George F. Kennan : an American life

I have no illusions about the significance of my petty bureaucratic success nor the qualities which have helped to bring it about. I could take more pride in one page of decent writing than in being an Ambassador. And there are times when I see myself as a spineless, somewhat infantile, futile little man, passively growing older in the bonds of matrimony—missing dreams which grow fainter and fainter, and farther and farther from realization as the years go by.

George had been struck to learn that Jeanette was having similar problems: “We are so alike. It’s almost embarrassing.” And it was “ridiculous” that neither of them had been able to discover what their shared symptoms meant. Perhaps “thwarted ambitions” were “only the scapegoats on[to] which our . . . subconscious minds divert dissatisfaction.” They probably reflected the family inheritance “of repression and sacrifice,” or perhaps “a strange, stiff, motherless childhood.”

The night before, George added, he had written in his notebook of a man sobered by scrapes with catastrophe who was willing to sacrifice much to save a little. There was humor and enjoyment in this, but no great elation: “No fantastic vistas gleam momentarily through the shifting mists.” A price had been paid for peace of mind. It brought him “courage and a concentration of strength which he lacked before. His eyes are clear and his nerves are steady.” However, “I disrigged my sailboat today and it was very sad.”²⁰

III.

Bullitt asked Kennan not to hurry back to Moscow. There was a long, hard winter ahead, and the work to be done there was less important than his health. But by the end of July George was ready to return: “I really feel that I have gotten all I can get out of my vacation here, and that to stay longer would only mean to get rusty and lazy from inactivity.” The entire family—including Grace and a Norwegian girlfriend of Annelise’s who served as a nanny—were back in Moscow by the end of August. “Kuniholm, Kennan, and Bohlen are all working admirably,” Bullitt reported to the State Department a few weeks later. “[W]e could run this Embassy with the assistance of these three boys and no superior officers whatever.”²¹

Kennan would have blanched at this after going through the previous winter, but he and his family were at least reasonably comfortable in their apartment on the fifth floor of the Mokhovaya. They shared the building with some forty other Americans who lived and worked there, mostly free of friction, with an intimacy and informality unusual in a Foreign Service post. Grace spoke a mixture of Norwegian and English that George found “fluent for this peculiarity.” She was, he wrote Jeanette, “a sweet, happy child, and a good companion” who enjoyed family activities, including “the scrubbing of my back, whenever she is allowed to.” Dividing her attention between Americans in the Mokhovaya and children in the Kremlin park, Grace “commanded communists and capitalists alike with a queenly contempt for ideological differences.”²²

Annelise had a Russian cook and maid, although it was a mystery to her how they could work so slowly. She had bought George a guitar and was herself learning Russian. “I understand a lot when I hear people speaking, even more when I read.” One book on her list was Trotsky’s autobiography: “He is a brilliant man, but also very vain.” Family finances were better than they had been for some time, with George having received a promotion and a salary increase—the apartment came free. He was even considering co-purchasing, with Annelise’s father, the island off Kristiansand where they had spent the summer: “It might provide for little Grace—as Nagawicka did for us—the symbol of a home, something which she will otherwise lack sadly as long as we continue our wandering existence.”²³

In the privacy of his diary, however, George was as gloomy as ever. He could not help but contrast the Soviet experience with “the neurotic unreality of our own.” Russians lived life “in the raw, . . . good and evil, drunk and sober, loving and quarreling, laughing and weeping—all that human life is and does anywhere—but all the more simple and direct and therefore stronger.” Their revolution, like nature, was lavish and careless. “Its victims are no more to it than the thousands of seeds which are cast to the wind, in order that one tree may grow.” The survivors, though, possessed a healthy, earthy vitality that attracted him despite the fact that it would quickly crush him, “as it crushes all forms of weakness.” So much for Kennan’s confidence, two years earlier in Riga, that the Soviet system carried within itself the seeds of its own self-destruction.²⁴

One visitor to Moscow that fall was George’s half-brother Kent, then twenty-one, who spent a month in Bohlen’s temporarily vacant apartment. Kent got to practice on the Spaso House grand piano while the ambassador was away. He relished seeing opera and ballet at the Bolshoi—“lavishly mounted, frequently with a good deal of gimmicky stage business like rising moons and setting suns (in which the Russian audiences seemed to take a certain naive delight)”—and even managed to get into a performance of Dimitri Shostakovich’s controversial Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk before Stalin shut it down. Annelise found it alarming, though, that Kent was even thinner than George, and George worried about his shyness. “I see in him,” he wrote Jeanette, the “restless ghost (and a very gaunt ghost it is) of my former self.” Kent remembered the visit as an exciting experience, with George and his colleagues constantly dropping into each other’s apartments, confusing the maids and the hidden microphones with code words, expecting GPU eavesdropping—that was the current acronym for the secret police—on every telephone call.²⁵

On November 7, the seventeenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Kennans watched the six-hour military parade in Red Square from their apartment windows. The next day George and Annelise attended their first Kremlin reception, mounting a terrifyingly high straight staircase that “made us feel like ants” to enter the great ballroom where Ivan the Terrible had once received foreign emissaries. “America,” Annelise wrote, “seems far away.” Life in Moscow was getting strenuous again, George complained later that month, as much because of social obligations as office work. In a single week the Kennans went to three dinners, three parties, and an impromptu luncheon, while giving another dinner and a tea. One event, hosted by the Russians, began at eleven in the evening and lasted until three-thirty in the morning. “I sometimes have misgivings as to how long I can stand it.”²⁶

Not long at all, as it turned out. George wrote that letter on December 2, 1934. Ten days later he fell ill with severe stomach pains, together with the inability to keep food down. “Poor boy,” Annelise wrote Jeanette on the twenty-first: “He hadn’t had anything to eat for 40 hours.” As a consequence, George missed the most famous party ever held at Spaso House: the Christmas Eve celebration at which Thayer, responding to Bullitt’s instructions to “make it good,” brought in trained seals from the Moscow Circus to slither across the ballroom balancing champagne glasses on their noses. Annelise did not miss it: “I remember that very well.” But George lay in bed at the Mokhovaya, entertained only by Grace, the two of them one “in our preoccupation with the present, our indifference to past and future.”²⁷

“He looks pretty bad to me,” the embassy counselor, John C. Wiley, reported to Bullitt, who was in Washington. Soviet doctors had recommended a sanatorium in Germany or Austria. “Private means zero,” but “Kennan is a valuable asset to the Service.” Bullitt needed no prompting. “I am so fond of that boy and have such confidence in him that I hate to see him leave Moscow,” but he knew from his own experience the agonies of ulcers. Could Kennan come to Washington for free treatment at the Naval Hospital? “[T]he President’s physician . . . is a good friend of mine and would see to it that you had every possible care.” But George’s Foreign Service superiors decided instead to keep him in Europe, temporarily assigning him to the nearest post so that he would not have to take sick leave. They had been “magnificent,” he wrote Jeanette. “I could embrace the old State Department for that, columns, conservatism, intrigues, and all.”²⁸

As for himself, “I am not unpleased at this turn of events.” After months of feeling miserable while being told that he was suffering from an imaginary ailment, or perhaps “the lack of another drink,” convalescence would be