George F. Kennan : an American life

He dreamed again about death one night in 1995, this time horribly. His dread, though, came not from what afflicted or awaited him but from a vision of Annelise bidding him farewell outside a large dark Victorian house, entering it, putting on a black gown, and disappearing behind a closing door. She was a widow, she would be alone, and “I could not stand it.” Should he not rush up, ring the doorbell, and ask for reconsideration: “Why don’t we disregard all the circumstances of our lives that have led to this denouement and start all over again?” But this, he knew, was not possible, and even if it had been, it might have frightened her more than the loneliness she now faced. So he had no choice but to wake up, “still shattered by what had happened, and desperate.”²⁹

To be sure, not all deaths were devastating. What everyone understood to be the last reunion of George and his siblings—Frances, Constance, Jeanette, and Kent—had taken place at the farm on a brilliant fall day in 1982. Frances, the oldest, thought it extraordinary that all were alive, even ambulatory: “Nobody had to be wheeled in!” But this final reunion was their first in six decades. They had long since ceased relying on each other to fend off loneliness, and so when they did occur—in 1984, 1991, 1994, and 2003, respectively—these deaths did not drive George, the last to survive, into the despair he feared Annelise would face when he was gone.³⁰

She did all she could to keep him going. After a protracted visit from a tedious friend, George made a point of acknowledging, in his diary, “the sweetness of my wife and of the loyalty with which she, still enjoying a relative robustness, looked after both of us tottering, shambling and tiresome old men.” She, in turn, made her own point by acknowledging his infirmities as little as possible, a habit that at times exasperated him but that balanced the fretting with which he filled his diary:

July 1983: I stand now, presumably, within a year or two of my death.

May 1985: Would that . . . the young could cast us out and be done with us, as the animals do.

January 1988: I had [hoped] that the end of my life would precede the final filling up of the [tax] ledger, so that I would not have to buy another.

April 1994: I feel myself moving closer to the abyss; but everyone says: “Oh, you look so well.”

April 1996: If I die in Norway? . . . What to do with the damned body?

He practiced death there once, when Annelise wasn’t looking: “I simply collapsed on the stony path near the boathouse, lay on my back staring at the oak leaves silhouetted against a cloudy Norwegian sky, and thought to myself: this would not be a bad time and place to die. But Fate (which, as Donne wrote, God fashioned ‘but doth not controul’) decided otherwise.”³¹

So did George’s hyperactivity, which countered his hypochondria. His mostly handwritten diaries—carefully recording each ailment and its attendant indignities—were as voluminous and legible as ever. He published a new book of “reflections” in 1996, chiefly his lectures and articles since 1982. He was driving himself and Annelise over much of New England researching a long-planned history of the Kennan family: even she thought this to be too much. He was compulsively reading, or rereading, and taking notes: on Shakespeare, whose plays suggested experiences with women—some presumably painful—that had left him “with high respect” for them; on Saint Augustine, whose Confessions had taken up far too much of God’s time; on Macaulay, who had made English “the most felicitous” of all languages for expressing “the higher ranges of thought and feeling”; on Saint Paul, whom Kennan found to be, disconcertingly, a Dostoyevskian “extremist.” And he had wisely come to relish the great naval history novels of Patrick O’Brian.³²

Major birthdays, now major events, also encouraged survival: it would have been irresponsible to die before the festivities had taken place. The Council on Foreign Relations celebration of his ninetieth in New York in February 1994 left Kennan, he claimed, “not only overwhelmed but unable to think of any even appropriately adequate response.” In fact he spoke vigorously, regretting how much had been made of a certain talk on “containment” given there in 1947, cautioning against any comparable oversimplification of post–Cold War foreign policy. Shortly after returning to Princeton, he had a minor stroke and spent a few days in the hospital, but within a week of his release was rigging a sump pump in the basement and driving himself, alone, to the office.³³

The Kennans were still traveling frequently, if to familiar destinations: Kristiansand for part of the summer, but also now regularly the island community of North Haven, Maine; Hermann Hatzfeldt’s castle at Crottorf for Pour le Merite meetings in the fall; Captiva Island in Florida for winter visits with the naturalists Bill and Laura Riley— George left behind, on one such occasion, a set of poems, addressed in stately formality to the resident birds. His research trips were over by the late 1990s, but their results appeared in his last book, An American Family: The Kennans; The First Three Generations, published when he was ninety-six. He had made his ancestors, one reviewer observed, into what he wanted them to be; but at that age, perhaps he had earned that right.³⁴

The pace could not continue. “What a doctor!” George wrote with relief, when his primary physician, Dr. Fong Wei, ordered him in the spring of 1998 to stay at home for a week, not answer the phone, and watch whatever animals visited the backyard. George “wasted the time most grandly” and was grateful for having been told to do so. But he was having trouble walking by the time his book came out in 2000, and Annelise, now ninety herself, was becoming frailer. Worst of all, his ancient Royal typewriter broke down one day that fall, “initiating a very similar breakdown in him who does the writing.” He continued the diary entry in a quavering hand, inscribing “the end is nearing.” It almost came out “the near is ending.” It made little difference: “the one, come to think of it, was no less true than the other.”³⁵

The summer of 2001 was the last George was able to spend in Norway. Reduced almost to immobility, he found a typewriter there that worked and so resumed his diary as his extended family came and went. “[C] rippledom,” however, did not lead “to productive brilliance of the mind,” for his thoughts would evaporate while waiting for his limbs to catch up. One of his final afternoons in Kristiansand was spent watching anxiously from the lawn as his young namesake, now seventeen, expertly windsurfed himself across the great sound and safely back. In Princeton that fall, George at last closed the Institute for Advanced Study office that Oppenheimer had given him half a century earlier. The Kennans’ seventieth wedding anniversary fell, unhappily, on September 11, 2001— happily, though, Christopher, Joan, and her husband Kevin Delany had arranged a congratulatory dinner with a few Princeton friends the previous weekend. George and Annelise spent the terrible day quietly at home.³⁶

I found him, a few months later, stretched out on a couch in his living room, his legs covered in a blanket, his hearing aids malfunctioning, his profile still strong from the side, but emaciated head-on. His mind, though, was undiminished: the conversation was a healthy mix of convictions firmly held and curiosity keenly expressed. Why did no one read Toynbee anymore? Because his books dealt with forces, not people: “You could spend your life reading Toynbee, but what would you have at the end of it?” Kennan did not find it necessary to say, as on several previous occasions, that his own life soon would be ending. He was beyond the need for denial, or reassurance.³⁷

VI.

The Kennans had live-in help now in the Hodge Road house. A Portuguese couple, Tony and Ana Mano, cooked and gradually took over other duties as well: Tony even began bringing ocean water from the New Jersey shore to bathe George’s arthritic knees. Betsy Barrett, who lived in the garage apartment, started as a housekeeper, became George’s secretary, and wound up as his nurse. Days became indistinguishable, apart from a brief stay in a Washington “assisted living” facility in the fall of 2002, while the Manos were away. The word got out, reporters got in touch, and Kennan granted his last interviews, condemning President George W. Bush’s plans to invade Iraq as