American” must have made—the Sorensens’ feelings, he sensed, “had not been exactly those of confidence or elation.” But he spent several weeks with them before the wedding and that helped, as did Annelise’s steely resolve. “So I don’t think that it was really very awkward.”5
The wedding took place in the Kristiansand cathedral on the afternoon of September 11, 1931: Annelise noted the event in her appointment book with the single Norwegian word “Bryllup.” Cyrus Follmer came from Berlin to be best man, and the Kennans honeymooned in Vienna, where—Annelise’s passport not corresponding with his— George labored to persuade the hotel porter that they were really married, only to have him look paternally over his spectacles to say, “We understand.” A few weeks later George wrote Jeanette to say that concerns he had had six months earlier were all now nonexistent. “I might almost say that this letter comes from a completely new brother and not the one you have known before.”6
I.
The marriage coincided with the end of Kennan’s postgraduate studies in Berlin and his first assignment as a fully qualified Russian specialist. The Foreign Service sent him back to Riga—still, in the absence of diplomatic relations, the chief American observation post for the Soviet Union—and Annelise accompanied him. But his illusions of glamour as an unattached bachelor faded with a young wife. George made it no easier by warning Annelise that this or that colleague didn’t like him. “[I]t wasn’t really quite true,” she recalled, “but I had to discover it in my own way.”7
The Kennans chose not to live downtown among inquisitive diplomatic colleagues but instead leased the top two floors of a factory owner’s house in the suburb of Tornakalns. It was cheap enough for them to have a cook and a chauffeur, who doubled as a butler. Unfortunately, though, there was a park across the street with a summer bandstand whose brass ensemble knew only five songs, endlessly repeated for months at a time: “You could retire to the innermost clothes closet of the house and bury your head in the clothes, it made no difference—the sound reached you.”8
It was, George explained to Jeanette, a “new and strange world.” For despite the fact that he was well trained, generously paid, and in no danger of losing a job that was sometimes interesting, “I, together with my wife, am lonely.” The problem was not that marriage precluded thinking, as he had thought it might before meeting Annelise. It was rather that having a wife magnified his uneasiness with the lifestyle of his Foreign Service friends. People who once seemed interesting “stand before me now in a state of complete moral nakedness, and I see all the selfishness and cruelty and cowardice and emptiness which lies beneath their cordiality and their veneer of culture.”
Loneliness, to be sure, could not be too serious for a married couple in love and living comfortably. But the future was very uncertain. The worsening economic crisis was worrying: George had not “the slightest faith in my money and property” because too many fortunes had already been lost “through inflations, revolutions, and confiscations.” The Soviet frontier was only a hundred miles away, which meant that the Red Army could overrun Latvia whenever it wished. If that were ever to happen, “I think I should prefer to dispose of myself and my family in my own way before they got here. I have seen too many photographs of the corpses they left here twelve years ago.”
But even if these dire events did not happen, “I don’t want to stay in the Foreign Service.” The United States had no foreign policy, only the reflections of domestic politics internationally. There was no satisfaction in representing that. The country was succumbing to a consumerism in which people equated charm with the absence of halitosis, balanced competing claims about toothpaste, and fretted about whether their refrigerators ejected ice cubes or required an ice pick.
The America I know and love and owe allegiance to is Father’s America—the America of George Kennan the elder, and John Hay and Henry Adams and Roosevelt and Cleveland and the Atlantic Monthly and the Century. That is the world we were brought up in on Cambridge Ave., after all, and it stood for certain ideals of decency and courage and generosity which were as fine as anything the world has ever known.
“I am not expatriated, Netty,” he added. “I am very homesick—for the autumn in Wisconsin, for football games, for Sunday morning waffles, for loyal, generous people, and for a thousand memories of the U.S.” If only Americans “could have their toys taken away from them, be spanked, educated and made to grow up, it might be worthwhile to act as a guardian for their foreign interests in the meantime. But when one can do none of these things?”
So he would stick with the Foreign Service for another two or three years, then become a student again and eventually “a pedagogue.” Professors could survive almost anywhere: even the Bolsheviks had killed only a few. He would do Russian history seriously, writing something “so dull and so specialized that no one will ever dare to try to read it and everyone who sees it will be convinced that I know something about it.” George ended this long letter, contradictorily, with a consumerist plea: could Jeanette please send a toaster, three cans of maple syrup, a dozen boxes of graham crackers, a dozen pairs of silk stockings, and subscriptions to
Annelise, in the meantime, had become pregnant. “I can hardly believe it myself,” she wrote Jeanette. “A year ago and I did not even know George!” She had already caused a “scandal” by fainting at a dinner given by the Belgian ambassador, just as dessert was being served. “They say I did it very nicely, and poor George took it like a man, but you can imagine what a shock he got!” The young husband had to carry his wife out, before the astonished guests, “as though I were abducting her.” Grace Kennan—named for George’s surrogate mother, “Cousin Grace” Wells—arrived, in Riga, on June 5, 1932 : “The nights were again white, and the river,” George recalled, “lay bathed in the golden reflections of an early sunrise as I drove back from the clinic.”10
The rearing of Grace, as was customary in those days, was left to her mother. “Never mind George,” she wrote him from Kristiansand, “it is not more boring than I expected it to be.” George, for his part, juggled fatherhood with other concerns. His sister Constance remembered him pushing Grace in a baby carriage one day, thinking about everything but her, when he hit a bump, and she bounced into a snowbank: “It’s so typical of George.” But Annelise, when asked about this, doubted the story: “I have no recollection of George ever pushing the baby carriage.”11
There was, in George’s defense, much to think about, because the global financial catastrophe had by then hit home. His father, who had never accumulated much wealth, had seen his legal practice dwindle and an iron mine in which he invested shut down: by the early 1930s, he was struggling to pay for young Kent’s education at the University of Michigan, and Louise was taking in boarders so they could keep the Cambridge Avenue house. In January 1932, shortly after his eightieth birthday, Kent senior sent a sad letter advising George to save as much money as possible and “hold fast to your job, for it might be a long time before you could get another.” These recommendations came, he acknowledged, “with a poor grace from your old father who never saved anything and hasn’t even made any provisions for his old age. Let us hope that the younger generation will profit by the mistakes of their elders!”12
Two months later Eugene Hotchkiss, Jeanette’s husband, sent George “the most difficult letter I have ever written.” George and Jeanette had entrusted Gene, a bond salesman at the respected investment bank Lee, Higginson, with managing the inheritance they had received from their mother. The money was in Northwestern National Life Insurance stock—the James family firm—but Gene had used it as collateral to buy shares on margin in Kreuger and Toll, the international holding company run by the Swedish “match king” Ivar Kreuger. George’s father, Jeanette recalled, had advised against this on the grounds that matches were “unsafe,” and so they turned out to
