George F. Kennan : an American life

role she played in his life. It first became clear to me one evening in Princeton in 1983. The Kennans were just back from Norway, and when I asked how it had been, George started complaining about dissolute youth hanging around the docks. Annelise put an end to that: “George, you’re always worrying about docks!” All docks everywhere had dissolute youth. That, along with tying up boats, was what they were for. And then, turning to me: “He worries too much about the docks.”⁴

Annelise had her way with this book, and that’s why I have dedicated it to her memory. It’s by no means the first, though, about George Kennan. I’ve learned from, and respect the work of, my predecessors, especially C. Ben Wright, Barton Gellman, Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, David Mayers, Walter Hixson, Anders Stephan-son, Wilson D. Miscamble C.S.C., John Lamberton Harper, Richard L. Russell, John Lukacs, Lee Congdon, Nicholas Thompson, and Frank Costigliola, who will now be editing the Kennan diaries. But I’ve made no systematic effort to compare their conclusions—or even some of my own previous ones—with what this book contains. I want it to be a fresh look at Kennan himself, not at the scholarship he has inspired.

This is also, despite its length, a selective life. I’ve given more attention to some episodes than to others, and I’ve left out a lot. I’ve done so partly because I think that character emerges more clearly from the choices biographers make than from the comprehensiveness they attempt; partly also out of compassion for my readers. Kennan once recommended to me, as a model, Leon Edel’s monumental biography of Henry James. He had in mind, though, Edel’s psychological insights, not the five volumes required to convey them.

Finally, a note on names. First ones are necessary when writing about family, as an older sister of George’s pointed out when I began an early interview with the question: “What was Professor Kennan like as a baby?” At the same time it seemed inappropriate to write, in later chapters, of “George’s” long telegram, or his “X” article. So I have used “George” within the context of family, and “Kennan” elsewhere. I have also, following the custom of Kennan and his generation, occasionally used the term “Russians” when discussing the inhabitants of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I am fully aware that a substantial minority were not Russians, but I also know how cumbersome it would be to have to remind readers repeatedly of this fact. I ask their indulgence in being reminded here.

George Kennan’s willingness to entrust me with a biography he would never read was, from the beginning, an extraordinary expression of confidence. How much so came through all over again in 2002, on one of the last visits my wife Toni and I paid to the Kennans at their Princeton home. George showed me a stack of loose-leaf binders containing the only copy of his diary from 1970 until that moment. “They go with you,” he said, to my astonishment. “But I guess you wouldn’t be interested in this,” he added, indicating a single smaller volume. “What is it?” “Oh, just my dream diary.” “Take it too,” Annelise insisted. I didn’t argue. Never have I driven more carefully back to New Haven.

Whether I have merited the trust both Kennans placed in me I do not know. They were my companions, though, through a considerable portion of my life, and that, for me, was a great privilege. Now that we have reached, with the completion of this book, the point of parting, I can see how much I will miss them.

John Lewis Gaddis

New Haven, Connecticut

July 2011

Part I

ONE

Childhood: 1904–1921

“ THE GREATEST TRAGEDY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE,” GEORGE F. KENNAN told me when we first talked of this biography, “is that we do not all die at the same time as those we love.” It might seem odd to begin a life by invoking death, but in this instance it was appropriate, for the tragedy Kennan saw in death was not the oblivion it brings but the separations it causes: the way it rends relationships without which there can be no life. And death severed the most important relationship in young George’s life just as it began.

Throughout much of his childhood George believed that his mother, Florence James Kennan, had died giving birth to him in Milwaukee on February 16, 1904. She had not. The death occurred on April 19, and the cause was peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, a mishandled but completely separate medical problem. The effect, though, was much the same: the rending of a relationship so brief that it could not even exist in memory. “Whether she nursed him or not, I don’t know,” George’s sister Jeanette recalled eight decades later, “but I suspect she did. What a tragedy.” Florence died at home, painfully and protractedly. The older children were brought in to kiss their mother goodbye, while baby George, held by an aunt in the next room but hearing everything, was “so quiet .”¹

In his memoirs, written when he was in his sixties, Kennan acknowledged having been “deeply affected, and in a certain sense scarred for life,” by his mother’s death.² But he was not then prepared to reveal where the evidence lay, in the realm of visions and dreams:

March 1931. A young diplomat at a Swiss winter resort suddenly finds himself dancing with tears in his eyes, not because the girl he’s with isn’t the one he wants, but because, as he notes bitterly in his diary, he misses someone else: “You had better go out into the open air and realize that Mother is far away and that no one is ever going to understand you and that it is not even very important whether anyone ever does.”³

February 1942. An older Foreign Service officer, married now and a father, writes an unsent letter to his children from internment in Nazi Germany, wondering whether they would remember him were he not to return: “I myself grew up without a mother; and there are so many times that I have wished I had known what she was like—that I could have had at least one conversation with her.”⁴

January 1959. A middle- aged historian, retired temporarily from diplomacy, dreams for the first time of meeting his mother. “She showed no recognition of me; she was plainly preoccupied with something else; but she accepted with politeness and with an enigmatic smile my own instantaneous gesture of recognition and joy and tenderness. She was, for the moment, the main thing in my existence; I was not the main thing in hers.”⁵

July 1984. An aging brother, now eighty, writes his surviving sisters on the day he learns that their eldest has died: “I think of what desperation our mother must have felt as she faced death with the realization that she was being torn away relentlessly from four small children and abandoning them to a wildly uncertain future. And I think, of course, of the crushing blow this must have been to our poor father—who, God knows, had enough blows in this life without this crowning one.”⁶

June 1999. A distinguished elder statesman, at ninety-five failing physically but fully in command mentally, suddenly sheds tears as he recalls Anton Chekhov’s haunting story “The Steppe,” about a boy of nine traveling with a group of peasants across a vast Russian landscape. The boy misses his mother, “understanding neither where he was going nor why,” trying to grasp the meaning of stars at night, only to find that they “oppress your spirits with their silence,” hinting at “that solitariness awaiting us all in the grave, and life’s essence seems to be despair and horror.”⁷

How to weigh the pain of loss when it occurs so early in life that one lacks the words, even the concepts, to know what is happening? When one accepts such pain at first as the normal condition of human existence, only to