be. With bankruptcy looming, Kreuger committed suicide on March 12, 1932. Eight days later Gene had to inform George that both his and his sister’s inheritances were lost. Gene’s job followed when Lee, Higginson also went under. “My first mistake,” he admitted, “was to ever start to speculate, but my greatest was to ever speculate for you. . . . [M]y optimism . . . has been a curse rather than a blessing.”13
George handled the shock with extraordinary graciousness. “Not only did he forgive it,” Jeanette remembered, “but he apparently, as far as we knew, forgot it.” There were no recriminations, and for fear of hurting Gene’s feelings, no one said much about it. Many people were suffering financial reverses, George consoled his sister, but it was not worth worrying about them. “If one is fed, housed, and healthy, then debts, pride, conscience, standards, dignity, and what you will, will have to be laughed off.... We can’t let ourselves go to pieces because we live in a cock-eyed economic system.” The family was like his Berlin friends. “We must not all sink,” Volodya had insisted, “trying to help each other.” Jeanette knew, though, that George had wanted to leave the Foreign Service, and now he couldn’t afford to do it.
The news came as “quite a blow,” Annelise acknowledged. It was, she remembered, the first time she had seen George cry. No longer able to afford the Tornakalns house and its servants, the Kennans first moved into one of the diplomatic apartments downtown, and then, the following summer, to a tiny and very cheap dacha on the Riga Strand.14
The world was “falling to pieces,” George confided in his diary a week before his daughter was born. As a single man, he might have adapted. As a married man and a father, it was out of the question. The only thing protecting him from unemployment was “[a]n accident, a freak”: the fact that the State Department still provided its agents with a living standard few people anywhere else enjoyed. This was not likely to change, because Russian specialists were going to be needed. But there were no alternatives now, and even the Foreign Service carried the risk of purges brought about by Washington politics. The only defense was complete political neutrality, which would mean a long, quiet life as a minor official. “As one who had certain intellectual aspirations, I find this a blow to my pride, hopes, and egotism. As a father and a husband, I find it an undeserved blessing.”15
II.
Over the next year and a half, George Kennan’s character began to take on much of the shape it would retain for the rest of his life. It’s best to think of it as triangular, held taut by tension along each of its sides. Professionalism was one of these: it was during this period that Kennan established his reputation, within the Foreign Service, as the best of its young Russian specialists. He would maintain that preeminence throughout his diplomatic career, and then transfer it successfully to the vocation of history. A second side was cultural pessimism: Kennan had begun to doubt whether what he thought of as “western civilization” could survive the challenges posed to it by its external adversaries and its internal contradictions. He never wholly reassured himself that it would. The third side was personal anguish: where did he as a husband and a father and a professional and an intellectual—but also as an individual tormented by self-doubt, regretting missed opportunities—fit into all of this? As happens with triangles, adjustments on one side could not help but affect the others.
Personal anxieties were not new, but they now had a new context. The date is June 13, 1932, the place Riga. A young man who has just become a father trudges home along the river after an excruciatingly boring day of work. The weather has cleared, and the late, low northern sun lights his way. A familiar temptation appears in the shape of a small, freshly painted Swedish passenger steamer, due to sail that evening for the Baltic island of Visby. “Why should I not go on board and ask to be taken along as a guest?” It is only a dream, but the details are vivid enough to fill a diary page when he records them. “Just now,” though,
we must walk home—one foot before the other—along the uneven cobble-stones of the quai, over the dust and manure.... Past the dirty tenements, which remind one so of Russia. Across the flats [where people] are working in their vegetable gardens. The sun catches a string of freight cars up on the embankment. This aggravates me. Why this silly lavishness? . . . Darkness would be a more proper setting for our actions and our thoughts and our creations.
And so he reaches home, with his mind circling through thoughts like these as if some kind of rosary. “There is only responsibility and self-sacrifice; all else is meaningless, all else is vanity, all else is not even interesting; adventure, mystery, even justice do not exist. Learn it, repeat it, comprehend it, wrestle with it, embrace it, cling to it.”16
Most young fathers have felt such urges and suppressed them; few, however, take the trouble to write them down. Kennan claimed at the time that his “notes” were a protest against pointlessness. He always felt, he explained years later, “that there should be greater things happening in life than I could see around me, wherever I was.” Diaries provided a private place to write about them: they were “a protective exercise for myself.... When I was happy and busy, I wasn’t writing.” Annelise confirmed this. “When you read his letters, you would think he was always just so blue.” Even Jeanette, from a distance, at times thought so. In daily life, though, as Annelise knew better than anyone else, “he can be so gay.” He had, she was sure, a “dual personality,” and what he wrote tended to reflect only the morose side of it.17
The diary entries, therefore, should be read with this in mind. On June 14, for example, George followed up his fantasy about sailing to Visby with the appalling observation—by today’s standards but by that day’s as well—that “[w]omen are like the leaden centerboards on sailboats. They keep the boat upright and on its course, but they are not the motive power which makes it go.” To “go fast before the wind, you have to eliminate them at all times. And one of them is all you can use; any more pull you down.”18 But Annelise, had she read this, would probably have been more indulgent than insulted, for this was a young man’s backward bad-tempered glance in the direction of the independence he had chosen to give up. It did not mean that George was about to turn his fantasies into reality and sail away, unstabilized, from his wife and daughter. The marriage would last for seventy-three and a half years.
“One might well dream of the past,” George admonished himself a few months later. One might “watch life outside, through the bars.” But one could not participate in it. Pride and spirit were inconsistent with responsibility for other people, so he had become the model married man, faithful “in the ordinary sense as well as in the intellectual.” Promiscuity was not sinful, “it was merely sloppy.” Confusion, disorder, and uncertainty always accompanied it. And if monogamy was unhealthy, then a certain amount of physical discomfort was the price one paid for dignity.19
These outbursts of despair over ordinary life provide a clue, then, as to what to make of the self-described “complaints against civilization” that were beginning to pepper George’s diaries:
April 7, 1932: There is, in this world, a preponderance of filth and cruelty and suffering. Cannot something be done to alleviate this situation? Yes, but not by the bourgeois. Why not? . . . Because he cannot be a leader. And the demand of our age is not for followers but for leaders.
July 13: Nothing good can come out of modern civilization, in the broad sense. We have only a group of more or less inferior races, incapable of coping adequately with the environment which technical progress has created.... No amount of education and discipline can effectively improve conditions as long as we allow the unfit to breed copiously and to preserve their young.
August 4: The world is at the end of its economic rope. I am at the end of my mental one.... I am beginning to comprehend that I am condemned (I know not whether by circumstances or by my own shortcomings) to a rare intellectual isolation. Be it a compliment or a reproach—the fact remains: my mental processes will never be understood by anyone else.20
