to be in Japan, Kennan decided to test Soviet hospitality. He had taken the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Novosibirsk and Kuznetsk in 1945, he wrote Anatoly Dobrynin, the new ambassador in Washington, but he had never ventured beyond those points, despite the fact that the elder George Kennan, the author of “a well-known work” praised by the early Bolsheviks, had traveled extensively in eastern Siberia. So might it be possible, after his Japanese visit, to travel to Norway by rail, seeing the rest of the Trans-Siberian and revisiting Moscow, “which has changed so much since I was last in the Soviet Union”?
The embassy’s consular division replied curtly that Kennan should consult Intourist, the notoriously unfriendly Soviet travel agency. Dobrynin apologized a few weeks later, claiming a misunderstanding and offering to help with the arrangements, but by then Kennan had contracted hepatitis. The illness required a recovery not likely to be facilitated by a long Russian train ride, so he let the matter drop. Sadly, he never made the trip.17
Instead the Kennans flew from Tokyo to Oslo, by way of Bangkok, New Delhi, Tehran, Beirut, and Geneva. While Annelise waited for Christopher and Wendy to arrive from the United States, George traveled alone to Kristiansand to open the Sorensen house, empty in the wake of her parents’ recent deaths. “The old, so-little-used Buick, . . . which no one else was allowed to touch, was now standing there,” George wrote in his diary, “our property, officially.”
With the feeling of one who commits sacrilege, I drove it out to . . . the empty cottage; wept a tear and said a prayer for the peace of the souls of its erstwhile proprietors, whose absence seems so preposterous; went to bed in their bedroom, unoccupied since they died; and lay long awake, listening to the many night noises: the banging of the shutters and scraping of the [e]spalier tree against the wall in the night breeze, the chattering of the hot water heater and, with the advent of the early northern dawn, the cries of the gulls.
The family got there the next day, and after dinner George, Christopher, and Wendy walked to the boathouse, dragged the rowboat down to the water, and watched as it promptly sank.18
But there was a better boat waiting. On July 10, just outside Bergen, the Kennans took possession of
On the second day out—the first beyond the shelter of islands—they ran into a strong headwind accompanied by stinging rain, an “uninterrupted shower-bath” that left Wendy, huddled against her mother, “barely recognizable under her heavy oilskins.” The next afternoon, with fog approaching, they anchored near Stavanger, from where George had intended to put Annelise and Wendy on the train to Kristiansand, to spare them the long sea-exposed stretches that lay to the south. But the weather was fine the following morning, and there was another port with a rail connection—Egersund—on the way, so George decided, “influenced, I must say, by the common desire of the male contingent to continue to have the services of a cook,” to proceed there.
They were off Egersund at five that evening, with another five hours of daylight left, when George changed his plans again: why not do another twenty or thirty miles? He quickly regretted this. The diesel engine quit, just as visibility diminished and a sudden storm began driving them toward the coast—the one portion for which he had neglected to bring a chart. Sturdy as she was,
It was the first of many such voyages with family and friends, some equally hair-raising. “George obviously responds to this sailing life,” his Princeton neighbor Frank Taplin recalled of a trip they made together on a successor sailboat,
George never allowed Annelise to take the tiller when sailing out of a harbor, Dick Dilworth noticed, “although she’s fully competent to do so.” So because
V.
The Soviet Foreign Ministry was still trying to get Kennan back to Moscow, and in December 1964 Mikhail Smirnovsky, the head of its American desk, brought the matter to the attention of White House aide David Klein at a Washington dinner: why was Kennan so reluctant? “I said the reason was probably the obvious one,” Klein wrote him, “the treatment you received in 1952.” Smirnovsky insisted that the expulsion was “no longer valid,” that Kennan would be received cordially. Dobrynin then followed up with another invitation. So Kennan finally decided to go, not as an official guest but as an ordinary tourist, and to bring Christopher with him.21
They left Budapest by rail on the evening of June 21, 1965, in a Soviet sleeping car on which George was relieved to hear Russian spoken—Hungarian being one of the few European languages to have eluded him. The rough roadbed irritated his kidney stone, but the car attendant did her best to make him comfortable. “I saw it in your eyes,” she said of his pain. There was a late-night border crossing, after which George and Christopher slept through the Carpathians and spent the next day crossing the fertile plains of the western Ukraine. An Intourist guide took them around Kiev on the twenty-third—the cathedral, the university, the catacombs, the banks of the Dnieper, the deep but excellent subway. The next day they flew to Moscow.
Foy Kohler, the American ambassador, had invited them to stay at Spaso House, which to George’s eyes looked “absolutely splendid—immensely improved.” There was time that afternoon for a drive through the city, a walk around the Kremlin, and an evening at the Bolshoi, where the dancers conveyed simultaneous impressions of proficiency and of “something already done too often.” The Soviet foreign minister, Andrey Gromyko, came to lunch at Spaso the following day, bringing only Smirnovsky with him—it was,
