George F. Kennan : an American life

“secretary George Kennan.” This was Kennan’s first experience with inaccurate journalism, for in fact “I was too cheap to buy one.” He did, however, appear in the official photographs, a tall, thin young man, standing politely behind the dignitaries in a cutaway and striped pants, ready to translate for them when needed. Even without his own top hat, it was the high point so far of his diplomatic career: “I almost fainted . . . to think where I was and what I was doing.”³⁷

V.

There was another reason to feel faint, though, because on December 12 George had received, through State Department channels, Jeanette’s telegram conveying the news that his father had died. “It is somewhat to my own horror,” he wrote her on the fourteenth, that he had been able to carry on “almost as though nothing had happened.” The shock was not the death so much as “the inadequacy of our last visit, and the feeling that he may never have realized how much I loved him.” It was the final episode of the tragedy that had begun when their mother died.

I would like to hope that God is now satisfied with his handiwork—and I like to picture Father in a Heaven like the country place at Nagawicka thirty-five years ago, with himself no longer only a Kennan and our mother no longer only a James, but both of them full, complete beings, and ourselves as the group of understanding children we should have been—and then the breeze coming off the lake on summer afternoons, and the sounds of the grasshoppers and the crickets and frogs and the barking of the dogs across the lake on the long summer nights.

During the past few days in Moscow, George told his sister, he had been through “the most interesting and absorbing things I have ever experienced,” but they seemed nonetheless trifling and foolish. “I have no heart to write about them now.”³⁸

He did write later about the “kaleidoscopic” ten days Bullitt had spent in Moscow. Kennan went to the ballet with the Litvinov family, and then to a performance of Chekhov ’s The Cherry Orchard accompanied by, improbably, Harpo Marx: there is unfortunately no record of what, if anything, they talked about. Backstage, however, they met the playwright’s widow—a thrill because Kennan already had in mind someday writing Chekhov ’s biography. He called at the Foreign Office and other diplomatic missions, and then with Keith Merrill, the State Department’s specialist on overseas buildings, drove to the outskirts of the city to pace off prospective embassy construction sites, with the temperature at twenty below zero. Too excited to go to bed when the day ’s activities were done, the Americans would sit around and talk until four or five in the morning. Kennan remembered it as a wonderful time, an example of “what Soviet-American relations might, in other circumstances, have been.”³⁹

He had Bullitt to thank for it all. “When I came back to Washington last fall,” Kennan wrote him at the end of December, “I was—like a number of other young men in the service—pretty well beaten down by the bureaucracy. I despaired of ever getting work of any genuine significance.” Bullitt could well understand, therefore, that “the events of the last few weeks took my breath away.” Kennan was grateful “for the confidence and responsibility you’ve given me. They’ve done me more good than anything could have, . . . [and] the beneficial effect will wear for a long time to come.” Bullitt too was pleased. “The men at the head of the Soviet Government,” he wrote President Roosevelt, “are extremely eager to have contact with anyone who has first-rate intelligence and dimension as a human being. They were, for example, delighted by young Kennan.”⁴⁰

Part II

FIVE

The Origins of Soviet-American Relations: 1933–1936

“ TH E BLOW HAS FALLEN NOW, WITH A BANG,” GEORGE WROTE Annelise from Riga on December 29, 1933: “It is a mean one, but we’ ll make the best of it.” He had gone there to collect their possessions while Bullitt returned temporarily to the United States; but now the State Department had ordered Kennan back to Moscow to set up the new American embassy. However thrilling the previous weeks had been, this was not a task he welcomed. He would not be, as he had hoped, charge d’affaires. The salary and benefits would be minimal, and his status would be “full of dangers and responsibilities.” Should Annelise choose to join him, she would be the only Foreign Service wife in town, and because conditions were difficult, Grace would have to stay in Kristiansand. “You’ll hate the hotel, and there won’t be much for you to do there.” He would leave it to her: “If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to.” But “I am damned anxious to have you with me again as soon as possible. After all, darling, we are man and wife, aren’t we?”¹

The assignment had come about because Bullitt insisted on it. He wanted Kennan in Moscow until the full embassy staff arrived, supervising building activities “and other urgent matters.” The State Department questioned Kennan’s training for such duties, but Soviet officials had asked specifically for him because of his linguistic fluency. They also associated him with the first George Kennan, who had exposed the Siberian prison conditions under which some of them, as young revolutionaries, had once been held. Bullitt took the issue to Roosevelt himself: without someone like Kennan to deal with authorities at the top, the staff could arrive in February to find their accommodations half finished, creating “extreme inefficiency and possibly . . . endanger[ing] life.” Faced with this onslaught, the department capitulated. Kennan was “detailed for purpose outlined.”²

He arrived in Moscow on January 3, 1934, and Annelise joined him two weeks later. “There is nothing I want to do more dear,” she had replied to him. “I don’t think it will be bad.... As long as we are together I don’t care.” She found George, still a month shy of his thirtieth birthday, the sole responsible representative of the United States of America in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.³

I.

They lived, for the moment, in the National Hotel, just off Red Square. With restaurants slow and the food bad, Annelise cooked for George in their room, using a hot plate on a whiskey case behind a screen. Under construction next door was the Mokhovaya, named for the street on which it was located, the building that was to be the temporary embassy chancery. Spaso House, the American ambassador’s future residence, stood on a side street a mile west. Constructed by a wealthy merchant in 1914, it had been seized by the Soviet government, which used it for offices and apartments and was now leasing it to the Americans, along with the Mokhovaya, until a new residence and chancery could be built on a bluff in the Sparrow Hills, overlooking the city. Bullitt had proposed the location—it could be, he argued, a “Monticello in Moscow”—and Josef Stalin agreed at the end of a vodka-fueled Kremlin dinner, sealing the pledge by kissing the astonished ambassador. But the diplomatic climate soon cooled, and the compound never got built. Spaso House and the Mokhovaya were still the principal American facilities in Moscow when Kennan himself became ambassador in 1952.⁴

Kennan’s job was to negotiate the leases, oversee construction and remodeling, arrange gas and telephone service, and clear shipments of office supplies and furniture through customs so that Bullitt and his staff would have places to live and work. Helping out were a male stenographer, the State Department architect Keith Merrill, and Charles W. Thayer, a young West Point graduate who had shown up in Moscow hoping to acquire Russian and a position in the Foreign Service. Kennan hired him; Thayer found a Harley-Davidson and was soon zooming around town on official business, “the ear tabs of his Russian fur cap flapping wildly in the wind.” This bare-bones