George F. Kennan : an American life

George led multiple lives through most of their marriage, and Annelise knew that he did. What these were when—which were real, which imagined, which dreamt—is harder to establish and doesn’t much matter. He was hardly alone, in this respect, among his contemporaries. He was unusual in taking responsibility for these affairs, whatever their nature, and in leaving behind an account of what they cost. He would hardly have done so had they not filled a void, the origins of which lay further in the past than he could remember. Annelise, missing little, understood much. George, in turn, understood how much greater his emptiness would have been without her.

VIII.

“Received this morning the proofs of some portrait photos I had taken for publicity purposes,” George wrote one day in January 1965, “and was so appalled at the hideousness of my own visage that I went off . . . to the library and worked alone there, that others might be spared the ordeal of looking at me.” So how could he expect female companionship to ease the mind if the body was so visibly advancing beyond middle age? In fact, it seemed to help.

“He’s adorable,” the journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn had written another of George’s admirers a few months earlier: “so naive really, so gentle, so conscience eaten that he feels he ought to suffer every minute for the US.” Gellhorn had not been so smitten when she stormed into the Prague legation in the fall of 1938, demanding that a younger Kennan “do something” about the German takeover of the Sudetenland. Now, though, she found him charming and began a passionate but one-sided correspondence about their mutual detestation of the war in Vietnam. George saw her less frequently than she wished and responded laconically to her letters: “What, you ask, does the private citizen do? If he is capable of it, I think he prays.”⁴³

A less needy friend was the formidable Die Zeit editor Marion Donhoff, an East Prussian aristocrat who had joined the anti-Hitler resistance during the war and then, in 1945, escaped on horseback to the west, just ahead of the Red Army. George saw her as “a rare phenomenon in German life: a person who has preserved a real knowledge and understanding of the values of the past, a clear conscience, and a detached judgment, into the modern age.” That she had done this without self-pity was the source of her strength, “now so widely recognized.” When Donhoff’s nephew, Hermann Hatzfeldt, enrolled as a Princeton graduate student in the mid-1960s, the Kennans treated him as a surrogate son, and after inheriting Schloss Crottorf, the Rhineland family estate, he would host them there, along with his famous aunt, for many visits over many years.⁴⁴

The most famous of George’s female friendships, however, was one about which the father of the woman involved would have spun furiously in his grave, had it not been encased under tons of concrete just outside the Kremlin wall. She was Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Josef Stalin, and on the evening of March 6, 1967, she appeared at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi to request political asylum. She had with her a memoir that, Ambassador Chester Bowles informed Washington, was likely to sell extremely well if published with “timely guidance from some American whom she trusts.” Bowles arranged to fly her to Rome, and shortly after midnight on the tenth, Connie Goodman (as Moench was now, having recently married) got a phone call “from a gentleman I knew to be connected with the C.I.A.” He was Donald “Jamie” Jameson: “I’ve been trying very hard to get in touch with Mr. Kennan. Can you tell me where he is?”

Upon learning that he was at the farm, Jameson waited until a more reasonable hour to call: “We have a tremendous defection.” The agency had the manuscript. Could Kennan assess it, both for its intelligence value and with a view to possible publication? It arrived in Princeton on the sixteenth, by which time Kennan was in bed with the flu: “I read it through the night, and realized that this was not only publishable but also probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.” After receiving this information, the State Department asked Kennan to meet Alliluyeva in Switzerland, where the authorities were now hiding her: the news was out, and journalists were on her trail. So he flew to Milan, and the Swiss smuggled him across their border. They were “very good at this sort of thing—don’t ever underestimate the Swiss!”

“George Kennan was tall, thin, blue-eyed, elegant,” Alliluyeva wrote of their first meeting, which took place at a safe house in Bern on the twenty-fourth. “That hour proved that fantasies and dreams could sometimes come true.” She should indeed publish, he told her, and perhaps also emigrate to the United States. It would be unlike the Soviet Union, but she would have friends, not least his own family, who would welcome her to the Pennsylvania farm, a place like “your Zub-alovo.” That was the dacha outside Moscow where Alliluyeva had grown up, and “I knew then that he had read my manuscript very attentively.” Kennan had already found her a lawyer, his Princeton neighbor and Institute trustee Edward Green-baum, who in turn secured a publisher’s advance that made Alliluyeva wealthy before she ever set foot on American soil. She did that on April 21, and The New York Times described the scene: “A vibrant figure danced down the steps of a Swissair jetliner,” approached the microphones, and said cheerfully, in English, “Hello there, everybody!”⁴⁵

Now a media sensation, Alliluyeva at first sought refuge on the Long Island estate of Stuart H. Johnson, whose daughter, Priscilla McMillan, was translating her memoirs: the Kennans went there to greet her, using young Hatzfeldt as their driver. “Annelise by nature was very calm,” Svetlana recalled. Neither “a university professor, nor a writer, nor a historian,” she would “give good advice.” George, in the meantime, was trying to portray Svetlana not as a “defector” but “as a human being in herself.... She is a remarkable and courageous woman.” The elder Kennans were about to leave for Africa and then Norway, though, so Joan offered to host—and hide—Stalin’s daughter in East Berlin.

Svetlana spent two months incognito at the Cherry Orchard with Joan, Larry, and their two young sons. The house reminded her, as it had George and Annelise, of a prerevolutionary Russian country estate. She found something special in every room, especially George’s study on the third floor: “full of sunshine, reflected in squares on the yellow parquet floor,” it was “rather empty, and this was the most wonderful part of it.” One wall was full of books, Russian newspapers, and journals. There was a big plain wooden table with no drawers, “so convenient for work, it seemed to invite one to settle down.” By the window was a hard rocking chair, “polished by time,” and nearby an old-fashioned typewriter, sitting on a stand “nailed together by the professor himself.” Svetlana had confided in her, Joan wrote her father, “that she loved you very much, [and] missed you.” This was “not to be interpreted in some overly emotional sense—it meant simply that you were the first person she met after leaving India, with whom she had an instant rapport.”⁴⁶

Soviet propagandists, by then, were trying to discredit Alliluyeva: she was, they claimed, psychologically unstable; her arrival in the United States had been a plot to divert attention from the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution; Kennan had arranged it. So she retaliated, on a day when no grown-ups were present to try to stop her, by summoning Joan’s and the farmer’s children, their babysitter, and Christopher, then seventeen and just back from his spring term at Groton. She had him light the hibachi. On it went her Soviet passport, incinerated before small solemn American witnesses, its ashes then scattered in the Pennsylvania wind.⁴⁷

After his return from abroad that fall, George introduced Svetlana to Princeton. They walked through the Institute’s woods, toured the university campus, and visited the chapel, “leaving outside his black poodle [Krisha], who followed us everywhere. No one paid the slightest attention to us, and this was the best thing I could have wished for.” She rented a house and became, for several years, a neighbor. Bill Bundy remembered a dinner, in 1975, to which the Dilworths, the Taplins, the Kennans, and Alliluyeva came. “Let’s have some music,” someone said. So “George started playing his guitar, singing these sad Russian songs, and, well, Svetlana brightened, she effervesced, in a way that I didn’t ever see her do on any of the other half-dozen occasions we met her. Her devotion to George was very clear that evening.”⁴⁸