“Dear George,” she wrote him the following year from California, where she had recently moved, “you are unhappy—and this is very obvious—because you constantly betray yourself.” What followed was a bizarre form of poetic justice. Kennan, famously, had analyzed Stalin from afar three decades earlier. Now Stalin’s daughter, from a shorter distance and in still slightly erratic English, was analyzing him.
You constantly do not allow yourself to
Like Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Frank Lloyd Wright—Alliluyeva had lived briefly at Taliesin West, the late architect’s compound—Kennan had been “
You
Changing one’s life, however, took an effort. She had done it by leaving the Soviet Union. He could do it by separating himself “from that killing vanity of Hodge Road; from that depressing Norwegian narrow practicality; from constant calls from Washington, D.C. which only frustrate you, and remind you that you are a ‘retired ambassador.’ . . . Because, George, you deserve to be happy, you deserve more than anyone else to live
It’s not clear whether George showed this letter—one of many he received from Alliluyeva—to Annelise. When later asked about her in his presence, however, Annelise succinctly said a lot: “George, you don’t realize—there’s something about that female! She gets a little jealous!” It was an unusual reprimand. For if Annelise resented George’s need for female companionship—or the need of other females for George’s—she rarely showed it. “Whatever difficulties she and my father might have had were never aired in public,” their daughter Joan recalled. “She never spoke disparagingly about him, aside from the minor frustrations common to all married couples.” With an even temperament and practical good sense, self-pity was not her style. “She had a healthy sense of herself.... She was like the rock of Gibraltar.” George had been “extraordinarily lucky,” Frank Taplin concluded. Annelise was “the greatest thing that ever could have happened to him.”50
IX.
The Kennans went to Africa in the spring of 1967, George later explained, to “cure my ignorance, since I’d never been there.” The trips—there turned out to be two of them—came about through his friend Harold Hochschild, an Institute trustee with extensive mining interests in the region. The United States–South Africa Leader Exchange Program and the African-American Institute sponsored the visits, drawing on help from the State Department to arrange an arduous schedule of tours, luncheons, receptions, dinners, press interviews, and meetings with public figures. Kennan also lectured on his historical research but found his audiences more interested in the Vietnam War and in the now-famous Alliluyeva.51
Determined to miss nothing, George kept an unusually detailed diary, employing undiminished descriptive skills to capture Johannesburg’s sprawl and the aridity of the plain surrounding it; the California-like cultural sparseness of Pretoria; the stately elegance of the Blue Train to Cape Town; the excitement of standing at the windswept tip of the continent, where great swells from the Atlantic collided with smaller ones from the Indian Ocean. He noted jarring contrasts: modern universities, luxurious country clubs, and efficient mining operations, but also townships into which Bantus were being relocated against their will. Kennan had no objection in principle to the idea of separate development, having long believed that race shaped culture. Recent American efforts to pretend otherwise had even left him sympathetic to apartheid, he confessed to Donhoff in 1965. But separation should not require humiliation, and that was what bothered him about South Africa.
Took a walk to a park [in Johannesburg] where grown up “non-Europeans” were permitted to walk but their children could not play on the swings. Similarly, there is a beach, on the sea-coast, where black fishermen may ply their calling and launch their boats but must not swim for recreation. I am told that a drawing appeared in one of the periodicals here showing a black man on his hands [and knees] scrubbing a church floor and a white overseer saying: “One prayer out of you, and out you go.”
In the Transkei, the first of the “homelands” the white minority government had established, the Kennans visited a hut with a thatched roof and a dirt floor, surrounded by human and animal excrement because there were no sanitary facilities. It was, George guessed, how most of the territory’s residents lived. He found it “heart- rending” to see how cruelly apartheid oppressed the people he met, “particularly the younger ones.” He doubted, therefore, that it could last.
It was a relief, paradoxically, to arrive in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, where Kennan saw fewer signs of “racial tension and artificiality.” The chief excitement there was a visit to a game preserve near Beira. Lions appeared, as expected, but just at that moment the Kennans’ Volkswagen minibus broke down, unexpectedly. “So there we stood” while the driver nervously attempted repairs, “with our heads sticking out above the roof . . . , surveying the scene, but powerless to move.” A passing car at last rescued George and Annelise from the prospect of being eaten.
The next stop was Lusaka, in Zambia, on June 4, and here things began to fall apart. Arriving exhausted, George found that his hosts had lined up, beginning early the next morning, a long series of calls “on people I did not know, whose country I had never seen, and with whom I had nothing in common.” One was President Kenneth Kaunda, to whom he was introduced as “Mr. Frost.” Even worse, Kennan was asked to meet exiles from South Africa, Mozambique, and Rhodesia who were seeking to overthrow the governments of those countries. A set of book proofs he had needed to work on had not caught up with him. And then, on June 5, war broke out between the Israelis and the Arabs. If it escalated, “we would be stuck here for God knows how long.”
“I was over-reacting,” George knew, “not sleeping, not digesting, suffering—literally—from a touch of jaundice and viewing everything with a jaundiced eye.” But to continue in that condition would be unfair to the organizers and to the remaining countries they had him visiting. So he proposed, and Annelise agreed upon, a quick escape to Norway. “I feel terribly about having to break off the trip,” George wrote Joan from Kristiansand, but had it gone on it would have ended badly. He hoped to go back: for the moment, though, “I must go out and mow the lawn.”52
The Kennans did go back, for two weeks in September, first to Zambia, and then on to Rhodesia, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast. What George saw strengthened his pessimism. He was used to having communist governments treat him as an enemy, while the people were friendly. In Africa, “everyone equivocates.” But he did, this time, meet all of his obligations. On the last evening in Abidjan, “amour-propre thus partially restored,” George was satisfied “that I had had just about as much enlightenment as I could absorb at my
